The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy

by Jules Watson

  With difficulty, Eremon clasped her hand and pressed it safely to his chest, smiling shakily. ‘Indeed, but I fear there will be some disappointed people if we do not go, and they have worried for you so much.’

  ‘So they have been planning something!’ Rhiann stepped away, her hand still linked with his. ‘I knew it!’

  Eremon laughed, and ran his fingers through to the ends of her hair. ‘So they have, but act surprised, won’t you? And leave your hair unbound, so that I can feast my eyes on you, if not my lips.’

  Rhiann grinned up at him, the exhaustion of weeks suddenly falling from her heart. ‘Are you sure you would not rather have been a bard, prince? You’ve missed your calling, I fear.’

  ‘Perhaps I would have been happier for it, my princess.’ For a moment, a shaft of bleakness dimmed the joy in Eremon’s eyes. ‘But now I will escort you, and we will speak no more of dark things. Only promise you’ll kiss me like that later, and I will be content.’

  The King’s Hall fell strangely silent as Rhiann entered on Eremon’s arm, but at their appearance it erupted into cheers and foot-stamping, and she saw that it was packed with people, not only the nobles living on the crag, but a great many villagers as well.

  Rhiann smelled the decorations before her eye travelled upwards to the carved posts supporting the roof, and the beams laid along the underside of the thatch. Each was festooned with boughs and garlands of sharp-scented pine and yew, and wound about with tendrils of ivy. ‘The longest night!’ In shock, Rhiann glanced at Eremon and then sought for Caitlin, who was beaming alongside Conaire and Eithne. More moons had passed in illness and recovery than she had realized.

  That night, Rhiann’s lingering weakness meant that she was forced to let the tide of music and laughter wash about her, while she remained quiet. And so it was that perhaps she alone, floating somehow outside the night, was able to sense something lurking behind the wild abandon of the drink and jests and music. A sourness ran beneath the pungent smells of roasting meat, honeyed fish and pine resin, and in her stillness Rhiann could scent it. Fear.

  Despite Eremon’s words and Caitlin’s efforts, the shadow of the Romans could not be banished now, not even for one night.

  This was the first winter Agricola had ever spent in Alba. Every other year, all his men except the fort garrisons had returned to their legionary headquarters in the south.

  He turned his head, making out Samana’s black hair against his pillow. The coals in the brazier still threw a bloody light over her skin. Yet the rest of his bed chamber was in darkness, the shadows swelling and creaking with cold, as the wind scraped the thatch roof above.

  He was warm within the nest of heaped furs, but he could see that the damp on the roof beams had frozen to frost, and his nostrils burned with cold at every clouded breath. These mud and timber barracks were no match for an Alban winter, he was quickly discovering. So, he wondered for the tenth time, why had he stayed?

  He could find no escape from Alba, from its undefeated challenge – that’s what it was. He must have it, he would have it, and, as autumn darkened into winter, the desire for it had mixed with unassuaged rage and frustration until the feelings seared his veins like a fever. It simply wasn’t possible for him to leave here again, to retreat to his warm, bright home in Eboracum. For beneath his rage he had sensed, with a twist of superstition, that if he left he somehow gave up the right to possess this land. If he left, he was branding himself as unworthy.

  The sacrifices at the mid-winter feast of Saturnalia had been favourable, at least. Though it was a dour, cold affair, and not at all like the noisy, well-fed revels he was used to in Rome, the haruspex had read only good fortune in the steaming entrails of the white hare. And that was the crux of the matter. For if his own gods were to stake a claim to this land, Agricola, their envoy, must stay, too.

  The haruspex, trembling with cold as he poked at the bloody offal on the snow, had in the end only confirmed what Agricola himself felt in his own bones. This was the year when all would be resolved in the matter of Alba.

  Samana murmured now and rolled over, her naked breast bulging against Agricola’s chest. His senses were immediately alive to the skin melting into his own, and the musk perfume drifting up from between her legs. Agricola sighed with a strange resignation.

  On his return from the west, the defeat that he had put behind him only reignited Samana’s old anger, drawing her from her listless despair. Yet surprisingly, she never made the connection that had come immediately to Agricola when she told him of her banishment: if she was outcast, she was no use to him at all. Contact between her and her tribe had ceased, and with it, all news of native Alba.

