Embers

by Helen Kirkman

  "Ready to go?"

  He was striding towards her. Her gaze took in the fine riding boots, the swirling folds of the dark cloak pinned with gold and garnets at his left shoulder. The decorated scabbard swinging from his jewelled belt—

  "You cannot," she shouted, straight across the cold-tinged dawn air that divided them. "You cannot mean to go now. Today." Was he mad? He was not well enough yet. He would kill himself—

  Behind him were his men, one holding the bridle of the great black horse he rode, another leading the smaller grey that had been hers on the ride here. Farther back, she caught the gaudy flash of Cunan's chequered cloak.

  "Change of plan. It seems to be upsetting people." The bright gold eyes flicked carelessly from her to the press of men and horses. Bright red crossed with blue caught the sun.

  We leave for Bamburgh in five days. Tell your brother, the Strathclyde Hound. He needs to be ready.

  Her own gaze, guilt-studied reflex that she could have killed herself for, flew to the bright slash of colour. The disturbing encounter with her half brother in the herb garden was stinging at the back of her mind. She shut it out.

  "Well?"

  She could feel her face lose its colour, go stiff. She tried to find the mask that had always served to hide what she felt. Practice had made it second nature for her to do that. Easy. But not with him.

  "Come. We have a long way to go."

  He extended a gloved hand and someone tossed him the reins of her mount. He closed the small distance between them, dragging the skittish horse behind as though it were no more substantial than a spider's web. His feet in their heavy boots struck the hard-packed earth of the courtyard with dangerous precision.

  She waited until he was so close that what she said would belong to the two of them. She said the only piece of truth she had behind her mask. Even though there was little chance of her being heeded.

  "I meant only that it is too soon for you to travel. Because of the wound. You could cause damage, make yourself ill again—"

  "You were thinking of me?"

  She kept her gaze on him. She refused to look at the chequered cloak. She did not know whether the mask was not in place, or whether it was too well fixed, but his eyes had hardened into ice.

  "You should be thinking of your brother."

  "What?"

  She could see the gaudy cloak advancing towards them out of the press. She thought of the secrets in its wearer's head.

  "Cunan…"

  "Who? Oh, I am sorry. Did I not clarify which brother? I meant Modan."

  Bastard.

  Cunan kept walking towards them. He would hear.

  "I hope you have replenished the medicine bag with herbs."

  The sweet scent of horehound in the monastery garden…

  Cunan with his dangerous thoughts and his dangerous whiplash strength. Cunan with his terrible vulnerability.

  "Did your brother help you?"

  Cunan's footsteps came to a stop. "It is as well she has someone who cares for her welfare. She needs her kin. We have discussed that, have we not, Alina?"

  Some detached part of her brain, the part that made calculations, told her that it was just as well if Brand believed her false. It was what she was trying to achieve. That part of her brain made her smile, in the way that had lashed her father and uncle into fury.

  "Aye."

  Cunan's smile held an exactly equal measure of warmth.

  "So did you ask him?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  Her heart began beating out of time. She tried to widen the smile so that neither of them would guess what was inside her. But she thought her eyes must hold the wildness of something hunted. She could not bear it. "I will not."

  "Then I will—" Whatever Cunan would do was obliterated in a blur of grey. Brand caught the reins before Cunan could be trampled to death.

  "Sorry. The horse is restive. Can I help you up?"

  "Cunan…" She stepped between. Because she never learned. The instant of stillness she created gave Cunan the chance he needed.

  "Ask him," screamed her brother, rolling in the mud of the stable yard. "Ask him for the truth." He got as far as his knees. "Ask the Northumbrian whether it was me who found out where you were when everyone else had given you up for lost. Ask him whether that is true."

  Not a word would come out of her mouth.

  "It is true." Bright gold, achingly clear, locked with her gaze.

  "I told you—" Cunan had gained his feet, mud streaking the garishly dyed cloak. "It was me who knew. It was me who spoke to the traveller whose arm you healed. It was me who guessed. He described you."

  The goldsmith. The man with the broken arm she had helped the abbess to set. His gratitude…

  "He could have been describing any woman whose charms had witched sense. But there is one thing you can never disguise." Cunan was reaching towards her, his face alight with triumph. "The man saw your useless hand."

  She snatched her left hand away before her brother could touch it, before his fingers could grasp the ugliness of badly-healed bones and scarred flesh.

  She stepped backwards. Only one step. It was quite controlled. The mask of cold indifference was in place. But even so, her head turned.

  Not towards Cunan.

  "Is that how it was?" Useless question. He had already told her it was true. Brand was not a person who lied.

  "It is true. I have told you. I believed you were dead." The eyes clear as melted gold, just as hot, held her.

  "Besides, Cunan's sources of information are impeccable. Your injured goldsmith was selling his wares to Goadel."

  "Goadel…"

  She tore her gaze away. Her eyes sought her brother's, sought to find all the things he had not said to her.

  You should believe.

  She lurched away. Brand caught her before she slid into the mud like Cunan. His arm closed on her body, crumpling the soft folds of her dress, holding her. She heard the hiss of her brother's breath, sharp and dangerous. The hellhound. She tried to pull away, stumbled, then the air left her lungs as her body slammed full-length against the toughness of Brand's.

