The Unveiling (25 page)

Rowan groaned, and the hand holding his tunic to his throat flopped to the mattress. “’Tis true.”

Beyond Rowan, she saw the doorway fill with Wulfrith, but it was Rowan who held her, Rowan who had known her mother as Annyn’s father had known her, Rowan who had sought Lady Elena’s attentions and, it seemed, never received more than a grateful nod. But at least once he had lain with her.

She retreated until the backs of her knees came up against the chair. Clenching her hands, she said, “I do not understand.”

He momentarily closed his eyes. “You do not understand because your mother, like you, never knew.”

“How could she not?”

“Always she drank too much, all for love of a man denied her by marriage to your father.”

“Uncle Artur.”

“Aye,” Rowan growled. “And none knew, none but your mother and him.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “Do you know how long I have hated the Wulfriths?”

What had they to do with this? Annyn glanced at the doorway from which Wulfrith had not moved. Did Rowan know they were not alone? That the one of whom he spoke listened? Likely not, for the bed was positioned such that he would have to turn his head to see Wulfrith. And his attention was all on her.

She reached behind and gripped the chair with one hand.

“I have hated them since Drogo—and Artur—came to the castle that long ago winter day while your father was absent.” He looked to the window beyond her and cleared his throat. “Time and again, Elena called for her goblet to be topped, leaned near Drogo, smiled and laughed, touched his sleeve. I was near mad with jealousy, and so I also drank.”

He fell silent, and time interminable passed. Finally, tears wetting his eyes, he said, “That night I went to the solar to tell her of my love, but ere I could raise a hand to the door, I heard her laughter—and Drogo’s, I thought.”

Annyn felt herself into the chair.

“Telling myself she was but a harlot, I returned to the hall and filled my tankard, how many times I do not know.” He jerked his gaze to Annyn, causing a tear to slip onto his cheek. “I was drunk when I did it.”

Lord, not that. Pray, not that.
“What?”

“I returned to kill Wulfrith for having her as only a husband should.” Gaze imploring, he pushed to sitting. “But when I entered the solar, she was alone. She was smiling in her sleep, and it was then I...determined to have her myself.”

Not Rowan who had cared for her, protected her, soothed her fears, taught her to hunt, to ride, to swing a sword. Not Rowan whom she loved as she had not loved her own father.

“I put out the torch and went to her.” His voice was muffled where he spoke behind the hand gripping his face. “She whispered words of love that I told myself were for me.” He braved her gaze. “She never knew, Annyn, and I never told, not even when Jonas was born bearing the mark that most males of my family bear.”

Annyn felt ill, her mouth so dry it was a long time before she found her voice. “You violated my mother.”

Regret turned down his mouth. “I did, and I have lived every hour of every day repenting.”

Had she the strength, Annyn would have fled, but she did not. All lies, nothing to hold to in a storm. She squeezed her arms against her sides. Only minutes ago, such gratitude she had felt to discover God had answered her prayer for Rowan, that He
did
hear her. But for this? That she might know such pain and loathing?

“Though I hated myself,” Rowan broke into her thoughts, “I exalted in knowing Jonas was mine, that the strength of my manhood had surpassed the all-powerful Wulfrith.”

“But not Drogo Wulfrith,” Annyn spoke low. “Uncle Artur.”

“Aye, Artur who must have believed all these years that Jonas was his.”

Rowan and Artur, Artur and Rowan, both loving Elena, both loving Jonas. “Did my brother know?”

Rowan’s eyes snapped. “And have him look at me as you do? I could not have borne it.”

As she was to bear all that was revealed this day. She considered her hands in her lap.

Refuge in God,
she reminded herself, though she longed to rail at Him, even to deny Him.
The Lord is my light and salvation.

“Now you know why I could not love you as I did Jonas.”

Aye, and wished she did not. She lifted herself out of the chair.

“I pray you will not hate me too long,” Rowan choked. “That one day you will forgive me.”

She looked to Wulfrith who watched her. Was that pity in his eyes? Whatever it was, it made her long for his anger.

“Annyn?”