  At first, this turn of events amused Agricola, perhaps because of its absurdity. Yet once the bulk of his men rode away to winter quarters, leaving a modest garrison, Samana’s demeanour had begun to grate on him instead. Agricola chafed at his confinement, forced inside by howling, sleet-driven winds, and had little to do but eat, think and pick over the bones of his recent failures. His unrelenting rage at the Erin prince could find no external ease, either, for Samana talked of him incessantly, her hatred a fire that she nursed with great zeal.

  So the pressure grew, the air in Agricola’s quarters taut with repressed tension, until the day came when Samana’s mutterings sent him over the edge, and he struck her. One hand to the red mark on her cheek, Samana glared up at him not with anger, but with a flare of lust. And so Agricola was lost. Before he knew it, they were rutting like dogs across his bed, on the floor, and against the cold walls, and the climax eased his rage. For a time.

  Soon, he was seeking that same escape between her legs, over and over, and the storms battered the roof while they thrust at each other. For a while some cold part of him did stand outside himself, thinking of his wife sheltering his son in her body. But eventually, the resignation had descended. He could not leave Alba, and if he sent Samana away he would go mad – from fury that could find no release, and frustration at the obstructive snowstorms that delayed his revenge. So Agricola’s world narrowed to the soft, wet place that Samana opened for him, praying that if he had to pay for this abandonment to lust, the debt would become due only after victory.

  Half-asleep, Samana now crooked her leg over Agricola’s hips, and he rose instant and hard against her. ‘Nemo liber est qui corpori servit,’ he muttered to himself. No one is free who is a slave to his body.

  Then his sigh was swallowed by Samana’s writhing tongue, and the desire, as always, easily drowned both logic and the fears that stalked him.

  At Dunadd, though the feast would continue until late, Rhiann and Eremon needed no urging from a concerned Linnet to seek their bed in Rhiann’s house.

  In silence, Rhiann unpinned her brooches, slid off her rings and torc, and folded her cloak and dress over them on the chest. Gradually, Eremon’s jewellery joined hers in an untidy pile, as she slipped beneath the furs in her shift, shivering.

  In the faint chinks of firelight, Rhiann could see the dark outline of Eremon’s back as he bent to pull down his trousers, and the black sweep of hair against the linen bandage around his torso. Her heart began to fling itself against her ribs so violently he surely must hear it, and her fingers were pressed to her lips as if to taste the kiss that still lay there between them.

  Rhiann couldn’t see Eremon’s eyes when he slipped naked into bed beside her, but was struck speechless when he leaned over and gently kissed her on her forehead. ‘Sleep well, my love,’ he murmured, and yawned, then sank down on his back, his face turned away from her towards the bedscreen.

  For a moment, hurt and confusion bloomed in Rhiann’s chest. All night, she had breathed in his male scent, and watched his lips moving and smiling for others, as his eyes slid over her throat, her curves, their heat drawing her gaze again and again. And now … this?

  Stabbed with indignance, Rhiann reached out to Eremon’s shoulder. But before her fingers could clasp him, she sensed the quiver that ran through
his muscles. With an outraged snort she pulled him over as gently as her anger would allow. ‘Eremon!’ she cried, and he uncurled and was suddenly holding her, the dim firelight showing his grin.

  Rhiann batted at his chest. ‘You mean fox! How can you tease me like this!’

  ‘Tease, my lady?’ Eremon frowned. ‘I was only sleeping. Why, what else do you want me to do?’ He shook his head, and his unbound hair fell into her eyes.

  Rhiann pushed it back with both hands and tucked it around his ears. ‘You know very well, rogue!’

  ‘What?’ Eremon had become very still. ‘Tell me what you want me to do.’ She heard the new note in his voice, and knew that, as before, he needed her to ask, no, demand it of him.

  Because Maelchon now lay between them, dark and cold.

  Because Eremon was still unsure of the depths he moved in her.

  So Rhiann drew Eremon’s head down to her, and this time it was her tongue that parted his lips, until his breath came in gasps. ‘I need,’ she whispered, ‘to take you within, and make you mine again.’

