By the Light of the Moon (13 page)

“Did you … find your way back easily last night?” she finally asked. A test, maybe. Or just the need for the silence to cease.

“I did, milady, thank you.”

Clipped. Careful. She pursed her lips and then bit at the soft flesh and pulled up her shoulders in a protective gesture. He was a servant, but he was not hers. He did not answer to her, nor was he bound to her command. It struck her that she found herself wondering if he simply disliked her.

“I didn’t know you would … he would be so close to the castle,” she tried again.

“Neither did I, milady.” His voice was low, a little rough around the edges and she turned back to him when he continued. “He usually stays away from inhabited areas. Something must have … drawn him back.”

Both of them fell silent for a while but where most people bothered her by their mere proximity, by the sound of their breath or the way they switched their stance, Moira couldn’t help but notice that Owain didn’t make her feel that way. It was almost comfortable.

“He isn’t completely you, is he?” she finally found herself asking, too curious to maintain the polite distance she assumed was most appropriate.

“No,” Owain answered. Again, he paused, but when Moira turned around to look at him, and raised her brows, he relented and continued. “We share an existence, we influence each other but we are not of one mind. He has his own ideas and opinions. As do I.”

Moira offered a low humming sound. She turned around in the crenel until her feet were on the stone floor again and she could look at him without craning her neck. There was a certain secrecy about his kind and she assumed this was by design. She couldn’t help herself, though; after a night of getting to know the animal, she felt like she deserved to know something about him.

“Like what?”

“He doesn’t have the same … restraints or considerations of decency and propriety.” Owain replied after a few heartbeats of silence. He seemed uncomfortable to her or maybe it was just the contrast between his stiff stance and the way his wolf felt to her, relaxed and quite happy to be near her.

Moira eyed him for a long time and finally replied, “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Of course you won’t.” Owain’s answer had come quick but he immediately changed his mind and corrected himself; “My apologies, milady. It’s not my place to assume.”

Moira waved this off, frowning at him. She would never say it out loud, but she liked the wolf better. “You aren’t very happy here, are you?”

“Milady, if I ever offended you, I apologize. I truly do.” His voice was low, earnest but distant and Moira huffed out a breath, frowned and ran her fingers through her open hair.

“You haven’t.”

He bowed and Moira turned around again. This time, she didn’t dangle her feet off the battlements, she just squeezed herself into the crenel and rested her face on her knees, facing out over the dark landscape. Her fingers fanned out over her shins and she gnawed on her bottom lip for a while. Finally, she reached into a pocket and pulled out Deagan Fairester’s necklace. It gave a small, dull sound of tinkling metal and sparkled in the moonlight.

Heaving a heavy sigh, Moira laid it down on the merlon in front of her, then balled her hand to a fist and fanned her fingers out again. Free now.

“Do you think it’s pretty?” she asked after a long silence between them.

“I am not sure it is appropriate for me to have an opinion, milady.”

“I asked you a question.” She was getting frustrated with his non-answers and his need to remain distant when she wanted to talk to him, wanted to pet the wolf again.

“My kind is not fond of gold. We dislike the sheen; it makes us uncomfortable. We prefer silver.”

This made her smile a little and she looked over at him. “I do too. But gold is more expensive so … I’m supposed to wear gold when he’s around.”

He didn’t offer an answer. Moira wondered for a moment whether this was why people disliked her, because it was so hard to have a conversation with her. Not for everybody, of course, not her father when he stopped worrying about marriage and heirs, not Brock, and not Bess, her maid.

“I don’t like it,” she finally offered herself and leaned her head back against the wall of the merlon she was leaning against. She inhaled the cool air and felt her lungs swell nicely in a way indoor air never quite managed to do. “He hopes to buy me with trinkets when I know as well as anyone that he wants me for the riches of my fief. He must think me very stupid.”

Again no answer. And so Moira continued; “I am to marry a man who thinks I can be bought with something I could have in abundance if I was so inclined. Does that make sense to you?”

At that direct question, Owain shifted from one foot to the other and finally he shook his head. “No, milady.”

