Daughter of Fire (18 page)

“He could not have known precisely where and when the attack would come. You sent the falcon, you saved my life. Why would you do such a thing?”

What could she possibly tell him? That it was for the same reason she knew she must accompany him to the Norman encampment that day at Amesbury? That she had seen a powerful vision of a magnificent creature born in fire and blood—the very same creature that he carried upon his shield? And knew that her fate was linked with his?

How could she possibly explain the gift she possessed to see deep inside others, to sense their emotions, their true hearts, their very thoughts? But that she could not sense those things about him?

And, finally, how could she possibly make this fierce warrior who was her enemy understand the forces that even now gathered around them, in the vision of that unwoven tapestry of what had been, what was, and what was yet to be, when she herself did not understand?

At her movement, brilliant blue light glinted and winked beneath the fiery veil of her hair. She was startled as he brushed back the silken fall, the glow from the brazier reflecting at the magnificent blue crystal that hung from her neck. Those long fingers wrapped about the shimmering crystal as though he would seize it from her.

She held her breath, waiting for his cry of pain at touching the crystal. Only once had someone other than herself ever touched the crystal and not been horribly burned by it—Meg, when she carried it on her pilgrim’s journey, charged with the care of a small babe, the crystal wrapped in a chrysalis of spun silver.

Meg had woven a silver chain from the threads of the chrysalis and when Vivian was but two years old, had placed the chain with the blue crystal about her neck without a single mark upon the old woman’s hand. Once it had been given to her, Meg refused to touch the crystal again.

“I must not,” she had explained when Vivian asked her the reason those many years later. Only once was it possible for me to touch the crystal, and that in the giving of it to you. If I were to touch it now, I would be burned, as would anyone else who attempted to remove it. That is the protection of the crystal.”

But now there was another who had touched the gleaming stone and remained unscathed as he cradled it in the palm of his hand.

Rorke had seen such rare blue stones in the Eastern lands, but never of the size or unusual cut of this one. It was magnificent, a deep blue oval sapphire polished perfectly smooth on the outside, with the illusion that one could see through it. But as he turned the sapphire it caught the light from a nearby brazier as it had when hanging about her neck and he realized that it was not perfectly clear. There were myriad patterns in the heart of the stone. The patterns were no haphazard formations of nature as the sapphire was formed by fire, but spirals of precise design, as if some highly skilled craftsman had cut it just so.

“It is a fine rare crystal,” he said, his voice low, as he speculated how a simple Saxon maid who wore peasant’s clothes might come by such a gem. “It is of the same blue as your eyes, and seems to hold the fire within, the way your eyes seem possessed of fire.”

It took no gift of inner sight to know the question that turned in those cunning, quicksilver thoughts. She saw it in his eyes.

“It was a gift,” she said hastily, her fingers closing over his in an effort to retrieve the stone. But his fingers were not easily pried from about the gleaming blue orb.

“A fine gift of costly value. You must have held a special place in the heart of the one who gave it.”

Knowing he would not be satisfied until he had an answer, she hastily explained. “It was a gift from my father. It was all that he could give me before...”

“Before...?”

“Before he was forced to send me away. It is all I have of him. It is called the Eye of the Dragon.” Her fingers slipped between his, trying to loosen them. Instead, as their fingers entwined about the sapphire, she felt the sudden glow of warmth from the heart of the crystal, a languid heat that seemed to draw their hands together with a stunning, sensual warmth as if it bound their hands together around the crystal.

Ten

R
orke reluctantly relinquished the crystal, and Vivian tucked it into the bodice of her gown.

“The Eye of the Dragon,” Rorke mused. “Do you believe in dragons, Vivian of Amesbury?”

She shrugged her shoulders in a dismissive gesture as she bent to her task of bandaging the wound at his side.

“There are those who believe in them. It is said that a dragon guards the Holy Grail in a deep cavern far to the north.”

“Ah, legends,” he commented dryly. As many countries as he’d traveled at William’s side, there were a like number of legends about the cup of Christ. “No doubt, then, you also know the legend of Excalibur.”

