Chapter 15
Regardless of what had triggered his need to speak, Bran found the memories rising inside him and bared them before Marin for her mercy.
He welcomed the angry, frustrated rage firing through him. It was an easier emotion to handle than the ugliness of his hurt. He couldn't fall prey to such pain. Not again.
“I know Leila is not Ena,” he said.
Marin nodded.
“Ena was the same age, with the same long dark hair…” Brown eyes surfaced in his mind, doe-like and dark, fringed with long lashes.
“She doesna have blue eyes like Leila. The hit to my head knocked my wits about.” He put his hand to the back of his skull in demonstration and found his scalp still sensitive.
Marin leaned forward to rest both elbows on her knees, as if she needed to be as close as he yearned for her to be. “Who is Ena?”
“My sister.” His voice was gravelly with disuse, from the ragged pain of his loss.
“And Gregor?”
The pain of that name tore a fresh rawness in Bran’s heart. “My brother.”
“Will you tell me what happened?” Marin's request was equally as kind and calm as her expression–an invitation, but not in any way a demand.
“I was still a lad, the youngest of the three of us.” He drew in a deep breath, but it did not ease the band of tension squeezing at his chest. “We lived on the border as ye do now, but we didna have yer wealth. We didna have yer stone castle and yer guards. We were villagers, with homes that barely kept out the wind, let alone reivers, and with walls thin enough for us to hear them coming.”
A scream rang out in the dusk and immediately cut off. Mum edged toward the door and brought down the latch over the frame, a meager means of protection. “Hide.”
Another scream rent the air, this one longer, tinged with anguish. And far closer. Bran didn't move. He stared, watching the door, uncertain where to go. What to do.
“Now,” Mum hissed.
Gregor, the eldest of the three of them, grabbed the sword their da had used before he died. “I’ll protect us, Mum.”
“Nay.” She reached for the sword. “They’ll kill ye.”
Bran looked to Ena, the way he always did in times of crisis. She always knew what to do. Her arms closed around Bran, enveloping him in safety.
She gave him a reassuring smile and pulled at him. “The cupboards are safest.”
She tucked him into the darkness within, but he reached out to her.
“There's only room for one, sweet Bran.” She stroked his hair and kissed his brow. “All will be well.”
A thump sounded at the door and her eyes went wide.
Mum hid on the opposite side of the cupboard, buried in the shadows. Near him. He knew she'd done that for him, to make him feel safe. Gregor was at her side, sword in hand. Brave Gregor, who was ready to defend them all.
Ena ran to the center of the room and stood for one panicked moment. Time crawled to stillness then, in the hissing pop of the fire and the distant cries of loss and pain. Ena dove under the table just as the door flew open in an explosion of splintered wood.
“Ena hid me, then went under the table,” he said around the rawness–of his throat, of his memories, of his heart.
“My mum and older brother had hidden near me to ensure I'd be safe.” Bran balled his fists.
The action echoed in a light sting on his shoulder where the arrow had nicked him days before.
He reveled in the physical pain, even wished it was more, anything to distract from the blaze in his chest. “Four of them came in, broke through the door as though it were nothing. They threw the furniture about in their search for food, coin, whatever they could take. Then they flipped the table and saw Ena.”
Marin pulled in a hard breath.
Bran dragged his gaze from her, unable to bear her sympathy.
“Ena tried to run, but they grabbed her by her hair and yanked her back. They pulled out their swords, ready to run her through. My mum came from her hiding place, screaming, and Gregor was there too, running toward them with that damn sword.”
His mother's voice cut through his mind, filled with terror.
No’ my bairn.
No’ my bairn.
He shuddered. “Gregor stabbed one in the neck and the man fell. Two reivers caught him and held him down while the third ran him through. He’d only seen eight summers, still a lad.
” He hesitated, trying to ward off the memory and falling prey to its clutches regardless. “My mum was next, and then Ena.”
The blade shoved through Gregor’s skinny chest and he dropped like a sack. Mum’s screams were like an animal, feral and wild with grief before they too cut off with a choked cry.
Bran's hair stood on end and he buried his face in his knees to keep from seeing anymore. He wished he could close his ears too, to keep out the sounds of Ena’s cries, of how she struggled.
