by Nora Roberts
Those eyes fired at the insult, as she’d hoped. “I don’t fear you.”
“Why should an armed man and his faerie guard fear a lone witch?”
“Leave us,” Thane demanded of Kern, and his gaze stayed locked on Aurora’s face.
“As you wish.” Kern bowed deeply, then disappeared.
“Why are you here?”
“Prince Owen needs a wife. Why shouldn’t it be me?”
He had to choke down a rage, bubbling black, at the thought of it. “Whatever you are, you’re not like the others.”
“Why? Because I walk alone at night in the Black Forest, where wild beasts are said to roam?”
“You’re not like the others. I know you. I do know you, or what you were once.” He had to curl his hand into a fist to keep from touching her. “I’ve seen you in my dreams. I’ve tasted your mouth. I’ll taste it again.”
“In your dreams perhaps you will. But I don’t give my kisses to cowards who fight only smoke.”
She turned, and was both surprised and aroused when he gripped her arm and dragged her around. “I’ll taste it again,” he repeated.
Even as he yanked her close, she had the point of her dagger at his throat. “You’re slow.” She all but purred it. “Release me. I don’t wish to slit your throat for so small an offense.”
He eased back and, when she lowered the dagger, moved like lightning. He wrested the dagger from her hand, kicked her feet out from under her before she could draw her sword. The force of the fall knocked the wind out of her, and she was pinned under him before she could draw a breath.
“You’re rash,” he told her, “to trust an enemy.”
She had to swallow the joy, and the laugh. They’d wrestled like this before, when there had been only love and innocence between them. Here was her man, after all.
“You’re right. The likes of you would have no honor.”
With the same cold look in his eyes that she’d seen when he fought, he dragged her arms over her head. She felt the first licks of real fear, but even that she held tight. No groveling stableboy could make her fear. “I will taste you again. I will take something. There has to be something.”
She didn’t struggle. He’d wanted her to, wanted her to spit and buck and fight him so he wouldn’t have to think. For one blessed moment, not to think but only feel. But she went still as stone when he crushed his lips to hers.
Her taste was the same, the same as he’d imagined, remembered, wished. Hot and strong and sweet. So he couldn’t think, after all, but simply sank into the blessed relief of her. And all the aches and misery, the rage and the despair, washed out of him in the flood of her.
She didn’t fight him, as she knew she wouldn’t win with force. She remained still, knowing that a man wanted response—heat, anger or acquiescence, but not indifference.
She didn’t fight him, but she began to fight herself as his mouth stirred her needs, as the weight of his body on hers brought back wisps of memories.
She’d never really been with a man, but only with him in visions, in dreams. She had wanted no man but him, for the whole of her life. But what she’d found wasn’t the wolf she’d known, nor the coward she thought she’d found. It was a bitter and haunted man.
Still, her heart thundered, her skin trembled, and beneath his, her mouth opened and offered. She heard him speak, one word, in the oldest tongue of Twylia. The desperation in his voice, the pain and the longing in it made her heart weep.
The word was “Beloved.”
He eased up to look at her. There was a tear on her cheek, and more in her eyes where the moonlight struck them. He closed his own eyes and rolled onto his bloody back.
“I’ve lived with horses too long, and forget how to be a man.”
She was shaken to the bone from her feelings, from her needs, from the loss. “Yes, you forget to be a man.” As she had forgotten to be a queen. “But we’ll blame this on the night, on the strangeness of it.” She got to her feet, walked over to pick up her dagger. “I think perhaps this is some sort of test, for both of us. I’ve loved you as long as I remember.”
He looked at her, into her, and for one moment that was all there was, the love between them. It shimmered, wide and deep as the Sea of Wonders. But in the next moment the heavy hand of duty took over.
“If things were different . . .” Her vision blurred—not with magicks but with a woman’s tears. It was the queen who forced them back, and denied herself the comfort. “But they aren’t, and this can’t be between us, Thane, for there’s more at stake. Yet I have such longing for you, as I have always. Whatever’s changed, that never will.”
“We’re not what we were in visions, Aurora. Don’t seek me in them, for I won’t come to you. We live as we live in the world.”
She crouched beside him, brushed the hair from his brow. “Why won’t you fight? You have a warrior’s skill. You could leave this place, join the rebels and make something of yourself. Why raise a pitchfork in the stables when you can raise a sword against an enemy? I see more in you than what they’ve made you.”
And want more of you, she thought. So much more of you.
“You speak of treason.” His voice was colorless in the dark.
“I speak of hope, of right. Have you no beliefs in the world, Thane? None of yourself?”
