Being with him was so new, and yet somehow, it felt like she’d always known him. In so short a time, he’d managed to carve a place in her life all his own, one she couldn’t fill with anything or anyone but him. It scared her—the chance of losing someone always did—but it pleased her, too, to have this man, this person, who belonged only to her.
Slipping free of his embrace, she pulled aside the covers and wrapped herself in a silk robe. In case he woke soon, she topped off his water, then poured herself a goblet of wine. She padded to the vanity table and mixed in a dose of queen’s lace powder, smiling. Although she hadn’t needed it yet, it was always better to be prepared.
Next to it lay the canvas-wrapped bundle containing the remnants of the bolt. She grabbed it and slipped through the glass-paned doors that led out onto the balcony.
They’d moved to the Red Room, and its best asset was its full view of the Lady’s Garden, a vibrant and internationally renowned collection of exotic flora tended into the shape of a labyrinthine blooming rose.
The night-blooming flowers welcomed her, and she closed her eyes to inhale their alluring scent. She brought the goblet to her lips. Alone, in the quiet of the night, she could gather her thoughts until Brennan arrived.
On the stone balustrade, she unwrapped the bundle, revealing the broken bolt. Cedar shaft. Goose-feather fletching. Standard. The bolt tip was rhombic—crafted to penetrate plate armor—and although the crossbow didn’t require special skill, it was a very expensive weapon. Prohibitively expensive, because it had the power to kill a noble in the costliest of plate. Which meant that the crossbowman’s employer had possessed ample coin. She frowned.
She and Jon had stumbled into a massacred outpost of Crag mercenaries, courtesy of Brennan. The attackers could have been survivors, but Brennan wouldn’t have left any. Investigators, maybe?
Too soon for them, too. Perhaps scouts checking in?
She sipped her wine. A crossbow countered armor. The target had been Jon.
Arcanir poison, however, could dispatch a mage easily or prevent a target from being healed. Useful for handling either her or Jon.
But they couldn’t have known she loved him. That hurting him could trigger fureur... Which would have happened. At least if Leigh hadn’t come along to hit her with arcanir.
Thanks were in order. She would visit him soon. Gran, of course, didn’t want “that man” staying at Prevost, regardless of his good deeds. She grimaced.
But the attack... The Proctor and the High Priest hadn’t been wrong in assigning Jon an escort. The question was why. Were all paladins in danger now, or only he? Was the target actually his adoptive father, the High Priest? Did someone hope to prove a point to him?
She turned away.
There, to the left and just below the ledge, was a living fixture embedded in the castle wall. Brennan.
“Do you come here often, or is tonight an oddity?” she asked softly.
With a snarling smile, Brennan rent a set of claws free only to dig them into the stone just above him, scaling the last few feet with ease to perch upon the balustrade like a wolfish gargoyle, somewhere between man and beast.
“If you’re asking whether I visit the Lady’s Garden often, the answer is yes,” he hissed, with a grin too wide to be human. “If you’re asking whether I cling to the castle wall below this balcony every night, then no.” He casually polished his claws, the black fur of his man-beast form shining under the starlight.
She pursed her lips, fending off a smile. Sometimes he could actually be tolerable. She sipped her wine and looked out at the garden.
His nostrils flared as he sniffed the air.
“How convenient to lace the wine with preventives,” he remarked, his voice low and rumbling. “Makes it easier to swive with abandon.” He observed her darkly through slits.
Smug bastard. “You’d know all about that.” She leaned her back against the balustrade.
“Judging by your scent, you’re out of practice.” He huffed a soft bark. “Do you need a review?”
Sucking her tongue, she regarded him disdainfully. “I’m still smarting from your last lesson.”
His back stiffened, and his upper lip curled. “To business, then,” he said, his monstrous voice gravelly. He stalked to her on the balustrade, more wolf than man, and sat within her reach.
Good. She needed a favor.
“You killed those Crag scouts.” She ran her fingers through his long, thick fur, and he closed his eyes and groaned.
