Forbidden

by Christina Phillips

  “I didn’t think so.” Morwyn twirled a long raven lock around her finger. “Although even if he was, the need for secrecy would still be prudent.”

  Carys couldn’t argue with that. Even before they had been forced to flee into the forest, Aeron’s possessiveness toward her was more than enough to quell any other man’s interest.

  Notwithstanding that he’d fucked around whenever the fancy took him, and she had severed their ties two years and five moons prior to their flight. He still appeared to imagine he retained rights over her, when the truth was he never had.

  “It’s easier if no one knows.” Carys leaned back against a tree and yawned. Sweet Cerridwen, but she was exhausted. “Then there’s less likelihood of him hearing a whisper.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.” Morwyn kissed the tips of her fingers to seal the promise. “Now, tell me how you met. Is it someone I know?”

  Carys dearly wanted to confide, but knew she never could. “He is newly arrived at the settlement around the Roman fortification.” Almost true. Not quite a lie.

  She could live with it.

  When Morwyn finally left, after having extracted enough erotic details to satisfy her probing questions and a promise to meet for morning tea when the shadows shortened, Carys examined her aching hand. Now she remembered why it hurt so much.

  She’d punched Maximus.

  Across the palm, dried blood streaked, and shock arrowed through her heart. The bluestone. Had she damaged it?

  Heart thundering in her ears, she dragged her bag over and carefully pulled out the soft leather pouch. After glancing around to ensure she was still alone in this part of the forest, she quickly examined the sacred stones.

  They appeared to be unharmed. With a relieved sigh she quickly slid them back into the pouch.

  Of course, if anyone did see the stones in her possession, they would assume they were merely ordinary bluestones. As such they commanded due respect for their spiritual significance, but these stones were far from ordinary.

  She had stolen them after the terrifying ceremony at the Feast of the Dead when Aeron had fused the powers bestowed by their immortals to invoke the sacred spiral.

  Carys stroked the leather pouch with humble reverence for its contents. Even now, seven moons later, she could scarcely understand why she had done such a thing. Yet she had felt compelled. As if the broken shards, scattered across the ground of the cromlech, had called to her.

  And perhaps they had. Without their protective magic, shielding her and Maximus from unexpected discovery, last night could not have occurred.

  Fingers clasped around the pouch, Carys hesitated. Did that mean the gods had foreseen and approved of her liaison?

  She wanted to believe it. And yet she wasn’t convinced. The Romans had invaded their country. Enslaved their people. How could their gods approve of anything but the utter destruction of the enemy?

  But she didn’t want to think about that. She thrust the pouch deep into her bag, and her fingers brushed against another leather pouch.

  Blood flooded her cheeks and her heart kicked against her ribs in shocked disbelief. How could she have forgotten something so fundamentally important?

  She dragged it from her bag, pulled it open and stared at the contents of her emergency pack of cleansing creams and special herbs. She had assumed that, after leaving Maximus, she’d come back here, bathe away the evidence of their liaison and prepare the preventative tea.

  Instead she’d been so exhausted all she’d managed was blessed oblivion.

  She couldn’t return to the cromlech and risk encountering Aeron in her current state. Dawn drifted over the valley and she didn’t have much time before the risk of others finding her escalated.

  Ignoring the way her body protested, she sprinted to the nearby river.

  Carys found Morwyn at her favorite meditative spot some distance from Druantia’s oak grove.

  “Are you still going to the Cauldron?” Morwyn said as she placed two highly decorated cups on the ground.

  “Yes.” Carys shot her a glance as she sat beside her and began to prepare her herbs and bark for infusion. It was obvious Morwyn knew that Aeron had forbidden her. As if he had any right to forbid her to do anything when it concerned her personal goddess.

  “I’ve always thought it odd,” Morwyn said as she picked up the pot suspended over her small fire, “how the Cauldron was excluded from the protection of the sacred spiral.”

