That was what men did. Took away yourself, so that all that was left was a used and bitter wreck with no life and no power of her own. Even Brand would do that to her, just by the things that he did. Because despite her fear she could not stop wanting him.
Her voice was moaning softly, as though it did not belong to her but only to the heated aching body that had forced itself against his like a creature beyond sanity. She thought she said his name.
Her hips thrust against that tormenting intimate touch because she could not stop herself. It was as though she wanted to bring him deeper, so deep inside her. But then there was the edge of pain and with it came terror. The shock made her cry out, and the sound tearing her throat took the shape of the fear beating inside her head.
"Don't—"
She shouted at him. She had to make him stop before the sum of her buried fears took life and the truth came out. She could not bear this and she was not right for it. Above all, she did not want Brand to be to her what her father had been to her mother. She could not face it.
But then it did stop, both the fear and the magic. She was left on her own on die grass beside the clearness of the moving stream utterly bereft, beyond helping. The tears inside her eyes were no longer dream tears but sobbing gasps, real, wrenching and ugly with pain. Without hope. Like her.
The coldness of the air cut at her exposed skin. There was no movement. The choking rasp of her breath cut off all sound. She was alone, just as she had always been, and he had left her.
Nay, she had left him. Just as she had before. Only worse. Because this time she had done it out of the measure of her fear, out of the shame and the lameness inside. There was no redemption. A man would never forgive a woman for what she had just done.
She was not a woman. She was a maimed being, crawling about on the grass like some sick animal.
He knew all that she was now, and he did not want her.
He was gone.
Her fingers blundered against the solid shape of his arm.
"Alina…"
"Do not let me go."
They were the only words she could get out of the pit of her mind.
The shivers that racked her body were like fever chills.
She lay against his warmth. Brand could feel how fast her heart beat because she clung to him as though she had a she-wolf's claws. He could also feel how small she was, so seemingly…helpless. All the beauty of her and all the finely balanced pride marred beyond saving.
The press of feeling locked inside him was deadly. He did not want to touch her. He did not even want to see her.
His hand settled on her head.
His fingers curved round the shape of her skull, stayed there as though it were possible to touch what was inside it. She did not move. Nothing. Nothing but the harsh sound of their breath and her stillness.
It was not stillness. She was shaking.
His fault. It was not something that could be borne. He wanted to take the pain away from her.
At the same time he wanted to kill her with all the strength in his hands.
Everything she had ever said to him had been a lie. Every action. All that he had believed.
He dragged the crushed clothing across her naked skin, moving round so that the bulk of his body sheltered her from the cold wind. It made no difference to her shivering and when he moved, her small shaking hands clawed at his flesh, biting with the blindness of panic.
It was not the cold that caused her tremors. It was terror. He had utterly misunderstood the depth of her fears. He had wanted to have her. The driving need inside him had been to wipe out her last memory of
Hun's touch with his own. An act of possession that had been as desperate as it was futile. The body's betrayal had been complete, in more ways than he had counted on, its closeness a mockery.
But even if the act had been completed, it would not have brought him what he wanted. He had wanted to be inside her mind.
That was what had driven him beyond sanity. The need to know that what Eadric had said in the forest clearing, that what she had said was true. That when Goadel's men had shot at him, she had turned not towards his enemy, but towards him.
But there was no truth between them. There was no way to change that. He had known it, even through his desperation.
"Why did you he?"
He had not meant to say it, to let her have the smallest power to guess at the writhing vulnerability inside him. Certainly he had meant to keep the lethal blackness of his heart out of his voice.
She flinched as though he had struck her.
"What do you mean?"
It was as impossible not to go on, as it was impossible to stop the punishing breath that scored his lungs.
"Why did you say you had been with Hun when you had not?"
"How…how do you… Why do you say—"
Her voice cut off under the sharp, uncontrolled movement of his body. He heard the frightened hiss of her breath. But he did not know what on Middle
Earth she expected. That she could lie her way even out of this?
"Why…" She stopped. Because there was naught she could say. Yet the thin line of her voice held none of the bravado he expected, only despair and…distance. As though her mind were filled with something else, something he could not guess at and he was forced back into the morass of unknowing. The sense of powerlessness ignited fury to a depth that appalled him.
He tried to hold every muscle still, using the fighter's discipline that had been forced on him since birth. "I know exactly what you have and have not done with that man."
He made not the slightest movement, yet each word struck like fire off steel.
"What I do not know is why you lied."
She did not look at him. All he could see was the nightfall of her hair, spilling through his motionless fingers in waves, rich and tangled from their loving that had been no such thing. It could not go on so. He had to see what lay in her eyes.
His hand moved. The thick fingers, scarred from a life spent sword fighting, slid across the fine silk of her hair, sought the soft curve where neck met skull. In a lightning-fast movement, she turned her face away, eluding him in one last graceful motion of defiance.
