The Reluctant Berserker (34 page)

It had been a day of wonders and dreams, so he crooked his knees and spread his legs and felt the harper settle between them, just as though he were a guilty thought brought to life. Except that Wulfstan felt no guilt.

He was, however, a little afraid, and it didn’t help to reach up and feel on Leofgar’s face the curve of that almost-cruel smile he remembered with such confused lusts from their first meeting. “What…what…?” he gasped around a tongue gone thick with longing. “Last night I begged you and you refused to ‘dishonour’ me. Yet this afternoon suddenly you kiss me in men’s sight and care nothing for what they think of you. You told that…ah, oh do that more…you told that lie to Tatwine. And now… What changed?”

Leofgar’s quiet laugh was fond and so very sure of itself that another wave of heat went through Wulfstan just at the sound. The long fingers he had watched with utter fascination were now working their way inside him, and at that thought, at that feeling, he didn’t give a damn what Leofgar said, as long as it went on.

“Yielding isn’t weakness,” Leofgar said, as though it was a whole treatise of thought bundled up in a single phrase. Wulfstan was far too distracted by the growl of the voice to worry too much about whether it was making sense. “So how can it dishonour either of us?”

There was only enough light left to guess at the complex of emotions on Leofgar’s face, something like laughter beneath the need and fierce possession. Even this close to driving himself home in Wulfstan’s body, like a sword into the sheath made for it, he found something amusing. “You aren’t listening to me at all, are you?”

“Mmmn?” Wulfstan ventured, because the truth was that he wasn’t. He was not at all in the mood to share this moment with discussions about philosophy. “Just… Please.”

Leofgar laughed and bent down to kiss Wulfstan’s open mouth, and when he rose again he was as predatory as Wulfstan could have wished. It was a long time before either of them spoke again, though he groaned enough, and he thought the shout of joy his body made at last should have been heard in the highest heavens.

It wasn’t until he had wiped them both down with the corner of a blanket and curled into Leofgar, tucking his head under Leofgar’s chin and feeling the scop’s long arms pull him in tight, narrow but strong as bands of iron, that he had the ability to think again. What came first was dread.

For all Leofgar’s words, how would he act once the deed was done? The soreness he had left behind him was warm inside Wulfstan. Wulfstan’s body told him he was at peace. He floated in bliss like warm water, all his muscles lax save for the smile on his face. The little voice within feared that Leofgar would do as Cenred had done and—now he had proved his triumph, he would want to tell it to the world.

He had, after all, spent such a great deal of time and effort to try to prove himself a man, and this—fucking a warrior who could take him apart with one hand—this would show everyone his strength of spirit and of will.

“Still nothing to say?” Leofgar asked.

Darkness had fallen, save for the suggestion of a distant moon, and Wulfstan could see very little of Leofgar, but he could feel the two long hands knotted in his hair, making small, soothing circles on his scalp. He could hear amusement and concern both in Leofgar’s tone. Never again, he thought, would he take pleasure in a voice that didn’t laugh, just a little. To the fear of exposure was added the fear that Leofgar would leave in the morning, and nothing again would compare favourably with him.

“Come, it wasn’t that bad, surely? I dare say I can do better with practice.”

Wulfstan liked the sound of that, with its promise of a future, but they had spent so long running on assumptions, he wanted it out, plain. “I don’t understand. I wish I knew why you had changed. You no longer despise me for this? You no longer care if men see you and suppose you are mine—my boy. What happened?”

Leofgar gave a soft exhalation of laughter which ruffled the hair on Wulfstan’s crown. “I spoke to Gewis,” he explained in drowsy tones. “He pointed out to me that God himself did not despise the choice to be helpless, nor trouble to defend himself from shame. Why should I claim to be greater than God? I am proud, yes, but I am not that proud. And I know that you could not bear your folk to think you any man’s boy, whereas I have spent this last five months with Tatwine thinking me Anna’s. It didn’t kill me.”

He heaved up onto his knees, letting cold air drench the inside of the nest they had formed together. Wulfstan might have protested but for the hand under his elbow that tugged him to come up too. He obeyed because it was Leofgar, and he adored and trusted him more than any other man alive.

“My shoulders are strong enough to bear the burden of gossip and censure, when yours are not. So I will do the office of a man, and protect you from them by taking them on me. Give me your hands.”

“Oh.” Wulfstan saw their posture in his mind. He knelt before Leofgar with his head bowed and his hands raised, the palms laid flat against each other. Tears came to his eyes as he felt Leofgar enfold his hands with his own—the gesture of a lord to his man. An oathtaking. A way to vow, in the sight of each other and of God, that he would take Leofgar as his protector for the rest of his life. “Oh yes.”

“Speak,” Leofgar said, quiet and calm, his smoky dark voice full of natural authority. “Tell me what you promise.”

“My lord.” Wulfstan sniffed, for his joy filled him so completely it squeezed tears from his eyes. This was why Leofgar was worthy—to think of something so perfect, that allowed them both to cherish and rely on one another without dishonouring either of them. “My lord, accept me, Wulfstan Wulfricing, to your service. Receive my sword, my honour and my love, and use them to your glory.”

Without letting go of his captive hands, Leofgar leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. It was a surprised laughter that trembled beneath his words this time, a laugh as at a wondrous and unexpected thing. “I accept you, Wulfstan. I promise to return love for your love, protection for your honour, generous reward for your service. Let this oath bind us from now until death release us.”

Outside, a late party of travellers passed with a lantern, and the light showed him glimpses of Leofgar’s gold curls and the dazzled, hopeful look on his face. A reflection of fire caught in his grey-blue eyes and made them blaze, and his smile grew until it rivalled the moon.

