White Pagan, page 21
part #6 of Kestrel Harper Saga Series
“There is an epic…Bhrán the Adventurer…who used the guises of animals to escape his misfortunes. As a child, I often thought how wonderful such a gift would be, but never imagined it possible…until Mánd showed me how…”
“You can shift?” The revelation was surprising enough that he did not question the name she had spoken.
“I learned only a single form, and never managed it for long…but there were times when he and I…before Ombhrís…”
He was thankful she did not finish the statement. If she had been with another man before her husband, he preferred not to know the details. His fleeting imagination was unsettling enough.
Though she could not see his flushed face she could sense his mood and giggled as she reached his side. “He was márbhyndhánis, a friend of my father’s…selected to teach the veiled things my father could not. Sometimes my father joined us…but he had responsibilities as kydhé and it was difficult for him to escape them. Anyone might seek him without notice and he could not risk being caught.”
She imagined now that he had been watched, that they both had been, for how else would anyone have learned she was practicing?
“What form?”
Both Dhóri and Sóbhán had joined him as children, but as Sóbhán spent more and more time in Bhryell as his internship blossomed and his relationship with Chethá grew, those shared moments became fewer. Dhóri had no fondness for shapechanging and had done it primarily to be included in the time Sóbhán spent with Kavan. As the time with Sóbhán decreased, so too did Dhóri’s participation. Kavan was left to practice that skill alone, and though solitude was often the purpose of flight or runs through forest and field as the White Hart, he sometimes craved having someone to share those jaunts with.
“A wolf. Wolves are bountiful, revered and protected so long as they do not raid the flocks or attack people, and so Mánd chose that form to teach me.”
“Then wolves it shall be.” He pointed to the tree line. “I know places that are safe to run, if you wish to…”
Beginning to peel her nightshirt from her shoulders, she eagerly replied, “I do.” Such a run would tire her enough that she hoped to finally be able to sleep when they were done. She stopped undressing, however, beneath his mortified, embarrassed stare. “One must undress to change,” she said matter-of-factly. “Surely you have…”
Kavan shook his head no, then yes, and finally no again. He had seen the bodies of men and women prepared for burial, bodies of the dead. The bodies of children. He had seen Orynn’s nude bathing shadow behind a tent wall. But even in his dreams, of Orynn, of Gabrielle, when he had been younger, neither appeared nude, not even in that odd ‘dream’ instance when Dhóri and his sister were conceived.
To avoid an uncomfortable conversation, not wanting to explain himself if she asked, he changed without word or effort. To Raebhá, it was as if she blinked and a moonlight silver wolf devoured Kavan to stand in his place. There had been no shedding of clothes, no rending of fabric, as Mánd had told her was part of the process if one did not undress beforehand, and unlike any change she had witnessed with her father or Mánd that often took up to a minute to complete, Kavan’s change had happened in the span of a single heartbeat.
She crouched and extended a hand, wanting to touch him, to assure herself that this was her host contained in the body of a wolf. The color of the pelt beneath her hand, the green of its eyes, told her he was real.
He seemed less resistant to her touch in that form than he was as a man. The feel of his fur made her grin.
“I will try,” she decided out loud. If he could change while clothed, so could she. There was no reason, beyond a lack of experience, that she should not be able to do as he had done. “I want to see your land as the wolf sees.”
The white wolf backed up a few paces, giving her room to change without the interference of his power. He monitored her focus, her gathering of energy, her channeling efforts, the skills he had taught her and helped hone, until a crimson wolf materialized from the air and claimed the place where she had been standing. The smaller wolf shook out its fur as an animal would if covered with rain, and then yipped her eagerness to follow him. He returned the audible signal and broke into a run, determined to reach trees before anyone within the nearby structures chose to hunt them.
They ran, chasing through the forest, under the brush, baying at the moon in response to a distant pack’s call, bumping and rubbing past one another when abrupt shifts in direction called for it. In a form other than his own, Kavan had few qualms about touching her, instinctively communicating intentions as a wolf might, through sound and touch and scent. He showed her every secret place he knew, thickets that only animals could enter, caves and clearings and creeks that fed into rivers, many dry or nearly so. There was joy in the run, joy in the sharing, joy in being with her. Joy in not needing words to understand and be understood.
He felt the same joy in her playful nips, in her intentional drops before him that caused him to leap over her, in the landing rolls and the rapid sweeping of her tail.
There had to be a way to make this last.
By the time he brought her to the edge of a pond amid a forest clearing, he could read her weariness, the stress that holding the change caused. She had learned much from him but she was not prepared for the sort of extended shift Kavan was accustomed to. His energy was far from depleted but she needed a safe place to rest, to recharge dwindling power if they were to make it home to the manor before dawn, which was still two or three hours from breaking.
“We shall rest here,” he explained, resuming his form, the reversion taking no longer than the initial change had. The red wolf loped to his side, panting but looking pleased, and after several seconds of power transfer and focus, Raebhá reappeared. Unsteady on her feet, exhaustion and the expenditure of so much energy having drained her, she stumbled as her knees buckled. Kavan caught her and held her up. She slipped one arm around his waist to steady herself, her head resting against his shoulder, her other hand pressed to his chest with his nightshirt balled in her fist.
