"Alina…trust Duda. He knows…"
She leant lower, trying to shield him from view with her body. All her senses trained on the strained mouth.
"Do not go with Cunan… betray…"
Her brother, her flesh and blood. Her only link with her home.
"Why…" But it was too late. Someone grabbed her arm and even as she braced herself, clinging to the fever-wracked body she could feel the life of consciousness drain out of it.
"Lady, come away." .
Duda. Even his hands were hairy. He had won then. It was hardly surprising. He had half a dozen Northumbrians at his back.
Above her she heard Cunan's voice arguing. He was the one who was supposed to protect her.
But all she could see, all she could think of was the lifeless form in her arms and the fact that his last conscious thought, right or wrong, whatever he believed her future should be, had been of her. All that filled her mind was the bond that had been forged between them those long months ago in Bamburgh. Tested by loss that could not be borne without breaking.
Their bond was shattered, yet even so, her last thought, her last action, would be for him.
Behind her Cunan's voice rose. The werewolf's paw on her arm tightened. There was only one weapon that would keep her with Brand.
She fixed her gaze on the abbot.
"Father, if you could send for the infirmarian to help my husband…" There was an appalled silence behind her. She filled it by saying, "I know something of healing myself and I can help."
She took a strength-giving breath. "My husband is all in the world to me." She let her voice rise in pitch, become shrill, but piercingly clear. "I will not be parted from him." The words rent the air in a male-chilling shriek of womanly desperation.
Her hand, despite the weakness of badly healed bones, despite the grip of the wolf's claws at her wrist, embedded itself in Brand's tunic. The other hand lighted on his unconscious face with a possessiveness none could miss. It was not feigned.
No one moved. She took another breath. She sobbed. The abbot must have thought it pathetic. The others knew precisely what it was: a declaration of war.
The next sob took on an edge that made teeth grate.
"Of course you must stay with your husband and help care for him. There is terrible danger on the road for travellers. We will do all we can to aid you." The abbot's hand patted her shoulder in a commendable attempt to stem the threatening flood of hysterics. She used the opportunity to shake off the werewolf's paw. Her foot slid back, stabbing into Cunan's ankle.
The abbot got to his feet, filling the small space she had created behind her. "You and your husband are safe now."
She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and, she hoped, quite luminous with gratitude. Gracious-ness in victory. Always.
"Saint Dwyn reward you for your kindness, Father."
Even Brand would have appreciated the apposite-ness of that
He was going to die.
It was so obvious that when the abbot came to administer extreme unction, no one protested.
Alina watched. It did not matter what she had done, neither her strategy, nor her vain attempts at healing. Some things could not be turned aside.
The infirmarian had tried everything, every wort and herb and simple. No one could have faulted his skill. Just as no one could doubt the faithful wife's devotion, or the watchful loyalty of companions, all of them, bristling with weapons. Cunan had had the sense to keep his mouth shut Duda, his command firmly established, was not in a mood to refer to reason.
She glanced at Cunan's furious face. She did not believe he would be harmed while Brand was alive. But afterwards, if he did something that… She could not think of afterwards.
When the sacrament was over, Duda threw everyone out of the chamber. Healing, he said, had proved useless. Prayers could be said in the chapel with the same effect. Wives could weep elsewhere.
"I do not weep," said Alina, "but I scream very well. The brothers will hear me."
She thought for one moment that the
seax
he was toying with would be stuck through her throat. But in the end Duda did not move.
She brushed past the naked edge of the blade and sat down at her accustomed place on the wall bench with the pitcher of water.
There was no point in going on, but she could not stop. Her arm reached out in the rhythm that had become eaten into her brain. She watched the muscles shake with fatigue. It was quite visible even under the coarse wool of her sleeve.
Soak the cloth with cool water, squeeze it out. Touch him. Smooth the wad of wet linen across the alien-familiar form of his body, the long, sleek, full-muscled shape of arm and leg, the wide chest: smoothly dense skin, dark gold hairs flattened by the water, by her touch. Burning. All burning.
The cloth under her hand heated before her touch could bring relief. Nothing she could do to stop all that brilliant, precisely constructed beauty, all that frightening, virile, masculine strength from being consumed before her eyes.
When she touched him with her hand, his fire burned through the aching wet coldness of her fingers.
Her hand dropped. Mostly because her arm was too heavy for her to move. Mostly because her heart was dead.
She slumped, buried her face in the damp-glittering mass of his hair. So close that her face fitted beside his like the other side of a coin. His heat enfolded her like a shield against the chills that chased over her exhausted body. If she just cast herself on those warm, strong planes, if she placed her arms around his body and held him, she would be safe. Nothing, besides him, had ever made her safe. The urge to do that, just to hold on to him for eternity, was overwhelming.
But she could not. The warmth of him was destructive. The breath that slid so softly across her skin was fought for. The wide, strong chest strained for every inward life-giving gasp of air, so that she was afraid to touch it.
She kept her hand at his head, where the life-force found its home, the force that burned too strongly. Her voice spoke, even before she knew what it would say.
"You must not die." The words whispered into the tangled, sweat-streaked hair were low, but clear as crystal water. "You cannot. There are too many people who need you. Look at Duda."
She raised her head to glance across the room.
"See?"
She had no fear of any reaction from the heap of despair across the room because she spoke in Celtic. Her language, and yet not so. Theirs. Because they had shared it. It was what they had spoken in the night, when they had fled through the dark, when they had shared what small secret moments they had had, in love.
She buried her face again in his hair, as though he had looked with her, as though he could hear her. As though it were not utterly and wildly mad to carry on a conversation with an unconscious man.
"He is loyal to you and he depends on you. He would collapse into a heap of grubby rags and disintegrate without you. He does not want you to go. If he knew how, he would beg you."
