Shana Abe (17 page)

She felt his hands rub hers. Slowly her fingers uncurled, and the warmth returned. The buzzing around her faded as she stared up at him. She could hear again.

“… better?” he was saying. He let go of that hand and took the other, rubbing it as he did the first. She blinked at him.

“We have to go,” she said abruptly.

“Aye,” he agreed, not letting go of her hand. “We’ll go.”

But they didn’t move. Tarrant shifted on his feet, crunching on his bit. The alley smelled strongly of garlic and brine.

“They’ll come after us,” she said somewhat desperately.

“Don’t worry,” Damon replied. “We’re safe for the moment.”

His fingers massaged hers in a way she found suddenly disturbing, the way he drew out the movements, followed the lines of her palm to her wrist with long, deep strokes. Wherever he touched her it felt peculiar, a
tingling sensation that warmed her whole hand and traveled up her arm. He said nothing now, just studied her, moving his hands around her own in that way that was making her short of breath again.

But it was not fear that made her heart pound so fiercely now.

Oddly enough, she felt like crying. It was the shock of things, she told herself sternly. Don’t you dare cry. Keep your wits about you.

She stared down at their joined hands and felt the tears well up. It was baffling, this turn of events. She was angry, yes, angry that the touch of the man she had longed for for so many years would have to come in this way. It was not fair. It should have been so different.

She looked up at him again and watched his face change back into his usual hard mask. He released her hand.

“We’ll go now. Follow me and don’t stop until I tell you to, and for God’s sake, keep that damned hood on.”

He took them back through the maze of alleys of the town, always a casual walk when there were people nearby, otherwise a trot.

Once they accidentally stumbled across a duo of men in Redmond’s colors, and only the overheard snatch of conversation saved them from rounding the corner, where they stood talking to a group of peasants.

“Are you positive they have not passed by?” one asked. “A dark-haired woman on a roan mare, a man with her on a black stallion with a white blaze?”

Another man spoke. “The reward is rich, my friends. Think it over.…”

They retreated slowly, cautiously, and wandered around a few more of the twisted streets until she realized where they were going.

They had reached the gateway to Calais they had entered what seemed a lifetime ago. They were headed back for Du Clar.

T
hey will not think to look for us coming toward them,” Damon explained patiently. “We have been spotted in Calais. They will comb the city, and when they cannot find us they will either assume we secured passage to England or that we fled farther north.”

“What makes you so certain of this?” Solange was visibly upset to be backtracking. She didn’t trust his plan, and that bothered him, though he didn’t want to admit it. A part of him could understand her reluctance to follow his reasoning, given the fiasco Calais had turned out to be. But he wanted her to trust him. He would not have turned his life upside down for anyone but her, dammit, and the least she could do was trust him.

They had traveled on through the day and night; now dawn was breaking again. It seemed he had not slept in weeks, months.

“It will work,” he said gruffly. “I passed a fishing village on my way out to Du Clar. They had boats, sizable ones. We will gain passage from there.”

“It is too close to Du Clar.”

“You are exaggerating. It is some distance from the estate, and perfect for our needs. I should have thought of it before. Your dead husband’s men will have passed it already.”

“ ‘What makes you think there won’t be soldiers still there?”

“There won’t be.” He prayed there wouldn’t be. His entire plan hinged on the fact that they had passed by the village days earlier. The soldiers would surely have already been there and gone, if they had even noticed it at all, it was so small. All he could recall were a few miserable boats and some squat houses lined up along a beach. But it would do. It would have to. He tried to inject some authority into his voice.

“If you want to get to England, Countess, you had better listen to me.”

She gave him a cold look. He edged Tarrant a little closer to her mount and tried a diversion.

“Or you could tell me why those men are so intent on finding you.”

“I am with you, Damon Wolf, on the promise that you will get me to England. If you wish to make inquiries into my former life, please feel free to do so. But I will not be here to answer your questions.”

She gave her horse some invisible signal and they bounded ahead into the countryside. Well, at least he got her going in the right direction.

By noon they were both too exhausted to continue. Damon kept pushing them, however, even as Solange complained she simply couldn’t stay upright in her saddle any longer. Besides, she said, the horses needed the
rest more than they did. It had been more than a full day since they had last slept.

She was correct, of course, but he told himself there were no suitable locations to stop. The fields they traveled now were too exposed. And the more land they could put between them and Calais, the better.

The landscape was gradually changing as they went on hugging the coast, growing wilder, rockier, less fertile. They encountered a slanting wall of limestone that stretched far ahead. Damon remembered it from before, a good sign.

Solange finally stopped him by refusing to ride farther. She had found a secluded meadow of tall, wild wheat grass that had been unharvested. The dry fronds waved in the breeze invitingly. There was a grove of trees for the horses, she pointed out. It was ideal for their needs. She was going to stay there and sleep and didn’t really care if he wanted to or not.

With that, she led her mare to the grove, patted her down, and then stretched out in the meadow wheat. She closed her eyes and rolled away from Damon, wrapped in her cape.

He contemplated her from atop his steed. She was right. He knew she was right. There was no reason for them not to stop here for their slumber except the nagging reluctance that kept him immobile, watching her. He simply didn’t want to lie next to her. He didn’t think he could take that. Despite the peril of the past few days, his attraction to her had not abated. It was more than a nuisance. Seeing her stretched-out form on the grass made him think of her lying in a different place.

