The falcon shifted restlessly against the leather gauntlet Erik wore. Wind tugged Erik’s rich bronze mantle, sending cloth swirling, revealing the indigo wool tunic he wore beneath. The pommel of his sword gleamed like silver lightning.
“If I hand over Sea Home like a woman’s shoe at a marriage ceremony,” Erik said finally, “then every outlaw in the Disputed Lands will descend in hope of spoils.”
Cassandra shook her head. “I’ve had no vision of such a thing.”
“Nor will you,” Erik retorted. “I will fight to the last drop of blood before I hand Stone Ring Keep over to Dominic le Sabre!”
Unhappily Cassandra looked down at her hands, which were all but hidden by long, full scarlet sleeves. Rich embroidery in blue and green glistened like water threading through fire.
“I have dreamed,” she said simply.
Impatience showed in Erik’s glance.
“Of what?” he asked in curt tones. “Battles and blood and keeps falling stone by stone?”
“Nay.”
Erik waited.
Cassandra looked at her long, carefully tended fingers. A large ring set with three gems shone as brightly as the embroidery. Sapphire for water. Emerald for living things. Ruby for blood.
“Tell me,” Erik commanded.
“A red bud. A green island. A blue lake. Together as one. And in the distance, a potent storm waiting.”
The peregrine opened its beak as though the day were too hot rather than decidedly chill. Absently Erik soothed the bird without taking his eyes from Cassandra’s ageless face.
“The storm swirled out and touched the red bud,” she said. “It bloomed with great beauty…but it bloomed within the storm.”
Erik’s eyes narrowed.
“The green island was next to be touched,” Cassandra said. “The storm surrounded it, caressed it, possessed it.”
Tawny eyebrows lifted, but Erik said nothing. He simply continued stroking the restless falcon with slow, calming sweeps of his hand.
“Only the deep blue water of the lake remained untouched,” Cassandra said. “But it yearned toward the storm, where the flower bloomed in scarlet riches and the island glowed in shades of green.”
The wind flexed, tugging at Erik’s mantle and the long red folds of Cassandra’s clothes. The falcon whistled and resettled its wings, watching the sky with hungry eyes.
“Is that all?” Erik asked.
“Is that not enough?” Cassandra retorted. “Where the heart and body go, the soul will soon follow. Then rich life might come, but death certainly will flow!”
“The amber prophecy,” Erik said beneath his breath. “Always that cursed prophecy.”
“You should have left Duncan to die in the Stone Ring.”
“Then the bud would never have bloomed and the island would never have glowed in shades of green. Of life.”
“But that’s not—”
“Your dream describes rich life, not death,” Erik continued ruthlessly. “Is that not worth a few risks?”
“You are risking catastrophe.”
“Nay,” Erik said savagely. “Catastrophe is already upon me! My father is so tangled in clan rivalries that he refuses to spare warriors for his outlying estates.”
“It was ever thus.”
“I must have warriors,” Erik said. “Powerful warriors. Duncan is such a man. With him I can hold Stone Ring Keep. Without him, it is lost.”
“Then let it go, and Duncan with it!”
“Whoever holds those estates holds the key to the Disputed Lands.”
“But—”
“Whoever holds the Disputed Lands,” Erik continued without pause, “holds a sword at the throat of the northern lords from here to Dun Eideann’s stony knobs.”
“I have dreamed of no such war.”
“Excellent,” Erik said softly. “That means great risk will indeed be rewarded by great gain.”
“Or great death,” Cassandra retorted.
“It takes no prophetic gift to see death. ’Tis the common end of living things.”
“Stubborn lordling,” she said angrily. “Why can’t you see the danger of what you’re doing?”
“For the same reason that you can’t see the danger of doing nothing!”
With a muscular thrust of his arm, Erik launched the falcon. Her painted jesses gleamed and her elegant wings beat rapidly. She mounted the wind with breathtaking ease, riding the wild, transparent beast higher and higher into the sky.