“They were there to kill you.” He sighed. “They needed to die.”
When her fingers stopped moving, he opened an eye, looked at her, and then turned his wolfish head. He reached out with a clawed hand to grab her wrist, and she met his endless, dark depths.
His black fur disappeared as wolf ceded to human, replaced by bronze skin and a man’s powerful physique. “I will always do all that I can to protect you. As a man, as a beast—it makes no difference.”
“To preserve your means of control.”
“Not only.” His human, hazel eyes were earnest and yielding. “I want to marry you.” He grinned, exuding both confidence and calm, as though the outcome of their extended game was both certain and in his favor.
Grapes would ripen on the willows. She scoffed.
He leaned in. “Long before I knew about how to break the curse, I agreed to marry you. That day I came to you at the Tower, I knew only that your family was gone, that you were alone. I offered you everything, and you threw it back in my face.”
“I was thirteen,” she shot back. “Did you really want a child bride?”
“Of course not,” he hissed, his face contorting into a grimace. “But marriage was the only way to get guardianship of you. We would have been wed in name only until you were old enough and felt ready to make it a reality. You know that, but the Divinity filled your head with poison.”
She shook her head. “I was scared and had just lost my whole family, then you showed up talking about marriage while I worried about not killing you and your family by accident. So of course I couldn’t go with you. And you exacted more than your fair share of vengeance six years later.”
He blew out a breath. “You refused me like some knave. Is it any wonder?”
Her refusal. It always came back to that. No matter how many times she explained to him her fear, what her needs had been, her intentions—he always blamed her for his resulting humiliation among the Houses. If he’d actually cared about her needs, he would have left her in the care of those who could actually help her.
But he’d pushed for the marriage. Hard. A terrifying prospect for an orphaned thirteen-year-old girl.
She swallowed. “Tell me, if you’d known how to break the curse before Midwinter at Tregarde that year, would you have done anything differently?”
He clenched his teeth. “Maybe. Would you have deserved it?”
The air escaped her lungs, and she turned away. His old wound still bled. They could argue about this for hours.
He winced. His gaze bored into the stone beneath him.
Either she had hit the truth, or he still played his game. Either way, she wouldn’t indulge him.
It didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t care. She would never marry the man who’d treated her so cruelly.
The intensity ebbed from his gaze. “I made contact with Nicolette.”
A change of subject. Divine be praised. “Anxiously awaited news. Did she agree?”
“Yes.” He heaved a breath.
“Thank you.”
He tipped his head toward the bolt pieces lying on the canvas. “That almost broke your commoner plaything.”
“He has a name.”
Brennan curled his upper lip. “ ‘Commoner’ will do.”
She rolled her eyes. “We were attacked by a team near the Crag outpost. A mage and a crossbowman. I killed the crossbowman. The mage disappeared.” Her blood simmered at the thought.
“You’re losing your
touch.”
She sighed; he didn’t even know the half of it. “I went into fureur.”
That couldn’t happen again; she’d have to make peace with herself, as Leigh had advised.
She traced the bolt tip’s edge with her fingertips. “Leigh stopped me with the arcanir coating on this bolt tip.”
Quiet for a moment, Brennan’s face went slack. “That team almost killed you, then.”
“Almost.”
He approached the bundle and brought the pieces close to his nose. “All I am getting is the overwhelming smell of your commoner’s blood, kestair oil, and arcanir.” He examined the tip of one piece, followed by the fletching of the other.
“Then I’ll have to find the mage myself.”
“Leave that to me.” Brennan wrapped the bundle. In his savage eyes was the unadulterated fixation seen only in lethal predators.
“As if you care.”
He clenched his jaw, baring his teeth wolfishly. “You could have been killed. I would have spent the rest of my life an uncontrollable beast, howling at the moon—if I should have been so lucky as to live. I would have nothing.”
No matter his faults, Brennan could always be trusted to protect his own interests. She nodded.
