Dreamspell (31 page)

“I want Arthur,” John said.

“When he is finished resting, I will take you to him.” Hopefully, come the morrow the boy would forget the promise. “But I am here, and I have missed you, boy.” Only after he said it did Fulke realize it was true. Though he’d had little to do with his nephews while at Brynwood, their presence—uncertain smiles and muted laughter—had rooted a place within him.

Perhaps John sensed it, for he released Lady Lark’s skirt, took a tentative step forward, and barreled into his uncle’s chest.

Fulke gathered the boy to him. The small, warm body felt strangely agreeable and temporarily displaced the woman he had believed would share his life. Nevermore. “We are going home on the morrow. Would you like that?”

John nodded.

“Good. Now ‘tis time you slept.” Fulke scooped him up and gestured for Lady Lark to precede him. Telling himself he and the lady would talk once the boys were at rest, Fulke followed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“I
t can happen here, too,” Mac murmured, the words so embittered they seemed to scorch the air.

Kennedy looked from Sir Leonel who warmed himself before the fire some thirty feet away to the man whose head was in her lap. Though his hand convulsed on his bandaged thigh—made it obvious as to what he referred—she said, “You’re awake.”

“And yet dead.”

She shifted against the tree at her back. “Mac, listen to me—”

“Where are John and Harold?”

“In the tent with Fulke and Lady Lark.”

His fingers on his thigh clawed into a fist. “I failed them.”

“Fulke won’t harm them.”

“Won’t he?” His slit eyes pierced her. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

Even now. She eyed Mac’s injury that she had cleaned and dressed with strips torn from her chemise. “How does it feel?”

He continued to scrutinize her, but finally levered onto an elbow and regarded his leg. “I’ll lose it. Just like before.”

Though the bleeding had eased considerably, he was right. Without proper medical attention he
would
lose it, perhaps even his life. His pain slid like a knife between her shoulder blades and made her long to hug him.

“Wynland!” Mac burst. “That devil’s spawn!”

The two knights who stood watch over the roped pen between the trees tensed as if expecting Mac to leap to his feet and rush them.

Kennedy laid a hand on Mac’s arm and urged him to lie back.

He wrested free and struggled to sitting. “Don’t you understand?”

She glanced at the knights and lowered her voice in hopes Mac would do the same. “I do.”

His upper lip curled. “You don’t believe, do you? You still think it’s only a dream.”

The irony of it was that, as he said, she didn’t believe, and yet she had once more allowed it to become real.

“You’re wrong, Ken. It’s everything I told you it was. And more.”

The knights were listening, their interest punctuating the night like question marks. “Please, lower your voice, Mac.”

He laughed. “You’re worried about them? If it’s only a dream, why concern yourself?”

He was right. It was becoming harder and harder to distinguish dream from reality. But then, she didn’t want to. Despite her predicament, despite Fulke turning from her, there was no place else she longed to be. Here there was hope—and love, even if not returned.

“What I don’t understand is why you did it,” Mac said. “If you don’t believe, why are you here?”

“I’m my own subject.”

His jaw slackened. “Your research. Why you? What about your other subjects?”

“The university closed me down.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I never could leave anything unfinished.”

“They shut you down because of me?”

“It had just as much, if not more, to do with my illness. I was having a hard time—” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

Mac shifted around to face her, winced, and gripped his thigh. “How many times have you been here?”

“Please, Mac, lie back.”

“How many times?”

The knights were taking it in, superstition gaining momentum. She leaned near Mac. “I’ve had the
dream
three times.”

His mouth tightened, but when he spoke his voice was pitched low. “Did you read the book?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.” She knew where he was headed, but how to cut him off?

“When did you read it?”

“Before I completed the first cycle of sleep deprivation.”

Mac scooted nearer, the effort making him groan.

“You’ll start it bleeding again.” Kennedy looked to his fingers splayed over his injury. It was then she noticed something was missing. Though there was only moonlight and scattered torches, the tattoo that had wound the back of his hand for as long as she had known him was gone. “What happened to your tattoo?”

“Gone the same as your tumor, the same as any scar you may have had.”

Reminded of her discovery before the mirror in Lady Jaspar’s chamber, Kennedy fingered the smooth skin at the outside corner of her eye. Though the scar had been small, she’d had it since childhood. But not in the fourteenth century.

“It’s like starting over. Being reborn. It’s the reason we’re here, Ken. Have you read the book since your first journey?”

“No. I let my mother borrow it, though she said. . .”

“What?”

She rolled her eyes. “This is ridiculous.”

“It isn’t. The book’s the key. It’s all there.”

“Mac—”

“It changed, didn’t it? From the time I showed you the passages at the lab to when you read it through?”

“I. . .just remembered it differently, but I’m not exactly right in the head, you know.”

His gaze slid to her forehead, concern momentarily replacing fervor. “It’s really bad?”

Grateful that the intense headaches and her failing motor control were, for the moment, reduced to memories, she forced a smile. “I may not be awakening again.”

“Good. Though it’s over for me, you still have a chance to make a new life here.”

She longed to point out that, as it stood with Fulke, her chance at a new life was highly improbable, but the debate would only lead back down the path of believing something that existed only in her mind. Of course, at this point, what could it hurt?

“Tell me what you read.”

Kennedy told him all she remembered, from Sir Arthur and the boys’ flight from Brynwood Spire, to the two weeks spent searching him out.

“Everything’s changed,” Mac said.

“Only because I’ve lost my marbles.”