Her rapid breathing and the thundering of her heart suggested exertion, exhaustion; believing her too weak to stand, he continued to hold her, pretending to ignore the way she molded against him. He closed his eyes, intending to meditate on anything to erase the awareness of her. His efforts were greeted with the shift and tipping of her head against his shoulder, the caress of air against his throat.
His breath caught and he struggled to expel it as hers feathered over his skin. He knew that feeling from dreams, but this was very real and sent a shudder through him that knotted his belly and drove away thoughts of anything else. The arm around her tightened in reflex and he moved, an act borne of instinct rather than intent, until his mouth lowered and met hers.
Kavan groaned, hunger and fire devouring him, and brought her down on the mossy earth. Rather than resist as he thought she would, she met his kiss with passionate force, raking her fingers along the white skin beneath the fabric of the nightshirt that was quickly shed and cast aside to lie abandoned with hers. A man prone to self-control, the need of her, something he had never sought with another, the need to be hers, binding them in a way that would never be lost, burned away every awareness of his surroundings and mortified him with its overpowering compulsion. He could not fight it. There was only her, the sweet floral scent of the bath oils she had used enmeshed with the warmth and taste of salt exertion on her skin. Everywhere her hands roamed burned hot with the tingle of power and arousal. Everywhere his fingers passed left trembling in their wake.
When she welcomed him into her secret embrace, an impulse that came without thought, that came on the waves of need for something more, he whimpered, shuddered, and lay still to cry softly with both physical, mental, and spiritual relief into her tangled hair. Her arms around him, a hand behind his head gently cradling, a feeling of home and belonging he had believed forever beyond his grasp, beyond his wildest imaginings of how this moment should be…could be.
How could anything so pure be wrong?
They lay entwined in the forest’s embrace, her soothing kisses and soft murmurs bringing him to a sleep that she quickly joined. Bird song and autumn insect hums wove with the gentle rustle of leaves and her heartbeat beneath his ear gradually growing calm again. There was nothing else, no outside world to intrude on the contentment Kavan had found.
The rising of the sun, its heat on the arm wrapped possessively around her body as she burrowed against him brought a second unplanned union, longer but no less ardent, a sliding of sweat-soaked skin against skin that this time brought her to tears too. After another short sleep, roused this time by the cracking of twigs that announced the arrival of a lynx seeking water from the pond, a third joining, slow and tender, awkward and hesitant in its exploration, brought them to the apex of noon and a third much-needed slumber.
When Kavan awoke again, the sun was setting beneath the treetops in the west and the beautiful woman was still beside him, her hair mussed, her skin still flushed with passion. His own felt both hot and cold against hers. The rawness of nerve endings meant he detected everything, the breeze, the minute changes of temperature as branches swayed and moved the shadows and sun over his body, the movement of the wind, the tickle of insects. The ease of her breathing and the natural rise and fall of power as it ebbed and flowed in her contented slumber. His muscles ached in a host of unusual places but none were unpleasant and not one of them, nor the reason for it, gave him cause for regret. He could trace her sun-kissed softness, the swell of her breasts, the arch of her hip, the flat of her stomach, without blushing. He looked upon her without any of the expected sense of shame and realized he felt none of it for his nudity either, even as she shifted into his warmth, awakening further need in his belly.
As tempting as it was to rouse her, to claim her again, to satiate the unending hunger, now that his brain had re-engaged, now that he could think of the world beyond this mossy clearing and their tangled limbs, he was aware of the rumble in his belly, aware of his thirst and the passage of time, aware that, come dawn, he must be in Rhidam for Bhríd’s wedding. If he did not go, there would be questions, and this was not a secret he wished to divulge. Rhyrdan and Dhóri were surely looking for them, worried and troubled.
Duty called. There was no choice but to return to the estate.
But blessed Kóráhm, he thought with a moan as he disentangled from her embrace and moved to the water’s edge, quenched his thirst with cupped palms, and then stood with his arms wrapped around himself, he did not want to go back.
Raebhá rolled, her hands seeking the assurance of Kavan’s presence, but found herself alone and sat with a languid start. There was no misremembering where she was, why she was here, and no regret. The movement of nearby shadow proved he had not abandoned her out of some afterglow of guilt as she feared, but stood with his back to her, no more than ten feet away, his white skin gleaming beneath the late afternoon sun. He looked relaxed, at one with the universe, with nature, with himself in ways he had not looked before.
She had never seen a more beautiful person in her life. His beauty had as much to do with the purity of his complexion as it did his shape, his comportment, the definition of each line of his form. If she had learned one thing during these last hours together, it was that he had no idea how beautiful he was.
When he had wept, she recognized not tears of pain or sorrow but tears of relief in knowing that he was every bit the man he had feared he could never be.
Raebhá did not understand how he could ever have believed otherwise.
