The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (13 page)

Clutching the basket close to her side, Aileen set her feet upon the path toward the palisades looming on the crag above. It was as natural as breathing, her mother would tell her, for her woman’s blood to be racing in her veins at a time like this. Wasn’t it this very night, long, long ago, when one of her own ancestors raced to the Samhain fires to meet her destiny? That ancestor had known there would be a price to pay for going to the fires—a price that succeeding generations still paid. That ancestor had gone nonetheless, driven by a heat stronger than her own human will.

Aileen burrowed deeper in her woolen cloak and hiked the hem above the dirt of the path. She hadn’t expected to find fires on these bare and barren hills. For all the burning in her blood, she scented no magic rising from the ground, not even the faintest perfume of the Otherworld. Why should she hurry her pace to make the safety of the palisades before dark? Would the dead truly rise to walk on earth this night, joined by the fairies and all the creatures of the Otherworld, to do what mischief they could? She couldn’t imagine such a thing, not here, where the veils which separated the worlds seemed as hard and impenetrable as mortar and stone.

A rumbling rose from the ground beneath her feet and she thought, for one crazed moment, that perhaps she walked upon a holy burial ground. But then the rumbling grew more distinct and she recognized it as the clatter of a horse’s hooves coming from the direction of the
llys.
Even as she lifted her head, even before the horse and rider rounded the curve, she knew that the rider was Rhys.

She knew those wide shoulders silhouetted against the deep purple sky—she knew them by touch. She knew the way the fine hairs lay on his arms, how his strong neck flexed when she touched it as if he stiffened against the healing magic she still could not seem to muster in his presence.

Aye, for all the deadness of this land, the fires burned far too hot in her blood this night.

She tightened her grip on her basket as he approached. “The fires are upland, Lord Rhys. But look, I am here, making my way back, just as I promised Dafydd.”

Rhys jerked his mount to a stop, spraying her ankles with pebbles and soil. He thrust out his hand. “I told him not to leave you unattended. I don’t trust you as easily as he, Irish.”

She ignored his hand and strode past him. She should have known there’d be trouble, but she hadn’t thought it would be so soon. “It would be a fine thing if you lost trust in the one brother who loves you.”

“He left you alone.”

“Dafydd wasn’t made to be a babysitter. At the hut he was scuffing about, pawing and gazing out at the hills, doing nothing but knocking things over and blocking out the light from the door. He was not of a mind to wait for me while I tended the wounded.”

“He thinks with his
braies
and not his head.” He stretched out his hand again. “Get on this horse.”

On all of Inishmaan there was only a single horse—a gentle Connemara pony that the priest stabled with one of the islanders, a small and sturdy mount which carried the elderly man up the hill to the chapel every other Sunday for Mass. She’d ridden that pony once, on an Easter Sunday when the priest offered rides to the children of the parish. But this black beast of Rhys’s snorted steam into the cold air. She had no trust of this pawing war horse, and less of the man losing patience upon him.

She said, “I’ll keep my feet to the ground, thank you very much.”

He dismounted with a jangle of metal. “You’ll walk right off a cliff. You’ve got too far to make it home before dark on foot.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“The dead rise tonight, Irish.” His voice turned wry as he trailed the horse’s reins through his hands. “Hellish specters walk the earth. Beasts beyond all your imagining.”

“I know well enough what night it is, and I’ll walk just the same.”

“Clutching your mountain ash twig, no doubt. And mumbling prayers to an empty sky, like all the old fools cowering in the mead–hall right now.”

He fell into pace beside her while the wind snapped his cloak off the broadness of his shoulders. The purple haze of twilight glazed the leather mask and shadowed his features, broken now by the most cynical of smiles.

"You and I have no fear of this night," he said. “It looks like we have something in common after all, Irish.”

“There’d sooner be ducks on the cliffs of Craig Gwaun in January.”

She stepped over a narrow fissure in the rock path. Fear was not the word. She had wary respect for the night, for the thinning of the veils between the worlds, for the Otherworldly creatures who unwittingly stumbled through to walk in Earthly darkness. She knew better than to get in their way. “Any man or woman with a bit of sense knows better than to mock the darkness of Samhain.”

