Insolent: The Moray Druids #1 (Highland Historical) (2 page)

A howl rent the afternoon, and still the giant fought on, cleaving clean through a shield and embedding his axe into the skull of a man. Kicking the body off his weapon, he roared again as a second spear lodged in his back, this one just beneath his ribs.

And yet more men fell before him. But his movements began to slow. Blood flowed from his back and thigh with startling speed.

Hot tears branded Morgana’s cheeks, and she couldn’t reach up to wipe at them. Didn’t understand why she already mourned for this lone, violent beast. A strangled gasp escaped her as the spear found purchase a third time, again in his back. Shoulders heaving, the warrior’s head dropped and his magnificent body swayed before plunging over the stone wall and into the river, his blood mingling with that of the countless men he’d massacred.

Saxons took the bridge and flooded the east bank. Instead of spreading and breaking upon the Viking shield wall like a wave, they pierced through like an arrow. The screams of rage and pain rose above the gentle song of the trees. The gurgles of throats filling with blood drowned out the gurgle of the river.

Morgana couldn’t bear to look. Instead, she followed the slow progress of the giant as the current carried him downstream from the bridge toward her. In moments, he would pass her and his body would be gone forever.

Not today
, she decided.
I need you.

Ignoring the roiling in her stomach, she inched both her feet into the freezing river and reached out with her magick.
Bring him to me,
she told the current.
Bring me the warrior.

The river obeyed. The Viking’s body slid along the bank, magickally avoiding rocks and the water’s other gruesome occupants, until the current deposited his impressive weight in the mud at her feet. Most of his thick frame remained submerged, the water not strong or fast enough to propel him with any force.

His features, all but an obstinate jaw and lips too full to be concealed by his few days growth of beard, were hidden from her by his fearsome bone and iron helm. The water leached blood away from hair the color of volcanic stone.

Gods but he was massive.

She needed to touch him in order to know where to send her magick. How could she possibly do it with her wrists bound behind her? Healing magick was intimate, internal. Generally she had to lay her hands on a wound, on a body, to diagnose and provide a cure.

She cursed her bonds once again, futilely testing their strength, and winced as the leather bit into her skin.

Damn.
That left her only one choice. Trying not to think of what polluted the river, Morgana dropped to her knees beside his alarmingly still frame, grateful that the water had lifted much of the blood from his skin.

Willing her heart to slow, she pressed her ear to a chest the texture of firm Highland stone and almost as deep as it was wide. No breath lifted his ribs. No pulse moved the blood through his veins.

But life still flowed within him.

So did magick.

Alarmed, Morgana fought to remain calm as she closed her eyes and used her ear and cheek to connect with what blood was left in his body.
Where are your wounds?
She knew he’d been stabbed three times, but she needed to assess what damage had been done on the inside, and she doubted her ability to roll him over even if she had the use of her hands. He was simply too heavy.

His blood connected to hers as no other patient had before. A clear and instant knowledge of the damage seared her mind. The wound in his thigh was mostly meat and vein. But blood leaked from both of his lungs, and would prove fatal any moment.

This mythical savage needed breath. He needed the punctures in his lungs healed. Since she couldn’t reach his back, she’d have to do it a different way.

Taking strength from the water flowing around her knees, Morgana chanted a spell of healing against his chest. Willing his wounds to mend like she never had hoped before.

Nothing changed. In fact, she could feel his life draining out of him with every moment that passed. A frantic panic welled within her.

“Stay with me, warrior,” she implored, moving to kneel at his shoulder. “Do not cross to the Otherworld just yet. I need you.” Taking the loamy air deep into her chest, she brought her lips close to his and breathed her healing spell against his mouth.

“Earth is our body.

Fire, our soul.

Air, our breath.

Water, our blood.

Flesh knit to flesh.

Vein to vein.

The Goddess blesses you.

Be whole again.”

An impulse borne of pure feminine urge pushed her to make a hasty, desperate move, and she fused her mouth to his, breathing her magick into his lungs.

It should have taken but a moment, the space of a short and powerful breath.

But once her warm lips were pillowed by his cool mouth, Morgana was seized by a typhoon of such shocking sensation; she lost all sense of place. The green of the forest, the chill of the water, the sounds of rampant bloodshed all faded as something as subtle as a whisper and as deafening as the truth rushed around and through her. It reminded her of holy days, when planets aligned in their orbits, or when full moons coincided with a solstice or equinox. It was a foreign and potent magick. Masculine. Dominant. Binding.

Before her overwrought brain could process movement, she was shackled to a chest by bands of pure iron, and being devoured by a mouth that was cold no longer.

Pulled onto an enormous body bowing with the first breath of life, Morgana knew she should panic. That she should struggle. But she didn’t. It would have been fruitless. There was no escaping a hold this powerful.

