Conqueror (15 page)

“My father was in the Holy Lands, too, when the Holy City fell.”

She smiled bitterly. “So, you, too, think war a glorious thing. Whereas they are an awful business, and I care for them naught.”

“Happens you might care if they were to take your home from you,” he said coldly.

“As Marcus tried, you mean? Trust in me, Pagan, I need no war to hoist men’s ambitions on me or mine. That is a burden women bear in the most peaceful of times.”

He put his palms, outstretched, over the glowing coals. “And yet, here you are, and not with fitzMiles.” He swung away from the fire and crossed the room, bringing a jug of wine with him. Pouring it into two mugs set on a narrow table under the window, he came to the side of the bed and extended one. “One for the ladies, I suppose.”

She laughed, feeling pleased at his little toast. It must have been an errant mood that had poked at him these last few minutes, like brambleweed. She relaxed back into the pillows and took the proffered drink. “One for rogue knights and frightened women, more’s the like. We put up a good fight, did we not, you and I?”

“Aye,” he said, dropping onto a bench near the wall. “Never have I seen a shoe propelled with such ferocity before, and hope never to again.”

She laughed and fingered the rim of the mug. “At least not if ’tis coming at
you
.”

“Indeed. I shall watch closely to see that your slippers are securely attached to your feet ere I anger you ever again.”

She lifted the cup. “My thanks.”

“I want you to stop thanking me.”

“That was the last. I promise.”

He stretched out his boots and wrapped his cloak around his shoulders. In the shadows his face was mysterious, dark hollows under his cheekbones, his eyes hooded and deep. The cloak was drawn over his long, taut body, his knee-high boots crossed at the ankles.

Gwyn drank deeply, then lowered the mug and considered it suspiciously. “I ought to drink a more watered wine than this.”

He lifted his brows.

“I became rather…addled when I drank your posset earlier.”

He smiled, a small mark of amusement that seemed to creep out despite his best intentions. And still it was heart-stopping in its sensuality. “That was no posset, mistress, and you’ve nothing to fear from this potion.”

She sipped again. “’Tis good.”

It was quiet for a few moments, and she peered beneath her lashes at his shadowed figure. Even motionless he filled the room.

He wore simple grey braies and a loose-fitting chainse without belt. The collar opened in a V, exposing a chest dusted with dark hairs and plated with muscle. The strong column of his neck descended to wide shoulders and a rock-hewn body, taut with sinew that came only from long years of wielding a sword and wearing heavy knightly attire. She was unable to drop her eyes further, but knew the rest of him would pulsate with the same presence. Even small movements, such as picking up a strand of her hair and bringing it to his lips, as he had last night, revealed sliding muscles and the easy grace of a well-honed predator.

Her heart started a small thundering. Alchemy. The rest of the world receded and there was only Pagan’s dark eyes and this feeling in her blood. She looked away but the feeling still hummed through her body from head to toe, long and flat and sweeping.

Home was a long way away, and she was glad.

He was watching her. In the dimness she could not tell what flickered in his eyes as she met his gaze again, but a quivering cord of heat began to unravel through her body.

“And what of you, Pagan? What are
you
doing here?”

“Sitting with you.”

She smiled. “I mean at this inn.”

“Sitting with you.”

She drew a deep breath and let it out. “What were you doing on the highway last night, alone, at such an hour?”

“You would rather I had been with someone?”

She laughed. “No, I think not. So.” She eyed him with a considering look. “You will not answer me. You are used to wielding power. Only those who are can sidestep questions with such ease. And, my compliments,” she added, nodding her head, “for you do so as deftly as you wield a sword.”

“Ask away, mistress.”

She paused, quite certain that whatever he had been doing on the king’s highway, or at Hipping’s lodge, not only had nothing to do with her, it would be something not open for discussion. There was no point in fishing for information. “How came you to carry a flask of drink with you?”

His brows arched halfway up his forehead. “
That’s
your question?”

“I know I will get nothing else from you, and at the moment, I find it does not matter in the least.”

