by Lisa Hendrix
It was when he’d paused to retrieve the gown he’d left lying on a rock to dry that he’d seen her there combing. He’d ducked down before she’d spotted him, wanting to watch.
He was glad he had. She’d seemed so fragile last night, so broken, but tonight … Perhaps it was the power of this simple ritual, but she did not seem broken after all. Sad, yes, of course, but whole, both body and spirit intact despite that bastard Tunstall and his men. Fury bubbled within him at the thought of them laying hands on her, then faded as she continued to comb. Seven. Seven.
She finished at last and laid aside the comb to braid her hair, her fingers catching the hanks and weaving them into the sort of simple, fat plait women often wore when they had no maids to attend them. She tied off the end and dropped it over her shoulder, then folded her hands in her lap and sat, waiting.
For him.
How many times had he imagined coming down the path to find her waiting there like that? Even after Alnwick, even having seen for himself how content she was with her husband, a part of him had clung to the dream that she would someday come back to him, that she would lie with him, not in lust but in love, and heal him after all. Perhaps that was why she was here, a hopeful voice whispered in the back of his skull, and the idea of losing himself in her had him hardening in an instant.
Shite. He couldn’t go down there like this, so full of desire. It had been difficult enough to hold her without demand last night, and still worse to leave her this morning, but now … Now it would be impossible even to be near her. Torturous. He would just have to stay here and wait for Brand and Torvald to return. They could watch over her in his stead tonight, and Jafri and Ari could carry her to safety tomorrow. He should have told them to take her back today before he’d had to face her again. He didn’t need this torment.
Wings ruffled the air above, and the raven swooped down and landed on the rock in front of him. Gunnar reached up to snap the bird’s beak shut. Too slow.
The raven’s kaugh echoed through the gorge.
Below, Eleanor jumped to her feet. “Gunnar?”
Shite. Now he had no choice.
And a part of him—the foolish, hopeful part—was far happier about that than he should be. Shite, shite, and shite.
“I’m going to pluck you and roast you for dinner,” he muttered as he flapped his hand to send the raven soaring off into the evening sky. Shoving his dream of deliverance and lovemaking down deep where it belonged, next to childhood fantasies of killing a fireworm, he straightened.
“Aye, my lady. It is only I. Be at ease.” He slid the last few paces down to the bottom, yanking his gown over his head, making sure it covered his swollen tarse before he stepped out where she could see him clearly.
The wariness left her in a sigh and she took a tentative step forward. For a heartbeat he thought she was going to run into his arms the way she had that night in the solar, and he willed her not to, knowing that once he touched her, what little control he had left would turn to mist.
To his relief and his agony, she only stood there, staring at him. “It is you.”
“I thought we settled that last night.”
She nodded. “We did. But there is yet a part of me convinced I only imagined you. That I am even now mad.”
He knew the feeling. He hadn’t suffered the ordeal she had, but he craved a chance to touch her, just to be sure she was real, to know for certain that it had been her in his arms last night and not some wraith. Could a real woman’s skin possibly be as warm and soft as hers had been? He leaned toward her, needing to know.
He caught himself and jerked back. “Brand and Torvald should be here any moment.”
“Aye. Sir Ari said you all would be hungry. Especially Sir Brand.”
He turned to the pot and pulled the lid off. “This smells good.”
“It is pease with ransoms and salted pork.”
“Did you—” Did you make it? he started to ask, but of course she hadn’t made it. Countesses didn’t cook; they gave orders for other people to cook. “Did you have some?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Didn’t Jafri and Ari feed you?” He reached for a dipper and bowl. “They were supposed to take care of you.”
“Do not fault them. They both offered, but I—”
“Of course. You are too distraught from what happened to eat.”
“No. I just … I wanted to wait for you.”
“Well, I’m here.” He filled the bowl and shoved it at her. Her fingertips grazed his as she took the bowl, and he jerked back, burning, and quickly circled the fire, putting it between himself and temptation. “Now eat before you make yourself ill.”