  He groaned, and buried his mouth in the curve of her neck, where her shift gave way to soft, scented skin. Arching her back, she closed her eyes as his lips lit their way along her throat, from below her ear to her collarbone. Then she gasped and buried her fingers in his hair, as he spread the fine linen shift against her chest and closed his mouth over one nipple and then the other, blowing on the wet cloth to make them burn with cold.

  Then Eremon’s fingers were at her waist, drawing the shift up, and she tensed as his lips whispered over the delicate skin between her thighs. The slightest flick of his tongue caught her by surprise and she cried out, but before she could murmur anything sensible, the heat of his tongue was bathing her, swirling as he had drunk from her mouth, and she could only dig her fingers into his arm, emitting high, sharp gasps.

  When he groaned again, at first she thought she had hurt him with her fingers, but then he stilled, and she pulled back the covers to free his face. ‘Your wound!’ she exclaimed. ‘Goddess, you shouldn’t be doing this.’

  Breathing heavily, Eremon edged onto his right side and then his back, a spasm of pain on his face. ‘Should be,’ he managed.

  Rhiann placed her palm over the bandage, relieved to feel that it was dry. Catching her breath, she smiled and trailed her fingers higher, over his chest. ‘So,’ she murmured, ‘I have an invalid at my mercy.’ She leaned over and kissed the soft place beneath his right armpit, breathing in his scent. ‘And such a beautiful invalid, too. What am I to do with him?’ With small kisses, she edged her way around his ribs, gliding upwards to suckle his nipples.

  ‘You may wish … to reconsider those kisses,’ Eremon whispered, gasping with every flick of her tongue. ‘For I will take you, though we both bathe in my blood.’

  Rhiann raised herself over him, her hair falling about them in a tent of roan and amber. ‘Or,’ she said, ‘I could take you.’

  Fixing her gaze on Eremon’s eyes, Rhiann sat up and slowly drew her shift from her shoulders, so that it fell around her waist in a cloud of white. And the feeling that took her as she did it was the same she had felt in the Otherworld: as if she was revealed in all her power and love; that which made her.

  Eremon groaned, his head rising as he was drawn to her, but she pushed him back down. ‘Careful,’ she said sternly, and slowly bent over his face, until her nipple was against his mouth.

  With every flick of his tongue on her breasts then, the sparking between Rhiann’s legs grew brighter. At last she broke free from his mouth and leaned behind her, stroking the lean belly below the bandage, gliding down his upper thighs. His muscles were rigid under her fingers, and she kneaded them as her palm slid around to his inner thighs. Eremon’s breath froze in his chest. ‘Speaking of teasing … ’ he forced out.

  Yet he only gasped when her searching fingers found him, so curiously hard yet sheathed with silk. And suddenly Rhiann knew that all her fear of this power he wielded was gone from her, for as she glided her fingers up the length of him she felt her own self opening, pulsing, and when she slid onto him they both groaned.

  The sweetness rose first as trembling waves of heat, as the soft parts of her melded with him, and she threw back her head and gripped his arms. Then the heat flared, and Eremon cried, ‘No! Look at me!’

  So Rhiann did, holding his cheek with one hand, her thumb under his eye, so she shared the explosion in its depths even as the flame burned her body away.

  In the days that followed, Rhiann was aware of no one but Eremon: the tilt of his head when he spoke; the dark shine of his hair against the snow; the breadth of his shoulder when he shrugged off his cloak; the movement of tendons in his wrist when he patted Cù.

  Rhiann was nearly sick with the wanting of him. And in the darkness of their bed they soon made up for all the moons they had been sundered. Yet despite the opening of their bodies that they could not, and did not want to control, Rhiann was still keeping a secret from Eremon.

  For that first night together, as the ecstasy consumed them, she had seen with her spirit-eye the flame of Eremon’s soul spiralling up from his body. But there had also been another light, a cloud of shifting hues that surrounded them both, yet which came from neither.

  Now, looking down at her flat belly as she sewed by the fire, Rhiann resisted the urge to touch it. For she was not ready to think about what the light might mean. Not ready at all.