Wulfstan lay back down and pulled his lover, his lord, back down with him. Fear, departing, left him incredulous, amazed.

“So,” Leofgar murmured against his collarbone. “Rome. Byzantium. The market places and libraries and scriptoria of a dozen countries.”

“And bandits.” A yawn broke free of Wulfstan’s control, but he felt too warm, too blissful and too full of hope to waste the moment sleeping. “Shipwreck, bad water, plagues and famine.”

“What do we have to fear from bandits?” There was sleep in Leofgar’s voice too, stubbornly held back. He traced the line of Wulfstan’s spine as though he was reading it, brushing his fingers along the line to point up the words. “We will kill them all, and I will make you a different song every night lauding your valour, and sing them until the pilgrims beg me to stop.”

Wulfstan snorted softly. “You’re a fool.”

“My Lord Fool to you.”

It lay in his heart like an ember, and every time Leofgar mentioned it, it flared into life and warmed him anew.

“Sleep now.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. “I want to savour this joy for as long as I can.”

“Yet have we not sworn to be together until death?” Leofgar asked, mocking-stern. “That means the joy will be there tomorrow. And all the kingdoms of the earth with it. We have a lot to look forward to, so let us not do it dropping down tired with a thick head and no appetite. Sleep.”

Since it pleased him to obey, he did.

About the Author

Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the Peak District. She studied English and Philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full-time author, Alex lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

You can find me in many places, but chiefly at
www.alexbeecroft.com
.

Look for these titles by Alex Beecroft

Now Available:

Captain’s Surrender

Shining in the Sun

Too Many Fairy Princes

Under the Hill

Bomber’s Moon

Dogfighters

Happily ever after doesn’t always come quietly. Sometimes it puts up a fight.

Too Many Fairy Princes

© 2013 Alex Beecroft

Kjartan’s family is royally dysfunctional. He’d prefer to ignore the lot of them, but can’t since his father has set him and his brothers on a quest to win a throne Kjartan doesn’t even want. Worse, his younger brother resorts to murder and forces Kjartan to teleport—without looking where he’s going.

Art gallery worker Joel Wilson’s day has gone from hopeless, to hopeful, then straight to hell. One minute he’s sure his boss has found a way to save the floundering business, the next he’s scrambling to sell everything to pay off a loan shark. If anyone needs a fairy godmother right now, it’s Joel. What he gets is a fugitive elven prince in a trash bin.

They’ll both have to make the best of it, because fairy tales run roughshod over reluctant heroes. Particularly when there aren’t enough happy endings to go around.

Warning: This sweet romance contains a starving artist trying to scrape together a living, extreme sibling rivalry, royalty behaving outrageously, and elves being unreasonably beautiful, grotesque or deadly.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Too Many Fairy Princes:

He reached out to the nearest bin and grabbed the handle, paused before lifting it. There was still time to walk away. Hadn’t he got enough trouble of his own already?

Well yes, he did. A moment of sharp joy surprised him with its cutting edge. Did he really have anything left to lose? No. That meant a certain freedom. Wherever he went from here, it could hardly get worse. He grabbed the bin with the other hand too, lifted it away, and stood for a long time looking down, sucker-punched into silence, even his mind shutting down in the face of the impossible.

Because he was far too much of a Tolkien fan not to recognise what he saw. He was just not enough of a dreamer to believe it. Oh yes, he’d told himself, “You never know.” The folklore had always been there, surprisingly consistent from country to country. People in Iceland believed enough to still leave sacrifices for the creatures, but…

But Joel hadn’t realised how firmly he disbelieved until this moment, when he found himself looking down on what was unmistakably an elf.

Of themselves, his hands came up to cover his nose and mouth. He rebreathed his own air, warm and reassuring, for a while, as his already queasy stomach curled and turned over.

It was white, the creature. Whiter than paper, its face and outstretched hands gleaming like snow under moonlight, and its hair behind it like a comet’s trail, silver as a falling star. The tunic and trousers it wore must once have been equally white—even now they glimmered with threads of silver. Its moonstone belt and baldric gleamed and flickered as it breathed.

But the knees of the trousers were torn out, and spatters of blood showed stark around them. Rips and long scuffs of dark London dirt cratered the radiance of the tunic, and everywhere it touched the ground it had soaked up the decomposed brown liquid from the bottom of the bins, sticky and stinking and wrong.

“Nhn,” said Joel at last and lurched closer as if tugged. He bent down, caught—in the middle of the reek—a faint scent like primroses after spring rain. Saw the long, twisting burn, raised and livid on the skin of the creature’s hand and arm, and his face with the brows still creased in pain and lashes like silver wire and lips as white as clouds. “Oh…”

It didn’t require belief to reach down and carefully, carefully in case his skin stung it, or his strength crushed its spun-glass delicacy, to brush his fingertips along its cheek. A little colder than human skin, a little sleeker, but the firmness was the same, as though bones and muscles still filled it out from within. He curved his hand around the half-open mouth and felt its breath like a cool breeze against his palm.

“All right, this is…this is officially not happening,” he told it as he knelt down and got a hand under one of its shoulders. Oh, not good. Where he couldn’t see, his fingers sunk into a wet mess of blood. He almost dropped it, shifted his grip clumsily, and hauled the torso into his arms. “I want you to know I don’t believe any of this, but you’re hurt and I guess I can’t take you to the hospital. And I can’t leave you here. So…”

With one arm around the creature’s back, he wormed the other under its long, slender legs, firmly told his trembling body to shape up, and lurched to his feet. It weighed more than he’d expected from something so ethereal—less than a healthy young man, but about the same as a slender young woman. At the jerk of the lift, its brows pinched in further. It gave a little musical gasp of protest or pain.