Faerie (37 page)

“In Catalonia too.”

“You have been many places.”

She watched his eyes lose their spark of mischief and become sadly regretful. “Aye.”

“It’s why they call you the Peregrine.”

He looked down at the silver plate and said nothing.

“Sometimes I think there is much you do not tell me about yourself.”

“Aye.” He let out a sigh. Then once again he cocked his head to eye her from an odd angle, and he laughed. “Another time, haps,” he said. “Let us have this dream together. It is too good to waste.” He leaned to her and turned her face to meet his kiss, and his fingertips skimmed her cheek. Leonie lost herself in the ripple of sexual delight that ran through her body.

He leaned back again. “Aye, let’s enjoy this dream while we have it.”

They were behaving like giddy, silly lovers. He didn’t love her, she knew. But that was not his fault. Whatever might come, what was wrong with simply enjoying this experience together?

“Do you really think we are in a dream, Philippe? Haps it is your dream, since I have no memories like these.”

“If it’s a dream, where do you suppose we really are while we’re dreaming?”

“I don’t remember falling asleep. Usually I have a sense that I’m having a dream.”

“Then where did the dream begin?” he asked. “Where did we leave the real world?”

“But what if it’s not a dream?”

“How can spring and summer exist at the same time? Where can fruit ripen, yet new blossoms bloom on the vines and trees at the same time?”

He fell silent, she noted, having successfully evaded her probing. With a napkin, he wiped his mouth and set aside the plate.

She, too, was marvelously sated, and sat up on the couch. This place made no sense to her. It was not simply the alien trees or the strange ponies with golden manes, not even this house, which with its transparent servants and pools of water inside the house was the strangest thing of all. It was the way it made them act and feel. All the anger she should have, she couldn’t find. And oddly, his seemed gone too. Instead, they seemed to want to frolic like young colts. And make love like wild hares. But she needed her anger. She needed its shield. She would rather lose all her Faerie powers than fall so dangerously in love with him.

She snickered at her own ridiculous ways. Now she was angry because she couldn’t stay angry?

The ethereal servants reappeared, and with properly downcast eyes removed the plates and remaining feast. They filed through a door, and Leonie watched, fascinated, as the ghostly figures merged into one man who still was no more substantial than any one of them had been.

As they stood on the smooth flagstone terrace, the man bowed again and waited in the manner of a servant who expected them to pass by him into the chamber beyond. Philippe spoke to the figure, which silently bowed once more, making all the previous motions so exactly that Leonie began to think those were somehow the only movements he could make when someone spoke to him.

She shrugged. She’d had worse dreams in her life.

Beyond the door, many candles burned around a room with a large, rectangular pool of clear water. A series of wide steps descended into the water, and tendrils of steamy vapor rose from the surface. If it was meant to be a heated bath, it was the largest one she could imagine. The closest she had ever seen before was
a big wooden tub that might hold two people only if they were avid lovers.

An intriguing idea.

In an adjoining chamber she could see a bed with carved legs and a thick, plump mattress with brightly colored bedding. Through a different door, she thought she saw another pool, and wondered why anyone might need two bathing places. But as she watched, the room changed into a garden terrace with stone benches. She saw flowers form. And bushes in bloom in many colors. Beyond the garden, a small lake transformed, with several low cascades of a small river flowing into it. Such a place of beauty surely could not be found in the wilderness.

Inside, near the steaming pool, more of the strange servants stood by with folded cloths draped over their arms.

Leonie removed her sandals and stuck her toe in the water. “Hot,” she said. “I suppose we are expected to bathe.”

He knelt beside her and dangled his fingers in the steamy pool. “Aye.” He glanced back at her. “Leonie, I want to know. What are you?”

“But you won’t tell me what you are,” she countered.

“I asked first.”

Leonie sucked on her lower lip. She had been waiting for this conversation to come back. Haps the lost anger would return too. “You called me witch. Are you suddenly unsure?”

“I was wrong. But you are not like any woman I have ever known.”

“Didn’t you say to everyone in Castle Bosewood I was a witch?”

