So closely attuned to Zamiel she’d grown, she sensed his unease like a prickling along her own skin. The rider thundered toward them...closer...then thundered past without slowing.
Linnet released her breath in a shuddering sigh.
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Zamiel said, “if we ride faster and take a less direct route. That crossroads there, for instance. We could veer from the main road to a less traveled route, and throw anyone following off the scent.”
Feeling sick, she closed her eyes and swallowed. She was running again, the way she’d run from Jasper. She was hiding, as she’d hidden all her life. Hiding like a mouse from those who hurt her, those who thought her mad.
But this time, she had something to run toward—an answer to the gnawing doubt that had plagued her since her father condemned her. She was running toward her long-lost mother.
Linnet would be damned before she’d let Cecil or anyone else get in the way of that.
Grimly she gathered her reins. “Aye, then. If Cecil sent his bloodhounds, either to bring me back or finish the job they started, I’d rather lead them a merry chase than wait tamely to be taken. Let’s take the hunting trail. How fast can yer black beastie ride?”
Anticipation lit his face and he laughed, that madcap joy flaring in his purple gaze. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
* * *
By nightfall they were lost, but at least they were alone. Whenever they came to a crossroads, they angled south and west toward Cornwall—a destination not even the well-informed Cecil could know.
They’d left the well-traveled highway far behind, with the hamlets and cultivated lands near London. Now their road twined through the forest, gray boughs piled with snow, the white crust unbroken until it crunched beneath their hooves.
As twilight shadowed the sky to lavender, Linnet began to long for the crackling fire of a good inn, the liquid heat of a hearty stew to fill her belly, the decadent pleasure of sinking her weary bones into a straw-filled mattress. While they galloped in good light, the exercise kept her warm, though her face stung fiercely from the wind’s brisk kiss.
Now, the light too uncertain to risk their horses’ fragile ankles on a hidden pothole, they slowed to a walk. The cold settled deep in her marrow.
She clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. “Do ye think we’ll find an inn soon?”
Zamiel stirred under the sweep of his sable mantle. “Better if we don’t. They’re like to remember us, two travelers so well mounted on this quiet road. A farmstead would be better, someplace anyone hunting us would be less certain to inquire.”
“I’d settle for a w-w-woodsman’s hovel.” She curled and uncurled her cold-stiffened fingers. “Or one of these travelers’ wagons we keep passing, aye? I can’t f-feel my feet.”
He shot her a sharp glance. “Best jump down and walk a while. Isn’t that what one does to keep the blood moving?”
She studied him curiously. “It is. Were ye never cold in the Netherlands, during yer exile?”
“Right, I would have been.” He blinked, as though clearing his head. No doubt the strain of their long ride was affecting him too. “Let’s both walk a bit, shall we?”
Stiffly they dismounted, booted feet sinking to the knee in snow. But the intense cold had frozen the drifts. Gathering her heavy skirts, gripping Moibeal’s bridle for balance, Linnet found herself able to walk.
“Ye don’t say much about yer life before London,” she ventured, breath white as smoke in the gloaming. “Yer estates, for instance. Where is Briah?”
“It was, ah, in the west.” His breath rasped gently as he walked beside her, the black stallion flowing like ink in his wake. “Far from here. But I lost any home I had...it feels like long ago, already.”
“That’s a pity. ’tis hard having no place in the world, isn’t it?” she said sadly.
“You have a place, Linnet. You’ve lands to hold and people who rely upon you. The earls of Glencross are among the premier magnates of the north, or so I’m told.”
“Aye, but I’ve never felt I belonged—” Her foot skidded on a hidden patch of ice. She fell hard to her knees.
The pain of impact shot through her, coupled with the sharp sting of abrasion on the knee that took her weight.
At once Zamiel was there, bending over her, his concerned face filling her vision. He’d discarded his helm long ago, and a curtain of inky hair poured down on either side.
Lightheaded from the pain, gazing up at him as he bent down like a benevolent angel, Linnet thought him the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen.
“Here, can you get up?” His gauntleted hands closed beneath her elbows, lifting her weight from her throbbing knee.
