It couldn’t. Unless an Aelynn Agrarian lived here. Murdoch had never shown any talent in that direction—although he did have destructive earth skills. Had he found an Agrarian Crossbreed here? One who might be responsible for the rapid new growth? Had he found a Crossbreed wife, as Ian and Trystan had? Lissandra clasped her fingers tighter and focused on doing her duty.
She’d told the driver that her husband had taken ill along this road, and she required a man to drive her from town to town so she might seek him. If Murdoch was married, a public encounter could prove embarrassing. “Where do those who were burned out live now?” she inquired to prevent her thoughts from straying.
“Most share the cottages that survived the fire. Others live among the ruins.” The driver shrugged. “We are too poor to own land, and these days, who knows who is responsible for repairing the houses? Our landlords have fled France. Our so-called leaders argue in Paris, telling us we must pay tithes to a church that no longer exists and rents to a government that cannot help us. They send deputies from the Tribunal to make certain we do not complain as we pay. Good Bretons rise up in arms against the patriotic Guards, but here, in this village”—he shrugged again—“we simply wish a roof over our heads.”
She had seen the soldiers—the National Guards—in Pouchay, heard that angry villagers throughout Brittany had risen up in revolt against them, but she had not yet seen an outbreak of the violence that she could feel simmering across the land.
As they approached the village, she could see burned-out shells of stone houses, their ancient thatching gone, their contents scorched beyond repair. She was relieved she’d reached her journey’s end, but this disaster crippled her hope that perhaps Murdoch had miraculously changed and thus earned the regard of the gods.
Despite the temptation, she refused to turn back without personally confronting Murdoch. Dreading the encounter, she picked at her cloak and scanned the street in search of his familiar form.
“Do you know who I might talk to?” She glanced at the two-story inn ahead. The fire hadn’t reached its tall roof, although the whitewash on its lower walls was blackened with soot.
“You may need to offer coin for answers,” the driver said. “They are isolated here and not likely to speak with strangers.”
She had exchanged her pearls for a purse of coins at a moneylender’s, as she’d learned to do from Mariel. Using her Empathy to judge the moneylender’s greed had resulted in a fair trade, but avoiding the thieves who had followed her had been daunting. Aelynn law required she not cause harm or display her supernatural abilities in this world. But just thinking that an Olympus of Aelynn was reduced to hiding from miscreants because of an irresponsible bastard like Murdoch deepened her anger and resentment.
She produced the small silver coin Trystan had said would buy almost anything. “Is this enough?”
The driver nodded curtly. “Do not display more than one. The world is full of thieves.”
She shuddered, knowing the truth of that. In just two days, she’d had thieves attack her for the coins she carried, and seen the fire damage caused by deserters. If deprivation drove people to such levels, what would become of Aelynn should its crops continue to fail, or the volcano continue to spew its deadly lava?
As they drew closer, she could see a man in a neat blue uniform lounging at the tavern door, watching her arrival with suspicion, reminding her that this village was not any safer than the port she’d left behind. She had already discovered that uniforms did not mean security.
Also noticing the soldier, her driver spit on the ground and guided his cart down an alley, out of sight of the main street. “There are committees for everything these days. Here, they send the Committee of Public Safety to conscript our men,” he explained with bitterness. “In the name of the Revolution, they have been licensed with the power of life and death, but they do naught except harass the innocent when they should be fighting for our country. It does not matter who you are—they will ask for your documents. Do not go near them if you’re alone.”
Having no documents to show, Lissandra found it far simpler to travel unobtrusively and pray no one noticed her. It had worked thus far, but it wouldn’t if she stayed in any one place for very long.
Her driver pointed to a row of attached stone houses covered in soot and scorched in places, but relatively intact in comparison with those on the main street. “The widow Girard is a respectable woman with a young son she raises alone. Tell her Luc sent you.”
