“You are well?” Drustan whispered. “Deord told me Alpin was angry. That he would have hurt you.”
“Deord did a good job of stopping that,” she managed, “though not before your brother had struck my maid. Your guard is a very capable man. Alpin did have cause to be angry with me, though not with Ludha. I had disobeyed a rule. More than one. He told me your story, Drustan.”
No reply at all to this. Glancing across at Ludha, Ana surprised an expression that was more fascination than terror. This was too far gone now; she would have to hope her maid could be trusted. “He told me something terrible. About what happened all those years ago.”
Silence again.
“Drustan, talk to me.”
“What can I say?” The tone was weary.
Tears pricked Ana’s eyes again. The truth burst out despite her best efforts. “I suppose I’m hoping you will tell me it was a lie. That you didn’t do it. It is something I do not want to believe.”
After a little he said, “You are distressed. Better if you do not talk to me. That’s what Deord says.”
Ana felt anger stir. “It’s not up to Deord or to anyone but me to decide that. Unless, of course, you don’t want to talk …”
“I do not wish to make you sad. I do not wish to frighten you. That was a dark day. It set a shadow over Briar Wood that will never be lifted.”
Ana’s heart was still racing. She made herself take a deep breath. “Will you talk about it? Tell me? Is it true, what Alpin said?”
“What did my brother tell you?”
Ana gritted her teeth; she did not want to utter the words aloud.
“Ana? What did he say?”
“He told me you … you are subject to some kind of frenzy. That it grips you from time to time, and you act as if you were mad. He said you killed his wife. That you … drove her to her death.”
“A man does not lie about a matter so close to his heart.” The tone was flat now.
“Wh-what are you saying, Drustan?”
“I would give much to be able to tell you my brother is wrong. But I cannot.”
Her heart was a leaden weight. She closed her eyes, unable to speak. Why this mattered so much, she could not imagine. She hardly knew the man. Yet it seemed the heaviest of blows. “Thank you for being honest,” she said when she found her voice again. “This grieves me. I did not believe it could be so; you do not seem to me like a … a …”
“Monster? Madman? They give me many names, some far worse than those. My brother has treated me better than I deserve.”
Ana was gathering up her work, packing linen and needles into the willow basket. On the other bench Ludha did the same. The silence stretched out.
“Your singing gave me light,” came Drustan’s whisper. “Thank you. I had forgotten such fair sounds.”
Ana quashed the strong inclination to ask further questions. Something within her was unwilling, still, to accept the truth about this captive, even now he had confessed to her in his own words that he was indeed a savage killer and unfit to walk abroad. She must not allow those thoughts to get the better of her common sense.
“We must leave now,” she told him. “It’s late, and it’s getting cold up here.”
“Will you come again?” There was a forlorn note in the question that told Ana he knew the answer must be no.
“I—I don’t know,” Ana whispered, hating the weakness that would not allow her to grant him a firm response, I cannot come.
“Say it.” Drustan’s voice had changed: this was a challenge. “Tell me the truth. You will not come because you despise me. Because you shrink from me. Say it!”
“That’s not true! I don’t despise you!” Sudden tears filled her eyes.
“Then will you come?”
“What about Deord?” Curse it, why couldn’t she shut her mouth and walk away as any sensible woman should?
“Sometimes he is here, sometimes out in the house; he must fetch what is needed. If you sing, I will know you are there. If I speak, you will know it is safe.”
Ana looked across at her maid. A great deal depended on Ludha’s loyalties. The girl gave a little nod.
“A friend advised me once,” Ana said to her unseen listener, “to rely on the intellect before the emotions. It was wise guidance. If I heeded it, I would tell you I cannot return here. Your brother has promised immediate and cruel punishment for any man who so much as looks at me in a way Alpin dislikes. I can imagine how he would view our meeting thus. To do this again would be foolish, risky, and entirely inappropriate.”
Silence indicated Drustan was waiting for more.
“I’ll come if I can, Drustan.”
“I’ll wait for you,” Drustan said. “Farewell, Ana.”
THAT NIGHT ANA gave the crossbill its portrait in fine silks and received in her turn a gift of a small chip of stone on which, roughly scratched, was the outline of a heart. If she had refused to acknowledge to herself, before this, that her interest in Drustan went beyond curiosity, compassion, and a need to see justice done, she was forced to do so in the moment when the bird laid this token on the small table in her bedchamber. Ludha had retired for the night; the creature had flown in the window from the darkness outside and waited at a safe distance from the candle, watching as Ana put the gift under her pillow.
When it was gone she lay on her bed thinking of Alpin, who had pressed her up against a wall after supper and given her a kiss that was unabashedly persistent. She had endured it, imagining all the while how it would be if another man held her, a man whose kiss would be as gentle as this was rough, as tender as this was brutal. Alpin’s embrace chilled and frightened her; she knew that the other kiss would send a fiery warmth through her body, making her limbs weaken and her heart pound with excitement. It was a thing that was never going to happen: the stuff of foolish fancy. She wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything before.