“I said it to no one. I told them you had gone missing. They assumed you must be hiding somewhere inside the castle walls.”

“You said it to the king.”

“I did not. He guessed you had escaped again, as you did at Brodin. He also guessed my suspicion and told me it was not
so, but that you came by your talents naturally through your mother.”

Leonie blinked suddenly, staring at him. “What does Rufus know of my mother?”

“It’s what he guesses, not knows, but he is far better at gathering hidden information than most people credit him. And he is very good at fitting pieces together to reach the truth. What are you, Leonie?”

“What are you?”

“You’re evading me. You know I’m no more than a man. You are something else. No ordinary person can do what you can do.”

“Did I not see you walk through solid rock?”

“Why do you insist there was no cave?”

“It’s all very well for you to say I saw no cave, but how can you explain why that demon sorcerer creature couldn’t see it, or see us in it? Yet we could see him outside. Didn’t you hear the ringing of his steel sword and the pommel against the stone?”

“How do you explain being inside a cave if there is no cave?”

“I can’t. And tell me what you did to block that lightning power from the thing’s sword. It left me paralyzed, yet you bounced it back on him like a mirror.”

“It must have been my mail. I am but an ordinary man. But answer me. What are you?”

“You won’t believe me. You don’t believe anything I say unless someone else confirms it.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She let out a harsh huff and folded her arms across her chest as if she might shield herself from the onslaught of his questions. But she supposed there was no greater danger in telling him than there was in not doing it. She huffed again. “My father was Theobald of Bosewood, a Norman.”

In that infuriating superior way he had, he nodded and smiled. “And?”

“My mother was Herzeloyde of the Summer Land.”

“Somerset. I know all that. Tell me the missing pieces.”

“If you so desire, sir knight, but you must be patient enough to hear them. Not Somerset. People assume that because Somerset means ‘summer land.’ She is from the Summer Land, a place humans cannot find unless they are led to it. She is Faerie. Since my father was a mere Norman, I am but a halfling. Beyond that, I know almost nothing.”

His eyebrows could not seem to make up their minds which way to go—one arched high while the other furrowed into half of a frown. A smirk formed on his lips, and amusement widened his dark honey eyes. “Aren’t the Faerie folk wee creatures who play wicked jokes and mend people’s shoes in the night when everyone sleeps?”

Nostrils flaring like an offended horse, Leonie jerked to her feet and turned her back to him. She jerked off the soft wool tunic, tossed it aside and stalked nude to the edge of the pool.

“Leonie, come back here. I am talking to you.”

Sneering as she tossed her head, she glared back at him. “Talk to yourself. You may answer yourself too.”

She crouched, sprang, dived into the pool, and cruised through the silky water until she reached the center. She turned over and floated on her back, the long tendrils of her hair fanning out all around her head as she absorbed the luxury of the enormous heated bath as if she lay on the softest of beds. Tiring of that, she arched and thrust herself backward, head first and down, deep into the water, and spun beneath the surface like a wheel, rotating back to the surface to float and breathe in the fragrant, steamy air. She dived backward again and swam underwater toward the deeper, far end of the pool.

Still beneath the surface, she felt, rather than heard, a powerful splash and whoosh into the pool. Like a sleek river otter, he caught up to her. His powerful arms snared her in his embrace,
and lips found lips in a forceful kiss. They popped up to the air, floating, still in the embrace as his tongue invaded her mouth. Her mind fought her lustful body, wanting to be angry, wanting to shut him out, then just as strongly wanting, needing him, every part of him.

“Damn you,” she said when she forced herself free. She grabbed a deep breath and shouted, “Damn you!”

“Aye damn me, lady,” he said in raspy tones, kissing her again. He brushed her dripping hair away from her eyes. “Why, because I teased you?”

She felt her anger rising, hotter than passion, hotter than the water. “You think it is funny? You ask me to tell you the truth, but when I do, you ridicule me.”

Following an odd impulse, she flung her hands high and twirled them in the air. A stream of arrows flew at his head from all directions. She gasped and rapidly splayed out open hands, spread fingers. The arrows halted in midair. A finger’s breadth away, circling his head.

