The Crystal Chalice (Book 1) (55 page)

                     
Love

            
                Triana.

 Elorin smiled and ran
the soft silk through her fingers.

 When Celedorn quietly
entered the room some time later, he found her seated by the open window,
gazing out into the moonlit orchard. She was wearing the silk petticoat and her
rich hair lay loose upon her shoulders. She did not appear to hear him come in,
for she continued with contemplation of the scene, until she heard the slight
click of the lock being turned in the door.

 “Triana has made the
room so beautiful” she said.

 “Yes,” he replied, not
taking his eyes off her. She arose and silently crossed to him.

 “This is the point
where I always wake up,” he said, taking her hands. “I have dreamed this dream
many times. You would tell me that you loved me and would cross a room like
this to me and then I would wake up and you would be asleep across some forest
glade from me, and it felt to me as if the distance between us was a million
miles.”

 “You once said to me
that you thought the Father of Light had forgotten you. Do you still think
that?”

 “No. What I believe is
that I do not deserve such kindness.”

 She gently shook her
head in disagreement. “Look,” she said softly, pointing to her throat. “I wear
the heart you gave me.”

 He lightly touched the
little necklace and his voice sank very low: “Do you not know that you have
possessed it since Ravenshold?”

 He bent towards her but
she checked him by lightly placing her fingers against his lips.

 “There is something I
wish to do,” she said and standing on tiptoe, she began to press lingering,
sensuous kisses against the scars on his cheek. He flinched, as always, and
would have stepped back but she held him with surprising strength. At first his
shoulders were tense under her hands, but gradually she felt the muscles relax
and saw his eyes close. When she had kissed each of the three scars in turn, she
said: “They are all healed now. Finally they are healed. When you look in the
mirror from now on, you must remember only this night and no other.”

  Unable to reply, he
caught her hard against him and smothered her face in kisses, finally taking
all restraint off his emotions. He was exhilarated by her response, feeling an
immense need for him flare up in her. His hands caressingly travelled down the
smooth skin of her neck, then gently he drew the straps of the petticoat off
her shoulders. The silk slid to the floor with scarcely a sound.

 When Elorin awoke, for
the second time she saw the room aglow with the youthful blush of sunrise -
only this time, unlike the last, there was no fear in her heart. She lay within
her husband’s arms, her head pillowed on his shoulder and had never felt safer
or more at peace in her life. He was still asleep, his chest lightly rising and
falling in time to his steady breathing, his dark lashes lying quiescent.

 She stretched her arm
across him and gently touched the shiny red diamond that marked the site of the
wound on his shoulder, letting her mind travel back to that fateful night when
she had discovered she loved him. Further back her mind travelled, on a sea of
fragmented memories, all floating like driftwood in a current. The cliffs near
Sirkris in the rain when he had refused to leave her.  The spray breaking
over him as he struggled with the tiller of the boat. Standing alone with his
sword poised in both hands as that terrifying black cloud rose higher and
higher above him. The broken bridge at the Serpent’s Throat as he had tried to
save her. Even now she could hear his voice calling to her ‘
Elorin, Elorin’
.

 She had often wondered
when it was that she had first loved him and all at once she realised that it
had been then. When she had journeyed alone through the Great Forest, unaware
that he was following her, she had been unable to get his voice out of her
mind, or the vision of him poised dangerously above that dreadful gulf intent
only on saving her, oblivious to his own peril.

 Her thoughts shifted to
more recent memories and a little tingle of remembered pleasure echoed through
her body as she recalled his touch. Such powerful emotions, yet always tempered
by tenderness.

 “What are you thinking
of?” he asked softly.

 She started out of her
reflections, surprised to find that he was awake.

 She tilted her head
back and smiled at him. “You.”

 He drew a strand of her
hair back from her cheek. “No regrets?”

 “None. I was
remembering those evenings that we spent together at Ravenshold. You would be
sitting by the fire, your ankles crossed, a glass of wine in your hand and
you’d be staring into the flames as if you were miles away. Do you remember?”

 “Yes. I also remember
that I was not by any means miles away. I was watching you, aware of you,
wondering what it was about you that fascinated me so much.”

  She adopted the demure
look which he had come to recognise as meaning mischief. “Did you ever find
out?”

 “No, but I’m willing to
spend my life trying. It defies definition. I admired the courage with which
you faced me. I appreciated your quick wit and directness. I thought you
beautiful even then. It was all of those things and yet none of those things. I
can’t explain it.”

 She chuckled. “If
anyone had said to me at that stage, that the dark and moody person by the fire
would become my husband, I would have thought they had been over-indulging with
the wine bottle. Yet here I am and there is nowhere else on earth that I would
rather be.”

 Celedorn sighed and his
gaze returned to the ceiling. “We must be moving on soon. We have delayed the
Prince yet again and although he has been very generous about it, I sense a
great anxiety in him, a great urgency to be gone. Time has just slipped through
our fingers. Do you realise that in a very short time it will be a full year
since you were sent as hostage to Ravenshold? The Prince has been so long away
from Eskendria that anything could have happened there.”

 “He fears that it has
been defeated in his absence.”

  Celedorn appeared to
consider this. “We must leave tomorrow,” he said suddenly, then equally
suddenly a little devil of mischief danced in his eyes. “Which is a pity,” he
continued with mock solemnity, “because you and I will have to be more
circumspect.”

 “Circumspect?”

 “Indeed, we must, after
all, show consideration for the others when we travel in their company.”

 “Show.......? Oh, I
see!” she exclaimed, discovering his meaning. Her face promptly fell.

