We had been better earlier, before I had gone into the water; it had felt like we had reached a new understanding. He was the Griffin, and he wore Devyn’s tattoo… Had I dreamed it? Twisting around more fully in his arms, I pushed his tunic back. The feathers of the Griffin’s eagle wings curled over his collar bone. I hadn’t imagined it.
I moved behind him and untucked his tunic. He tensed against my touch as if it were something he endured rather than enjoyed. I needed to see all of it, and there it was, the same but different. Where Devyn’s Griffin had been poised to protect, Gideon’s was positioned to attack. I traced the arc of the wings and the powerful haunches. There had been no curl of tattoo on the Devyn who had kissed me in Avalon.
“Not Devyn,” I whispered. Devyn was gone, Gideon was here.
Or at least, he had been as he shrugged my hand away and leveraged himself to a standing position in one fluid motion.
“Where have you been?” he growled.
“What?” He knew where I had been. My hair still lay wet and bedraggled about my shoulders.
“I should have left. She is alone.” He scowled down at me, his powerful form backlit by the fire that lit up the circle of the glade and its rough camp before the dark became dominant once more. I surveyed the glade more thoroughly. The camp was not the work of a few hours whiled away waiting for me. There was a stockpile of wood and a substantial shelter – not the quick assembly of branches and leaves and cloth that I had become accustomed to when a journey took more than a day to travel. This was not like the quick camps of the Britons that borrowed from nature in a light-touch way, that could quickly be constructed and deconstructed, leaving little trace of the overnight presence. Further signs of extended habitation filled the clearing: another fire pit, a buck hanging from a tree.
It was cold too, cold in a different way than a March evening would be. I had become more aware of weather out here in the Wilds than I had been behind the walls. In Londinium, the urban environment was dominant to the point where summer or winter barely changed the shape of the day. Here in the north, where once I would have dismissed the cold as merely another northern night regardless of the season, now I could feel the difference in the atmosphere – the additional warmth imbued in the land that came from summer, the mellower feel to the evening of early autumn, the early fall of summer gold and russet leaves that I picked wonderingly from the ground around me. How was this possible?
“Where were you?” he asked again, his voice demanding an answer that I wasn’t able to give. His jaw was darkly bearded where he had been clean shaven this morning. Gideon suffered from evening shadow, but this was more than that, substantially more.
“Did you forget about us again? That seems to be your speciality. Did you find somewhere better, somewhere you preferred? A place where small considerations like your daughter didn’t matter? Again.” His glare suggested he expected no more from me. Forgotten? Had I forgotten?
“No, I was… It’s only been a couple of hours.” It was dark, I had left in the morning.
But it was no longer spring.
“Ha,” he scoffed. He stepped closer to me, looming above me as he gripped my shoulders. Gideon wasn’t just angry, he was furious, and he was blazing with an unrestrained fury. It was suppressed and constrained no more. “I told you I would stay. But what about Féile? How could you do this to her? She will have given up hope by now. If she’s still alive. I don’t even know that much. Nobody has come; I’ve had no news. What if she’s dead? What if Rion attacks without us? What if they think we are dead?”
I wilted under the barrage of questions and circular thoughts of a man who’d had nothing else to do but wait and fume and wonder at the events unfolding far from this lake – events that he would be desperate to be part of. I could scarcely believe that so much time had passed, but for him to have waited here while Féile was out there somewhere was impossible to swallow.
“Why didn’t you leave?” He had sworn me no oath. He had said he would wait, but there had been no vow, no promise. For him to have remained as day after day passed, while Féile, was out there alone… He had sworn to find her. I couldn’t imagine that there wasn’t a law of man or nature that he would not tear asunder to get to her.
His teeth ground together audibly.
“I could not leave.”
My gaze flickered to the buck by the tree. He’d clearly managed to go hunting.
His eyes tracked my gaze. “I can hunt at night but when dawn breaks I am here again.”
His hand encompassed the glade and the lakeshore. “The Griffin has been well provided for one way or another while imprisoned here, awaiting my lady’s return.” His tone was off, as he bowed his head in mocking subservience. To me or to the bounty provided for him, it wasn’t clear. Both probably.
“How long?” I felt a horrible tension. How long had Féile been waiting for us to come? How long since she had been stolen from me?
“Twenty-three weeks,” he ground out, despite the incredulity in his eyes.
Almost six months!
I gasped for air. I had only been there for a few hours, and I hadn’t even managed to find the cure I had been promised. Callum had been wrong, there had been nothing waiting to reveal itself to me. Nothing that would allow me to descend on Londinium with the well of power available to Evaine’s heir overflowing and ready to rain down fury on those who had dared to challenge me, to hurt my child. Half a year.
“You’d better be ready now,” Gideon stated flatly, as if he could sense the truth and was not ready to hear it. How could I tell him the truth of the months he had given up? All those months for nothing.
I had nothing to show for the time I had been gone.
The buck was lowered from the tree, and a store of berries and nuts packed as Gideon stiffly moved around the camp, demolishing it as he went. A few long-legged strides carried him into the forest and when he hit the edge of the clearing, he looked over his shoulder at me where I still stood, uncertain of what to do.
