Phantom Bride

by Cach, Lisa

  Woding protested at first, but soon he, too, was among them, being passed around the women like a new baby to be cooed over by all, and of course most especially by Felicia.

  Serena left the room, revolted and sick, angry and helpless all at once. Woding seemed not to mark her leaving.

  In the main entry hall, several of the children, their ages ranging from four to fourteen, were huddled at the foot of the stairs. The blond-haired daughter of Philippa, Louisa, had their attention as she told a story in low, breathy tones, her eyes wide, her hands telling the tale alongside her words.

  “And on her wedding night she vowed her husband would never touch her!” Louisa said to the pale little faces all around her.

  Serena knew what story the girl told, the same way a young Rhys had told a tale to Woding, the same way countless other children had told each other tales over the years, to frighten one another in the ruins of Maiden Castle. She felt an urge to make herself visible to them, preferably with a dagger dripping blood in one hand, le Gayne’s severed head in the other. That would give them something to whisper about under the covers at night!

  She resisted the urge, never having enjoyed the hysterical shrieking of frightened children. She was not a monster. Instead she climbed past them up the stairs and went down the hall to Woding’s bedroom.

  Otto was lying in the middle of the bed, Beezely curled up nearby. Serena crawled onto the mattress and lay down beside them, resting her cheek on her folded arms, watching the animals sleep. She would wait here for Woding to tire of the dancing pudding and come to her, where he belonged.

  Alex finally escaped from those few relatives still awake, and from Felicia, who seemed to have made it her mission to take any and every excuse to bump into him, touch his arm, sit beside him, and give him views of her prodigious bosom, all the while gazing up at him with invitation in her eyes. She was a foot shorter than he was, and he felt in constant danger of stumbling over her, the way one stumbles over a spaniel that in its adoration stays too close to one’s feet.

  She was a sweet girl, but quickly becoming a pest. He knew why she was here, and knew equally well that there was no chance in hell that he would find her acceptable wife material, even if there had not been someone else.

  Serena. He had seen her watching from alcoves and doorways, from corners and shadows, silent and still. He wondered what she was making of all this, and whether she wished to chase them all from his house.

  When Philippa had started playing music for dancing, he had rather wished Serena would appear, and send them all running. He had always loathed dancing.

  He began to climb the stairs. He was impressed with Serena’s forbearance this past day and a half. Given her behavior when he had first moved in, her admitted abhorrence of noisy guests, and most of all her temper, it was a minor miracle that she had not found it necessary to vent her frustrations in some unearthly manner.

  Sometimes he felt that he hardly knew her, for all the time they had spent together. Sometimes he felt he did not know himself, or what he wanted. When she had vanished for weeks after their lovemaking, he had at first gone half-mad with the torture of not knowing where she was. He hadn’t known if she was gone for good, if she was avoiding him, or if she were paying some unknown ghostly price for engaging in physical love with a living person.

  Her unexplained absence had made her an obsession in his mind for several days, until he had finally sought a return to sanity in his work, into which he diverted all the passion that had been devoted to her. It had been effective, and he had been able to convince himself that it was a good thing she had disappeared when she had. If she had remained, he might have become even more deeply involved with her. How much worse it would have been if he had been fully in love with her when she had vanished.

  And then she had returned, suddenly and without warning, as if no more than a day had gone by, and as if they could pick up where they had left off. His emotions, so briefly ordered during her absence, became again a turbulent jumble. He wanted her as much as he had before her disappearance, but now he had the fresh memories of the pain of her absence to hold him back. His rational mind told him he would be an utter fool to risk his heart on a woman who might vanish from his arms even as he held her.

  He opened the door to his room and went in, seeing Serena at once, then Otto and the orange cat, all spread out upon his bed. He smiled despite himself, liking the cozy scene, thinking of how much cozier still it would seem through the winter to have so many companions on or in his bed. If they stayed. If Serena didn’t wink out of existence like a falling star.

  Serena rolled over to face him, propping her head on her hand, her elbow making no dent in the mattress. “Done with them for the night, are you?” she asked.

  “They’ve gone off to bed.”

  “I wish they’d go off home.”

  “Want me all to yourself, do you?”

  “You think very highly of yourself, Alex Woding,” she said, looking haughtily at him.

  He came over to the bed and sat down beside her. Otto and the cat both raised their heads at the disturbance, cast accusing looks at him, and then got up and thumped—at least, Otto thumped—onto the floor. He spared the animals a brief scowl––whose bed was it, anyway?––then looked back to Serena. He hesitated a moment before placing his hand on the curve of her hip. Would she be solid? His hand touched warm flesh, and he saw that she was now pressing into the mattress as much as he himself did.

  “I could wish them gone myself,” he told her, running his hand up her side. She rolled onto her back, half closing her eyes as his hand made its way up to her breast, cupping and massaging the soft mound. His body answered, tingling to life. When she was real beneath his hands, it was impossible to think of her as anything other than a living woman. Doubts fled under the heat of desire.

  “What of your plans to renew the bonds of family?” she asked, although he could tell her interest was far more on what his hand was doing.

