She felt a strange quiver. So it wasn’t her imaginings then, the odd silence of the woods and valleys, the deathly stillness of Arthur’s grave.
“Rhys would flay me with the sharp side of his tongue if he heard this talk. He has no use for anything he can’t taste, touch, see, hear, or smell.” His half–smile faded. “There are men who’d mark me for a fool for saying this, but I’ve believed that if Rhys heals—then so will we all.”
Her skirts sifted out of her arms to swish around her legs. The sounds of the kitchen roared behind her—the bubbling of cauldrons and the chatter of women, the crackle of fires and the squeal of turning spits. She knew she should rise up and ask him with scorn in her voice what he was talking about, but she also knew it would all be in vain.
Dafydd had heard the footsteps in the woods. He’d seen the enemy cower. And he’d understood what he’d seen on that riverbank.
“You are going to heal him, aren’t you, Aileen?”
Chapter Seven
Rhys yanked his gauntlets out of his belt and tossed them into the corner of the room. The door squealed behind him and soft footsteps sounded on the reeds.
“Leave.” The footsteps faltered, but did not retreat. He yanked his belt off and tossed it and the sword upon the bed. “I said leave.”
“I will not.”
He jerked his head out of the neck of his tunic and paused. He’d expected Marged with food. After spending the day in search of his brothers, he’d had no stomach for the dinner she’d had lain out on the trestle tables. Marged had long made it a habit to follow him with a tray. He hadn’t expected her standing just inside the doorway with defiance in her eyes.
She clattered two bowls upon a chest by the door. “Marged tells me you’ve sent your men off to new duties. If you’ve a moment, I’ll see to you now.”
“While you still have the courage?”
He tugged at the buckles of his hauberk. Those smoky gray eyes cleared to the sharpest silver when she was in a fury. Granted, the woman had courage. More courage than his brothers, whatever that amounted to. They’d vanished into the hills as quickly as they’d appeared rather than face him again. Yet this woman came to his chamber on her own will after tearing out of it last night as if the devil were after her. She must have spent the day bracing herself for the ordeal.
Poor little wretch. Forced to touch the monster.
“I won’t stay awake till the wee hours of the morning for the likes of you.” She slapped a pile of linens beside the bowls. “We’ll do this now before you set off for that castle of yours again, or find another reason to roam the borders of your kingdom in search of your murdering brothers.”
“I admire your eagerness.”
She hiked a bowl onto her hip and plunged a pestle into it. “I’ve made you a salve of a sort. It’s the best I could do with what little I could find in your kitchens.”
He jerked open another buckle of his hauberk. “You disappoint me, Irish, by playing the pretext still.”
“Aye, Lord Rhys, you won’t be happy until I powder a newt for you, will you?”
“I’ve had powdered newt.”
“Is that the source of the bitterness on your tongue?”
He jerked open his hauberk. “What is it you have in that muck? Frostwort? Celandine? Or have you fried cabbage leaves to deaden the pain? Hung house–leek to the thatch of the roof?”
“If you let yourself be talked into eating a bit of powdered newt, then I’m sure you’ve tried all sorts of useless things. Who have you been seeing?” She scraped the pestle across the rim of the bowl. “I would expect better medicine from the Prince of Wales’s own doctors.”
He wrenched the hauberk off his shoulders and launched the iron links across the paving stones. The chain mail spit sparks as it scraped across slate and slammed into the stone wall. He glared at her, but she’d turned her profile to him and now wiped the pestle clean on a linen scrap. He wondered how she’d heard of his relationship with the Prince of Wales, and wondered if she’d been talking to someone—Marged, perhaps, with her wagging tongue, coloring the whole story with the softness of a woman who’d nursed him into manhood—or Dafydd who’d spent dinner staring down at his trencher bread rather than discuss the building of the castle.
Well, she’d hear the whole story sooner or later. Everyone knew of the public humiliation of the leper–lord of Wales.
