By Possession (14 page)

Is that what he said.

Joan looked at her meaningfully, hungry for details.

Moira could not oblige her even if she wanted to. She had not been at Barrowburgh during those months, had not even come for the wedding. The last she had seen of Addis had been his broken, bandaged body lifted into the wagon that would take him home. Beside him had sat Claire, her face a mask of duty and obligation.
Not proud. Young and frightened
.

She did not want to talk about this. She groped for a way to change the subject only to realize that she didn't want to talk about anything. In fact, she didn't want to be here any longer. Ann had managed to squeeze herself among the men at the table where she could give Addis her full attention. Lucas looked a little embarrassed by the girl's boldness. Addis neither encouraged nor discouraged her.

“You don't mind?” Joan asked, glancing to them both.

“It is not for me to do so.”

“Nay, with such a man … still, a woman has feelings.”

“I do not mind.” That was not true. While she had no intention of giving him what he wanted, she still resented the idea of his bedding Ann instead.

Well, she couldn't have it both ways. Her good sense had been praying for deliverance since she got on that horse even if another part of her had not, and now redemption from her own weakness had been sent in the form of an eager girl with tawny hair.

Joan had told her about the daughter's cottage, and Moira stood abruptly. “I will go prepare the house,” she said, wondering if Addis would bring Ann there and if she should just bluntly ask Joan if there was a pallet in another house that she could use.

“She and her mother have their own place a few doors down,” Joan explained kindly, lighting a candle and handing it to her.

Moira slipped through the crowded room toward the
door. At the threshold an invisible connection touched her like a hand on her shoulder. She looked over her shoulder to see those dark eyes noting her departure.

She found the little cottage without difficulty. Its new thatching and clean plaster announced it the home of newlyweds. She opened the door and her candle's flame pierced the gloomy interior. Finding the window over the bed, she threw open the shutters to the moonlight.

Buckets stood by the hearth. After lighting a low fire, she collected two and made her way back to the village well. Sounds of revelry still poured out of Lucas's house. She carried her burden back to the welcome silence of the cottage and set the water near the hearth.

Lucas's daughter was an impeccable housekeeper, and the cottage needed no preparation. In fact it possessed an organization and cleanliness that made Moira uncomfortable. It reminded her of her own cottage at Darwendon, and nostalgia for those four years with Brian flooded her.

It had been almost like having a real home and family during that time. She sat by the hearth, using some of the warmed water to wash, fighting the bittersweet mood that those memories evoked. A real home. A secure place. She hadn't had either since she was thirteen years old. A child to love and care for. A spot of stability and warmth in an indifferent, angry world.

The thoughts weighed on her, emphasizing the loneliness that she had known in her life so often that it had become predictable. Worse after Edith died. Excruciating with Claire's passing. Unassuaged by that brief marriage, but wonderfully dulled for four years by caring for a child.

She wanted that balm again. She yearned to feel centered and grounded in one place, with a purpose that mattered and a small world that belonged to her forever. Not the Shadow, but, for a few people at least, for her family, a source of light.

The reflections saddened her and she tried to cast off the mood. When that didn't work she walked out of the cottage to escape its strange power. The little house stood at the edge of some fields, and just past its croft she spied the high roof of the open structure that protected the hay mound. She picked her way through the neat garden toward it.

The sweet smell of hay wafted to her on the cool breeze. She shifted some this way and that, making a ledge on which to sit. Lying back in its springy support, she could watch the half moon and the starry dots sprinkling the velvet darkness.

She began counting those little marks of brightness and her mind wandered through memories recent and old. Her heart grew full and vulnerable. She became isolated from everyone and everything except this little ledge of hay and that vast sky propelling her consciousness freely through space and time.

CHAPTER 7

N
OT PROUD, JUST
young and frightened …

The passageway smelled cool and damp and the stones absorbed the faint scuffle of her shoes. No sounds here, like so many places in the castle this day. The whole household had grown subdued, holding its breath, waiting for death.

She had already tried all of Claire's other hiding places. The chapel, the east tower roof, the nook beside the hall hearth. Now she peered into the shadow under the stairs rising from the kitchen. Her candlelight reflected off a cascade of blond hair draping a huddled body.

A head moved and blue eyes looked up, wide and frightened and then relieved. “Thank the saints it is you.”

She bent down over her friend. Two years older than she, but a child again suddenly. “You must come.”

“I cannot,” Claire breathed, shaking her head slowly, looking to a spot on the floor.

“You must. Your father sent me to find you.…”

“I cannot!” She glared up. “Have you seen him? Have you?

Cut to pieces. My God, he had no face left, and his body …” The words sliced, full of horror. The tone was close to hysterical.

“Wounds always look worse at first. My mother says it is the bruising that deforms his face, that no bones were broken. She will tend him. There will be a scar, but all knights have scars.…”

“He will be crippled and he looks monstrous.” She said it bitterly and her eyes glazed, looking inward. What did she see in her soul? A betrothed girl lacking the strength to do her duty toward her intended? A spoiled girl angry that fate had played such a trick on her? Both most likely, but a man suffered upstairs and Moira found that she had little patience all of a sudden with Claire's delicacy and selfishness.

