Chapter 9 #2
Roark was getting good at distilling his and
Alina’s story down to the pertinent facts, which Bryce listened to
without comment. Then he told them what Roger’s men had told him,
which was what they’d told Roark’s parents, with a new twist.
They’d said that Alina was a servant girl who’d lured Leif into the
stables with the promise of a quick rut, where Roark was lying in
wait and had slain Leif.
“Even if that were anywhere near to the
truth,” Roark said, “how would Roger know? Leif couldn’t have told
him if he was already dead.”
“Roger’s manservant, Craig, swears he heard
Alina invite Leif into the stables. Says he saw them go in
together, but only you and she came out.”
“Craig, whose daughter, Jenny, is carrying
Leif’s bastard.” Roark met Alina’s gaze. “I think we know who stuck
the scythe into Leif’s chest.”
“It could verra well be this Craig,” Bryce
said. “But unless you somehow get him to confess, you two are on
the hook for this. Roger’s hired extra men searching for you and
offering a reward to whoever brings you back to him, alive. The
four who came here said they were splitting up. Two’ll be heading
west and the other two’ll be taking the inland road bordering the
Mounths.”
Roark rubbed his jaw and spit. “Damnation. We
were planning on taking the inland road around the Mounths.”
“What do we do now?” Alina asked. “Is there
another way around?”
“Not around,” Roark told Alina. “Over. We cut
due north, across the Mounths.”
“The Mounths are a wild, tough crossing,”
Bryce said. “Not for the timid or the frail.”
“Good thing I’m neither then,” Alina said.
“I’m a Northland woman born and bred. What you call mountains we
call hills.”
Bryce raised his bushy red brows at
Roark.
“I’ve seen the mountains of the Northlands,”
Roark said. “Ours are trifling hills compared to theirs.”
“Well then.” Bryce knelt and opened the pack
he’d brought. “Here’s some food and supplies for your leisurely
trek across our trifling hills.” He pulled out a loaf of bread, a
wheel of cheese, and a skin of wine. “Who else knows you came this
way?”
“My mother and Logan. My father’s taken
Roger’s side on this.”
“I coulda guessed as much,” Bryce grumbled.
He stood and clasped Roark’s arm. “Best keep your ears open and
your eyes peeled, lad.” He winked at Alina. “You’re in good hands,
Princess,” he told her. “From what I’ve seen, so are you,” he told
Roark. He slapped Roark on the back and started to walk back into
the night’s shadows. “If anyone else comes looking for you, I’ll be
sure to send them in a westerly direction, unless of course it’s
some Northman king.”
“You look like your uncle,” Alina told Roark
as he packed away the new supplies. “You have his coloring and his
eyes.”
“Aye. My mother always said I took more after
my Uncle Bryce than my father, in looks and temperament.”
“Would he protect you from Roger, after I’m
gone?”
Roark hadn’t even considered this. “He
would,” he said, and knew it to be true. “But I can’t ask that of
him.”
“You could return to Sea Ridge with me,” she
said.
Roark held her gaze, soft and pleading. “Even
if your father didn’t kill me for my part in abducting you, I have
to return to my family to try to make things right between them and
Roger’s.” Her gaze dropped, and Roark cupped her chin and gently
raised it. “If it were my choice alone, I would sail with you in a
heartbeat, Ali girl. But here in this world, there are consequences
and repercussions for what we do, what we’ve done. I have to stay
here and deal with mine.”
“I understand,” she said, blinking back
tears. “I do. Your sense of honor is one of the things I respect
and lo— regard about you.”
***
Roark woke curled around Alina’s soft, warm
body, his morning wood, as she’d called it, snug against her
backside. He lay there sharing her body heat and burying his nose
in her nape, breathing in the heady scent of green grass, cool
earth, and warm woman. Prolonging his exquisite torture. A torture
he’d only suffer for another fortnight if everything went according
to plan, which nothing had since the moment he’d laid eyes on her
racing her mare along the beach.
He nuzzled her nape and she stirred against
him. “Time to wake up, my sleepy owl,” he rasped. “The sun is about
to rise and so should we.”
“Unnnh.” She burrowed her nose into the
bedroll and nestled her backside into him and he grit his teeth. He
backed away from her, missing her soft heat instantly, and when she
tried to wiggle close to him again, he threw the blanket and otter
cloaks off them and stood abruptly, staring down at her petal pink
cheeks, rosy lips, and tousled mane of burnished cedar. She
stretched and rolled her lithe, lean body from side to side and
then lay on her back and blinked sleep-filled eyes at him. “Why is
it I sleep so much better on the cold, hard ground with you than I
do in a soft bed without you?”
