Shana Abe (33 page)

She expected the soldiers to growl a protest, to edge even closer to her, but to her amazement both men merely nodded, stepping back into the boughs of the woods, blending in with the forest cover.

“And how is your husband, my lady?” Harrick looked down at her, folding his hands together in a posture of serenity.

“I—” She could hardly say she had no idea. It was what she had been seeking to learn from Harrick, anyway. He had cut off her mental preamble with his own words, direct and to the point.

“I believe he is well,” she tried.

Harrick raised an eyebrow, the resemblance to his half brother suddenly eerie. “You believe?”

“Well, I have not seen him much of late—”

“And why is that?”

“It’s not that I have not wished to do so. He is simply not around for me—”

“Have you sought him out?”

Kyla was beginning to feel somewhat ill-used. “No,” she said crossly, picking up a pinecone from the ground. “I have not.”

“Why not?”

“Because he does not seem to wish for me to.” The thick tips of the pinecone felt sharp against her palm, her fingers.

“How would you know? If you have not seen him to know if he would like to see you?”

She found the question nonsensical and ignored the flash of guilt it provoked. “If he wished to see me, I am not difficult to find.” She pointed the cone in the direction of where her guards had disappeared.

“I never meant to suggest you were difficult to find, my lady.” Harrick’s voice was laced with amusement. “I would lay odds the entire castle would know your position within a half minute of your moving, so closely are you watched.”

Kyla expelled her breath in frustration. “Exactly!”

“It seems to me”—Harrick looked up at the star of branches above, his voice low, his hands cupping emptiness—“that the one who is lost is not you, but Roland.”

She opened her mouth to reply, then shut it. Harrick looked down at her again. “Exactly,” he said. “I believe you will find him becoming acquainted with too much wine in his study right now.”

“His study?” She shook her head.

“Thomas and Berthold will show you.” Harrick placed a hand on her back, pushed her gently away from him, out of the circle.

R
oland was sitting behind an enormous desk in a room with a heavy brocade cloth draped over the battlement windows. The cloth was purple and teal, creating an odd glow where the sunlight tried to pierce it—muted, stained colors that spilled at random across the rug.

The desk was littered with a strange assortment of objects. A horseshoe, slightly warped; a thin golden necklace with a locket; a jeweled box, perhaps to hold the necklace. A goblet of something that left a daisy chain of sticky rings on the wood. No horseshoe nails that Kyla could see, bent or otherwise.

His head was bowed. He did not look up when she opened the door, nor when she entered one slow step at a time.

“Not now,” he said, and his voice had that strangeness she had heard before, that time over the chess game. “Get out.”

Kyla stopped, throwing a glance at the door behind her. One of the men had already closed it, both of them waiting out in the hallway.

“Dammit, Marla, I said I didn’t want any of your infernal brew. Leave me—”

Roland broke off when he looked up and saw her standing there, curves and outlines of a dream he remembered, a woman with autumn hair and moonlit eyes, a woman he could not bear to even think about right now, but of course he did, because she was all he ever thought about anymore, she was his obsession, she was his life. Kyla.

She moved forward into his dream, gliding steps, her gown spilling down to pool at her feet, a trail of silk or velvet or he didn’t know what.

Flowers to bloom beneath her steps. That was what should happen. She deserved for flowers to bloom to life from her touch, a trail of them to mark wherever she went; she deserved a crown of stars, a staff of gold.…

He moaned and buried his head in his hands again. She would be gone the next time he looked up. And then in her place might be the blackness.

“Roland.” She made his name soft, lyrical. He gritted his teeth against it.

Time spun out. Minutes. Seconds.

He was thirsty again. He needed another drink. He reached for the goblet but it was still empty. Why the hell was his goblet empty? He was the earl around here. That had to be worth something. He should have some more wine.

Roland looked up, and she was still standing there, exactly the same as before.

“My lord?”

He bowed his head and laughed into his hands. Perhaps she really was here. Certainly. Of course she was.

“What?” he said.

She floated over closer to the desk. One pale hand reached out, lifted the goblet he had knocked to its side, set it upright. Behind her trailed not flowers, not stars. No, no. Behind her came his nightmare. He could see it so clearly.

The blackness was fading. And what was taking its place was even worse.

She moved in flawless beauty in front of him now, blocking the visions, teasing him with flashes of what might have even been redemption: steady hands, eyes like truth. But that had to be the wine singing to him, tempting him with such thoughts. And yet, she was still here.

Kyla.

He had been wrestling with it for days, and the end result was always the same. Roland told himself he had needed to bind her to him because she was the countess, and he was the earl. Together they would be responsible for a dynasty, the creation of which was to be his nightly delight.

But fate, of course, had laughed at his confident plans. This wasn’t mere lust he felt for her. Not infatuation, nor any of the other pallid emotions he had encountered before for a woman.

He loved her. He loved her as sure as he had loved anything, including his family and his home.

Oh God, he loved her, and what was to become of him
now? She would never truly accept him, all of him, not with these unspeakable ghosts that stalked him.

Kyla smelled the stale wine on the air, noted the tumbled amber of his hair, the circles beneath his eyes, through the lurid teal-and-purple light. Roland was looking down at the desk again, shaking his head slightly, saying something too soft for her to hear.

She walked over to the window and pulled on the brocade cloth. It came loose but then stuck on something; she pulled harder, ripping it where it had been caught on the iron bar at the top of the window. The heavy bundle fell in slapping waves to her feet, and the room was flooded with sunlight. Kyla kicked the material away from her and leaned over the windowsill, pushing the latch back and opening the glass until she could smell the ocean air. Then she came back to the desk.