Lissandra handed him a coin and let him assist her from the cart. Given that she had the strength to knock the driver over with a slap, Lissandra found quaint the custom of treating women as weak, inferior creatures, but she had spent a lifetime disguising her inner self while studying others. She was an adept student.
An Oracle must be cold and harsh to be heeded, she heard her mother say. An Oracle must be superior to those she would lead. And so with discipline and hard work, Lissandra had made herself superior, which had put her on a lonely pedestal. Now that she’d stepped down, it seemed practical to be unassuming—provided she was offered no provocation to act otherwise.
The widow Girard was a small wren of a woman who checked the alley before opening her door. “There are too many prying eyes these days,” she whispered after Lissandra introduced herself. “They seek spies and traitors around every corner. And the elders whisper of witches and demons.”
Lissandra had no understanding of the subject or any interest in it, but she listened politely until she was offered an opportunity to speak. “I seek the stranger that Luc tells me has recently arrived. I had word my husband was ill along this road, and I hope the stranger might tell me of his whereabouts.”
“The stranger is everywhere,” the widow claimed, with a broad sweep of her hand. “He never rests. He is in the fields when we rise, and hauling broom for thatch when we go to bed. He fights the fires that linger in the peat fields.”
Lissandra found it hard to fathom a warrior like Murdoch building instead of destroying, but she decided to reserve judgment until she saw it for herself. “Where does he sleep?” Or, when does he sleep? might be a better question if she was to believe one man could do all that the widow claimed.
The woman shrugged. “No one knows. You might ask at the church. The priest has been staying there to guard the statues from the thieving deserters who hide in the woods.”
After obtaining directions to the church, Lissandra began her search. She prayed that it was her smoke-filled surroundings and her need to block the villagers’ belligerent emotions that prevented her from sensing Murdoch clearly. If she let down her shields, the grief and hatred spilling from an entire town would incapacitate her.
When she saw no one at the church, she set out along a back way into the countryside, following her meager Finding instinct. She’d been warned that wolves and wild boars still roamed this wilderness, but she sensed few creatures of any size except some men in the distance—where her instincts told her she would find Murdoch.
Taking a deep breath to steady her ragged nerves now that she was so close to her objective, she entered the edge of the woodland.
As if a fire-breathing dragon lurked in the shadows under the trees, a cloud of smoke engulfed her, and she coughed harshly. Curse the gods, but this was worse than climbing the volcano’s slope. She could feel the heat through the soles of her shoes.
A rabbit dashed across her foot. She tripped and caught her balance on a tall standing stone. The rock was so hot, she quickly withdrew her palm before it burned.
She dragged her gown up from where it tangled her feet, and held the fabric in her hands, using her Aelynn strength to stride faster. She doubted anyone could see her abnormal speed in this murk, and her lungs would appreciate a hasty departure.
A geyser of fire flamed upward through the layers of decaying vegetation on the side of the road. Startled, she halted. Was Murdoch out there, warning her to leave?
The devil she would.
Determined, she marched on, coughing harder in the thickening smoke. She would have this confrontation done with. The setting might be ominous, but it was certainly fitting—
A demon shot through the smoke at inhuman speed. Lissandra glimpsed only a blur of broad, filthy bare chest before iron arms tackled her waist. She shrieked as the creature tore her heels from the ground and tumbled with her into the ashes on the far side of the lane.
Another fiery geyser spewed into the air on the spot where she’d just been standing.
Muttered curses assaulted her ears. With bare arms propped on either side of her head and muscular thighs pinning her legs, the demon prevented her escape. In shock, Lissandra closed her eyes and screamed at this smothering male proximity. Her attacker covered her mouth with his hand.
Refusing to surrender, she locked her mental shields against any emotional assault and shoved at broad—naked—shoulders, with the intent of flinging her assailant into the air with her superior strength. Beneath her palms she encountered the grit of soot and ash and the powerful play of muscles, but no matter how much strength she applied, her attacker merely beat the ground with his fist.
The ground trembled. She opened her eyes in terror.
