18
WITHDRAWN, silent, Amber watched while the last of the rude camp was loaded onto horses.
“Can you mount unaided?” Meg asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. We wouldn’t want to hurt you again.”
“And Duncan can no longer bear to touch me,” Amber said with outward calm.
Reluctantly, Meg nodded. Her intent glance missed neither the pallor of Amber’s face nor the dark brackets of pain on either side of her mouth.
“I have lived without touch before,” Amber said. “I will do so again.”
“Before, you didn’t know…” Meg’s voice died.
“Aye. Knowledge is my punishment.”
The bleakness of Amber’s voice made Meg flinch in silent sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” Meg said.
“Don’t be. Better that I live untouched than be touched by Duncan now.”
“He would never lift a hand to you,” Meg said quickly.
“He wouldn’t have to. I can feel his fury like black wings beating against my soul.”
Instinctively Meg held out her hand in a gesture of comfort, then remembered that pain rather than ease would flow from her touch. Her hand dropped to her side.
“Duncan will soften,” Meg said. “I’ve never seen him so tender with anyone as he was with you before he knew that…”
“That I was less than I seemed and he was far more?” Amber’s mouth turned down in a sad curve.
“His temper is like a summer storm,” Meg said, “loud and even frightening, but it passes quickly.”
“The rocky fells will melt and run like honey before the Scots Hammer forgives me for tarnishing his honor,” Amber said. “Such forgiveness would require great love. Duncan loves me not.”
The combination of anguish and acceptance in Amber’s voice told Meg more than words could have.
“You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” Meg whispered.
“I knew it might. I hoped it wouldn’t.” Amber closed her eyes. “I wagered…everything. I lost.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Duncan came to me in shades of darkness…and touching him taught me that the darkness was mine, not his.”
“I don’t understand.”
Amber smiled oddly. “I doubt that anyone could unless they were cursed with my ‘gift.’”
Motionless, Meg waited, seeing Amber’s truth and sorrow with Glendruid eyes.
“Mine was a lifetime of night,” Amber said simply. “Duncan was my dawn. How could I let Erik hang him?”
“Hang Duncan?” Meg asked, appalled.
“Aye.”
As though chilled, Amber wrapped her arms around herself and whispered, “‘Death will surely flow.’”
Coolness coursed down Meg’s spine. “What was that?”
“Cassandra’s prophecy, the one I hoped to evade.”
“What prophecy?”
Amber’s laugh was a cry of throttled pain.
“More fool I,” Amber said bleakly. “Rich life was the lure, death is the truth. Better that I had never been born.”
“What prophecy?” Meg asked again, sharply.
The tone of her voice brought Dominic immediately to his wife’s side.
“What is it, small falcon?”
“I don’t know. I know only that something is wrong, black wings beating…”
The echo of her own words brought Amber’s attention back to Meg. The compassion in the Glendruid healer’s eyes was as clear as it was unexpected.
“A prophecy attended my birth,” Amber said. “‘A man with no name may you claim, heart and body and soul. Then rich life might grow, but death will surely flow.’”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed into slivers of beaten silver as he listened. He would have dismissed the words, but his own marriage had taught him that some prophecies were as real, and as deadly, as a drawn sword.
“‘In shades of darkness he will come to you. If you touch him, you will know life that might or death that will.
“‘Be therefore as sunlight, hidden in amber, untouched by man, not touching.
“‘Forbidden.’”
When Amber finished speaking, there was a silence unbroken by even the wind. She turned around and found what she had feared she would—Duncan standing behind her, watching her with wintry contempt in his eyes.
“You came to me in shades of darkness,” Amber said,” a man with no name. And I touched you. You claimed my heart and my body. We had better pray that my soul is still unclaimed, or death will surely flow.”
“Then we are lost, witch. Your soul was sold to the devil a long time ago.”
“Duncan!” Meg said, appalled.
“Don’t let your soft heart lead you astray, Meggie,” Duncan said. “There is naught but hell’s own calculations in that sweet-faced witch.”
“You are wrong. I have seen her.”
“So have I,” he retorted sardonically. “I have seen her bend to me and whisper of love at the very instant she most deeply betrayed me.”
Amber’s head came up. She watched him with a falcon’s proud eyes.
“I have never betrayed you,” she said distinctly.
“You didn’t tell me my own name. I call that a betrayal.”
“I didn’t know who you were until you fought the outlaws with such lethal skill.”
Duncan said nothing.
“And even then I wasn’t certain beyond all doubt,” Amber said. “It made no sense. You had flashes of Learning, yet Duncan of Maxwell wasn’t Learned.”
Meg looked curiously at Duncan, as though seeing a side of him that she hadn’t known existed before.