“I’ll investigate the scene and see what I can find.” Black fur spiked out of his skin until it became a full coat covering a muscled, tailed, clawed, snouted beast resembling a wolf but possessing the figure of a man. His beastly amber eyes held hers for a moment.
He bounded to the corner of the balcony and leaped off.
With a gasp, she threw herself against the balustrade, looking down—
He lifted his head from the garden a final time before he stalked off into the night. She exhaled and backed up to lean against the castle wall, shaking her head.
Did he have to be so dramatic? Did it please him to know she cared whether he lived or died?
Fire ran through her veins. She managed to settle her gaze on the goblet she’d left on the balustrade.
The doors creaked open behind her.
Jon. His eyes brightened.
Bandages interrupted the tattoos of his bare chest, the break a visible reminder of his brush with death.
She wouldn’t let it happen again.
“Here you are,” he whispered, walking carefully toward her.
She rushed to brace him. “Did I wake you?”
His hands settled on the stone, then he wrapped an arm around her to embrace her from behind. He kissed her head. “No,” he answered quietly in her ear, “I just awoke to find you gone.”
She closed her eyes, savoring the feel of him against her back and gently stroking his arm.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
She turned in his embrace to face him, but his gaze had wandered to her goblet.
“Black arts stuff.” She smiled. “Communing with ghosts and monsters, drinking witchy concoctions, casting my love spell on you—”
He kissed her, swaying with her in his grasp. “A love spell?” He laughed under his breath. “That explains everything.”
She scoffed. “Bastard.”
“Witch.”
Her lips twitched. He seemed to enjoy teasing her almost as much as she enjoyed chiding him.
She rose on her toes as if to kiss him, but when he descended to meet her lips, she stopped just short. “You’re lucky you’re injured, or I’d show you what happens when you mouth off.”
He gave her a squeeze. “Don’t you mean ‘unlucky’?” His voice dropped an octave lower.
Unlucky indeed. Held together by catgut sutures and bandages, he was in no shape for a proper reprimand.
“Take it up with the physician.” Before he could reply, she took his hand in hers, wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and helped him back into the bedchamber.
Somewhere far beyond the balcony and the garden, in the outlying wilds, a wolf howled.
Chapter 40
The afternoon sunlight peeked through the dense canopy, illuminating patches of ground with a golden glow as Brennan made his way through the Forest of the Hart. The magic-tinged smell of ash still disturbed the air. But the earthy fragrance of oak, beech, little-leaf linden, and silver birch dominated these woods, the common dogwood on the outskirts—he inhaled—no, winter-flame. The moon would be full tonight, and the Wolf clawed close to the surface, heightening his senses even more than usual.
Separating its scent from the moss, the rot, the trees, and the other shrubs, he breathed it in. Its leaves would have turned orange-yellow by now and fallen to reveal the beauty of its red-tipped, amber winter stems.
The winter-flame gave way to pungent hoarwithy, with its vermilion leaves and toxic gray bark. Crisp foliage crunched underfoot to the unmusical, noisy song of a common starling and the chattering of far-off finches above. Elsewhere, magpies, wrens, and a golden oriole staked their claims.
His sharp nose picked up the markings and filth of a bear, deer, foxes, and the myriad forest rodents. From a distance came the scents of a pack of wolves—they’d give him a wide berth, as always. The Wolf liked its space.
The bodies of the Crag scouts had been removed, but the slightly sweet, acrid smell of old blood and decomposition still clung to the earth. Mingled with the stagnant scents, fresh ones—men from the Connétablie of Melain, knights, and men-at-arms.
And her scent.
It lingered, along with the commoner’s. Brennan gnashed his teeth but followed. The ash grew stronger—scorched trees, scorched earth, scorched human—
The char of burnt wood overwhelmed his nostrils.
A crater. Massive, black, everything incinerated for thirty feet in every direction. The wind riffled the ash, sweeping it by. On the fringe, trees lingered with amputated limbs and disfigured trunks, blackened at the points of separation, still shaping what looked like a perfect sphere. Unnatural.
