Chapter Nine #3
There was no alarm in the question, only curiosity touched faintly with suspicion.
Morggán glanced back over one shoulder. She still knelt in the grass beside the hut with the blackened pot resting forgotten in her hands now, watching him beneath the filtered morning light.
He realized suddenly that she ought to come with him, that he wanted to see how she looked standing in that sunlight.
“Just out there,” he answered. “I want another look south.” After a moment, he added, “Come with me.”
She shook her head, a frown knitting her brow, and he realized that in all the days he had been here, he had never once seen her willingly step beyond the shelter of the forest, despite how inviting sun on the swaying grass seemed to be.
Her gaze remained fixed on him. “I don’t go there.”
“Ever?” he challenged, hardly able to believe it. The swaying grass was not much more than a hundred feet from her front door.
“Never,” she confirmed.
“Why?”
She shrugged, her shoulders staying lifted for more than a moment. “There’s nowhere to hide.”
He glanced outward himself. Beyond the forest the southern hills rolled broad and green beneath the pale spring sky, the long grasses bending silver-green beneath the steady wind.
Open country—exposed country—and to Avery, plainly dangerous country.
The realization sat heavy inside him. She had shaped her entire existence around concealment.
The forest was not merely where she lived, but what governed her life altogether, the thickness of trees determining how far she wandered, the nearness of cover deciding where she stepped, where she gathered water, where she dared exist at all.
Her world was scarcely larger than what could be reached while remaining hidden.
Morggán found himself retracing his steps, just a few, walking back toward her.
“Come with me, Avery.” When she hesitated still, though clearly looked as if she wanted to, he pressed, “No one can cross that ground without being seen long before they reach us,” he told her.
“I would nae lead ye into harm, Avery. And I’ve my sword again. ”
Her gaze flicked briefly toward the weapon at his hip.
“Come with me,” he prompted again.
For a moment he thought she might refuse altogether.
Instead, she gave a small uncertain nod and rose to her feet, abandoning the pot.
She wiped her hands on her breeches and moved toward him, her gaze fixed beyond him.
He glimpsed curiosity in her blue eyes, quiet but unmistakable, as though she approached the edge of an unknown world, but he sensed a hint of dread as well.
Morggán turned and continued on toward the meadow, as if it were no big thing, what she was doing.
The warmth of the air and of the unfiltered sun hit him almost as soon as he stepped beyond the last tree. He paused briefly, staring out across the landscape, waiting for her to come.
As soon as she came abreast of him, without looking at her, he went further into the grass, only turning when he felt her following.
The wind reached them fully there without the forest to blunt it.
In the distance, the hills spread outward in long quiet swells beneath drifting clouds, the spring grass already risen high enough in places to brush Avery’s hips.
She brushed her fingers along the swaying blades of grass as she moved, with a quiet grace, into the meadow.
She stopped when they were only a dozen or so paces into the grass and stared across it with an expression he had only once seen upon her face, one of wonder.
Though he imagined that some apprehension lingered still, there was something deeper in her expression, as though she had forgotten the world could be this wide.
Charlie bounded ahead through the grass in great delighted arcs, disappearing entirely at times before bursting upward again farther off.
Avery laughed.
Morggán’s eyes widened. Avery laughed.
Sure, he’d heard her make small sounds of pleasure before—dry amusement beneath her breath, the faintest amused huff at something Charlie had done—but never this. Never open laughter. It startled him so thoroughly that for a moment he only stared at her.
The sound carried lightly across the grasslands, warm and bright and entirely unguarded. Not loud—she did nothing loudly—but so genuine in a way that struck him unexpectedly hard after days of so much silence and restraint from her.
By God, it transformed her.
The wariness that so often lived about her seemed to fall away all at once.
Her face opened with it, her eyes brightening as she watched Charlie vanish and reappear through the tall grass like some great hairy beast breaching waves at sea.
Wind tugged loose strands of damp hair across Avery’s cheeks, and she thoughtlessly pushed them back, smiling still.
She looked unbearably young when she laughed. Not anything like the strange solitary creature who moved quietly through shadow and watched every tree line, but simply a lass standing beneath the spring sky watching her hound race through the grass.
Morggán found himself smiling in reaction.
The sound lingered comfortably within him even after her laughter faded.
He wanted to show her more, to be there when she experienced more firsts like this.
What a strange thing to wish for, he thought briefly—as if he had time for such an indulgence!
Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
And standing thigh-deep in the spring grass with the wind moving through her dark hair, she seemed suddenly less like someone made for the forest’s shadows than someone who’d merely retreated there too long.
Perhaps taking comfort from the dog’s easy confidence, she slowly stepped farther from the trees herself, more out into the open space of the tall grass.
Her hair had not fully dried from the loch and the wind caught constantly at the dark strands, lifting them across her shoulders and along her back.
The tall grass moved around her in long rippling waves that softened her outline.
Sunlight touched her face freely here without the shadow of branches overhead, and he stared unabashedly, judging that she was, at this moment now, the most beautiful he had ever seen her.
Avery Mercer was not polished beauty, had not the adorned loveliness of court women wrapped in silk and jewels. She was something quieter and stranger than that, a wild solitary creature standing uncertainly beneath an endless sky.
She turned slowly where she stood, studying the distant hills with open fascination, and the image fixed itself unexpectedly deep within him.
He thought, with a profound certainty, that he would remember this long after many other things had faded: Avery standing thigh-deep in spring grass with the wind moving through her dark hair while Charlie raced circles around her beneath the clear blue sky.
For one dangerous moment he thought he should stride toward her, that he should take her in his arms.
Jesu!
The urge came sudden and alarming enough that it vexed him deeply—the desire to cross the grass between them and put his hands on her, to touch his mouth to hers and discover whether traces of that laughter still lingered warm upon her lips.
He wanted to draw her attention away from the distant hills and back toward himself, to make that rare, unguarded smile his.
Before he might have acted, committing what surely would be a profound mistake, he forced the compelling notion away.