And watched the geyser of fire die.
Cursing tonelessly in several languages with phrases so vivid they scorched her ears, her attacker trapped her between his bulging arms, glared down at her through the smoke, and, after only a moment’s hesitation, covered her mouth with his.
Stunned by this invasion of her sacred person, Lissandra grabbed the monster’s arms and tried to pry him away. She kicked and struggled, but her screams were smothered by lips so commanding she almost forgot to fight.
She did forget to fight. Senselessly, she clung to the strong support of his arms and kissed him back. Or maybe not so senselessly. This kiss lived inside her heart. . . .
. . . and her memories. She had dreamed of this kiss so long. . . .
His mouth tasted of strong wine, his beard bristles chafed her skin, and the heavy desire consuming them erased rational thought. She parted her lips at her assailant’s insistence, drank his breath into her lungs, mated her tongue with his, and almost burst into flames.
Only when all the alarms clamoring in the back of her mind merged did sense return. With a cry of outrage, Lissandra summoned her strength and brought up her knee.
The confounded skirts hindered her effectiveness. Before she could emasculate the bastard, he rolled off her. Lying flat on his back, he stared at the leaves above them, loudly repeating his curses of earlier.
Undeterred, Lissandra turned on her side and glared into the piratical unshaven features she knew too well. Rising up on one arm, she smashed her fist into his iron-hewn abdomen. He merely oofed and grabbed her elbow, pulling her off-balance and across his bare torso.
“By all the gods in this universe and the next,” he roared, “this is the most asinine, ridiculous, inane, spectacularly stupid behavior I’ve yet encountered! What the devil was Ian thinking to send you here?”
Three more fiery geysers burst from the earth’s floor.
Lissandra had found Murdoch.
Four
Lissandra.
In the Other World. Alone. This could not be good.
Cursing the peat fire, her presence, and his stupidity in kissing her, Murdoch sat up, dragging Lis with him. If she wanted to run away from Aelynn, there was an entire world she could have chosen to explore. Why had she come here?
Another geyser of flame erupted from the peat bog of the forest floor. He’d spent months practicing self-control, and he lost it with one glance at Lis.
Shoving her into a hummock above the peat bed, he grabbed his temples and concentrated with all his might. With Lis, he didn’t have to pretend he was dousing the fires with dirt, but she shattered the concentration he needed to mentally snuff the fire.
Once the danger was past, with only a vague ache at the back of his head as a reminder of his incompetence, he had time to contemplate Lis’s improbable arrival, but he was too stunned to do more than act on instinct and help her from the filthy ground. The reality of her slender hand in his callused palm jarred him even more than the delicious, unbelievable taste of her kiss.
Lissandra? Here?
The possibility that Aelynn had somehow exploded and existed no more—for what else could have brought her to leave it?—froze his soul. His home had always been an oasis in the back of his mind, an idyllic place he dreamed about to which he did not belong.
But if the princess had left her throne . . .
Then he remembered. Wincing, Murdoch rubbed his still-healing shoulder and, with horror, glanced at the glowing ring he’d been trying to ignore since he’d been shot. His Aelynn ring of silence was so much a part of him that he’d have to cut off his finger to be rid of the glow of condemnation that had settled there.
If there were gods, they obviously hated him. Nothing else could account for Lis’s arrival now, after all these years, when he was in the midst of another odious disaster of his own creation. The blue flame hovering over his ring taunted him with his guilt.
Scalding memories tore through Murdoch’s soul: of Luther falling to his death at his hands; of leading a troop to hunt down his former friend Trystan and setting fire to a harbor; of wearing a French uniform and shooting Ian, his brother at heart. Even conjuring up his pride in his officer’s stripes as he’d ridden his valiant steed into battle, rapier flashing, could not ease the pain of knowing he’d fought for the wrong reasons. And then there had been the final horror that even he couldn’t justify or understand. . . .
