~ 10 ~

Anlin reached out and touched Faulk’s back. She had no idea where the impulse came from; it was just something she had to do. She wanted to reassure him that she was there, as she had done when Telm awoke crying from a dream. It was a ridiculous impulse. If there was ever a man who did not need reassurance, it was Faulk. Yet, when her hand grazed the mass of scars on his back, he immediately stilled.

She slowly moved her fingers over the ridges and welts, amazed that they felt polished, as if large drips of candle wax had flowed over each other. She’d expected the ruined skin to be harsh and coarse. She had also not anticipated the heat. Warmth spread into her hand and seemed to creep up her arm, as if she held her fingers to a fire.

She trailed her fingers up over his shoulder, the skin there smooth and soft, the muscles beneath firm and hard. She walked around him, concentrating on her stroking hand, not looking up at his face. His chest too was ridged, but only from the shape of the muscles lying close beneath his warm skin, skin that was pale, lighter than that on his face and arms. A cross of hair, soft and springy to the touch, ran from one flat nipple to the other and then arrowed down across his taut abdomen to disappear behind the tunic he held in his relaxed hands.

She rubbed her fingers from side to side across his chest She was fascinated by the tightening of muscles wherever her questing hand touched. Different. Faulk felt so different. He was nothing like herself. And he was also not much like the Rennish men she’d known, whose chests were narrower and hairless. She would never have been allowed to touch them in this manner, however. Such stroking was not the province of a slave.

Her fingers circled around one of the darker, flat nipples. To her surprise, when she brushed the tip, the nipple puckered until it sat like a small pebble on Faulk’s chest. There was a strange, answering response in her own breast, a tingling, a tightening. She transferred her attentions to the nipple on the other side and watched it change, fascinated by the transformation. She stroked her hand down the long, vertical line of hair until she touched the tunic that Faulk clutched below his waist. Although he hadn’t moved, Faulk’s earlier relaxed posture had disappeared. He held himself stiffly and his knuckles showed white as he clasped the tunic as if it would be torn from his grasp.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice scratchy.

Anlin stopped contemplating the progress of her hand and looked up at Faulk’s face. His expression was blank, but the look seemed to be one that was willed rather than natural. The firelight accented the plains and hollows of his face. His green eyes appeared dark. “Don’t touch you anymore?” she asked.

“No. I’ve told you that you may touch me. It’s pleasurable. Perhaps too pleasurable. But don’t touch me any lower.”

Anlin realized that stroking him was indeed pleasurable. Other than with Telm, she’d never consciously touched another human being. And this experience was nothing like caressing her son who had been all round, velvet smoothness as a baby and had grown into all sharp ribs and bony shoulders right before he’d been taken from her. Trailing her hands over Faulk was a very different experience. It made her feel both heavy and quivery, an odd sensation she’d never felt before.

“If you like to be touched, why wouldn’t you like it everywhere?” She continued to run her fingers down over his abdomen until they bumped into his clenched hands, then she feathered her hand back up.

He gave a choppy exhale, the precursor of a laugh. “I would like to be touched everywhere, but if you pet me any lower, you’ll discover just how much I like it, and I’m afraid it will frighten you away.”

She returned her gaze to his face. “I’m very difficult to frighten,” she said, running her hand back down, exerting pressure on his hands until he unclasped them, letting them fall to his side. She encountered his braies, the material damp and somewhat chilled. Within was the heavy bulge of his arousal. When she ran her fingers over it, he stiffened, an odd look ghosting over his impassive face and then quickly disappearing. She did it again, watching his expression. How odd. His staff was hard, ready for mating, and yet, she was still fully clothed.

She partially circled his arousal with her hand and moved it up and down. He could no longer keep a look of tension from his face. His breathing accelerated. Anlin marveled at this power that she seemed to have over him. Perhaps this was something magical in herself that she had never before discovered. If it was a spell, however, it seemed to affect her as well. She, too, was breathing more rapidly, and she felt a damp warmth between her legs.

“Enough,” he said loudly, one of his hands covering hers with a vice-like grip. “Enough,” said more softly. “I am not a man made of stone.”

He certainly felt like he was made of stone, but she didn’t want to say that. There had never been a stone that put off such heat, however. Waves of warmth seem to radiate from him. She looked at him expectantly.

“Touching is only good for so long unless I’m allowed to touch back,” he said. “Would you stand there and let me touch you just as you have touched me, or would you, eh, go away?”

“I wouldn’t run.”

“No, I mean go away in your mind.”

