Chapter Twenty Six

Fatigue dragged willfully at his shoulders, pounded a relentless beat at his temples, but despite himself, sleep would not come tonight, not even the brief hours he usually managed to force himself to. The horses were in and cared for, Kier had returned and slipped his way into the bedroom to be at last reunited with his mistress, his work couldn't be finished until tomorrow at the earliest—he had done everything he could, and still, his mind would not find rest.

Instead it treaded the tired trails it had been slogging for the last several hours, revisiting again and again each part of their discussion, weighing words, measuring inflections to try and find the meanings that might, or might not, be hidden there.

With a sigh, he rose from the armchair again to pace softly around his house. His footsteps were silent in deference to the girl that slept in his bed, just a door away.

The thought sent another twinge of discomforting heat winging down his body to stir his manhood. With lips whitening against a heartfelt groan, he wheeled away, and stalked towards the fireplace instead.

Why hadn't she stayed the child she had been? The child, he could now see, she had been up until the very day she had left his tower. If she had remained that child, perhaps he could have stayed strong against her. But now, at only seventeen, she was a woman, mature in her own right. He could see it in her eyes—no child had the same self-awareness as a woman, the kind of self-awareness that showed she knew precisely what she could do of her own power, and warned a man to beware.

Daughter! He shouted at himself. At the most, she is daughter! But his body was proof of the lie. She wasn't his daughter. She was a woman, the woman, he had discovered in those long six months without her, he loved to the exclusion of all others.

Why wasn't she married? He demanded suddenly, silently, bitterly, of whichever deity might be listening in. Why had she not married and stayed elsewhere, present to him only in thought and dream, where, eventually, she might become only a memory? Instead she was here, lovely and still as forbidden as ever, tormenting him with questions that called up the very worst of their situation.

A noise distracted him from his thoughts, a mumble from the other room that resounded through the silent cottage like a scream. He frowned—never, at the tower, had she had nightmares, or talked in her sleep. A brief war was waged within him—should he go to her? Should he stay? The first excuse (and it was an excuse, he knew, no more) won out, and he walked across the room again, and eased the door open.

Kier's eyes shone gold-green at him in the meager light, from where the cat lounged at the end of the bed. And there was the cat's mistress, in his bed, sleeping, as she always had, curled up on her right side in her long sleeping gown, her long golden hair braided loosely and coiled on the pillow. He had always loved her hair, he thought, padding into the room silently. Liquid light, tamed to a braid as thick around as his wrist.

He gently brushed her wispy bangs out of her face, letting the milky light of a half-full moon that poured in the single bedroom window wash delicately over it, rendering it flawless. He could feel the warmth of her skin, so near his fingers it made him ache.

But he brushed away the hair, and left it at that. Satisfied that she slept peacefully, he turned his back, and closed the door gently behind him.

She was twelve, once again, living in the tower. It was nighttime, and it was winter. She should be asleep—the stillness of the air told her that the sorcerer had, at last, gone to bed. But something had woken her—what, she wasn't sure.

The sound came again, the low groan of a creature in pain. It was faint—very possibly; it came all the way from the forest. Knowing it, knowing Dórainn sometimes went to the aid of the beasts and demons of the Dark Forest, she struggled from under the bedclothes, and left her room, the stone floor icy against her bare feet.

When the third sound reached her ears, she stopped. It wasn't coming from the Forest. It was coming from upstairs—from Dórainn's room.

Rapunzel hesitated. Dórainn had very few rules that could not be bent with a request and a logical explanation. Only three were truly ironclad; she could not play with his tools unless he expressly said she might and was there to 'supervise'. The same went for the herbs hanging on the third rafter and sitting on the shelf nearest his desk. The third rule stated that she was not allowed in his room unless it was an emergency.

Well, it is an emergency, she decided, and dashed up the narrowly winding set of stairs that led to his chamber. The heavy wooden door gave under the pressure of her body, and swung ponderously inward.

The stone room was small—not even as large as her own, much less the kitchen-study-library downstairs. The single window facing north let generous amounts of the full moon's cool light, bathing part of the room in silvery light. There was a table somewhere in the gloom of the shadows, but she had eyes only for the bed and its occupant.