She gaped at him like he’d grown horns. But of course he did grow horns, every single, damnable morning—and he had the tender spots on his head to prove it.
And yet she’d once said she loved him, even knowing. And she was here, and he wanted her so much.
Shite. Shiteshiteshiteshiteshite.
Brand’s voice came echoing up the dene. Thank the gods. Saved.
Eleanor heard him, too, and set her bowl aside, and as Brand and Torvald and the damned traitorous raven came into sight, she stepped forward to meet them with a deep courtesy. “Messires.”
“Lady Eleanor.” Brand looked from her to Gunnar and back, as though expecting something. When whatever it was didn’t happen, he gave her a brief nod. “I am called—”
“Sir Brand,” she said with him. “And Sir Torvald. There can never be thanks enough for what the three of you did last night. I don’t know how you knew I was there, but if you had not found me …”
“Ari first spotted the riders,” said Brand. “And Jafri realized it was you.”
“But I spoke to them both. Neither of them said a word of it.”
“That is Jafri’s way, though it surprises me Ari said nothing. He seldom keeps his mouth shut about anything.”
“I begin to think the disease has spread,” said Gunnar, dropping the lid back on the pot so hard it rang like a bell. “Stop standing around and let the woman eat.”
Brand and Torvald glanced at each other, but went off to fetch their bowls and a quarter wheel of cheese, which Torvald sliced while Brand poured ale. They filled their bowls and settled in around the fire, the three of them and Eleanor, and for a while there was little but the sounds of eating and drinking.
Then Eleanor cleared her throat. Gunnar looked up to find she had done little more than nibble at a sliver of cheese. He frowned. “Is something wrong with the potage?”
“No, but I—”
“Then why aren’t you eating? You need more than that little bit of cheese. You cannot get your strength back that way.”
“My strength is fine,” she said as Torvald got up and disappeared into the cave. “It just that—”
“You must eat,” insisted Gunnar.
Torvald returned and silently handed Eleanor a horn spoon.
“My thanks.” She gave Gunnar a sideways glance as she dug in.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he demanded.
“She tried. You didn’t give her a chance,” said Brand in Norse. “You’re acting like a fool. Again. You need to just bed her and be done with it.”
“Fuck you.” Gunnar got up and stalked off.
He’d barely gone a dozen paces when Brand’s hand clamped down on his shoulder and whipped him around. “Stop it. She’s here. You have your amulet. It is time. Claim her.”
“What good would it do?” Gunnar ground the question out between jaws clenched so tight his teeth creaked.
“Bah. The Nornir have woven your lives together so firmly that you cannot escape her even hiding in this hole. The gods have put her in your path three times now.”
“Four.”
“What?”
“Four times. I saw her last autumn, when we stopped at Lesbury. Just from a distance, but …”
“Balls, Gunnar. What else must they do to convince you? The gods will not sta
y patient forever. If I were you—”
“You’re not.” He hadn’t seen her with Burghersh, smiling at him. Touching him.
“If I were, I’d claim her tonight, lest the gods decide I was too thickheaded to bother with anymore.”
“How can I, when she’s already married?”
“Bed her, wed her, make a blood pledge with her beneath the moon. I don’t care. Just find some way to show the gods you intend to hold on to her this time. They have brought her to you time and again. They must have cause.”
“Aye. They like watching me suffer,” Gunnar muttered.
“Who can fault them when you make it so easy for them?” Brand turned around and stomped off toward the cave. “Grab your gear, Torvald. We’re moving down to the lower cave before I end up beating him bloody in front of his woman.”
“Good idea.” Torvald slurped down the last of his pottage and rose to follow Brand into the cave. There was a moment’s rustling about, and then they both came out toting bedrolls and weapons and food.
