Brothers of the Wild North Sea (46 page)

“I don’t know. The dunes. Just…away.”

“Yes. Good.”

“Not too fast. Clover can’t keep up.”
And nor can I. Why is it so hard to breathe?

“You called your warhorse Clover?”

“It was short notice. Just ride.”

Off the coastal plain and into the hills, where earth turned to sand beneath the turf, where marram whipped freshly in the wind. Where salt and the manes of white horses made the air crackle with life, sustaining Cai a little longer—long enough to gallop after Fen deep into the maze of crests and sandy troughs.

“Here,” he called, when his hold on Clover’s reins began to slip. “Fen, stop here.”

Eldra came snorting to a halt. Fen turned her neatly and brought her to stand beside Clover. “Is it far enough?”

“Yes. It’ll have to be.”

“Cai…” Fen took hold of his shoulder once more. He looked into Cai’s face. Cai didn’t dare look back. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Can you see them from here—Sigurd and my father?”

“If I ride back up this crest. Wait a moment. Yes.”

“Are they fighting?”

“No. They’re still where we left them. They’re…talking, I think, if you’ll believe it.”

Cai chuckled. “Just barely. If you’re here, though—who’s translating?”

“Does Broccus speak Latin?”

“A little.”

“Well, Sigurd speaks a little less, but maybe it’s enough. Your father seems to be drawing something on the ground.”

“Partitioning his lands, perhaps.”

“Does he really own them?”

“Not an acre. But if that’s what it takes…”

“Yes. Sigurd won’t ask to see his deeds. Cai…?” Fen leapt off Eldra. He came running down the dune and took hold of Clover’s bridle. “Why are you so pale? You were mending when I left, weren’t you?” He reached up. Cai began to dismount. Fen would help him down, and then he would be fine. But something went wrong between Clover’s broad back and the sand. The noise of the sea had got inside his head. When he tried to tell Fen about this—to lean down and find his embrace—his eyes filled with salt water too, blinding him. And then the sun went black.

My only grief is that I can’t deceive you.
Cai lay listening to the thud of a heart that was now so much stronger than his own. He was curled up with Fen in the sheltering arm of the dunes. The wind was growing chilly as the dusk came down, but he could scarcely feel it. He had awoken wrapped in a beautiful cloak, its soft red wool drawn closely all round him. Fen had been holding it there, holding him. Briefly he had tried to lie. But the damn cough had started, racking him, for the first time bringing blood.

“Why is it happening?”

“The wound’s healing badly, I think.” Cai was calm now. His words no longer came in crimson rags. His head was on Fen’s shoulder. “Binding up one of my lungs.”

“What can I do? I will bring you a physician.”

Cai smiled at the imperious tone. “Knock one over the head and bring him to me hogtied?”

“If necessary.”

“It isn’t. I’ve had the opinion of the best doctor for miles around. The only one, as it happens. It’s all right, love. It doesn’t even bother me now.”

“It doesn’t hurt?”

“It did until today.”

Fen took his face between his hands. He brushed back Cai’s fringe, wiped a trace of blood from his lips with the pad of his thumb. He was so lovely to Cai in the fading light—his haughty features softened, the breeze blowing his hair to kestrel’s-wing feathers across his brow. “But it will get better?”

Cai couldn’t deceive him. He could hold his peace, though. He buried his hands in the heavy, warm hair, kissed the sculpted profile where the setting sun was limning it in gold.

Fen shuddered deeply and moved to lie over him, bearing his weight on his arms. “Tell me the truth,” he growled. “I’ll take your silence for your answer otherwise.”

“Don’t. Just touch me. I have been hungry for you.”

“And I for you. I have starved. Why did we do it?”

“We thought we had our duty.”

“Yes. But I missed weeks of you, months of…”

Months of whatever I have left.
Cai captured Fen’s mouth before the words could come. “Never again,” he whispered, between one fervid kiss and the next. “My only duty is to you.”

“And mine to you.”

