“No, my lord, I was not. I wandered off too far and happened on Avalon.” She shifted on his mantle in the grass and avoided his gaze. She pushed a lock of her loose flaxen hair behind her ear, reached for a grape, and then shifted again.
He waited until she stopped moving. But she was also finished speaking. Her silence told him plenty. Something was being planned against him, or against Bennett and the entire garrison. “I must warn you, Miss Hetherington,” he said in a low, quiet voice and moved an inch closer to her, “many have tried to kill me and have failed. Whoever comes will die and I will feel like hell because you will hate me for it.”
She went from pink to pale so quickly he thought she might turn green next. “What if…” She stopped and drew in a deep breath then began again. “What if ’tis me who comes in the morn?”
He gave her a doleful look and pushed out a ragged sigh. “Ah, I hope ’tis not you.”
She arched her brow at him. “Are you saying you would kill me?”
“Would you kill me?” He realized how foolish their questions were. They hardly knew each other. Why would either of them hesitate to kill the other if they had to?
She did not answer. Nor did he.
“I do not find you ordinary or dull,” he told her instead.
“And you find others so?”
“Aye. All of them. I know them. I have seen them in the faces and actions of others. They are all the same. But you seem different.” His gaze captured hers for a moment before she looked away. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.”
“Perhaps,” she countered softly, “you assume too much, too quickly.”
He didn’t. He knew he was correct about her. There was something refreshing and different about Braya Hetherington. He was beginning to believe what he’d heard about her being a fierce warrior. He’d heard of women warriors before. Songs were still sung on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall about fearsome Pictish queens. Something about Braya reminded him of the nine sisters of Avalon and made him want to smile at her—not for the first time today.
This wasn’t the time to go soft on someone. It hadn’t happened since little Florie Moffat when he was seven and lasted for three years after that. Just a few years after fleeing the massacre of his family, Torin had returned from visiting the village of Pitlochry with Jonathon and found Florie’s dead body along with most of the other children he’d come to care for. They had been killed by the English when they found the orphans’ camp.
Going soft hurt, so he never let it happen again. It worked out much better for him to draw others in while remaining distant.
It could be her coming to kill him in the morning. He needed to win her today so that he wouldn’t need to kill her tomorrow.
“Forgive me,” he atoned. “And forgive me for killing your kin.”
He started to rise but the slightest touch of her fingertips on his knee stopped him. “All right, I forgive you,” she granted, her voice a soulful melody to his ears.
Who else’s forgiveness did he seek and would never find?
“But I fear ’twill not change anything,” she said on a soft whisper. “’Twill be worse now.”
Torin wished he hadn’t met her. She was caught in the middle of his battle and would likely end up a casualty. He’d already saved one lass, young Miss Julianna Feathers, from the hell he’d unleashed on her home in Berwick. He wasn’t completely wretched.
But Braya Hetherington was different. She wasn’t helpless. He had to sever the Hetheringtons’ friendship with Bennett so she would not fight against the king’s army when they came to Carlisle again. He might meet her on the field.
He almost shook his head at the notion of it.
He would do what he could. In the meantime, he could keep abreast of what the reivers were doing through her. He would have to spend more time with her—that is, if they had any time before her kin struck back.
“Then let us enjoy the afternoon, for ’twill likely be the last time we spend together.” Saying it left a sour taste on his tongue.
“I hope that is not true,” she said, then turned scarlet as if she hadn’t meant to speak the words out loud.
He wanted to laugh. He almost did. What was this spell she was weaving over him to make him forget she was an enemy, a hater of Scots? She could have stabbed him four times already and he would have been too slow and distracted by her to stop her.
“Tell me, Torin,” she said a few moments later, as sweetly as the scented breeze. “Why do you bear the name Gray? ’Tis a name of a border family in the eastern Marches.”
“Gray is not my true name,” he told her. “I took it as a boy after lying in the grass and staring up at the sky. I felt a kinship with the clouds.”
Her expression softened on him. “What is your true name?” she asked, no longer bothering to pretend interest in eating.
“I do not remember.” He only remembered Florie and the other children telling him it was Scottish and to stop using it. So he had. Some nights, he wasn’t certain if Torin was his true name. Had he made it up when he was a child?