Anlin stood still for a moment, examining her own mind. The peaceful meadow did not beckon. She found that she very definitely wanted to stay in the here and now. “I won’t go away.”

He released her hand, which fell to her side, and raised his, softly stroking the side of her face with one finger. A comforting warmth spread out from his gentle touch. He pushed her damp hair back with both hands on either side of her face. His thumbs made lazy circles on her temples—the calluses from years of handling a sword slightly abrasive and soothing. She closed her eyes. She could hear the rain beating on the roof, the constant drip of water into puddles in the section of the barn where the roof was gone. Somewhere behind her, a horse shifted and blew softly through its nose. She felt herself relax. The world shrank to sounds and the feathering circles on her face.

The circles broadened, covering her cheeks and eventually trailing over her lips, making them tingle. She unconsciously licked them. Faulk made a humming sound that was almost a groan. She felt his lips cover hers, warm and surprisingly soft. She jerked back; her eyes flew open. He kept his hands on the sides of her face, but didn’t hold her tightly, letting her move away from him.

“It’s only a kiss,” he said. “A different kind of touching.”

His face was close, his green eyes vivid. It’s only a kiss, a different kind of touching. She closed her eyes. She felt him lean back over her. His lips touched her again, moving slightly like a brush of thistle down. His tongue played along her lower lip. She relaxed her mouth and felt his tongue lave the inside of her lips. The sensation was peculiar and sent a shaft of warmth from her mouth to her midsection.

She had lied when she said that she wasn’t easily frightened, since this frightened her. Or, more particularly, the feelings spiraling inside her were frightening. She felt she no longer had mastery of herself and hated the feeling. Hated it, yes, but she still wanted to continue the unique experience.

She did not pull away.

One of his hands drifted away to caress the side and the back of her neck. Then it flowed over her shoulder and down the side of her arm. It was a gentle stroke that spread fire in its wake. The hand shifted to her waist, hypnotically rubbing up and down. Then it moved up her rib cage to cup her breast from beneath. Her breasts felt tender and heavy and she wanted, she wanted…she wasn’t sure what she wanted. But she knew she didn’t want this gentle touching to stop.

His hand lifted her breast and his thumb rubbed over her nipple. She strained toward him instead of away. She allowed her tongue to brush his and then rubbed it on his inner lips. Her hands came up from where she’d held them at her sides and wrapped around his waist, pulling him tightly against her. She relished the feeling of his firm body. She moved against him so her tender breasts rubbed against his chest, the friction causing a yearning she did not recognize.

She should have felt disgusted to have a man pressing against her, but she did not. This was not just any man; this was Faulk, and that seemed to make all the difference. She splayed her hands across the ruin of his back, touching him as he touched her.

He suddenly thrust her away from him.

“Wha—?” She stopped as Faulk held his finger to his lips and looked behind her. She listened for whatever it was that had attracted his attention, but could hear nothing but the pounding rain, the dripping water, and their own ragged breathing. And then, behind a portion of derelict wall, there was a scrape of metal like a hoe encountering a stone.

She turned to look in the direction of the sound, following Faulk’s gaze. But she could see nothing except dripping darkness beyond the weak circle of firelight. The metallic sound came again. Faulk grabbed her arm and flung her toward the other side of the barn. With the same movement, he reached to his stack of gear and retrieved his sword and scabbard. He pulled the sword loose from its covering and threw the scabbard to the side.

Simultaneously, a form appeared, a man, then two men, three, four. They materialized out of the darkness, two burnishing swords and two hefting pikes.

“Behind me,” Faulk said, backing toward the far wall. “Stay behind me.”

Anlin complied, but she pulled her knife from the sheath at her waist. Whoever these men were, they had not come to share a fire on a damp night.

The four men spread out, trying to encircle them. The two with pikes poked at Faulk but didn’t come close enough to actually touch him. Faulk continued to move backwards until Anlin was nearly pressed against the wall.

Then he suddenly sprang forward, toward one of the pikemen, dodging the blade, flowing by the shaft. With a stroke almost too fast to see, he sliced into the man’s side. The man screamed, dropped his pike, and crumpled. This all seemed to happen in the space of a heartbeat, and then Faulk was back where he had been standing directly in front of her.

“Kill the bastard,” one of the remaining men said in Rennish. His voice sounded very much like Nerth’s, but in the uncertain light, Anlin was unable to determine the identity of the speaker.