The druid was taking a long time to come. As one turning of the moon stretched into two, Ana recognized the delay as a gift of sorts, and began a delicate kind of dance, a dance with an invisible partner. Each step, each measure, each move was fraught with danger. Often the patterns of it were interrupted, for Ana could not disappear to the little courtyard every day without attracting undue notice, and when she did go there, often Drustan remained silent, which meant Deord was with him. Ana thought it likely Deord already had suspicions, for if he had ever been within the sleeping quarters when folk sat conversing up above, he must surely know the building’s secret. But Alpin’s special guard went to and fro with his supper trays and kept his tranquil eyes discreetly away from his chieftain’s bride-to-be. In no way did Deord indicate anything was out of the ordinary, and Ana’s heart beat more calmly for it.
All the same, her days formed themselves around those brief times, those brief, magical times when she could speak to Drustan, could whisper to his unseen ear and crouch by the wall to catch his soft replies. She finished the second little square and dispatched it with the hoodie when the bird came visiting. She planned a third but did not start on it, since she had not quite the right colors to render the smallest bird’s plumage exactly. Besides, she had Alpin’s wedding clothes to finish, and now that Ludha had provided the design there was no excuse for not getting on with it. It was this piece of work she had with her the afternoon Ludha forgot to pack a particular length of ribbon in her work basket and had to go down to the sewing room to fetch it.
It was the first time Ana had been alone with Drustan. She had been careful, thus far, in what she said to him. Not a word had been spoken of their encounter in the forest, or the fact that he and Deord had the means to escape their confinement. If Ludha had suspected anything unusual in Ana’s rapid befriending of her prospective brother-in-law, she had not spoken of it. Often they sang songs together, the three of them, and once or twice exchanged old tales and childhood rhymes. On one occasion Ana asked Drustan about the birds, how they came to be so close to him, how it was they stayed
safe in a house full of cats. He answered cryptically; it was hard to interpret his words. She told him a little about her childhood in the Light Isles, and about becoming a hostage, and how it had felt.
As time passed and spring warmed into summer, their talk became easier. She asked him about his childhood, and learned of a boy who had been often alone, but never lonely. Creatures had been his companions; dreams had sustained him. He had lived at Briar Wood with his brother and sister until he was seven years old. Then he had gone away to the west, to his grandfather’s house, a house that had later belonged to Drustan himself, before he was shut away.
“That place is called Dreaming Glen,” he told her with a shy pride. “It is full of soft light, a light not seen anywhere else in Caitt territories. It’s like a blessing from another world; I always thought the touch of the gods was on those sheltering hills, that still water. There are two lakes near my house; I had my own names for them, names I gave them when my grandfather first took me back there with him.”
“What were the names?”
“The first lake, near the house, is fringed by trembling birches. It seems to give back a brightness beyond that of sun or moon, as if it made its own shining. I called it Cup of Sky. The other is a place where mist lies over the water even in the heat of day. Broad-leaved plants float on its surface, with white flowers in summer, and long-legged birds move in and out of the vapor like visitors from another realm. That lake was Cup of Dew. A child’s names.”
“Those names paint a picture for me. I would love to see Dreaming Glen one day. Drustan, why were you sent there to live when you were so young?”
“There was no place for me here. I was a source of shame to my parents; my brother and sister shunned me. My grandfather made me a place.”
He asked her about the wedding and she gave guarded replies. She did not know if the tumult of feelings inside her, the longing to see him, the desire to touch him, an impossible, ridiculous thing, was evident in her voice. She thought she heard an echo of it in his, but Ana put it down to a craving for company to while away the endless days of incarceration.
Now, today, Ludha was not here, and all of a sudden she felt quite different.
“Drustan?”
“Yes, Ana?”
“Ludha’s gone to fetch something from the house. We have a little while alone.”
A pause.
“A little while is scarcely long enough to begin,” came his voice. “To find the first words.”
“I know,” Ana said softly. She had moved to sit on the flagstones by the base of the wall, her knees drawn up under her skirt. Even on this fine day the stones were chill. Down below it would be bitterly cold. “I wish I could talk to you properly. I wish I could see you.”
“That cannot be.”
“I know that. I know what happened here; I’ve heard it from Alpin’s lips and from yours. I suppose … I suppose I want to remake the past. But not even the gods can perform such a task.”
“You wish you had never come to Briar Wood? Perhaps, that you had wed a man of the Light Isles or of Fortriu, and never set eyes on these two benighted brothers of the Caitt?”
“No,” Ana told him, clutching her arms around herself for comfort. “I don’t wish that at all. Only that somehow what happened here can be mended. I know it’s foolish, but I still long to hear that what you’ve told me isn’t true. But even if it is, I could never be sorry I met you, Drustan. If you did do that ill deed, it seems to me you have paid for it. It seems to me you have changed. I cannot believe the man I know now is capable of performing such an act.” She felt the heat rise to her cheeks and was glad that he could not see her.