“Of course it’s not mine. Not the fief, not the riches.” She wasn’t looking at him, eyes cast up to the sky, the stars still mostly outshone by the bright moon. “I am not deemed intelligent enough to own anything myself. Not because someone talked to me or tested me, but simply because I was born a girl. So maybe he is right in trying to buy me with jewels and hollow flattery.”

“I don’t think you stupid, milady.”

Moira turned around, for the first time there was something like an emotion laced in his voice, a darker layer beneath the distant propriety. Moira shivered but she wasn’t cold. Still, she wrapped her arms around herself and finally her cheek came to rest on her arms. She looked tiny like this, a little package of a woman, nestled in a crenel in an ancient battlement.

“I liked your wolf,” she admitted quietly and a smile stole over Owain’s features.

“He … is quite fond of you, too.”

For a moment, they smiled at each other; then Moira’s face grew warm and she looked away. Her chest felt different, constricted but not in the painful way it usually did.

“Tell me about them? I mean you … your people?” A little shy now, she brushed her wild hair back over one shoulder and Owain smiled at the way she sucked her bottom lip between her teeth while her brows were still raised in hopeful expectation.

“What would you like to know?”

Moira decided that he didn’t sound as distant anymore. He seemed to have shed the formal address for the moment and there was something in that concession that made her feel lighter, less tense. She eyed him again and his arms had moved from his sides to his back. He seemed to be leaning forward the slightest bit.

“Anything? About … how you live? What it’s like?”

“We don’t naturally live in towns. Our groups are smaller. I have lived in cities sometimes, but those were human ones. It is more natural for us to stay in smaller packs and family structures. We have camps in the less populated areas of Lynne and we try to stay in touch, try to exchange news and information. Is this at all what you were looking for?”

“But you don’t have a central organization … like a king?”

“No. Technically, your kind is my king. We swore fealty to the human crown generations ago. It isn’t natural for us to elevate one of our own into such an exalted position. The packs are led by a strong Blaidyn but their power does not extend past the camp. And even inside … we don’t have such a strong distinction between the ruling class and the rest.”

Moira thought about this. It was clear that he was talking about her, that he disapproved but she couldn’t change how her world was organized. Nor did she particularly relish it herself.

“What about women? I have never heard anything about them … ”

“That is because humans won’t employ them in their armies, or their castles.” Owain answered with a hint of a smile. “Blaidyn women are strong and independent. They can be as good fighters as the men, but there is no work for them and so most of them find a calling in a crafts or in motherhood. Not all camps or packs depend on humans, some live remote enough to completely self-sufficient. We dislike trading, or money …
gold
.”

He shrugged when he said the last word, as though this would explain something and Moira remembered what he had said about gold jewelry. She watched him again and finally stretched herself and got to her feet. He was easily over a foot taller than she was but the difference was less pronounced when she stood a few steps away.

“You must think me very … different,” she finally uttered with the same hint of proud defiance that had stopped her from using words like ‘weak’, or ‘pathetic’ instead. But she was neither independent, nor could she fight, nor did she make her own decisions.

“I have worked for humans for many years, milady … but I must admit, I have never been much around their nobles, especially not their noble women.” The formal address was back and Moira looked at her naked and dirty feet with a shrug.

“I don’t want to marry him.”

The sentence hung in the air for a long moment. It had come almost without any conscious thought. One moment, she had looked at him, tried to see herself as he would see her and the next moment she’d heard herself confessing. She could feel her face heat again. Owain’s eyes never left hers, but his expression changed slightly, slowly. It rearranged itself until, by a tiny shift in lighting or shadow, he didn’t look so distant anymore. He took a step forward, bowed his head closer.

“Then don’t,” he murmured. Moira could feel her heart beat hard and fast in her chest. It seemed so easy, so perfectly easy when he said it.

“Just … that?” she asked, tiny-voiced.

