Moving Target (22 page)

Burning was an ugly way to die.

“Do you have a flat table that has good light?” he asked, heading for the door to the house.

Serena looked sideways at him. Though nothing in his voice or expression had changed, she sensed he was wary or angry or both. It was something about the clarity of his eyes and the predatory way he carried himself.

“How about the one in the kitchen?” she suggested.

He thought of the little knee-knocking café table that she used for solitary meals. It would hold a plate, silverware, and a cup. Salt and pepper were pushing it.

“Anything bigger?” he asked.

“I can clear off my design table.”

“Perfect,” he said. Anything used for designing would have good light.

Serena wondered how he would react to her studio. Other than various delivery people, no one had seen it. She had been raised to be self-sufficient, a loner. Nothing had happened to change that, including men.

When she graduated from her twenties, she had decided to join that curious modern phenomenon of “born-again virgins,” single women who had quietly decided that living without sex was better than living with it. She didn’t need a man to support her; she supported herself. She didn’t need a man to get her pregnant; a sperm bank could take care of that. She didn’t need a man to keep her car going; there were a gazillion eager mechanics in the telephone book—ditto for landscapers, house painters, plumbers, and electricians.

As for company, she had never met a man who didn’t limit her possibilities more than he expanded them. Given that, Mr. Picky was the perfect male companion: he could take care of himself and only demanded occasional petting.

A trilling whistle cut through Serena’s thoughts, a sound like a wild falcon. She spun toward Erik.

He didn’t notice. He was studying the looms with something close to reverence. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.”

She blinked. “Actually that’s Big Betty, Middle Betty, K. L. Betty, Little Betty, and Betina.”

“You name your looms?”

“I spend most of my life with them. Should I call them one, two, three, four, and five?”

“You’ve got a point. Five of them, actually. What does K. L. stand for?”

“Kinda little.”

He looked at the nearly six-foot-tall loom and laughed. “Kind of is right.”

“You should have seen G’mom’s. It was the reason her cabin had a twelve-foot ceiling. The loom had been passed down through more generations than anyone could remember.”

Erik didn’t have to ask what had happened to the loom. Wood burned. Old wood burned even better.

Serena went to Middle Betty. The loom’s warp threads were fully strung but had no weft threads to give substance and pattern. Eight harnesses held heddles that were waiting for her to have time to start the design that had haunted her since she was six. She had dreamed it, drawn it, redrawn it, chosen yarns and colors, strung the warp, checked the drawing one last time, and promised herself that she would begin as soon as she tied off the Norman cross weaving she had finished during the long, restless night.

Despite her lack of sleep, eagerness fizzed through her blood at the thought of beginning a new weaving. Especially this one. She had been building her skill as a weaver for a lifetime with this design in mind. Finally she was ready. She was certain of it.

She had dreamed it last night, only . . . not quite. It was a loom holding cloth that looked like her scarf, and she was weaving, dreaming, humming.

Lure to one, deterrent to all others.

Erik watched Serena’s face while she stroked the warp threads as lightly and lovingly as a harpist stroked her favorite harp . . .

Ariane with her midnight hair and amethyst eyes and slender white fingers which could draw forth such sadness from a harp as to make his peregrine weep. Ariane, with her vibrant Learned dress, the cloth a guardian stronger than armor and a lure to just one man. Uncanny cloth woven by the sorceress Serena of Silverfells.

Cassandra had meddled brilliantly in Ariane and Simon’s match. Would that his own match had been so charmed.

With a lurch of adrenaline, Erik yanked his mind away from the haunting not-quite memories. It was one thing to have a medieval profession—calligraphy and illumination. It was quite another to have medieval memories that he had never written, never illuminated, never even read. That was called imagination, and his was entirely too vivid.

He was obsessed with the Book of the Learned. He knew it. What he didn’t know was how to escape the compelling grip of the mystery or the soul-deep need to know the fate of Erik the Learned.

“. . . the whole table?” Serena asked.