  Carys dropped her prepared herbs into her cup and picked up the dried bark. On that fateful night, as the shattering violet waves had radiated outward from the double circle of bluestones, it had never occurred to her that her beloved Cauldron wouldn’t be included.

  “I sometimes think Aeron deliberately eliminated the Cauldron from his protective spells.” She didn’t have any evidence, and her feelings were illogical. But she had never been able to shake them.

  Morwyn frowned as she poured the hot water into her own cup. “Not every Druid’s sacred place was enclosed, Carys.” She replaced the pot on its stand and dropped the protective handling cloth on the ground between them. Then she gave Carys a calculating look. “Although most were, certainly.”

  “And he expected me then, and expects me now, to simply abandon the holy spring.” She hadn’t believed him at first, because aside from the spring being Cerridwen’s sacred Cauldron of Wisdom, it was her own personal haven. She meditated there, practiced her training for endless hours. Felt safe and loved and, most of all, close to Cerridwen.

  “Then he will continue to expect in vain.” And Morwyn gave a little snort as if the thought of Aeron being crossed pleased her.

  Carys peeled a strip from her bark. “Although if the Cauldron had fallen within the protective circle, none of the villagers could have continued to meet me there.”

  Morwyn shrugged. “You’d have found another holy place, Carys.”

  Yes, she would. Although she was only an acolyte with barely ten years’ training, people trusted her with their health problems. For two years she’d been treating a growing circle of patients and she’d been furious when Aeron had assumed she could simply abandon them at a moment’s notice.

  A smug smile tugged at her lips as she recalled what else she’d done in her most beloved of places. Had Aeron enclosed the Cauldron, she could never have invited her Roman there.

  Luxuriating in the illicit glow warming her core, she made to drop the prepared bark into her cup. And paused. The herbs already there were arranged into the unmistakable shape of a womb, save for a few sprinkled pieces in the center.

  An eerie shiver chased along her arms. But perhaps it wasn’t so strange. Not when this preparation would clean out her own womb of Maximus’s potent seed.

  Yet still she hesitated.

  A flutter of darkness made her jerk up, and she sucked in a shocked breath as the raven landed less than a stone’s throw away. Symbolic of the Morrigan, in her guise as the War Goddess, the raven prophesied both devastation and regeneration. One black, glittering eye observed her, as if sizing her up, before it suddenly took to the air. Was this a sign that the goddess truly was appeased? Had her orgasm with Maximus been with the Morrigan’s blessing? Did this mean the Great Goddess would no longer disdain Carys’s existence?

  “Goddess save us.” Morwyn gripped her arm in a painful grasp, and Carys stared in transfixed silence as one black tail feather fluttered to land at her feet.

  The potent omen couldn’t be ignored. It foretold fertility and new life.

  Morwyn’s grip intensified. “War,” she whispered, staring at the feather in horror. “Death.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Aeron stood by the stone altar, palms pressed against its cool surface, his hazel rod at his feet.

  He didn’t know how many hours he had remained in this position. Only that now, as glimpses of the future fluttered behind his closed eyes, other Druids approached.

  Anger stirred at the disruption, at the distortion in his
visions. The cromlech was the center of the Druids’ spiritual connection with the gods, but it was more than that to him.

  Since the age of eight, when he’d received irrefutable proof via his bloody vision of his importance in the future of the world, the cromlech had become his own personal bastion of power.

  His hands fisted. The others would disperse when they saw he was engaged with the gods. They would assume he was communing with the mighty god of the Otherworld, Arawn. Or perhaps the warrior god Camulus or Taranis, god of thunder, as to ways of beating the Roman scum and bringing peace once more to the valleys.

  Contempt for his fellow Druids seared through his arteries, pounded in his mind. As a chosen acolyte of Arawn, he had always been a favored one of both Camulus and Taranis. But in the depths of his soul he had long ago abandoned those weak deities. They were nothing when compared to the one true source of power that had spewed forth those insipid gods, which bound all life together, which had shown itself to him on the longest day of summer twenty-five years ago.

