Shana Abe (9 page)

“Be reasonable, my lord,” Avalon said now. “I offer you everything you desire. I will freely give you all my lands, all my money. It’s yours. Only let me go.”

The winter look grew colder. “Everything I desire?”

“Come, come,” she said, impatient. “You must agree. You may have all the d’Farouche fortune with none of the trouble of me. How can you resist?”

He was not afraid, she realized suddenly. Not at all. His manner at best could be said to contain a mild annoyance, as if he were dealing with a troublesome horse on the journey.

“But what of the curse?” he asked, still mild.

“Oh, the curse.” Avalon dismissed it with her tone. “Surely you don’t believe in such fantasy, my lord.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not. Everyone else does.”

“No,” she said.

“Aye,” he replied, with the beginnings of that chilling smile. “You have the look, Avalon. You meet the requirements. My people will not be content until they have you in the family again.”

“It is naught but superstition!” she cried, forgetting herself. “You cannot be guided by the fears of a hundred-year-old story! There is no curse!”

He moved like the wind, knocking her hand away, making the dirk fall to the leaves.

“It is just a story,” she said to the circle, wanting to convince all of them, including herself.

Marcus took her arm, turned to his men. “Let’s go.”

O
ne hundred years ago …

The tale always began that way, and Marcus wondered how it could always be that same number of years when he himself had been hearing the story for at least the past thirty.

One hundred years ago there lived a laird and his lady, and she was the fairest lady to ever grace the lands. Her hair was light as moonlight, her eyes were the color of the rarest heather flowers, her brows black as jet.

Lady Avalon sat quietly now in the saddle before him, only her hands had been bound again with a soft strap of cloth torn from a blanket. Whether or not her eyes were really the color of heather flowers Marcus couldn’t say, because she kept them cast away from him, kept them fixed on the horizon, searching for something he could not see.

The laird loved his lady fair and she him, both of them ruling just and right over their clan. It was the days of riches for them, of long summers and gentle winters, when the mountains still sang their songs at night and the deer were plump and plentiful. Each day was a jewel in the mind of God, and the Clan Kincardine was the most blessed of all people.

Into this peace came an evil faerie, who had watched the laird’s lady for such a time until he fell into envy. He wanted her for himself, her moonlight and heather and jet, and set about to win her, using magic and gold and gossamer promises.

But she would not be won. Her heart was true to her laird.

Marcus found himself focusing on every part of Avalon that touched his body, the softness of her lines pressed to him in the confines of the saddle, the heat of
her stomach against the arm he had wrapped around her waist. She smelled of apples and flowers. She had tasted of spice.

He wondered briefly if she was naive enough to be in love with her oafish cousin. She had seemed to accept his hasty plan to wed her without protest, even knowing the disgrace it would bring upon her, the war that might ensue.

But she was a woman. He had no idea why women did anything.

One day our lady went off wool gathering to the glen. She was so gentle that the thorns would bend back from the branches of the brambles, allowing her to harvest their treasured wool without harm.

But the faerie came upon her, and he had lost patience with his wooing. He took her honor there in the glen and broke her true heart until she died on the spot, weeping for her love.

The laird found her in the grass and knew what had happened.

Understand how much he loved her. Understand how great was his loss, for then and there he abandoned his faith and called on the devil to avenge the wrong done his lady.

The day had favored them by turning cloudy and dark, making their movement through the woods more obscure, turning them all into mere extensions of the shadows.

Lady Avalon was trying to resist falling asleep, Marcus noted. Her head would sink lower and lower, then jerk back up, only to repeat the process.

He thought about the offer she had made back in the circle of his men. She had told him she would give him everything he desired if he let her go. But if he let her
go, he would never get the one thing that it turned out he desired most. And he was not a man to take his inclinations lightly.

Her chin dropped down and stayed there. With a subtle shifting of his arm he leaned her back against him until her head rested against his shoulder. Her hair was the only brightness around them.

The devil came with smoke and sulphur to the glen, and he brought forth the wicked faerie and held him in chains of fire in front of the laird.

“What would you have me do?” the devil asked.

“Revenge!” called out the laird, holding his poor lass in his arms.

So the devil took the faerie with fiery hands and twisted and turned him, shouting shrieks and spells until it wasn’t a faerie any longer, but something else, black and burnt. And the devil tossed him onto the side of the mountain where he burned deep into the rock and melted there, gone forever.

“Now,” said the devil. “My payment.”

And it was only then that the laird realized what he had done.

When she was asleep it was easy to forget the fire in her eyes, a fire he provoked. It was easy to think about how she might have been if they had met under different circumstances, his own version of a fairy tale. She would have been trusting but strong, clever but kind beneath all that beauty. And he would have never, ever left on any crusade for any man or god.

“I find I have too many souls right now,” said the crafty devil. “Yours will only crowd my halls. I will take something else from you. I will take your children away from you, and your children’s children, and their children and their children, as
well. They will be banished from you and with them all your golden days, and your clan will languish without them, and your lands will be barren, and your animals will drop.”