  BOOK FIVE

  Leaf-bud, AD 83

  CHAPTER 58

  Under a dark sky, the small barge rocked precariously in the tumbling, storm-fed waters of the stream that split the Roman camp by the Forth. From the broad, wind-whipped expanse of estuary, the oarsmen had struggled upstream, obviously determined to deliver their cargo however violent the weather.

  Agricola was returning from the bath-house, a heavy sheepskin cloak wrapped around his head and shoulders. When he saw the barge through the obscuring sleet, though, he slid to a halt on the icy path. No vessels were expected up the Forth until full spring, and the first month of it was only dawning now. It was too early in the season to be chancing the seas, surely! Only a madman would do so … or one with urgent news. Agricola’s pulse, heavy and slow from the heat of the bath-house, suddenly pounded harder in his neck.

  Samana, her head down as she sought refuge in her own fur wrap, ran right into his back, her feet slipping on the frosted stones. ‘Why do you halt?’ she cried, shuddering with cold. ‘Come, before we are frozen through!’

  Her imperious tone slid from Agricola like the drops of melting sleet, for he was too absorbed in the sight of that barge approaching the plank pier on the shingle bank below. What news could be so urgent that a crew would risk their lives to bring it to him by sea? Without a word to Samana, Agricola turned and hastened to his own command quarters. Whatever it was, he would rather receive it at ease in his own chair by the brazier, with a cup of fine wine in hand.

  By the time the messenger made his way to the door, both Agricola and Samana had shaken the sleet from their hair, discarded their soaking boots, and were wrapped in dry, fur-lined robes in the outer chamber. Three well-stoked braziers gave ample warmth, and lamps blazed on the map table, the wall shelf and the side tables beside the chairs.

  The messenger took in the golden lamp-glow and warming air with visible relief, as rain dripped mournfully from his black hair and the hem of his thick cloak into a puddle around his feet. His face was pale, and one hand hovered over his belly.

  With a distinct lurch in his own nether regions, Agricola saw at once that this man was from Rome itself. For Agricola knew him – he was in the pay of the household of Tacitus, Agricola’s son-in-law. Tacitus had spent only one season here on the frontier, but ever since had been Agricola’s most vocal advocate with the emperor.

  ‘Sir.’ The servant tried to salute in the military way, but was shaken by a terrible sneeze, trailing off into a series of shudders that made his teeth chatter beneath his long
tunic and cloak.

  ‘Warm yourself, man.’ Agricola indicated the brazier and, as the man shuffled to it and spread his hands with a sigh of relief, Samana moved to the map table, with a glance at Agricola of desperate curiosity.

  Almost immediately, the servant’s shivering began to calm, and his sneezes faded into occasional sniffles, which he wiped on his sleeve, all Roman fastidiousness gone. ‘Forgive me,’ he managed at last, turning to Agricola and going down on one knee. As he did, he pulled a tube of ivory capped with gold from the belt of his tunic, and from this withdrew a parchment scroll rolled in oiled leather.

  Agricola took the scroll, noting with a stab of excitement the wax seal of his son-in-law. In silence he broke it and unrolled the message, unusually informal and hastily scribed.

  Greetings to my esteemed father-in-law,

  Forgive me for dispensing with our social niceties, but you will understand when you hear what I have to report, after a frustrating wait of two years. The emperor has enjoyed a major triumph in Germany and, with the resulting consolidation of his forces, I have been able, at last, to prevail upon him the urgency of returning all your forces to you. It has been a difficult road altogether, entailing many tedious visits to his various villas, innumerable boring dinners, and far too much time spent in the company of that odious man. But he has heeded me at last (now that it suits him, of course – I make no claim to have changed his mind) and has become freshly enamoured of the complete conquest of the island of Britain, including Alba. To that end, your men of the Ninth and other legions are being returned, and after a particularly successful deer hunt I even secured four cohorts of Batavian cavalry and two of Tungrians for you, plus the ships they arrive on. The men will be setting out on the Kalends of April, barring bad weather, and I hope you will have them by early May.

  Your official notification will follow, of course, but I decided to send you word early enough for you to make whatever added preparations are necessary. Poor Marcus, I don’t know in what state he has arrived with you, but a trip at this time of year was beyond the call of duty and I hope you will treat him well before sending him home.