  His eyes snapped open. Morwyn emerged from the mouth of the great mound, and when she realized he looked her way, she gave an exaggerated swing to her hips.

  Revulsion curled his belly. He knew it wasn’t Morwyn herself who repulsed him. It was her calling. Whenever he looked at her, at the maiden aspect of the Morrigan, he saw only the wrinkled crone.

  A shudder crawled the length of his spine. Soon, the triple goddess would be relegated to her rightful position in the circle of existence.

  Crushed beneath his feet.

  He hooked a finger at Morwyn and, as he knew she would, she sauntered over, tossing her long black hair over her shoulder.

  “Good morn, Aeron.” She braced her hands on the altar, the disrespectful whore, and angled herself so he had a clear view of her ample cleavage.

  He offered her an icy smile, when all he really wanted was to swipe her undeserving hands from the sacred slab.

  But she was Carys’s special friend. And his major recourse for discovering what Carys did with her days. For almost fifteen years he’d nurtured the tenuous ability he possessed that enabled him to keep mental track of her whereabouts. It was a power he cherished; one many would covet had they known of its existence. A power that had inexplicably vanished the night he’d created the sacred spiral. Even now he couldn’t fathom how such a fundamental error had occurred, but one thing was certain. It had nothing to do with his flawless incantations that night.

  “I trust you weren’t troubled by disturbing dreams again?” He feigned interest, though he didn’t care whether Morwyn’s visions drove her insane or killed her. All that interested him was why Carys hadn’t returned to the mound last night. She’d never before slept out in the forest.

  “I slept like a babe.” Morwyn fluttered her eyelashes at him.

  He knew she lied. Currently she was fucking the brains out of Gawain, a fellow Druid, and whatever she may have done last night, sleep wouldn’t have been a major factor.

  “Have you seen Carys this morn?” He had never been a great one for small talk, and over the last few moons it had grown increasingly more difficult to converse with his inferiors.

  He didn’t have time for mindless chatter. Only information.

  Morwyn straightened, as if his question didn’t please her. “We shared tea and broke our fast.”

  Something in her manner alerted his senses. He leaned toward her across the altar.

  “And?” His voice was persuasive. He could be very persuasive when it suited.

  Her brow creased and she nibbled on her lower lip. He waited in silence for her to continue.

  “We were touched by the raven’s eye.”

  Shivers skittered across his skin as excitement tightened his chest. “You or Carys?” Of course Carys. Morwyn was nothing compared to Carys, in beauty, in power and in potential.

  Morwyn hugged her waist as if the recollection disturbed her. “The raven eyed Carys. But then, when it took to the wing, it dropped a tail feather at her feet.”

  Aeron’s heart stilled for one eternal moment, then slammed against his rib cage as the significance of the omen penetrated.

  “How did Carys react?” He kept his voice calm, but inside victory thundered. The raven, with its gift of prophecy, frequently inhabited his visions of bloodthirsty conquest, the bird and its flock picking over the broken carcasses of their slaughtered enemy.

  If the raven had singled out Carys for its token, then Aeron’s destiny was assured.

  In the midst of carnage, Carys and the fruit of her womb would belong to him.

  He no longer cared why she had slept outside last night. It had been a prelude to what had followed.

  “She didn’t.” Morwyn sounded confused by Carys’s reaction to the bird. “Aeron, I know what the raven portents. There’ll be more fighting and death before this is over, won’t there?”

  He forced himself to respond, to drag his lustful thoughts from once again possessing Carys’s body. Except the next time he did so, he would also possess her mind. Her soul.

  Her freedom.

  “This will never be over until the strait churns with Roman blood.”

  “Celtic blood also.” Morwyn’s whisper was filled with sorrow.

  Aeron drew back, folded his arms across his naked, blue-daubed chest. “The gods are with us, Morwyn. They’ll protect us against the heathen invaders.”