“If I do nothing,” Erik said, “I will surely lose Stone Ring Keep. If I lose Stone Ring Keep, Sea Home becomes as exposed and naked as a newly hatched chick.”
Silently Cassandra watched the peregrine.
“Winterlance will be little better off,” Erik continued relentlessly. “What the outlaws don’t seize, my cousins or the Norsemen will take. Do you deny this?”
Cassandra let out a sigh. “No.”
“A weapon has been given to me.”
“Double-edged.”
“Aye. The weapon requires careful handling. But better it be in my hands than in Dominic le Sabre’s.”
“Better you had left Duncan to die.”
“Hindsight or prophecy?” Erik asked sardonically.
Cassandra said nothing.
“He wore an amber talisman and slept at the foot of the sacred rowan,” Erik said after a moment. “Would you have left him to die?”
Again Cassandra sighed. “No.”
Erik narrowed his eyes against the brilliant silver of a cloud-chasm where the sun threatened to burn through. The peregrine was well up into the sky, scouting the marshy edges of the lake with matchless eyes, questing for waterfowl.
“But what if he remembers before he marries?” Cassandra asked quietly.
“That isn’t likely. The storm is as hungry for the possession as the bud, the island, and the lake put together. He will have her before the week is out.”
Scarlet sleeves whipped in a burst of wind, revealing Cassandra’s tightly clenched hands.
“It won’t be rape,” Erik said. “In Duncan’s presence, Amber burns as though lit from within.”
For a time the only sound that came was the muted rattle of marsh grasses combed by the wind.
“But if Duncan remembers first?” Cassandra repeated.
“Then he will try his strength against my quickness. And he will lose, as he lost to Simon. But with a difference.”
“Duncan will die.”
Erik nodded slowly. “It is the only defeat he would accept.”
“What, then, of Amber?”
A falcon’s wild, mournful cry keened through the wind, answering Cassandra before Erik could. She turned, saw his face, and knew why the falcon had screamed.
Cassandra’s eyes closed. For long moments she listened to the inner silence that spoke most clearly of crossroads and coming storms.
“There is another possibility,” she said.
“Aye. My own death. Having seen how Duncan fared against Simon, I don’t hold it likely.”
“Would that I had met this Simon,” Cassandra said. “Any man who could defeat Duncan easily would be a warrior worth knowing.”
“It wasn’t an easy victory. Despite Simon’s catlike speed, Duncan nearly caught him twice.”
Cassandra’s eyes darkened, but she said nothing.
Erik drew his bronze mantle more closely around his shoulders. Through long habit, he made certain that the folds of cloth didn’t foul the sword he wore along his left side.
“If truth be known,” Erik said, smiling slightly, “I’m hoping not to face Duncan over drawn swords. He can be devilish quick for a man his size.”
“You’re hardly smaller. Nor was Simon.”
Erik said nothing.
“If you die on Duncan’s sword, you won’t go into the darkness alone,” Cassandra said softly. “I will send Duncan after you with my own hands.”
Startled, Erik looked at the serene face of the woman he thought he knew
.
“Nay,” he said. “That would bring a war Lord Robert couldn’t win.”
“So be it. It was Lord Robert’s arrogance that caused much of what might come. He is overdue to sleep on a bed of thorns and regrets.”
“He wanted only what all men want. A male heir to hold his lands undivided.”
“Aye. And he would have set aside my sister to achieve it.”
For a moment Erik was too surprised to speak.
“Your sister?” he asked.
“Aye. Emma the Barren.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“That I’m your aunt?” Cassandra said.
Erik nodded curtly.
“It was part of the bargain Emma and I struck,” she said. “Lord Robert fears the Learned.”
Erik wasn’t surprised. The breach with his father that had come over Erik’s pursuit of Learning had never been healed.
“Once Emma married Robert,” Cassandra said, “he barred me from her presence. He lifted the ban only once, when she came to me as Emma the Barren.”
“And went home to conceive soon after,” Erik said dryly.
