This time it did not scorch her throat. She could not feel anything.
"I have to tell you. I have to make you know how it was. I should never have married your mother," said Maol. "But…it had to be done."
"For Pictland." She tried to keep nineteen years of bitterness out of her voice, but she could not. It made the hand vanish. Her last human contact.
"Yes."
She heard him get up. The terrible restless pacing resumed.
"For Pictland. We needed an alliance with the Britons and so it was made in all honour. Even though your mother's maidenhead was gone long before I bedded her. Even though she was already breeding when the vows were taken."
"Modan?"
"Yes." The first son. Her beloved brother. Mayhap.
"Then who—"
"Who had got him on my wife's body? Morcant. Need you ask it?"
A dark, lean face, arrogant laughing eyes jarred in her memory. Morcant of Strath-Clòta had been in her mother's train since she could remember. It had been he who had taken her mother back to Alcluyd with her two small children. He had always been there.
Until that last day when her mother had been forced to return to Pictland with the tears of hysteria streaming down her face.
"She must have loved him and—" She cut the shocked words off. Across the width of the room, the slow, heavy tread faltered, picked up again.
"Did you hate her?"
The heavy feet stopped.
"Is that the question of a child or a fool?" The man called Maol turned round so that she could see his face. "I loved your mother to the depths of my soul. But she would have none of it."
The fine Rhenish glass slid out of her fingers. The faint musical sound as it shattered caught her senses, like the echo of her shattered world.
She had understood nothing of it at all.
"I would not let her make a fool out of me. I made sure, when she came back, that she never saw that whoremongering Briton again. She was my wife. It was me she was going to think of. Me who was going to be in her bed, and only me," spat the proud, arrogant, invincible Prince of the Picts. But the desperation in his face was visible.
Her unsteady feet scuffed the rushes as she stood, but he had already turned away.
"But whatever I said, whatever I did, made no difference. She was never mine. Just like Modan. Just like you. The only one who ever truly belonged to me was my bastard, Cunan."
The blood pulsed in her head.
"You married me into a kindred of savageness. You left Modan here to die."
He swung round.
"I made an advantageous match for you. I would have come for Modan."
"It would have been too late. Modan would have been dead. Just as I died inside when you gave me to Hun."
"No. It was only that you did not understand—"
"Oh, I understood. I understood full well that you did not love me. Even though I wanted you to love me the way I loved you. So much that I—" She cut the words off. Her damaged hand throbbed in the cold air where she held it out, a dumb, maimed witness to damage.
So much damage. Not just to her.
"I understand now why you cannot love me."
"
No. It is not true—"
The booted feet stumbled in their restless path, failed to right themselves. Then with horrifying suddenness, the figure in its fine Pictish clothes collapsed.
Her own feet crossed the chamber with a swiftness that was completely sure, even as the shock and disbelief blanked her mind. She dropped to her knees, her hand fastening on an outflung arm. His hand, buried in the sweet-smelling rushes, was coiled into a fist.
"Father—" He did not move. She stared at the bruised hand, the cut skin where Goadel had tied him. "Father."
She began shaking his arm like a madwoman, her damaged fingers sliding off his flesh. Then there was someone beside her, another presence, large, shadowing her. Her frantic hand was caught up, swallowed up by equally bruised fingers. The warrior berserker's hand. It was utterly safe.
"Brand."
He was there and he would help her with this, as with everything. Always. She forced the breath into her lungs.
"I cannot move him. He is too heavy."
Like you when I thought you were dead
.
"It is all right."
She let herself feel the living warmth of his presence beside her, drink in the incomparable steadiness of his voice. His free hand reached past the knot of their joined fingers towards her father's unmoving form, feeling for breath, for the life warmth.
"He is all right. It is just weakness. He lost blood yesterday and—"
"Like you."
"Fetch the bolster from the bed for his head and cloth and the water bowl, and some of the wine for when he wakes."
She did what he said, the numbness of body and mind responding to what had to be done.
She turned with the luxurious feather-stuffed pillow in her hands and looked at the helpless, sprawled-out figure. Then at Brand's bent head, the wide, muscular line of back and shoulder, the sure confident movement of his hands loosening the ties at the neck of her father's tunic. Maol's tunic.
Her father's.
She brought the bolster, kneeling down on the floor.
"I will lift his head and his shoulders."
"But you—"
"It is all right." Competent hands lifted the heaviness she would have dragged at. She slid the feather pillow under her father's head.
"Find the doth."
"I do not know why you would help him. He almost caused your death. He would have deposed your king."
"Get me the wine."
The precious flask slipped in her left hand. He caught it, set the flask down. But her fingers remained trapped in his.
"How did you damage your hand?"
He had seen. He had guessed.
"A riding accident."
That was what she always said. It was the truth. And then she always… She found Brand's eyes.
"I took… Maol's horse."
She had said it and the world was still there. She kept speaking. "He had a new one. He wanted to try it out" Brand kept hold of her hand. "He took Cunan with him. He was going to let Cunan ride it. He would not take me. He never did."
She did not know why she said this. Now. When it could no longer matter. Because she was not Maol's daughter.
"I took the stallion he had left in the stables. I was ten winters old. I wanted to show I could ride. I wanted to go after them. After
him
. I wanted it so much that—"
The only thing she could feel was Brand's hand, his presence, the fact that he was there. That was how it always was. Even in the confines of the Wessex nunnery she had imagined he was there.
"I could not manage the horse, so it threw me. I did not die and it was actually Maol who found me. I thought things would change. I was only ten. But nothing changed. Only this."
She turned the crushed fingers on the steadiness of his palm.
