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I love you too.
A high whinny startled her fingers from their work. Lazarus’s mount called to another.
Aidan was coming.
The shrill welcome of a horse shredded the silence. His own animal returning the greeting with a clarion call of his own.
So much for surprise.
Dismounting within the sheltering woods, Aidan tethered the bay to a tree. Pulled the velvet-swathed Kilronan diary from the saddlebag.
He’d toyed with the idea of offering Lazarus a fake. If he and Cat could no longer read his father’s gibberish, it was doubtful Lazarus would be able to do so either. But the limits of the Domnuathi’s abilities remained elusive. And Aidan refused to risk Cat’s life. Were it just his own? Perhaps he’d have given it a go.
He knelt in the protection of the tree line. Scanned the gatehouse. It looked empty.
Wait. There. He narrowed his gaze.
A glint that could be the moon in a broken pane of glass or the reflection of readied steel. A skitter of movement that might be some innocent nocturnal prowler or could be the shifting of a much larger and more deadly predator.
He straightened, but as yet made no move beyond the sheltering trees. “Bring her out where I can see her!” he shouted through cupped hands.
Another shifting of bodies. Words exchanged. And the door opened on a screech of hinges. Cat stepping into the faint spreading light of the moon. Hair loose down her back in a tangled ebony wave. Soaking up the midnight. Eyes bright in an otherwise impassive mask.
“Has he harmed you?” Aidan asked.
“No, but Jack—” her voice constricted with weeping.
Lazarus cut her off. “The diary, Kilronan. Bring it forward into the clearing.”
His scar burned. His whole shoulder on fire. A deepening well of heat digging roots into the soil. Burrowing far into the bones of the earth where the creatures of the void waited. “And what’s my guarantee you won’t kill me as soon as I do?”
A silence followed, Cat’s figure a wavering flicker of light, her clasped hands, her posture as defiant as if she strode to the scaffold.
His hand found the pistols he’d strapped to his chest. The knife at his waist. Closed around the sword at his side.
Finally, the voice rolled out from the well of the house with the answer Aidan expected: “No guarantee.”
Even as the scar’s spreading arctic plunge numbed his body, his mind sharpened to diamond clarity. He inhaled a lung-filling breath and stepped into the breach.
“Dwi’n cofio hwn.” I remember this.
Again the words in that sorrowful language of lost causes. Spoken just before Lazarus stepped in front of her. Drew his sword on a high metallic note.
Aidan moved from the trees with a stiff gait and a stiffer expression.
Lazarus’s eyes focused on the wrapped bundle Aidan carried in his left hand. Ignoring the aimed pistol in his right, he gestured toward the low stone wall. “Place it there and back away.”
Aidan did as instructed, and only after did Lazarus’s attention drift from the diary to the man.
“Now free the girl,” Aidan’s voice edgy and dangerous.
“The girl?” Surprise colored Lazarus’s words. “You speak of her as if she were the horse or the dog. My lady has a name, does she not?”
Aidan’s breath sharpened in his throat. “Gallantry from a deathless monster? What would something like you know of it?”
Did Lazarus flinch against the insult? She couldn’t tell in the uncertain light. But his shoulders squared, his sharp-featured face holding an ancient warrior arrogance. Raising an empty palm, he shook his head. “Nothing at all anymore.”
The pistol shot caught him square in the chest, knocking him backwards. Aidan drew again. And a second pistol roared, this one just as well aimed. Just as deadly.