  “Perhaps that is something better done one at a time. All of them here at once is overwhelming.” He prodded her to roll onto her stomach, and then raised her skirts, dotting kisses up the backs of her legs.

  “You would not have liked living in my day,” Serena said, her voice muffled by the arm her face rested upon. He felt her shiver as he opened his mouth against her tailbone, on that small, flat triangle of skin directly above her buttocks. He flicked his tongue against her. “Everyone ate in the hall, and most everyone slept in the hall; there were always people about, and little privacy. At least, until they all died.”

  His tongue stopped for a moment, but then he realized she was stating a fact and was not distressed. He continued his quest up her backbone, his hands searching over her body as he came up beside her and lay on the bed facing her.

  “Do you prefer it in this time?” he asked.

  She smiled, her eyes crinkling although her mouth was hidden by her arm. “I prefer your bathtub to mine.”

  “Don’t tell me that is why you took to watching me at my bath: envy over modern plumbing.”

  “You thought I liked looking at you? What pride you have, Woding.”

  “We could share a bath,” he suggested.

  Her head came up off her arm. “We could?”

  He raised his eyebrows at her.

  She climbed over him in a flash, her knee digging into his belly, and let out whooping cries of joy all the way into his dressing room. After a stunned moment awaiting the return of his breath, he rolled off the bed and followed.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Serena listened as Ben Flury explained to his grandson his plans for the sapling they had just unloaded off the wagon in the courtyard. John was maneuvering it into the wheelbarrow, to be transported to the garden.

  “This is the right time of year for it. We’ll cut this sapling off about six inches from the ground, and then make a split in the trunk. We’ll cut a small branch of newer growth from the old tree, and wedge it
into the split. The key is in lining up the inner portion of the bark of each tree. That’s where they grow, you see. You don’t have that lineup, you don’t have a graft. We’ll seal it all with wax when we’re done.”

  John nodded through all this, as did Serena, following them to the garden. They must be talking about taking a graft from her tree. She didn’t particularly like the idea of a small living branch being cut from it, but she trusted Ben to take only the minimal amount. And a small hope was forming in her breast: might her own energy be renewed along with the tree’s, if the graft were to take? Might she be given more time? It seemed unlikely, but no more so than that she was here at all.

  “Hey, there, what are you doing?” Ben suddenly shouted.

  Startled, Serena looked up and saw what the normally gentle-voiced man had seen. There were children all around her tree, and one, a boy, was up in the branches, reaching for her medallion.

  She flew through the garden in an instant, and up into the tree.

  “Stop!” she yelled, her voice supernaturally loud.

  The boy started, surprised, and for a moment lost his balance. He grabbed for the base of the slender branch that held her medallion, and the slightly wider branch it grew from, but his weight was too much and there was a sickening crack as the wood gave way. The limb bent down at a broken angle, still attached to the tree by only its flexible bark.

  The boy gave a yelp and tried to cling to the branch as it broke and bent, but he began to slide off the end of it, his legs kicking madly at the air trying to find purchase. He caught the medallion with his frantic flailing and held it tight in his grip as he came to the very end of the branch.

  Serena made herself solid and lunged for the boy, snagging him by the arm just as he began his plummet to the ground. She saw startled brown eyes look up at her, but she was not visible, and to him and to the children below it must look as if he were hanging in midair. He howled, the screech echoed by those of the terrified children below.

  She made herself visible, and that only increased their bellowing. She didn’t care, her only thoughts of the branch the idiot child had broken, and on the medallion that, somehow, he still held in his dangling hand.

  “Give it to me!” she yelled at him. “The medallion!” He only looked at her with wide eyes, making no move to raise the hand with the medallion. Was her accent too thick for him to understand?

  She shook him a bit to get his attention, sending gasps and shrieks through the audience below. “Give it!”

  “Mama! Mama!” the boy screamed.

  Strong as she was, Serena realized she couldn’t haul the boy up one-handed, and solid like this she needed her other hand to keep hold of the tree. They were not that far off the ground, as she had caught him when he had already begun to fall. Keeping a tight grip on the boy’s wrist, she began to carefully move down the tree a few feet. Bending low with the boy dangling from her long arm, it was only a few moments before he was low enough that the drop would not hurt him.

  She released him, and he screamed again, as did his cousins, and then he was safely on the ground, falling over as he landed. Serena leaped down after him, her wild hair and skirts billowing about her, and she straddled his prone form. The other children all ran screaming from the garden.

  “Give it to me!” she ordered. “The medallion!” When he only stared at her with terrified eyes, she bent down and pried the charm from his fisted hand, then climbed off him. “Go!” she told him. “Shoo!” she said, waving her hand at him, and then went invisible again.

  She was only dimly aware of him scampering to his feet and following his kin, for she was too busy examining the medallion for damage. The fine silver chain was broken, part of it no doubt still wound around the broken branch, but other than that seemed all right.

  She looked up at the broken branch, wincing. She closed her eyes for a moment, and could feel the life—her life—beginning to drain from it. The limb was connected to the tree by only a bit of bark now.