If the blue flame meant the gods had targeted him for retribution, they’d found no surer vessel of revenge than Lis. Regrettably, he knew that if Lis had made up her mind to hunt him down—for whatever reason—she would follow him to the ends of the earth. And Murdoch would lie down and die rather than harm Aelynn’s goddess.
Yet she’d kissed him in all his unworthiness, with a hunger to match his own. Impossible.
He’d hoped for far too long that she would forgive and forget and send someone looking for him. He’d given up that hope after he’d abandoned her brother in England.
He stamped out embers, trying not to recall how right her mouth had felt on his.
As usual, he hid his real feelings behind sarcasm when he finally spoke. “What the devil is the high-and-mighty Oracle’s daughter doing here?”
“And a pleasure it is to see you, too,” she said, adjusting her foolish hat and shaking leaves and sticks from her garments. “Do you always greet visitors with fountains of fire?”
Lis never wore skirts and petticoats. He stared at the ethereal silver and gold woman he remembered, now weighed down by the crude heavy garments of this world, and couldn’t integrate the two images. Even covered head to toe in clothing filthy with ash, she was the tropical goddess he remembered, and his heart was still blacker than her skirts.
He picked up his shovel and ax and looked for more hot spots. “The peat burns underground. Unless you’ve come to help put it out, you need to leave.”
“I see your charm has not improved during your years away.” Ice dripped from her tongue.
And still he smelled the scents of sea air and jasmine of the girl he’d once known. She was like a breeze straight from Aelynn, and he defied his longing by pretending to search for any lingering fire. “Have you come to punish me for my sins?” he asked coldly. He needed to walk away before he fell into his old role and reached out to rub a smear of soot from her beautiful peach-flushed cheek. She wouldn’t appreciate the caress.
“I doubt that’s possible.” She rubbed the dirt smear away herself. “I understand this time your fire killed an old woman.”
“I saved the woman,” he protested. “But she died of natural causes before I could carry her out of the flames.”
“And I’m sure there is an excellent explanation for the conflagration also,” she said in a rationa
l tone that taunted him with his faults. “As I’m certain there was a logical reason for nearly killing Trystan and his wife with Greek fire, and attacking Ian with the intent to maim, if not kill. You always have an excuse.”
She sounded just like her condescending mother. He needed the reminder that she was no longer the adoring playmate she’d once been—and that he’d been the one to turn her cold.
He set the wind to clearing the murk around them so he could see her, really see her. Overhead, branches swayed and rattled in the breeze he’d summoned, but at least no more embers flamed to life.
With the smoke gone, the full impact of Lis’s slender, radiant beauty an arm’s breadth away nearly crippled him, but Murdoch refused to falter in her eyes any more than he would in the face of danger. As usual, her proud mask of scorn and arrogance tarnished the gentle spirit he had once known. Or thought he’d known. The last he’d seen of her, she’d been well on her way to becoming as judgmental as her harridan of a mother.
Lissandra studied him as he studied her. He dripped sweat, he stank of smoke, and his crude homespun trousers were plastered to his legs. Murdoch wickedly considered embracing her again, although finally having Lis in his arms would no doubt ignite his lust like dry tinder, and he still had the result of his last error to clean up. “I repeat, what the devil are you doing here?”
Her gaze finally found the blue flame flickering on his finger, and her expression of dismay was so poignant that he almost walked away.
“I was right,” she whispered. “The gods have chosen you.”
He snorted rudely. “If there are any gods, they wish to destroy me.” And had almost succeeded, if he accepted the glow as anything more than a lightning strike. Lightning was the only explanation that he could accept right now.
Lissandra had learned what she needed to know. The spirits had rejected her and Ian as Oracle and had chosen Murdoch.
Given that the spirits had not yet entered Murdoch, she supposed some doubt about his suitability must linger. For good reason, she knew. His crimes were many. It served him right to be reduced to a mere woodcutter instead of taking over the world as he’d probably intended.
Mystic Warrior Page 4