The Viking ripped off his helm and sat up, dragging her into his lap and cradling her body into the cavern of his. Once again, Morgana found herself a captive. For something about this kiss was stronger than any length of rope or magick spell could ever be.

There was a hint of the divine in his savage lips. A glimpse of the eternal.

And just like that, she was bound.

The Viking ripped at the front of Morgana’s bodice; effectively breaking the spell and dumping her soundly back into reality.

“No!” she gasped, ripping her mouth away from his.

To her utter shock, he stilled, though his big hand nestled in the valley of her breasts, spreading unsettling warmth through her. She became equally frozen as she looked up into his face.

By the Goddess, she was cradled in the lap of a monster.

Morgana often felt when she looked out into the absolute black of a moonless night, a bereft sort of expectant danger. Like the darkness peered back at her, studied her weaknesses, and reached into the places of her soul where magick resided that should never see the light.

If one concentrated that darkness, that trepidation that lifted the hairs on the back of one’s neck and caused even the bravest of men to avoid the shadows, it still wouldn’t have aptly described the pure black emptiness of the Viking’s eyes. He seemed to study her in that way she imagined the nighttime did. Those fathomless pools of onyx roaming her face as though
she
were the peculiarity.

She remained locked with the beast in a moment of stunned visual discovery. Aside from his eyes, or lack thereof, the rest of his face was undoubtedly male. Or would be, if the Gods of war, those fiends of destruction, ever
created
a warrior’s features.

Nothing about those broad and brutal planes were ever meant to please the eye. His chin and jaw, set in sharp angles, thrust forward with unyielding menace. A forehead positioned in an eternal scowl shadowed those already impossibly dark, deep-set eyes. Scroll tattoos toyed with his hairline and disappeared into his abundant dark hair.

But his lips.

Morgana’s gaze latched on to them with a desperate fascination. Those lips were the Goddess’s compensation for his frightening demeanor. She’d never before seen lips like that on a man. The rest of him would
have
to be so alarmingly masculine in order to claim such a luscious mouth.

“What are you?” she breathed the question. For surely a creature such as he was not of this world.

He didn’t answer. Instead, his hand lifted from her chest to her cheek. With a tenderness that shocked Morgana, the Viking explored her own features with the thoroughness of a blind man. A soft ticking rumble, like that of a contented cat, began to emanate from somewhere within his massive chest. It echoed through her in the most unsettling way, the vibrations rocketing a strange awareness directly to between her legs.

Morgana submitted to this, wondering if his sight was, indeed impaired by the soulless voids of his eyes.

A slow recognition began to permeate her memory, one her brother, Malcolm, and her cousin, Kenna, had discussed in awe-struck whispers after pouring through tomes in Dun Moray’s library.

Morgana had never been much for the hours of scouring spells and memorizing the legends of her Druid people as her brother and cousin were. She learned from the forests, from the rivers, from the elders of Moray. She would rather read the faces of her people than a dusty old book.

But this story she remembered, because she found a brutal sort of romance within it. One of a Northman blessed by the war Goddess Freya with preternatural strength and stamina. When he saw blood, he unleashed a beast of battle with black eyes and sharpened teeth. An unstoppable beast who slaughtered indiscriminately, unable to decipher between man, woman, or child. What had Malcolm called them again?

Berserkers.

By the Gods
. She was bound in the clutches of one of the most lethal creatures to ever walk the earth. And, according to Kenna, who paid particular attention to this part, the only possible way he would refrain from murdering her was if—

She gulped, her eyes peeling wide and her mouth dropping open.

If he’d claimed her as his mate.

It was because she’d kissed him, Morgana realized with a dizzy sort of exhilarated horror. In bringing him back from the brink of death, she’d bound him to her for life.

The battle began to spill back toward the bridge, Vikings and Saxons alike using the trees across the river for cover and ambush. With an animalistic noise, the Viking stood taking her with him, and began a frantic search of the ground around them.

“Put me down, and I’ll bring you your axe,” Morgana offered. “You’ll be needing it.”

The Berserker reluctantly complied, and she yet again decided to forgo touching the river with anything but her feet as she commanded the heavy axe toward them.

“Do you think you could untie me?” she ventured.

Instead, the demon-eyed warrior shocked her by snatching his weapon from the blood-soaked river, securing it to his back, and gathering her into the safety of his chest before striding through the trees with unnatural swiftness.

“Not that way!” Morgana protested, renewing her fruitless struggles against her bonds. “It’s too dangerous. We should go downriver.”

She would have called the sound that escaped his throat a scoff if the idea that a beast like him making such a sound wasn’t so ludicrous.

The Berserker clutched her tighter as they broke from the tree line and crossed the near-empty west bank battlefield. Sickened, Morgana was grateful to turn her eyes away from the massacre and bury her face against the strength of his chest. Without a doubt, this place would become a graveyard of sun-bleached bones and drifting souls for centuries.