He lay sprawled on his front, the blankets reaching only his lower back, leaving the rest of his back and shoulders bare to the cold. Rapunzel blinked—she had never seen the mage less than fully clothed—and was intrigued by the difference it seemed to make. There were his master mage's marks, tattooed blackly onto his back, curling slightly around his shoulders and trailing very lightly onto his upper arms. The rest of the interlinking tattoos were cut off from her sight by the blankets, but she knew that they would end at the very base of his spine—he had told her about them, and shown her a diagram in one of the many books. The pentagram, the Eye, the metaphysical and alchemical elements, the triquenta, the Stag and the Wolf, the Tree of Life, and countless other symbols of magic all linked appropriately for balance and control.

Curious, she moved closer—and froze in her tracks when he shifted, mumbling inaudibly. Now she noticed that his skin had a light patina of sweat, that his visible hand had clenched painfully on the pillow, that his face was hard and tight with emotions she had never seen on it before.

But it wasn't until she had completed her careful, silent walk to his bedside that she saw the scars beneath the mage marks. They were old—she could see that much. But so large, and so many!

"No, no…"

She jolted at the moaned words, blue eyes snapping from his back to his face again, only to relax marginally when he showed no signs of waking. Then, very gently, she laid a hand on his shoulder, found it icy. The scars there were raised ridges against her hand, slightly rough and rather unpleasant. Immediately, he shuddered, almost flinched from the contact. Before she could withdraw it, though, he gave another shuddering sigh, and seemed to relax.

A bit frightened, and sad, she had drawn his covers higher, and padded back to her own bed.

She woke in the night, following the odd dream of another night, years before. Kier, who seemed to have taken up station at the foot of the bed, as he always had, looked up, golden eyes gleaming slightly in the almost nonexistent light. He chirruped inquiringly when she shoved back the sheets—they smelled cleanly of him—and padded across the sanded plank floor to the door. It didn't creak as she opened it—his doors never seemed to creak—but swung silently inward, to reveal the rest of the darkened cottage.

No candles were lit, and the fire was only glowing coals, but they emitted enough luminescence for light to dance redly along black stands of hair, and to give a glow to the black-clad form of the sorcerer, stretched easily in the chair he had indicated he'd sleep in earlier that evening. It was nearing dawn, she noted, looking out into the blackness of the forest—the moon had set, or nearly.

He probably hadn't gotten much more than half an hour's sleep by now, if he was still sleeping as erratically as he had when she was a child. But his chest rose and fell peacefully, and he showed no signs of being trapped in a nightmare. That was good. Judging from the fatigue that etched itself willfully in the lines of his face, he was getting no more rest than ever.

She loved him, she acknowledged grimly. It was no great epiphany, not when the realization had been building up, it seemed, for years. Not as a friend, though he was a friend. Not as a father, though he had raised her. As a lover—as what she had heard described of lovers, having never taken one, despite several opportunities at court. With warmth coiling in her belly, a strange tightness in her chest, and dampness between her legs.

As a life-partner; helpmeet, lover, friend. And therein lay the problem. Not only would society look in askance at such a strange relationship as theirs, but he may not even feel the same.

It was selfish, being here. She was hurting him—she could see that much at least, knowing him. But she had needed to see him, to get the answers she had come for, to deal with the pain he'd dealt with them in turn. He had answered some of them, the ones about her birth family, about how she had come to live with him in the first places. The answers were more difficult to overcome than she had expected, summoning very old sensations of abandonment and fear…and anger, disillusionment, outright pain.

Strangely, there was an odd sense of freedom as well, a lack of restrictions. Truly, she was her own woman now. Her father had given up any right to her ten years ago, and the contract had stated she was free when she chose to leave of her own volition—

A yawn cut off her musings, made her entire travel-worn body ache in a way she'd become accustomed to. Why was she awake, when there was a soft bed available to her for as long as she might want it, her body inquired silently. There was time in the morning for such foolishness, it muttered, if she wanted to continue this bizarre line of self-questioning.