“I do.” He lay stretched out with the dying embers of their fire on one side of him and the limitless sky above. Bradana was no more than a silhouette with the harp on her knee.
“I did no’ think I could manage it,” she confessed. “How to capture all that ye are in my music? Funny and bright and deep and beautiful—so many things, ye are. But as we have been riding, a tune has been unfolding in my head. I call it ‘Planxty Adair.’”
She put her fingers to the strings. A shower of notes, a moment’s hesitation, and then the music burst forth. A winding, intimate, and quite complicated tune it was, as magical as the night.
The hound’s head came up. Adair stopped breathing, for he had no need for breath.
That—what he heard—could not behim.
Naught about him was so beautiful. Besides, he heard Alba in this music, the broad breadth of the sky, the bold sweep of a hillside, the strength of the land at night when they lay upon it. He heard Bradana too, her grace and capriciousness. Her endurance. And Wen, regal and steadfast. Even the clop of their ponies’ hooves.
Everything they were, and everything they were to each other, lay in the music. He could have listened to it forever.
And a curious thought entered his mind. If he never had anything more than this, a moment of lying here in the night in Bradana’s company and her music in his ears, it would be enough. For a higher state of living could not be reached. A man could ask no more.
When she finished, when her fingers stilled on the strings, a hush fell over the land and upon Adair’s heart. He broke it only to say, “Bradana,alanna, are ye sure that is for me?”
“My gift to ye.” She set the harp aside and came to him, already loosening the ragged blue dress she wore. “And all that I am.”
They made love there on the strong earth, and Adair could still hear her music in his head.
After that, she played for him often. They traveled south and west, leaving the open moorland and any Pictish structures behind and once more entering dense forest. They still followed signs—the glint of light on the hide of a deer, the flight of birds—so Adair could only conclude later that it was Alba who led them astray.
Or perhaps it was the wind, for as they headed down a slope and into an open area, it blew hard from behind them, fooling even the clever hound’s nose.
They never heard or had any whiff of the riders till they saw them, a band of five or six men mounted like themselves. They appeared from the trees on the far side of the clearing as abruptly as if they’d materialized out of the thin air. Indeed, Adair blinked at them even as Bradana, still ahead of him, drew her pony to a sudden halt.
All this time away, in the wilds of Alba, they had encountered no one other than Pictish hunters at a distance. These too must be a hunting band, for they had bows upon their shoulders. Adair’s shocked eyes also noted a boar, loaded onto an extra pony.
And he recognized the foremost of the riders, a man of middle years, his face deeply seamed by what might be grief.
Mican.
Bradana recognized him also. Her back tensed, and if she had shouted aloud to him, Adair could not have picked up more clearly on her rush of alarm.
By all that is holy. Mican. Here.
That the man—that all of the band—was surprised to see them also, there could be no doubt. Mican knew them in that instant. His eyes grew wide, and it took him only an instant to cry out.
“There! It is she, the false bitch who betrayed my son!” His gaze moved to Adair. “And Earrach’s killer.”
Wen gave a growl, and Adair drew his sword from its loop. These men, out hunting on what could only be their own land, had come armed with only knives andsgian-dubhs, the bows and arrows. Not one of them boasted a sword.
“Come,” Bradana said, and pulled her pony around. “Wen, come.”
The hound obeyed her instantly. She moved her pony, clearly intending to flee. Adair weighed their chances, then eased his mount over behind her, still facing Mican and his men.
“Adair, come!”
He could stay and take responsibility for what he had done—indeed, it was his first instinct, what he had meant to do all this while, and perhaps the reason Alba had led him to this. It had been a fair fight, that in which Earrach had died.
But he had no reason to believe Mican would see it that way or would hear him fairly. He believed Adair had possessed no right to come between Earrach and his bride. To make off with her.
And if this went very badly, this fight he stayed to face, Adair did not want Bradana to see what befell him. Indeed, his greatest concern at that moment was for her.
Over his shoulder he told her, “Go.”
She gave him a stare so incredulous that it needed no words, though she spoke anyway. “Leave ye?”
