through the window to fatten the scavenging mice. He secured the loose shutter, replaced the spent torch with a rushlight, and banked the embers in the fire-place. After Vivet’s return, he took up his sword and moved the piled evergreen boughs for his bed to the threshold. Then he sat with his back against the shut door. Tired himself, he honoured his word: burned reckless resource to keep wakeful vigil until the woman settled her nerves and rest overcame her anxiety.
The rushlight burned low. Melted into shadow, the swept boards smelled of damp. Long fled, the sweet fragrance of the bundled herbs once hung to dry in the rafters. No ephemeral trace of the healer’s presence remained to chafe Arithon’s overkeyed senses.
Aching, bereft, he watched Vivet fight the stir of incipient nightmares. Reflection sparked a fitful gleam in her opened eyes until the reed ember winked out. She did not toss and turn but lay in taut stillness into the deeps of the night. Chafed by her turbulent tension, and haunted by other ghosts from his gapped memory, Arithon yearned for the balm of his talent on the lyranthe. The cabin’s too-personal history made the silence ring loud on his ear. Each breath offended his nostrils with the stinging pungency of balsam: a strong scent, not her, and a signal wrongness that frayed every natural instinct.
Fretted past sense, Arithon shouldered the watch through another wearisome hour. The thud of his heart-beat yearned for another woman’s secretive thoughts. He felt more alone than ever before in his years of extended life.
The onerous minutes crept by. The risen moon silvered the cracks in the shutter. Naught stirred the fir boughs outside but the breeze, while the shuttlecock flight of an owl chased mice come to gorge upon the scrapped bones.
Until Vivet broke the unbearable quiet with a tremulous whisper, “I’m sorry. I never asked for your name.”
“Call me by Arin,” said the Prince of Rathain, disinclined to share his identity. That mistake had harmed the crofters in Kelsing, whose fortunes had turned for the worse by his presence. Better to consign Vivet’s well-being to her family and depart without leaving a trace.
Time came at long last when the body’s exhaustion surmounted distress and the throbbing complaint of fresh injuries. Vivet’s tortured breathing deepened and quieted. Beyond weary himself, Arithon fashioned a simple cantrip to awaken himself before sunrise. Then he retired the sword and snugged down his mantle. His depleted awareness let go at once. Alert for too long, reserves utterly spent, he welcomed oblivion and plunged without care into dreamless sleep. But not as he wished, until dawn.
Pulled from the drugged syrup of black-out exhaustion, Arithon stirred to the blissful, bold heat of a woman’s hands on him: fingers that teased through his parted clothes and caressed him with intimate urgency. Her touch trembled, shameless, arousing as fire, intoxicate with the fierce promise of release. The assault on his undone defences caught his breath, then drove the wind from him, branding his skin with desire that rushed him senseless.
He roused, consumed. Vital, alive, hazed by animal lust after repressive years of cruel abstinence, his flesh screamed. The air he fought into punched lungs wrung him dizzy. Clinging as velvet, musked in piquant smoke, the scent of exotic perfume unmoored him. He need only surrender himself. Falling into the abyss of raw pleasure, he plunged heedless towards blind conflagration. Past reason, the urgent clamour of male ecstasy trampled his desolate hurt.
Confusion welcomed the storm wind of passion, a forceful antidote for the heart-break that stranded him in bleak solitude. A longing too vast to contain might be drowned, if only for one fleeting moment.
If he dreamed, here was surcease. Veiled in a silken fall of warm hair, raised to heightened torment by blind need, Arithon groaned. Thought fled as her fecund weight straddled him.
Reflex took over. Yearning drove the leap of his being: but no answering spiral surged in response. No rarefied synergy kindled delight. The lightning bolt of her counterpoint harmony did not rise to balance him. If ever he had shared such exquisite joy, or flown, bedazzled, into the glory of a matched consummation, no such seamless experience unfolded. His spirit encountered no flowering grandeur but launched into nothing, unpartnered. No piercing tenderness thrilled his raced pulse with the grace of a mirrored response.
The hands gripping his shoulders were none that he knew: and in the burgeoning blaze where emotion should have melted him into cascading completion, Arithon slammed, bewildered, against an implacable separation.
In fact, the glad shimmer of physical pleasure on her part was utterly absent.
This frenetic bid to possess him was not carefree eagerness but the desperation of dread, overwritten by calculation. His shaken faculties curdled. Pain of the flesh and anguish of mind violated his initiate’s integrity.
Arithon recoiled as though struck in the gut. He broke the chokehold of her embrace. Wrenched free of her naked weight in revulsion that tore the eyelets of his unstrung laces out of his rifled clothing. Slammed backward against the cabin’s latched door, he cried out. The jolt to his frame scarcely registered. Cold to the bone, breached desire quenched utterly, he stared reeling into the dark, blistered to mage-sighted outrage.
The waif’s face he confronted wore bruises.
“Vivet!” he shouted, aghast. “Ath’s greater mercy!” Moved again, jackknifed upright, Arithon snapped off his shredded shirt. He flung her the garment with a hoarse plea to cover her nakedness. “What are you about? Grace above, you can’t want this! Not from me, tonight, surely not from any man!”
“Believe it.” She crumpled, shivering, the mangled cloth crammed beneath her soaked cheek. Damaged in body and spirit, she languished in artless prostration amid the scattered balsam. “More than life, I crave your affection.”
Which was an outright lie. The note of her falsehood jarred his musician’s ear and splashed ugly echoes across his rogue far-sight.
Arithon jerked away lest she debase herself further. Yanked up his small-clothes and breeches, even as she stretched and clasped his ankles in entreaty.
Offended, he shoved her off. “What do you want of me, Vivet?” Furious, he pressured her frigid intent. “Comfort? Favour? Security? Do you wish a house, a mate, or just a randy champion to cosset your injuries on a pedestal? Is it children you want to salve loneliness? Or do you seek a stranger’s infatuated sympathy to bury your sorrows? Take care how you answer! I am no puppet to be yanked on the strings of a craven manipulation.”
“I want nothing!” she retorted. “Only to win back a measure of happiness.”
Which indignant denial made Arithon feel soiled. “Stop cheating yourself.” The heated air gagged him, smoke-thick, floral sweet, and cloying enough to blanket his senses. “Tell me the truth before I walk out!”
She hung her head. Tangled hair, fallen, muffled her plea, “Is your offer to guard me so easily shaken?”
Sickened, wrung dizzy by his raced pulse and the mangle of grief left by his own ravaged hope, Arithon side-stepped and flung open the shutter. He needed the shock of cold air in his lungs. Anything to quench the rife scald of his temper, before he vented his outrage and struck her.
Whatever forsaken sentiment drove her, Vivet rejected all instinct for self-preservation. “Why spurn my thanks for your generosity?”
Arithon met her pandering question with sarcasm. “Should I succumb? A strumpet requires less attention. How long, before you also demand my loyalty and my confidence? Poppet, enlighten me. Is wanton sport in my
