The boy froze at the sight of Alex and stared down at the ground, his hands clenched with uncertainty.
“It’s all right,” Laren murmured. She nodded toward the outside. “Thank you for keeping the fire going. Go and get some sleep now. You can return in the morning.” She reached into a pouch that hung at her side and handed him some dried meat and an oat cake, that he accepted.
“I started the green melt,” Ramsay muttered, before he crammed the food into his mouth and fled.
Alex had no idea what the boy was talking about, but the interior of the cavern was roasting hot. He removed his cloak and loosened his tunic, walking in front of the furnaces. Rows of pipes were set within one of the openings and inside another he saw clay crucibles.
When he reached the last fire, he turned to face his wife. Laren’s blue eyes stared at him and slowly she removed her gloves.
Upon her hands and forearms he saw mottled red skin and burn marks he’d never noticed before. “My God, what happened to you?”
Alex crossed the cavern to examine her. From the look of them, they were not recent marks. Even so, he was almost afraid to touch the skin, for fear of hurting her.
“When did you burn yourself?” It seemed that there were multiple scars, some older than others.
“The burns are from the times when I caught a heated segment of the pipe. Or when I was careless with the fire.”
Alex stared at Laren. “You’re saying that the glass Nairna wants to sell…is yours?”
She lowered her head in a nod, then raised it again. “Yes.”
He kept his stare fixed upon her. If she’d said she’d created diamonds out of grass, he couldn’t have been more surprised. But it did explain why she disappeared each day for hours on end. And why her hair often smelled of smoke.
And the scars upon her hands.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her burned skin, unable to grasp the truth of it. It was as if the woman he’d married had disappeared, leaving another woman in her place. “When did you learn to make glass?” he asked, keeping his distance from her.
“Almost three years ago.” Her voice was quiet, emotionless. “Just after we lost David.”
Though she was saying something about how she’d needed to bury herself in work, that she couldn’t be around the keep because it reminded her too much of the baby, all he could think of was that she’d hurt herself.
By playing with fire, she’d caused scars that would never go away. She’d taken grave risks, injuring herself, to make glass that she’d hidden in this cavern. And he’d never noticed. Guilt flooded through him, and he realized he didn’t know his wife at all.
Laren. His Laren. Making glass?
She hardly talked to anyone and seemed overwhelmed at the thought of running a household. How could she transform sand and other elements into glass? It seemed impossible.
He caught her hand, another suspicion taking root. “There were nights when you left our room and said you needed to sleep with the girls.” He kept a firm pressure upon her fingers. “Did you leave Glen Arrin to tend the furnace?”
Her face paled, but she admitted the truth. “Yes. After all the work I’d done, I didn’t want the fire to go out and lose the glass. I had to do it alone, the first few months after Father Nolan died. I lost many, many melts until Ramsay agreed to be my apprentice.”
There were so many lies she’d told, so many deceptions. He no longer knew what to think of her. Why hadn’t she confessed the truth? Why had she built up stories about taking walks, about sleeping with the girls because they were frightened of the dark?
And most of all, why hadn’t he noticed? All the signs had been there.
Mingled emotions fumbled within him, anger and confusion, but shadowed beneath them was the question that bothered him most. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked at her scarred hands, her mood turning somber. “Because I knew you’d be angry with me. And in the beginning, nothing I made was good.” She turned her gaze toward the heated stones, drawing her knees up to her chest. “The colors were wrong. The glass cracked apart when I tried to cut it. Nothing I did had any sort of beauty.”
“Then why continue?”
“Because it kept me from thinking of David. I lost myself in the work and it made it easier to bear the pain. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t good enough. It was my escape,” she whispered.
“You used to weave tapestries,” he reminded her.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t touch a loom any more, because the last thing I wove was clothing for the baby. Making glass was different.” She turned back and raised her scarred hands to him. “I remember each of my mistakes and I won’t repeat them.”
He went to her and touched her knuckles, studying the marred skin. He confronted her, unable to let go of the betrayal. “You lied to me.”