She heard the shocked exclamations of the few Saxons who stayed behind to thrust their swords through injured Vikings or to pull their wounded from the battlefield. Peeking from the safety of his chest, Morgana was astounded to see that even on foot, they moved with the speed of a galloping horse. Arrows sliced through the air, but none of them found purchase.

Before long, she and the Berserker had traveled west over countless fields of purple meadow thistle, and over short stone hedges of farmland. He never seemed to tire, his breath remaining even against her cheek. Morgana could barely contain the gratitude she felt toward him for helping her to escape the horrors of the English-Saxon horde.

The terrain gave way to rolling emerald hills and lush valleys of grazing beasts. The hills seemed to present a challenge for her transport, and a few grunts and hitches of breath escaped him when he climbed.

Cresting a hill, they spotted a stream winding through a vale lined with trees that were short but still thick with vibrant autumn foliage. As though he read her mind, the Berserker made for the copse of trees, his gait becoming increasingly uneven. Ducking into the cover afforded by low-hanging branches, he took her to the water’s edge and set her feet on the soft mossy ground.

Morgana felt a bit unsteady, and was glad when he didn’t move away. He crowded his massive body against hers, dipping his neck toward the crown of her head, and taking deep pulls of breath against her hair.

Though she wasn’t as afraid as she knew she probably should be, Morgana didn’t feel ready to meet those fathomless obsidian eyes again just yet. Now that they’d escaped the battle, just what did this beast of muscle and magick plan to do with her?

Or—
to
her.

The possibilities sent a trembling thrill of fear laced with a dark excitement washing down her spine and pooling between her legs. The puzzling reaction of her body to his nearness both troubled and stimulated her.

The breath in his chest shortened and hitched, as though he tested the air like a hound scenting something delicious. The sound he made was laced with sin and need, and Morgana found herself once again pulled against the wall of his body, the black voids of his eyes conveying the most unmistakable of intentions. Against her belly, the thick column of his sex pulsed behind the layer of his trews, full and hard.

He meant to have her. To
take
her.

“Wait!” She would’ve held up her hands against him, were they free of the bonds, and her shoulders tensed with the need to have them back.

He stopped. Though he grunted his frustration at her, and bared teeth just a touch too sharp to be human.

Morgana felt the blood drain from her face, but she met his savage displeasure with all the courage she could muster. If he treated her roughly, she could try the sleeping spell on him, and hope it worked upon another creature of magick.

“I-I don’t know if you understand me,” she ventured, realizing he might not even know her language, let alone any verbal form of communication. “But I would ask one more thing of you.” She stepped back and turned, offering him her bound hands. “Untie me?” she tried again.

He didn’t hesitate before reaching for her wrists and pulling her leather bonds apart as though he ripped a piece of spun linen.

Morgana turned and gaped at him, rubbing one wrist, and then the other as the uncomfortable tingle of feeling rushed from her shoulders all the way down to her fingertips. “I thank you, warrior,” she sighed, testing her aching shoulders.

He made an animalistic sound of distress, his hands shackling her forearms and lifting her wrists for inspection. The skin was raw and angry, but not broken. He growled at the marks, and then lifted them to his lips. Those soft, full crescents of skin brushed against the thin flesh covering the veins of her wrists, and her pulse flared beneath the slight pressure of his mouth.

His dark beard, only long enough to be soft rather than rough, provided an entrancing contrast in sensation as his hot tongue escaped to venture over her newly sensitized flesh in a long lick.

She felt that lick elsewhere, and her lips parted on a gasp of equal parts dismay and delight.

His eyes latched onto hers, and his grip tightened. She got the impression his gaze sharpened and dulled, like he fought to maintain his focus. His breath became more labored, and he blinked as though fighting something.

Doubt lanced through her, causing her to wonder if he only toyed with his prey before devouring it. Needing to be free and regain her bearings, Morgana tugged on her wrist, but he refused to relinquish it.

“Let me go, Berserker,” she ordered in a voice much stronger than she felt.

Again, he complied, a whisper of hurt furling his brow before he suddenly crashed to his knees with a hard grunt of unmistakable pain. A pool of blood had gathered around him, and Morgana noticed the bronze of his skin had taken on a pale tinge.

Only then did she remember his leg.

“Oh
no
,” she cried. Her healing breath would not have reached the spear wound in his thigh. Only his lungs. He’d run with her as his burden all this way with such a deep and painful wound.

His torso swayed, his lids fluttering as though they battled consciousness. Morgana caught him as he fell forward, and did her best to lower his heavy trunk to the ground.

“I’ll heal you,” she promised, pillowing his head upon the moss before moving to tug at his trews. The wet animal skin clung to his boulder-sized thighs as though it had claws, but she didn’t stop wrestling with them, using her powers to pull the water from the material.

In order to save his life, she needed to get him naked.