The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [110]
He merely smiled and reached for her, but the candle went out with a last dancing flare. A red eye in the dark, the wick slowly faded. In the darkness she was freed from his smile, and she got up before he could grab her.
“Get out, or I’ll find my sword and cut you in pieces.”
Without a word of argument he got up and began searching for his clothes. She leaned against the wall, because the room seemed to be spinning around her. Every little scuffle or rustle Perryn made was unnaturally loud, as if the noise echoed in a chamber ten times the size. Finally he was done.
“I truly do love you,” he said meekly. “I’d never just trifle with you once and then desert you.”
“Get out! Get out now!”
With a dramatic sigh he slipped out, shutting the door behind him. Jill fell onto the bed, clutched her pillow, and sobbed into it until finally she’d cried herself to sleep. When she woke, sunlight poured into her chamber window as thickly as a flood of honey. For a long time she lay there, wondering at light made solid. The dented pewter candle lantern shone like the finest silver, and even the gray stone of the walls seemed to pulse within this splendid light. With some difficulty she dressed, because the patterns of stains and pulled threads on her clothing were as engrossing as fine needlework. When she went to the window, she thought she’d never seen such a fine summer day, the sky so bright it was like sapphire. Down below in the ward stableboys were tending horses, and the sound of hooves on cobbles drifted up like the chime of bells. Her gray gnome appeared on the windowsill.
“Do you know how I’ve shamed myself?”
It gave her a look of utter incomprehension.
“Good. Oh ye gods, I might be able to live with myself over this, and then again, I might not. Pray that Rhodry never finds out.”
Puzzled, the little creature hunkered down and began picking its toes. She realized that its skin, instead of being the uniform gray she’d always thought it, was made up of colors, many different ones in minute specks, that merely blended to gray from a distance. She was so busy examining it that she didn’t hear the door opening until it was too late. She spun around to find Perryn, his hands full of wild roses, smiling at her.
“I picked these out in the meadow for you.”
Jill was tempted to throw the lot right in his face, but their color caught her. She had to take them, to study them, roses more lovely than she’d ever seen, their petals the color of iridescent blood, always shifting and gleaming, their centers a fiery gold.
“We’ve got to talk,” he said. “And we don’t have much time. We’ve got to make a plan.”
“What? Plans for what?”
“Well, we can’t be here when Rhodry rides back.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. I never want you in my bed again.”
But he smiled, and this time, after their lovemaking, she felt the bewitchment a hundredfold. Even as her thoughts grew muddled, she knew that somehow he’d linked himself to her, that some strange force was flowing through the link. Then he took her shoulders and kissed her, the flowers crushed between them with a waft of scent.
“I love you so much,” he said. “I’ll never let you go. Come with me, my love, come to the hills with me. That’s where we belong. We’ll ride free together, all summer long.”
Jill had one last coherent thought, that he wasn’t daft: he was downright mad. Then he kissed her again, and it was too difficult to think.
Lord Nedd’s warband met the king’s herald a day and a half’s ride from the dun. Rhodry was riding next to his lordship when they crested a small hill and saw, down below them on the road, the royal emissaries, all mounted on white horses with red trappings set with gilded buckles. At the head came the herald, carrying a polished ebony staff with a gold finial strung with satin ribands. Behind him rode an elderly man in the long dark tunic and gray cloak of a legal councillor, with a page on a white pony at the old man’s side. Bringing up the rear were four of the king’s own warband, wearing purple cloaks and carrying gold-trimmed scabbards. Nedd