“Just that. Just don’t … ” Another step closer. Moira now had to lean her head back to look up at him. He had never stood this close before. She could still feel the wolf around. Almost as though Owain was behind a pane of glass upon which the wolf’s image was a mere reflection. They were both there, superimposed, and with a tiny shift in her eyes she could see one or the other, or could blend them together into one blurry man-beast in front of her. It was curious and strange and she had never experienced anything so strongly. The wolf wasn’t there. And yet, he was, somehow.

“Why?”

“Because … ” he didn’t finish. Instead, he lifted his hand and with a tenderness she could never have expected from its size and strength, he ran his fingers along the line of her jaw, pale and almost translucent in the moonlight.

“Be … because?” she asked again, croaking a little. He filled her entire vision, blocking the stars and the moon, and the rest of the castle. There was a heat coming off his body that didn’t feel human and when she inhaled, she was sure that she smelled the same earthy and silvery note she had smelled in the wolf. Not human, not animal. Something else entirely.

“Because he is utterly unworthy of you … ”

There it was again, the heat in her face. This time, it came with a tremor that ran from the back of her neck down her spine and to her hands and feet and down into the pit of her stomach. Nothing could have prepared her for that sudden rush of sensations, the swell in her chest that made her feel like she was floating just above the ground. His eyes were deep brown, she noticed, with tiny silvery flecks around the bottomless dark of his extended pupil. They were beautiful. Had she ever thought that about a man’s eyes before?

They stood there, suspended in time, their eyes locked. Moira couldn’t think of a single thing to say. But then, breaking the silence, her lips made the softest little plopping sound when she released her bottom one from her teeth.

A fraction of a second later, his mouth was on hers. It was warm and so, so soft and Moira couldn’t for the life of her, figure out where she was or whether she was still standing.

Owain pulled away first. He was aware that his hands were on Moira’s shoulders —
Moira
in his head, even if it didn’t sound quite right,
where she should have been young Lady Rochmond
. Her body had leaned so close that he found himself cursing his breastplate for denying him the touch of her dress and her chest. But he couldn’t remember how he’d got there. His lips were burning for more and he hadn’t yet managed the inhuman effort of actually physically stepping away.

But how in the world could he have kissed her?

Owain was not an impulsive man, not anymore. He had spent years growing into a person he could be proud of. A thoughtful man, deliberate, he thought, not the kind of man who would try to ruin his life for the feeling of a pink pair of lips on his, however plush and dewy and beautiful they were. He tried to shake that thought, his eyes locked on those twin petals, redder than usual, trembling and wholly alive. He hardly dared raising his gaze to hers, but he knew he couldn’t avoid it forever.

Everything — his body, his mind, the present — it all felt clouded and disjointed; like a mural on a wall with too many compartments that didn’t make sense together. He could look at the individual ones; her lips, puffy and red and moving slightly; her chest which rose and fell harder than usual, exhaling loud breaths; his own hands, still clasping her shoulder, unable to let go; the wolf, happy and wanting, pulling Owain closer with the need to smell and lick and taste every inch of her body and face.

He could see her wild hair in the wind, the way it made her look like herself and not like the doll her parents paraded in front of her suitor; could see her flushed cheeks and feel the ache in his groin. But there were other parts to the picture; the golden necklace on the battlements, the castle itself, Lord Rochmond’s warning to never enter her chambers, Sir Fairester’s hand on her wrist and the way his rage had risen like a sudden flame, had made him want to tear that hand off in one swift motion and stuff it in his gloating face.

The last parts were the ones he was trying to avoid the hardest, the ones that seemed to make everything dizzy and impossible to consider as a whole; Moira in a wedding gown, her hand in Sir Fairester’s; himself in shackles, whipped, maybe dead; his room in her father’s castle, the small bag of belongings that represented every single thing he owned in his world; no family, no pack, no riches, no home. And yet, right next to it and jarring and in sharp relief, was Moira again, soft and small and stubborn and when he looked up just those few last inches, her eyes were open wide. They brimmed with tears. He could swear in that moment they shone green, like a fine gemstone polished to the perfect cut that seemed to catch the light and trap it within.