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Barring this one night.
He reached for his bow. Leaning on the end of the stave, he depressed it, forming an arc, and wrapped the string around the other end.
Cassia’s brow furrowed. “What are you doing?
“Hunting.”
“You are going to leave me here?” she exclaimed. “Alone? With the wolves. And the boar.”
He inched his head up. “The boar, is it?”
She folded her hands in front of her waist. “He was very large. I believe he might have followed us.”
That broke the grim set of his mouth. Something lightened in his eye. He reached for her and lifted her in his arms, bow held in the hand under her bottom.
“Let’s not break tradition now,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, her arm slung comfortably around his shoulder. “We should keep on exactly as we are.”
Although she could have easily walked herself by now. But she would much rather be carried.
One last night.
“Hang on,” he said and trudged into the trees.
Every stride of his body was like a song she’d once heard, all percussive beats and power, energy to march to war by. It roused the blood and inspired the heart. She felt every sinew of him, and wanted it never to end.
He emerged at a small clearing and settled her just inside tree line.
“Silence,” he ordered as he set her down. “No speaking or complaining about anything for a quarter hour.” He started off, then looked back. “Half an hour.”
She put her fingertips over her lips to assure him of her silence and settled in to watch him hunt.
Máel was entirely correct; she did love beautiful things. Ached for them. And this man…he was beautiful.
There was no other way to describe the grace of him. How he crouched in the grass, utterly still until he shifted his body on the balls of his feet, following a sound. How he rose from the grasses and lifted his bow in a single fluid movement. How his hard fingers pulled the string back, back, to his jawline, his eyes level and focused somewhere in the distance. The low reverberation as he released the arrow, how it hummed through the liquid evening sky…
And in a single shot, without pain or shock, it downed a hare she hadn’t seen.
She broke out in applause.
The sound broke Máel’s stride across the meadow to retrieve his prey. Startled, he glanced back.
She sat in a rose and dark blue gown, looking like sunrise as the sun went down, her long hair neatly braided now, but still flowing like a riotous river over her shoulders. She was beaming at him. Clapping.
Jesus. He’d never been applauded for hunting before.
He’d never been applauded for anything before.
Never been approved of before.
His blood brothers Fáe and Rowan would die for him, but they would never do anything so demonstrative as approve.
He collected the hare and strode back, where she sat like a princess of the wood, her gown trailing over the green grass, smiling at him like a queen.
The truth slammed like a blacksmith’s hammer on the armor around his heart. She’d been right in her arrogance: she was above him in every way.
But they would have tonight.
