A great, roaring wind had whipped into his heart when his Mamá had fallen, scouring his emotions until he felt raw. He walked, he observed, but the heart blow was so hard, no emotion could be summoned.
T’Holly held one of D’Holly’s limp hands, then he smoothed back her bronze hair.
Holm trembled at the loving gesture and concentrated on the returning color in Lark’s cheeks.
“Remember, Holm Senior,” T’Heather admonished. “Send only a small amount of your strength and energy to her. This isn’t a time for impulsiveness. Not all your energy nor your sons’ combined would Heal her, and she’s too fragile for a Great Ritual Healing; the poison is too entrenched. You hear, Holm Junior?”
Holm cuddled Lark and jerked a nod. “I hear.”
“You hear, Tinne?”
“Yes.” Tinne’s face appeared as colorless as his hair, and Holm knew his brother had been violently ill.
T’Heather crossed to T’Culpeper and placed a hand on his daughter’s forehead. “Ur is too weary to work further, even linked with a PerSun. I’ll send her home by HealingHall glider.” He swept a look around the room. “We all must conserve our energy until this is resolved. Even with additional PerSuns from Cayenne and with you Hollys providing life support, this case will be very difficult.”
“The Apples will contribute strength, too,” T’Holly added. “I called her brother, the GrandLord.” T’Holly stroked his HeartMate’s hand. “No one wants to lose Passiflora.” He choked and continued to caress his Lady.
T’Culpeper’s mouth pinched. “I’ll take Ur to T’Heather Residence, then port home from there to work on identifying the poison.” He opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head and left at a quick pace with Ur in his arms.
T’Heather glanced at Holm. “There’s a small cotspace just outside behind the green door. You can put Lark there until she wakens.” The Healer sighed. “This was her restday. No doubt she expended her energy instead of saving it to Heal. I’m surprised she did so well, but she’s a consummate Healer.”
When Holm thought how they’d “expended” energy, heat rose to his cheeks. Then he found Tinne studying them. Perhaps his father and T’Heather had been too preoccupied to notice, and T’Cayenne and T’Culpeper too unaware of Holm’s character, but Tinne surely knew the difference between the touch of a lover and that of a courteous man. Holm held his woman like she was his, now and forever.
Tinne frowned and Holm noticed fine lines etching themselves in his younger brother’s forehead. Lines that wouldn’t fade after the feud ended. Holm wondered how the circumstances would age him, and his Bélla.
He had a very bad feeling about how Lark would react to this tragedy, both as Healer and his enemy’s daughter. T’Hawthorn was his enemy now, no doubt of that.
Holm nodded to the others and exited, carrying Lark to the cotspace. Though tiny, the room held only the finest furnishings: three layered Chinju rugs of dark, brilliant colors; a carved reddwood frame supporting a thick permamoss sponge and several covers of the softest llamawoolweave. A premier entertainmentspell whispered soothing tones and matched them to pastel colors tinting the walls. Holm smiled grimly, this was PrimaryHealing Hall. Such comforts weren’t available in AllClass Healing Hall near Downwind, where Lark donated her time. That brought the recollection of the ball. His heart tightened in his chest so he could barely breathe.
Now, right now, he should be holding Lark in his arms, dancing, not cradling her after she dropped from exhaustion. He should be listening to his Mamá’s music and introducing Lark to his parents. Not wondering whether his Mamá lived from one moment to the next and thinking how he might comfort his father.
He sat on the cot and buried his face in Lark’s hair, inhaling her fragrance and roses. As much as he tried, he found no trace of the scent they’d made together. So he contented himself with brushing his face against the silkiness of her hair until she stirred.
She stiffened. “Holm,” she said.
He only clasped her closer.
“Actually,” she continued in a dusty voice, “I should call you ‘Holm Junior.’”
“Call me ‘Lover. ”
She pulled herself from his arms. He didn’t want to let her go. He needed her more than he could say, but he’d never hold or constrain her.
Twitching her gown into smoother folds, she avoided his gaze and turned to the open door.
