Shana Abe Read online

  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.”

  They 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 a
nd 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.

  Marcus had lived in both worlds, that of the wild mountain Highlands and that of the unforgiving deserts, and how could he ever bring the two together for his clan when he couldn’t even do it for himself?

  He was caught, precarious, on the line that separated these two opposing poles, trying to find a peace somehow between them.

  “She is quiet,” said Balthazar now, nodding his head to the lone woman in the leaves and ferns.

  A very bad sign, Balthazar was saying, and Marcus could not help but agree.

  “We’ll make the next marker by tomorrow noon.” It was Hew, his lieutenant, approaching the two men with bread for each of them. All three then turned back to look at Avalon.

  “Did she eat?” Hew asked.

  “Aye,” said Marcus. “Not much.”

  “Ye should make her eat more,” observed Hew.

  “Aye.” Marcus took a deep breath, clearing the aggravation from his head. Making Avalon eat the little she did had been trial enough.

  She didn’t want the bread. She wouldn’t touch the cheese. She turned up her nose at the oatcake and clamped her lips shut, turning her back to him.

  It had taken Balthazar to get her to eat even an apple, both of them sitting together in the woods as if they were all alone.

  Marcus had watched the scene while bent over his saddle, adjusting a loose seam in the leather. He had to walk away from her after she refused the oatcake. He didn’t want to but she was trampling his reputation beneath her pretty feet without having to utter a word, just the straight line of her back and the unequivocal rejection of him tearing him to shreds. Everyone had been watching; Marcus was sharply aware that he was still relatively new to most of these men, and they would be judging him by his actions.

  It was either walk away or force her. And he would not force her. That had been his father’s way, not his own.

  He thought now that it was fortunate for both of them that the legend had it she would be predisposed to hate him. Her behavior now, in fact, served only to seal the idea in the clansmen’s minds that she would be their salvation.

  But she had to eat, and it frustrated him that she would not.

  Then came Balthazar, graceful and dignified, a blaze of indigo and saffron robes amid the muted colors of the woods. He had squatted near Avalon but not too near. Just enough to get her attention, Marcus supposed.

  Marcus had no idea what his friend had said to get her to eat, if they had spoken at all. He had not heard any words exchanged, but after a few minutes she had reached for the apple Bal handed her.

  She had even changed her mind about the bread, consuming it in tiny, slow bites as she stole glances at Bal.

  “She has pride,” said Balthazar now, and Marcus thought this was meant to be an understatement. “It will not let her eat from your hand.”

  Hew frowned. “Not eat from the laird’s hand? She’ll be changing her mind soon enough on that, no doubt.”

  “No doubt, as you say,” agreed Bal serenely.

  Marcus knew then he had more than a battle on his hands. More, in fact, than he had ever anticipated. It was going to be war.

  Chapter Four

  For seventeen years of his life Marcus had dreamed of his family tartan. It was black with thin, even stripes of gold and red and purple, and to the young man he was, it had represented everything of meaning in his existence.

  He had worn it with pride all the way to Jerusalem with Sir Trygve, had mended the tears it gathered on the journey, washed out the blood—his and the enemy’s—when he could. It had lasted a powerful long time, that thick woolen tartan, and even though the Holy Land had days so hot it seemed the skin would melt from his bones, he had not taken it off. It was the symbol of his clan, his home, his hope.

  Aye, he had worn it thin, until the pleats were stiff with grime and blood and desert dust, and every night he had dreamed of the day he could go back to Scotland.

  Until Damascus. Until that one night when it had been torn off his body and burned, his boyhood dreams burned with it.

  When it was over he had taken up Sir Trygve’s hauberk and shield, and that had been his uniform ever since. But every now and again the dreams had crept back, slipped through the cracks of his defenses and made him think impossible thoughts: snow, woodsmoke and crisp air, green valleys. Innocence.

  It had taken an act of will greater than he knew existed to don the tartan again when he finally returned. Only Balthazar might have understood how hard it had been. Only Balthazar had been there in Damascus and watched Marcus abandon his hope.

  Still, he would not give in to the seduction of the comfort the plaid offered. Not so easily. He kept his own Spanish sword at his waist, a clear outward sign of his inward difference. That the people of his clan had admired it, thought it a cunning and lethal thing was fine. It would not have prevented him from carrying it even if they had loathed it. He needed something, some visible thing to keep him in check amid the rough paradise of Scotland, to keep him from forgetting the trials he had endured in foreign lands.