“Rich doctors are no wiser than poor ones,” Rhys said, “just better born, lighter of tongue, and more clever.” He tore at the buckles of his gambeson until the padded shirt dropped to the floor. “You fool no one but yourself with these salves.”
“Believe what you will, it’s sure I’ll not be able to change your way of thinking.” She marched to the bench and clattered the bowl upon it. “I suppose it’s better that you believe in something else you’ll never be cured.”
He snorted a humorless laugh. He’d tried that, too. Believing in God. Trusting in man. He seized his shirt at the nape of his neck and tore it over his head.
He said, “Shut the door.”
She stood up and scraped the door closed, then took the bowl of water lying upon the chest and poured it over the center hearth. No arguments this time, Rhys noted, as steam hissed up to the smoke–hole. No mockery, no hesitation. He wrestled the shirt off his arms and tossed it onto the bed. She’d learned her lesson last night as she touched him in the dark then reeled away, racing out of the darkness into the light.
He tore at the ties of his mask. One beneath his arm. Another on the side of his neck. The third above his ear. A cool breeze siphoned down through the smoke–hole and chilled his face as he crumpled the leather in his fist and then tossed it aside.
Not even the endless Welsh drizzle could completely cut off the afternoon light. A beam of hazy gray sifting down the smoke–hole to gleam on the stones of the hearth. Aileen sat upon the bench, her lap jutting into the haze, her face a ghost in the darkness.
Exhilaration seized him. Now, woman, you’re in my land. You’re in the darkness where we are both equal.
“Come here,” he said.
He sank upon his bed. The straw mattress crinkled beneath his weight and the bedclothes rustled. He thought of a time when a woman would eagerly cross the rushes at such an invitation. He remembered a time when he never had to command a woman to his bed. Now this skinny witch–creature hesitated when his intent was no more prurient than to draw her into the darkness so she could wield her magic.
“I’ve eaten my pound of human flesh today,” he said into the darkness. “It’s unlikely I’ll get hungry again before Vespers.”
He heard the bench squeak as she jerked up from it. He caught a flash of silver eyes before she turned away to gather her bowl and linens. She stomped across the room, cursing as she tripped over his discarded armor. She faltered and flailed and knocked her arm against the bedpost.
He reached out and caught a fistful of woolen skirts then dragged her toward him. He hiked a knee upon the bed and turned his back to what little light remained in the room, swung her so she stood in front of him, so that meager light gleamed in the whites of her eyes and on her lips as her tongue darted out to wet them.
She yanked her skirts out of his hand, withdrew a safe distance. “I could have found my way myself.”
The bedclothes drew tight beneath his knee as she set the bowl of unguent beside him. He heard her ragged breathing, the rustle of linen under the wool. She edged closer. Her skirts brushed his legs. He sensed her hand in the air between them. He lifted his face and his gut wrenched.
How easy it came, this motion of a supplicant, a beggar. At times he wondered if he were born into the wrong class. He’d have made a better pilgrim or itinerant priest than a landed lord. He was ever on his knees, ever raising his face in supplication.
Her fingers curled into his hair. Her breath caught in her throat and her hand shot away. He reached out and seized it, then crushed the fingers in his grip.
“No one ha
s contracted the disease from me,” he said, releasing her. “At least, not yet.”
“Isn’t that a risk every healer takes?” Her voice sounded shrill. “Now be still. This might burn.”
She leaned closer. He heard the sop of liquid as she dipped her fingers into the bowl on the bed. Something soft and silky trailed across his bare arm—a strand of her hair, he supposed, one of the long kinky strands which always sprung from her plait. She straightened and the strand of hair trailed away, catching on the hairs on the back of his arm.
She started by dabbing the cold grease in the hollow of his shoulder. He probed her face in the faint light, but the haze only glazed her features and cast dark shadows in the hollows of her cheeks and eyes. He smelled the onion and wood–smoke clinging to her clothes—the smell of kitchens. But as she leaned closer, another scent wafted to him from the gap in her tunic. Floral. Sweet. Mixed with the warmth of her body. Heather–soap. Heather on the warm hills in the late springtime.