“Don’t go,” he said roughly.
Before she could answer, a youngster appeared at the end of the corridor. He stopped as he caught sight of Lark, then ran to her, an ungainly boy awkward in his growth. He skidded to within a handspan of her.
“Laev,” she said.
His gaze wildly ranged to Holm, then back to Lark. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I never meant to hurt a Lady. She’s tall, but she’s skinny, and her clothing and colors mixed with the others and the fight lurched around and—” He caught his breath and pretended to cough, not to sob.
Holm was glad his emotions were frozen. He was deathly afraid that if he felt something it would be killing rage at this boy.
“I never meant to hurt her. I didn’t really mean to fight at all, but that Eryngi taunted me. . . .”
“That matches Eryngi’s story,” said a new voice, Tinne’s. Laev jumped and Holm started. For an instant, he’d thought it was his father speaking. Tinne’s voice was usually smoother, lighter. “He’s blaming himself, too. I imagine we all are, in some way or another—T’Holly for not accompanying her on her errands, the rest of us for not sending better guards with her. . . .” Tinne lowered his eyes. Holm felt the same self-blame.
“You’d better get that whelp out of sight before papa kills him,” Tinne said, not looking at anyone but the boy.
“You’re right.” Lark’s voice wasn’t normal either.
She took the youngster’s hand and led him down the hallway. Words floated back to Holm. “I’m needed now. Why don’t you wait for me in the chapel? You know where my den is. . . . I’ll join you shortly.” She watched as the teen obediently walked away.
When she didn’t turn back to them, Holm stood up. “Lord and Lady.” The prayer-curse shot from him with unusual violence.
Tinne eyed him warily, then looked at Lark’s ramrod back. “I’ll report to T’Heather that his Daughter’sDaughter has awakened. They have four SecondLevel Healers with Mamá.” He shook his head. “Four!” A tremor rippled through his body.
Holm dipped his head. “I need to speak with . . . Mayblossom.”
He made no attempt to muffle his footsteps as he came up behind her. Even through her loose gown he saw her shoulders tense. He hesitated, but knew she didn’t intend to turn and confront him, so he circled her. “Bélla—”
She cut him off with a chopping gesture, her face set in stern lines. “Your Family needs you. Your mother and your father.”
“And I need you.”
She raised both palms. “Stop. Our association was irrational, foolish, doomed. It’s done. We can’t go any further without hurting ourselves and others, and I won’t do that.”
“Our ‘association’?” His own voice grated with a note he’d never used with a woman, but as red hazed over his vision, he knew his anger at her words and her rejection was too deep for manners. Better anger than pain. When the horrible numbness around his emotions wore off, he would have two great wounds in his heart.
He was a fighter. He’d fight. “I won’t listen to you now,” he said through clenched teeth. “I won’t give you up. You will be my He—wife!”
Her released breath was more scream than sigh. Her nostrils widened and he saw her stance brace and her lips move silently. A few seconds later she said far too calmly for his temper, “Find another wife, Holm.”
He ground his teeth. Far too much had happened. Time to tell her she was his HeartMate, damn the consequences.
“Mild silence spell on Holm HollyHeir!” she commanded, and his lips clamped shut, emitting only garbled sounds. He reached f
or her mentally, but all her shields loomed high and strong.
“You listen to me! I will not be forced, in any way.” When he noticed white flashes emanating from her, he was relieved she’d gagged him. “Everything is different, now. How can you stand there and say we could marry?”
Her question to him released the spell. He battled down the fury and panted until he could control his own voice. “My parents promised. By their Words of Honor I could have my wife, whoever she might be.”
Lark raised her eyebrows. “And when was this?”
“Before I went wooing,” he said deliberately. “As HeartMates, they were sorry I had to take only a wife.”
She flinched, and he cursed hurting her. But he continued. “So they gave their solemn Words of Honor, Words that cannot be broken to the detriment of the GreatHouse.”