“We’ll come back for the rest tomorrow. And for supper.” Brand stopped at the fire to light one of the tallow-dipped rushes Gunnar kept on hand for when he needed a quick torch. He gave Eleanor a nod. “My lady. Rest well.”
“Where are you going?” Eleanor jumped up and hurried toward Gunnar. “Where are they going? Did you tell them to leave? Why?”
“I didn’t. Come, Brand, there’s no need for this.”
“Yes there is. There are some things in the small cave that I think are hers. The bundle with the saddlebags right in front. You’ll see.” Brand snagged the ale skin, and he and Torvald started off downstream. As they headed off into the black, he called back in Norse, “Your fylgja is a bull, Gunnar, not a jackass. Try to remember that.”
And then they vanished, and it was just him and Eleanor, staring at each other.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Brand is being Brand, that’s all. It is nothing. Just … Just eat your supper.”
“If my supper is of such concern to you, monsire, eat it yourself,” she snapped, and stalked off into the cave.
ELEANOR SANK DOWN on the bed and hugged herself, trying to hold herself together. She felt as thin and fragile as an old silk gown, ready to shatter from being used too hard.
Seven brave men and a good woman were dead, plus Tunstall and his band, and all their bodies lay at her feet. She had lied to her mother, defied father, king, and Church, risked all that she was, all that she owned.
And for what?
This?
Gunnar might be right outside, but he seemed every bit as distant as when they’d been half a country apart. She could hear him right now, pacing back and forth, angrily kicking stones at the trees.
She didn’t understand. She’d wanted him so much, been so certain he wanted her in return. That certainty had buoyed her through the years, carried her through all those nights beneath Richard. Had she been that wrong, that foolish? Was he angry that she’d come here?
Or was it something else? Perhaps Heaven had decided to punish her after all, for her arrogance in assuming she was destined for him and the destruction she’d wrought trying to get to him. Perhaps she wasn’t meant to be here after all.
Outside, Gunnar stopped pacing, and for a heartbeat she hoped that he was coming in to her, that they would work their way past this awkward … whatever it was. But his boots scuffled in the gravel, moving away up the dene. A sob slipped past her defenses and echoed off the cave walls sounding more like laughter, as though the very stones were mocking her. She hugged herself harder, trying not to weep.
She was still sitting there when she heard him crunching his way back down the stream bank a while later.
Closer.
Closer. Please, Holy Mother. Please let him be coming back to me. She held her breath, waiting.
“My lady?”
Thank you. His voice came from the cave mouth, but if she looked up, if she so much as moved, she would surely fall apart. She took a deep breath. “What is it?”
“I, um, have this.” His toes appeared just at the edge of her vision, and he dropped a cloth-wrapped bundle at her feet. “’Tis what they took off of Tunstall. Brand thinks some of it belongs to you.”
“Ah.” She reached for it, but her hands shook so badly, she couldn’t pick the knot loose.
“I’ll get it,” he said brusquely. He knelt at her feet, tugged the bundle open, and started laying out the pitiful remains of Simon Tunstall’s life.
“What did they do with him?”
“Tunstall?” Gunnar looked up, and he was right there, so close she could see the flecks of gold in his green eyes. “You don’t need to hear that, my lady.”
Eleanor, she wanted to shout. Call me Eleanor. “Yes, I do. Tell me.”
“His body was put down the well with the others.”
“All of them? What if someone finds them?”
“They won’t. The well was old and beginning to collapse. Brand and Torvald just helped it along. Tunstall and his men are well buried and they will stay that way.”
“Then they got better than they gave my men.”
Gunnar’s expression softened a little. “How many did you lose?”
“Eight.” She didn’t want to think of their faces right now, so she motioned toward the pile of gear. “I think Simon put what he took off me into his saddlebags.”
“Let us see.” Gunnar unbuckled the bags and tipped the contents out on the edge of the cloth closest to Eleanor. “There’s your knife.”
