Chapter 28 #2
Cullen’s name pressed against me like a knife. He was Margaret of Roxburgh’s gift, after all. “You are never too old for a good dog,” I said, with a false smile stretching across my face. “I believe they would have been the best of friends.”
Thomas clutched at his hair, frantic, eyes glazed. “Why did I not bring him, Bess? Why was I such a fool? I thought I had time. I thought . . .” He broke off with a choked sob.
I went to him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. “He understood,” I murmured softly. “I believe in the end Malcolm would have understood.” Thomas could not know the significance of my words, but I did.
I could not have said them were they not true.
He breathed in deeply, as if he inhaled my essence, then pulled me into his lap. “Time,” he repeated. “So little time.”
I buried my face in his neck, murmured soft reassurances into his ears, strong as spells. His breath shuddered in his chest, he sobbed unabashedly, and I let him. These human tears, they call them salty, but I taste them sweet. The emotions they express are a gift.
“We have so little time,” Thomas kept murmuring, as he kissed my shoulders, the side of my throat, where the rosebud yet bloomed. We were not the wood nymph and the shepherd king now, only two lost souls who happened to find one another.
And then, worst of all things, one soul dared to awaken from this dream to face the glaring light of day.
Thomas straightened, pulled away from me, going so rigid I nearly slid off his lap. “I am sorry,” he said, face white as milk. “I cannot take my comfort here. I am to wed Margaret of Roxburgh in a fortnight’s time.”
At first, I did not believe I had heard him proper. My shepherd king could never be putting me aside. The bond between us would not permit it. I felt it like a hair wrapped around my heart, still.
But humans are not ruled by such bonds.
Thomas was still red of eye, red of nose, curls mussed and standing on end. ’Twas enough to wake the purely mortal pity in me again. Yet my inner fae burned with fury, knew it could not permit this insult to go by unchecked.
“I am to wed Margaret of Roxburgh in a fortnight’s time.”
“No.” If I did not consent to this state of affairs, it could not be true.
Thomas’s face said otherwise. He held out his arms. “My love—”
“Do not call me that!” I clenched my fists tight, hard enough to crush stone. “How can you call me that when you would make another your wife?”
What sort of lies do these mortals live by anyway?
Thomas was startled into the pure and simple truth. “I call you ‘love’ because you are. Because you ever will be. I owe you my life.”
It rang inside me, heavier than church bells.
“Do not say it,” I hissed. “You have no idea what it means.”
You have no idea of the price you could pay.
Neither did I, then.
Thomas shook his head. “I do.” He stepped towards me, put his hands on either side of my face.
“You cannot tell me what I mean, what I feel,” he said softly. “I have known Margaret for a long time, we have been good friends and true, but she can never be to me what you are.”
Hope lifted in my breast, light as the sun bursting through a cloud.
With his next words, Thomas dashed it. “Men of my station rarely marry for love.”
I heard the bitter laughter of the baroness then. She knew she held a distant second in her husband’s affections, if his heart had any place for her at all.
“Your station,” I echoed. “Yesterday, you had none.” Save as my shepherd king, Dumuzi, Adonis, Endymion, all rolled into one. But which of their lady goddesses would suffer such treatment? “Your rise comes at the death of a child.”
It hung in the air, raw and painful. And I did wish I could take the words back.
Thomas dropped his hands from my face. “Perhaps my father was right. You should not have been allowed into the manor again.”
My welcome—rescinded.
The room grew too close of a sudden, and it became difficult to breathe. We of Faery may not enter where we are not invited—though those who uninvite us do so at their own risk.
“Fie upon your father!” Flame leapt inside me; I might have spat out venom with every word. “An ill death may he die.”
“That is enough.” Thomas’s expression was granite hard; for the first time I did see his father in his face.
I was not done. “Your father rejected you. Your whole life he did. How can you believe he welcomes you now?”
“Bess.” Thomas closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “Because there is no other. None to take his title when he is gone.”
Good. Let the house de Lyne fall into obscurity, lose its holdings and its repute. What care had I? “He promised he would not step between the two of us. We could marry if I saved Malcolm’s life.”
Failure, failure, failure, echoed inside me. Every iron weapon in the place seemed to cut into my skin, but none so painfully as the look in Thomas’s eyes.
“And did either of you consider my feelings on the matter?” His voice was brittle, fragile yet sharp.
“You said you wanted me!”
“I still do!” His gaze dropped to his fingers.
They curled; his arms lifted as if to enfold me in his embrace.
Tears streaked his handsome cheeks. “Do you not know how much I have missed you? Do you not understand how lonely my bed has been, how your absence has kept me awake at night? How my heart leaps whenever I see your face? And yet . . .” He trailed off, shoulders slumping. “We do not always get what we want.”
I fought myself then. Every inch of my body longed to go to him. Wipe the cares from his brow. Kiss away the tracks of his tears.
Instead, my words were sharp as glass. “So much for the power of men.” I swallowed, beat down the compassion, and let my hurt speak instead. “For all I know, your father moved the poppet himself.”
Thomas cocked his head. “Poppet? What poppet?”
“Did no one find one in Malcolm’s room?”
Thomas shook his head. “The room had a strange aroma, of flowers and blood. A peculiar weed had grown and wound its way around the bedpost; we plucked it out, but it appeared to grow back.”
Oh, thank Mab. My work had not been undone.
But Thomas continued. “My brother, he arched upwards, body contorting itself in pain. The priest did murmur a brief prayer, and Malcolm’s flesh grew slack, never to move again.”
I screamed, a pitch to shake the rafters and make goblets shatter, should there be any about. The priest! His prayers undid my faery spells. I said Malcolm was not to be disturbed.
Thomas cringed, though his brow still softened into pity. “Lass, you are overcome.”
“Overcome!”
A part of Faery I had made Malcolm’s room. A part of Faery banished in an instant. My work was rendered useless, destroyed. My enchantments were undone.
I was undone.
Revulsion churned inside me, fouler than any aroused by Christians’ nasty little crosses and the mortals’ toxic iron. How could I stand these fools, who turned in their need to the unfeeling heavens, and undid the work of true magic around them?
How could I love a man who put me aside?
I held my hand out before me, saw it as if a tree branch, cracking, dying, splitting in two. I felt the rose at the side of my throat growing thorns.
Thomas’s mouth fell open; horror-stricken, his face went pale. “My Bess, what is happening to you?”
I laughed without mirth, silver lightning lancing through the palm of my hand. “The bond is broken,” I told him. “And so ends the peace between us.
“You have made me an enemy of your very house.”