Page 191 of The Daughters of Avalon
“For what, m’lady?”
There was so much she wished she could do all over again—so much she wished she had never said. “For not thanking you properly before now. You’ve… well… you’ve been… a godsend.”
His lips spread into a warm smile. “Your sister would make no bones about it; she would have said Goddess sent.”
He winked at her.
Seren averted her gaze at the mention of Rosalynde, but he mistook her gesture. “Worry not; you are thanking me now. All is well that ends well. Is that not so?”
“And will it?” Seren asked, clutching at her breast as though to still the beating of her heart. “End well?”
The question seemed to sober him, and his smile fled.
“Wilhelm,” she said, again. “I do not know what we would have done without you. I am so grateful for your succor. I only wish…” She averted her gaze, tears pricking her eyes, and Wilhelm heaved a burdensome sigh, and then fell back upon his rump.
Seren sat as well, pulling up her blanket up to wrap it about her shoulders, shivering a bit, though not because she was cold. It would have been easy enough to cast a simple warming spell, but there was no remedy for what she truly felt.
“I am sorry,” he said, his turn for apologies. He plucked up a pebble. “If only I’d not wasted so much time…”
“As you have said, my sister’s death isnotyour fault,” Seren reassured, and for a moment, Wilhelm wouldn’t look at her. He tossed his pebble into the darkness. She heard it smack a tree somewhere in the depths of shadows.
“I suppose `tis no one’s fault.”
“Aye, but itissomeone’s fault,” Seren argued as the fire crackled behind her. “`Tis my mother’s fault. She is the one responsible for my sister’s death—not you.”
Silence.
“Wilhelm,” she said again, in part because she liked saying his name. “I fear, if we do not stop her… England could be lost.”
He stared at her intently. “Lady Seren… even without your mother’s intervention, England may still be lost. Eustace is not Stephen, and Stephen is not Henry.”
Now, more than ever, hearing the affection in his voice, Seren wished she’d known her father better. So many of his barons seemed to hold him in such high regard—why then, had they allowed Stephen to steal his crown?
Oh, but she knew why, even as she wondered… Morwen. Although Matilda had not won herself any devotees, so much of this was Morwen’s fault, and she and her sisters had been naught but pawns in her unholy war against this realm.
If Wilhelm only knew half her story, he might abandon her, here and now. “Alas, there is so much I would say—so much you do not know.”
“I know enough,” Wilhelm said, pulling up a knee, and wrapping an arm lazily about it. Seren longed for that embrace to be hers. “I know enough to have judged you when I should not have,” he confessed.
“Aye, well… so did I—judge you—do not fret.”
He lifted his brows at her confession. The gesture only accentuated his scar, and a hint of his smile returned. It made her heartbeat falter and her pulses scatter.
“You are not as I once supposed,” she said shyly.
His full lips turned a little more. “Neither are you.”
Bracing herself for truth, Seren wrapped her blanket tighter against the cool night air. “So, what is it you thought about me… before?”
He tilted her a look. “Alas, m’lady, I should not say, but I will. I thought you vain, selfish and self-important, for what else could such a beautiful lady of your caliber be, but all these things and more?”
Seren blinked. She had expected him to speak of her witchery, but the confession startled her. The smoky look in his dark eyes, and the spread of his deep red aura warmed her more than any fire could, and she was suddenly acutely aware of the boy sleeping not more than five feet away. She blew out the breath she forgot to exhale.
He thought her beautiful?
The thought was so arresting that the rest of his assumptions about her vanity didn’t faze her. Goddess only knew why this should excite her so much when he was not the first man to say it was beyond her. Somehow, none of those other professions seemed to matter one whit. Only Wilhelm’s.
She swallowed now, uncertain how to respond. “My sister Rosalynde is beautiful,” she said, discomfited, trying to remember all the reasons she could not have this man—primarily, he was already bound to her sister and who was she to come betwixt them?