  Cunan was right behind them. She saw his face. She saw his hand move.

  "No! Let me go." She swore savagely in Celtic. But she did not know why she was pleading and cursing. Because of what Brand might do. Because she was afraid that Cunan would kill him. Because his hair dazzled her eyes like teased gold in the first light and the feel of him struck through her like glory.

  Because they were nothing to each other. Just nothing. She struggled, but his grip tightened, so that she could feel all of the hard length of his body, the tension held back in each muscle.

  It was not a strength she could combat. Yet her mind registered the breath that came slightly too fast, despite that harshly held control, the body warmth that burned through the touch of his hand just slightly more than it should.

  She felt all of his anger.

  Then her feet left the ground and she was tossed into the saddle, one hand clutching at the horse's mane, the other entangled in Brand's sleeve.

  "Take care, Alina. We have a long way to go."

  His eyes were unreadable. Somewhere below her Cunan's hand slid away from his left hip. Behind that was a slight flutter of ragged clothing.

  "The journey has only just started."

  His gaze was not on the hellhound of Strath-Clòta or on the slowly settling rags draping the faithful Duda. She realized what he was looking at. Her hand was clutching like a raven's claw at the richly woven cloth of his sleeve.

  It was something as simple as a blackbird's call that told her. She had gone aside, for what small amount of privacy she was allowed, and she heard the fast angry clacking of its voice. Blackbirds were the world's sentinels. They announced every disturbing presence.

  She thought at first it was her own presence that had caused such indignation. But it was not. The bird was too far away, its attention directed elsew
here.

  Duda, then. He was her watchdog. They both pretended this was not so, but no one had any illusions. She could not say he intruded, but if she was ever rash enough to consider a bolt for freedom, they both knew how it would end.

  This time he had been spotted, if not by her. She allowed herself a smile. Over to the left a twig cracked and the blackbird screeched. There was a hasty rustling noise. Caught out—

  Duda never rustled. In spite of waving rags and leaf-snarled hair, he never rustled.

  The hairs on her forearms rose.

  It was someone else, one of the others bound on the same errand as herself. Cunan? Cunan with his secrets.

  She did not want to be alone with her brother again. She plunged back through the bushes towards the camp.

  They were all there. Even Cunan. No one could have got back to the camp before she did. She had taken the most direct route. She sat down. There was food. She began chewing through the unlikely amount Brand expected her to eat.

  Suppose it had been one of Goadel's men? Suppose he knew where she was already? Suppose Goadel was out there, now, just waiting for his chance?

  Ridiculous.

  It would have been some animal come to drink at the pool across the clearing, a fox, a stoat, an early evening badger.

  Her gaze went to Brand. He sat, talking quietly to his men. One of them laughed softly. They seemed frighteningly relaxed.

  Cunan was as tense as a hawk.

  If it was Goadel's man… Goadel was death.

  She had to warn Brand. The instinct was pure and unstoppable. She realized equally quickly that she could not. Her own deception had prevented her.

  There was only one other way.

  She waited until Duda had settled himself into an untidy drift beside a beech tree and wandered past. She threw him her saucy look that held a hint of mockery.

  "You are losing your touch."

  There was a furtive blink among the debris. She took this as a sign of interest. There was nothing else to go on.

  "Just now, when you followed me. You startled a blackbird. I heard you."

  "Not me."

  The rags settled back into complacency. Or was that vacancy? She glared in irritation.

  "Then it must have been someone else." She tried to turn the glare into an encouraging look. If it was not you, you wantwit, then it must have been…

  "Nah. A fox, then. Or…just you."

  She resisted the impulse to apply her foot sharply to where his brain seemed to be lodged.

  "I do not think so. Do you never get nervous of what might be around us?"

  "No."

  Her foot twitched.

  "New shoes pinching?"

  She suddenly became aware that Cunan was watching her across the fire. So was Brand. Whatever chance she had had was gone.

  She settled her feet. "Not as much as they might, Duda, not nearly as much as they might."

  "Let me see the wound." There was always more than one way to achieve what you wanted. She would just rather it had not been this way.

  "It is fine."

  "I need to check it."

  "Wifely duty?"

  The eyes that held hers were as dangerous as knife blades.

  "What else?" She hesitated. She could feel Cunan's eyes on her back. It was like being caught between two wolves snarling over the kill. "There is a pool through the trees. I may need water."

  It was the thinnest of excuses and if he had seen the pool as she had, he would know the water in it was not clean enough. But if there was something wrong with the wound, if he was like to take ill again, she did not want Cunan to see. Not after what she had thought she had heard.

  She tried not to flinch under the measuring look and Brand got to his feet, in one smooth movement that belied the day's weariness that dogged her own limbs, weariness that he must feel doubly.

  Cunan's gaze remained riveted on her back until the trees swallowed her in shadows. Even after. She could feel what it said: Traitor.

  "The water is useless."

  "Is it? I did not realize. I will just use the salve." She had the wit not to look at his face. She fixed her attention instead on the swollen, jagged scar across his arm. She closed her eyes against one brief moment of sickness.