“The sword of King Arthur,” she commented without looking up. “According to legend it possessed extraordinary powers.”

“Aye,” he replied thoughtfully. “The Sorcerer’s sword set in stone and the only one capable of removing it was the boy who became king. ’Tis also said that the handle was set with a magnificent blue stone.”

“Legends oft take on magical qualities in the telling,” she commented.

He grunted a painful response as she pressed a cloth against the wound. She knew he still watched her; she could feel the scrutiny of that gray gaze. From the corner of her eye she saw him reach once more for the goblet and raise it to his lips.

“What do you believe?” she asked.

“I believe in what I can see and hold with my own hand. A warrior’s sword is his own true strength, not some mythical sword from legend.”

Still he watched her. Untying the leather bundle, she spread it upon the table and searched among the powders and herbs until she found the ones she wanted.

White willow leaves and shavings of bark were tossed into the second basin of steaming water to bathe the wound against infection, horsetail and ground yarrow for a poultice.

“No magical healer’s touch to close the wound?” he asked, watching every move she made.

“It will heal well enough with sufficient care, and healing powders there will be no fever. I have taken precautions against infection.”

“I am indebted to your unique skills,” he said, the words filled with myriad meanings. “You must explain it to me, for I have a curiosity of such things.”

“White willow protects against festering,” she explained while she worked. “Crushed horsetail will stop the bleeding.”

He winced. “Hopefully you didn’t pluck it from the tail of my warhorse. He might heartily protest.”

Her mouth quivered at the corners. She couldn’t resist smiling, “Not your horse, milord. I took it from Vachel’s.”

Those cool gray eyes glinted with amusement, stunning her in the way it transformed his features as she applied a portion of the salve to the poultice, another portion directly onto the wound. Then she pressed the poultice against the wound, holding it in place with a length of linen that she wrapped about his waist.

His skin leapt at her touch. The muscles at his belly, above the leather breeches, flattened and went hard as stone as he sucked in his breath. As she bent to pass the linen from one hand to the other at his back, her hair brushed his shoulder and he ceased to breathe at all.

“Why did you send the falcon?” he asked, when he could finally reclaim his breath. Her hands went suddenly still at the task of tying off the bandage.

Fear—vicious weapon of the unknown—knifed through her. She had never felt it before. Before, all things were known to her. She saw them in her visions and dreams, sensed them with a single touch that stripped away all pretense and disguise, and exposed a person to her completely. But this man was unknown to her. She could sense nothing about his inner being.

She feared him—feared what she could not see, feared the other senses that she was forced to rely on—feared these unknown feelings that he stirred within her.

She refused to look at him, even though the question demanded it. Instead, she hurriedly tied off the bandage so that she could be gone. But her fingers, always certain and skilled at their task, fumbled over themselves as if they mocked her.

The flaming cascade of her hair swept forward at her shoulder, but failed to completely conceal her features—that small, stubborn chin, the full curve of her mouth, the small indentation centered above her upper lip, the slender arch of her nose, the high angle of cheekbones, and those magnificent blue eyes that were like the heart of a flame.

His fingers flexed and then fisted with the desire to run his hands through that torrent of fiery hair. He wanted to see again the look of stunned surprise in those flame blue eyes as he had that morning on the heath when he found her among the Saxon dead, her expression wild, tumultuous, uncertain, rather than this carefully controlled coolness she cloaked herself in.

He longed to feel again the warm satin of her skin. Not with the touch of a healer but the touch of the woman that hid inside. And with a raw, rare hunger he ached to taste the fullness of her mouth.

She felt his warrior’s hand in her hair and the gentle but insistent strength that drew her head back and forced her gaze to meet his.

His features were hard, forbidding, all the more so for the scar that etched his cheek from the corner of his eye to the angle of that bearded jaw, and by myriad other scars wrought by time in the lines at the corners of his mouth and between those dark drawn brows.