  She climbed back up into the tree and, finding a new branch, wound what was left of the silver chain around it. This was the only place it made any sense to her to keep the medallion, where it could guard the very essence of her against the reappearance of le Gayne.

  She looked down and saw Ben Flury at the base of the tree. Remembering what he had said about cutting a small branch for the graft, she reached out to the one that had originally held the medallion, and snapped it off of the larger, broken branch. It would die soon anyway.

  The sound of the snap drew his eyes, and she let the small branch fall. He picked it up from where it fell, looking up into the tree once more before nodding. He moved off toward where the wheelbarrow and sapling had been abandoned. His grandson was nowhere to be seen, doubtless having led the charge from the haunted garden.

  All was quiet now, the only sounds the growing breeze and Ben’s snips and sawing. Serena rested in the branches, insubstantial as the wind, feeling shaken by what had happened. She didn’t think she would be able to relax again until all of those relatives were gone.

  Ben was sealing the graft with wax when Woding appeared at the entrance to the garden. Serena lifted her head, watching him, feeling a tremor of anxiety move up her chest. He didn’t look happy, and after he exchanged a word with Ben, the older man left the garden.

  He did not like what had happened; she could see that from here.

  She came down from the tree and sat on the bench, waiting as he approached. Her legs were wobbly enough that she did not think it wise to stand on them.

  He stopped in front of her, his face set in hard, dark lines. She had seen him annoyed, but never had she seen him angry like this. Not with her. This was the look he had given Sommer while berating him for his attack on Underhill.

  A sick feeling churned in her stomach, and sweat broke out beneath her arms and on her forehead. Even her father’s wrath had not caused her the distress that Woding’s did now. So this was the price of caring.

  He glared down at her, and the seconds stretched into eternity as she stared at the folds of his cravat, unable to raise her eyes all the way to his face.

  “Why, Serena?” he said at last, just when she thought the silence would kill her. “What could have been so important that you had to terrorize a group of children?”

  “The medallion,” she said, still not meeting his gaze. “A boy climbed the tree to take it.”

  “So you had to scare him out of the branches, then dangle him above his cousins? You had to drop him, then attack him while he lay on the ground?”

  Her eyes flashed up to him at that. “I didn’t attack him, and I didn’t mean to scare him out of the branches. That was an accident. I was only protecting what was mine.”

  “You said last night you couldn’t wait for them to be gone. Was this your way of ensuring it? Frightening children? Endangering their lives? My sisters are now more determined than ever to have me leave this place, and I can hardly blame them.”

  “I had to get the medallion! I wasn’t trying to scare them away.”

  “How can I believe that, when you could have come to me and asked for the charm back? I would have retrieved it for you immediately. You know that.”

  She felt his statement hit home. She had not even thought of going to him; she had simply been intent on getting the medallion at whatever cost. Did she still feel she could rely only on herself, or had she deep down wanted to scare those children and send them running to their mothers? “Le Gayne could have come back for his revenge on me in the time it took you to get it,” she argued, the excuse feeble even to her own ears. “He’s been waiting centuries to get back at me!”

  “Revenge?” Woding asked. “You told me he hated you, not that he wanted revenge. He killed you. What reason for revenge would he have?”

  She clamped her mouth shut.

  When she didn’t answer, his eyes widened. “Did you kill him?”

  “No! I told you before I didn’t. How could you even thin
k that, knowing me as well as you do?”

  “Knowing you! What do I know?” he asked. “There are a dozen topics you will not let me bring up, a thousand questions to which you answer ‘I do not know.’ How well do I know you?”

  “I am not a murderess.”

  “Then tell me why he would want revenge on you. Tell me why you are so connected to this tree,” he said, gesturing above her at the branches. “Tell me everything that happened between you and le Gayne. You were guiltless, weren’t you?”

  She shifted on the bench, her eyes going to her palms in her lap. She heard the wind, and heard his breathing as he waited.

  “I thought that you knew me well enough to understand you could trust me with whatever you had to say,” he said at last. “How can there be anything worth preserving between us, if we cannot trust one another?”

  He waited a long moment, giving her one more chance to speak, but when she remained silent he left her without a word, his footsteps loud on the path. She looked up and saw his back as he retreated, his stride quick. He did not look back.

  She sat motionless on the bench, her heart numb, her world feeling as if it had fallen apart in the space of an hour. The sky began to darken, the wind to pick up, swirling dead leaves around the legs of the bench and through her feet.

  With the coming of darkness she began to shake off the spell of numbness, Woding’s words becoming something he had said to her, and not something heard from a distance, as if he spoke to someone else, someone who had no heart. The breach the argument had opened between them felt like a chasm through her soul.

  She had no one but Woding, and now she might have lost even him with her ruthlessness with that boy in the tree, and with her unwillingness to share with him all that had happened with le Gayne. She would lose him, with no one to blame but herself.

  There must be something wrong with her, that she destroyed all that she touched. Perhaps there was too much bile in her nature, or she was too choleric. The forcefulness and stubbornness that had seemed to guarantee her survival amid her brothers and during the Pestilence now seemed to guarantee losing Woding, and alienating any with whom she came in contact.