Leonie gulped, heart racing. How did that happen? She could have killed him.

“Haps I was wrong?” he said, his eyes shifting warily around at the halo of arrows.

“A-ah!” she huffed. Leonie splashed her hands against the water. The arrows fell and floated. She scooped them up and sloshed through the water toward the stone steps on the opposite end of the pool. She could hear him shoving through the water behind her, but she disregarded him and pushed herself on through the shallow water to the steps.

“Leonie,” he called. From behind her, his arm caught her at the waist. “Put the arrows away. Stay with me here a little longer.”

She huffed back at him. “I can think of no reason to.”

“Because the water is so warm.” He pressed her back to his lean and utterly naked body. “Because it feels as silken as your skin. Because you are so beautiful and I want to be with you.”

She stiffened as his hands slid gently up her arms and brushed her massive hair away from her shoulders. But she couldn’t resist him. She wanted to but couldn’t.

“You lie,” she said. Yet she could not stop herself from leaning back in his arms and closing her eyes. She laid the handful of arrows down on the paving of tiny colored ceramic fragments that surrounded the pool. In this odd place that seemed to change as things did in dreams, she couldn’t seem to stay mad at him. Somehow the place seemed so real, like some deeply buried memory that had come back to her. But was it?

He must be right. It was only a dream. Then if it was, why should she not enjoy with him what she could not in their real world?

She followed the urging of his hands as he gently tugged her back into the sumptuously warm scented water, and they floated, his arms still around her as he propelled them with leg kicks back into deeper water. He released her and they floated side by side on their backs. Leonie’s hair spread out in waves through the water.

“I’ve decided I like sharing dreams with you,” Philippe said in a languid voice.

Leonie just hummed, curiously happy. “At least it’s better than running from evil, faceless demons.”

At the far end of the pool, a stone carving of a blowsycheeked man with a stone mane of wavy hair radiating from his face poured water from his fat-lipped mouth into an alcove of the pool. Stone seats were built into the side of the alcove, and they moved through the water to sit beneath it, letting the warm water cascade over them at their shoulders.

As equals in the water where such things as height did not matter, they locked in an embrace. Leonie’s hungry hands stroked his body, roaming over hard muscles, letting the healing touch of her fingers find the dark bruises on his chest where the metal of his mail shirt had cut into him. Aye, she could close wounds again, but now she could even heal bruises. She wondered what else she could do that she never could before. Was this like the arrows that suddenly came when called, or the sword in the water? Or was it part of the magic of this place?

“What are you doing?” he whispered hoarsely, nuzzling into her neck as if he didn’t care what she answered.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You’re making the bruises heal. How do you do that?”

“I don’t know. I just do it.”

“Is that one of your Faerie skills?”

“I suppose. I’ve always done it. Ealga would never let me tell anyone. She thought I would be accused of witchcraft.”

“She’s right. Nobody trusts a witch. Are you sure you’re not one?”

“Why would I be a witch? Do you care?”

“Nay. Your touch is like heaven.”

“Then hush. Let it be.”

He pulled her into his arms, tight against his chest, their limbs entwining in the sleek water, and pulled them to stand beneath the cascade of warm water flowing out of the fountain.

“I love you,” he whispered hoarsely. “I love you so much.”

Her heart burst into a wild rhythm, echoing like drums inside her head. He loved her? Did he forget and think he was back in time with his Joceline? Perhaps this dreamy place had affected him more than her.

But just for now, she could let even that go. She closed her eyes as his lips found hers once again, slowly, with passion, his
tongue exploring yet caressing. She had never thought kissing could be this wonderful. She would give up everything to be kissed like this the rest of her life.

Abruptly he halted. His face looked as if he had been slapped. Then as he pushed away, his face became a mask of purest torment.

“What now?” she asked, and knew she sounded more than a little impatient.

His eyes searched hers, a hungry passion mixing with some terror that made her heart pound in fear. His hands glided slowly from her cheeks over her shoulders, down her arms.