Making a sound of supreme annoyance, he flung his hands out. “Fine! No denutting, either. Though that’s being unfairly cruel to me, just so you know.”
She laughed again. “You’ll survive.”
“And he’d best be good to you or else I’ll tear him to pieces.” Duel went over so that he could lean down and kiss the top of her head.
“Love you, Du.”
He growled in response, then stepped away. “Don’t you dare think for one minute that I’ll allow you to move away from here. He’s to move in with us. Final word on that.”
“Whatever you say, dearest.”
“Mean it, Elf. No planting of any rocks will be done. I won’t have it. You keep you-know-what caged and around your neck or else I will have his nuts planted at my feet.”
“Aye, brother.”
Mara blinked as the scene faded. She wasn’t sure why Elyzabel’s harthfret had taken her there.
Not until it flashed again and she saw the image that had driven Duel to madness.
Against Du’s words and threats, and at the insistence of her fiancé, his sister had planted her stone in the nemeton where Mara had been born.
“Why here, my love?”
Mercyn smiled at Elyzabel. “I was born in this forest. While my father’s hall may be gone now, he told me that this would always be my home. That the trees here would shelter me and mine. So I wanted a piece of you placed here so that they can watch over you, too.”
But it was a trick. He didn’t want Elyzabel as his wife. He wanted vengeance against Du for his own family, who’d been slaughtered during a raid that had been led by Du’s father. The same raid that had destroyed that hall.
A vengeance Mercyn had known he couldn’t take until Elyzabel was separated from her harthfret and brother.
That was how they’d managed to kill her—especially since she wasn’t fully Deruvian, but rather half. Separated from her stone, she’d been unable to regenerate. They’d raped and slain her as a human woman.
And left her floating in the lake where they knew Du went in the mornings to read. It was the cruelest thing they could have done.
Mara gasped out loud as she saw his sister’s brutalized, naked body as Duel had found her. Tears blinded her at their cruelty.
No wonder he’d gone insane. Through his sister’s harthfret, she could feel his anguished shouts as he sprang from his horse and called her name. Feel his heart shattering the moment he gathered her frail body into his arms and held her like a baby against his chest, willing her to open her eyes and live again.
But they’d seen to it that she couldn’t.
Never in her life had Mara seen anyone so heartbroken. Heard more sorrow as he shouted his misery to the heavens and demanded the gods spare his sister and take his life in her stead.
No one had answered him.
That was the Duel she’d met as he’d torn her nemeton apart in an effort to find the ones who’d taken from him the only person who had ever given him kindness without cruelty or condition. The sole heart he’d held sacred above all others.
The only person or family he’d had in the entire world.
“Oh, Du,” Mara breathed as she finally saw the truth of him. All he’d ever known was pain and loneliness. Heartbreak. Betrayal.
No one had held him when he’d ached. Or grieved. No one. He’d gone through it all alone. Without friend or family.
With her cursing and damning him every step of the way.
That was why he’d hesitated that day in the forest. Even after everything they’d done to his sister, he’d refused to harm her. Because deep down, in spite of Mara’s Deruvian magick and his desperate need for vengeance and blood to assuage his sister’s death and his own guilt for not protecting Elf, he’d known that Mara was weaker than him. That she couldn’t defend herself against him any more than his sister had been able to fight off her attackers.
And rather than see her harmed or lay another innocent in her grave, he would have walked away and left her alone. Because, in spite of his ferocity, it wasn’t in him to harm anyone who couldn’t fight back against him.
Du was not the savage beast she’d proclaim him.
