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  THE RELUCTANT BRIDE

  “I shall never marry,” Avalon said in a perfectly normal voice, as if she were saying a wheel was round.

  “That might be difficult,” Marcus said. “Since I have over a thousand people and a family prophecy that say you will.”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to do it, my lord.” Her look was amused. “You cannot force a bride if she does not wish it.”

  He leaned over on his hands and came up close to her face in one quick movement. Her eyes widened; she pulled back.

  “I think you wish it,” he said.

  A hot blush was stealing up her cheeks. “I do not!”

  “I think so.” He let his gaze linger on her lips, deep pink, erotic curves. “I know what you feel, Avalon. I know what happened to you today, when you kissed me back. I know”—he came even closer, not touching her—“what you want. Because I want it too.”

  Her breath was quickening, her eyes tinged to match her amethysts in the afternoon light. He bent down even lower, letting his lips hover over hers, so close they took in the same air.

  “It is inevitable.”

  THE TRUELOVE BRIDE

  A Bantam Book / June 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by Shana Abé.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83392-1

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Prologue

  LONDON, ENGLAND AUGUST 1159

  “Madness.”

  The courtier standing in the royal great room said the word with relish, drawing out the syllables. “It’s from her mother’s side, I heard. Some Scottish thing.”

  Lady Avalon d’Farouche brushed by the hushed conversation, which ceased altogether as she approached. She threw a languid smile at the trio of young men who bowed in return to her, not meeting her eyes. Deliberately she paused by them, pretending to flick a speck of something from her gown. The faces of all three grew heated as she stayed, looking to each other and then finally at her.

  Again she granted them a slow smile, letting them see the coldness of it, the gathering ice in her eyes. She hardly ever did this—it would only serve to feed the rumors—but the temptation was impossible to resist.

  Though the third man was unfamiliar, two of this trio had been stalking her since her debut at court a year and a half ago. They had publicly hounded her in spite of the well-known fact of her betrothal, had at first tried to woo her, and then, when she continued to politely rebuff them, they had lashed out against her, banding together to nurse the seed of gossip until it was in full flower.…

  Avalon d’Farouche of Trayleigh was cold, she was inhuman. She thought herself better than everyone else. She was tainted with dark Scottish blood and barbaric rituals. Her heart was nothing but black shards of ice.

  How little they knew her at all.

  But the rumors had not needed very much prodding to blossom. They were hurtful and ridiculous, but people had listened, as people always did when scandal was the topic. And beneath it all lay the real root of her problem: Avalon did not fit in here at King Henry’s court, and she knew it full well. So did everyone else.

  Now she looked directly into the eyes of the man who had spoken, watching him redden even further under her scrutiny.

  “Nicholas Latimer. How do you fare, good lord?”

  “Very well, my lady,” he replied. A small, thin line of sweat was beading up over his upper lip. Avalon let her gaze drift down to it, considering.

  Fear. Nightmare, whispered a voice in her head, a thing only she could hear.

  “How relieved I am to hear it.” Her words were sweet and smooth, giving no hint of her objective. “I had heard such unhappy stories, my lord, about your rest.”

  “My rest?”

  “Oh, yes. Some of the ladies are quite concerned.” She took in the other two men, both of them staring at her avidly, then gave Latimer a gentle smile. “We have heard that you … dream, my lord.”

  Now Latimer blanched. “What?” he asked, a whisper.

  Nightmare slave, suggested the sly voice.

  “Do you not dream, my lord?”

  “How did …”

  He seemed unable to complete the sentence, overcome with the loss of blood from his face, the flicker of something unmentionable in his eyes.

  Avalon examined the man who was almost trembling before her—darkness, lips, taste, want, afraid—and decided abruptly to take pity on him. “It is nothing, I am sure,” she said now. “I wish you well, all of you.”

  They watched her walk away, a lone figure in the middle of a crowded room. An invisible barrier seemed to surround her.

  “How could she know?” she heard Nicholas ask behind her.

  “A witch,” said his friend.

  The third man spoke in hushed tones, almost reverent.

  “She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  Avalon nodded thoughtfully to those who greeted her, reflecting.

  A witch.

  Surely not. Surely not, though she knew that most people at this polished, useless court were secretly convinced otherwise. But it wouldn’t take a witch to notice the constant circles under Nicholas Latimer’s beady eyes. It wouldn’t take a witch to catch the haunted look he wore, the rabid visions that danced in his pupils even while he was awake. He had nightmares, it was so plain. Anyone could see that. Not just a witch.

  She was not a witch. In fact, she didn’t even believe in them. Witches were a convenient evil thought up by fearful men to describe the unknown. Witches did not really exist. They were just poor, lonely women with no protectors, and certainly Avalon was not one of them.