“Why?” Because our hearts and souls call
out in recognition of the other’s. “Because our bodies
instinctively seek out the warmth and comfort of another living
being,” he said, choosing the practical explanation over the
poetic. Determining then and there to continue being a practical
companion rather than a moonstruck fool. One would get Alina home
safely, the other could get her killed.
“Oh,” she said, and though she flashed him a
quick smile, it didn’t reach her eyes. “I suppose you’re right.” He
offered her his hand, as he had every morning they’d woken together
on the ship, in the stables, on the road, yet instead of accepting
his hand as she had every other time, she stared at it for a moment
and pushed herself up and stood. “I, ah…” She lifted her chin
toward the hedgerow and then strode over behind it for her morning
relief.
When she returned, she eyed the cold
breakfast of bread and cheese and cherries he’d spread out on their
bedrolls.
“There should be wild blackberries and
bilberries to pick once we make the foothills,” he told her.
“That’ll be a nice change,” she said
impassively.
As the sun shone high overhead, they rode in
the same uneasy silence since morning, crossing the narrow waterway
flowing between the Loch of Bracken and the Loch of Standing
Stones. Following the northern shore of the loch for another
league, they came upon the ceremonial circle of seven stones, which
stood as high as two men standing one on top of the other.
“Can we stay for a bit?” Alina spoke for the
first time since they’d woken.
Roark pulled out his spyglass and scanned the
area. All he saw were sheep grazing on a far hill. “We can stay for
a short while,” he said.
Alina dismounted and walked from stone to
stone, laying her palms flat along their smoothed sides, running
her hands up and down them then pressing her ear to them, listening
to their secrets with her eyes closed and a beatific smile on her
lovely face. After she’d done this with each and every stone, she
stood in the middle of the circle and dropped her head back,
lifting her face and arms to the sky as she twirled in slow
circles, a graceful, elemental goddess of the earth praising the
heavens.
It took every bit of Roark’s sorely tested
will to keep from laying her down in the grassy circle and claiming
her body and soul in the primal ritual of man and woman.
“Keep ahold of yourself, ye randy stag,” he
muttered. He put the spyglass to his eye and scanned the area
again, as much to distract himself as anything else, and spied a
shepherd coming up over the hill to the west. “Alina, we need to
go.”
***
Alina didn’t know why Roark was acting so
cold and distant, but she knew she didn’t like it. She missed the
friend who teased her and talked with her about anything and
everything, and she ached for the man who kissed her with such
bone-melting heat they’d both jumped into the freezing cold river
to douse their passions before they ignited.
Most of all, she missed his slow, easy grin
and those rain eyes pouring into her.
Eyes that kept sneaking glances at her as
they rode away from the stones across fields, staying off the road
and avoiding the villages, which grew fewer and fewer as they
neared the foothills of the Mounths.
They made good enough time to stop for the
night along the Garadh River—famous, Roark told her, for its
salmon. Being spring, it was the best time to catch the biggest
fish.
Alina watered the horses and staked them in a
grassy area while Roark grabbed the net Logan had given him and
surveyed the river for the best fishing spot, picking a pool formed
by large rocks upriver from their camp. She gathered wood for a
fire, and to make a cooking spit with, and then she walked up the
shoreline, gathering sorrel and dandelion leaves along the way. At
the pool, Roark had already netted two large salmon and was pulling
in a third.
“You seem to have found a good spot,” she
said, sitting down on a grassy hillock.
“Aye.” He climbed over the rocks and
deposited the fish next to the other two on the ground. He grinned
for the first time that day. “I swear I fished this verra same pool
with Bryce the summer of my ninth year.”
“When is your birthday?” she asked, glad to
be having a friendly conversation with him.
“I was born on the seventh day of the seventh
moon under the Crab,” he told her. “A child of the moon and
water.”
“That explains your rain eyes.”
“My rain eyes?”
“I was born on the first day of the fifth
moon,” she said, ignoring his question.
“A child of the earth and growing things,”
Roark said, sitting down beside her. He met her gaze and held it.
“With eyes the color of new spring grass.”
That grow greener every time your eyes
rain on them. Alina’s cheeks flushed hot at her unspoken words.
She grabbed her bundle of greens and stood. “I’ll go start a fire
whilst you clean the fish,” she said, walking away from a
perplexed-looking man.
She struck the flint and lit the dry leaves
and kindling while peeking surreptitious glances at Roark, who had
four crows strutting and cawing around him for the fish guts he
tossed them. He carried the scaled and gutted fish over, spit them,