Like his bed.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes, as if to rid himself of the vision. She was right, they had to rest.

Grudgingly he joined her, setting Tarrant loose amid the trees with the mare, making a bed for himself as far from Solange as possible while still keeping her within a safe distance. The wheat stalks surrounded him in a fantasy of delicate reeds. Slowly he relaxed.

He dreamed of her.

He woke once and thought he heard her singing: a sweet, clear voice reflecting the heavens. But perhaps it was part of his dream.

When he woke again it was to moonlight and crickets. Solange was already up, feeding the horses and herself some of the leftover apples from an orchard they had encountered two days before. Both horses crowded close to her as she murmured to them, a string of soft syllables he couldn’t make out.

He stretched and strolled over to them, helping himself to one of the apples in an open pouch. It was hard and sweet, just the way he liked them.

Solange greeted him without turning around.

“Sleep well?”

He grunted in response, intent on finishing the apple. Somewhat to his surprise, he discovered that he was ravenous. He tossed the core over his shoulder and reached for another.

“Damon, how much farther, do you think, to your village?”

He had been calculating that from the moment he started eating. He adjusted for the possible time they
would lose for caution, traveling a circuitous route. It wasn’t too bad, actually.

“Another day or two, I suppose.” He couldn’t help but add, “Are you so eager to be rid of my company, then?”

She shook her head. “It’s just that … bad weather is coming. Very soon, I think.”

He stopped chewing. “Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of weather?”

“Sleet, perhaps snow as well. That’s all I can tell.”

Wonderful. It was all they needed, to be caught in France in the miserable flush of winter. It didn’t occur to him to doubt her words. She had always had the knack of predicting the weather. As a boy he had seen her proven right again and again. Her attempts to inform the adults had been rebuffed, but she had always let him know exactly what to expect outdoors. Damon rapidly finished the second apple and this time gave the core to Tarrant, who was nudging him.

“How much time before it hits?” He almost didn’t want to know.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Solange, how much time?”

She turned to look at him. The moonlight gave her a ghostly air. “A day. Two days. No more.”

She had been generous in her estimate. The storm hit almost eighteen hours later, a driving, greasy sleet that pelted their skin like bee stings. They were soaked immediately in the frozen slush, skin red and eyes tearing. The path they had to follow led them directly into
it; the horses kept their heads bowed low with each plodding step.

When it grew so fierce it became impossible to see, they took shelter in a small cave Damon discovered in the cliffs, with just room enough for all of them. They formed a huddled, dripping mass. Damon had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling, then gave up trying altogether and slumped on the ground against the rough limestone wall. Solange sat beside him, peering out from beneath the legs of Iolande. All four watched the storm rage by the oval mouth of the cave.

From the scraps of wood that littered the floor of the cave they managed a sullen, smoky fire. It was shielded from the winds by a small outcropping of stone, but it offered little real heat.

The next day was no better. It was cold comfort to think that the men searching for them were enduring this weather as well.

The sleet remained constant, but now there was a thick coating of ice over everything. There was plenty of water and they ate the last of the apples, but their stomachs were not full by any means. Damon could not hunt when the game stayed hidden, and so they waited, while the skies emptied above their heads.

He had finally found the one thing that could blunt the sharpness of his desire: exhaustion. And it affected her too. He could see it in the purple smears under her eyes, the way she slept like she had melted onto the rough ground, no matter how awkward her position, no matter how cold it became.

By the morning of the third day he would wait no
longer. The small cave had been tolerably warm, thanks to the fire and the body heat of the horses, and so they were mostly dry but starving. Solange had developed a translucency to her skin that made him deeply uneasy for her. He could not sit around and watch her vanish before his eyes. Or, worse, go into that deep sleep she had found and not wake up again …

Damon could make no sense of dying in a cave, not after all he had been through already. If crazed men with battle-axes could not bring him down, he wouldn’t let a sheet of frozen water beat him.

At his urging, they struggled on. Before they left the cave, Solange had pulled a sharp knife from one of her packs and sawed the green tent in half, then sliced a ragged tear into each half. She placed one piece over each horse, fitting their heads though the holes. The cloth hung down to the horses’ knees and halfway down their backs. Damon thought it would be no real protection against the storm, but she retorted it was better than nothing, and he was too tired to argue with her. The tent would never have withstood the force of the winds anyway.

Now the green material flapped in the gales, making a wet, slapping sound with every step. Damon tried to follow the line of the limestone cliffs in case they needed to shelter again. His sense of direction was growing blurry, and time slipped past without his being able to mark it. Was it the same day or the next? Did the steel-gray clouds indicate dawn, or sunset, or midday, or moonlight? He didn’t know. After a while he found he didn’t really care.

Each moment extended, flowed without interruption into the next. The wind was an incessant howl in his ears. He was frozen, and he couldn’t feel his body any longer. He thought the dim gray line ahead was the blur of the horizon, almost indistinguishable from the sky.

And still the sleet came, always slanting into his eyes, always pelting his already-unfeeling body. Did the Lord have no mercy left for him? Had he truly sinned so much to deserve this purgatory of ice?

He couldn’t remember why he was out there. He couldn’t remember where he was supposed to be going. Sometimes he recollected he had a companion, a dark figure beside him, but mostly he saw his own hands, the leather of his gloves black with wetness and coated in ice, solidified to the reins he held.