She had his attention now, by God.

He was staring up at her, trying not to squint in the sudden brightness.

“Kyla?” he said, his voice sounding slow and scratched, as if he were waking up from sleep.

“My lord.” She folded her arms across her chest.

Roland brought up a hand and rubbed his eyes, then looked around at the room, almost in surprise. “You are here.”

“I am. And you are drunk.”

“I’m not.” He laughed, a self-mocking sound. “I wish I were. I was trying.”

“I would speak with you, my lord.”

He leaned back in his chair, regarded her with shuttered eyes, then shrugged.

“Pray, speak.”

But words fled from her tongue. To cover her disorientation she made a show of choosing a chair to sit in, a small one opposite his, leather-backed and carved of oak, then arranged her skirts in precise, graceful folds.

He was still watching her, silent. His fingers formed a steeple beneath his chin.

“How do you fare?” she asked at last, at a loss for anything better.

“Passing well, my lady.”

It was so obviously untrue she thought he must be taunting her, but his mouth was twisted in not quite a grin, more of a grimace. She decided to let the moment pass.

“I have not seen you much of late,” she said instead, keeping a tranquil tone.

He said nothing. She saw his eyes flick to something over her shoulder, then back to her.

“No doubt you are busy. No doubt your duties as earl keep your days filled.”

He gave a peculiar half-smile to the desk, toyed with the gold chain on it, drawing it out along the flat surface, making a twisted pattern out of its links. An S. A triangle.

“No doubt,” she continued, watching his fingers work with the bright metal, “you prefer the company of darkness and wine to that of your wife.”

“Is that what you think?” Roland looked up at her, right at her, for the first time. His eyes were feverishly bright. “Is it really?”

She lifted her hands in the air, a gesture of resignation. “What else?”

“You don’t want to know.” He stole another glance over her shoulder, looked away.

“Yes, I do.”

The chain became a straight line, the locket exactly in the middle. He placed his hands on either end of the links.

She was beginning to lose her hold on the patience that had kept her in the chair. He was ignoring her again, stone-still, staring down at the locket. Kyla shifted, began to rise, when he spoke.

“She was younger than you when she died.”

He said it low, almost a private thought that took them both by surprise.

“Who?” she asked.

“Eleanor. She married young. Too young, I thought. Fifteen.”
He leaned back again, closed his eyes, sighed. “Ah, perhaps it’s not so young.”

Kyla frowned, glanced down at the locket. It was a disk of gold, a design of some sort in the middle, a Celtic cross, or a lover’s knot.

“But she was so happy with him. She loved him so much, she said. I had to believe her. James was a good man. And I knew he had loved her for ages, watching her grow up. It almost killed her when he died.”

Kyla looked up at him again but his face was blank. He had found that spot behind her. He was watching it with detached interest.

“She was five months pregnant, and James had to go and get himself lost in a storm at sea. There was nothing we could do. He should not have been out. But he was.”

She moved in her chair, uneasy with the tale, his focus gone to that place behind her.

“This is what you consider all day?” she asked, perplexed. “This keeps you in here?”

“I had to leave, you see,” he said, pinning her with his look again. “I had to. Henry sent for me. I couldn’t refuse him, it was a command. A campaign in the north. He needed me, and he needed my men. I had to go. It didn’t matter that it was only a fortnight after the death of James.”

She nodded, frozen in his look.

“I was gone, do you understand? I was gone, and so were almost all of the men. There were only the women, the children, my father, and his guard. That’s all. It had always been enough before.”

There once was a queen.…

Elysia’s words came back to her, held shades of ominous new meaning.

“Kyla.” He said it like a caress, aching, startling her with his pain, the turquoise eyes fully on her again. “Leave me now.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t leave.”

Roland laughed. “No, I suppose not. My fearless Kyla. Would you like to hear the rest of the tale?”

No
, she thought.

“Yes,” she said.

“Siren’s Cove, that very place where you were felled, my love, netted the island two ships while I was away. Most of the crews drowned. A few survived, climbed up to shore. No more than twelve and seven men, all of them half-dead by the time they were found.” He picked up the locket, rubbed his fingers over the design. “It was our way, then, to take in strangers. My father did what he had always done; rescued them, gave them food, clothing, a place to bed until they grew strong enough to leave on their own. Only these men did not leave.”

The queen loved everyone.…

“Eleanor seemed to have befriended one in particular, a lad about her age, sixteen then. I suppose he told her wild tales of the sea, beguiled her with made-up stories. She had always been enamored of stories. And this lad—Justin was his name—convinced her to convince our father that the men needed a little more time to recover. A few weeks more, and they would be on their way.”

Roland opened the jeweled box. The inside was lined with faded satin, perhaps once a royal blue, now lavender-gray and splattered with water spots.

“Three days later, at dawn, these men massacred everyone they could. They had been fit for days, after all, but spent their time learning of the castle—how many people, how many soldiers, what they could steal. They were pirates. They had been pirates all along.”

Kyla felt her chest constricting, her hands clenched on the arms of the chair.

“My father fought them, I am told, but he was old then, and his guardsmen were taken by surprise. Most of them were killed immediately, before they could even leave their beds. A few of the pirates went down with them, but not enough. They kept my father alive. Perhaps they meant to use him as a hostage.

“Marla has always been one to rise before dawn. She was out in the woods that morning, gathering herbs, when she heard the commotion from the soldiers’ quarters. And being
Marla, the first thing she did was slip back inside the keep through one of the tunnels, something the pirates had not managed to discover. We did not use them so much then, you see. She had Madoc and Seena gather the children and the rest of the women, had them hide in the walls of the keep. And then she went to find Eleanor.”