This had not been planned. zethenaer, she thought, the possibility of foregoing her promises and taking another who was not her husband, had not crossed her mind. It was as if power had compelled them and they had been helpless against it.
Or maybe they had not been so helpless to resist and had rather chosen to allow nature and power to run its course.
She felt no regret. This was, as her father had explained, the way it was meant to be. She understood what he meant now. Being with Ombhrís would have been duty. Being with Kavan was right and good, free and pure. She had found herself here, with him, more fully than she ever had before, a gift of understanding she could not repay. And she had given Kavan something equally priceless, the gift of knowing, finding himself that meant more than any vows she could have made.
He was content there, silhouetted by the setting sun.
It would not last. They would have to leave this place. This could not happen again. Not until she knew the truth about Ombhrís. Maybe not even then.
Thinking music, focused on the notes inside his head to drive everything else away, Kavan absorbed nature’s energy to replenish what had been spent loving the woman who owned his heart and soul. He did not notice her movement until Raebhá’s arms wrapped around his waist, her hands on his stomach pulling him back against her. This time when he shivered, it was not out of fear.
In her touch, with mental barriers torn down between them, he could feel that last lingering thought, a thought that pierced his heart and made his breath hitch. She was right, but knowing it did not lessen the sting. “We should go back,” he whispered, covering her hands with his without looking at her. Her breath on his shoulder and neck was warm in the cooling air and he could feel the beating of her heart.
It was safer to focus on the ripples of dying sunlight on the water than to focus on her. Despite his words, however, he did not move.
“We should.” She kissed the nape of his neck, along his spine between his shoulders, and smiled at the pulses that tickled through him in response. She chose not to say anything else that might spoil this moment. He already knew those thoughts, already knew that this brief intimacy would be over too soon.
“There will be a dinner in the evening; the Lachlans will insist on it.” Bhríd had served the Lachlans for so many years, as chancellor, chamberlain, and King and Queen’s champion, a title he continued to hold regardless of the rarity of his visits to Rhidam or participation in tournaments. Queen Diona and Prince Merrek would honor him because it was the right and noble thing to do. Kavan would be expected to play. Having spent too many days without his harp, he looked forward to turning his attention to music. Raebhá was eager to hear him, he knew, and music would ease the longing to have her in his arms that he did not expect to ever leave him.
He did not believe he would ever hold her that way again. That she would ever hold him and welcome him into her soul’s embrace. Not while the thought lingered that her husband could be alive.
Maybe not even when she knew the truth.
He scowled but the look was gone before he withdrew from her hold and picked up his nightshirt from where it had been discarded. Raebhá did not need to see his expression to imagine his moment of regret. Before she could question him, seek his thoughts, every level of mental protection he possessed was once more in place.
She could no longer reach him.
“Afterward, the following morning, we will resume our search. If need be, we will go to Clarys. We will find what you seek.”
The clipped edge of his words was unintended but the abrupt surge of sorrow sharpened their edges and took away the last of his comfort.
There was no going back. What was done, was done. He was hers, and soon enough, she would be ripped out of his life.
k'Ádhá help me, he prayed before the pair of wolves began their race back through the forest in the direction of the estate. I do not believe I can endure this.
***
Prince Oska watched the setting sun from the room that looked over the courtyard, a room where he had often played as a boy because so few adults rarely came to it. The servants kept it cleaned, rearranged the sofas and settees and chairs periodically to keep it usable, but there were other lounges, libraries, meeting rooms, and dayrooms that his father and mother and brother preferred to use. There had been a time when his mother had been here with him, and his sister, but that had been before Jerit was born. In small ways, Oska was relieved that his mother had never brought Jerit here, had kept this as his secret place. It became his place to retreat when his little brother grew bothersome or when he simply wanted to be alone with his books.
After eleven years Jerit had yet to find him here and Rika was no longer in Glevum to share it. If his mother considered that he still came here, she did not come either, leaving it his special place.
Or perhaps, as Inness suggested, his mother no longer cared enough to pursue her eldest son or spend time with him here.
He shook his head with a scowl before closing the window against the night’s chill. Regardless of his father’s perceived contempt, Oska refused to believe that his mother shared it. Asta accepted and welcomed everyone. Asta loved her children unconditionally. Asta would never turn on him, scorn him for his differences, or deny him what was his by the order of his birthright.
What Inness suggested, the plan she had initiated on his behalf, was for the best. He knew it. It would guarantee his right to the throne without the need for anyone to be hurt, would force his father to decree that, only in the event of Oska’s death without an heir, could Jerit sit upon Neth’s throne. Not because Jerit would be a bad king, but because Oska was the rightful heir. It was as simple as that.
There were a few more details to arrange, Inness had said, a few more guarantees to secure before they could approach Kjell with demands. When those things were done, when everything was ready, she would guide Oska through the steps required if he wanted to stake his rightful claim to Neth. Though he could admit his anxiety to himself, he would not admit it to his wife. Nor would he regret what had to be done. The future of Neth was too important to leave it up to the prejudicial whims of his father.