“My gifts are poor things,” Drustan said. “If I could, I would give you treasures woven of light and laughter, of color and shadow, of life and breath. I would wrap you in a cloak of moonlight and set slippers of rippling water on your feet. I would …” The voice faltered. Ana sat motionless, spellbound. “I would touch you and awaken joy,” he whispered. “I knew this from the first moment I saw you, alone by the swollen river with your face full of terror and courage. I knew it when I watched you sleeping by your little fire, with another man’s body to warm you. I wanted to be that man; to hold you as he did. I knew it when you came upon us in the forest, the day you had to learn what I had done. It was a forlorn hope. And yet, I was not able to kill that longing; it remains with me every waking moment. It walks with me in my dreams.”
Ana could not speak.
“Your friend will return soon,” Drustan said. “Don’t waste this with silence. Speak to me; say anything. Let me hear your voice.”
Ana’s head was full of all she wanted to tell him, the messages of the heart, but the habits of a lifetime spent in royal households died hard. She could not say what she felt; she was betrothed to another man, and there was the treaty. “I—how did you see me, by Breaking Ford?” she asked. “The hoodie was there, but …”
“Sometimes I see through different eyes,” he said. “We are linked, my friends and I. We help one another. Without them, without my little ones, I would have perished here for all Deord’s patient care. I send them out; they let me travel beyond my cage.”
“Do your birds have names?” Gods, she was wasting time, precious time.
“Hope,” Drustan said. “Flame. Heart.”
“That’s beautiful, Drustan.”
“They are part of me. And you are part of me, Ana. I don’t want you to marry my brother.”
She sucked in a sudden breath. “You shouldn’t say such things,” she told him as firmly as she could. “The marriage seals a treaty. That’s why King Bridei sent me here. I have no choice.”
“Don’t marry him, Ana.” The tone was not soft now, but conveyed a warning. “If you were a bird I would bid you fly away while you still can.”
“Drustan, I’m sitting here with your brother’s wedding tunic half-sewn beside me. A druid is on the way to perform the handfasting and set the treaty in writing. If he’d come when he was supposed to, we’d be married by now. Alpin met all the terms the king put forward. I can’t change that.”
“This is what you want? To see your light quenched, your heart constricted, your freedom lost? To wed a man you cannot love?”
Ana closed her eyes. “What I want has nothing at all to do with this,” she said. “I have always known this would be my future. The blood I bring with me is of too much value to allow me freedom of choice. A woman of the royal line does not wed for love.” Her voice shook on the last word. “I think I hear Ludha coming back. We must stop this.”
“Ludha is still in the sewing room looking for her ribbon,” Drustan said calmly. “There is time to tell me what you think, what you feel. There is time to tell me the truth.”
“How can you know—oh. A bird. That unsettles me. Your little wren has perched on my windowsill and watched while I undress at night. While I fall asleep. Your crossbill has attended my waking with gifts. It seems I cannot escape your gaze wherever I am, whatever I do. That is … it is another form of captivity.”
“Not so, Ana. I would never watch if I thought it made you unhappy. I do not employ this often. Only when there is a need. Are you saying you would not wish to undress before me?”
“I …” The bold question, spoken in a tone of extreme delicacy, stirred every part of her. She felt the blood rush to her face and could not answer.
“That would not please you?”
“I can’t answer such a question, Drustan. It’s … improper. There are countless reasons why I should not conduct a conversation about such matters with you, even supposing I wanted to.” She drew a breath, forcing herself to stop before she said something utterly inappropriate. “I wish to ask you a question in turn. You will find it even more difficult than I did yours. But since you speak of telling truths, I need you to tell me one.”
“I have never lied to you. I know you wish that I had.”
“Then tell me what happened that day, the day Eris
a died. Tell me why you did what you did.”
A silence. Then he said, “If I answer your question truthfully, will you answer mine?”
“That is only fair,” said Ana, shivering in anticipation, for she was on the brink of hearing the truth, the whole truth at last, and she did not know if it would make sense of things or merely break her heart. “Quickly now. Ludha cannot take all afternoon to fetch a ribbon. It is hard for you, I know. Just tell me the facts.”
She heard Drustan take a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh.
“I don’t know where to begin,” he said.
“Just start on the day it happened and tell me what you did.” Ana’s heart was pounding; in effect she was asking for a firsthand account from a murderer. This bargain was the most unfair she could imagine.
“I must explain first that … that when I go there, I cannot always remember afterward. Sometimes it is clear in my mind, sometimes it is lost and never regained.”
“What do you mean? I don’t understand. Go where?”
“To the other place.”
“What place?”
“Where I go when the … the frenzy, my brother calls it, comes over me. He is wrong to give it that name. I would not call it a frenzy, but a journey. Still, I am at its mercy, whatever it is. If it renders me mad, as folk say, then I am the last one who can argue otherwise, since my every word must be doubted.”
“How does it happen? What does it feel like?”
There was a long silence.
“Drustan? Can you tell me?”
“Like coming alive,” he said in a whisper. “Like waking from a long sleep. Like fresh water to a man dying of thirst. Like the first touch of the sun. Like being set free. But it made me do a terrible thing. It makes me dangerous. They tell me I would kill again if I were let out. I must believe them. Why would they lie about such a thing?”
Ana was mightily confused “But Deord did set you free,” she said. “You were out in the woods, without fetters, when I saw you.” When I saw you and thought you the most beautiful man in the world.