  Nevertheless, the tartan he wore now was new and sturdy, and Marcus could not help but think it a miracle of sorts, the straight threads of gold and red and purple, the solid black around them. It was the inviolable tie to his heritage he needed as much as that Spanish blade.

  So here was Lady Avalon in front of him this morning, and the sun had decided to rise and shine through the trees, catching in the ivory silk of her hair, caressing the curve of her cheek.

  She was so lovely, even in her fancy ruined gown. She was so lovely as she took the tartan Marcus held out to her and threw it to the ground at his feet.

  “I have made a vow never to wear it again,” she said, defiant and delicate all at once. He was not fooled by that delicacy. She was the product of Hanoch as surely as he was.

  “Alas for you,” Marcus told her, picking it up. “For you are going to wear it anyway.”

  She didn’t back down, not one bit, but stood ready, fists at her sides, leaves clinging to her. The amethysts on her bliaut were undimmed, glinting in the sunlight.

  “You will have to make me,” she said, soft and deadly.

  In his mind’s eye she was undressed suddenly, fully undressed and delightfully available, beckoning him with a smile. By heavens, he was more than ready for that, to have that unbelievable hair wrapped around him, to taste her again. It would be sweeter and hotter this time, it would not be a lesson but a pleasure—

  Marcus blocked the vision, shocked at his loss of control.

  Her eyes had become very wide, her whole body grew still as she stared up at him.

  She knew. She knew what he had thought. He knew that she knew.

  It was unexpected, that they would be able to touch thoughts like this, the curse had never mentioned it. But Marcus didn’t doubt the power was real. He had grown up on the legend, it had been ingrained in him from babyhood, his mother crooning his destiny to him in her soft voice as he went to sleep. After she died, when he was ten, it was the women of the clan who took her place, who told and retold the legend to him so that he might understand his role in it when he became a man.

  Marcus believed in the curse, and strange as it was, he believed that the bride could know the thoughts and hearts of others. He knew such a power was real, because a tiny fragment of that gift lived in him, as well. And it was a gift. He would not believe it could be anything else.

  Avalon snatched the bundle of cloth from his fingers, walking briskly away. She pushed aside the flap of blanket he had hung between a pair of bushes for her privacy and disappeared behind it.

  He could see the outline of her shadow, blending in and out of those of the branches and leaves. A perfect profile, a perfect arm reaching out, a perfect teasing glimpse of a shadow thigh. Perf
ect everything.

  When she emerged again, she wore the tartan.

  Praise the clanswoman who had thought to include the silver brooch to secure it and the black gown that went beneath it. Marcus would have never remembered such things.

  Lady Avalon threw him a glance as she walked over to her unfinished breakfast. A glance that meant … what? Anger, yes. But something else less easily defined. Wariness, perhaps. Fear—he hoped not. No, it wouldn’t be fear, not in her. More likely caution.

  Well, that would be a good thing. She was already almost more than he could handle; a little respect tossed in his direction would not be amiss.

  His men watched her eat in silence, noted the neat pleats in the tartan she had managed by herself, all of them exactly right. They exchanged satisfied looks over her bowed head. No one else knew what Marcus did, that she had only capitulated so that she could walk away from him and not have him follow.

  Avalon sat on a flat stone in the ground and morosely chewed an oatcake.

  Here it was again, that horribly familiar plaid enclosing her body. She really had sworn not to wear it again. She had been fourteen, and the night she had crossed the border from Scotland back into England she had taken it off for what she had thought would be the very last time. She had burned it herself in the hearth of the inn where they stayed, had watched the flames eat into it, and no one had said a word to her, not the king’s emissary nor the soldiers nor the innkeeper. They had all witnessed it turn to ash with her.

  And now like a bad dream it had returned, the Kincardine tartan draping over her shoulder and wrapping around her waist, just as it did the shoulders and waists of all the other women of the clan. She had remembered how to handle the giant square of material without thinking twice; her fingers had readily managed the tricky tucks and folds that had taken her untold time to master as a girl. She knew she looked no different from any of them now. It filled her with gloom to realize how easy it was for the Kincardines to absorb her into themselves again.

  And was this moment of relative freedom worth the loss of that vow she had made? Was it worth it just to stem the torrent of feeling she had sensed from Hanoch’s son when he faced her over the rejected bundle of cloth?