“I promise it to ye, Darlei—we shall be together. I do no’ ken quite how. Or when such a thing may come about. I do know I will no’ rest till ye be mine.”
She stopped walking again. This time she gazed out to sea, fighting, perhaps, to master her emotions.
“Your father,” he said softly, paused beside her, “will no’ be easy to convince. I am naught but a second son and scarcely worthy o’ a Caledonian princess, MacAlpin’s order no’withstanding.”
“I shall have to make Father understand.”
“If ye can. He is a proud man and gey proud o’ his daughter. I am…naught at all.”
“You are everything, everything to me. If Father will not give his permission, we will run away together. Live wild on Caledonia’s breast. Or—or we will sail away in one of those wee boats, begin a life in a new land.” She cast a look at him. “So long as you come to me. Find me.”
He repeated it, a vow: “I will always, always find ye. If I ha’ to search a lifetime.”
Her lips trembled in a smile. Amazing, Deathan thought—he had not yet kissed those lips. And yet he’d sworn his future to her.
“Then it is agreed,” she said. “Ye will come to me.”
But it was not to happen that way. By the time they walked back to the settlement, the meeting between chief and king had ended. Things had apparently been decided as they usually were, without Deathan’s input.
Indeed, one of King Caerdoc’s men was looking for Darlei and summoned her hastily.
“Princess, your father is looking for you. Come, please, to his chamber.”
Darlei cast one look at Deathan, as tactile as a touch. She could not touch him here, nay, but as she moved off with her father’s man, Deathan felt the ties that had formed between them pull and tighten.
Nay, though, those ties had not so recently formed. In some way Deathan could not explain, they had existed even before she and he met. Anchored in his heart. He’d felt them the first time he laid eyes on her. The first time she’d looked at him.
His life had always been hers. He merely had not known it.
He went in search of his brother, figuring Rohr, having been released from the meeting in the hall, would be his best source of information. He could not find him. Not in the guards’ warming room, not up on the walls. Not even, when he peeked in, with Mam.
Had Rohr gone to Caragh? Indeed, if he truly loved the woman, he would, if only to share the trouble her wild words had caused.
It was exactly what Deathan would do, were their positions reversed.
To be sure, though, were their positions reversed, he could ask no more from life than to wed the Caledonian wild woman with the valiant heart.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Darlei’s legs trembledbeneath her as she followed Breh into Father’s quarters. A grand chamber, it was, no doubt the best the keep could offer. Sunlight spilled in through the large window and lit Father’s figure as he paced the floor. He and Moradoc, his holy man, were alone.
“Daughter,” Father cried even as Moradoc slipped out, “terrible news has come to my ears. Woeful news.”
Let him say the marriage is off, Darlei begged silently.We will go home, and Deathan will follow me. We will be together.
How did not matter. Where did not matter. Only that they would be.
Because her whole life up till now seemed to have been one great longing. For him. All the wildness, the dissatisfaction. The defiance. She had not known for what she longed till she saw him.
No explaining it. It just was.
She looked her father full in the face. “What is it?”
“Sit down.” He indicated the bench near the window.
She sat, her stomach writhing. Father continued to pace as he spoke to her.
“It has all gone wrong, this marriage agreement we came to fulfill. There are things the king, when he ordered the union, did not know. I am sorry to say, it has now come apart.”