“But we both belong here, in the darkness.”

“I’ll take the warmth of the kitchen fires, thank you very much.”

“This night, your creatures wait for you up there”—he waved to the fires flickering on the inky silhouette of Craig Gwaun—”to dance around the ashes of the fire with the dead in their shrouds. And I,” he mused, humorless laughter deepening his voice, “I ride among my own, the hellish creatures of my own people’s nightmares.”

“If you believe I dance with the dead, then you’ll believe I can turn myself into a mouse, stow away on a merchant ship, and cross the sea.”

“You won’t. Hawks thrive on these mountain peaks. Foxes teem in the wood. And sailors can get very hungry at sea.” He leaned toward her and whispered close enough to ruffle the hair springing from her silvered hair net, another item borrowed from among the silks. “Try a broom, Irish. You’ll have better luck.”

“If you’re so sure of yourself, then why did you see fit to race down here and make sure I didn’t disappear in the mists?”

“You’re alone on an evening when most of the women are quivering beneath the bedclothes.”

“You’re thinking I won’t honor my promise.”

“Adam once trusted a woman in the face of temptation.”

“A wise man would know I’d prefer an escort to the sea and a captain paid well to see to my safety,” she said, “than a journey alone through foreign countryside and putting my faith in pirates. I made a deal with the devil. You were there, remember?”

“I’m here now to see you keep it.”

“You gave up the pleasures of the fires to chase after me? I should be flattered.”

“Don’t be. I avoid those fires. I’ve never taken well to playing the part of a ghoul. What’s your excuse for avoiding them?”

“I have my hands full tending to your wounded.” She swung the basket up the other arm and hiked the knee of her tunic up as the path grew steeper. A faint heat stained her cheeks. For all the excitement roiling in her blood, she’d never dared do more than stand outside the circle of light at the Samhain fires. She watched the others pair off. She didn’t dare to step within the light, for fear she’d be left alone, partnerless, shamed. “I’ve no time to be racing off to the fires, but you’re lord of this place, it’s your duty.”

“It’s not my duty to terrify the young wenches.”

“There’s more to the fires than that, don’t you know it.”

“Just superstitious rot. Faery–stories to justify the crop of bastards we’ll have in nine months.”

“Listen to you talking, you who thinks I could fly my way out of here on a broom.”

“Ah, but I believe in sorcery.”

“It’s a fine thing you believe in something.”

“Sorcery is evil done by humans. I believe in the evil of the human soul.”

“But not in the good? I pity you, then.”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

Aileen shook her head. Maybe that was the problem between them. There was no healing a man so utterly bereft of faith. She increased her pace, but he only mocked her with a laugh and lengthened his stride. He was talking rot, he was. She’d felt the surge of his blood. She’d felt it under her hand just yesterday eve, when she’d traced his throat and the vein had throbbed under her finger, when she’d smelled the man–smell of him rising hot and urgent from the bareness of his chest, when she’d heard the hitch in his breathing, and the roar of her own blood had filled her ears.

“You say such things just to shock people, I’m thinking.” She took a deep breath to calm the racing of her heart. “But there’s no telling me you feel nothing at the coming of this night.”

“I smell rain on the wind.” He tilted his head to the sky. “A herd of cattle reached the northern pasture—”

“Any man with blood in his veins feels the coming of Samhain.”

“I feel lust, Irish. Is that what we’re talking about? I’m capable of that every night of the year.”

He yanked her to a stop. He loomed over her. All mockery washed from his features. Beyond his shoulder she glimpsed the flicker of a distant fire, one of a string of fires that lit the night, fires of a stubborn belief in the ways of the world long, long passed but never forgotten.

He pulled her so that she faced him and spoke in a strange voice. “Are the tides rushing in your blood, Aileen the Red?”

Her basket slipped down to her hand. She curled her fingers around the handle. His mantle flew off his shoulders like a falcon taking wing, baring a chest as solid as the stone behind her back.

What did she know of men other than of Sean the fisher’s son? The excitement of those awkward fumblings in the caverns bore no resemblance to the hot liquid yearning born into life in Rhys’s presence. Aye, so he was a fine cut of a man, there was no denying that. But for the mask which hid half of his face, he had fine enough features. Clear skin ruddied by the cold wind, bright eyes intense under a slash of a dark brow. But the heart of the man was hidden from her. Only a lust–driven simpleton would succumb to these urges with a man she despised.

