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“Brendan once called him a prune.” Elisabeth brushed away a tear.
Aunt Fitz laughed. “He could be, but he also loved his wife beyond reason. It’s rare to find that kind of bond. And almost impossible to set aside. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot follow where Brendan’s gone anymore than my mother could follow my father. And there is a risk in living only in dreams.”
“So you’re saying I should wake up now?”
Firmness in her gold-flecked eyes, Aunt Fitz nodded. “It is time.”
He stood upon a hill above Belfoyle, his hand upon the ward stone, its power pouring through him in pulses of coruscating light.
Breán Duabn’thach, it whispered in the tongue of the ancients, accepting him as its own, though he’d the feeling it had hesitated, as if unable to comprehend this strange mixture of man and Fey that he’d become.
From this ridge Brendan could look down upon his home, seeing it laid out before him like blocks upon a child’s quilt. The folds of the hills, a stream becoming a river as it moved inland, cabins and houses connected by lanes and tracks and roads bordered by a low stone wall, the walls of the house, its towers rising above the trees, and beyond it, the sea moving slick and gray in the distance, the sound of the surf amplified by the low, dirty clouds scudding overhead.
Closing his eyes, he inhaled the cold, damp air, feeling it in every freshly healed bone. Flakes drifted frozen across his cheeks, clung to his eyelashes. He opened his eyes to see snow falling softly over the meadows and fields, bleaching the world to gunmetal gray.
All but for a lone rider. The horse’s glossy chestnut coat drawing his eye. The rider’s blaze of red hair clamping a fist around his heart. A vision and a name he’d clung to when all else had grown ragged and faded in his mind. A woman he’d traveled between worlds to find again.
Elisabeth.
He’d finally come home.
Snow swirled in the wind, drifting out across the gray waters of the sea. Gulls floated on the updrafts, while others dove into the chop. Surfacing to swallow their dinner. Elisabeth lifted her face to the cold, letting the sting of ice burn her cheeks. Inhaling the crisp bite of winter wind. Her horse sidled with impatience, but Elisabeth held the long-legged chestnut mare still as she scanned the horizon, a ship’s sails bright white against the cloudy sky.
She’d ridden out alone, the laughter and noise and constant need to play a part finally wearing her down. She needed space to breathe. To be alone with her thoughts and last night’s dream.
It had been as real as life. Brendan looking over his shoulder as he stepped from a circle of weathered stones. Swinging up on a rangy, flea-bitten gray with a wild eye and chopping gait. His gaze lifted, and it was as if he looked straight at her. Over time. Ove
r distance. And she’d jerked awake, heart crashing, blood pushing through a restless body. Somehow she knew this would be the last such dream. He would not come to her again. She would lose even that small comfort.
The snow intensified, the tiny, drifting flakes becoming a curtain of white, the ground disappearing beneath a feathery blanket. Her horse pawed the ground, its breath clouding the air. Perhaps she should return to Belfoyle’s warmth and company. Let Sabrina’s daughter crawl into her lap for a story. Smell the sweet baby scent of Aidan’s new son. Wrap herself in the love of family, old and new.
She reined the chestnut in a circle, headed back toward the warmth of the Belfoyle stables. The horse dropped into a slow, surefooted canter, the cliffs sliding past them on their right, the sea a foaming, white-capped silver froth rimed in black at the far edge of the world. The wind and the snow mixed with her tears to blur the track before her, but instead of slowing, she gave the chestnut its head, the lengthening pound of its stride matching her heart beat for beat. Her hat flew off. Her hair fell free from its pins in the tear of wind and snow.
And then there was another. A rider pushed his way through the storm toward her.
She dashed the tears from her eyes as she leaned over her mare’s withers, refusing to allow an intruder into her solitude. And then refusing to lose the unspoken challenge as the horse swept down on them.
The ground flew beneath her, the mare giving and then giving again, but still the newcomer inched his way closer, eating the distance between them. Elisabeth steered for the far hedgerow, but he was on her, the horse’s nose pulling even, then just ahead. The rider turned his face toward her, and his eyes glowed bright as suns.
She couldn’t breathe. Her heart stopped. She heard nothing but the sound of the wind. Saw only a swirl of storm clouds. Felt nothing beyond the slowing of her mare as the man leaned over to take a rein, bringing both horses down to a trot, then a walk, pulling them up as she slithered from the saddle and into his arms.
His lips warm upon hers. His embrace like steel bands pressing her close, his voice a lilting purr in her ears. “No tears. No tears, my love.”
“Are you real or a dream?” she whispered, unable to believe. After all, how often did one’s wishes come true?
Brendan took her by the shoulders, pushing her to arm’s length, and she got her first good look at him. There was the scar on his left cheek. The unfashionably long hair brushing his shoulders, the leanness of his once muscled frame.
“Not a dream, Lissa,” he answered. “Not this time.”
Her eyes widened. “You sent them. It was you all along.”
“It was the only way I knew to keep you from forgetting until I could find a way back to you.”
As she drank him in, other changes sharpened into focus. A new sculpted beauty to his fallen-angel features as if he’d been riven in sharper lines, deeper colors, all earthly softness cut away, leaving only the forged steel of his Fey heritage. The very air seemed charged with his presence.
She frowned. “You’re not the same. I don’t mean the clothes or the hair, but something else. You don’t feel the same.” She placed a hand over his heart. “In here.”
His fingers laced with hers. The bones broken and bent, they curled into his palm. The flesh stretched and silver with scars.
