Embers Read Online Free PDF Page B

have bothered. He could have held her against his injured left arm without effort. Her weight was wrong, not nearly enough for her height.
    His hands tightened on her body under the threadbare sack she seemed to consider passed for a gown.
    "Cuthbert's bones."
    It was an appropriate expression because that was all mat seemed to be under his hands, a collection of very small bones. Had they starved her at that miserable-looking nunnery where she had chosen to wait for Hun, or what?
    He could not believe this was what the smooth, curvingly voluptuous body had been reduced to. But then neither could he believe the coarse sack a creature of silk and fine cloth and bright gems was wearing. That creature had dazzled an entire court. And himself. She had struck straight through his heart.
    But she had done that to a person who no longer existed.
    The small frame pulled away from a grip that was too close. Strands of her night-black hair slid across the backs of his hands like remembered silk. Remembrance. A hunger beyond limits. The tightening in his loins was instant, tearing.
    "Let me go…" The words were breathless, whispered low against his ear. Her rapid breath fanned across his heated skin, enough to send the desire twisting deep inside.
    Desire born of memory. There was nothing else left in him.
    Or in her. She spoke so low only because she would not struggle with him in front of his men. A princess to the last. He let her move away but kept hold of her wrist until the camp was made and she was settled.
    She sat, stiff-backed, between Cunan the Pict in his long cloak and brightly coloured clothes and Duda the Northumbrian dressed in what could only be described as rags. If you were feeling charitable.
    Duda's various mismatched coverings twitched, which meant Alina's bastard brother had irritated him. Cunan's hound nose flared in response. Brand did not bother to intervene. Cunan would find out. Everyone did eventually. Duda was both the most cunning-minded and the most ruthlessly disgusting fighter he knew.
    He was also the most trustworthy of his men.
    He left them. Because he could not bear yet to be too close to the risen phoenix, to the woman he had believed dead. Because he must. To see whether he could really hear it, or whether it was imagination: the stealthy sounds of pursuit. Nay, not pursuit, it was too circumspect as yet. The sound of a shadow. Someone who watched where they went.
    It made no sense. It could not be Goadel yet. Goadel would still be racing down the ancient Roman road that led due south, believing that his prey, his brother's leman, was still hidden away in Wessex. Waiting for him. He thought of his phoenix's stunned ignorance of Goadel's intentions. It had been very well done.
    But he knew what it was worth.
    The stream among the tall beech was clear, ice against the heat of his face. A coldness you could lose yourself in, as darkly seductive to him as the sense of aloneness. The water drew him, as it always did, at every sudden twist of his life. It was the clearness of it, a clearness that the human world did not allow to those who had to deal with the complex ties of living.
    The silence was complete beyond the plashing of the stream and yet… He raised his head because he thought he heard it: the stealthy sound, quick and un-traceable.
    Just as suddenly it was gone, leaving no clue. It was like trying to find an unseen enemy who would strike out of the dark. It made his skin crawl with loathing. He would deal with anyone in a fair fight in the daylight. But he had never been suited to treachery.
    He was starting to learn.
    Like Alina.
    Treachery. He closed gritty eyelids but the vision he saw was not Goadel racing down the well-worn straightness of Ryknild Street. It was Alina's face. Not as it looked now, in its nun's veil, full of such suppressed anger and bitterness, but as it had been the first time he had seen it at Bamburgh.
    She had been the most beautiful woman ever to step into that