Queen's Heart: An Arthurian Paranormal Romance (Arthurian Hearts Book 2) (25 page)

The creature was enormous, as black as Fallax and towering at least two handspans above Calannog. And on its back rode… I struggled to name it. A Valkyrie out of legend. An avenging angel. Or…

“Herne?” I asked Tris.

“What?” He’d heard me well enough. That he didn’t recognize the name immediately for what it was—who it was—meant Des had yet to share his secret.

For an hour or more, Herne and his Hounds stayed with us. Then, as we trotted over an outcropping where the woods closed around us, they veered away and were gone. Des’ hand, raised in farewell, was a poignant gesture to a father who’d cursed and abandoned him. But who had come to him still when the need was greatest.

Why was love always so complicated?

~ ~ ~

I think from the first I knew where they were taking me. When we rode into the little grotto with the mouth of the familiar sea cave open in welcome, it felt a little like coming home.

Des dismounted first, at once by Fallax’s side to help me down.

“Tris doesn’t know we were here before, you and I,” he whispered in my ear as he wrapped me in his arms and crushed me close.

Surely we were done with secrets. Yet here were two today already I’d found he’d not yet shared. Life-secrets too, not just petty lies of omission. Still, I nodded. I owed him that and more.

Tris swung down behind us. With a simple hand to Des’ shoulder he parted us. Without thought, I melted from Des’ embrace into his. “I knew you’d come.”

“I knew you’d be waiting.”

I smiled. Gallows humor. Gentle enough it was and I trusted Tris would take it no further. We were safe for now but what of Ireland and Cornwall? Had Mark even thought what King Anguish would do when he’d cried the order to burn? Or had he simply reacted as a man with great power and not as king, damned be the consequences.

For now, of course, there was a more immediate and personal issue at stake.

“What of us?” I asked “What do we do now?”

“We give Mark time to come to his senses. For Anguish to pressure him. Eventually we go back.”

“The knights with Mark this morning”—I hardly dared asked— “did the hounds…?”

“They live,” Des assured me. “The Wild Hunt doesn’t slaughter the innocent.”

Tris gave him a sharp look. “Then you think Yseult and I are the guilty ones?”

“In this? There are no innocent. There are no guilty. There’s just Magic and Fate and the turn of the world.”

I had never heard Des so bitter and sad. “I thought The Hunt would be a joyful thing to see.”

“The Hunt, Herne, you alive—there has been joy beyond hope this day. Only—”

I stepped from Tris’ arms to lay a hand of comfort to Des’ cheek. “Only—?”

“I gained all, only to lose it all again.”

The Hunt had left him, amenably at least, it seemed, and I was reunited with Tris. And where Tris was Des could never be. Not foremost in my heart nor in my bed.

“It was brave of you to bring me here,” I whispered in his ear. “Know I’ll never forget what this place was to us before.” Was it pain or guilt that hooded him so?

He looked over my head to Tris. “We have all been very brave today.”

Tris returned him the same tantalizing look of pain or guilt.

Another secret? For every one we unburied between us, it seemed we buried another.

How many more secrets could we possibly reveal?

Until I heard Dinistriwr, my father’s horn, I did not know whether he would come or no.

As fae, my pack was with me always, no more than a thought away. And center to our world was Herne who heard all, knew all, or so it seemed. Some fae, such as he and the Lady of the Lake, simply
knew
when they were needed most and where. It was not a gift he’d passed to me, his son. Or one not yet revealed to me. But I prayed he’d hear my silent plea, perhaps not when I was man but as hound and as close to fae as I could be.

What more I hoped, I couldn’t say. I thought little beyond Yseult and keeping her safe. I would not beg for my place again in the pack and the curse be lifted. Herne would do so when he saw fit and not before. That much of my father I was certain. He ruled his son and pack alike, and in a world where magic was dying and others of our folk were lost, we survived because of Herne.

Once Yseult was safe within our keeping, it was pain and pleasure both to ride with Herne. How could it not be pleasure to look upon him once again and to see my kin cavorting, happy to connect with me no matter how briefly it might be? How could it not be pain to be held in this form, unable to shift to join them? To know the curse remained? To watch them fade away so fast?

And how did it seem an easy idea to return Yseult to the grotto and this cave? She had called it ‘brave’ knowing only the half of it. There was nothing brave in the sweet memories I held of rapture I’d known here with both her and Tris. It was agony to see them lie together on the same cave floor, in the same hollows and on the same shore where we’d once sinned.

Why did I torment myself spying on their private pleasures? Why was I drawn back again and again? Why could I not turn away from the sound of their moans or the intoxicating scent of their passion? Why was I helpless to watch every exquisite moment, every lavish of their tongues, every deep-throated kiss, every tender thrust that was theirs between them?

Otherwise, our days in exile passed much the same. Using my dagger, Tris fashioned a yew bow that he named Failnaught, chipping arrowheads from the flint in the cliffs. Yseult collected flowers and herbs to dry and test in various potions, learning the properties of native plants she’d not seen on the Irish shore.

Yseult was hunting scented Evening Stock plants in the early twilight and Tris was hunting deer by a creek that flowed to the sea. It was summer’s end and only a handful of weeks since we’d come here to our secret world.

Like Tris, my hound was hunting too, only smaller game. I’d just heard the rustle of a sleepy grouse when Yseult cried out.

