Shana Abe (31 page)

Avalon began to scramble out of the bed, pulling the blanket with her. Marcus leaned over without haste and took both of her hands in his, turning her back to him. The blanket fell and perched, precarious, on the tips of her breasts.

“Truelove, don’t go.” His gaze took in the edge of the blanket, the promise of her skin, and then came back up to hers. She recognized the color of his eyes, darkened snow and sky, and felt her senses betray her, all of them going back to him, wanting him. She swallowed, fighting it. Losing.

“Avalon. We must talk.” Marcus offered that smile again, slowly drawing her back to him, back to the well of blankets on his bed, strong limbs and tanned skin and an inviting warmth from the chill of the room. Her resistance drained away as he got her closer and closer, nestling her down amid the softness and then coming even closer still, an embrace.

He lay beside her and began to stroke her hair, running his fingers through it, each touch bringing a tiny thrill to her. His head was even with hers, he watched his own movements.

“Are you happy here?” he asked, betraying nothing in his voice.

His hand moved again, stroking. She knew she should lie and say no. If she lied, he would have no idea of her true heart. And yet she couldn’t say it, and had to settle on a half-truth.

“I—” Avalon gave a little cough. “I am. In a way.”

“What way is that?”

She could see her own hair as his fingers laced through it, a leisurely tumble of bright strands between them.

“Just the way anyone could be, I suppose,” she said softly, watching his hand, her hair.

“Could be?” His voice was light, impartial. His hand kept its rhythm. “Meaning, as happy as anyone could be under the circumstances?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Do you think, then, that you could be happier?”

His stroking was soothing, slow.

“I don’t know,” she said, lost in his movements. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“What would it take, Avalon, to make you the happiest you could be?”

His words were a great puzzle to her, a problem she couldn’t sort out. Her hair still rose and fell between them, strands separated by his touch, held and released, over and over.

“I don’t know,” she said again, and her words felt strange to her, foreign.

“A home,” he said, low, matching the rhythm of his hand. “A family. A place where you belong, forever and ever.”

Someone to love me
, she thought, her mind spinning lazily.
For you to love me.

“Yes,” he said. “That would make you happiest.”

He didn’t stop his stroking, just let the moment float free between them, nothing but innocence, his movements, her gaze transfixed on him, her hair, the colors of them both.

“I would give you all that,” he said at last. “I would give you whatever you wanted to make you happy.”

His hand slowed, then stopped, freeing her eyes to meet his.

“Only you must marry me first,” he said. “Will you—”

“—marry me, treuluf, and be mine,” he said, “and I would be the happiest man ever to live.”

She covered her mouth with both hands to contain her joy, her surprise, and he lifted his face to her, still kneeling in the meadow grass, and spread his arms wide.

“I will hand thee the stars on a platter of gold. I will capture the sun for thou to carry in thy pocket, shamed that it is that thy beauty is so much the brighter.”

She began to laugh around her hands, standing still among the nodding wildflowers.

“I will rid the oceans of all their salt for thee,” he cried loudly, “so that thou might not be offended by the tears of the sea, weeping jealously over the beauty of thy face!”

Her laughter grew, and he inched closer on his knees, arms still wide, his smile wider, and she was certain all the clansmen could hear him now.

“I will climb every mountain from here to heaven to prove my love for thee,” he shouted dramatically, “and will bring back the most precious of gems, the rarest, for only those could be worthy of thy beaut—”

Her laughter spilled over; she had to clutch her stomach, she was laughing so hard, joined by all the clan standing on the fringes of the meadow. He stopped and laughed with them, then moved so fast and came up around her, pulled her down to him and they fell together into the tall silver-green grass, rolling.

Her laughter faded but still she could not stop her smile, and
his was equal to hers, his eyes alight, his look so charming He lay above her, very improper, then tried to kiss her in front of everyone and she pretended to fight him off, though everyone knew she was only pretending, because they all knew how much she loved him. And how much he loved her.