“Aye.” Eleanor plucked it off the pile and returned it to her belt where it belonged, then picked out her silver chatelaine and keys, three rings with bruted stones that Tunstall had ripped off her fingers, and her purse. As she lifted the last, the coins within jingled, a sound far too merry for such grim business.
“Is that all of it?” asked Gunnar.
“Aye. They were too busy arguing over what to do with me to divide the other spoils.” The coppery taste of fear flooded her mouth and set her heart racing. She pushed back at it in anger and starting shoving her rings onto her fingers. “There is one other thing. A cloak that Miriam carried for me.”
“Miriam?”
“The woman my lady mother lent me for the trip north. She was to do my hair.”
“Oh. It wasn’t Lucy, then. Last night, when you said your woman had been killed, I thought …”
“No, thank the saints I sent Lucy with the wagons. She is safely on the main road.”
“I’m glad, for your sake and hers.” His sympathetic smile faded into a scowl. “But you should have been on the main road with her.”
“If I had been, I would not have found you.”
“You were the one found, m’lady, and if you had been where you belong, there would have been no need to find you.”
“Where I belong? What does that mean? Why are you so angry with me?”
“I am not angry,” he said, even as his clipped voice proclaimed him a liar. He reached down into Tunstall’s leavings and pulled out something shiny. Grabbing her hand, he turned it over and pressed his find into her palm. “There. You missed something, Lady Burghersh.”
Eleanor stared at the plain gold band that had shackled her to Richard for so long. It had served its purpose, keeping her father at bay, and she supposed she should keep it to honor that good use, if not her husband’s memory. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. It would be like a prisoner keeping his chains to honor his gaoler.
She tossed it back amongst Tunstall’s things, and as it left her hand, a small portion of the freedom she’d felt after Richard’s entombment came rushing back to her as if by some conjuration. She smiled, perhaps the first true and honest smile that had touched her lips since her father had invaded her hall at Upton.
“I have no use for it. Sell it.”
GUNNAR STARED AT Eleanor, unsure what this blithe dismissal of her wedding ring meant. “Do you care for your husband so l
ittle?”
“I cared as much as I was required to. I am done. And you can stop calling me Lady Burghersh, as well. The title belongs to Isabel.”
A roar like an incoming storm filled Gunnar’s head. “I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? He is dead, and the title passed to his sister, and by right of her, to Bergavenny.”
“Dead,” he repeated dully. “Richard is dead?”
“Yes. Yes, of course Richard is dead. I told you that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Eleanor gave him that horn-sprouting look again. “It was almost the first thing I said to you last night, that Richard is dead, and that I couldn’t bear to marry Henry.”
Something in the shape and rhythm of her words brought it back. The revelation buried in her sobs propelled him to his feet. “That’s what you were trying to say? That Richard was dead?”
“Now it is I who does not understand. I did say it.”
“You were crying so hard. I thought … Ah, shite. Brand is right. I am an ass.” He paced around the fire, pounding his fists against his skull, trying to knock loose the idiocy that had possessed him. “I thought you were talking about your men. Or perhaps Tunstall. I don’t know. I just didn’t …”
“Oh. O-Oh. Of course.” The confusion on Eleanor’s face faded, replaced by something he could only describe as wonderment. “You thought I was still married.”
“Aye.”
“I am not.” She stood up and cocked her head to study him a moment. “You thought I was merely a traveler waylaid nearby by chance.”
“Aye.”
“I was not. Well, I was waylaid, but …” She swept Tunstall’s gear aside with her foot and started toward Gunnar, and his mouth went dry with hope. “You thought that where I belonged was with my husband.”
He nodded.
“I did not.” She stepped in front of him. “Ever. And you were angry with me because … I am uncertain of this one. Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to send you back to him,” he growled, agonized even to say it. “And I knew I must.”
She made a tiny sound of surprise and sympathy, and lifted one hand up to cup his jaw, comforting him. The faintest smile curved her lips. “I told Lucy you were an honorable man.”