He replayed the last few moments in his mind and answered her question. “I’ll just need enough to spread out the pages.”

“One whole table coming up.”

While she cleared the table, he fought the temptation to just sit down on the floor and go through the manuscript pages right that instant. But he had felt the reluctance in her fingers when she handed over the portfolio. Having him rip into it like a kid opening a candy bar wouldn’t make her any happier about sharing the pages. He had waited years. He could wait a few more minutes.

Erik was still telling himself that when he put the portfolio on a drafting table that was only partially cleared. As he lifted the scarred leather flap, his breath came out in a low sound that was both triumph and awe.

Curiously Serena watched him. Like Warrick, he seemed to recognize the pages. Unlike Warrick, he wasn’t angered by them.

Erik was enthralled.

Silence stretched until it vibrated like a plucked harp string.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Well what?”

When he spoke, he didn’t so much as glance away from the pages he had spread across the part of the table he had given her time to clear. He wouldn’t have looked up for an explosion. Four leaves from the Book of the Learned lay before him, gloriously intact. No letters had been scraped away to make room for inappropriate—if beautiful—miniatures. No courtiers and castles of fifteenth-century French style had been drawn over a page of simple calligraphy: simple, but precious, for in those words lay fragments of the story of Erik the Learned.

He read quickly, silently, ravenously, translating the words in his mind.

I long for sons to marry the daughters of Simon and Dominic, and I yearn for daughters to marry the sons of my lord and friends. I pray for a wife like Amber or Meg or Ariane, women brave enough to love and strong enough to teach their fierce lords compassion.

It should be enough that my blood lives on in my sister Amber’s children, blood joined by that of Duncan, her dark and beloved warrior. Their children will share marriage and estates and babes with those of Simon and Dominic. They will hold and protect this land as their fathers did.

Yet it is not enough.

I want more than my nieces and nephews, my godsons and goddaughters, and my friends’ sons fostered in my home. Would to God that I had sons to foster in their homes, daughters to cast melting eyes at foster sons. That is the way lasting alliances are built. That is the way history begins.

No history will begin with me.

I do not know whether to damn the sorceress Serena or damn my Learned self for being unable to escape her. She is woven into my very soul. Would to God I could rip her out and be free to live as other men live, even Learned ones.

Enchantment makes fools of all men.

Especially Erik the Learned.

“Are they forged?” Serena asked when she couldn’t take the silence any longer.

His head snapped up. He was still hearing echoes of a name in his mind, the sorceress’s name he had known before he could have known it:
Serena.
“What makes you ask that?”

She thought of her grandmother’s warning note, but all she said was, “Isn’t that why people have things appraised? To find out if they’re real?”

Erik smiled thinly. “Most people just want to know what they’re worth.”

Serena waited.

“I’ll have to run some tests,” he said.

And he would, for his own pleasure rather than for any personal doubt. The pages were real. He was as certain of it as if he had created them himself.

Then, like ice crystallizing across an autumn pond, freezing everything, came the certainty that he had done just that.

W
hat type of tests?” Serena asked quickly.

Erik wrenched his attention back to the here and now, but still he saw the past so close, so real, like a colored shadow cast by an uncanny light. Or perhaps it was the opposite; the past was real and the present but a colored shadow of the past’s vibrant life.

“Nothing destructive.” Erik touched the edge of a page as though it was alive, breathing, whispering to his soul. “Script comparisons, text comparisons, technique comparisons, ultraviolet, visual examination of the vellum, that sort of thing. If there’s still doubt, I’ll take the pages to a lab that can do paint analysis as delicately as a butterfly makes love.”

She frowned.

“This lab is very clever about not hurting the original,” he reassured her, stroking one page again.

It was the care and the intense restraint of his fingertips touching the vellum that convinced Serena more than any words Erik said. He was a man touching something he cherished. No, loved.