“There could have been other warriors,” Amber said, her voice subtly pleading, “men whose names I didn’t know, men who had a strong hand with the hammer, men who were Learned.”
“Did you know who I was before we married?” Duncan asked bitterly.
Amber’s spine straightened and her chin came up. “Yes.”
“Did you know I was betrothed to another, a marriage arranged by my true lord, Dominic le Sabre?”
“Erik…told me.”
“Before we were married?”
“Yes.”
“And you say you never betrayed me. Such fine calculations they must teach the Learned, all the ways to split hairs until nothing remains but dishonor.”
The contempt in Duncan’s voice made Amber feel as though she were being flayed with a thin whip.
“I had to marry you,” she said desperately. “It was either that or watch you hanged!”
“Better I had been hanged than live to know myself an ill-begotten bastard whose vows are worth less than sheep dung.”
Dominic stepped up to Duncan and put both hands on his broad shoulders.
“I don’t consider you a man without honor,” Dominic said. “You, and your oath, are much valued by your lord.”
Duncan became very still. Then a visible shudder went through him. He went down on one knee in silent reaffirmation of his oath of fealty to Dominic le Sabre.
“You are generous, lord,” Duncan said in a strained voice.
“I hope Lord Erik thinks so,” Dominic said ironically, “when he returns from Winterlance and discovers that I have taken Stone Ring Keep.”
DUNCAN rode alone over the lowered drawbridge and into Stone Ring Keep’s bailey. His shout brought the keep’s men-at-arms running.
“Go to Amber’s cottage,” Duncan ordered them. “She has much to bring to the keep.”
The men obeyed quickly, leaving the bailey at a trot. The remaining guardians of the keep were more boys than men, squires who dreamed of someday being knights.
“I will take the gatehouse watch,” Duncan said to Egbert. “If either of you sees aught amiss, don’t cry out. Come to me swiftly and silently. Do you understand?”
“Aye,” the two boys said as one.
As the squires trotted off to their posts, Duncan went quickly to the armory. The weapons that remained there after Erik’s departure were ill-assorted but quite sufficient for the keep’s defense.
Duncan locked the armory door and kept the key. Then he went to the gatehouse to wait for the Glendruid Wolf.
And while he waited, he tried not to think of the amber witch who had set fire to him as no other woman ever had.
My body knows you. It responds to you as to none other.
How many times have we lain in darkness together, our bodies joined and slick with desire?
How many times have I undressed you, kissed your breasts, your belly, the creamy smoothness of your thighs?
How many times have I opened your legs and sheathed myself within your eager heat?
She had come to him so perfectly.
So falsely.
Come heaven, come hell, I will protect you with my life. We are…joined.
The echo of Amber’s vow twisted through Duncan’s memory, and with it came the pain of a betrayal so deep he would spend a lifetime measuring it.
I believed her. By all the saints, I am a fool!
Yet even as Duncan told himself he was a fool, he couldn’t help but remember his own burning need, a hunger greater than any he had ever imagined.
You’re a fire in my blood, in my flesh, in my soul. If I touch you again, I’ll take you.
Then touch me.
Amber—
Take me.
And he had, despite all.
I am afraid for you, for me, for us.
Because I can’t remember?
No. Because you might.
And he had done that, too.
Would to God I could forget her more thoroughly than I ever did the past!
But that Duncan could not do. The memory of Amber was a thousand torches afire in his mind, his body, his soul.
Touch me.
Take me.
With a throttled sound, Duncan fought his brightly burning memories as savagely as he had once fought a thousand shades of darkness.
Without success. He was a man torn by conflicting needs. The part of Duncan that was ruled by rage hoped that Amber would take the men-at-arms he had sent to her and run for Sea Home or Winterlance.
And part of Duncan feared she would do just that.
Then he would never again hear her laughter, never again turn and find her watching him with eyes of fire, never again feel the sultry yielding of her body as he sheathed himself in her.
“Sir?”
The whispered word came from behind Duncan. He spun with such fierce speed that Egbert backed up in alarm.
“What is it?” Duncan asked.
“Three knights and a lady are riding up to the keep. They have a small amount of baggage with them.”
“Just one lady?”
Duncan’s voice and eyes were a blunt warning of his temper. Egbert swallowed and backed up.
“Aye,” the squire said nervously.
“Amber?”
“I recognize neither the lady nor the knights.”
Rage and pain struggled for control of Duncan’s voice. Neither won. He was unable to speak.
Duncan turned his back on Egbert and looked out through the open gate to the road. There were indeed horses coming up the road. One of them was Shield, his own battle-trained stallion. Shield’s saddle was empty, but the broadsword was now at Duncan’s side rather than in its riding sheath.
“Sir?” Egbert prompted.