Dream of Me/Believe in Me (45 page)

In the morning, the memory of the night seemed unreal. It had no existence in the brilliant blaze of the cloudless day. The snow that had ebbed and flowed for weeks had finally stopped, although piles of it remained on the ground with drifts as high as a man along the walls.

Miriam clucked and tried to discourage her, but Cymbra dressed warmly in a long-sleeved wool gown of blue so deep as to be almost purple. Over it, she donned a cloak made of wool she had dyed herself to produce a rich green hue. Thus arrayed in colors that hinted of the spring for which she yearned, she ventured out into the brittle day.

The servants were busy in the great hall but several nodded to her as she passed through. Just outside, she paused to allow her eyes to adjust to the brilliant light reflected off the piles of snow. Pathways had been cleared between the keep and the outbuildings. People were hurrying about their tasks only mildly inconvenienced by the weather.

Off to one side, small children rolled in the snow like exuberant puppies. Cymbra laughed at the sight. On impulse, she went to join them. They quieted respectfully, managing to bow their heads without taking their eyes from her.

“Good morning, my lady,” one of the bolder among them murmured. He was a boy of perhaps six with dark, curling hair and inquisitive eyes.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. “Isn't the snow wonderful?”

They all nodded, continuing to look up at her like so many grubby-faced, wide-eyed angels. A sudden thought occurred to her. “Do you know how to do this?” Before any could answer, she plopped down in the snow, stretched out to her full length with her legs together and her arms at her sides. As the children watched in astonishment, she moved her limbs back and forth in the downy flakes. With great care and just a little awkwardness, she stood up again, managing not to damage her creation. When she stepped out of it, she left the clear impression of a winged creature.

With a wave of her hand and a smile, she said, “A snow angel. Think you can do that?”

The children hesitated scarcely a heartbeat before leaping to the challenge. Cymbra helped the littler ones until they, too, had the idea. Soon that side of the keep was festooned with snow angels of varying sizes and shapes. The boy with the black locks even thought to try making one while turned on his side. She applauded his efforts, then attempted it herself while the children, who had thrown off their shyness, stood in a circle and encouraged her.

Cymbra had finished and was just getting up again when a shadow fell over the little group. She looked up to see the dour face of her half-sister frowning down at her.

“What
do you think you are doing?” Daria demanded.

Reluctantly, Cymbra got to her feet. Although she gave the children a reassuring smile, they scattered like so many flakes before the wind. She frowned to see them go but contained her annoyance and addressed the older woman. As always when confronted with her half-sister, she found it hard to conceal her distaste. Daria roiled with emotions—anger, resentment, bitterness—and beneath them all, something else, something Cymbra instinctively shied from as from a chasm. Even now, her half-sister radiated
tension, every inch of her too-thin form proclaiming rage.

“Just playing,” she said quietly. “There's no harm in that, surely?”

Daria stared at her scornfully. Her long, narrow face twisted in a sneer of derision. “No harm? Of course there's harm. What sort of example do you think you set by cavorting like a hoyden? I have a hard enough time as it is getting these people to respect authority. When they see someone like you completely forgetting her position, what do you imagine they think?”

“That I'm human?” Cymbra suggested softly. She truly did not want to dislike Daria; they were family, after all, and she realized that her own presence at Hawkforte was upsetting to the woman, who seemed to have a frantic need to control every aspect of her own life and anyone else's who was foolish enough to accept her interference. Yet even as she strove for patience and tolerance, Cymbra had to admit that her half-sister made it extremely difficult to find either.

“Don't you be glib with me,” Daria snapped. “Save that for our brother, who believes you can do no wrong. What he was thinking of bringing you here I can't imagine. We'll be lucky if we don't all end up murdered in our beds.”

Cymbra repressed a sigh. Ever since her arrival at Hawkforte, Daria had been prophesying doom and destruction. She seemed to enjoy envisioning the most lurid scenes filled with rampaging Vikings who would attack without mercy, commit the most unspeakable atrocities, and leave no man, woman, or child alive. No one at Hawkforte paid much attention to her histrionics, and that seemed to drive her to even greater excesses. Yet her predictions were a constant reminder to Cymbra of how much she longed for one particular Viking and how greatly she feared that he had torn her from his heart.

“Your concerns are misplaced,” she said quietly. “As for playing, you might want to try it yourself. It lifts the spirit.”

Daria stiffened and drew herself up so straight that Cymbra worried her spine might snap. “Do not tell me about my concerns.
I
have far more important things to do.
I
am not a spoiled child always indulged and pampered.”

That was too much for the woman who had been kidnapped from her home, married under threat of death, introduced to incandescent passion, gifted with profound love, and driven to risk her own life in a desperate gamble to make peace between two peoples.

With aloof disdain that Frigg herself would have envied, Cymbra said, “And I am not one to tolerate your rudeness any longer, Daria. Stay from my path as I will stay from yours.”

Her half-sister was taken aback by such cool defiance. She looked about to respond but could not find the words. With a snort, she turned on her heel and stomped away.

Cymbra put her from her mind almost as soon as she was gone. The day was much too fair to be spoiled by thoughts of one such as Daria. Instead, she spent several cheerful hours in the kitchens. The servants welcomed her warmly. Despite their initial surprise when she had first begun to come there, they were accustomed now to her working beside them.

She had just completed assembling a pie of apples, raisins, and cinnamon that she knew Hawk liked when a clatter from the bailey yard drew her attention. Dusting off her hands, she looked out the window to see her brother returning.