 “These disappointed
looks are very flattering to my vanity,” he remarked smoothly.

 She suppressed a crow
of laughter and said: “Did anyone ever tell you that you are a very aggravating
man?”

 “I believe someone did
once, but I can’t immediately recall who it was.”

 He had raised himself
on his elbow as he spoke and promptly found himself pushed flat on his back
again. She leaned over him.

 “We still have
tonight,” she suggested ingenuously.

 “Not to mention this
morning.”

 “Shouldn’t we be
getting up?”

 He drew her face down
and kissed her. “Not just yet.”

 She looked down at him
tenderly. “I was hoping you would say that.”

 When they joined the
others in the orchard, the morning was far advanced - although everyone was by
far too polite to mention the lateness of the hour.

 “Good morning, my
children,” Relisar beamed at them. “Another fine day, is it not?”

 Triana laughed. “Since
you two got married he has become positively patriarchal. I have been reduced
to infant status.”

 Leaving Elorin to
respond to that comment, Celedorn sat on the bench beside Andarion. “You are
impatient to resume our journey,” he suggested.

 Andarion smiled
ruefully. “I thought I had concealed it so well. I do not want you or Elorin to
feel that I am pressing you to leave.”

 “Nonetheless, it is
time we were going. Even today the sunshine has that mellow feel of approaching
autumn and that tells me it is time we were at the Harnor. I was looking at
some of the maps in Galendar’s study and it would seem that we are only about
four weeks journey from the river. Our quickest route is to pass through the
forest to the south-east of here and then skirt the ruined city of Korem. After
that we should turn directly south for about a week and hopefully we should
reach the Harnor at roughly the place where you had your brush with the Turog.

 “Do you think they will
still be there?”

 “It’s impossible to
tell. What I do know is that as we approach the Harnor we will be entering the
most dangerous part of our journey and must proceed with the greatest caution.
There is also the little problem of how we are to get across the Harnor - but
we’ll deal with that when we come to it.”

 In an attempt not to
dwell on the depressing thoughts circulating in his head, Andarion said:
“Perhaps if all goes well, you and Elorin could return here someday.”

 “Perhaps, but I find it
difficult to think so far ahead. I am trying to decide what to do once we cross
the river into Eskendria. Obviously that depends to a large extent on what we
find when we do so, but I am also quite aware that while we are in the Forsaken
Lands we live in some sort of dream divorced from reality. Once we cross the
river that all ends. Reality will have to be faced in whatever form it appears.
Everything changes then.”

 “Not everything,” the
Prince disagreed somewhat obscurely.

 Relisar, who had only been
half listening to their conversation, suddenly interrupted. “Do you feel it
too? A certain dreamlike quality about this place? The way the bell began to
toll in the forest that day, just when we were in such desperate need of help,
was little short of miraculous. There is something about this place, some
quality in the air, in the light, which makes it like a lovely, peaceful dream
from which one has no desire to awake. I could stay here happily studying the
manuscripts in Master Galendar’s library for the rest of my life and forsake
the outside world entirely. Yet there is something strange and mysterious as
well. How is it that this place still exists a thousand years after the fall of
the Old Kingdom? I know it is hidden from the Turog by a curtain of concealment
but where do the young apprentices come from? Where does each successive
generation of brothers come from? There are no towns or villages, indeed, no
human beings at all nearby and they apparently have no contact with the Kingdom
of Adamant. So how is it that the brotherhood is renewed, when the older
brothers die, in what is clearly an exclusively male environment?”

 “In one of my long
conversations with Master Galendar when I was ill,” Celedorn said, “I asked him
much the same thing and he gave me a rather enigmatic reply. He said that the
monastery was being carefully preserved against time until its purpose had been
fulfilled - whatever he meant by that.”

 Relisar was intensely
interested. “Then it is as I suspected. Do you realise what he was saying?
These are not the successors to the original brothers who saw the fall of the
Old Kingdom, these are those very same brothers, who have not aged a day in
over a thousand years. Time does not exist within these portals. Everything
remains exactly as it was until the reason for its preservation has been
fulfilled.”

 “And what is that
reason?” asked the Prince.

 “I....I am not certain,
but it is perhaps an unexpected yet wonderful reason.”

  The Prince looked at
Celedorn. “That’s his way of saying that he knows but is not telling us.” He
glanced at the old Sage who was staring raptly into thin air. “Relisar has left
us,” he observed. “Come, cousin, we must inform Galendar of our plans.”

 As they crossed the
lawn towards the cloisters, Celedorn asked: “Do you think Relisar is right?”

 “Hardly. There must be
some logical explanation.”

 His companion glanced
shrewdly at him. “There is something else that troubles you. I would guess that
King Orovin is not far from your thoughts.”

 Andarion stopped dead and
stared at him. “You are uncanny. How do you do it? You are, of course,
absolutely right.”

 “You are wondering,
perhaps, how he would react if the Crown Prince of Eskendria stole his bride
from under his nose.”

 Andarion flushed a
little. “Something like that.”

 “He is like all weak
men,” said Celedorn contemptuously, “he is vindictive. There would be little
chance of help from that quarter against the Turog, and he might very well
poison Kelendore against you as well.”

 “Then it looks as if I
shall not be as fortunate as you,” concluded the Prince gloomily.

 His cousin gripped his
shoulder. “I am resisting the temptation to repeat to you all the words of
wisdom that you said to me, but I will content myself by paraphrasing Relisar,
by saying that fate can take some strange twists and turns, so do not despair
just yet.”