Solstice to solstice, hand to hand…
Their rough interchange called into Cai’s head the words of the vow, the chant Danan had begun for them and then stopped when she caught sight of their futures. She had been right—Fen hadn’t had a year and a day to give, and now neither did Cai. And yet here they were. He wrapped his arms round Fen’s shoulders, and something tugged at his wrist, restricting him. “Fen, I’ve still got… Look. Gleipnir.”

“Bury it. Chuck it in the sea. It took me away from you.”

“And brought you back. Give me your hand, love.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t want…”

“No. To finish what Danan started.”

Fen caught his breath. Carefully he unwound the relic from around Cai’s arm. “The handfasting?”

“Yes. I know the words.”

“Then say them.” Fen wrapped the ribbon tight round their joined wrists—awkward, and not in the intricate pattern Danan had begun, but it was tight and hot and it would do.

“It feels like using up the last of the magic in it.”

“If it’s so, then you can only use it once. Not like Danan’s ribbon—not just for a year and a day.”

“I would never take your freedom, Fen.”

“You
are
my freedom. Bind us. Bind the wolf.”

Cai swallowed. “Solstice to solstice, hand to hand, from blood-mother earth to the heart of man…” He couldn’t go on. Instead he hung on to his end of the strand, and Fen grasped the other, tighter and tighter until their veins ached and pounded with the force of pent-up pulse.

Then Fen released them both, gasping. “Can I love you? Can I have you without hurting you?”

“I don’t care if it bloody kills me. Find a way.”

Fen undid Cai’s shirt. He knelt over him, unthreading its leather fastening one loop at a time. With the same deliberation he pulled out its hem from Cai’s belt, and lifted, exposing his belly. Cai hadn’t looked at his own flesh in daylight in months. He didn’t look down now—kept his gaze fixed on Fen’s, reading there all the changes in himself, the message of the wound that hadn’t healed. Fen caressed the scar. Cai arched his back in response, his skin sending wild mixed signals of pleasure and pain to swirl around in his head, raising waves of goose bumps, suddenly lifting his cock. “God. I wasn’t sure I could anymore.”

“That’ll be the last thing to go, if I know my Caius.” Fen’s grin was too bright, and he swiped the heel of one hand across his eyes before returning his attention to his task. “Sit up a little way. I want this shirt off you.”

Cai shivered in the wind, until Fen drew the cloak round him tighter and leaned over him, shielding him, kissing his shoulders. He brushed the flat of his palm over Cai’s groin, teasing and promising before he tore his belt buckle open and pushed his hand down inside.

His grip was perfect. He had learned Cai’s body in the waves of Addy’s island, in the summer hayfields, in these dunes. He knew the tender dip between his balls where a light touch was unbearable but an outright grasp, a squeeze of one finger into the sensitive gap, would wring out cries of pleasure, call up climax even from exhausted flesh.

Cai writhed and clutched at him. “Yes. Like that. No.”

Fen gave a muffled grunt of laughter. “Yes? No?”

“It wasn’t just your hand I missed on all those nights. It was all of you.”

“I want you comfortable on a bunk somewhere before you get…all of me.”

“Not like that. I mean I want you in my arms.”

“I don’t want to put weight on you.”

“Beside me, then. I’m still good for that. Oh, God, Fen, please.”

Fen stretched out at his side. Cai drew him in so that they were sharing the warmth of the beautiful cloak. He undid the wolf’s-head belt, and Fen’s fingers tangled with his in the urgent undoing of his leggings. He gasped with impatience—his Viking was girded for battle, another of those cunningly worked bronze cock-pieces shielding his manhood, stitched into his subligaculum. “That can’t help you now.”

“Help me? It’s strangling me. Help me get it off.”

Between them they unwound him. Cai sobbed in relief as at last the garment was out of the way and Fen shoved his hips forwards, his hand on Cai’s backside holding him still to receive the long, shuddering stroke. Held and braced like this, Cai could push back. He groaned beneath the next thrust and the next, an anvil where the white-hot fetters of the wolf were being forged, and then he hurled himself into the fire, all pain and injury and shadowing death forgotten.