“Are you coming?” he ground out.
I scurried to catch up but was happy to trail him from a safe distance. Close enough to keep him in sight in the falling dark but not so close that I had to absorb the waves of sufferance at my company that were rolling off him.
We had walked a reasonable distance before I got up the nerve to speak.
“Where are the horses?” I asked. It was not an entirely outrageous question. We had ridden here from Carlisle; was he now planning for us to walk back?
He stopped ahead, rolling his shoulders back before he responded.
“They wandered off.” His tone was sour.
“You let them go?” We really were going to have to walk the whole way home.
“I thought you would be back in a few hours,” he said. “I let them wander. By the time I realised that you weren’t coming back, it was too late. “
“Too late for what?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“Too late to fetch them.”
I frowned at him. I was not following this explanation.
Gideon sighed in exasperation. “When I went to gather them that first afternoon I discovered that while they might not be tethered, I certainly was.”
“How?”
“I could walk for an hour or so in any direction before I would wind up back at the camp.”
“Oh.” I was horrified, that he had been trapped this way while also learning that he had tried to leave me, after promising he wouldn’t. My stomach sank. It was ridiculous to be disappointed. Of course he had tried to leave; it had been months. He must have been going out of his mind with worry for Féile, not to mention boredom. While the entire country prepared for war, he had sat beside the lake waiting for me to return. Day after day. I cringed.
He opened his mouth then shut it before finally adding. “Turns out that was the least of my problems.”
His jaw set, and he turned his back once more and continued on his path.
I followed
without any further attempt at conversation, despite his cryptic comment. We took a break after a while, at which point he silently handed me some of the food he had brought from the camp. He set a gruelling pace, and when the sun went down on the grey day he pushed on, our way lit by what moonlight filtered through the trees. After I stumbled over a root for the tenth time, he waited for me and took my hand in his before continuing, pulling me up and preventing me from falling as we powered on. As if I was a small child being tugged along by a hurried parent.
Which he was. How would Féile be? She would have expected us by now. Had she given up? I had been gone the whole summer… She was three now. Who had her? Had they celebrated her birthday? Did anyone care for her? Had they given her to a family like they had with me, and told her to forget us? Or was she locked in a cage with no one to read to her? With no one to tell her it was going to be all right, that she was loved…
The thoughts went round and round in my brain as I kept pace with Gideon’s longer legs, breaking into a little skipping run every now and then to keep up with him. I felt as if my feet were on fire but fuelled by thoughts of my daughter no pain or exhaustion would keep me from her.
I had been frantic when she was taken, but it was nothing to the agony I felt now. I couldn’t bear to think of her believing we were not coming for her.
Gideon came to an abrupt stop – at least it felt abrupt as I had been entirely focussed inwards and not paying attention, but realised now that he had been slowing the pace for a while.
“We’ll sleep here.”
“I’m fine,” I protested. We didn’t need to stop. We needed to keep going. Féile needed us.
“You’ll be no good to anyone if you can’t walk,” he said gruffly.
“We can go for a little bit longer,” I said. I was fine. My feet were sore, but they had toughened up in the years since I’d left Londinium, I was no longer the tenderfoot who had made the journey north with feet that only had to see a road to start to blister.
“No,” he said. “We’re nearly out on the moor. It’ll be warmer here under the trees.”
I nodded my acceptance and went to sit down but, still holding my hand, he pulled me over to sit under a tree. I pulled my hand from his and went a small distance away to relieve myself. On returning, I found he had piled the leaves together and was lying down in a mound of autumn leaves. I felt absurdly shy. I had slept with this man for the last year or so, but his anger made me loath to go near him.
“Are you going to stand there all night?” he asked in the same derisively mocking tone that he had thrown at me in the past. I hadn’t deserved it then but I did now. It was my fault we had come here. I had thought that the Lady of the Lake would offer me stronger magic, a way to guarantee that no force could stand in the way of my reaching Féile. Instead, I had wasted months. Months.
I lay down next to him, unresisting as he pulled me closer. It was cold now that we had stopped moving and I was grateful for the heat. For his proximity.
“I didn’t know,” I offered into the dark.
Silence.
What did I expect? Every day for him must have felt like an eternity. For me it had been hours but for him it had been half a year. I lay there with his arms wrapped around me, as I tried and failed to subdue my shivering.
“Sleep,” he rumbled in my ear.
How had so much time passed?
“Maybe they already have her?” I whispered, a small flicker of hope inside me bursting to life, hope that they had somehow managed to catch her, or had already got her back from the city.
“No,” he said shortly.
“How do you know?” I asked. He had been tied to the lake; he could know no more than I did.
“They have waited for you at York.”
“How can you be so sure?”
The silence stretched so long that I momentarily wondered if he had gone to sleep, but I was familiar enough with the feel of his body and the tempo of his breathing at night that I knew he hadn’t drifted off. He was coiled tight, every muscle and sinew in his body taut, ready to continue the journey. We had stopped for my benefit alone, and I couldn’t relax enough to sleep either.