The three men rushed toward Faulk, leading with swords and pike. With a deep growl, Faulk brought the second pikeman to the ground. He ducked under the man’s thrust and felled him with a blow across the legs. The attacker crashed to the ground, screaming for his fellows to help him. The two men with swords hesitated and then rushed Faulk in a coordinated effort.

What transpired looked to Anlin like a deadly dance. Faulk’s sword blurred as he moved to counter one stroke and then the other. Metal clanged, loud in the darkness. Men grunted and swore. But neither of the attackers was able to land a debilitating blow. Faulk wove between their lethal blades, forcing the man on the right to back up, stumbling. He immediately turned to the man on his left, stopping a sword stroke aimed at his head and deflecting it to the side. Faulk’s recovery was faster than his opponent’s. Faulk thrust directly into the man’s midsection, bringing him to his knees, his sword dropping from a nerveless hand.

The fourth man seemed to think better of attacking Faulk on his own and turned to run. Faulk easily caught him and brought him down with a stroke between the shoulder and the neck. This man fell without a sound, blood spurting from his nearly severed neck.

Faulk spun to face the three men groaning or screaming on the ground, but none of them posed any threat. He walked by them, kicking any weapons away that might have been within reach, bending over each of them as he passed.

Anlin stood rooted, her knife in her hand. Faulk hadn’t needed her help. It had all occurred so fast, she wasn’t sure exactly how the rout had happened.

“Please go get the horses ready to travel,” Faulk said, walking up to her. “We can’t stay here now.” She reached out and touched a line of blood that ran down his left shoulder. He winced. “The second pikeman got under my guard. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s only a scratch.”

The line of freely flowing blood certainly looked like more than a scratch to Anlin. “It would be better if I bandaged that before we went anywhere.”

“Now, Anlin, now! Get everything ready so we can leave.”

“Why the haste? These men can’t hurt us now.” She looked over at the huddled forms of the three men who still lived. The one who had been screaming had stopped, but all three were now moaning.

“These men can’t hurt us, but any who might be following them could.”

“But why would these men attack us? We’ve had no trouble with all the other Rennish we’ve seen on the road. We’ve been easily taken for traders.”

Faulk turned her face up to look at him. “One of these men is Nerth,” he said. “I thought his avarice was such that he would just pretend he’d never seen us, or else pretend he had told us nothing about how to get to Ridgemere. It’s my fault I so underestimated him. I thought that if he were bought, he’d stay bought.

“Evidently, his conscience got the better of him. I assume he recruited these other men in Chirlon. We can only hope he told no one else. But even then, we have to get out of here.” He took her arm and moved her toward the horses. “I’ll help you ready the horses before I take care of other matters.”

“What other matters?” She came to a stop.

“You must realize I have to kill them. It’s likely they will die of the wounds they already have, but I can’t take that chance. I have to be sure they can’t send others on our trail, if they haven’t done so already.”

“Kill them? But you said one of them is Nerth.”

“Do you have any strong feelings for Nerth?” Faulk’s voice was harsh, as if it were forced out between clenched teeth.

“No, no special feelings.” She whipped her head from side to side in denial. She really didn’t care about Nerth, but she’d lived with him for years. She knew him. He wasn’t just some faceless attacker in the dark. He had probably been good to her, if measured by his own standards. “But to kill them when there is no resistance…”

“Sweet Cheelum!” His voice held disgust. “Killing us was their goal when they came here. Or at least killing me. You they might have kept again as a slave. Or perhaps they would have used you and then killed you. Whatever their purpose was, they were willing to kill to keep us from going to Ridgemere, though why they think that is so important I cannot imagine.”

Faulk stalked away from her and began loading the packhorses, his movements jerky and angry. Anlin followed and silently helped make things ready to leave. She even eventually helped Faulk with his mail hauberk, although he made an irritated comment about already having been caught with his dick out and accepted her aid without good grace. Finally, they were ready to ride out into the inclement night.

“Take the horses out of the barn,” Faulk said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

“Faulk?”

“Don’t say anything else. I’ll do what I have to do, but there is no joy in it. Just get the hell away.”

Anlin mounted her horse and led the others out into the blustery darkness. It was going to be difficult to find their way. Fortunately, they could follow the major trail for some time, but it wasn’t going to be easy to follow even a well-marked path in the blackness.

Faulk reappeared from the barn and mounted his horse without comment. They moved off at a slow pace, Anlin leading. The night was miserable. The rain eventually stopped, but heavy clouds still obscured the moon. After she nearly led them into a ravine, Faulk dismounted and went first on foot. Their progress was slow, but they kept moving, always moving away from four dead men in a derelict barn.