“I’ll have to, aye?” Still breathless, she clutched his shoulders as he set her gently upright. When she stood erect, they stayed as they were, his grip reassuringly steady, his body a bulwark of warmth against the threatening night.
They were nearly of a height. She stared straight into his eyes, their noses nearly touching. If she leaned forward only a little, their lips would touch—
“Are you well?” he said softly. His breath was flavored with cloves and citrus from the mulled wine they’d bought earlier, warm as fire on her frozen face.
She struggled to clear her mind. “My knee’s gruppit, but it can wait till we stop. I think we must though, aye, next time we pass a wagon or cottage? We can barely see the road.”
As one, they glanced toward the trees that huddled close, darkness clotted thick as mud beneath their boughs.
“It’s a cold night to sleep rough,” he said at last, “and hard to start a fire. Can you ride a little farther?”
She straightened her spine and released him. “I’ll do what I must, aye? Pray God we find a place soon.”
He snorted at that and didn’t trouble to hide it, the same flash of contempt he’d shown before when she mentioned God. His lack of faith troubled her, but she felt too cold and weary to address it. Perhaps he’d lost his faith during his exile. Either way, the state of his soul should be none of her concern.
For once, he misread her troubled expression.
“Why don’t you ride with me? Morningstar can carry two. I’ll keep you warm and safe.”
Surely she ought to oppose that plan. Scandalous enough to be traveling alone, an unmarried lady and the court’s foremost rogue, unchaperoned even by a tiring-girl. But who was there to see?
She tethered the mare to Zamiel’s saddle.
While he held the black steady, she scrambled into the high saddle. When he vaulted up behind her, settling her sidesaddle across his pommel, she realized at once the intimacy of their placement.
His arms closed around her to gather the reins, the sweet smell of tobacco rising from his skin. Her heartbeat quickened as she settled between his thighs, lean and sinewed in leather breeches and high boots. His codpiece prodded her hip, a hard, unsettling bulge. The breath snared in her throat.
“Relax,” he breathed into her hair. “Sleep if you like. I’ll look after you.”
“My guardian angel,” she murmured, drawing his heavy fur-lined mantle around them. “And don’t tell me I don’t have one. I’m in no mood for another theological debate.”
“Praise God for that,” he said dryly.
At first she tried to maintain a seemly distance between them, but her placement made that impossible, and a wearisome struggle. After a time, the rhythmic sway of their pace and the creeping warmth of his nearness lulled her. With a sigh, she let her heavy head rest against his chest. Above the dark leather of his jerkin, the medallion gleamed silver in the darkness.
“This business with your father,” he said, their bodies moving as one. “Have you narrowed the list of likely candidates?”
“I’ve started a list of noblemen who joined the King’s progress that summer. But ’tis no easy thing. They came and went, aye? Betimes the King would break away with a few favorites for hunting and such. My mother and a few
other ladies joined them, most of the time. But only a few of his inner circle were always present—and the King himself, of course.”
As they rounded a bend in the road, Zamiel stiffened. A heightened alertness ran through him like a vibration, transmitting itself to her, as though they shared a single body. Lifting her head, she glimpsed the orange flicker of a campfire, illuminating the bulk of a covered wagon alongside.
“God be thanked!” she cried softly. “Let’s stop here, if they’ll have us.”
Zamiel seemed to hesitate, his native suspicion less blunted than hers by weariness.
But a cloaked form stirred beside the fire and called, in a rich sweet voice, “Well met on this dark road. Will you share my fire?”
This latest traveler proved to be a young woman, alone but for the placid draft horse that pulled her wagon and the tame raven dozing on the driver’s seat. Her name she gave simply as Morgause, and she seemed glad enough of their company to share a meal and a fire for the night.
Though the accommodation promised to be basic, at least it would be dry and off the ground. For the cheering heat of the fire alone, Linnet gladly accepted her kindness.
More, the girl seemed content to learn their Christian names and said naught about their business. For that, Linnet was more than grateful.