He gripped her arm. “Take off your doctor’s hat, and let yourself believe.”

“Come on, Mac. I’m not that naïve graduate student you tortured with pranks and gags. This is a dream, though I admit it’s the most amazing one I’ve ever had.”

“Wrong.”

She was tired of arguing. “Do you want to hear the rest of it?”

“Continue.”

Mac was silent throughout the telling of the confrontation at Farfallow—until she told of his death at Fulke’s hands.

“It was as he should have done,” he rumbled. “Instead, he left me like this.”

Because, dream or not, Kennedy had begged. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” He chuckled, a sound so void it was frightening. “Ironic, isn’t it? I came here to be whole again and Wynland sends me straight back to hell.”

Kennedy didn’t know what possessed her to say what she did next. “You’re not going to lose your leg. I’ll talk to Fulke—get you a doctor.”

His eyebrows shot up. “If you held any sway over him, you would be with him. I don’t know what happened between you two, but you’re now as much his enemy as I am.”

Maybe more.

“Besides, one of the drawbacks of the fourteenth century is that there’s no quality healthcare. Leeching is the cure-all.”

Bloodsucking worms. . .

“What about your mother, Ken? What did she read?”

“She said the author referenced a woman who posed as Lady Lark for a short time.”

“You? You’re the impostor?”

Then he had heard about her charade. “Yours truly. Well, in this dream, that is.” Mustn’t forget that. “It’s all a misunderstanding.”

“How’s that?”

She told him of awakening at the massacre, of Fulke chasing her down and assuming she was Lady Lark. “Who was I to argue? As I had fallen asleep thinking about her, it followed I had dreamed myself into her.” She put her head to the side. “Who told you there was an impostor?”

“Lady Lark.”

“How did she know?”

Mac shook his head. “Later. What else did your mother read?”

“That the impostor suddenly disappeared—”

“That would be when you awakened. Just like I disappeared when I came out of the coma.”

It made sense. “I suppose—” Kennedy caught her breath, but before she could separate fact from fiction, Mac pulled her back in.

“How did the story end?”

“My mother looked ahead and read that Wynland was hanged for the deaths of his nephews.”

“Truly?”

“Yes.”

He dragged a hand down his face. “Then my boys will yet die.”

He said it with such anguish it was as if he spoke of his own sons. But that was it, wasn’t it? Though Kennedy couldn’t remember the ages of Mac’s sons when his wife ran off with them shortly after his return from the Gulf, they had been young. In this, the fourteenth century, Mac had set out to reclaim what he had lost. The trouble was, John and Harold didn’t belong to him.

“I have to stop Wynland!” He tried to rise. “Somehow—”

“He’s not the one, Mac.” She gripped his arm and glanced at the knights. They would fall on Mac in an instant. “Fulke won’t harm them—didn’t harm them. I promise you.”

“You’re a fool, Ken. That greedy knave killed his brother and now—”

“No.” She rose to her knees. “Cardell killed the earl. I was there when it was revealed.”

For a moment she feared Mac would spurn her, but confusion came to roost. “I was certain ‘twas Wynland.”

“He’s been wronged.” And, if possible, she would prove that neither did he have anything to do with the deaths of his nephews. “Now tell me, how did Lady Lark know I was posing as her?”

“She saw you when her captor brought her from her prison to identify you.”

“But I never saw—”

“Of course not, as was intended.”

A chill crept Kennedy’s spine. In Fulke’s search for his nephews, they had paused briefly at several castles and numerous villages, so it could be any of them. But it was at Castle Cirque they had lingered, there she had sensed someone watching her while Sir Malcolm tailed her through the outer bailey. “Where was she imprisoned?”

As if shot with sudden pain, Mac grunted and dug the heel of his hand into his thigh. “At a castle. Which one, she doesn’t know. By some miracle, she knocked her captor unconscious and escaped. She ran and never looked back.”

“What did her captor look like?”

“He—or she—never showed his face, and Lady Lark was too fearful he might regain consciousness to look beneath his hood after felling him.”

It was the “or she” that captured Kennedy. Lady Jaspar? The woman had been taken aback when Fulke introduced Kennedy as Lady Lark.

“What is it, Ken?”

“Have you heard of Lady Jaspar?”

“Her name is familiar. I may have heard it mentioned at court.”

“She might be the one—at least, the one who arranged the attack on Lady Lark.”

A light shone through his pain. “Tell me all of it. From the moment you first arrived.”

“If you lie back.”

The ultimatum didn’t sit well with him, but he settled his head in her lap.

She leaned over him. “It begins with a wyvern.”

“T
hen Sir Arthur is not dead?”

Fulke met Lady Lark’s gold-flecked gaze. “Only injured.”

“For that, I thank you,” she said, stiffly.

Another who liked the miscreant. Fulke glanced at John and Harold where they slept on the pallet that Squire James had stuffed with leaves. “How is it you know Crosley, my lady?”

She began to pace the tent. “I met him at court when he came to petition my. . .the king for wardship of your nephews. Though Edward refused to grant it, I convinced him to send Sir Arthur to Brynwood to champion the boys.” She halted, causing her mantle to swirl about her ankles.

Fulke drove down his resentment. So the king’s leman was responsible for the curse of Crosley. Why had she done it? Had she taken Crosley as a lover and rewarded him thus?

She stepped forward and squinted up at him. “You believe as all believe, Lord Wynland, except those who know the truth. And they are truly few.”

“Of what do you speak?”