“I do what I’m fated to do. No more, no less.” He moved away from her and sat, staring into the thick shadows. “You should not be here, my lady. Owen would never select a wife bold enough to roam the forest alone, or one who would permit a stable hand to take . . . liberties.”
“And if he selects me, what will you do?”
“Do you taunt me?” He sprang to his feet, and she saw what she’d hoped to see in his face. The strength and the fury. “Does it amuse you to find that I could pine for one who would offer herself to another like a sweetmeat on a platter?”
“If you were a man, you would take me—then it would be done.” If you would take me, she thought, perhaps things would be different after all.
“Simply said when you have nothing to lose.”
“Is your life so precious you won’t risk it to take what belongs to you? To stand for yourself and your world?”
He looked at her, the beauty of her face and the purpose that lit it like a hundred candles glowing from within her. “Yes, life is precious. Precious enough that I would debase myself day after day to preserve it. Your place isn’t here. Go back before you’re missed.”
“I’ll go, but this isn’t done.” She reached out, touched his cheek. “You needn’t worry. I won’t tell Owen or Lorcan about the tunnels or the spy hole. I’ll do nothing to take away your small pleasures or to bring you harm. I swear it.”
His face went to stone as he stepped back, and he executed a mocking little bow. “Thank you, my lady, for your indulgence.”
Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “It’s all I can give you.” She hurried back to the tunnel and left him alone.
SHE slept poorly and watched the dawn rise in mists. In that half-light, Aurora took the globe out of its box, held it in the palm of her hand.
“Show me,” she ordered, and waited while the sphere shimmered with colors, with shapes.
She saw the ballroom filled with people, heard the music and the gaiety of a masque. Lorcan slithered among the guests, a serpent in royal robes with his son and heir strutting in his wake. The black wolf prowled among them like a tame dog. Though his eyes were green and fierce, he kept his head lowered and kept to heel. Aurora saw the thick and bloody collar that choked his neck.
She saw Brynn chained to the throne with her daughter bound at her feet, and the ghost of another girl weeping behind a wall of glass.
And through the sounds of lutes and harps she heard the calls and cries of the people shut outside the castle. Pleas for mercy, for food, for salvation.
She was robed in regal red. The sword she raised shot hot white light from its killing point. As she whir
led toward Lorcan, bent on vengeance, the world erupted. The battle raged—the clash of steel, the screams of the dying. She heard the hawk cry as an arrow pierced its heart. The dragon folded its black wings and sank into a pool of blood.
Flames sprang up at her feet, ate up her body until she was a pillar of fire.
And while she burned, Lorcan smiled, and the black wolf licked his hand.
Failure and death, she thought as the globe went black as pitch in her hand. Had she come all this way to be told her sword would not stand against Lorcan? Her friends would die, the battle would be lost, and she would be burned as a witch while Lorcan continued to rule—with the man she loved as little more than his cowed pet.
She could turn this aside, Aurora thought returning the globe to its box. She could go back to the hills and live as she always had. Free, as the Travelers were free. Content, with only her dreams to plague or stir her.
For life was precious. She rubbed the chill from her arms as she watched the last star wink out over Sorcerer’s Mountain. Thane was right, life was precious. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, turn away. For more precious than life was hope. And more precious than both was honor.
She woke Cyra and Rhiann to help her garb herself in the robes of a lady. She would wear the mask another day.
“WHY don’t you tell her?” Kern sat on a barrel eating a windfall apple while Thane fed the horses.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Don’t you think the lady would be interested in what you are, what you’re doing. Or more what you don’t?”
“She looks for heroes and warriors, as females do. She won’t find one in me.”
“She . . .” With a secret little smile, Kern munched his apple. “Does not seem an ordinary female. Don’t you wonder?”
Thane dumped oats in a trough. “I can’t afford to wonder. I put enough at risk last night because my blood was up. If she chatters about the tunnels, or what passed between us—”
“Does the lady strike you as a chatterbox?”
“No.” Thane rested his brow on a mare’s neck. “She is glorious. More than my dreams of her. Full of fire and beauty—and more, of truth. She won’t speak of it, as she said she wouldn’t. I wish I’d never seen her, touched her. Now that I have, every hour of the rest of my life is pain. If Owen chooses her . . .”
He set his teeth against a flood of black rage. “How can I stay and watch them together? How can I go when I’m shackled here?”
“The time will come to break the shackles.”
“So you always say.” Thane straightened, moved to the next stall. “But the years pass, one the same as the other.”
“The True One comes, Thane.”