"He had to apologize for the damage when he arranged my marriage with Goadel. He complained that it lessened the size of the morning gift Goadel would offer. I hated him for that." Her breath shivered.
"But you still wanted his love."
She could not even say the word
yes
. But Brand would know it. The way he always saw such things and understood. She felt the kind of acceptance that stopped people from turning mad with shame and grief and all the miserable hurts that life inflicted.
She watched her flesh lying against his and she thought of the way he had kissed her, taken her damaged fingers inside the passionate heat that was his, as though she were not hideous but something to be valued. - In a moment of time that had no future.
The heat surged through her again and her twisted fingers tangled with his, held there, and it was as though the power of the moment still had life, recaptured, and she was desired, deeply. Valued. Wanted in the way she had only ever known from him. She thought she felt the power of that vibrate through his skin.
But then his hand was moving, sliding away from hers, placing the broken fingers on Maol's crumpled sleeve.
He poured water from the pitcher into the brass bowl and she found the linen, dipped it in, let the water flood over her hand.
"Why are you doing this? Helping him?" She tried not to tremble, just because he had touched her. Her hand pressed the damp cloth lightly against a brow etched with lines of high temper, the thinner skin at the temple.
"You have told me yourself. Cenred is having mass said for him. It is not for me to choose."
"I do not believe that is the reason."
"Then call it a debt payment."
Her eyes sought his.
"A__"
"He is waking."
Her gaze turned to the white face and the eyes the colour of Cunan's.
"Alina."
"Father." The word was past her lips before it had time to form in her head. But she did not call it back. Sometimes there were no choices.
The thin lips in the bloodless face moved with an effort that pained.
"I am sorry…for what I have done to you." The temper-harsh voice choked and she knew that the pain had not only been physical.
"It is all right."
"It will be." He levered himself upright and then she was lost in his amis. The shock took her breath. He had never, never done that since she was the smallest child. She did not even know what his touch was like. Her hands lighted awkwardly on heavy shoulders bowed with more than forty winters of bitterness.
"It will be all right, my daughter. You have my promise. I will let you go where you wish. To Strath-Clota."
Her hands on the unfamiliar shoulders shook.
"To
Strath-Clòta
?"
"I have said so. Did you think I would go back on a promise made in return for my life?"
"A promise? A promise to whom?" The coldness of the air choked off her words. The coldness of the room. Emptiness.
"It is my debt payment. The Northumbrian…the Northumbrian holds my word."
The darkness was complete, starless
. Alina could not see the waves, only hear them surge against the rocks, like the voice of some ravenous beast. It was so restless, this Northumbrian sea. So unlike the deep waters of Alcluyd, the jewel of Strath-Clòta. She could see that other palace in its high place, bright with the gilding of childhood memories.
Alcluyd
.
He wanted her gone.
He had taken a life-price to make her father agree.
He could have died.
She did not have to turn to look at Northumbrian Bamburgh to see the light that burned in his chamber.
She wondered whether his kinsman, King Cenred, was still there. Or his people from Lindwood. Or Duda flashing silver like a real thane. That was his life. It was not hers.
He had given her freedom.
It was what she had wished since she had been a small child: freedom and her place in life. Now they were hers. A gift beyond price.
She turned, blind in the dark, her feet slipping on wet rock.
"What the devil do you think you are doing?"
The shape, blacker than the starless night, seemed to grow out of the rock as though it were not human.
Perhaps it was not.
It was the hellhound.
"Cunan."
He steadied her arm, so that she could regain her balance. But when she would have pulled away, he did not let go.
"Why are you not with him?" The bite in his voice was sharp, familiar.
"I have been. Why did you not come to him? He is your father—"
"Maol? Ah. It has been a family gathering, has it? Nay, my father will not want me when you and Modan are by. I never crowd family gatherings. You know that. Did you wish me to let you go?"
He released her, so abruptly she almost staggered again as he brushed past her, swaggering the way he always did, all but forcing her feet off the rock ledge.
She watched his back. The wind tore at her and then she saw it. It was as though the scales of misunderstanding that had fallen from her view of her father had cleared her sight of her half brother, too.
"Cunan."
She scrambled after him. The impossibly vulnerable figure stopped, but did not turn. She could not see his face in the blackness, not with her body's eyes. But she could with her mind.
"He has told me." The words struck against the wind. "He has told me what you knew all the time— that Modan and I may well be no more to him than you are. Less. Because at least there is no doubt you are of his blood."
The man who might or might not be her brother turned round. He moved, like a blacker patch of night, crowding her in the narrow treacherous space. But what she had always seen as a threat now seemed oddly empty, defenceless.
"He told me everything."
"Everything? He would have married my mother if that foreign trollop had not come. My mother was well enough born. But no, all he could see was that inconstant bitch from Strath-Clòta. And her children, his or not."
The black shape leaned over her, like something that could take the light from her. The way it always had. Abruptly, it wrenched away, leaving only the restless beat of the east wind. She spoke into its power.
"Do you want to know what else he said to me?"
"No."
She grabbed his arm, the way he had grabbed hers, swift and vicious as a hunting cat.
"He said that the only child of his who ever truly belonged to him was you."
The arm under her hand was tighter than a bowstring before the shot flies.
"Do you say that in truth?"
"I would not say it otherwise."
"No. I do not suppose you would. Do you know how much I hated Modan the firstborn all these years?"
"Yes."
The arm was not steady.
"And you. But then the feeling was mutual, was it not?"
The arm would have pulled out of her grasp, but she held on to it.
"No. Although it would have made my life much easier if I had. But I always thought of you as a true brother."
"A brother…"
The shadow of his head bent, as though he were staring at her hand where it rested on the blackness of his sleeve.
"It was you who would not believe it."
"You little fool."