Even as these thoughts passed through her head they were pushed aside by the memory of all those years she’d stood outside the Samhain fires, afraid that the shame of not being chosen would follow her, afraid to live with the sight of girls cackling behind their hands, of boys edging away from her with a smirk. But here in Wales she was an outsider, living far away from all who knew her, far away from the world which would someday be her home again.

Dark thoughts flitted through her mind, tempting thoughts. She could do things here. She could do things in Wales that she would never have dared on Inishmaan. The failure would not haunt her beyond the coming of spring.

She heard herself whisper. “Aye, the tides run in me, Lord Rhys.”

He stiffened. Hot breath billowed down to brush a tendril of hair across her forehead. She couldn’t catch her breath. Every time she sucked in the thinning air, her nipples scraped harder against the constraint of linen and wool. Who was this man to make her quiver like this? He’d shown her no kindness. This yearning was about the young couple she’d left behind in that hut, about tangled linens and sweat and flesh slick against flesh, and something more, something much more.

He dropped the reins to the ground. He seized her hips with strong hands. He pressed his thumbs in the hollow of the juncture of hip and thigh, a brush away from the place in her body where the molten heat smoldered the hottest.

“You don’t need Samhain fires for this, Irish.”

He dipped suddenly, as if he stood upon a
curragh
which had sunk in the trough of a wave. She flattened her hands against his chest as he hefted her up. He carried her three steps and then pressed her against the cliff. He wedged his knees between her legs and then jerked them open wide. As she gasped, he sank his hips between her thighs and pressed the hard tip of himself against the fabric between her legs.

Shocked by the sensation, she could do nothing but open her mouth and gulp air, full of the scent of him, horse and leather and steel and something sweetly fragrant he’d rubbed into his hair. He scraped his hands around to her buttocks to press her harder against the tumescence straining against his tunic.

He pressed his face against hers and spoke into her ear, ruffling tiny hairs on the nape of her neck. “I
feel
you.”

Her body pulsed from throat to foot. Her skin flooded with tingling. She flattened her palms against his chest.

“You’re hot, woman. Hot and ready.” He lifted her hips a fraction and sank them down deeper on him, rocking her so the hard ridge drove the smooth linen into her tender flesh. “Is this the magic that you speak of? The magic of
Calan Gaeaf
?”

She knew she should say something. She should tell him to stop. But she was a prisoner of the ripples of sensation which shuddered through her body with every movement of his hips. The thought slipped through her mind that twenty odd years she’d lived, and not since this very moment had she ever felt alive right down to the last strand of her hair.

He growled, deep in his chest—a fierce, animalistic sound that rumbled against the palms of her hands. He pressed his mouth against the vein throbbing in her throat. She flexed her fingers against his chest, and that’s when she felt it. A single sensation in a sea of sensations, but distinct enough to draw her notice. It was a movement of a sort, as if a rock she’d been straining against for a terribly long time suddenly budged beneath her hands. When it did, something fiery and molten flowed out from behind it.

Pain.

The scream rang through her mind. It pierced the heavy waves of sensual languor, too loud to ignore, too insistent, even as she clung to the quivering sense of life pulsing through her entire body. The pain howled until she could no longer focus on the pleasure of his wet mouth riding down her throat, but, rather, the vibrating hollow beneath her palms.

Pain.

Her eyes flew open to the stars just starting to wink in the sky. She pushed at him, pushed and pushed and felt the suck of light course through her body into that hollow of his chest before he abruptly stiffened.

Before he thrust her away.

She stumbled to keep her balance. The world had turned asunder. The stars, the vague jagged peaks of the hills, the distant orange fires . . . they all swirled until she didn’t know whether she stood still on the earth or whether she’d somehow stumbled into the faery lands where all was not as it seemed. She fixed her gaze upon the only focal point in a spinning world: Rhys. Rhys with his hair wild in the wind, Rhys glaring at her across the darkness, his shoulders heaving as if he’d run all the way up the slope.