The laird cried out but what could he do? He had called on the devil and now his people would pay the price.

She wasn’t that heavy against him. Marcus thought it would be no problem to ride the rest of the day with the sleeping Avalon in his arms, to ride off into eternity with her relaxed before him, the sweet softness of her hair flowing down over her hips to brush and curl against his leg.

The laird wept and begged for mercy but the devil would have none of it. Only when an eye opened in the sky did the devil stop laughing, and from the eye came a ray of sunlight, falling down only on our dead lady.

Perhaps she was up in heaven right then, entreating the Lord to have pity on her true love. For this was the Eye of God in the sky, and He had taken an interest in the laird’s fate.

Now, the devil knew what this meant, that God was listening and noticing, and the devil knew what he had to say. But it filled him with spite that he had to soften his curse, and he spat the final words to the kneeling laird.

“This curse will last one hundred full years, until there comes from these children a lass with the mark of your lady, a daughter of your clan to wed the laird. Until she returns you will not prosper, not you or any of yours.”

And because he was the devil, he added one more thing before being swallowed up whole by the ground:

“And she will be a warrior maiden who will know your deepest hearts and thoughts. And she will hate your very name.”

T
hey ended up camping in a woods so tight with trees that they had to scatter the campsite. Even this was to their advantage, however. The plentiful trunks and branches offered ideal protection. Marcus had a watch set up to scout the perimeter of the camp and put Lady Avalon squarely in the middle, where she could be seen from all sides.

There was a stream nearby, cold black water, and he had taken her there himself after untying her hands, watching her slake what had to be a tremendous thirst, watching the water dissolve and sweep away the dried blood around her wrists.

It pained him somehow, the sight of that blood against her white skin, and he didn’t want it to. She wasn’t really harmed. The ropes had merely scraped her. He had endured far worse almost every day for the past twelve years.

She caught him staring at her with her enchanted eyes and almost shamed him into looking away. But he didn’t.

He had no recollection of a heather flower of that particular shade of purple. It would have to be a magic flower, clearer and sharper and more pristine than life to match those eyes.

That night on the stairs at the squalid inn he had thought them more blue, but it must have been a trick of the light, because it was plain to see now that blue was not their tint.

What a surprise it had been, Marcus thought to himself as he walked her back to the camp. What a complete and total surprise it had been to find that the distant voice in his head had awakened that night on the stairs,
had called out to him with absolute command to stop this particular girl before she could pass.

She had dressed like a peasant girl. She had spoken like a peasant girl. But one look at her face—the creamy skin, the pure line of her brow, and of course, those eyes—and he knew something was wrong.

He couldn’t prove it. She had faced him boldly at the end, and though her beauty was staggering, he had to let her go.

All he had seen was a lass with midnight lashes and eyes that reached his soul. Sweet cherry lips.

All that he had felt was pure lust.

It coursed through him, stronger than the ocean tide, stronger than opium or pain. Just lust, just want, just the desire to claim this woman, whoever she was, and bind her to him until the lust was spent and he could be free again. It had never happened like this before, not in Jerusalem or Cairo or Spain. This was the first time.

She had felt the power between them then, he knew she did. But he had thought his mission involved a different woman, one that was about to destroy his clan with her ill-advised marriage to another, and Marcus had too many people relying solely on him to dally with the mystery of a woman in an inn, lust or no.

Rosalind, her sister had called her.

It hadn’t sounded quite right. But he had no cause to go asking discreet questions among the villagers about a dark-haired girl named Rosalind. He had plans to make and obligations to fulfill before the baron’s party. He’d had no time for inquiries.

But he had asked them anyway.

And naturally no one knew of such a girl; there was
one Rosalind, but she was too old, a mother of five, and her hair was red.

Because Rosalind had never been her name after all. Her name was Avalon, and she was the end of the curse, one way or another. Thank God he had her now.

Balthazar walked over to Marcus where he leaned against one of the trees, openly watching the woman he would soon wed.

Lady Avalon had accepted someone’s cape and curled up in it on a bed of leaves the color of autumn, no longer fighting them, it seemed. Her eyes were closed. Her hair shielded half of her face.

“It is done,” Balthazar said. The fading light made the tattoos on his face almost slip away against his dark skin, disguising their exotic lines.

Marcus didn’t reply. He knew it wasn’t done at all, that his friend actually meant just the opposite. It was Balthazar’s habit to speak in short ironies, one of many of his unique ways that most of the Scots had yet to comprehend. They had accepted the Moor because he came home with their laird, and they would always obey the laird, even if he had been away for so long. But Balthazar, with his tattoos and long robes and gold earrings, was something the Highlanders had never before seen, even though to Marcus his friend’s appearance was as common as the sand in the desert. Which was another thing impossible to explain to the Scots.