He leaned back and she saw him against the sky: black hair, light eyes, her beloved.

“Wilt thou marry me, lass?” he asked softly now, just for her, serious and devout.

She reached up a hand and captured a lock of his hair, curling it around her fingers.

“Aye,” she said to him, still smiling. “Just thou try to stop me.”

“—marry me?” he asked.

Avalon started, came back from her vision, and found Marcus leaning over her, black hair and light eyes, but there was a canopy of a bed beyond him, not a blue sky; and they were alone in his room, not in the glen with all the clan, everyone watching.

For a moment she couldn’t move, the sudden change was too great for her, the vision too pure still, too closely meshed with the present. Her heart was beating too hard, the laughter still infected her, and she could still smell the grass.

Marcus waited, unchanged, for her answer.

Just thou try to stop me.…

“I …”

The moment expanded, a bubble, one vision imposed on another: two couples, two pairs of lovers, one moment. One answer.

“No,” she said, breaking the spell. The bubble vanished, and it was just the two of them again.

Marcus didn’t move, didn’t change at all that she could tell. “Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She blinked up at him, not knowing what to say to that. His hand reached out, found her hair again, but this time he simply wrapped his fingers in it, just as the bride had done to her love.

“I think you can do better than that, Avalon,” he said mildly. “ ‘Can’t’ isn’t a reason.”

She looked away, nonplussed, and then began to sit up. Marcus moved back, allowing her to pull away from him slightly, though he kept his hold on her hair.

“I can’t marry you,” she said again, and felt the uselessness of her repetition.

“Don’t you want happiness?” he asked softly.

“Of course,” she said. “But—”

“Don’t you think I could make you happy?”

She thought of the sheer joy felt by the bride in the meadow; she had felt the girl’s boundless exultation as the laird got down on his knees in front of her, shouted out his love for her. That bride had known ultimate happiness, Avalon was sure of it. How could she ever hope to match something like that?

Her life was a different pattern altogether from that girl’s in the meadow. The laird who asked her now was not asking because he wanted to hand her the stars, the sun, the oceans. He was asking because he thought he had to. Because he thought he should. Duty. Honor. Legend.

“The only person who could make me happy is me,” she said to him at last, not cutting, just a trace of sadness.

Marcus examined her, then bent his head slightly.

“I would like to try,” he said simply. “Is that so much? To want to please you?”

Her heart was breaking, the pain was back tenfold, he couldn’t love her, not like what it turned out she truly wanted, the glimpse of that honest joy.…

He looked up again. “I would do anything to have the chance to try,” he said, fierce.

Her hands covered her mouth as the other girl’s had, but to hold in the pain, not the laughter. She couldn’t meet his eyes, she couldn’t sit beside him like this any longer, and so she slid out of the bed and ran over to her gown, a lump of cloth on the floor.

He watched her, saying nothing, doing nothing.

When the gown was on again—she couldn’t manage all the buttons, and most of them were gone now anyway—she looked around for her tartan, found it, and draped it over her shoulders like a cape to block the cold.

She was facing one of the windows, and the sun came free from a ripple of clouds just then and dazzled her.

Outside was a world she did not recognize, true winter, blinding white. Snow had come during the night while they slept, in exchange for the fog. As if the mist’s final farewell, its last touch to the land, all had turned to white. Sparkling snow covered everything from the lochs to the mountaintops to the eaves and the windowsills.

Avalon turned around and he was behind her, silent, his own tartan wrapped loosely around him, the tunic abandoned. He was no longer looking at her, but out at the landscape, the splendor of white.

The brightness illuminated everything now; she could pick out the tufts in the weave of his plaid. She could catch the sliding rainbows in his black hair. She could see the faded scars marking his side, where the tartan hung more lax than usual, and down his back, where he had missed the fold.

Scars, not a few of them, varied and ragged, almost invisible but for their paleness against his tan.

