Page 45 of The Daughters of Avalon
“Nay, mamau.
“Do you want to burn?”Elspeth didn’t answer quickly enough, and she squeezed her hand tighter and harder.“Do you?”
Elspeth swallowed, remembering her grandmother’s screams.
Nay Mamau!”
And all this while, as Elspeth was so diligent about keeping her sisters from indulging in the Craft, her mother was practicing the worst of thehud du.
Morwen was no White Witch. She was a child of the Death Crone whose beauty was only a glamour. She was a monster—a heartless, greedy beast. And this was an untenable position to be in—to have glimpsed such terror, and to know that a pythoness held her sisters’ destinies in her hand.Sweet, sweet fates!How could she ever have abandoned them? She was the eldest, and as the eldest she was responsible for them. She should have never allowed Rhiannon to convince her to leave. And now she wondered how much Rhiannon had known of their mother’s crimes. Her sister had been so desperate for Elspeth to go, but she must have believed she had it all in hand—or at least that’s what Elspeth hoped. Only now she wondered: Was it her intention all along to save them, and face Morwen alone?
Swallowing her grief, Elspeth understood now that their mother would stop at nothing to see her will done—including invoking the most hideoushud du. She had seen that clearly enough, and since none of her sisters would ever dare pay any such a price for the use of darkmagik, none of them had any true recourse to fight Morwen alone.
Now Elspeth was at a loss as to what to do. And it wasn’t enough to simply warn them. Shemustfind a way to remove them from the priory before Morwen arrived to claim them, and to do so, she must trust in Malcom’s good will—a man she had never set eyes upon before two days past.
Look to your champion…
Clearly,she was tormented, Malcom realized as he watched the play of emotions cross Elspeth’s features.But why?What could he do to help?More than any other time in his life, he felt driven to serve. Anything—literallyanythinghe could do, he would, and he must.
But hadn’t he proven as much?
Inexplicably, his own father could be dying, and, yet, he was here, with her…
Nay, it wasn’t merely that he was enamored of her look, even though he was. And what a vision she was lying in that cloud of scarlet, her crimson dress pillowing beneath her.
“Elspeth,” he said gently. “Do you know what ails you?”
She nodded, and Malcom suffered a moment of dread as he recalled her sleepy demeanor over the past few days. It was as though she’d suffered some sleeping sickness.
He had taken her brusque manner as a matter of consequence of their meeting, but, in truth, he was no less ill-mannered when he awoke in the mornings. And now it seemed to him that she was perpetually waking, and she was either ill, and she knew it… or… maybe… breeding…
Carrying d’Lucy’s bairn?
Christ, no, please!
Of course, neither option appealed to him, and if the latter were true, he would be forced to reconsider his position. For all he knew, d’Lucy was an honorable man—as honorable as he could possibly be as a commander of the Rex Militum. He was more honorable than Malcom, in truth, because Malcom was certain the man had never murdered his own grandfather.
And regardless of who might be the better man, far be it from Malcom to keep any man from his own bairn—not even if the mother should be Elspeth… not unless she had a very good reason.
And then another thought occurred to him: What if the child wasn’t d’Lucy’s? Betimes women were cloistered when a child was conceived without benefit of marriage. Was this even possible? He’d heard so many tales of ladies who’d been cast away by their families or kept hidden until the unwanted child could be born.
But none of that made sense, because all five sisters were sequestered together, not only Elspeth. They couldn’tallbe breeding.And yet, as much as he loathed to ask, he felt he must. “Is it possible you could be with child?” he asked, holding his breath for her answer.
“Nay!” she cried, and Malcom was instantly relieved to see her color. “I am not,” she said, with such consternation and surety that he felt reassured.
But somethingwaswrong. He could see it in the depths of her bonny eyes and sense it in her demeanor. “You can trust me, Elspeth. I have pledged myself to aid you.”
He spoke his next words from the depths of his heart. “I will be your champion,” he said, and then again, to be sure she knew he meant it. “I will be your champion, Elspeth.”
For all the sins he’d ever committed, Malcom was determined to do right by this woman. Leaving her to fend for herself was simply not an option, nor did he trust Beauchamp with her welfare. And still she seemed unwilling to speak.
“Elspeth?” he pleaded.
She turned watery eyes to his shoulder, avoiding his gaze. “I’m afraid,” she said, and then swallowed. “What ails me… is naught so simple as a babe.”
And her gaze lingered over the spot where Malcom’s wound had once been… and it struck him then… the impossible truth.
Elspeth healed him. How was that possible? It was as though she’d done so by witchery.