Then the taut lines eased about his mouth, the wintry coldness shifted in those gray eyes, and they took on a much darker shade of some new storm that gathered, stunning her with the transformation to something she sensed was far more dangerous.

His warrior’s hand closed over the thickness of hair that hung loose at the nape of her neck. He twisted it into a silken rope, pulling her to him.

“Jehara.”

The ancient word was low and fierce in his throat. At the same time it whispered on the night wind that sighed against the walls of the tent, and caressed the trembling flames at the candles with unseen hands. His mouth hovered close to hers. His breath, wild and sweet, bathed her.

“Sorceress, Tarek has called you.”

Trapped between his legs, imprisoned by his hand in her hair, unable to escape, a fear greater than any she had ever known tore through Vivian. The inner sight that always guided her had now abandoned her, leaving her naked, exposed, completely vulnerable for the first time in her life.

“Touching you is like touching the sun.”

Her skin trembled as his other hand came up to cup her face, callused fingers fanning across her cheek, lightly grazing her skin with a rough tenderness that was stunning and made her long for more.

“The taste of you...” The tip of his tongue flicked at the curve of her lip, as light as the stroke of a butterfly wing.

“... is like tasting fire.” He groaned, and the words became a shuddered whisper as the fiery heat of his mouth took fierce possession of hers.

Vivian was caught, trapped by the strength of that powerful hand clasped in her hair. There was no opportunity for escape, nor any hope of it. There was only the warrior strength of his kiss scattering the precious herbs from her stunned fingertips, as he scattered the thoughts from her head and then invaded her senses. Terrified, she tried to push him away.

He tasted of the wind, cold steel, and sweat, overlaid with the dusky sweetness of warm wine laced with exotic spices, discovered in an explosion of intoxicating heat as his mouth opened to hers.

She tasted of wild heat, lost, ancient dreams, and an unexpected innocence that knifed through his baser desires to open a breach in the wall of ice around his heart.

He felt the heat of her hands at his bare shoulders, the insistent pressure as she attempted to end the kiss, the bite of her fingertips like the frantic grasp of a young falcon’s talons uncertain whether to fly or hold on.

From beyond the tent he heard an insistent voice. Then the tent flap was suddenly thrown back.

 “Forgive me, milord.” His squire hastily mumbled an apology. “I tried to stop her.”

Abruptly the kiss ended and Vivian was scrambling frantically as a startled falcon to pull away. Rorke experienced an intense ache of loss equaled only by the cold fury of the words that immediately leapt to his tongue at the intrusion.

He snarled an oath. “I gave orders I was not to be disturbed!”

“I’d heard you’d returned, milord.” Judith de Marque’s silken voice permeated the tent as she stepped past his squire, then halted at the sight of the flame-haired girl who knelt between Rorke FitzWarren’s legs.

Stunned, bewildered, humiliated, and terrified at what she should not, must not, feel, Vivian struggled to free herself. But that powerful hand, twisted with gentle restraint in her hair, held her as surely as a falcon tethered by leather jesses to its master’s wrist.

Her eyes were almost iridescent as they reflected the flames from a nearby brazier. There was such agony of pleading in those eyes that Rorke loosened his fingers, the silken ribbons of her hair slipping through his hand like liquid fire.

“Stay,” he commanded, at that moment loathing Judith de Marque with an intensity he would not have believed possible. But like the falcon that sought the sky, Vivian rose and hastily gathered her herbs and powders.

“Nay, milord,” she whispered, “There are others who may need my care.” And she fled the tent. Suddenly, it seemed colder, the shadows deeper, as if she had taken the light with her.

“You are amused by the Saxon slave,” Judith commented as she poured warm wine from the into a flagon. She brought it to the table where he sat flexing his left arm against the stiffness that had set in from blows he’d taken. Standing between his spread legs, she refilled his goblet.

“Spoils of war,” she commented, pouring slowly, so that the wine sighed into the cup with a faint murmuring sound, until the deep burgundy color edged the rim, its pungent, faintly spicy fragrance drifting upward between them.

“And yet, you hesitate to take what you could easily take by right of conquest.”