Page 18 of Forbidden

“I don’t know,” he said flatly. “But I know that I have met them.”

Amber went to Duncan and put her fingers over his restless sword hand.

“Their names?” Amber asked in a soft voice.

Silence answered her, followed by a curse.

She sensed Duncan’s raw frustration and growing anger, but no faces, no names, nothing to call forth memories.

“Were they friend or foe?” she asked quietly.

“Both,” he said hoarsely. “But not…not quite.”

Duncan’s hand clenched into a heavy fist. Gently Amber tried to soothe the fingers into relaxation. He jerked his hand away and pounded on his thigh.

“God’s blood!” he snarled. “What kind of dishonorable cur can’t remember friend or foe or sacred vows?”

Pain twisted through Amber, pain that was both Duncan’s and, eerily, her own.

“Have you made any such vows?” she asked in a low voice.

“I—don’t—know!”

The words were almost a shout.

“Gently, my warrior,” Amber said.

While she spoke, she stroked Duncan’s hair and face as she had through the long hours when he had been lost in an odd kind of sleep.

At the first touch, Duncan flinched. When he looked into Amber’s troubled golden eyes, he groaned and unclenched his hands, allowing her gentle caresses to soothe him.

“Sleep, Duncan. I can feel your exhaustion.”

“No,” he said grimly.

“You must let yourself heal.”

“I don’t want to go into that fell darkness again.”

“You won’t.”

“And if I do?”

“I’ll call you forth again.”

“Why?” he asked. “Who am I to you?”

Amber hesitated at the blunt question, then smiled an odd, bittersweet smile as Cassandra’s prophecy echoed like distant thunder.

He will come to you in shades of darkness.

And he had.

She had touched a man with no name and he had claimed her heart.

Amber didn’t know if she could bend events so that life as well as death flowed from her reckless action. She knew only one thing, and she knew it with a certainty greater than that of the sun’s burning progress across the sky.

“Come heaven, come hell,” Amber said in a low voice, “I will protect you with my life. We are…joined.”