Anlin tried to divert her mind from the memory. She’d been worried that Faulk was not ruthless enough to do whatever was necessary to bring Telm home. Now she wondered what had prompted that concern. She didn’t understand the man who could touch her so tenderly and then calmly kill three men who were no longer physical threats.

Anlin found herself nodding in the saddle. Exhaustion had begun to take its toll. She forced herself to stare into the darkness, trying to stay awake if not alert. It would be easy to tumble from the horse, and her worry kept her upright in the saddle, jerking awake every time her chin came to rest on her chest. She must have dozed, however, since she awoke with a start when her horse came to a stop.

A faint, pearl gray smudged the east, indicating the approach of dawn. Directly in front of her was an odd, round building with a conical, thatched roof. It sat adjacent to the trail and had a large corral surrounding a lean-to off to one side. The corral was empty and the building shuttered.

“Do you have any idea what this is?” Faulk asked.

Anlin tried to focus her blurry and gritty eyes. The building was in good repair, but it was like nothing she’d seen before. “It doesn’t look much like a house or a barn,” she said. “It looks more like some sort of meeting house.”

“But nothing of religious significance? There’s a religious feel to this place, although I don’t know why.”

“It’s nothing I’m familiar with.”

“Then let’s see who’s home.” Faulk slipped his sword from its scabbard and pounded on the door. The sound reverberated in the early morning stillness, but no one came to answer the knock. Faulk tried the latch and discovered the door was unbarred. It swung open on silent hinges.

The interior was neat and well-scrubbed. Bunk beds, with linens and quilts carefully folded at the foot of each bed, radiated from the circular walls like the spokes of a wheel. There was a fire pit in the middle with a smoke hole above.

“Hello,” Faulk called out loudly, a useless gesture since the interior was obviously empty. “Sweet Cheelum, real beds. Correction, real dry beds.” Faulk turned toward her with a smile. “This is made to order. We’re both done in and the horses can’t go much further without rest. You can crawl into one of these real beds and get some sleep. I’ll take the horses to the lean-to and rub them down. Then I’ll keep watch while you sleep. I’ll wake you in a while and you can keep watch.”

He turned to move toward the door. “I’ll take first watch,” she said. “I’ve gotten some sleep and you’ve been walking.”

“And because I’ve been walking I’ve got my blood moving. I’ll wake you when I’m too tired to stand. You get some sleep.”

The beds looked inviting. Anlin didn’t think she would bother with the linens. Just wrapping a quilt around her and becoming horizontal seemed like a wonderful idea. But before she surrendered to sleep, she had to know the answer to a question that had been buzzing in her head all the long night. “Faulk, if I’d said that Nerth meant something to me, would you have not killed him?”

He just looked at her, silence stretching, then he said, “If you’d had an emotional attachment to the man, I would not have killed him.”

Cheelum wept. She should have lied. She could have saved Nerth’s life with just a word.

“Nerth was nigh on to gutted,” Faulk said. “There was no way he could have lived, but his dying would have been long and hard. Had you told me you felt something for him that you evidently cannot feel for me, I would not have given him the release I offered the others.”

His face became so bleak he was almost unrecognizable. “I would have left him to die screaming. I would have left him to die watching the flies crawl over his exposed innards. It would have been a low and ignoble thing to do. I killed those men not only for our own safety, but also to eliminate all the suffering and pain they would have had to endure before their inevitable deaths. But if I’d thought Nerth had your affection, something you’ve withheld from me, then I probably would have left him to die in agony.”

He ran his hands through his hair and gave her a smile that was more of a grimace. “The hell of it is—I’m not sure I could have left him to suffer. But I would have wanted to. And that’s a blackness in myself that I don’t enjoy contemplating.”

He swung abruptly away from her and exited. She could hear him talking to the horses in a low tone and then the sound of the horses moving away. She wavered slightly on her feet. If she didn’t lie down shortly, then she would fall down. Faulk was a puzzle she couldn’t piece together and she decided she wouldn’t even try. At least not today. At least not while her brain screamed for sleep.

She grabbed a quilt off the nearest bed, wrapped it around her, and tumbled into the lower bunk. She momentarily registered that she was hungry. Of course she was. She had eaten nothing since noon the day before. But she wasn’t so hungry that she would get up and look for some food. The quilt smelled clean and faintly of some herb. It made her think of a bright meadow in the sun. It was a much happier thought than dead men in a barn. And then there was no thought as she fell headlong into sleep.