He shuddered.
Fureur. This was what it looked like.
All those years ago, he’d raced to Laurentine. Right after. Stone walls had remained like a cage with nothing inside. Instead of floors, furnishings, animals, people—nothing but a fine powder. Ash riffled by the wind. He’d knelt in it, brought it to his nose, reached across the bond to no avail. She was in that ash, gone, dead, and the Wolf had crept just beneath his skin and clawed its way out—
Until he’d felt her presence flood him once more, a rush of warmth and joy. An illusion. Just confirmation of the bond. Not real.
And the absence, the death that he’d felt, had been false, too. Arcanir. The same absence he’d felt two days ago.
The Wolf had fought for freedom and had it in the wilds—days of mad ranging—until that warmth and joy rushed in once more.
Arcanir... If that was how it felt for her to be in contact with arcanir, he didn’t want to entertain the idea of her death.
With a deep breath, he rounded the crater, tried to leave the dominion of its overpowering odor. So much had burned, but traces remained.
Blood—the commoner’s. Brennan leaned toward a tree, brought his nose flush against it. The bleeding commoner had braced against it. Arcanir and kestair oil.
A collection of disarmed traps sat in a pile nearby, one tampered with, marked with the scent of Laurentinian leather. He recalled his balcony meeting with her and couldn’t remember any marks from such a trap on her body.
Rielle.
He snarled. He’d never met such an arrogant, infuriating woman. He offered her the sun, moon, and stars, but she rejected him because she liked the dirt. Wealth, power, strength, intelligence, good looks—every other woman he’d pursued had fallen for these, and easily. But not her.
Snarling little she-wolf. She’d refused him. Him, heir to Emaurria’s most prestigious dukedom. Brennan Karandis Marcel. Refused by a naive thirteen-year-old orphan.
As if that wasn’t humiliation enough, she’d debased herself a few years later by having an affair with her master, a Kamerish commoner.
&nbs
p; His fiancée had cuckolded him with a peasant-born foreigner.
He punched the rough trunk of an oak, sending splinters flying, the Wolf clawing inside for a way out. Mutilated flesh and fractured bone radiated pain up his arm.
Thanks to her indiscretion, the scandal had spread far and wide, animating every Emaurrian noble’s tongue to wagging. Whispers of his degradation had infected every noble function, and they had not been kind.
When her common-born lover had abandoned her, a little vengeance had been in order. Brennan had wooed her, captivated her, seduced her—pledged her his love, his loyalty, his protection, his hand in marriage, everything her broken heart had longed for. And when he’d finally gotten her to her knees, revenge had never felt so good.
But his guests walking in on it had made it all the better. He’d rejected her. Viscerally.
You didn’t think I meant all that, did you? A stroke of pure genius. How she’d paled! I’m done with the little tart. She can find her way back to the Tower.
Public humiliation. As she’d done to him years earlier. It should have felt good, equalizing, but even as he’d laughed at her with his guests, a knot had formed in the pit of his stomach. Her feverish, over-bright eyes pleaded with him, haunted him, even now.
Begged for a different reality.
Lamented.
But if he had defended her then and there, she never would have known the keen suffering she’d inflicted on him nine years ago. She’d never have understood it if he’d taken her in his arms, enshrined her in a bedchamber, comforted her the rest of the night and the rest of his life. Married her. Conceived their heirs.
But after that night, she’d understood.
And was that—
That was more important.
He swallowed and shook off the thoughts, then rubbed his bloody knuckles raw and watched them begin to heal. So she’d had her heart shattered. So some nobles had gossiped about her, made her an outcast to society. It was three years ago and trivial compared to his curse.
It was time to move on to his next strategy to bring her to heel. Her new commoner plaything was only a distraction, but she had risked her life to save him. The commoner’s survival was something she wanted.
Blade & Rose (Blade and Rose Book 1) Page 36