Bran stared at the coverlet of the bed, where a wrinkle in the fabric shaded the other side. “I waited a long time before I came out and that’s when I found them all. Ena was still alive, only barely. And so, I did what I could to care for her.”
The shame of it all pressed hard on him, the way it always did when he thought of that day.
Deep, burning shame for having been the cause of their deaths.
If he hadn't frozen, Ena would have hidden better.
If his mother hadn't thought he needed protection, she and Gregor would have as well. They would have both been alive.
“Ena lived.” He swallowed. “But it took several days before she was strong enough to leave.”
“You stayed with their bodies?” she asked softly.
Their bodies. Those of his mother and brother. He nodded. “Aye. I didn’t want to leave them, but I couldn’t bury them. I was too small.” Too weak. “Leaving them was hard. It made their deaths so real.”
“I understand.” She eased from the chair and settled on the bed beside him, the way she'd done when she was nursing him through his wounds. “I struggled with the finality of it all when my mother died.”
He wanted to curl against her and breathe in her sweet, soothing scent, to sweep away these awful memories. Hell, he didn’t know why he was telling her now. For a cathartic cleansing of his soul?
“When I got hit on the head.” He looked down at the coverlet where their hands were nearly touching. How he craved the brush of her smooth skin, the connection to keep him grounded through the awful reliving of his worst moment. “It brought me back to when I was caring for Ena.”
She reached up and put her palm to his cheek. This time he did give in to the temptation to lean into her. He put his hand over hers and cradled her against him. He allowed himself one perfectly wondrous moment to savor it before lowering her hand and easing back.
He was being weak, he knew. The pressure of the past fortnight had built around him: Ena’s marriage to the Englishman when the rule preventing English and Scottish from marrying was always broken before without consequence.
The Middle March Warden using it to his advantage and stringing up a rope to kill her.
The bloody bargain Bran had been forced to accept so that she might live.
The warden had been looking for an excuse for years to get Bran to work for him.
Ena had provided him with the perfect opportunity.
And now here Bran was, pouring out his soul to the woman whose castle he’d taken.
He scrubbed a hand over the thickness of his untrimmed beard, as if he could clear the sensation of her caress. And how much he wanted more. “I shouldna have told ye any of this.”
A sad smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “Everyone needs someone to need, even the strongest of us.”
“I dinna need anyone.” He said it gruffly, as though it might mask the exposed underbelly of his buried hurt, as if a brawny display could overwhelm his vulnerability.
“Why did you tell me?” she asked.
He shrugged, but deep down he realized he knew the answer he would never say. The considerate sweetness of her care had aided in the healing of his physical wounds. Foolish though it may be, he'd hoped she might likewise do the same for his soul.
Trust was a precarious thing, and somehow it had begun to spin between Marin and Bran like a delicate web with thin, fragile threads.
Mayhap she ought to rein in her curiosity, but she could not.
This intimidating man with his wild ruggedness had been a wounded boy forced to witness the violence and brutality at an even younger age than she.
She didn't need to ask to know it was not a story he'd shared often.
The way it had rasped from his throat, as though wrenched from a buried darkness. Mayhap he had never shared it at all.
“Why did you share with me?” She wanted to reach for him again, to cup the rasp of his beard against her palm. But the way he turned from her told her he did not wish her comfort.
“Ye're to be my wife,” he answered, and shrugged as if what he'd done were no large matter. “Ye should know.”
Aye, he would be her husband. This man who had stolen her castle and then helped her save her sisters. This man whose family was destroyed by reivers before becoming one himself. This man who had been a broken boy.
And she would be his wife. After years of being allowed to cast aside suitors, to focus her efforts on her sisters and weapons mastery and the upkeep of the manor, finally she would succumb to marriage–the one thing she never wanted.
Already her roles stretched her in so many directions between her father's people, the castle itself and her sisters. How could she possibly make time to be a wife?
There would never be enough light in a day to see to everything and everyone reliant on her.
The idea of a child slipped into her mind and glowed within her chest. A child of her own cradled to her breast… An ache blossomed where she’d imagined the babe, a desperate, deep pang she had told no one of. After all, how foolish to not wish to marry and yet crave a child so.