Her body curved tightly, rigid in every small muscle. His hand stopped. Suppose it was not defiance? Suppose it was only her terror? She looked as though she wanted to hide herself from his sight. Yet despite that, despite everything, she still clung to him.
Do not let me go.
That was what she had said.
She had nothing.
Because he had taken it all from her.
His mind, casting ahead to anticipate the next step, warrior trained, seemed to know what her words would be before she said them.
"I could see nothing ahead but danger and sorrow for—" Her hands gripped at him in that travesty of connection. She swallowed something back, something she would not say.
But then she said, "There was nothing else I could do."
The words had the power of a sword thrust. He tried to breathe through the pain.
"I could not stay with you."
"Because of what would happen?"
But the truth had already taken shape. He had been a fugitive. He had been able to offer her nothing, not even the protection that he owed her.
"Yes."
He kept breathing.
"You thought it would never stop, the pursuit and the exile."
She made some voiceless sound but his thoughts had run far ahead, seeking the truth that seemed now in his grasp, even if it meant the sword thrust in her words would be lethal.
"There seemed nothing ahead but danger. Because Hun would not accept a debt payment from me. Because of who I was, Cenred's kinsman and always a threat to King Osred, Hun's master. We had to be brought down, my kinsmen and I."
And your fate became bound by mine: a sorrow and a danger that was endless. You were left with the fate of someone who promised much and gave nothing.
"You were alone."
"Yes."
His words had sprung straight from his thoughts. Yet her answer was instant, as though it were the key to everything.
Alone.
She must have felt alone even while she had been with him. He watched her averted face and the hands clutching at him.
Clutching at yet another man she did not want. The blade thrust home.
"You did not go back to Hun."
There was a silence deeper than the earth's fastness. But he did not need her to speak. His own voice gave life to the words.
"When you left me, you were alone and you stayed alone. You were alone all the time, all through that journey—" He saw with the eye of the mind the charred body of the unknown woman she had found on the way, the woman who had been attacked by outlaws. His heart went black.
"You were so desperate to get away that no risk would stop you."
She made the same small sound as before, as though she would speak. But his mind had outstripped that. He could see all that his bitterness had hidden before.
"You were alone afterwards. All the time."
The fear and the loathing he had seen in her eyes for her intended husband must have been every bit as real as he had believed. Stronger than her duty to her father and to Pictland, stronger than anything. Strong enough to make her take risks he could not even think on.
He looked at the head buried in his tunic and felt the shaking in the small body. She had said that she wanted her own place in the world. He had been just as unable to provide that as Hun had been. The sunlight glinted on the thick gold at his wrist. Anything he could have given had come too late.
He watched the thinness of her shoulders, the scratches fading on her hands. He thought of the privation of the small convent in a foreign land. She had preferred that to being with him. She had gone to extraordinary lengths to be free of him.
"I wish I could have given you what you desired."
She turned her head and looked at him.
"You did. I just could not take it."
The world pulled out of shape.
Her eyes were wide and dark. For the first time, he believed he could see all the way through to their clear deepness.
"What you offered me," she said, "I could not take. Like now. I could not…take what you offered me now, not because it was not what I desired, but…because I do not know how."
Her hand uncurled, slid down the stone-hard tension of his arm, settled on white-ridged bone.
"I wish I did know how."
The breeze lifted her hair away from the whiteness of her face. Her flesh fused with his, flattening out his fist, twining round it. Her fingers dragged, small, damaged, frighteningly fragile.
Fragile and a virgin.
The very freshness of the evening air choked him. What he had done in all its lust-driven madness beat against his eyes. He would have handled her so differently if he had only known. But his bitterness, the unquenchable fire inside him, had blinded him. His need had blinded him.
He had thought that they fought this battle on equal terms. They did not.
"Alina, if I had known I would not—"
"You do not have to tell me." The harshness of her voice cut across his words. "I know you would not. I know why you stopped. It is because of me." He felt the breath she took against his side. "It is because I am not a proper woman."
"Not a what?"
"A complete woman."
CHAPTER TEN
She stared at him, with her eyes blacker than the darkest night, while his body pulsed with wanting. Brand's breath caught in his throat. It was impossible to think of a woman more complete, a face or a body that could be more beautiful or inspire more rampant desire.
She knew, she must know, what she could do to people. To him. Even the thought was enough to stir his body to a pitch of need like pain. A need that would frighten her out of her wits. He tried to move away from her so she would not sense how he burned.
She had run away from him.
He kept his voice as calm and expressionless as he could, even though it shaped what to him were the words that had the power to lacerate bone.
"I do not understand."
