“They would have rejected her,” Alexander snapped. “I couldn’t let that happen. These people are all she has now. Her life is at stake.”
“Right. The wendigo,” Gabriel snapped. A vein in his neck bulged and his hands balled into fists. “When were you going to tell us our guide was a healer with a monster hunting her? Or did you intend we find out when it tried to murder us in our sleep?”
“That didn’t happen. We were on horseback. The creature is on foot. We outran it,” Alexander mumbled. He actually didn’t know for sure how fast the wendigo could travel, but it was his best theory.
“No wonder you demanded we change course.” Tobias shook his head. “How could you keep this from us?”
“I couldn’t risk you turning her away! She needed our protection and we needed her. I was afraid you wouldn’t do the right thing.”
Gabriel charged at him until his face was less than an inch from his own. It took everything in Alexander not to take a step back. “We didn’t have a choice. You didn’t give us one.”
“Don’t tear him apart yet, Gabriel. Not until we get to the bottom of his stupidity.” Tobias crossed his arms. “You do realize, you promised to protect this tribe for as long as she lives among them. When do you plan to explain to them that your stay here isn’t permanent?”
Alexander stared into the fire and didn’t say a word. Oh, he had things to say. But where did he start when it came to his feelings about Maiara?
“By the Mountain.” Tobias squinted at him from across the fire. “You do intend to stay. Permanently.”
Gabriel harrumphed. “That’s ridiculous. He can’t stay with these people. He needs his own territory, a place to hoard treasure, a place to fly and hunt without interference from humans.” He pointed at Alexander’s chest. “Tell Tobias he’s mistaken.”
Alexander was done taking orders from Gabriel. “What does it matter to you? The two of you can go anywhere you wish. I made the promise, and I plan to deliver on it.”
Gabriel made a sound deep in his throat like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You would sacrifice your happiness for a human woman?”
With a heavy sigh, Alexander decided to tell his brothers the truth. There was no point in lying now. Not to them and not to himself. “My happiness is the human woman.”
“In what way?” Tobias asked.
“My dragon wants her.”
Gabriel laughed. “You can’t mean—”
“I am drawn to her to the depths of my soul and wish to mate with her.”
“Are you mad, brother? You are an immortal! She has a human life. If you bond with her, you will be tying yourself to a sinking ship.” Gabriel lowered himself onto the layers of fur that would serve as his bed and pulled a piece of jerky from his saddlebag.
“It’s not like I chose it consciously.” Alexander stared at his brother and tried to explain. “When it happens to you, if it happens to you, it’s like the entire universe is converging to bring her to you. She is mine. Mine to protect. Mine to care for. It is like how we feel about treasure when we have it. Even stronger.”
Tobias crossed his arms. “That’s never going to happen to me.”
Alexander shrugged. “Maybe not, but it isn’t an unpleasant experience.”
“Does Maiara share your feelings?”
“I don’t know.” He sank to his own bed and pulled off his boots. “But I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. I will stay with her until she either agrees to be mine or sends me away. It is the only thing I want.” He finished undressing and tucked himself between the pelts.
“Don’t get too comfortable, brother,” Gabriel said.
“Why not?”
“You promised to protect the tribe, remember?”
“So?”
“The wendigo hunts at night. Do you plan to wait until it claws one of the men or women of this village apart before you do the protecting? Or will you do your duty and patrol the perimeter?”
Fatigue from their long journey came to rest like a sandbag across his shoulders. Gabriel was right. During their journey, he’d protected Maiara by wrapping his body around her as she slept. He could not do such a thing with the entire village. The only way to do his duty was to stay awake and watchful.
He sat up and reached for his boots, then thought better of it. His senses were more alert in his dragon form. He’d shift and watch over the village from above. Rubbing his eyes, he moved for the flap in the teepee.
“Brother,” Gabriel said.
“Yes?”
“We’ll take shifts. Come back in three hours and wake me. I’ll take the second shift. Tobias will take the third.”
Tobias raised an eyebrow. “I will?”
“Of course you will,” Gabriel said. “Because we’re family and because this frozen wasteland will be the last time we’re all together for...” He turned his face away, unable or unwilling to finish the sentence.
Alexander had almost forgotten that the longer they stayed together in one place, the greater the risk that Brynhoff would find them. They were taking a big chance staying here, but until spring, there was nowhere else to go. And Gabriel was right. This would be the last they were together for what could be a very long time.
Funny, neither Gabriel nor Tobias looked angry anymore. Only exhausted.
“Thank you, brothers,” he said, moved by their understanding.
Tobias shrugged. “It’s your heart. I just hope you take care of it.”
The wendigo did not show itself that night or the next in the forests surrounding the village. But Alexander barely had time to reassure Maiara of this. There was little time to discuss much else either. Her teepee was overflowing with patients in need of healing. Many illnesses and injuries had festered in the absence of the tribe’s regular healer, Keme.