He remembered that scent. It was the scent of a woman pliant and naked in the grass.
He breathed it in as her fingers lingered in the hollow between his neck and shoulder. She smoothed the cool unguent into his skin with tight circular strokes. She warmed it with the swiftness of her touch so the lard softened into liquid and seeped deep into his skin. She should be trembling, but she stroked with a remarkably ease, and a dark thought flitted through his head of another swelling which could benefit from such swift and heated stroking.
How long had he gone without a woman now? Two years … three?
Her fingers left his shoulder and then returned to spread more unguent upon the side of his neck, beneath his hair. Her body swayed as she rubbed it in his skin. His blood pounded with the knowledge that her breasts were a breath away from him. Small, he’d noticed, nearly flat. But he’d caught sight of a nipple poking hard, and the sweet curve of the side. He wondered if a woman of such unusual coloring would have nipples that were a bold raspberry–red. Or would they be tight and smooth and the palest pink.
If he raised his hands and held them out just beyond his knees, he could grasp the bones of her hips. Between those hips rose the rope–belt she tied, letting the ends hang down to one side. Beneath the cloth, he could bury his head against the flat stretch of her belly, the mound of her sex.
All within his reach.
Time for you to reel away, woman. Fear me so I can lash out and grab you. So I can feel a woman’s flesh against my mouth.
Just then, the salve began to tingle painfully. Fine sorcery, he thought with a grimace, to fill him with the fires of common lust while stroking him with the burn of a salve. The woman had magic, but not of the sort he’d expected. This was a burn, no more. He’d yet to feel anything on his neck that he could attribute to healing, yet to feel anything more strongly than what was now happening within his braies.
He spread his knees to ease his growing discomfort. A fur brushed his bare knee. Soft stuff, like a woman’s long hair. He remembered that. He remembered the feel of silk giving away under his hands. He remembered pearly flesh against his dark thighs, he remembered the heat and the tightness, the ache, the stroking.
His mind raced with images of where he’d like to stroke this salve on her, and with what part of his body, and into what part of hers.
By God’s Nails. The scent of her was in his nostrils now, fevering his mind. She shifted on her feet, an uneasy restlessness, but she did not draw away. The darkness shielded him. Perhaps she couldn’t sense the rising of his blood. Perhaps she didn’t know the danger of a man long denied.
She scraped her fingers against his cheek and followed the line of the affliction to the edge of his mouth. All he had to do was turn his head. All he had to do was open his lips, take those fingers into his mouth and suck. Suck the slickness off them. Suck her hands onto the heat of his tongue. Taste her, taste the woman.
His blood surged.
He needed a woman.
He needed this woman.
Her face hovered close to his, close enough for him to hear the slightest catch in her throat. He knew he could have her. She was his prisoner. She would do his bidding—he could make her submit. The blood roared in his ears. Seize those hips. Rip the wool from them, rip the clothes from that flesh, bury this burning cock in her sweet heat. There’s the release I need, there’s the healing I want, the only “healing” I’ll ever get from any wench.
She leaned over to dip her hand in the bowl. She missed in the darkness. The bowl tipped, sloshed its contents onto his knee. A quiver shook her body. It vibrated the air between them as she skittered back, out of his reach.
He stared into the empty darkness. He felt her, strong and undeniable. Her terror washed over him. It sizzled dead the heat of his lust.
There were some horrors, it seemed, that not even the darkness could hide.
“Leave,” he said, hating the rasp in his voice. “We’re done here today.”
***
“Aye, will you sit still, man? I’ll never get your dressings back on if you keep squirming about like a boy of four years of age.”
Aileen knew the burly Welsh warrior couldn’t understand a word of her Irish, but there were certain tones of voice that transcended language. Still, the man shifted on his makeshift pallet of hay, barked something in Welsh, and then frowned at his wife who giggled behind her loom on the other side of the room.