He could not hold her gaze. Its deep clearness slid away from him. He thought he had lost. But then her thick, dark lashes fluttered and he felt the warmth of her breath on the exposed skin at his neck.
"It is because I am like my mother." The words were small, faint, so that he had to strain to hear them.
"My father used to say she was bespelled. He used to say that I was like her. Everyone did. He said she had tainted her children with her poison and that we would never be free of it"
My father and my mother hated each other… I did not tell you that. There was a lot I did not tell you.
The words sprang out of the warm darkness of a shuttered chamber, when she had lain just this close to him and he had had the first glimpse of who she was.
He felt her tension without seeing it because her body still pressed against his.
What kind of a life had she had at the palace of Craig Phádraig? Who was she, this maiden who had once had the soul out of him?
"You told me, that night at the monastery, that it was a difficult marriage but what—"
"I used to watch the way they dealt with each other. He used to shout at her, endlessly. He said she was not a complete woman. Not a proper one. My father would shout those words in the hall, in front of them all. He used to say her indifference was part of her curse."
His fingers fastened around the wounded hand because he could not help it.
"She just used to stare at him, with her head up, and not say a word. Until he could not shout anymore. She never let him see all the anger inside her, die things that Modan and I saw. But for all her anger, there was naught she could do against him. Even when she fled to Strath-C16ta with Modan and me, he made us all come back."
Her body shivered against him.
"Strath-Clòta was the only place I was ever truly happy. My father took us away from there because he would not let her alone. What he wanted was power over her."
The damaged hand shifted in his grip. So that he had to let it go. She would not want his touch. Would not want him.
"There were three more children, all girls. He said he wanted, no needed, another son, a warrior who would be true to the royal house of Craig Phádraig. That was what he cared for most of all, the power of Pictland, and he thought Modan was tainted by the time we had spent in Strath-Clòta, like me. She died of the last child. It was the son he wanted but it was stillborn. He said that was more of my mother's curse. He was like a madman when she died."
Brand swore without breath. The snatches of rumour he had heard at Alcluyd slid into place—Anna's mother, the headstrong British princess who, it was whispered, had taken her own path long before the constraints of a political alliance with a foreigner. But the marriage had still taken place. He could see it all unfolding as it did so often, the desperation on both sides and the bitterness life forced on people. The bitterness they forced on each other.
Alina.
But she was not looking at him. Her words tumbled onwards.
"Nothing could change what was. My mother's curse, the fault that he blamed her for, whatever it was that was missing from her, won in the end. Because despite all the power he had over her, he could not defeat that She was never really his, never like other women."
Her broken fingers twisted, catching in his sleeve because they were still so close.
"But he would not keep from touching her. He would not stop trying to get whatever it was he wanted from her. Why did he not stop?"
"I do not know. So many things drive people into acts that are desperate." He turned his face, staring at the deepening blue of the sky, the light fading out of it, the edges of darkness that would overshadow it
"Perhaps…perhaps he did not know what else to do. How he could ever be near her." His voice cut the silence of the glade
with a harshness that was jarring and out of place. But it was only because of the desolation leaching through him like deadly bale, and he no longer knew who he was speaking of.
"My father was wrong if he hurt her."
"Aye. He was wrong. As I was. I never intended to hurt you, Alina. I did not—"
The strength and the suddenness of her movement took him by surprise. She sat up, her hands gripping the tight-coiled muscles of his arms, her eyes wide open, burning.
"You did not. Never. It was not that. I wanted you. It was my fault. Because I am cursed, like her. I bring bad fortune and I…I am not whole."
She was staring at him. All the lethal desolation that lived inside him was reflected in her night-dark eyes.
"I know it is true and so do you. That is why you pulled away from me. That is why you wish you could draw away from me now."
Her words stunned. He had not thought the power of their misunderstanding could be deepened. But it was.
"That is not why I stopped myself from—" He bit back on the raw intensity inside him. "I stopped because I knew you were still a maid, that you had not been with Hun as I thought. Because everything I believed I knew about you and what you had done was a lie."
Fright blossomed in her eyes. A different kind of fright The look of someone who has been caught out in their deception. But he no longer cared about the fact that she had lied to him. He understood why, and it was impossible to blame her for his own failure, for the depth of Hun's malice. The only thing that filled his mind was the need to deal with the other fear before it killed her.
"That was the reason I stopped. You cannot believe that I did not want you."
Her face, so fair, brightly vivid with the passion of all that she felt, was turned towards him. She looked as though she wanted to believe what he said and did not dare.
"But I do not understand that. How would you know?"
"How—" Disbelief died under the frightened intensity of her eyes, replaced by a spurt of anger for the mother who had suffered through five children and an embittered brute of a husband and had not even told her daughter that much. It was not possible. But the truth was in front of him.
He just did not know what to do about it.
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