He told himself her withdrawal from him was a consequence of her compassion. Maiara had simply become distracted with caring for the tribe. But when Tobias demonstrated a special affinity for healing and Maiara invited him to assist her, Alexander burned with jealousy. Somehow his brother intuitively knew which patients would benefit from being packed in ice or from spending time in the sweat lodge. He also understood how to set a bone and learned quickly how to make a paste to heal rashes and abrasions. This freed Maiara to use her healing amulet on the sickest patients, those injured while hunting or suffering from debilitating infections. It left Alexander to pine for her.
Although Alexander would have liked to take Tobias’s place to be closer to Maiara, the language of healing made no sense to him. He found it difficult to be around the sick without being drawn into their stories by his creative brain. Talk to them, sketch them, feed them, those were things he could do, but hurt in order to heal? Tobias was far better at that than he was.
So he and Gabriel were relegated to patrolling and occasionally fetching water or wood for her fire. He would watch her when he could, linger in her teepee after bringing her what she asked for, or brush her hand with his own when she asked for help binding a wound. It never went anywhere, and during mealtimes, she would often sit near the chief and his council.
After weeks of this, he was convinced he’d made a terrible mistake. All this time, her affection for him had been transactional. She’d needed safety. He’d wanted her. But now that she had a home and everything she needed, she had no use for him.
He wouldn’t go back on his word to the tribe, but his dream of having her as his mate had grown foggy around the edges.
“Tell her how you feel,” Tobias said one night. Alexander hadn’t complained, but he supposed his withdrawn and sulky mood told its own story. “You can’t go on like this. Tell her. Then you will know for sure.”
Resolved to do just that, Alexander made a point of lingering in Maiara’s presence the next day.
“Hold this here,” she ordered him, pressing his hand to a scrap of cloth covering a nasty gash on an elderly woman’s hip. “Pressure.” She nodded at him and he complied. The old w
oman moaned softly. “She fell on the ice. We need to stop the bleeding. This will give me time to heal her from within.”
“The cloth is soaking through. What do I do?” Alexander asked.
“Rinse it in the bowl. There.” She pointed toward a silver vessel that looked like it came from a white man’s table. Then again, he suspected the scraps of cloth they were using as bandages came from trading with the white man as well.
“Always silver,” Tobias said from where he was helping another patient. “It impedes infection.”
“Right. Infection…,” Alexander mumbled. He understood nothing about healing. Quickly he rinsed the cloth in the bowl and pressed it against the wound. Maiara removed her amulet from one warrior, who was holding his head as if it ached, and placed it around the neck and against the skin of the old woman. Raising her hands, she chanted a healing prayer. The resulting power that coursed through the room raised the hair on Alexander’s arms.
“The bleeding slows.” Although he’d observed her healing before, it never ceased to amaze him.
She placed her hands on the woman’s forehead and spoke soothing words to her.
“Maiara,” he whispered. “When you are able, I’d like to speak with you… alone.”
Her gaze met his. She checked the woman’s wound, then removed the bloody cloth from the woman’s healing hip and dropped it back into the silver bowl. With a few words to Tobias, she gestured toward the exit. Alexander rinsed the blood from his hands before following her outside.
“It is time we spoke,” she said, her expression serious. “I have never thanked you for your help.”
“It’s no inconvenience.” He glanced back toward the teepee and the woman inside.
“No. I never thanked you for speaking for me and offering your protection to the elders. You are the reason I am welcome here.”
He met her gaze and held it. “I wanted you to have a home. You’ve lost too much.” He rocked back on his heels, warring with himself over what to say.
“I have sensed for many days that there is something your spirit wishes to say to my spirit.” Her lips pressed into a flat line, into an expression he found impossible to read.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Reaching out, he ran his hand along the sleeve of her deerskin dress. “You’re starting to shiver.”
“I left my pelt inside.”
“Come closer. I will warm you.” He extended his wings, and she moved into the harbor of his arms. “Better?”
She tipped her head back to look up at him. “Like the height of summer. Why was it important to you that I have a home? I would have continued to guide you to lands where you could settle if the council refused me.”
He swallowed the lump forming in his throat. “You needed a home so that you could be safe and warm and in need of nothing. And once you had all you needed, then you would be free to decide about what you wanted. If you might want one thing more. One… person more.”
She drew back to get a better look at him. After a long pause, she said, “You hoped it was the will of the Great Spirit that I would want you?”
He sighed. He did not know this Great Spirit. In Paragon, they worshipped the goddess of the Mountain. But he supposed he understood the sentiment, and he couldn’t agree more. Nodding slowly, he placed a hand over his heart.
“I will stay and protect you, no matter your feelings for me. To my dragon, it is done.”
“It is done?”
“You are mine.”
“Yours?”
He placed his hands on her shoulders and brought his face close to hers. “When dragons mate, they mate for life. I want you as my mate, Maiara.”
“Your… mate.” Her eyes shifted away.
“Connected… Mated… Married… Joined?” He hooked his fingers together. Not side by side as she’d described marriage once, but intertwined. “Bonded.”
“You want to join our spirits?” she clarified, her face remaining impassive.