In a wood in summer with plenty of food about, it is rare for wolves to stalk men unless the wolves are sickened by disease that maddens them. Whether the two that stalked Yseult were sick or simply bored, I didn’t know, didn’t care.

The first sprang upon her, teeth bared and snarling. It didn’t sense me coming, didn’t know I was there until I dove beneath it and grabbed its throat between my jaws. With a violent shake, I ripped open its life-vein, showering blood over us all.

I didn’t let go till Yseult had scrambled out of the way and the wolf in my jaws went still.

“Des!” Yseult cried, and the second, smaller wolf approached. Yseult ran as I lunged, tackling the dead wolf’s mate. The wolf bitch had no stomach for a fight, though, and fled into the forest. I ran after Yseult, a breathspace behind her as we neared the safety of the grotto.

Then a blinding pain shivered through my left hip. I stumbled one, two, three more steps, before collapsing with a whimper.

“No!” There was more terror in Yseult’s cry just then than when the wolves had been upon her.

Through the darkness that was falling faster than the twilight, I strained to see what Yseult saw.

It was Tris, running up the hill, Failnaught drawn and another arrow set to fly.

“Yseult, run!” I cried.

Yet she did not.

Instead, she leaped in front of the animal I aimed at and shielded it with her own bloodied body.

I pounded up the hill.

She met me with outstretched arms that gripped my own in supplication even as I dropped my bow and drew my sword, brushing off her hands.

“No!” she cried. “”Don’t kill him!”

The blood on her face and shift resolved me otherwise. My gut twisted when I got a clean look at the beast. The Gabriel Hound that had been skulking the woods, stalking us. A demon dog, not to be trusted. Its white coat covered in blood. Yseult’s blood. So much blood on both of them.

She grabbed my sword arm, her weight dragging it down. Fighting me.

More, fighting me with strength she should not own if all the blood was hers. I hesitated.

“Please,” she begged. “It-it’s Des.”

“What did you say?”

“The hound—it’s Des.”

Her utter conviction stayed my hand cold where her fighting me had not. I looked from hound to her and back again. Trying to comprehend.

“There,” she pointed to a gray shape a hundred yards away. “
That’s
the wolf that attacked me.”

Attacked
. Concern drove out all else. “You’re hurt then! Where?” I searched her closely with my eyes, unable to find even a rip in her shift.

“Des got to him first. I’m unmarked.”

“Des?” I repeated even as relief washed over me.

Shock worn off, the hound began to stir.

“Help me get him to the cave,” Yseult insisted. “We need to get the arrow out before…” She choked back a sob.

“Before he dies.” I finished for her. Her fear was understandable, of course. “But it’s not a mortal wound.”

She shook her head.

“What then?”

“Before he’s Des again. Hurry. We haven’t much time.”

This time I responded to her plea, still trying to piece together the puzzle before me. I sheathed my sword and Yseult helped shift the hound into my arms. It was heavier than I thought it would be, but I managed to haul it to the cave . Hurrying ahead in the failing light, Failnaught in her hands, Yseult reached the cave first and struck flint to relight the fire we kept laid at its mouth.

Kneeling, I laid the beast down, Yseult cradling its head so it wouldn’t strike the ground. She probed the wound, then threw me a half smile in relief.

“The bone stopped the point from burying too deep. I think we can pull the arrow rather than cut it out.”

That I understood. “What can I do?”

“Be ready to staunch the wound if it bleeds.”

I pulled off my tunic. We had precious little cloth between us not being used.

Surprisingly the wound, in hard and compact muscle, hardly bled. It had not been one of my better shots. I hadn’t even been sure the beast was in range, and it was running. I’d counted it fortune I’d hit it at all. As I counted it fortune now that I hadn’t hit it well.

Despite my fear that it might fight, the hound merely whimpered as Yseult pulled the arrow out. After, she took my hand and pulled me down to sit beside her as she held the hound’s head in her lap.

“Watch,” she instructed.

“For what?”

“A miracle.”

I scoffed, getting rather tired of miracles, but she was right. She had told me it was Des. I had understood the words she used but I had not grasped their meaning. Not until I saw the hound… melt… and … flow… a trick of the eye in the early night. And then it was Des’ head held so tenderly on Yseult’s thighs. Des’ glorious body so naked on the ground.

He wrapped an arm around her waist, let it slide in sudden weakness till it draped intimately across her hips.

Watching the transformation was startling enough. That Yseult had known and I had not more startling still. That she held to him and he to her even in pain as though they had done this often before… How many times had she held him naked in her lap?

I should have been joyed I’d not killed Des. Des who had taught me the far reaches of passion where Yseult and I simply could not go. Des who had saved Yseult from the fire and now from wolves.

Something in my soul snapped. My sanity, perhaps. It was as though my true self flew outside my body, and I watched as some other self took over—actions, words and feelings all.

And all I could feel was rage and jealousy. The secret kept between them. The ease with which they clung one to the other. The intimate way Yseult bent across his body as he lay on his side to examine his naked thigh. She had only to spread her hand to cover the distance to the rest of him there on flagrant display.

I flung my tunic at them. “Cover him,” I commanded, my voice sharp in the gathering night.

Yseult stared at me as she obediently spread the cloth over Des’ loins. Just before the length of him disappeared beneath, a flash of an image rocked me, reminding me just what pleasure it could incite.