Aileen beckoned the wife over to watch her wrap clean linens around the man’s chest and shoulder. She showed the young woman where to place the pad soaked in the brew of mead cailleath she’d made for her, and how to knot the binding firmly but not too tight. The fair–haired young woman watched with half an eye. Her dancing blue gaze was fixed upon the wounded warrior who’d only come back to this dry–rubble house at the base of the cliff this morning. A smile quivered about the girl’s mouth as another sort of wordless language passed between her and her husband.
Aileen stood and gave up the lesson. She’d forgive the couple their distraction, for after all, it was Samhain. Let them stare at each other by the light of burning pine cones. She’d just hoped the man’s bindings lasted through the rompings to come this night—and he didn’t split his wound open anew.
She gathered her things in the basket she’d acquired from Marged, then hooked it over her elbow and muttered her farewells. The wife clutched her arm just as she reached the door and slipped a linen full of fragrant soul–cakes into the basket. Mumbling her thanks in halting Welsh, Aileen dipped her head beneath the door frame and left the lovers to their passion.
Outside, she headed toward the homestead. A chill breeze rustled the thatch. She lifted her face to the wind, let it carry the loose tendrils of her hair aloft and chill the nape of her neck. She caught sight of the flare of a fire amid the black slate of a distant peak.
On Inishmaan this night, the fires would rage on the highest point of the island, fair weather or gale. Da and the boys would have spent the day gathering straw, thorn bushes, gorse, whatever they could find to heap up and burn. As twilight cast its murky hand over the land, the entire island would gather to dance around the golden light and do the sorts of things no one spoke of in the light of day.
Clutching the basket close to her side, Aileen set her feet upon the path toward the palisades looming on the crag above. It was as natural as breathing, her mother would tell her, for her woman’s blood to be racing in her veins at a time like this. Wasn’t it this very night, long, long ago, when one of her own ancestors raced to the Samhain fires to meet her destiny? That ancestor had known there would be a price to pay for going to the fires—a price that succeeding generations still paid. That ancestor had gone nonetheless, driven by a heat stronger than her own human will.
Aileen burrowed deeper in her woolen cloak and hiked the hem above the dirt of the path. She hadn’t expected to find fires on these bare and barren hills. For all the burning in her blood, she scented no magic rising from the ground, not even the fainte
st perfume of the Otherworld. Why should she hurry her pace to make the safety of the palisades before dark? Would the dead truly rise to walk on earth this night, joined by the fairies and all the creatures of the Otherworld, to do what mischief they could? She couldn’t imagine such a thing, not here, where the veils which separated the worlds seemed as hard and impenetrable as mortar and stone.
A rumbling rose from the ground beneath her feet and she thought, for one crazed moment, that perhaps she walked upon a holy burial ground. But then the rumbling grew more distinct and she recognized it as the clatter of a horse’s hooves coming from the direction of the llys. Even as she lifted her head, even before the horse and rider rounded the curve, she knew that the rider was Rhys.
She knew those wide shoulders silhouetted against the deep purple sky—she knew them by touch. She knew the way the fine hairs lay on his arms, how his strong neck flexed when she touched it as if he stiffened against the healing magic she still could not seem to muster in his presence.
Aye, for all the deadness of this land, the fires burned far too hot in her blood this night.
She tightened her grip on her basket as he approached. “The fires are upland, Lord Rhys. But look, I am here, making my way back, just as I promised Dafydd.”
Rhys jerked his mount to a stop, spraying her ankles with pebbles and soil. He thrust out his hand. “I told him not to leave you unattended. I don’t trust you as easily as he, Irish.”
She ignored his hand and strode past him. She should have known there’d be trouble, but she hadn’t thought it would be so soon. “It would be a fine thing if you lost trust in the one brother who loves you.”
“He left you alone.”
“Dafydd wasn’t made to be a babysitter. At the hut he was scuffing about, pawing and gazing out at the hills, doing nothing but knocking things over and blocking out the light from the door. He was not of a mind to wait for me while I tended the wounded.”
The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) Page 9