As I would.
"Brand?" The heated body moved. As though he heard, as though he knew and would not forsake them.
"Brand…" But it was nothing, just fever dreams. Each time his tormented body moved, each time the dry lips seemed to form words, her heart leaped. But he did not see her, could not return her words.
The only breath of sound she had recognized had not been her name. That name had belonged to the man who had been sacrificed.
Athelwulf.
The. division between them was not in the power of either of them to heal.
She touched his brow. But even her touch made him twist away from her, like someone in torture.
like someone who was cut off, even from what would help them.
Like someone who was alone.
Even when he said his brother's name it was as though he warded someone away.
She picked up the cloth, plunged it into the water, squeezed it out. Her hand shook, from exhaustion, from fear, from pity and helplessness and…soul-destroying rage. The cloth hit the wall with a smack that shocked the rag bundle on the other side of the bed out of its motionless despair.
She did not care. Her hands sank into the heap of discarded herbs on the scrubbed wooden table, horehound and feverfew, henbane, viper's bugloss and the seeds of cleavers. And vervain. Vervain the enchantment herb that staunched bleeding, dispelled fevers and the effects of snakebite, and when it was rubbed on the body granted wishes.
It conciliated hearts.
There was naught it could do here. It was useless. Everything was useless: the cloth, the herbs, the whole skill of the infirmarian. Even Duda's despair was useless. Her hands tightened on crushed leaves.
They were all powerless to fight his illness because none of them understood. It had nothing to do with the wound.
She was the only one who knew the cause. And she was the one who could not heal it
Because there was nothing else that could be done, she stepped into the flames with him.
She gathered the burning body into her arms, beyond thought of whether she would damage the wound or strain the laboured breath in his lungs. She held him with a strength beyond the tiredness in her arms, The coolness of her body melded with the heat of his until it was consumed and there was only one body tormented by the same pain and the words that came spilling out of her head were the words she had most wanted to say.
"It is me who cannot live without you. You cannot leave me. You have to remember what we said. That we would abide this together, whatever happened for right or wrong."
She took a shaking breath. "I would share all the wrong that has happened, as much as the right I know what my blame is and I would not leave you to bear what you should not." Her voice was like a thread in the darkness, something he might not have heard had he been conscious. "I am with you…"
Her words sped up, tumbling over one another while she held him. They whispered against his hot flesh. "I have not broken the vow we made, not truly. I might have seemed to because I could not bear the thought of what you would lose for my sake."
Her hands fastened with desperation on burning flesh, fragments of leaf clinging to her damp skin: white horehound, feverfew. And vervain that held magic. The coolness of her breath mingled with his.
"I never left you in my mind, in my heart. You were always there and you always will be. If you leave now, if you pass into the shadows, I will go with you. That is how it will be with us, always."
She was aware, in some other part of her brain, that Duda was on his feet, might be moving toward her. The thought did not stop her, nothing that belonged to the world could. Her hands held him, fragrant leaves crushed against his skin.
"You will not go. You will live. I know you will, because you will not leave with so much still to be done. With so many who need you. Because that is what you do. Abide with people and help them and understand their pain. You will not go. I know it even if you do not. It does not matter if you do not know. I know it for you."
His skin burned.
Alina woke in the same position as before, with her head jammed into his chest and her body curled up tightly into a ball, like a frightened child's.
He did not stir.
It was like waking into the same nightmare. Except it was not the pure cold light of dawn against her eyelids, it was a flickering golden glow, and she knew exactly where she was.
She could not have slept. Not at this time. It was not possible. How long? How long had she slept and why had no one woken her? Duda? Cunan? The monks?
The red-yellow glow beat against her eyelids: torchlight mixed with the light from the hearth in the monastery chamber. Fire's heat.
She could not open her eyes.
"Duda…"
He would be there, the Anglian werewolf, lurking on his side of the bed like some angry, despairing spirit. He would be able to tell her.
"Duda?"
There was nothing. Not a sound.
There was no one there. The chamber was empty. They had left her alone.
They had left Brand alone.
How could they have done that?
She twisted round, opening her eyes, forcing her useless limbs into movement. She turned her head.
The aching sobs, suppressed all night, rose chokingly in her throat, found their way out at last, so that her stiffened body was racked with them.
The sobs would not stop. Even though she should not cry. Not now.
But then that was what had the power to rend the heart most truly, not death, but life.
She buried her head in flesh that was scarcely warm, that was cool, blessedly, miraculously cool. She wrapped her arms round it, buried her hands in it, her whole body. Held it close, in her embrace, because just for that moment, it was hers.
He slept. Not like before when she had woken beside him in the morning under the trees, but with a quality that was quite different. Peace. It took her a while to recognize what it was. Because it was something that she had dreamed of all her life and seldom experienced.
It was something they had never had.
She did not want to rob him of such an unlooked-for gift. She should move away, leave him, but she could not go. She was bound as though under a double spell. Caught by him, and caught by that elusive quality you could never hold but which had lighted on him at this moment like a gift from heaven. It was just there in the simplicity and the softness of his breath, in his touch.
She lowered her head with infinite caution, dreading waking him, breaking the spell. She laid her head against his chest, but even with that slight movement, she felt his breathing change. He would wake—
"Alina…" His voice was roughened, fathoms deep, but not harsh. It could have been part of the dream-spell.
She raised her head. His eyes watched her, wide, scarcely focused, their brightness hazed, still half in the dream world.
"You are real."
She smiled. She could not help it. But she was frightened by it because the smile might show what was inside: the all-consuming joy that was the other side of the terrible fear she had felt. She tried to think, to be practical. To pull herself out of the dream that seemed to hold them both.