He nodded. “I… love you, Maiara. And I will stay and protect this village no matter what you decide. But you are why I agreed to stay. I needed to tell you that. I needed to ask you to be mine.”
She studied him as if she truly saw him, saw his soul. This woman of the trees understood every fiber of his being without sharing a single word. She knew the root of him, and he found himself fantasizing about their nights on their journey here, when she would sleep under his wing and curled into his side.
“You’ve given me much to pray about,” she said, her face serious. “I am glad you shared this with me. What is the polite way for me to respond to your request for this mating?”
He frowned. “If you reject me, you should do nothing. Go on about your life. I will vex you no further.”
“And if my answer is yes?”
“Lie with me.”
“I have already lain with you,” she said seriously.
“As a husband lies with a wife.”
Her lips formed into a tiny O and her eyebrows knit. “This is your way?”
“This is our way.”
She backed away from him. He retracted his wings to accommodate her. “I must return. There are many inside who need my help.”
He forced his face to remain blank as his heart shattered. She turned on her heel and strode away without another word. Without even a look over her shoulder. As he’d feared, she was indifferent. Soul shredded, he rushed back to his teepee, fearing he had his answer and knowing he’d never be the same again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After the night meal where he’d hardly touched his food and could not bear to look in Maiara’s direction, Alexander returned to his teepee, feeling completely dejected. He’d been wrong to share his feelings. He’d asked her to be his mate too soon. Tipped his hand. Made a fool out of himself. Ruined any hope of changing her opinion of him.
Grabbing his sketchbook, he brought charcoal to paper in a fury, outlining the crook of her nose, her angular cheekbones and square jaw, along with her hair that reminded him of the night spilling down to earth. He drew the stars in her eyes, captured the way the heavens seemed to peek out from inside her.
But when he sketched her mouth, all that would render on the paper was the tight line, the disappointment, the… Was it fear? He couldn’t get the mouth right because he didn’t understand her expression. Was she disgusted by what he was? Of course she was. He wasn’t just another gender; he was another species.
Assessing his finished creation, he immediately hated it. His lines were too heavy, too dark. He’d sullied her image with a layer of his angst. He folded the picture in half and tucked it in the back of the leather binding of his sketchbook, between the one of her naked in front of the mighty oak and the one of her hunched over the redcoat, healing him.
After storing it in his saddlebag, he prepared tea from dried mint that one of the women had given him. He hoped it would refresh him before his night’s work. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since they’d arrived and, unlike his brothers, had been too busy obsessing over Maiara to make up the sleep during the day.
He’d finished half a mug full when Tobias slipped through the flap of the teepee followed by a flurry of blowing snow. “It’s getting bad out there.”
“I’ll be all right once I shift,” Alexander said, taking another large swig of tea. It was time to patrol the boundaries of the village.
“About that…” Tobias sat on the log he used as a stool and tapped his thumb against his thigh. “Gabriel decided to take the first shift tonight.”
“Oh?”
Tobias rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve been helping Maiara with her patients.”
“And that has what bearing on the topic?” Alexander snapped.
“Tonight was the first night she requested you. It seems she needs help with a task beyond my abilities. A task only you can accomplish.”
Alexander furrowed his brow. “You’ve been healing by her side for weeks. What could I possi
bly help her with that you could not?”
Tobias met his gaze and lowered his chin. “I couldn’t possibly say, but I did notice that she is alone in her dwelling tonight. She made sure I helped every patient home this afternoon before she made me promise to send you to her. Don’t you find that unusual, Alexander?”
For a moment Alexander’s brain tried to rearrange the words Tobias was saying to him to make sense, but no matter how he flipped and fiddled with the idea that Maiara needed his help, he couldn’t make logical sense of it.
“Perhaps the healing she needs help with isn’t the traditional kind,” Tobias mumbled.
Alexander stilled as a current of electricity coursed from his fingertips to his toes. She didn’t need help with healing; she needed him.
He sprang to his feet. “Can you—?” He could hardly form words, and the thought cut itself off abruptly in his throat.
“Protect the village tonight with Gabriel? Yes, for as long as you need, although I predict it won’t be long at all.” The corner of Tobias’s mouth twitched.
Alexander pulled on his boots and gave his brother a devilish look. “Don’t count on it.” He burst out the flap and strode across the village with a singular determination. But when he reached her teepee, he wasn’t sure what to do. Was it polite to walk in? Should he knock?
“Maiara?” he said in a loud clear voice. “Tobias told me to come. May I enter?”
The flap peeled back and her shadowed face appeared in the opening. “Yes. Come inside.”
He stepped into her dwelling, the warmth and light of the fire enveloping him. Once his eyes had adjusted, he saw she wore nothing but a deerskin dress that reached to midthigh.
“Do you never grow cold?” she asked, looking at his shirt, which was open at the neck. He hadn’t bothered with his coat.
“No. Never.” He smiled. “But I think you knew that.” Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and the fire sent shadows dancing across her skin. He inhaled deeply her fresh spring scent. There was more to it tonight, a perfume. His eyes fell on a large silver bowl in the corner of the teepee with the same scent. She must have used it to bathe.
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