“Yes.” Cassandra’s smile was as chilly as the day. “It was my great pleasure to give Robert the Ignorant a Learned sorcerer for a son and heir.”
The smile changed as Cassandra looked at Erik, permitting herself to show the love she always felt and rarely revealed.
“Emma is dead,” she said quietly. “I owe nothing to Robert but my contempt. If you die at Duncan’s hands, I will declare a blood feud.”
For once Erik didn’t know what to say. Of all the patterns and possibilities he had foreseen, this hadn’t been one.
Wordlessly he opened his arms to the woman who had been his mother in spirit if not in flesh. Cassandra returned the hug without hesitation, savoring the strength and vitality of the man whose birth wouldn’t have been possible without her Learned intervention.
“I would prefer a different monument to my passing than the beginning of a war only my enemy can win,” Erik said after a few moments.
“Then examine your enemy with an eye to future good. Dominic le Sabre might make a better ally than your cousins do.”
“Satan himself would make a better ally than my cousins.”
“Aye,” Cassandra said ironically. “It is a thing to think upon, is it not?”
Erik gave a crack of laughter and released Cassandra.
“You never give up,” he said, smiling, “yet you call me stubborn.”
“You are.”
“I am merely following my gift.”
“Stubbornness?” she asked dryly.
“Insight,” he retorted. “I see the means to success where others see only the certainty of failure.”
Cassandra touched Erik’s forehead with her fingertips as she looked into his clear, tawny eyes.
“I pray that clarity rather than arrogance will be your guiding star,” she whispered.
DISTANT thunder rumbled over Duncan and Amber as they rode their horses toward Stone Ring and the sacred, unblooming rowan. Uneasily Duncan turned toward the grumbling sound and wondered if the storm would break near or far away.
The clouds that had formed a lid over the fells were flowing lower and lower, dragging a thick mist with them. Yet it wasn’t the damp weather that prickled coolly down Duncan’s spine. He sensed the possibility of danger, yet all about him seemed safe.
Absently he checked that the hammer he had taken from the armory lay ready to hand.
“Stormhold,” Amber said.
Duncan turned toward her quickly. “What?”
“’Tis just Stormhold purring like a great, contented cat now that winter is on the way.”
“Then you think the fells love the storms?” he asked.
“I think they were born for one another. The storms reach their greatest glory in the fells. The fells are never more magnificent than in the fierce grasp of a storm.”
“Dangerous, too,” Duncan muttered.
The whisper of peril came again to him. Again he looked around, but saw nothing moving except the silent, sweeping veils of mist.
“Danger whets beauty,” Amber said.
“Does peace dull it, then?”
“Peace renews beauty.”
“Is that part of your Learned teachings?” Duncan asked dryly.
“’Tis part of common sense, and well you know it,” she retorted, rising to the bait.
Duncan laughed, enjoying Amber’s quickness even though it made him ache to touch her again. Despite his hunger, he made no move to reach for her. He wasn’t certain why she had carefully avoided touching him since Whispering Fen, but he was certain that she had.
Smiling, Amber turned her face to the wild, seething sky. Against the violet folds of her cowl and mantle, her skin had the glow of a fine pearl. The deep rose of the mantle’s lining was repeated in her lips. When the cowl fell back, it revealed the circlet of silver and amber holding her loosely braided hair.
Gems of amber were everywhere on her. Bracelets of clear, golden pieces of amber circled her wrists, gleaming with every movement she made. The silver dagger at her waist was set with a single red amber eye. The hand-sized silver pin that fastened her cloak was set with translucent amber gems in the shape of a phoenix, symbol of death and rebirth through fire. A necklace of amber pieces hung around her neck, as did the pendant in whose golden depths Amber could sometimes see shadows of the past.
Yet as Duncan watched her, it wasn’t the fortune in costly gems he saw. He saw the thick fringe of her eyelashes and the wild roses blooming in her cheeks. He ached to taste the chill of the wind on her skin, and then to drink the warmth behind her rosy lips.
