Page 58 of A Constant Blaze

She drew in her breath. “Well, as I recall, life with you was always unexpected.”

There wasn’t a great deal he could say to that, and he didn’t. But the smile had gone from his eyes, leaving them serious as they searched hers. “Are we allies, Halla?”

The pain of that was like an arrow in her gut, depriving her of breath. All she could do was wrench her gaze free. “How can you even ask?” she got out before she bit her lip to silence.

His other hand came up, grasping the back of her neck, lifting her head once more. “You left Brecka. You left Ross.”

You didn’t come home!But she couldn’t, wouldn’t say that. Instead, she curled her lip for strength and raised her eyes to his once more. “I was about your business,” she said with disdain. “As I always have been.”

Those dark eyes hadn’t missed much when he was a young man. Now, they seemed to turn her inside out, against all her silent struggles.

“You never used to hide from me,” he said softly.

She hated him for the flooding memory, for the way her very bones melted as if she was still that young, devoted girl who’d withered away in lonely isolation. She lifted her chin.

“You are a stranger,” she said deliberately.

His eyelashes flickered, his own trick of hiding. He might even have whitened, but there was no time for either regret or triumph. His hands dropped as though burned, and he turned away from her, already opening the door. “It would seem we both are.”

*

Muiredach, whose feetwere always on the ground, had realized long ago that his unrequited love for his chaste lady was only bearable because no one else touched her either. As they rode toward the main road, the Lord and Lady of Ross at the front of their little party, he was almost surprised that the sight didn’t hurt him more.

Of course, it had been a very odd reunion. Ridiculously understated. Or at least it would have seemed so without the tension quivering in the very air between them. They pretended, but something worryingly deep and intense was going on beneath the surface, something that excluded everyone else.

“She is cold,” Mairead said beside him, as though the words were wrung from her. She sounded more distressed than she’d been throughout her escape. “I never imagined she would be cold.”

“She isn’t,” Muiredach said shortly. The lady, who wasn’t frightened of anything, was afraid.

Mairead turned her head and looked at him. “What do you want?” she repeated. “After twenty-two years?”

“You understand nothing.”

“I understand how much he’s longed for this, and how much she’s hurting him.”

“She’shurtinghim?” Muiredach edged his horse closer to hers, only just preventing himself from seizing her bridle as anger pushed discretion into the wind. “She fought every day for him, sent her sons to fight for him while she waited in agonies of anxiety. She ruled his earldom and kept every man, woman, and child loyal to him in the teeth of the king, and Norman soldiers and every other threat that reared its ugly head. She planned his escape and Donald’s, and when she heard it had worked, she made a feast for him, a welcome home, a triumph. And he didn’t come.”

Mairead frowned with brief confusion. “What do you mean, he didn’t come?”

“He sent the men with his sons and went off by himself as if she were nothing.”

“But she isn’t,” Mairead said blankly. “She is everything. It broke my heart every day, but she is.”

“Then allow her a little pride. For he shattered it with his carelessness.”

Mairead shook her head with surprising vehemence. “Not carelessness. Never that.”

“Then what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s as if…captivity damaged him, and then so did freedom.”

She looked away as the party slowed, peering through the woods in the direction of Kingowan. There, no doubt, soldiers again walked along the wooden parapet, watching. They would know by now that Mairead had gone. Probably, they had given up on finding Malcolm MacHeth or fled before his marauding army. If it existed.

“They are strangers,” Mairead said abruptly. “They need time to remember each other, learn what each other has become.”

“And if they don’t like what each other has become?”

Mairead laughed. “Then perhaps you and I have a chance after all.”

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