“He is asking for you. Whenever he becomes conscious he says your name. You must—”

“I must, I must! Who are you to tell me what I must? Go back and tell them that you could not find me. Say that you did but I am ill. Do whatever you choose, but I will not come with you. I cannot bear to look at him.” Her body began shaking, a slow shiver at first, but then jerking movements that made her cross her arms over her belly. She shook her head and careened like a mourner, heaving dry sobs. “Oh, my Addis. My beautiful, beautiful Addis …”

Moira gave her one last glance. So, this was love. What a thin, fragile, self-centered thing it could be. She turned on her heel and ran back up the stairs.

Sir Bernard paced outside the chamber, as worried as if the young man behind its door were his own son. “Where is she?”

“I … she is very ill. Prostrate with pains in the stomach.”

His eyes narrowed angrily and he glared down the passage at the void where his daughter should be approaching. Shaking his head, he took her arm. “Your mother is going to open and purify his hip. God willing the pain will put him out, and he is mad in his head from the fever, so perhaps …”

She resisted, not wanting to go in any more than Claire had.

His fingers closed more tightly. “Stand by his head, girl, and speak to him while it is done. Maybe he will think it is she.”

She found herself pulled into that torture chamber. Her mother looked up expectantly, then pursed her lips when she noted Claire's absence. Moira pleaded with her eyes to be spared this horror, but Edith was all business suddenly, laying a dagger in the coals of the low fire.

The space smelled of corruption and sweat and the noxious odor turned her stomach. Raymond and two other men stood alongside the bed. She forced herself to walk around them and look at the man lying there.

Bandages swaddled half his face where Edith had sewn the cut. They covered part of his swollen mouth and so his fevered ramblings came incoherently. Pain and bruising distorted the face she could see, thinner than she remembered, the bones looking very sharp, the youth looking suddenly old. Sympathy for his agony shredded her heart and her resistance.

They had stripped him, and she glanced down to the festering wound slicing diagonally from his waist through the top of his thigh. Someone had sewn it roughly on the field, to cover exposed bone and hold his stomach in, they had said. Edith suspected the sword had nicked the gut, causing the corruption to set in quickly.

She moved close to his head. Raymond shot a questioning look at his father, who remained stoically nonexpressive. Edith rose from the hearth and came forward with the dagger, its hilt wrapped in a thick cloth.

Someone had placed some water on a table near his head. She dampened a cloth and wiped the battered face as gently as she could, hoping she could give some small relief, feeling his pain as if her own body had been ravaged. Oh, Addis. My beautiful, beautiful Addis.

He felt her touch and grabbed her arm. The unbandaged eye opened to reveal a dark pool aflame with golden lights burning out of control. He peered at her and something like rational awareness flickered over his expression. He looked down his body at the men flanking him, and the hideous wound, and Edith with her dagger. His jaw stiffened.

Someone brought a stool and she knelt on it. She leaned forward and stroked his hair, cradling his head against her chest. “I will stay with you,” she whispered, hoping he would think she was Claire but knowing from that look that he would not. Still, the comfort seemed to soothe him.

Bernard nodded and four pairs of hands pressed down to hold him. Addis pulled his right hand free and sought hers and grasped it tightly to his chest. Edith bent over the hip.

He twisted his head toward her violently with the first hot cut and clutched her hand like a dying man. She pressed her lips to his temple and battled for composure and whispered prayers and poems and songs of love while he smothered his screams in her breast.

She became aware of his presence slowly, sensing it before the body leaning against the post took form in the shadows. He did not startle her. His reality simply emerged out of her thoughts like a seamless continuation suddenly given substance. How long had he been there?

Not now. I will have little strength now.

His shoulder pressed against the post and his arms crossed his chest. She might have been dreaming into the sky but he had been contemplating her and his attention created a disturbance in the breeze that had alerted her to him. She did not speak to let him know she had seen him, but waited desperately for the perilous mood of her memory to pass.

“I thought that you might have fallen asleep,” he said.

How could he be sure she hadn't? He could not see her face well in this darkness. Perhaps he heard the slow, hard pounding of her heart.

“Do you think to stay out here all night?”

“I had not planned to, but since … why aren't you with Ann?” It just blurted out, sounding more petulant than she felt.

He did not answer at once. He just stood there, filling the night with a subtle danger, making this hay mound a much less peaceful place all of a sudden. “I am not with her because I do not want to be.”

“It would simplify things if you did.”

“Would it? I don't think so. For this night perhaps. No more.”

She sat upright on the ledge of hay and looked out to the dark fields. His arrival had started a visceral throbbing in her that seemed to affect the whole night, as if the air and the crops absorbed a rhythm from her. The sensation was both unsettling and alluring. He hadn't moved, but his own pulse became noticeable in the space between them, as if his life force were adjusting to hers, seeking to join it beat for beat. Instinct mumbled warnings in her ear, but her spirit, hungry for unity of any sort, responded with an astonishing yearning.

“What do you want with me, my lord?” She sighed the question, emphasizing the
me.

“You have not called me that before. Do not start now.”

“I think it best if I do. It is a reality that I forget at great cost.”

“As your lord, I forbid it.” He walked toward her. Common sense demanded that she jump away from him. She didn't.

He settled onto the hay beside her and all of her senses snapped alert. She should have made the ledge larger so she could scoot away and his hip and shoulder would not graze hers like this, raising that horrible, wonderful friction.