  Aeron gripped his hazel rod in frustration. After leaving Morwyn—who assured him she had not the faintest idea where Carys might be—he mentally searched all the holiest places within the vast confines of the sacred spiral, attempting to pick up a glimmer of her aura.

  But there was nothing. And while the severance of his spiritual connection to her meant he could no longer pinpoint her exact location, when he invoked the mighty power of Annwyn—a power that no other even imagined could be enslaved—he always knew whether or not she remained within his specified limits.

  The fucking bitch had defied him yet again.

  Rage filled his chest and compressed his heart at the knowledge she had escaped to her precious Cauldron.

  He didn’t care that she loved her Cauldron. He didn’t even care that she loved ministering to her fucking useless patients. What tore at his guts was the fact she thought nothing of disobeying his direct orders.

  Gritting his teeth, he glared around the cromlech. He had always known how attached she was to the sparkling spring in the hidden glade. She felt the same affinity there as he did with the cromlech.

  He understood. It was part of who Carys was, part of her mystical power that even now he could scarcely comprehend.

  Because of that, he had specifically enclosed the Cauldron of Cerridwen within the parameters of the sacred spiral. Then, he knew, Carys’s anger would be appeased at the enforced captivity. She wouldn’t be able to see her patients but at least her sanctuary would be eternally available for her meditations.

  And he would always know where he could find her.

  But the spiral had fallen short. The Cauldron was now outside his power. And Carys, alternating from one holy place to another during the course of a single day, could never be found when he wanted her.

  He reined in his smoldering fury. Patience. For twenty-five years he had waited for his time, and he was a master of patience. In less than three days, during the shortest night of the sacred wheel, the old gods would fall, the enemy would crumble and his time would come.

  “Enter.”

  Maximus entered the Legatus Legionis’s office and saluted.

  “Primus.” The Legatus acknowledged him and then indicated he should sit. “I received communication from the Emperor yesterday. I’ve been promoted to provincial governor.”

  “Well deserved, sir.” And unsurprising. With only one Legion in this province it made sense to appoint the Legatus.

  The commander jerked his head in acceptance. “And Faustus has been reappointed to Rome.”

  Maximus remained silent. H
e knew what was coming.

  The Legatus leaned back in his chair and regarded Maximus through narrowed eyes. “That means the post of Tribunus Laticlavius is vacant.”

  “Sir.”

  “How old are you, Maximus?”

  The commander knew exactly how old he was, considering he was his father’s second cousin. “Twenty-seven, sir.”

  “Five years older than Faustus.”

  Again Maximus remained silent. It was an undisputed fact the commander’s nephew, Faustus, was indeed a full five years Maximus’s junior.

  The older man tapped one finger on his desk. “The Emperor has seen fit to promote you into the vacant position. Congratulations, Maximus.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He was now second-in-command of the Legion. A tight knot of pride glowed deep inside his chest, but he kept his features clear of any such expression.

  “Of course, if you’d gone about your career in the right way, you’d be looking toward your own quaestorship by now.” The Legatus gave him a dark scowl, which almost instantly broke into an approving grin. “You’re old to be appointed Tribunus, but what the fuck. Your experience makes up for it.”

  Nine years fighting his way up the centurion ranks more than made up for it. “Can I recommend my successor?”

  “I thought you might.”

  “Aquila.”

  “His record is impressive.” It was obvious the Legatus already had Aquila in mind for the position of the senior centurion. “Faustus is moving out within the next couple of days, so you can take over his quarters then.” A gleam lit the older man’s eye. “Now you’ve finally acquired a rank befitting your birth, I’ve no doubt you’ll soon also be acquiring a suitable Roman wife.”

  The thought held little appeal. He had no need of a wife. Not when he had his wood nymph.

  His groin tightened as he recalled the intense sexual pleasures of the previous night. He doubted a Roman girl of his patrician class could ever come close to satisfying him so thoroughly.