“The True One.” With a mirthless laugh, he hauled up buckets of water. “A myth, a shadow, to coat the blisters of Lorcan’s rule with false hope. The only truth is the sword, and one day my hand will be free to use it.”
“A sword will break your shackles, Thane, but it isn’t steel that will free the world. It is the midnight star.” Kern hopped off the barrel and laid a hand on Thane’s arm. “Take some joy before that day, or you’ll never really be free.”
“I’ll have joy enough when Lorcan’s blood is on my sword.”
Kern shook his head. “There’s a storm coming, and you will ride it. But it will be your choice if you ride it alone.”
Kern flicked his wrist, and a glossy red apple appeared in his hand. With a merry grin, he tossed it to Thane, then vanished.
Thane bit into the apple, and the taste that flooded his mouth made him think of Aurora. He offered the rest to a greedy gelding.
Alone, he reminded himself, was best.
6
WRAPPED in a purple cloak pinned with a jeweled brooch, Lorcan stood and watched his son practice his swordsmanship. What Owen lacked in style and form he made up for in sheer brutality, and that had his father’s approval.
The soldier chosen for the practice had a good arm and a steady eye, and so made the match lively. Still, there were none in the city, or in the whole of Twylia, Lorcan knew, who could best the prince at steel against steel.
None would dare.
He had been given only one son, and that was a bitter disappointment. The wife he had taken in his youth had birthed two stillborn babes before Owen, and had died as she’d lived—without a murmur of complaint or wit—days after his birthing.
He had taken another, a young girl whose robust looks had belied a barren womb. It had been a simple matter to rid himself of her by damning her as a witch. After a month in the dungeons at the hands of his tribunal, she’d been willing enough to confess and face the purifying fires.
So he had taken Brynn. Far cousin of the one who had been queen. He’d wanted the blue of royal blood to run through the veins of his future sons—and had he got them, would have cast his firstborn aside without a qualm.
But Brynn had given him nothing but two daughters. Leia, at least, had possessed beauty, and would have been a rich bargaining chip in a marriage trade. But she’d been willful as well, and had tried to run away when he’d betrothed her.
The wild beasts of the forest had left little more than her torn and bloody cloak.
So he had no child but Dira, a pale, silent girl whose only use would be in the betrothing of her to a lord still loyal enough, still rich enough, to warrant the favor in two or three years’ time.
He had planted his seed in Brynn again and again, but she lost the child each time before her term was up, and now was too sickly to breed. Even the maids and servants he took to his bed failed to give him a son.
So it was Owen who would carry his name, and his ambitions turned to the grandsons he would get. A king could not be a god without the continuity of blood.
His son must choose well.
He smiled as he watched Owen draw blood from his opponent, as he beat back his man with vicious strikes until the soldier lost his footing and fell. And Lorcan nodded with approval as Owen stabbed the sword’s point into the man’s shoulder.
He’d taught his son well. A fallen enemy was, after all, still an enemy.
“Enough.” Lorcan’s rings flashed in the sunlight as he clapped his hands. “Bear him away, bind him up.” He waved off the wounded soldier and threw his arm around Owen’s shoulders. “You please me.”
“He was hardly worth the effort.” Owen studied the stain on his blade before ramming it home. “It’s tedious not to have more of a challenge.”
“Come, the envoys have brought the taxes from the four points, and I would speak with you before I deal with them. There are rumbles of rebellion in the north.”
“The north is a place of ignorant peasants and hill dwellers who wait for Draco to fly from his mountain.” With a glance toward the high peak, Owen snorted in disgust. “A battalion of troops sent up to burn a few huts, put a few of their witches on the pyre should be enough to quiet them.”
“The talk that comes down is not of Draco but of the True One.”
Owen’s mouth twisted as he gripped the hilt of his sword. “Tongues won’t flap of what is forbidden once they are cut out. Those who speak of treason must be routed out and reminded there is only one king of Twylia.”
“And so they shall be. The envoys brought six rebels, as well as the taxes. They will be tried, and executed, as an example, as part of your betrothal ceremonies. Until then, the tribunal will . . . interrogate them. If these are more than rumbles, we will silence them.”
They strode through the gates of the castle and across the great hall. “Meanwhile, preparations for the rest of the ceremonies proceed. You must make your choice within the week.”
Inside the throne room, Owen plucked a plum from a bowl and threw himself into a chair. “So many plums.” He bit in, smiled. “All so ripe and tasty.”
“There’s more to your choice than a pleasing face. You may take any who stirs your blood into your bed. You are the prince, and will be king. Your bedmates may slake your lust, but
your queen must do that and more. You must have sons.”
Lorcan poured wine, and sat by the fire that burned even so