  Because witches were publicly killed. It happened all the time.

  Avalon was not poor, not lonely, and she had the most reliable of protectors with her at all times: herself.

  It was not the normal way of a noblewoman, and she felt her difference sharply here in the royal court of King Henry. When she first arrived in London, she had thought the separateness she sensed was because of her rather unusual history, which was very much on the tongues of the gossips.

  Well, there was nothing she could do about that. Her history was what it was.

  That the peculiarity in her—this difference—had been with her all her life, Avalon tried not to consider. It had taken the rude shock of her seventh year to understand that not everyone was like her. Not everyone could see the things she saw, could h
ear the things she heard. Not everyone could tap into the moods of animals, could be dragged into the groundswell of any strong emotion around them.

  Only her. Only Avalon.

  It wasn’t all the time; there were long stretches of days, weeks, even a few glorious months when it seemed this awareness in her, this awful beast, would just go to sleep, and she was able to slip completely into the role of a normal girl. Avalon had treasured those times, yearned for them. But eventually it always woke up again, opened the ruthless eye in her that let her see all that she didn’t want to see.

  As soon as she realized this, she had worked hard to change it, both in body and mind. Over time she’d almost convinced herself that these incidents were mostly her imagination, fueled by the constant and relentless superstition that had saturated her childhood.

  In her darkest moments, in her waking dreams, the voice took on a vaporous form in her mind, that of a fabulous monster, a legendary thing her nursemaid once told her about that had stuck in her memory. It coalesced into a hybrid of shapes: the head of a lion, the body of a goat, a serpent’s tail.

  A chimera. It breathed misty fire only through her, it had eyes and a voice that lived only in her. It was her terrible secret, and when the darkness would turn to daylight again, Avalon would banish the image with all her might.

  Chimeras, like witches, were not real. These things that happened to her were curious, yes, even inexplicable at times. But they were anything but supernatural. To succumb to that would be to admit belief in all she disdained: the irrational folklore that had sustained Hanoch Kincardine and his kin in Scotland, their abiding faith in an arcane fairy tale of which they thought she was an intrinsic part.

  Avalon was not just the manifestation of the Kincardines’ bizarre family legend. She would not believe in that.

  But for all her rationalization, nothing ever fully stopped the strange moments that took her, nothing ever totally succeeded in killing the chimera. And so, for most of her life, Avalon had simply acted as if it wasn’t there.

  Hanoch had laughed at her efforts.

  “Ye belong to the curse,” he had so often told her. “Don’t think different, lass. Don’t hide it. It’s the only strength ye have.”

  But she had denied it, had fought him bitterly to prove that she had many strengths, that she was not weak or frail, that his jeers did not hurt her. She had fought him almost every day in large and small ways. She’d refused to submit to his clan’s foolish fable, she’d refused to believe the nonsense they told her—that she would be the one, that she would break the curse that had been laid upon them.

  Deep inside her, coiled around her heart, the chimera would echo Hanoch’s laughter, mocking.

  Now, at King Henry’s crowded court party, the madrigalists began a slow song, strumming softly on their lutes as the tenor sang something about lost love. Avalon accepted a goblet of mead from a servant and sipped it pensively. To her left was a group of young women about her age, close and closed in a circle. They tossed her haughty looks.

  Hatred, sighed the chimera, that whispering voice. Envy.

  The walls of this royal room were covered in splendid colors, elaborate frescos of fantasy and fact mixed together: dragons and griffins soared above knights, kings, and saints. Avalon walked to an empty corner and made a pretense of studying one of the painted saints, crowned and robed, tied to a stake. Burning.

  “Look at her …”

  The saint had a curiously blank expression, no reflection of the flames or the smoke at his feet.

  “Look at her there, flirting with arty man who will pass by. She shouldn’t be allowed at court.”

  “She shouldn’t be allowed in the kingdom!”

  The yellow flames were pointed and sharp, unbending, thrusting forward like painful swords of light from the sticks of wood. A starburst of redemption for the saint, no doubt, who at least had never had to endure the agony of being the most notorious guest at a king’s formal affair.

  A glance over her shoulder showed her that the circle of young women was growing bolder; they said her name in tones that were not quite docile, and they seemed to shift as one, moving to see her more clearly.

  “I heard she’s mad, you know!”

  “Hardly surprising, raised by animals—worse than animals, those Scots.…”

  Avalon stared back at them for an endless moment, then glided off again in search of peace. Yet their stream of dislike followed her, directed straight at her, and for one disconcerting instant as she walked away the chimera blinked and let her see what that circle did: a young lady of no realm, tall and pale in a bliaut of pink lined with pearls; shining hair that glowed silver in the candlelight, bound by a coronet but no veil; strange eyes that had no focus.…

  In a dusky mirror by the madrigalists a quick look confirmed the view. True, the mirror burnished her hair to phantom gray, hid the odd color of her eyes with murky darkness. But certainly that was her own face in that sideways reflection, the unusual blending of colors and features that, Avalon was sure, had doomed her debut from the start.

