The Wedding Night
Authors: Linda Needham
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
THE WEDDING NIGHT
Linda Needham
Chapter 1
Northwest
Lancashire
,
England
Summer 1868
"
I
t's an elf bolt, miss! A real and truly one!"
"An actual arrow, made by an elf?" Mairey Faelyn gave a properly astounded gasp, then oooed grandly. The children scooted in closer to her as she studied the barbed flint arrowhead in little Orrin's coal-begrimed palm. "Amazing!"
"Found it myself, I did!" The boy was perched with elfin lightness on a bale of moldering wool-sacks in the abandoned fulling mill, a changeling if ever there was one.
He was wearing Mairey's hat—her father's, really—a tweedy, sagging-brimmed relic of his folklore field-collecting. It was dear and dilapidated, and reminded her of the wonderful years she'd spent following him into hip-narrow caves and weeping catacombs, collecting folktales and marvels from every part of
Britain
.
"Hey,
I
got three of 'em, Orrin!" Geordie leaped into the center of the pack, plucked back an imaginary bow string, and shot an equally imaginary arrow into the sagging rafters. "Yep, the sky cracked open one night during a storm and 'n elf bolts fell right out of the clouds."
"Imagine that!" Mairey had seen hundreds of such arrow flints; had a very fine collection of her own in her library at
She loved the children's tales most of all. "Where did you find this very fine specimen, Orrin?"
"In the barrow field, last winter."
The Daunton Barrow. She'd heard of the ancient burial mound but had never seen it. This was a coal town; the sacred site was probably a slag heap by now, but worth a visit.
"Is the barrow field far, Orrin? Will you take me there?"
"Oh, no, miss!" Orrin slid off the bale, shaking his head gravely. "We can't go there. It's a dragon's barrow!"
"A dragon! Here in Daunton?" She'd never heard of a worm tale this far west of the Bleasdale Moors. "Does he have a name?"
Orrin glanced around at his fellows and their smudged faces, looked past them to the open door with its afternoon glare, and then blinked back at Mairey. "
Balforge
."
Everybody gasped in delicious dread and then wrestled each other for a closer spot, primed for a whopping good story.
Orrin opened his mouth to continue, but Geordie, ever the
brinksman
,
thunked
a stone onto the floor, startling everyone and missing
Mairey's
toes by an inch.
"This here's one of his fangs!"
Orrin snorted. Everyone else
oooed
, Mairey loudest of all, though
Balforge's
fang was, in dull, scholarly reality, a primitive flint
axhead
. The wonder was that these children called it a dragon's fang. That was certainly worth a footnote in the book she was compiling on folk beliefs.
She picked up the
axhead
by its blade, and the boys tumbled over each other to get a better look.
"Careful miss! Could be poisoned! Just like his scales!"
"They shoot out of him like quills when he's angry!"
"His wings are as wide as the sky!" Geordie wedged himself and his part of the story into the space beside Mairey. "And when he roars, he scorches the forest—"
"And when he gets hungry," Orrin said, eyeing Geordie and nodding sagely, "he eats virgins."
Mairey bit back a laugh, her fingers itching to write this all down. "Which are…?"
"Oh, very much like onions, my
gran
told me."
"Ah." Mairey rescued her notebook and stub of a pencil from under the dragon's fang and quickly wrote,
Balforge
: fire-breathing, poisoned-scaled, foul-tempered virgin-eater
.
"And he lived right here!" Orrin stomped his foot on the planking. "'Neath our village. For ten-hundred years, way long before the mine came."
Mairey's
chest filled up so fast with red-hot anger, her next breath was a billow of steam.
Bloody coal barons and their bloody mines.
Balforge
was the product of
Daunton's
despair. A wicked, relentless beast with a heart as hard and black as the outcropping of coal that had bred
Daunton's
voracious mine.
She wanted to hug Orrin and Geordie and all the other boys gathered around her, but they would find no dignity in her sympathy, and might even run from the meddlesome stranger.
"What do you suppose gave
Balforge
such a foul temper, Orrin?"
"Treasure, miss," he said, spreading his arms to encompass the whole of the mill. "Had a heap of shiny gold and stolen silver and pirate's jewels that he was guarding—"
But then Orrin's tale seemed to dry up on his tongue, and exited his small chest with a rasping gulp and a whispered "
Bleedin
' cockles!"
Suddenly every child had gone silent, their gazes fixed with Orrin's on something behind her. Something huge and terrifying, by the wide-eyed, gape-mouthed looks on their little faces.
She began to feel a niggling fear of her own, a compelling coldness catching at her ankles, a pinpoint of prickling heat between her shoulder blades. She rose slowly from the clinging tangle of boys, then turned and tucked them behind her skirts.
"
Balforge
," Orrin whispered.
Sweet silver acorns! The towering shape in the timbered doorway could truly have been
Daunton's
dragon—it was tall enough by half again as he stepped out of the afternoon sunlight that blazed crimson across his massive shoulders into the colorless shadows of the mill.
"Just a man, Orrin." Though Mairey wasn't altogether sure what sort of man she was looking at. He lacked barbed scales and poisoned fangs, and his wings were only a black greatcoat that draped to his calves, but that was demon fire dancing in his dark eyes as he swung his gaze across the trembling huddle.
