The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (28 page)

She said, “You’re wounded.”

Rhys didn’t look at her as she came around to face him. She couldn’t read his stony expression. He and made a silent motion and the hall came alive. Men whittling by the fire dropped their work and lumbered up, the servants shuffled away, even the hounds skittered to the shadows. In moments, the mead–hall closed them in silence.

She curled her fingers into the edge of the fur–lined mantle she’d taken to wearing with more ease than she’d ever expected of herself. “It’s your brothers, isn’t it?”

Rhys clinked his chain–mail gauntlets onto the trestle table while the fire popped in the center hearth.

“You said they always emerge with the first thaw. Did they attack the castle today? Are there many wounded—”

“I forgot,” he said, in a soft, unsteady voice, “that the egg–begging was today.”

“That makes no difference.” She dared to take a step closer. His wound did not seem serious. “Where’s Dafydd?”

“Had I remembered the day,” he said, “I would have delayed my arrival until after dark.”

She realized after a pause that he was apologizing. For frightening children.

Her heart moved. Oh, Rhys could play a fine game, mocking himself and his mask and the scourge that raged over his face. She remembered a time not long after she’d been captured when she had accused him of vanity. Now she realized how hasty and thoughtless those words had been. He suffered the vanity of the mask for one reason alone: For the sake of the ignorant, for the sake of the innocent, for the sake of the children. She should have known this. She herself knew how important it was to hide from the innocent that which most people could not understand.

Aileen ached to run her hand over his ravaged face but she sensed he did not want to be touched. “You’ve done every mother in Graig a great service this day,” she said. “You frightened the love of God into them. There won’t be a single child in all of Graig who won’t be saying his prayers this night and sticking hard to his pallet.”

“Yes, each one of them has learned that monsters do exist.”

The words rang with self–mocking. Aye, monsters exist, she thought. But only in a tortured man’s mind.

“Marged,” he said, straightening up, “must be beside herself with all those bad omens splattered over the field.”

“Marged will recover. Are you going to tell me what happened to put that blood on your face?”

“It belongs to a puppy I slaughtered and ate for—”

“Stop it.”

A humorless smile cracked the granite of his features. He slipped a hand beneath the neck of his tunic and pulled on the only lace that still held his mask on him.

“Dafydd would have me believe,” he said, tossing the puddle of leather on the table, “that this is the work of your faeries.”

She lifted the mask and ran her finger over a sharp slice that had cut the top two ties.

He said, “We rode through the woods toward the castle. Something scraped my face.” He trailed a hand over his jaw and looked at the blood on his fingers. “I didn’t know what had happened until I saw the blood drip onto the saddle.”

She frowned. The slash in the leather was razor–clean. “Unless one of your brothers is a master archer, I’d say this looks to be the work of a faery–dart.”

“My brothers can be just as invisible as the creatures of your imagination, and disappear into the forests just as swiftly.”

“And shoot just one arrow? And none at Dafydd?”

He smiled drily. “Then the faeries should have better aim.”

Aileen thought of the children’s screams and the crowd racing away in terror and knew that the faeries’ aim was true.

“I’ve no skill with the needle,” she said, “but I can do a fair enough job when I must. This can be repaired.”
More easily than your heart.
She tossed the leather back onto the table. “Let me have a look at that cut.”

“Come and look.” A humorless grin stretched across his features, twisting his affliction tight over his bones. “Maybe you can prevent a scar. Maybe you can even heal it.”

“Don’t turn your arrows upon me, Rhys. I didn’t command the faeries to sling that dart.”

It was the children that had put him in this shifting, mercurial mood. She forced his face aside with a finger to the chin, and then trailed her hand just under the cut. The blood dried in dark flakes between the ridges of his cheek. He was right. It was nothing but a shallow slash. Already it had begun to heal.

Then her brows twitched together as she noticed something else. In the mornings, Rhys kept the draperies closed against the cold so the light sifting onto the bed was hazy and uncertain. She rarely got so stark a look at his unmasked face as now. She noticed a strange line of color, a purple mottling swelling from the edge of the affliction and running in a thin line down his forehead and across one side of his nose. It was an inky outline of the border between the condition and his smooth skin.

Curious, she traced its path across his cheek. Soft, it was, and tender to the touch. Like new leaves of a rosebush, ruddy and supple before hardening. She dropped her hand from his face and met his gaze, unreadable despite the mockery of a smile.

He said, “It’s growing.”

“No, it’s just inflamed,” she retorted. “Or a soreness from rubbing on the edge of that mask. All it needs is a cleaning and—”

“I’ve seen the same pattern for five years.”

She yanked at the ties of her mantle, fear rising. “We haven’t had a healing session in weeks. Now that spring is coming there’ll be fresh herbs on the hills. We’ll start with the salves again.”

“Heaven save me from your salves.”

“I’ve stopped it from spreading once before.” She swung the mantle on a peg by the wall, and then ran her hands over the fur, not wanting to see the disappointment in his eyes. “I’ll do it again.”

“Lies do have a way of coming around to a man.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This scourge of mine stops spreading every winter.” He stared into the flames sputtering in the hearth. “But with the plowing of the fields comes the flowering of the curse of Rhys ap Gruffydd.”