She looked around the room. Outside the storm was raging. Every so often a monstrous gust of wind broke free and stormed the building, reducing the walls to a quivering mass of woven reeds and crumbling stone. Even inside the air was damp, but with the shutters closed, the fire burning, and Pagan watching her, she was warm and comfortable. “So what I want to know is why you would carry around a flask of the very drink that could calm a panicked woman.”

The lines around his mouth deepened into a grin. “It soothes men too, Raven.”

“See?” she exhaled, throwing up her free hand in mock exasperation. “I will get nothing but what you wish to share, so I will ask nothing more.”

He picked up the jug of wine. When he cocked a brow in mute question, she replied by extending her empty cup.

He leaned forward and tipped the flagon forward, sloshing wine in. She nodded her thanks and retreated to the pillows. Outside the storm kicked and screamed, throwing itself against the stone walls, trying to get in.

“Highways or halls, mistress,” he murmured in his deep, masculine rumble, “there are always things to be seen and heard, when one is watchful and listening.”

She eyed him sideways. So, he was answering. Of a sort. “And is that what you were doing? Watching and listening?”

“A bit.”

“In times like these—”

“In times like these,” he said, cutting her off, “pretty ladies shouldn’t ride out on highways alone. They might meet dangerous men.”

She slipped back into the warmth of the furs. “You have already pointed out you are not one.”

He reached out again, this time retrieving a chunk of bread from the wooden platter set on the window ledge. Popping the bread in his mouth, he chewed, his gaze held on her. A sort of grimness had descended on him again.

“Not to you,” he finally said.

“Lucky me.”

“I’ll say,” was his dry rejoinder.

“Then to whom?”

He laughed and shook his head. “You’re unstoppable.”

She set the cup of wine on the furs covering her knees and tried to balance it. “Most find it simpler to surrender.”

“I am not most.”

The cup tipped over and she grabbed it just in time. No, she decided, sliding her eyes surreptitiously along his body, he was not ‘most,’ nor ‘many,’ nor anything but ‘one.’ Something about him pulsed with passion and verve and it was seeping into her bones, making her life sit like a yawning chasm of despair beneath. She had a sudden flash of insight, seeing her life before and after him as it always had been, aching and dry, like a week-old fish.

A streak of white light illuminated the room, then thunder descended in a mighty, crashing boom. Gwyn jumped half out of bed. Strange eerie moans keened their laments around the eaves of the building. A blast of furious wind set its shoulder to the side of the structure and pushed. The ends of her hair lifted in a ghostly breath of damp air that surged through the cracks in the walls. The shutters lurched and creaked, ballooning out in a thin wooden bubble, then sucking in, as if some giant god were blowing full a pig’s bladder for children’s play. Then, with a mighty crash, the shutters flung wide and crashed against the walls. She jumped fully and clutched the covers to her chest.

“Rest easy,” came Pagan’s low, steady voice.

He moved through the room like a strange dancer, hidden in darkness, then appearing in jerky moves as flashes of lightning split the sky. After each flash of blinding light came another detonation of thunder; the storm had settled in over the abandoned inn.

Winds whipped at Pagan’s chainse as he crossed the room, moulding it to his body. When he reached the window, he spent half a moment staring out. No oil parchment covered the opening; only the slatted wooden covering protected the inhabitants. Gwyn watched as lightning lit up the planes of his face, her mind spinning. Good Lord, she was not who she’d thought herself to be. All she wanted was for him to kiss her again.

“I used to ride in such storms,” she announced, staring at his back.

He angled his chin to the side, giving her his profile. “Ride? In a storm like this?”

She smiled. “Perhaps not quite like this. And aye, I rode. My horse. Windstalker.”

“A goodly name,” he replied, and pulled the shutters closed. With a flick of his wrist, he lowered the small iron rung, locking them in place. Casting his enigmatic eyes over the dark humps scattered throughout the room, he reached for a hemp towel slung over the bench and hooked it over the edges of the window. It fell down as extra covering, lifting and falling as winds buffeted the walls.

“You’ve a good horse too,” she said. “Noir.”

“The best,” he agreed quietly. “I had another, though, when I was young.”