Her face softened an iota, and she was more his passionate Bélla than the FirstLevel Healer. “Holm, Holm”—she shook her head—“our—affair—”
“Loving,” he said.
Again her chest rose with a deep breath and she dropped her eyes. “Our loving before was difficult. Now it’s unimaginable.”
“No.”
Red tinted her cheeks again, and she gestured to where his Mamá lay. “Can you tell me that T’Holly would welcome me into your Family? Can you tell me that there would be no rift between you now if you did?”
“You are more Heather than Hawthorn,” he muttered.
She only tugged a lock of black hair. “I am T’Hawthorn’s daughter. He will always seek to influence me. I will always be Mayblossom Larkspur Hawthorn Collinson.”
“You will always be Bélla to me. I will have you!”
“Why?” She flung up her hands. “Why? When any sane man would walk—run—from our liaison.”
He was cool enough now not to tell her the truth. “We have a special bond.” Though she might not let him in, she could do nothing when he enveloped her in a field of tenderness. For her, he’d dig inside himself for emotions. In her presence he could experience feelings in spite of his own great wound of his injured Mamá. So he gently settled a cloak of soft love, unthreatening love devoid of passion, around Bélla.
She turned her head away from him and sniffed. Her lips trembled. “Find another woman, Holm,” she whispered.
“The bond between us is strong and good. And right. Can’t you tell how right it is?” he, too, whispered.
Her mouth curved down. “The bond is right, the time is wrong. Let it go, Holm.”
“I can’t. They promised.”
Her chin came up in passion. “How could you hold them to such a promise now?”
He didn’t know if he could, but it seemed like the only thread of hope he could hang on to.
At that moment Tinne appeared, carrying a pair of drooping kittens. A ring of white rimmed his mouth. “Meserv and Phyll insisted on trying to help.” He stepped between Lark and Holm, facing her. Tinne sucked in a breath of air and blinked rapidly. “They did well. Both of them.” He handed Meserv to Holm and Phyll to Lark with a bow.
Tinne continued to keep his body between them. “I think you must be very weary, FirstLevel Healer,” he said evenly.
“Yes.” A small, sad smile flickered across her face. “It’s time for me to go. I’ll be here tomorrow to—to help.”
“Tinne—” Holm started.
Tinne didn’t turn to him. “Father is asking for you.”
“Blessed be, Holm HollyHeir and GreatSir Tinne Holly,” Lark said, and Holm knew her retreat into formal manners was to put as much distance between them as she could. Reluctantly he dissipated the field around her. She shivered, then shrugged and hurried away down the hallway.
“Don’t say anything, Tinne,” Holm warned his brother’s back. “I don’t want to hear a word.”
“You wouldn’t listen anyway.” Tinne sounded muffled.
“Damnable situation,” Holm smacked his fist against the nearest wall, hard enough to make a satisfactory sound and sting, but not do any damage.
“Yes,” Tinne said.
Lark took a shortcut through a Healer’s corridor to the chapel. On her way, she stopped by her den and found Laev huddled in the twoseat.
“Laev?”
He lifted his face, this time not pretending he hadn’t been crying, though the tracks of his tears showed only faintly in the dim light. “I stayed in the chapel a while, it smelled nice and felt good, but there’s a holo of the Lady, and she looks just like the one I hurt—” His voice cracked.
Lark winced inwardly. She’d forgotten that a woman of the Apple Family had posed for the portrait, some ancestor of the present Passiflora D’Holly, no doubt.
Lark shut the door behind her and advanced into the shabbily furnished little room.
“So I came here,” Laev said. He hauled a softleaf from his pocket and blew his nose. Since the tissue was a pale peach color, Lark knew he’d gotten it from the bowl on her desk.
“You have fash music.” He waved to the entertainment slot. Lark shivered. He’d spelled the system to play several of Passiflora D’Holly’s pieces. She didn’t know until Holm had left her apartment that morning how many flexistrips of D’Holly’s music she’d collected.
“Will she live?” Laev asked with the bluntness of youth and guilt.