Zamiel tended their horses, while Linnet produced a loaf of barley bread and a bottle of nut-brown ale to accompany the savory pottage bubbling on a tripod over the tiny fire. They used their saddles for seats. When Morgause learned of Linnet’s wrenched knee, she insisted on bathing the tender limb and applying a hot poultice of figwort root whose aromatic heat seeped blissfully through the throbbing hurt.
Ensconced before a warming fire, a steaming bowl cradled in her lap, Linnet exhaled a contented sigh. The pottage had an exotic flavor, tangy and green as spring, thick with fresh vegetables of unknown provenance—the greens a rare oddity at this season.
Though utterly devoid of meat, the meal was wholesome and hearty, and she thanked their new companion effusively for her hospitality. Morgause seemed to have little, but what she had, she’d shared freely.
“In fact,” Linnet told her, “ye’re by way of proving a wee point I made not an hour past. I prayed God and St. Bride to send us aid and comfort on the road, and so they’ve done, aye?”
Seated across the fire, bowl balanced on her knee, Morgause bowed her head and seemed to shiver, hugging herself with small hands wrapped in cloth against the biting cold.
Curiously Linnet studied her slight figure, wrapped in a patchwork cloak of jewel-bright colors over heavy skirts of crimson wool. Glossy black ringlets tumbled down her back, framing a dusky complexion with a child’s wide black eyes and a woman’s lush mouth.
“I’m glad to aid a fellow traveler in need,” the girl said at last. She spoke with the musical lilt of the high country, distant Wales perhaps. “If you wish to thank me, speak not of your Christian faith. My tribe follows the old ways. We worship the great Goddess Ceridwen, who is Mother, Maiden and Crone.”
Hearing that pagan name spoken so calmly, Linnet would have crossed herself, if her hands weren’t wrapped around the warming bowl of soup. Catholics and Protestants she knew in plenty, and Anabaptists they burned at the stake, but she’d never met anyone—unless in the lost years—who openly embraced the pagan Goddess.
“I thought so.” Zamiel studied the girl with heightened interest. “You have that look. Faerie blood runs through your veins. Some not-so-distant ancestor must hail from the Summer Lands.”
Without warning, a wave of dizziness rolled over her. Swaying, Linnet fumbled to lower her bowl to the ground before she spilled it.
Morgause had bent to sip her steaming broth. Now she glanced up through a screen of jet-black ringlets. Her dark eyes gleamed.
“So you can see,” she murmured. “They’ve clipped your wings and cast you forth to wander far from home, but you have still the Sight. Do you see what she is, this maiden you worship with your eyes?”
With an inquiring lift of her brows, the girl inclined her head toward Linnet.
“I see,” Zamiel said softly, “but she does not. Let us speak of other things.”
Morgause smiled and bowed her head. “How do you like your pottage, then?”
Linnet was floundering in a sea of confusion. Surely this outlandish conversation bordered on blasphemy. Her companions had never met, yet they seemed somehow to recognize each other.
The air between them was thick with secrets, heavy as the smoke that twined around them. Dangerous as the dancing flames that cast their light over the wagon’s shrouded bulk, mysterious as the star-spangled night.
She wanted to ask a dozen questions, yet suddenly she was frightened of what she might hear. Her palms were sweating with the cold dread that befell her sometimes, when she pressed to recall the lost years. If she persisted, she would grow ill.
A towering frustration swelled within her, a vast impatience with her own maddening ignorance. Why could she not recall her past? What precious knowledge was hidden in the mist, locked away in her mind?
“Please!” Raw passion shredded her voice. “I want to see. I want to know what I am. ’tis the very reason I’m here in dead of winter on this godforsaken road. What do ye see that I can’t?”
“So then,” Morgause said, her voice gone deeper. She leaned forward to study Linnet through eyes that glimmered with secret knowledge. “Art thou prepared at last to part the Veil, child, and see what lies beyond?”
“The Veil?” Linnet whispered, her throat gone dry. The world wavered around her.
“No,” Zamiel said sharply, leaping to his feet. He stationed himself behind Linnet, slender hands gripping her shoulders. Thankfully she leaned into his supple strength and felt the world steady around her.