She returned her gaze to Rowan whom she should hate, but could not if she were to hold to God who was all that might keep her tattered raft from sinking. “I am done with hating, Rowan. There is no good in it. Only pain.” And what pain! She stepped around the bed.

“You will come again?”

At the doorway where Wulfrith stood, she looked around and glimpsed Rowan’s distress at realizing his confession had an audience of two. “Methinks it best that I do not.” She turned back before she was made to further suffer Rowan’s pain. Finding Wulfrith had stepped aside, she averted her gaze and crossed the threshold.

The guard was no longer outside the room, and she guessed Wulfrith had sent him away when Rowan’s tale began. Grateful, she stepped onto the stairs and began her descent that seemed to mirror the descent of her soul.

Garr stared after her.
Curse Rowan!
However, when he looked to the man, Rowan’s shame and misery pulled at him, especially now that Garr understood the reason he had taken the arrow. Any father would want punishment given to the one believed to have murdered his child.

Grudgingly, Garr inclined his head. “This shall go no further.”

Rowan stared.

Garr closed the door and strode to the stairs. Just down from the second landing, he nearly trod on Annyn where she sat tight against the wall. She surely knew she was no longer alone, but she gave no indication of it.

Garr lowered himself onto the step beside her. “Annyn?”

She clasped her hands tighter.

He knew she suffered, and he told himself he should not concern himself, but he could not walk away. He caught her chin and urged her face around. Though she lowered her gaze, he glimpsed pain that carved him up like a pig to slaughter. How could this woman, whom he had longest known as a man, do such to him? It was not for a warrior to be so affected.

“Your wounds will heal,” he heard himself say.

When she looked up, there were tears as he had known there would be. “As your wounds heal?”

The injury done him by Rowan was not all to which she referred. Indeed, it was as if she saw through him to the young boy torn between mother and father, and he was struck by the realization that they shared a past of being born to a loveless marriage. But then, marriages were first made of alliance. Few were made of love.

“Eventually,” he said, “all wounds that do not kill, heal, though the scarring may be unsightly.”

She caught her bottom lip between those neat white teeth that had marked him all those days ago. “I have wronged you. Still I say my brother was murdered, but I know ’twas not you who did it.”

From her own lips, the words he had not known he longed to hear.

“For that, and the injury done you, I am sorry, but I will not burden you by asking for your forgiveness after all that has happened.”

As she could not forgive Rowan, so she believed Garr would be unable to forgive her. He leaned nearer. “What
will
you ask of me, Annyn?”

“But one thing. Nay, two.”

“Tell me.”

She searched his eyes. “Release me.”

He should have known. “And the other thing?” he asked too gruffly.

“And Rowan as well.”

Then she forgave the man for what he had done to her mother? “Why Rowan?” Though he now knew she and the knight were not intimate, still it gripped him that she cared for the man.

She smiled bitterly. “You hold him for something of my doing. As for his sins, they are of the past, and for them he should not be held accountable to you.”

She could not have spoken truer, though it surprised Garr that at least a portion of the vengeance that had set her to taking his life did not now turn to Rowan. But then, she had said she was done hating. “If I give you what you ask, you will leave here with Rowan?”

“Nay, I will go alone.”

Because she
was
alone. These past weeks had nearly broken her. Now the only things left to her were Duke Henry’s anger and marriage to Lavonne. And Garr did not need to know her better to realize that not even for the comfort of home and privilege of the nobility would she give herself to them. “Where would you go?”

“I do not know.”

He would give her coin and an escort to see her safe to wherever she chose to flee, he determined. Their quarrel was done.

“Will you grant me this, Wulfrith?”

It was near his lips to agree, but he could not say it, not with her skin so soft beneath his calloused fingers. “I shall think on it.”

The glimmer in her eyes extinguished. “Then still you will revenge yourself upon me?”

“Nay, Annyn. The tale has been full told, and though you do not ask for my forgiveness, I give it and accept responsibility for the lie that began it.”

“Then why will you not release me?”

“Lesson fourteen—be slow to make decisions of great import.”

Indignation flared in her eyes, proof that all she had learned this day had not broken her. She pulled her chin from his grasp and began to rise. “I am no longer your pupil, Lord Wulfrith. There is naught else you can teach me that I need to know.”