Lark petted the sleeping Fam in her arms. “I don’t know. No one knows. It seems your blade had a propulsion and poison spell.”
He turned very white and shuddered. “I didn’t put it there. I didn’t. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have used the knife if I’d known!”
“Where did you get it?”
Now color raced to his cheeks. “I picked it up in the street, about three years ago outside the Guildhall, but it was a real gang knife. It had symbols and everything.”
“Oh. I think someone needs to look at it. GrandLord T’Culpeper or T’Heather.”
Taking a chance, she went to the twoseat and sat, placing Phyll in her lap and putting her arm around Laev. He stiffened, then leaned into her. She stroked his hair. His mother, bless her, had been an unusually demonstrative person to marry into the Family and had taught her son how to touch and be touched.
After a few moments he said. “She might die.”
“Yes,” agreed Lark.
“And if she dies, he dies. They’re HeartMates, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
A racking shudder went through him at the thought of killing the great T’Holly, even indirectly. Laev had spoken the words no one in the HealingHall had wanted even to think, let alone say aloud. If D’Holly died, T’Holly would follow within a year, since HeartMates were so bound together.
“That’s bad. That’s horrible. I don’t ever want to be a HeartMate,” Laev said.
She ruffled his hair again. “I hear there are compensations. And it’s a few years before you’ll know yet.”
Once more the silence stretched between them. Laev wrestled with some thoughts. Another time she believed they’d get on well together, something she and her brother had never managed. She liked this boy, and could come to love him as one should love Family.
“You know what’s the worst?” he whispered.
“What?”
“Papa and FatherSire are proud of me. And FatherSire, he’s glad that T’Holly might die, and that I did it by mistake. It makes me feel sick.”
Bitterness welled up in her, but not surprise. Lark wondered how to handle this. She didn’t want to criticize their Family, no matter how wrong they were, that might make Laev react out of loyalty and stop him from thinking. “What would your mother have said about this?”
Tremors rocked him, and she took his hands and put Phyll in them. “Here, pet my kitten, Phyll. It will help both of you.”
“Mama would have said I was stupid and now I’m suffering the consequences of my own foolish actions. But the results shouldn’t have been as bad as this.” He snuffled and laid Phyll on his lap to use the softleaf again.
�
�She sounds like she was a wise woman.”
“She was a Grove.”
“Then she was wise.”
“I don’t think I like feuding.”
“Hawthorns aren’t very good at the fighting part,” Lark said carefully. “Groves and Heathers aren’t even good at the grudge part. I’ve never heard of either a Grove or a Heather feud.”
“Before I did this, Papa and FatherSire said the feud was just business. It seemed exciting.”
“And now?”
“How can it be just business if people die? That’s not what business is about, is it?”
“Not to me. But I don’t think Tryskel Pass is worth dying for, either. There’s enough land on Celta. I’m not sure I know what is worth dying for.”
“I don’t, either,” he said miserably. “We could die, too.”
“That’s right. I worry about you, your father, FatherSire—and Cratag.”
“Cratag fights all the time.” Laev petted Phyll faster. “He’s been Healed twice. He says he fights to keep his place in T’Hawthorn Residence, but I wouldn’t make him fight. I like him.”
“I like him, too.”
This time the quiet that spun between them was companionable, and Lark treasured the notion that she finally connected with her nephew and found in him someone she could feel affection for.
“When I’m T’Hawthorn, I won’t feud,” Laev announced.
“There are better ways of settling disputes,” Lark agreed. “From what you’ve already suffered, that’s a wise decision.”
His expression tensed with fear. “What can they do to me?”
“Who?”
“The NobleCouncil.”
Lark raised her eyebrows. “Your FatherSire will never let anything happen to you, and the informal laws of the feud protect you, as well as your youth. It was an accident.”
He jerked his head in the direction of Intake. “Do they know?”
“The Hollys? That it was an accident? Yes, Eryngi told them he taunted you.”
“He did, but I should have been able to ignore it.”
Heart Duel Page 19