She reached for them without thinking about it, tracing one with her finger, feeling the old wound, following it down beneath the folds of the plaid. His breathing quickened slightly, then calmed again. He would not look at her.

Beneath the cloth she flattened her palm, feeling for more, and found them. They were long, thin stretches along his back, slanted, the way the sting of a whip might fall when lashed down on a man.

She remembered the dream, remembered it vividly, and took back her hand to pick up his wrist, holding it up to the light, examining it.

The marks were there, almost gone like the rest, so faint she could barely see them. But she remembered what that had felt like, to be tied down to the table, to have the hard strands eat into her flesh.

Avalon bowed her head and brought his wrist up to her lips, pressing a kiss there, unable even to say why but that it seemed so imperative that she do it.

“I don’t want your pity,” he said roughly, and took his hand back, still gazing out at the world.

“It’s not pity that I feel,” she said.

Marcus gave a pained smile to the view outside, the snow. “And will you marry me now, Avalon d’Farouche?
Will you marry the marked man, out of the lamentation of your heart, if for nothing else?” He didn’t give her the chance to refuse again. “Now I would have you wed me for the wrong reasons.” He laughed, bitter. “And I don’t even care.”

“I do not pity you,” she said. “I would not marry you for that.”

Marcus looked at her at last, a faint scowl on his face, fallen angel.

“What then? What would you marry me for? Tell me and I’ll do it.”

She lifted her hands up in the air, seeking inspiration, or help, or she knew not what. He would not understand her. He couldn’t. And what a terrible irony it seemed to her, because she knew now that Marcus was the key to her final happiness. He
could
do it, he
could
bring her to that bliss she had glimpsed there in the grass with the girl and her laird. But only if he let go of the fantasy and accepted who she was. And only if she let go of her fears, and accepted who he was—the son of Hanoch. But it seemed that neither of them were capable of these things. And so she said the only thing that made sense to her any longer, the only thing she had been able to hang on to with good reason:

“I cannot marry you.” She took a few steps back from him, then turned around, going to the door. Her fingers fumbled with the latch.

“You
cannot
?” he repeated behind her—at last, at last catching up to her meaning.

She didn’t reply; the latch was sticky, perhaps with the new cold, and seemed frozen in place.

“You cannot,” he said again, and there was an
emerging change in his voice, an excitement that prickled the hair on the back of her neck even as she tugged at the latch. She began to pull at it harder.

“Why
can’t
you?”

She ignored him, still struggling with the stubborn lock.

“Avalon! Why can’t you?”

“Because!” she cried. But the latch popped free then, and she was escaping out the door, barefoot because she had forgotten her shoes, and she wasn’t going back for them, not with Marcus waiting for her.

Except he wasn’t waiting for her, he was following her, out into the hallway, less dressed than she was and even more uncaring.

“Avalon!” He was running to keep up with her, holding his tartan in place. “Wait! Talk to me!”

In her haste she lost her bearings in the maze of hallways; she couldn’t remember the way to her room, and the people they were beginning to pass were no help, astonished faces, rampant curiosity, and then an audience clustering behind Marcus.

Dammit, where was she? What hall was this? Avalon couldn’t tell, none of it looked right, the halls were too wide, and then she realized the enormity of her mistake, because when she turned the next corner she found herself in the great room, interrupting the breakfast of all the people seated there.

She stopped, flushed and breathing hard, wild hair falling everywhere, the tartan just draping her and the gown half free down her back, and knew with extreme mortification exactly what she looked like. She could see it clearly in every single face before her, and she
could read every single thought as the entire crowd turned as one to take in Marcus, who had just run up behind her.

Oh, God. She wanted to drop through the floor, she wanted the earth to open up and swallow her and end this misery.

The giant room was totally still, no one moved, no one said a word, only Marcus, coming up to stand beside her, breathing as hard as she was.

“Why can’t you marry me?” he asked in a clear, carrying voice.

The people swung back to her, waited with him for her answer.