“The ones when we were young are always the best.” She pushed herself straight against the pillows. “I got Wind when I was eight. Not all grown, mind you, but a foal, mine to raise. Papa said I was too young, but Mamma convinced him. She understood how I felt. She always underst—” She stopped short and swallowed. “I spent every moment with Wind. I remember nothing else of that year or the next—only Wind.”

“Mine was Rebel.”

She smiled encouragingly. “Your horse.”

He nodded, the tension in his jawline receding somewhat. “There was little else for me, either, for a time.”

She laughed, nodding, understanding. “Wind is in his prime. Twelve years old and in the stables.” When that earned a smile from him, she returned the gesture, pleased to have made the grimness recede. “I ride him every chance I get. He is my best companion. And you, do you still ride your Rebel?”

A spasm of something passed over his face. “He died before he reached a year. In a fire. The stables burned.”

Her face dropped. “I am sorry. When?”

“I was eight.”

“Eight,” she echoed, falling silent. A grievous loss, or so it seemed. That one so steeped in strength and power could feel the loss of a treasured horse so deeply, after all these years, said much about him. About what she could trust in him.

How was it, she wondered, that after one night, one revealing conversation, she knew more about this man than she’d known about her brother or her father or any of her friends in all their years together?

“I will sorely miss Wind when he is gone,” she said quietly. “Such things cannot be mended.”

“No, they cannot,” he agreed, his voice low-pitched and rough as wood smoke.

She tucked her lower lip between her teeth and pondered the covers. A minute passed, then another. It was a deep, steady silence, like the man, and she did not feel the need to fill it with idle chatter.

Then he leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs. His grey eyes seemed to burn through the darkness, and he said in a soft, rough voice, “Tell me something else, Raven.”

“What?”

“Tell me something else of your home. I have been gone from mine so long, it would be good to hear of one that is loved.”

His face was barely visible in the light from the brazier. Through the hemp towel over the window, only muted flashes of light seeped through the coarse weave, and she could see only the cup balanced between the fingertips of his hands, his dark head bent and watching her.

He was flaming, barely restrained, and the feeling of destiny burned down to her toes: things would happen with this man. He was riding the churning tide of a Fate he himself was carving, like an ancient Grecian god. His very being breathed ruthless, reckless chance.

He filled the Ache
.

A slow, thick wave of certainty flowed over her. She sat up in the bed and wiped hair away from her face. “I once talked my father’s scribe into walking me a goodly length of Hadrian’s Wall. It was a long trek, and we were tired when we were done.”

A faint smile lifted his lips. “Along the Scottish border. You are a persuasive woman.”

“Girl. I was ten.”

He smiled more broadly and lifted his cup in a toast.

“Papa was very angry when I returned.”

“No doubt. Which was?”

“Three days later.”

He started laughing. It was low, barely audible beneath the thunder and lashing rain, but it was there, rumbling under the storm and seeping into her blood.

If making him laugh brought her such deep-rooted pleasure, what would it be like to make him love?

She almost fell out of bed at the thought.

“What other borders have you walked, Raven, when your heart feels earthbound?”

Her head fell back on the cushions, tears pressing hungrily against her nose. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand.
No one
understood.

“Talk to me, Raven.”

And so she did. She talked because the night was dark and she didn’t know where she was. She talked because she needed a reprieve, however brief and however gained, from the yawning Ache, and in this man was the only place she’d ever found it, mad as that was.

She talked because he needed her to, and to succor
his
ache was a taste she’d never sipped on before.

And these storm-tossed revelations were nothing like what she’d told him before, when they’d ridden in the woods. Those things had told something of her, but they swam on the surface of her life, bobbing on daily events, the things that could have mattered, but did not.

The things she told him in the storm-veiled darkness were sunk so deep inside she felt like she was mining her very soul.

She told him about Windstalker and their midnight rides. About how she used to walk the ramparts in thunderstorms when everyone else was abed. About how she struggled alone against the force of the loneliness and sometimes thought herself losing. She talked about the difficulty of running her castle, of being hen-mother and war-lord, of how she’d stared into the abyss of her life and batted her eyes, how she almost succumbed to despair when her father had died.