“But you told me—”

“You proved an amusing companion, Irish.” He picked up a block of wood one of the men had dropped too close to the fire. “I had hoped our bed–sharing would put some power into your salves.”

She sank against the wall, the fur of her mantle cushioning her, remembering the magic they’d made in that smoky little hut with nothing but a single blanket and their eager bodies to keep them warm.

“You were supposed to be the greatest healer in Ireland. I was told you could heal my affliction with the pass of your hands. Did you even try, Aileen?”

She opened her mouth but no words came out. She thought of all the mornings she’d pressed her palm against the hollow of his heart and suffered the pain that pierced her, in the hopes she’d heal
him.

“This is what I get,” he said, “for listening to the words of tricksters who visit on pagan spirit nights.”

Her heart filled her throat, making her voice a husky whisper. “I warned you it may not work. I made no promises.”

“But I made you a promise.” He tossed the wood into the flames. “It’s spring. I’m sending you back to Inishmaan.”

Chapter Seventeen

O
nce, when she’d been searching for bird’s eggs on the cliffs of Inishmaan, she’d slipped and knocked her head against a rock. Her ears had rung and her senses had dimmed and the pain had throbbed until she could understand nothing.

Now she stood motionless while Rhys’s words rang in her head. She wondered if she’d even heard them or if she’d just imagined he’d said them. Just this morning she had woken dreamy–eyed to the thought of the garden she was going to plant by the kitchens. She’d spent the winter spinning and weaving cloth for the spring. Was he to sever this tie that bound them with the uttering of a few words, to relegate all those nights and mornings to the past?

No.

He stood as still as stone watching the fire consume the block of wood. The silence between them stretched. This didn’t make any sense. Men were odd creatures, but she understood something of this one. It was the affliction flaring up again, that was what was addling his mind. Aye, the affliction.

“Come now, Aileen.” He turned eyes of ice upon her. “Anyone would think you’d been expecting a marriage proposal.”

She’d never expected a marriage proposal. She’d known better than to wish for the moon when she’d been happy enough with the stars. And in Inishmaan, she’d buried that part of her that yearned for home and family, sure that she would never know it. But maybe, in the cold of this Welsh winter, in the warmth of this man’s bed, the seed she’d thought she’d buried had begun to bud nonetheless.

Now it began to bleed.

“I’m the son of Gruffydd,” he said, “who was the son of Owen, the son of Roderic, the son of Mervyn the Great. I can trace my blood back twelve generations.”

I am the daughter of Conor.
She tilted her chin, but it was an empty motion, a reflex of pride. She didn’t know her grandfather’s name. It had always been enough to be the daughter of Conor.

“We made a bargain,” he repeated

She searched those hollow eyes of blue. The heat that had begun a slow burn in her chest rose over her neck to lose itself in her scalp. At that moment, more than any other time in her life, she hated the fairness of her skin which stole from her any chance of pride. She had half a mind to tell him she loved him, to tell him she didn’t want to leave. She had half a mind to beg him to let her stay.

A trembling began deep in the core of her. She felt the trembling as if she were not a part of it, as if she were floating somewhere above her body watching herself shake and knowing that there would come a time when she couldn’t protect herself like this. There would come a time when she would feel this pain.

“If there’s a child, send him to me.” Rhys headed toward his room. “In Wales, a man takes care of his bastards.”

***

Hidden alone amid the woods, Rhys peered through the trees toward the mountain pass. He stilled his horse so that not even the creak of saddle leather interrupted the silence. He strained his ears for sound . . . and heard it, the first crinkle of hooves in the spring litter as his own men approached from down the road.

He edged his horse into the light as Dafydd’s mount came into view. Dafydd, who led the procession of armed men, passed his gaze across the woods around until he caught sight of Rhys. A scowl still marred Dafydd’s face. They’d nearly come to blows about Rhys’s decision to send Aileen back to Ireland. But Dafydd didn’t understand.

Rhys wasn’t sure he understood himself.

Rhys watched the passing procession, the mounted men and the clutch of Irish workers returning to their homeland. Those Irishmen glanced warily into the forest around them, knowing the danger. Cattle had been stolen on the northern border again. With the coming of spring his brothers and half–brothers had emerged from their wintering places like moles blinking against the sun, and again took up arms.

All the more reason to send her back to Ireland, he told himself. She hated the killing. In these bloodstained mountains it was as inevitable as the coming of rain. She’d be better off with her family, where he should have left her all those months ago instead of dragging her into the hell of his own life.

Then
she
emerged from the pass, riding the mare he’d given her, as straight–backed as if she’d been born to the saddle. Her red hair sprung from the netting she’d tried to stuff it into, and his hands itched for the feel of it in his palms. The fur–lined cloak she’d taken to wearing—the only luxury she’d really embraced in all her time in Wales—swathed her figure. He wondered if she even knew she wore it, or if Marged had tossed it across her shoulders while Aileen wandered in the same silence that had gripped her since the day he’d ordered her gone.

He hated her silence. It wasn’t natural on a woman who never knew better when to speak and when to hold still. If she had narrowed her eyes at him, if she had lashed out with that razor of a tongue and stripped him bloody with anger—that, he could have suffered. That, he could have fought. But she’d remained silent as the arrangements were finalized for the journey. This morning, she had mounted the mare without a word.