After almost a fortnight away, attending the king's court at Winchester, he appeared somewhat weary and deep in thought. Cymbra went to him with a smile. His
mood lightened when he saw her. He handed the reins to a stable boy and held out an arm to her, drawing her close.

“Are you well?” Hawk asked. His voice was very gentle when he spoke to her and the hard lines of his face eased, yet did his eyes remain shadowed by concern.

In both their minds lingered the memory of the conflict that had raged between them throughout the voyage from Sciringesheal and for many weeks thereafter. Cymbra had lashed out at her brother, decrying his betrayal of her trust and pleading to be returned to the husband she fervently claimed to love.

Hawk had resisted believing her with all his might, insisting that such love was an illusion and her judgment disordered by events. Only when he saw the depth of her anguish did he reluctantly begin to acknowledge that she might truly be in the grip of an emotion he had hitherto thought not to exist.

But by then they had reached Hawkforte and the swift onset of winter had closed the sea lanes. Slowly, reluctantly, driven by deepest concern for her well-being, he had drawn her out on the subject of her Viking husband and in the process discovered that Wolf was not at all what he had believed him to be. Honest to the core of his being, Hawk had finally been forced to the realization that he had made a terrible mistake.

One he desperately hoped to find some way to undo. But first he had to see to her safety and welfare even as he gave thanks for the generosity of her nature that had led her to forgive him.

“I'm very well,” Cymbra said as they walked together across the bailey, “and you?”

Hawk grimaced. “Considering where I've been, fine. Alfred apparently does not need to sleep and forgets that anyone else does. The tables groan under the efforts of cooks vying to produce the richest food imaginable. All
the while, the talk swirls from politics to fashion to music and back again.”

“Poor Hawk,” she teased, “if you thought you had escaped, you are mistaken. You must tell me all about what the ladies are wearing and if Alfred's physicians have any interesting new remedies. Did you bring back any books?”

“Four, all copied out by Alfred's own scribes. He sends thanks for the medical treatise you provided. Indeed, he was disappointed that you had not brought it yourself.”

“Did you explain to him why I prefer not to travel just now?”

Her brother nodded. He glanced down at the swell of her abdomen visible even through the loose cloak and sighed. His arm tightened around her gently. “I told him. We agreed to speak of it again in the spring.”

In the spring, when the sea lanes would reopen. When the waiting would end. When she would discover whether the love she nurtured within her heart as she nurtured the child within her womb would ever again know the man to whom they both belonged.

She mustered a smile and turned her face to the sun. Stray flakes of snow fluttered on the wind but there was no cloud to be seen. Over by the stables, where icicles hung from the eaves, a few sparkling droplets of water began to fall.

T
HE RED-BREASTED ROBIN LANDED ON THE
edge of the nest to be greeted by the squawking of his hungry young. He darted food into their eager mouths before setting off at once in search of more.

Cymbra watched him go, then she stood up slowly. The small of her back ached. She pressed a hand to it as she glanced around the solar. The windows were thrown open to admit air fragrant with the scent of damp, fertile earth.

Below in the bailey, rays of sunlight cascaded through the mist still lingering from the night before. Although small piles of snow tarried in the most shaded parts of the keep, the grip of winter was broken. As swiftly as it had come, so had it gone.

Daria and several of the other ladies, wives, and daughters of Hawk's lieutenants, were gathered at the far end of the spacious chamber. They were busy at their sewing—and their chattering. Cymbra had no wish to join them.

Indeed, she had no wish to do anything save walk
slowly to and fro, rubbing her back. The ache had begun the night before but she had paid it little mind even when it kept her from sleeping much. Now it seemed oddly persistent.

“Does it hurt more?” Miriam asked. For several days, she had rarely strayed from Cymbra's side, even insisting on sleeping in the same room with her.

“It's nothing,” Cymbra assured her. She rested her hands on the mound of her belly and looked down at herself ruefully. Somewhere under all that were her feet but she certainly couldn't see them. After carrying very small and high through most of her pregnancy, the last few weeks had seen a startling change.

“You are near your time,” Miriam said with a smile.

Cymbra looked surprised. “Oh, I don't think so. That would have to mean that I—” She broke off, flushing slightly, but reminded herself that as a healer she should entertain no such foolish modesty. “It would mean that I conceived right away and I don't think I did.”

“You don't think,” Miriam repeated. “But you don't know either, do you?” Her brown eyes sparkled with amusement. “I'll warrant you weren't paying much attention.”

“I suppose not,” Cymbra admitted. “I've never been exactly regular and I just thought …” She shrugged, still embarrassed by how surprised she had been to realize, shortly after reaching Hawkforte, that she was with child. A healer might be expected to know such a thing before other women but not, apparently, in her case.

“You can sense the feelings of others so strongly,” Miriam said. “I wonder if it doesn't make it more difficult to sense your own.”

“That's possible,” Cymbra admitted. It was as good an explanation as another. “But I really don't think this baby is coming anytime soon. It will be weeks yet.”

Miriam nodded but her smile only deepened. She resumed
sewing the tiny shirt she was making. The morning wore on. Beyond the high walls of Hawkforte, out toward the sea, the mist continued to lift. Cymbra saw gulls circling as they too, hunted food for their young on the incoming tide.

She was distantly aware of Daria and the other ladies but paid them little mind. At least not until she suddenly became aware that one of them, a young girl Cymbra liked, was gazing open-mouthed out the window at something that had just caught her attention.

“W-what is that?” the girl asked.

Another of the women followed the direction of her gaze and frowned. “I don't know. It …” She gasped and pressed her hand to her mouth.

“There are more of them,” the girl said even as her eyes widened in disbelief. “Many more … oh, my God …”