  "The scar is pulling. You should not ride again tomorrow. You should not have ridden today. Did the monks not tell you? Delaying another two days could not have made that much difference—"

  "That seems to distress you as much as it does Cunan—two days. I thought you would have been anxious to see Modan."

  Brilliant beginning for the conspirator she was not First stir up your opponent's suspicions and then try to deliver your warning.

  She scooped salve out of the jar and touched his skin. It was warm, not feverish, just solid and heavy with the kind of warmth she had longed for all her life. She bit her lip. The urge to be done with a deceit she was not designed for, to blurt out the truth and the full measure of her longings, seared through to her heart.

  Her fingers touched the violently distorted flesh of the wound and she knew she could not speak. She would rather die than see more harm come to him. Or to her brother.

  "I do want to see Modan. You can believe that much, if nothing else. I will go with you to Bamburgh. So you are stuck with me, all of you, however much you might dislike me."

  Her fingers, slick with salve, slid across the reddened, horribly ridged line of the scar. She tried to keep from shaking. She tried to keep her touch fingertip-light, so that she would not hurt him. So that she would not feel the touch of his flesh, even the scarred flesh, against hers.

  "I have offended Duda already," she said in her light voice. Idle chatter. Just noise to distract the patient's mind. Or her mind, because she did not particularly care for what she had to do.

  "I heard him following me, you know." She added a hint of triumph, a shade of resentment. She had hold of Brand's arm to steady it while she worked and she thought the thickness of muscle tightened. And then she thought it did not.

  "He would not admit I had caught him out, though. Tried to claim it was just some small beast, like a fox, that I had heard. I admit I did not actually see, but I knew it was a person."

  Brand would know that no one heard Duda when he moved. Would he realize what she was saying? Would he understand?

  "It was just near here." She risked a glance at the thick bushes shadowing the remains of last year's leaf mould. "So I rushed back to the camp and everyone was there, so it had to be Duda." Her voice crowed with a fatuous triumph that would make even a wantwit feel superior. Brand was not a wantwit. The true meaning of what she had recounted would be as plain as day.

  "There. Finished." She let her breath out.

  "I do not think so."

  The jolt that went through her made her fingers catch on a jagged edge of reddened skin. She swore. It came out in Celtic.

  "What are you about, Alina?" The words came out in the same language. The damaged arm moved. The hand pinned her wrist in a grip that made his muscles bulge.

  She raised her head.

  "You know very well what I am about—looking out for myself. I am good at it. You should take lessons from my single-mindedness, and then perhaps you would look after that wound."

  "Why? So I can preserve my own hide, or so I can make up for lost time getting you to Hamburgh and your brother? Which one is all this about?"

  She looked at the uncomfortable eyes that were never satisfied with less than everything. She looked at the sword-trained hand on her wrist.

  "Both," she risked in half-truth. "I want to get to Bamburgh. I have said so. And of course I need you to get me there."

  "And is that why you stayed with me when I was ill?"

  Her hand jerked against his wrist. Useless, betraying movement. But she had not expected that. She had let herself believe he was not concerned about that, had not really known. Saint Dwyn, how much had the moth-eaten Duda told him? How much had he seen and understood?


  "Answer me."

  She could not move.

  "Tell me." The strong, battle-scarred hand slid round until it held hers, not by mere force, but by something far stronger. She did not want to look at their hands together so, but she could not take her gaze away.

  "You were ill. I know about healing."

  "So does the infirmarian. Why did you stay?"

  Because I did not want you to lose your life. Because you are the only person in the world who has ever made me feel alive and cherished, however briefly.

  She stared at their joined hands. No, not joined. Her hand was balled uselessly under his, like a stone. Because that was all she could manage.

  She lifted her shoulders in what, during some other lifetime, might have been a gracefully careless shrug.

  "I have told you. I need you to get me back to my brother. It would hardly have been convenient for me if you had died."

  "You did not need me. Duda would take you back to Bamburgh. I told you as much."

  Trust Duda… He knows…

  That had been his last thought in the morass of pain and fever. For her.

  He had also said that Cunan would betray her. He would certainly betray Brand. She thought of the unknown watcher in the woods. It was like battling in one of those magic pools full of sea monsters. Wherever you turned there was a new threat.

  "Did you say that about Duda? I suppose I forgot."

  Through the small gap between her half-closed lashes she could see stray glimpses of him: the bright sun on his hair, the purple shadows of evening across the taut muscles of his arm.

  "You forgot? Is that why you decided to say you were my wife?"

  She kept her hand very, very still under his. So that the shivering inside her would not leach out through her skin.

  "Oh, that. I thought that was particularly clever of me. It meant you would be stuck with me. You should have seen Duda's face. Well, what anyone can see of it—"

  "Alina, why are you so afraid?"

  The question came from nowhere. Or so she thought. And then she could see under her eyes the way her fingers had moved, despite her will, so that they turned upwards, threading their way through his like the tendrils of a vine seeking warmth. The trembling she had closed her mind to must be obvious to him. He had felt it.