“What is this?” he fired at the girl in her patchwork cloak. “Who are you, and what is your business on this road? Were you waiting for us?”
“I am a traveler, as thou art,” Morgause said calmly. “A crusader, as thou art. I seek to alter the balance and change the world. Our causes are the same, my Severity.”
“No more riddles,” he cut in, voice hard as diamonds. “Who are you?”
The girl shrugged, her mantle of mystique falling away with her odd manner of speech. “I’m a seer and priestess of the Goddess. You guessed that much already.”
Her cloth-wrapped fingers touched the knife at her belt, a sickle-shaped dagger that tugged at Linnet’s gaze. Somewhere, she’d seen something like. Then passion lit Morgause’s face, transforming her from threadbare waif to blazing beauty.
“I travel these roads, my Severity, selling truth and vision to those who would see. Some call me a witch, for the power of my Sight and my healing potions, whose benefit you have already seen. But a witch serves her own ends, and I serve the Goddess. It was She who led your steps to me.”
“No!” Linnet cried. She would have jumped to her feet if not for Zamiel’s steadying hands on her shoulders. “This is no work of Satan or yer pagan Goddess. God in Heaven guides our steps!”
Morgause whitened, one hand going to her throat, as though the words were a fist that choked her. Yet her eyes seemed to gleam with amusement as they lifted to Zamiel. “Your fallen angel stands closer than you think. If you believe I lie, ask this one about Lucifer.”
“He’s a good and faithful man!” Linnet flared. “And ye’re a wicked devil to say otherwise. Ye don’t even know the man, nor me—”
“Peace, child.” Morgause lifted a hand to halt the spill of impassioned words. “I see my plain speech has overset you. You must forgive me for that. I have not a courtier’s gilded tongue.”
Disliking her vulnerable placement, Linnet was struggling to remove the unwieldy poultice on her knee. Sighing, the black-haired girl shook out her crimson skirts and came to her side.
“Be still now,” Morgause murmured, placing a light hand on Linnet’s foot. “If you wish to leave, then so you shall. But there ar
e dangers far greater than myself hidden in the darkness. I would offer you another path, if you would hear it.”
Linnet was still bristling on Zamiel’s behalf, the more so because the man refused to defend himself and stood oddly quiet at her back. He’d released her shoulders, and she missed his bracing touch.
Yet the girl’s obvious contrition made her abashed at her violent response. Where was Linnet the mouse, Linnet the meek, who’d hidden and fled all her life?
“Perhaps I was overhasty,” she murmured. “’Tis a weary long day for all of us, aye? Let’s say no more of it.”
“If you wish.” Morgause stripped away the spent poultice, the aromatic odor stinging Linnet’s nostrils, though she couldn’t deny both pain and swelling had eased. “Another road lies open to you, if you would take it.”
Zamiel prowled around the fire, a lithe slender figure whose rapier flashed like a star. “What do you propose to do, witch—read her palm? Chart her stars?”
“Neither,” the girl said calmly. “For you would question anything you hear from my lips now. I propose to let her see with her own eyes what she is...and you, Severity. Do you not wonder if your Deity has forgotten you? Do you wonder whose creature you are? Or seek some reassurance that you may yet return to the place you forsook?”
Across the fire, he stilled, his dark head lifting. Linnet’s breath hitched painfully at the raw anguish etched in his face, the haunting emptiness in his shadowed gaze. Aye, he wanted it, whatever the girl was offering him.
Yet he raised a hand, palm outward, to push the offer away.
“I am where I deserve to be,” he said hoarsely. “He has forsaken me, as He ought to have done eons ago.”
Linnet’s heart twisted. She gazed up at him, heart welling with compassion for his obvious suffering.
“No, Zamiel,” she said gently. “His capacity to love is infinite, aye? Whatever ye’ve done, ye’ve only to ask forgiveness.”
His mouth tightened. “Oh, aye, He’ll forgive me if I repent. If you knew what form that penance must take, the good deed I’m told to renounce...”
Laura Navarre - [The Magick Trilogy 02] Page 18
