A figure stirred on the path below him, the one that led up to the graveyard. She wore a dusty blue dress and her hair trailed over her shoulders, having fallen from the careless bun she had no doubt tied up this morning. His longing stirred, the way the music so often did in him. He felt the wheel of life turn.
She came to him. Weariness rode her shoulders, but when she caught sight of him standing there motionless on the path above her, that fled. Her step quickened and she skipped over the stones. Fleet of foot, if not light of heart.
“I ha’ been looking for ye all day!” she cried, breathless, when she reached him. “Where ha’ ye been?”
“Walking. Thinking.” He took both her hands in his and felt something—some terrible fear or restlessness in her—ease.
“I thought ye had gone. Off on the road wi’ your harp on your back. Then I looked in your chamber and saw Brada still there.” Her gaze searched his. “But wrapped. For traveling.”
“Aye.”
She drew in a great gulp of air. “So if I hold to my truth and accompany my da, ye will go also?”
“Aye.”
With an edge of desperation in her voice, she said, “But ye promised to stay.”
“While ye were here, aye.”
“That is no’ fair. I ha’ told ye, Da loves your music. He would gladly gi’ ye a place here for good. Ye might stay, wait—”
“Nay, Katrin.” He need not tell her he had no such intention, that even if he did, he could never go. He must hold firm. She it was who had to choose. To love him because she remembered, or justto love him.
“Reagan says we leave the day after tomorrow, at sunrise. That gives us two more nights together. Come.”
She tugged at his hand. He did not move.
“Finlay?”
Two nights. Only two more, possibly, in all the world. In all his life.
When she spoke again, she sounded impatient, but he caught the glint of tears in her eyes. “Will ye no’ come to my chamber wi’ me? Nay? Then let us lie out here beneath the stars. In the forest.”
“Katrin—”
“I maun ha’ ye.”
She must.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In the momentsbefore Katrin opened her eyes, she struggled to determine where she was.Whenshe was. Not her bed in the keep or anywhere she at once recognized. But that did not matter.
She lay in the arms of the man she loved.
The familiar warmth of him wrapped around her. The well-loved scent of him teased, and satisfied, and lent an inestimable sense of security. Wherever she might be was exactly where she needed to be.
She lay with her cheek against the naked skin of his chest and could hear his heartbeat. Slow and steady as the rhythm of the world. She wondered, with a tentative sort of marveling, in which of Finlay’s stories she had landed now. For surely, in one of those she did lie.
“Darlei,” he whispered, and kissed her.
She opened her eyes to darkness.
They lay outdoors in the forest, for surely those were trees swaying gently above her against a backdrop of eternal stars. And the man in whose arms she lay was not Deathan, but Finlay, the bard.
It came to her then. How she’d towed him up the slope away from the sea and across the graveyard where lay her ancestors, sleeping. Into the trees beyond. They had spread his cloak out on the ground and lain down to make love.
Once had not been enough. Nor twice. He had fallen asleep before she had, and she’d lain there wondering—wondering what he made of her life. Even now, she was only half certain whether this be the truth of that life, or dreaming.