Jealousy snaked through her, startling her. She told herself it was simply her reluctance to share the pages. She didn’t quite believe it. But she did believe it would be wonderful to be touched like that, with caring and gentleness and the kind of longing that made breath back up in her throat.

Then she looked at the page that so fascinated Erik. She hadn’t sent him a copy of this page, but she had sent one to Warrick. The heavily gilded, deeply complex design covered the full page. It would have shimmered even under thin moonlight. In daylight it was dazzling. By candlelight, it would be beauty and mystery woven together until the page breathed and trembled with life.

“That’s my favorite,” Serena said softly.

Erik jerked as though he had forgotten he wasn’t alone. “The initials?”

She smiled crookedly. “You saw them very quickly.”

“Practice,” he said, knowing it was only partially true.

“It took me a long time to see the initials,” she admitted. “The E and the S are so heavily intertwined that they’re impossible to separate without destroying the pattern. The complexity is both beautiful and intimidating.”

“Intimidating?”

“To a weaver, yes. Especially to a child who had seen nothing like it before, except in her dreams.”

Slowly he focused on her. “I don’t understand.”

Her chin lifted in a gesture that was both self-conscious and defiant. “Did I ask you to?”

He hesitated. The shadows under her eyes left by a nearly sleepless night gave them a haunting darkness. “I want to.”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

Serena looked at Erik’s touch resting so carefully on her heritage, her dreams. She closed her eyes and said quickly, “I don’t remember the first time I dreamed about that design. Mother was still alive, I know that much. She smiled when I tried to draw it. I couldn’t write my own name, yet I was trying to create something so intricate that I couldn’t even comprehend it.” Serena shrugged and opened her eyes. Erik was watching her. His eyes were as wild and clear as a falcon’s. “Anyway, I kept trying until I finally got it right.”

“How long did it take you?”

“I finished it the night my grandmother was murdered. The dream I had of it that night was unbearably vivid.”

“You dreamed of her death?” he asked sharply.

“No. Crazy laughter, the initials winding around each other like vines, a scream of inhuman pain . . .” She rubbed her arms and looked at the glowing, gold-drenched page. “I woke up sweating. I began drawing. I didn’t stop until I had it all.”

“How long did it take?”

“I don’t know.” She smiled raggedly. “Too long, according to Mr. Picky. Sometime into the second night, he started dropping choice morsels on the drafting table to lure me away.”

“No crunchy bits?” Erik asked.

She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a throttled cry. “No. Just the juicy ones.”

“Sounds irresistible,” he said ironically.

“It’s the thought that counts.” Her voice was as dry as his, but her hands kept trying to rub goose bumps from her arms. “Anyway, I finished the drawing.”

He thought over what she was saying and wondered about what she hadn’t said.

“The design you dreamed,” he said finally, stroking lightly down the margin of the illuminated page where initials were woven together in staggering complexity and beauty. “It was like this?”

“No. It was that. Big difference.”

“It’s not unusual for childhood memories to be very vivid and long-lasting.”

She nodded, hesitated, then gave a mental shrug. Maybe he would be able to explain what she never had been able to understand. “I couldn’t have seen the page before I dreamed it.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

“G’mom never gave the pages to my mother, never visited mother after she ran away, never spoke to her after she changed her name to Charters. And I never saw G’mom until my own mother was dead.”

“Yet you dreamed this page while you were still living with your mother?”

Serena gave him a slanting look. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe it.” She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “Not surprising. I don’t want to believe it either. It’s . . . eerie.” She blew out a breath. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

Erik wanted to agree with her. He couldn’t.

“It might,” he said.

“What?”

“It might matter.”

Her chin tilted up. “Why?”

“Provenance,” he said succinctly. “It’s part of any appraisal. You’re the only one alive who might have seen these pages in your grandmother’s hands.”

“Morton Hingham did. Her lawyer.”

“Are you certain?”

She hesitated. Her grandmother could have used the safe-deposit box and never told Hingham what was inside. It would have been like her. “No,” she said tightly. “So what?”