Page 119 of Come the Morning

A strange panic seized her. She dressed quickly, and took the scabbard and mighty sword and hurried out to the courtyard. The men were gone. There were guards on the parapets, but even Angus had ridden out partway to say his good-byes.

She mounted her mare bareback, rode hard to the shore. The horses, wagons, and men were regrouping on the mainland. She saw Waryk atop Mercury, directing the movements of his men.

A small boat lay on the shore. She slipped from her mare and into the boat, and she called to Waryk. He saw her and frowned, and she knew he was disturbed that she had come out alone and was taking the boat alone. He left his task, riding to the shoreline. There he dismounted from Mercury and watched her curiously, and she realized that it appeared she might have decided to come with him rather than stay, yet she thought that he might have been disappointed in her had she made that choice.

“Lady—” he began.

“Your sword, Waryk. Your father’s claymore,” she cried across the water.

He smiled suddenly, coming to her. He took his sword as he stood in the shallows, buckling it on, low on his hips. He dragged her boat on in, high on the sand, and lifted her from it.

“Thank you, milady,” he told her.

“Aye. I know that you fight with your father’s sword. That it may—that it may bring you back to me.”

“And you want me to come back?”

“Aye.” She hesitated, meeting his eyes. “Actually, you’re more than palatable. You’re quite handsome, striking, rather magnificent. But I …”

“Aye, lady?”

“I …” Her voice faded. She spoke in a whisper, giving all that she dared. “I’m finding that I need you and that … I …”

Her courage faded. It seemed that she had said enough. His eyes touched her with a strange, dark passion and tenderness she had never expected, and his words were equally comforting. “My love, I will return. And perhaps then …”

He kissed her, before the troops, and there went up a mighty yell, and she knew that they had the full approval of the men.

But then Waryk mounted Mercury, and with a last bow to her, he turned and rode to the front of his troops.

And as a breeze swept in from the Irish Sea, he was gone.

And she was left behind.

With a dying man …

And her deepest fears.

CHAPTER21

For five days straight, Ewan hung between life and death.

Mellyora had known a fever would come, and she had known that the fever was what they must battle. She, Phagin, Igraina, and Ewan’s grandparents tended him constantly, and no one else. She and Igraina grew close again, as they had been as children, cooling the whole of his body with ice brought down from the top of the hills when he burned too hotly, blanketing him with furs when the chills set in, changing the poultices on his many wounds every few hours, trying to draw whatever poisons tormented him from his blood.

For five days, he lay silent. They forced water and thin porridge between his lips. They sat in silence, they talked quietly, they prayed.

Angus remained constantly at the door to the cottage. Jon of Wick remained ever vigilant at the great wall of the fortress, while men now stood guard at the wall still being constructed around the residences.

Angus would never leave her, she knew.

And she wondered sometimes if he had been left to watch her, or watch over her. Yet the great, scarred, bald old warrior could be gentle in a way that completely defied his appearance.When other hands were busy, he would assist her. Though Ewan remained unconscious, Angus talked to him as if he could hear, and in time, despite her fears, Mellyora found herself doing the same. “Treat him like a dead man, and he may well die,” Angus told her. “Speak to him as if he were needed among the living …”

“And he will live?” she finished.

“He will have a good chance,” Angus told her.

Day after day, she sat with him. Held his hand. Tended to him. And she thought of him with tremendous affection, yet she remembered the days when they had been together now as if they had all happened very long ago. Theirs had been a strange time of innocence. She had loved him, just as she loved him now. It was a deep love, and aye, she did love him. But that love had shifted so! She thought often, in her long vigil, that she might well have made him a miserable man; she was far too willful, too demanding, too determined. She had been lady here, great Adin’s daughter, and she had meant to have things her way. She would have pushed Ewan to the wall time and time again, while with Waryk …

It was all so different. Her emotions regarding him—hate, anger, fury, passion, and even hunger—were stronger than anything that had ever ruled her before. She didn’t know quite what it was he had done, or when it had been, that had made him so predominant in her every waking minute, in her dreams, in her soul. She knew that it was not simply that he had married her, no matter how great that bond was meant to be under God and the law. The king’s command had not made her want him. Or love him.