“Without you, there is no chance.” He had waited so long to speak that I was momentarily confused, my thoughts having drifted back to my strong-willed daughter. Would she be free to roam the city as I had been? It had been the only thing that had kept me sane, those brief glimpses of sky and green pockets of park, a relief from the stifling urban environment in which I had grown up. How much harder would it be for Féile who had known nothing but freedom and open skies, green hills and forests, her whole life. My chest constricted just thinking of it.
I pulled my thoughts together.
“No chance of what?”
“Without you, there is no way through the walls, no way into the city,” he said. “We are not strong enough. No matter how many men have gathered, we cannot defeat them. Their technology has grown strong.”
“While our magic has grown weak,” I finished for him. He was right. In the centuries of fighting, the balance of power had never been more firmly in the Empire’s favour. They would have waited for me, and when I arrived, I would have nothing more to offer them.
He’d had months to think this through. I had only had the few hours that we had been trudging across the moor.
“The moor…” There was no moor on the way to Carlisle. It was all hills and mountains and dales. Our journey to the lake hadn’t been that far, and we had already walked through half the night. “Where are we going?”
“York,” he said in clipped tones. “Rion and his men left Carlisle months ago.”
“But how can you be so sure?” I asked. “Maybe they waited at Carlisle.”
“They didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer. His arms tightened about me.
“When I said before that I could only leave to hunt, that wasn’t all of it. At first, I thought I dreamt it, that Avalon provided the game that turned up in the camp. That in my dreams alone did I take to the skies and roam the forest as a beast. Night after night. I began to direct my dreams, to soar on eagle’s wings to Carlisle where I watched the banners assemble and march south to war. I could reach York in a night, but if I didn’t return before the sun rose, I would wake in agony. I learned the boundaries of my dreams,” he recounted tonelessly. “Until I no longer believed they were dreams.”
I lay unmoving in his arms. Was he telling me at night he transformed into… an actual griffin? I pushed at his arms.
“The sun has set, Cat.” His tone was indecipherable. I turned to try and see his face, but it was in shadow.
“You can turn into a griffin?”
“Something like. At least, aspects of; I could fly like an eagle, roam the forest as a lion.” His chest expanded as he took a deep breath and exhaled. “Or could. Whatever it was seems to have stopped now.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Indeed,” he said shortly.
“You were able to stop it from happening.”
“It just didn’t happen tonight.” He didn’t sound like he knew why. “Now, rest.”
His arms tightened around me, and there, clasped in that band, I somehow drifted off for a few hours.
“Cat.” Gideon’s voice pulled me from my sleep. I lifted my eyelids to the sight of my Griffin and our two horses in the grey dawn light.
“What? How?” I asked in astonishment. After all this time they had come back and found us. No saddles or bridles, of course. Those had remained uselessly behind at the lakeshore camp.
Gideon cast a sour look at the empty landscape.
“A parting gift to see us on our way, it would seem,” he said, patting the side of his stallion’s neck who shied away nervously until his whispered assurances seemed to calm the beast down.
“But how?” I asked again.
He cast me an incredulous look. After th
e revelations of the night, this was the thing I found hardest to understand.
“What does it matter? It gets us to York faster, does it not?”
Right. I stood, brushing off the worst of the leaves as his heavy cloak fell to the forest floor. I gathered it up and gave it back to him.
He waited for me by my horse, hands cupped to help me mount. I tied the cloak about my neck and accepted his help.
“Thank you,” I offered quietly as I put my foot in his hands. A slight thinning of his lips was my only acknowledgement as he hoisted me up and we set off for York at a brisk pace.
Chapter Sixteen
We rode hard for two days, making camp before sunset each night at Gideon’s insistence. His lingering edginess as night fell cost us the extra miles we could have travelled in the twilight. I could barely breathe when I thought of my daughter; the fear and guilt at having abandoned her for so long was crippling. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, so I focussed my swirling thoughts on my companion.
Gideon barely looked at me. As we rode, it was a blessing not to have to deal with him. I knew I had never done anything to earn his… well, anything, really. When I had met him first, he had been mocking of the city girl, and scathing of my relationship with a man he held in contempt as an Oathbreaker who had hurt Rion, his best and most loyal friend. He had married me at his lord’s command and had loved my daughter as a father. My lack of care for her must have galled him, but my appreciation of anyone’s emotions when I had been so devoid of them myself was low. Since I had come back from the brink, as it were, our shared love of Féile – not to mention our physical relations – had created at least a friendship of sorts between us. Before I had gone into the water, there had been a moment where the chance of something more had seemed possible.
Now though… The man I had come back to was not my friend. What he had been through while I was in Avalon… His need to get to Féile matched mine. If he hadn’t had a use for me, I suspected he would have been more than happy to leave me behind. As it was, he barely slowed down enough for me to keep up. But keep up I would; the faster the pace, the sooner Féile would be back in my arms.
Legend of the Lakes Page 19