Not a breath stirred, nor a muscle, as each of them, Mairey included, waited to be roasted and eaten.
The man made a sudden, growling grumble in his throat, sending the children screaming with the
shooshing
scatter of feet, like frantic wings beating against the sides of a cage.
Then the children were gone, and safe, and the mill tomb-quiet again, leaving Mairey alone to confront their poison-toothed dragon.
A wild-game hunter who had lectured at
Well, she'd cut her teeth on dragons and
manticores
and hoary trolls; had translated the Bestiary from its twelfth-century Latin before she was ten.
So she knew her monsters. She would easily be rid of this one—who was surely just the cantankerous landlord, here to banish the children from his property. Then she'd round up Orrin and the others, finish collecting her stories from them, and
be
off to the next village.
"You're exceedingly good at frightening children, whoever you are." Mairey swept her father's hat off the empty grain cask where Orrin had thrown it and crammed it onto her head. "Have you any idea how long it took me to gain their trust?"
"Have you any idea how long it's taken me to find you, Mairey Faelyn?"
Mairey stared at the shape in the doorway—at the dragon who knew her name. Before she could demand to know why or who he was, he was bearing down on her in a gait that thundered across the planked floor.
And there she stood like a stunned rabbit, a thousand and one questions knotted up inside her brain. She couldn't move at all, and just when it seemed the great beast would overtake her, he shifted his weight and coursed around her in a lingering circle, brimming her lungs with his startling scent of bergamot and saddle-leather, making her think absurdly of Sir Thomas Browne's observation that serpents copulated in slow, sinuous spirals, length against languid length, turning and turning against each other … just as Mairey was doing with this
Balforge
-incarnate, countering backward until she bumped against a strut and was forced to stare up into his coal-dark eyes.
"Who are you, sir?"
She'd never felt quite so much like a curio, so thoroughly and keenly appraised as his flinty gaze touched every part of her face: brow and lashes, the edge of her nose, her mouth. Then his jaw flexed and his frown deepened.
"Rushford," he said. His hair glistened
Why would an imperious viscount named Jackson Rushford be looking for her? Something to do with
Surely not a colleague of her father's: he didn't seem the scholarly type.
More like a smuggler or a
Barbary
pirate.
"I've never heard of you, my lord." And yet something about his name seethed in the pit of her stomach, some murky and roiling thing that made her certain she ought to know and fear him. That she ought to run home and shield her family from him. "I don't know what you could possibly want with me. And I certainly don't appreciate you standing so
cl
—"
"I
want
the
Willowmoon
Knot, Miss Faelyn." He closed the short distance between them, eyes glinting sharply. "And you're going to find it for me."
The
Willowmoon
.
Mairey's
heart stumbled, thudded, and stopped. A clanging like an alarm bell began to ring so loudly inside her head, she could barely think.
Hold fast, Mairey! Hold fast!
Hold fast to what, Papa?
He'd told her that no one else knew of the
Willowmoon
—no one but the
Faelyns
! Certainly not this thieving dragon
who
had curled himself around her and was stealing the air right out of her chest.
Mairey took an amazingly poised breath, considering the violent rattling of her heart as it chugged to life again. And, against the big-game hunter's dire warning, she looked up and into the beast's eyes.
They were fathomless. Blazing crimson and licking yellow.
He must surely have heard her gulp.
"The
Willow
…
which?"
she asked in a little squawk. It was safer to look at the fiercely square line of his jaw and the deadly muscles flexing there than to stray again to his eyes, where the flames danced so hotly.
He raised her chin with his gloved finger—not sharply, with nary a hint of violence—but causing her heart to rattle around in her chest again all the same.
"The
Willow
moon
," he said evenly. That very short, very nimbly 'moon' brushed past her eyelids, made her hitch in a long breath that filled her lungs with his exotic scent. "You know the piece very well, Miss Faelyn."
Dear God! She wanted to run for the farthest hills—but running away from a wild beast only made it give chase. And, pinned between the solid post and Rushford's even more solid chest, she wouldn't get any farther than the reach of his powerful arm.
I'm going to
lie
through my teeth, Papa—deny ever having heard of the
Willowmoon
Knot!
"Sir. Lord Rushford." He still had her chin caught up by his knuckle, was still staring down and deeply into her eyes—a tyrant used to having his own way. His intimidation only raised her hackles and sharpened her senses. "I wish you all the best in finding your Willow Knotty thing. However—"
"However, madam?" All that earth-rumbling converged in her chest and settled low in her belly, a provocative terror.
"However, I—" Mairey faltered, but thought of her father and her promise, then boldly stated her unshakable position. "I can't help you."
There! The simplicity of fact. She couldn't
possibly
help him find the
Willowmoon
Knot. No chance in the world.
"
Mmmmm
…" A growl which he must have perfected underground, best suited for shaking mountains. His eyes took on a deadly, narrow gleam even as he straightened and gave her a distant but oddly approving appraisal.
"You are clever, Mairey Faelyn."
She knew better than to take compliments from dragons. "I'm nothing of the sort, sir."