“For what, Cael? For discovering that you are still capable of love?”
He stood silently, wishing for Marcella’s sake that he could deny it… but he could not. His one point of comfort was that he knew he was never Marcella’s true love either.
She peered up at him then, her green eyes soft with affection. “The heart must love who it loves,” she reasoned. “And I, too, have my own cross to bear.”
“Jack?” he said quietly, and when she nodded, he said, “It’s obvious.”
“Indeed,” she said. “Alas, though… I remember a time when my heart was so easily led as well.”
This, he realized, was not a reference to him at all, for their relations had been anything but simple, or easy. He knew who it was she was speaking of, and it wasn’t him, nor was it Jack. And this, too, was something they’d shared in common, because, though his love for Morwen wasn’t Eros, Morwen was a poppet master of the greatest degree, expertly pulling her strings. Terrible though she might be, she knew how to engender loyalty, and… yes, even affection. Those who followed her, followed her devotedly, knowing the venerable lady behind the veil. In her weakest moments she bled like everyone else, and Cael had once cared for her as well.
How could he not?
But, then, again, love was not the proper word for what he’d felt for Morwen Pendragon. He’d never once shared her bed, nor, until recently, had she ever invited him.
There was only one woman he had ever truly loved, and not even Nesta had inspired in him the passion that his beautiful dewine bride could inspire.
Rhiannon was very much like her mother in some ways, but in every way that mattered, she was nothing like her at all.
During his time in this realm—at least this time around—the few times he’d fallen into another woman’s bed, it had been joyless and uninspiring. No other woman, save Rhiannon made his cock so hard that he walked around in a state of constant arousal, like some beardless youth with more seed than sense. Even now, he could think of little else but having her… undressing her, at long last, dragging her beneath him, and drinking from the font between her thighs.
Somehow he understood that what he now felt for Rhiannon—this wildly impassioned fire—Marcella had once felt for Morwen. They’d been friends before they were lovers, at a tender age when love must have seemed sweet and new—two gloriously pagan young women unashamed to explore. Some part of him envied her doughtiness, to love where she willed. He lingered a moment longer, because he felt compelled to speak aloud what they both knew.
“In the end, she must be destroyed,” he said.
Marcella nodded gravely, averting her gaze. “I know,” she said, and a single tear slid down her cheek. “The only true question remains… who will be the one to do it?”
25
Cael could barely concentrate on the business at hand for all his lusty thoughts of his wife. Therefore, he slipped away when he could, to find himself a quiet spot, thinking everyone would be better off if he could only reduce a bit of tension.
He couldn’t do much about their current circumstances, nor the travesty hanging over their heads, but there was something he could do to relieve a bit of stress—or, at the very least, settle the beast in his breeches.
Devil take him, he wanted naught more than to drag his new wife into these woods and consummate their vows at long last, but this was not the time for that.
And nevertheless, he should have enough bloody sense not to choke his cock alone in these woods, with his travel companions not more than twenty yards away and a wolfhound sniffing at his heels. But evidently, he didn’t, and there was only one small comfort he could embrace—that he was still human enough to have a man’s desires, even amidst the chaos surrounding them. And nevertheless, it was a youth’s appetite he enjoyed of late, and this was nothing to crow about. He was a besotted auld fool, whose modicum of good sense now faltered whenever faced with his beautiful, willful bride.
Such as it was, Cael couldn’t even begin to conceive why it was that he was compelled to make excuses in broad daylight, or why he thence put his back against a tree, or why he then unlaced his trews, or pulled out his cock—only to piss, he reasoned. But that wasn’t true, because he stood there with the beast in his hand a moment too long, and then he stroked himself a few times for good measure, moaning with pleasure over the feel of the hot, tight flesh in his hands.
But there was that bloody hound, with its bright wolflike eyes fixed upon him…
Still, intent upon his pleasure, he shut his eyes, envisioning Rhiannon’s face—not the way she appeared tonight, with that mile-long scowl—the way she oft looked when she trounced him at a game of Queen’s Chess, her soft, sultry lips curved ever so slightly with that beauteous smile, and her steel, blue eyes glinting with bravado…
The dog whined and Cael opened his eyes.
“Truly? Are you going to do this to me?” he inquired of the wolfhound. “I allowed you to come along, and I fed you.”
Scowling at the dog, he once again tested his own bravado, stroking himself a few more times, his skin hot and engorged. But the dog whined yet again, and his manhood wilted in his hand. Finally, he let his hand fall away, and growled at the dog—nonsensical as the gesture should be.
Shaking his head, still half mad with lust, and completely unsatisfied, he nevertheless tugged up his breeches and laced up his trews. “Bloody hell,” he said, scowling at the hound. “I thought you were supposed to be man’s best friend. God’s truth, you’re no friend to me!”
The dog whined pitifully, and Cael bade him to follow with a snap of his fingers. Together, man and dog started back in the direction of their camp.
Evidently contented with the outcome, the animal scampered up beside him, wagging its tail, and peering up at Cael with an unmistakable look of admiration. And, despite himself, it melted his heart precisely as it had when he’d first tried to shoo it away after leaving Blackwood.
God only knew, the rest of the pack had been pleased enough to run free, and Cael knew that they would eventually return home, as they always did after a hunt; hopefully not before Morwen departed. Clearly, this one had a soft spot for Cael, as he did for it. He was getting soft in his old age.
With a sigh, he reached down to scruff the animal’s thick fur. “Mayhap you can find a way to soften your lady’s mood,” he conspired with the animal. “It’s the least you can do.”
Long before there were grimoires, or even words for that matter, the hud simply was. Therefore, even despite lacking a true grimoire, there was no spell Rhiannon shouldn’t be able to cast, given the will to do it.
Even before her mother had clapped her in irons, she’d already begun to understand this experientially: that spells didn’t require words, nor did they necessitate herbs or rites. Rather, all these things only helped the caster cast: words for focus, herbs to facilitate manipulation of the elements, rites to channel the energy of the hud, and also to honor the Mother Goddess by whose grace all things were made possible.
Essentially, all things were summoned or banished, created or destroyed, transformed or reformed. And while it might seem there should be many, many nuances, or that, by virtue of these differences, it left too much to be explored, she had also come to know that all spells essentially belonged to the same two classifications, and that each had a genesis in either acceptance or denial. Therefore, if one viewed the world under these simpler terms, it was easier to channel the proper energy for a given spell.