Fen clutched him close. Their mouths met roughly, muffling howls of climax. Sand shifted under them, receiving their struggle, cushioning its aftermath as Cai rolled up and onto his lover’s body, hammering out the last of his strength. He fell and Fen caught him, easing him into the endless embrace of the dunes.

“Cai, when did Addy come home?”

Cai stopped brushing sand out of his clothes. There was little point to it anyway—he’d be washing it out of his crevices for weeks. He thought of the weeks, and the washes, perhaps down in the sapphire pools, Fen splashing and complaining of the cold beside him. How many days might be left to him? It didn’t matter, he decided. His lung was tight and aching now. The next fit of coughing might tear him apart and finish it, and he’d never think himself short-changed, not after…

He looked up at Fen, who was standing on the crest that overlooked the plain, holding the two horses. He had just retrieved them. They had wandered off placidly together, united in their good opinion of the turf at the foot of the dunes. The plain was now deserted. Had Broc and Sigurd too found peace for the sake of good land?

His passion-fogged brain cleared a little. “Addy? He didn’t—not that I know.”

“Look.”

Cai stumbled up to join him. Fen’s arm closed tight round his waist. He pointed off into the dusk. “There. Down by the islets, the place where you said the first monks from Hibernia settled. Near the green mounds.”

Cai leaned on him to look. The night was falling fast, the light shifting before his eyes could adjust. He’d never really noticed that the ancient beehive cells were surrounded by mounds, but they were. In the spring they were covered with every scented and dancing shoreline flower you could imagine—celandine, harebells and yarrow, sea pinks and thyme, snowy drifts of scurvy grass. It must always have been such a beautiful place, its sanctity held, deep and potent, in its very rocks. And yes—down by the worn wooden cross, a frail but vigorous figure in a plain brown cassock. “I can see him. I didn’t hear anything about him coming home—he’s still the bishop of Hexham.”

Fen broke into laughter. “Perhaps they threw him out. He’s got a girl with him.”

The girl was leading Addy by the hand. The old man was following her serenely. The sun dipped down between two bands of cloud and threw one final bright lance across Fara and the sea. Cai’s distance vision was no match for Fen’s, but suddenly the whole scene crystallised. She was wearing a green robe. Her hair blazed around her like an aura, and in this light Cai couldn’t tell if it was fair or…

Fair or white. “Fen, that’s Danan.”

“What—your old salamander from the fire?”

Salamander, witch, hare. Traveller by unknown tunnels beneath the sea and currents of air in the night. “She’s wearing all her jewellery. She made me trade for it over the years, but she never put it on, just hid it like a dragon in a cave. Do you see her earrings?”

“Yes, but…”

“Those are coral flowers in Roman gold.”

“It’s her daughter, then. Her granddaughter.”

She doesn’t have one, as far as I know. But the lives of our fellow souls are strange to us, most of them hidden like a dragon’s gold, and perhaps Fen is right.
Cai leaned his brow on Fen’s shoulder, and shuddered in pleasure as the grip around him tightened. “What is she doing with Addy?”

“I don’t know, but he seems pleased about it. Look, they’ve seen us.”

The girl raised her free hand. It was gleaming from wrist to elbow with Danan’s horde of bracelets, and her smile was just as bright. Addy’s too, when he turned and waved to them. They were standing at the foot of the largest green mound. Slowly, as if in a dream, Cai lifted his hand and waved back.

“Cai, look at all the seals.”

“Seals? Where?”

“All over the rocks there. I thought they
were
the rocks. Is it a haul-out time?”

“No. The tide’s wrong. God—listen to them.”

The seals began to sing. Hundreds of them—grey, mottled, inky-wet black, from smallest pups to mountainous grand-dams—were congregated on the rocks of Fara. They tipped up their sleek heads. The noise that rose up should have been a raucous clatter, huffing and barking, echoing off the cliffs. Instead it took flight on the wind and whirled up to fill the dusk from sea to zenith like a mermaid’s song of worship to the sky. And when Cai looked back to find Danan and Addy, they were gone.