He wished she were riding in front of him rather than on her own horse. If she were in front of him, he could gather her close, slide his hand into the opening of her mantle, and caress the soft warmth of her breasts. Then he would feel the softness change as her nipples tightened, pouting for the heat of his mouth.
Duncan’s thoughts had an immediate effect on his body. The rushing, flooding heat and the hardening of his flesh was something he was becoming accustomed to around Amber. What he wasn’t accustomed to was a small, quiet voice warning him that he must not take her.
It would be wrong.
Yet as soon as the thought came, Duncan disputed it.
She isn’t betrothed. She isn’t married. She isn’t virgin, despite Erik’s protestations. She and I have known one another. I’m certain of it.
And she is willing.
What can be wrong with that?
Nothing answered Duncan’s inner questioning except the stubborn silence of the darkness where memories lay beyond his reach.
Am I married? Is that what the cursed silence is trying to tell me?
No memory came, yet Duncan felt certain he was not married. He couldn’t say why, but the feeling remained unshakable.
“Duncan?”
He turned toward the girl whose eyes were even more beautiful than the amber gems she wore.
“We are nearing the Stone Ring,” Amber said. “Does the countryside look familiar to you?”
Amber reined in her horse at the top of a low rise. Duncan urged his horse alongside before he stopped and stood in the stirrups to get a better look at the land.
It was a glorious, hushed country of mist-wreathed trees, random outcroppings of stone, and steep-sided hills whose tops were lost in silvery cloud. A brook gleamed darkly among mossy rocks and fallen leaves, its voice hardly greater than that of the water drops slowly sliding from naked oak branches to the ground.
Anxiously, Amber waited, watching Duncan’s face for the recognition she both feared and prayed would come.
The fear was for her own happiness.
The prayer was for Duncan’s.
“It looks much like the trail to Ghost Glen,” Duncan said finally. “Would that Whispering Fen lay beyond.”
A small smile played beneath his dark mustache as he spoke. Col
or that had nothing to do with the cool day rose in Amber’s cheeks. When Duncan saw her blush, his smile widened into a frankly sensual grin.
“Are you remembering what it was like to feel my mouth upon your breasts?” he asked.
The color in Amber’s cheeks deepened.
“Or are you remembering the lush blooming of the flower?” Duncan asked.
Her breath hesitated.
Watching Amber, Duncan added softly, “I dream of the flower’s sleek, hot petals and wake up in a fever.”
Amber could no more conceal the sensual shiver that went through her body at Duncan’s words than she could take the high color from her cheeks.
“Tell me you remember,” Duncan coaxed in a low voice. “Tell me that I’m not alone in my fever.”
“I’ll die remembering,” Amber said, her eyes half closed. “You gave me…Paradise.”
The sensual catch in her voice sent a stroke of heat through Duncan’s body.
“You delight and tempt me beyond endurance,” he said huskily.
A sad smile curved Amber’s lips.
“I don’t mean to,” she said. “I’ve tried not to, now that I know.”
“Know what?”
“The power of what draws us together.”
“Is that why you’ve avoided touching me as though I were somehow unclean?”
Amber gave Duncan a quick, sideways look. “I thought it would be easier for you that way.”
“Is it easier for the falcon to have broken wings?”
“Duncan,” she said, stricken. “I never meant to hurt you. I thought—I thought if I weren’t always in your sight or within your reach, you would want me less.”
“Do you want me less now than yesterday or the day before?”
Her eyes closed as she made a despairing sound.
“Amber?” Duncan pressed.
“I want you more, not less,” she said in a low voice.
Duncan’s smile flashed. Then he saw the tears slipping from beneath Amber’s closed lashes and the smile vanished as though it had never been. He urged his horse closer to hers.
“Why do you cry?” he asked.
Slowly Amber shook her head. Warm, hard fingers tilted her chin up.
“Look at me, precious Amber.”
A torrent of Duncan’s emotions poured into Amber with his touch. Even as she drank them, she knew she must stop. The longer she knew Duncan, the more she understood what taking her would cost him.
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