The knot in her throat threatened to choke her. Elsbeth breathed on a shudder and blinked away tears. It took two swallows before she could speak. “You ask more of me than youknow.”
His faint huff of laughter was devoid of humor. “Oh, believe me, I know of what Iask.”
Elsbeth suffered a brief moment of anger—anger at being forced to bare an unrelenting pain to the wyvern. He was no longer a stranger to her, but even Angus only guessed at how badly Alaric the Bard’s departure had hurt her. She’d indulged in a moment’s maudlin nostalgia on the cliffs when she played with him in mind. She’d been lonely and frightened. She never imagined the reviled creature haunting Maldoza and terrorizing Byderside might be so sensitive to hermusic.
Wyvern and woman faced off in silence. Elsbeth almost refused, then remembered Alaric’s own confession, one given willingly and without hesitation. Like her, he’d loved and lost. “One song, Master Wyvern, and then something else.” Her voice turned pleading. “I begyou.”
“One song, Mistress Weaver. And then you may play your harvesttunes.”
She nodded, placed the fiddle under her chin and closed her eyes. An image of her Alaric rose in her mind. His dark hair, silvered by moonlight, was soft against her fingers. He twirled her around the solstice fire, gray eyes hot and promising all manner of seduction once he whisked her into the shadows. Elsbeth held that image and put bow tofiddle.
Her surroundings faded, buried by the power of her music and the emotion fueling its fire. She played as she had on the cliffs, pouring nearly a decade of love and memory into hersong.
She’d composed it shortly after Alaric left, a tribute not to the sorrow of his leaving, but to the joy he’d given her in the time he’d lived among them and made her his lover. The strings thrummed beneath her fingers, alive with a magic even wyverns could not create. When she played the last note and opened her eyes, she was stunned to see the cave once more and the wyvern watchingher.
“Beth,” he said, voice reverent and deep, “had you played that at Ney-by-the-Water, I would have never given you the choice tostay.”
Elsbeth gaped, unable to believe what she just heard. The blood rushed to her head. “Who areyou?”
Pinpoints of light glimmered along Alaric’s scales, coalescing until they covered his body in a ruby nimbus. The light pulsed like a heartbeat, flashing off the cavern walls and the flow of water beneath his feet. Elsbeth turned away, raising her hand to shield her eyes from thebrightness.
A voice, still deep but quieter than the wyvern’s, spoke. “Look at me, Beth. You know who Iam.”
She didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to look upon the reality of a man who, for eight bleak years, had been no more substantial than her most treasureddreams.
“Beth.”
Where Alaric the wyvern once stood, Alaric the man now faced her. Her stomach flipped; her heart thundered in her chest. Dressed in nothing more than the sun-burnished skin that made her palms ache to touch him, he stood within a haze of sunlight. Except for shorter hair and a beard, he was unchanged since she’d last seen him walk the roads leading away from hervillage.
His next words were not those of a poet romancing his love, nor those of a bard coaxing a reluctant maid to his arms. They were the words of a warrior, a conqueror returning to reclaim what was his and no oneelse’s.
“’Tis a good thing you have no husband, Beth, or I’d have to killhim.”
Elsbeth, who’d faced down an angry mob and bargained with a wyvern at the haunted cliffs of Maldoza with a stiff spine and absolute resolve,fainted.
She awakenedto a subtle warmth seeping through her clothing along her right side and the familiar scent of spruce and snow. The cavern’s spring no longer bubbled in the background, and she lay on the pallet she’d brought with her. She was again in the wyvern’slair.
Afraid to open her eyes, she remained still, basking in the heady recollection of meeting Alaric again. She didn’t want her dream to fade, didn’t want to find herself alone and heartbroken with only a puzzled wyvern wondering why she’d fallen asleep onhim.
“You have to open your eyes sometime, Beth.” That voice, so loved, so familiar and never forgotten, breathed gently in herear.
Elsbeth kept her eyes tightly closed. “No, I don’t,” she said. “This is a good dream. I don’t want it toend.”
The warmth along her side shifted until it pressed down on her from shoulder to ankle, and she snuggled against a solid chest and long thighs that slid between hers. Fingers flittered across her cheekbones and drifted into herhair.
“Does this feel like adream?”
Elsbeth moaned softly and finally opened her eyes. Alaric, the bard who had given her weeks of happiness and eight years of loneliness, stared down at her and smiled. He rested on his elbows and forearms. He was so close, she could see the fine lines fanning from the corner of his gray eyes, the curve of his eyelids. Black hair, streaked russet by the cave’s ambient light, fell across his forehead. It was shorter than she remembered, just grazing his shoulder instead of falling below them. A beard graced his cheeks, accentuating the line of hisjaw.
“Are you truly here, or am I just wishing you tolife?”
His bare shoulders, golden and smooth, flexed. He lowered his mouth to hers and brushed her lips in the faintest kiss before pulling away. “Ah, Beth, if such wishing worked, I’d have wished you to my side yearsago.”
Held spellbound by his smoky gaze, she stared for several moments, drinking in the sight of him as if he were cool water on a sweltering summer day. She’d missed him. Dear gods, had she missedhim.
Elsbeth touched him then, a tentative caress of fingers and palms tracing the slope of his shoulders and neck. Alaric’s eyelids lowered to half mast, and his breathing hitched. He shut his eyes when she ran a fingertip over his cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose. A strong, handsome face with a generous mouth that smiled easily and had brought her to delirium with a simple kiss. A belovedface.
“I was afraid you were dead,” she whispered, curving her hand against hischeek.
