Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [210]
Before her, his shadow lay superimposed on her own upon the empty tiles; his breath was sweet; his smiling lips in her hair. Her chin lifted. Staring open-eyed before her, ‘Are you afraid?’ she said. And raising her hands, slid apart his light ones and turned.
She had studied his sleeping face, exposed under the dye. Lymond asserting his full powers she had never met at close quarters before. Without touching her, he was so near she could feel the warmth of his skin; the lamps from the garden struck a sudden, dense blue from under his lashes. In the broken light, the short hair clasped his head like lit silver. He spoke again, his voice steady; but she could hear that, at last, he was controlling his breath.
‘The star of Gormluba was fair. White were the rows within her lips, and like the down of the mountain under her new robe was her skin. Circle on circle formed her fairest neck. Like hills beneath their soft snowy fleeces rose her two breasts of love. The melody of music was in her voice. The rose beside her lip was not red: nor white beside her hand the foam of the streams. Her eyes were bright as sunbeams; and altogether perfect was the form of the fair.… Maid of Gormluba, who can describe thy beauty!’
In the timbre of the Gaelic, you remembered his gifts, his hands on the strings and his thoughts in them. She answered him in the same tongue and kind, her body graced by his voice, her glimmering face and shoulders and breasts small and deep in his eyes.
Without looking, he put out his hand and drew the great shutter slowly closed. Behind her, the lit square dwindled on the fine tiles and was gone; in his eyes the last spark of light, reflected from her own, flamed and was extinct. In the soft darkness, smoothly, he found her two hands and brought them high under his own before gathering her for his kiss.
Within the boy’s frame and the armoured violence of her soul came a response stronger than her will: a surge of triumph so great that she would have stopped him, if she had been strong enough, in that moment before the glory could be dimmed. Then she was held fast in a sudden turbulence as suddenly leashed, as if an iron door had closed on a fire. Attentively, his lips visited her skin, exploring the way to her dry mouth, and found it.
He spoke, in the end, lifting his lips from hers; but she did not hear. Consumed like a spar in the flame she had incited, born like some parched changeling on the white bed of its heat, she was sealed by that spare kiss from words. When she came to herself she found him kneeling, and herself taut in his hands. ‘My dear, you are weeping,’ he said. ‘Welcome with hautbois, clarions and trumpets, noble lady. Welcome to the company of those who can be hurt.’
She had guessed, and she had gambled on one fact: that Francis Crawford’s ultimate stake in this war between them, unsought by either, would be the same as her own. And in this one thing she was his equal, and thought to find herself even his peer. She had almost loved O’LiamRoe for his innocence. She had come tonight, sure that Lymond would try to assail her mind in the end, in the long run, by trying to captivate her body. And grimly, icily, she had come prepared to show a conceited trifler ten years her junior a glimpse of what he had never known. She had come ready to serve him well, her anger cloaked, so that by morning, wordless, he would know that he had nothing of this coin with which to bid. And then, perhaps, he would let her and Cormac go.
Her plan was ashes. Braced for the torrid and the fanciful, she had met instead a strength steady and firm, easy in its ways and controlled—a mhuire, why had she not expected it? She