Better she was angry than beset—at least, that was what Garr told himself to excuse what he did next. He stood, caught her arm, and pressed her back against the stairwell wall. “Is there not?”

She jerked her head back, causing the circlet to slip from her head veil and ring stair to stair on its descent. “Let me go!”

He had heard that before and made the mistake of yielding, which had seen an arrow put through him. He looked to her mouth and remembered it as if it were only yesterday he had first tasted its sweetness. “Is that what you truly wish, Annyn? For me to let you go?”

Her gaze wavered.

Garr drew the skewed veil from her hair, pushed a hand through the silken black strands, and gripped the back of her head. The moment his lips touched hers, she shuddered and gave her breath to him.

He tilted his head to more fully possess her, and beneath the urging of his mouth, she parted her lips and whispered, “Wulfrith.”

It was not what he wished to hear. He wanted her to call him as no woman he had known had called him. “I am Garr,” he said.

“Garr,” she whispered, then slid her hands up his chest, wound them around his neck, and urged him nearer with a desperation that should have given him pause. He wanted her more than he could remember wanting any woman, even his first who had cost him—

Opening his eyes, he saw Annyn’s lashes were moist with tears. And cursed himself for taking advantage of her battered emotions. She was no harlot. She was a lady, albeit unlike any he had met. And certainly he had never touched any lady as he now touched Annyn, having always slaked his need on those whose profession it was to pleasure a man.

When she finally opened her eyes, he raised a hand to her bruised cheek and gently swept the moisture from it. “You are right, you ought to be alone,” he acceded what he had denied her when she had believed Rowan was dead.

He pulled her hands from his neck, stepped back, and stiffly bowed. “Once more, I apologize for my behavior. It seems I have been too long without a woman.”

He could not have said anything more hurtful. Pained by what she perceived was regret at having lowered himself to one as undesirable as she, Annyn swung her palm against his cheek. “Then find yourself one and do not touch me again.”

Jaw convulsing, Garr said, “As you wish, my lady.”

Choking down the knot in her throat, she turned and somehow made it to the base of the tower without putting her heels over her head.

As she started for the doorway, the jailer stepped out of the shadows and offered the circlet that had fixed her veil in place—the same veil that now lay somewhere upon the stairs. “Yours, my lady?”

Embarrassment warming her for what he must think—nay, what he knew—had happened, she snatched the circlet and hastened outside.

As she traversed the bailey to the donjon, Rowan’s sins, beget by her mother and uncle’s sin of cuckoldry, drove a pike through her. Though her mother had often been distant, absorbed by something not understood until now, and she had been unable to hide her favoring of Jonas, Annyn had loved her. No arms comforted more, no words soothed better. But the lie Elena had lived, the deceit...

It hurt a deep path through Annyn. Was all the world made of such people? Were there none who lived a straight course? Who spoke true?

Not that she was one to judge, Annyn chastened herself for the guile she had worked at Wulfen. Indeed, it seemed she was spun of the same thread as those whose falsehoods now burdened her. Yet, at that moment, what she would not do to crawl into her mother’s lap and bury her face against Elena’s breasts.

Rising above the memory of the last time those elegant arms fit around her, Annyn’s gaze fell to the horses before the steps, the reins of which were held by a single squire.

She faltered, causing the dirt to cloud up around her skirts. Someone had come to Stern, meaning she must go past them to gain her chamber.

Scrubbing the back of a hand across her cheeks as she neared the steps, she wondered whence the tears had come when Garr—Wulfrith!—had kissed her. Her tumultuous emotions that had first mourned Rowan? Her revulsion for him shortly thereafter? The benevolence of Wulfrith’s forgiveness? Her frustration when he had put another lesson to her? The passion, desire, turning and churning of once more knowing his touch?

All these things and more, though the tears that now threatened were for his rejection. Her mother’s daughter she might be, but none would know it to look upon her.

Hearing Garr call to his men, Annyn quickly ascended the steps. However, he must have taken them two at a time, for no sooner did she step past the porter than he appeared at her side.