  “Can you believe she would shun a veil at a royal gathering? No doubt she thinks her hair her only glory, showing it off as she does. Perhaps that’s how the heathens do it in Scotland!”

  “So unfashionable to have such pale blonde hair.…”

  Silvery blonde, like moonlight, Avalon’s nursemaid used to say.

  “And so coarse that the rest of her does not match even the peculiar hair, that her brows and lashes are as black as pitch.…”

  A delightful contrast, insisted Ona, the nursemaid.

  “I don’t know why she thinks she’s fetching at all. The style au courant is dark hair, of course. And look at her complexion! White as a ghost!”

  Ona used to proclaim: Alabaster, a sign of superior breeding.

  “And her eyes!”

  “Indeed!”

  “What color are they, my dears? No one can say!”

  Not sky blue, not deep purple, but something caught between, a blend of mist and light before dawn. Violet, had claimed the devoted Ona.

  Nothing normal and ordinary, like plain blue or green or brown, Avalon reflected wryly. Violet.

  She kept walking, sipping the king’s mead and wondering when she would be allowed to leave. Her feet were growing cold in the paper-thin slippers that went with her bliaut.

  Her chaperone, Lady Maribel, was talking to three women and a man, laughing, and Avalon hated to spoil her moment. London was her glory, not Avalon’s, and she liked Maribel enough to allow her to make the most of the hopefully short time they would be spending here.

  It certainly wasn’t Maribel’s fault that Avalon had not taken to court life. Maribel had done all she could, schooled her at her own small estate at Gatting since Avalon was fourteen, taught her manners, history, French, Latin. She had ordered all of the most fashionable gowns for her, procured one of the most skilled handmaids to style her properly for every hour of the day.

  Lady Maribel herself had labored almost an entire half year to rid Avalon’s speech of the “ye.”

  It was a sorry thanks that Avalon had proven to be so unpopular in London, and for that Avalon felt remorse. Lady Maribel—an aunt so many marriages removed Avalon could not count them—had been kind if distant, and deserved to have her young charge set the town aglow, reigning in wit and beauty and popularity, a tribute to all the good woman’s work.

  But no one, not even Avalon, had expected the reaction she actually received.

  Most men seemed afraid of her, the rest had attempted to seduce her. Women scorned her. It was all baffling to Avalon. The first few months here she had endured bewildered anger and hurt each night.

  “They will come around,” Lady Maribel had comforted her. “You’ll see.”

  But they had not. Perhaps her difference truly was visible to all, despite her efforts. No matter how she tried to make friends at court, she had been rejected, over and over again, until she had learned to stop
trying and began merely to wade through the sucking waves of gossip and spite.

  She would always be a stranger here.

  The madrigalists jumped into a new tune, something livelier, prompting many of the guests in the crowded hall to speak louder, laugh longer. The servants were having problems keeping goblets filled. Avalon waved away another cup of mead and tried to find a place to stand where she would not be trampled by the swirling mass of elegant nobles. In a corner she found a candelabra of black iron and white candles, soft beeswax melting in droplets. She ducked behind it and tried not to appear as though she was using it as a shield.

  The girls across the room were not yet done with her. They nodded and swayed together, a sea of gilded gaiety.

  “I heard her cousin didn’t even want her! I heard he refused to allow her back to Trayleigh, he was so embarrassed at her manners.…”

  “Oh, aye! And goodness knows they are already embarrassed enough that she managed to survive the raid on Trayleigh Castle and live seven years in Scotland while everyone here assumed she was dead.…”

  “Shocking!”

  “Well, I heard that even that Scottish brute she is betrothed to does not want her! That Marcus Kincardine will not come back from his crusade to wed her!”

  “I heard she’s gone mad from the raid! That she cannot even recall what happened that day, when those savages came and killed everyone! That all she knows are the common ways of the Kincardines who raised her—”

  “No, no, I heard that she went mad from seeing the murders of her father and her serf maid by those Picts!”

  “Aye, isn’t it delicious? And I heard that Lady Maribel seeks to wed her off to someone here rather than to that Kincardine! That she honestly thinks one of our good lords would have the harlot, when anyone could see she is a mockery of all that is respectable!”

  “Aye.…”

  “Aye, a mockery.…”

  Avalon lowered her head and pretended not to hear. How many others caught the malice in the room? Only her, she hoped, please let it have been only the chimera listening in, and not that their voices were so loud her shame was to be shared by all.