Page 130 of The Splendor of Fire
Snapping out of his stupor, Léo hefted Niall in his arms and threw him over the parapet onto the roof. Sprinting now, Léo came to the end of the parapet closest to Aileen as Malvina pursued her.
“Aileen!” Léo held up his arms to her. “FLY!”
Racing across the tops of the battlement, she launched off the tower turning through the air toward him. As if they were practicing beside the pond, he caught her, and he pulled her into his body as they hit the parapet. Behind her, Malvina scrambled after her not realizing where she was going, falling through the air and landing on the roof beside Niall with a heavy thud.
Aileen tightened herself around him, wrapping arms and legs over him and squeezing, the softness of her curls tickling his nose. He got to his feet, holding her against him, his words coming out in a rush of nonsensical French. “My little bird! I thought I had lost you forever. I will never leave you again. Never, do you hear me? I will never let you go. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you so much.”
Aileen held on, squeezing tighter and tighter, and wouldn’t let go.
Around them the sky turned dark like night and his skin prickled as the wind became like a cylinder, whipping around them in a mighty torrent. He placed her on her feet, and they broke apart.
Without warning, a wide streak of lightning blasted from the middle of the pyramid-shaped cloud and scorched into the center of Dun Ringill’s roof, blinding him, and burning his skin. Flames shot up from the heart of the dry-rotted keep.
God’s ultimate authority was on display. A smell of burning sulfur filled the air. Spinning fiery spheres of lightning, eight feet wide, in rainbows of vivid color began to hit the keep all around them like brimstone. Flash after flash lit around them in magnificent splendor, erupting in brilliant purple, blue, orange, green, and white. The balls raced across the roof and on the tops of the battlements, falling everywhere but on the parapet. Everything in their path was consumed in flame as they burst apart. Screams rent from the roof, and he saw Niall and Malvina drop into the flames leaping all around them.
Aileen’s hand slipped inside his own as the balls of lightning continued to fall, illuminating her ocean eyes in brilliant flashes. He should feel terrified, but instead he felt protected and surrounded by love. The light around them became as stardust, and for the first time he heard her voice though she didn’t speak.
Kind and musical, it lit up his insides like sunlight and filledhim with immeasurable joy.We’re not alone, Léo. It’s you and me, forever. We have each other. I love you.
“I love you, too, Aileen. It’s you and me—forever.”
The seas of her eyes sparkled with recognition, realizing that he’d heard her thoughts.
Flashes of fire caught the heavy gold chain as he lifted it over his head and reverently replaced it around her neck. He dropped his mouth near her ear. “Give me your heart, forever. Be my wife.”
Hauling him into her bruised lips, she kissed him, and he was once again the broken man in prison saved by the affection of the woman who filled the barren places of his heart.
Her mouth dropped kisses along his cheek and ear, and she rasped one faint word like heavy breath. “Yes.”
His hands twined in her hair, and he kissed her over and over, loving her, needing her.
The door at the end of the parapet blew off its hinges and Hector loomed in the doorway, chest heaving, cheeks stained with soot, battle axes in his hands. “WINCHING!? ARE YE MAD? MOVE! The whole keep is going up!”
Léo took his estoc from the parapet, and Aileen’s hand.
Epilogue
CALAIS, FRANCE - NOVEMBER 14, 1385
It was the same as he’d left it. Blinking his eyes, Léo had to pinch himself to make sure that this was not a dream, that he was truly back home in front of the same arbor, on the same pebbled path, before the same crooked-looking stonemaison. It’d been two years, five months, and twenty-nine days since he’d last laid eyes on home.
A kiss was pressed to his cheek, and he looked at his beautiful wife dressed in a simple leine of dark blue, the MacKinnon tartan wrapped around her shoulders, spirals of blond hair fluttering unbound on the wind. A new little bump had taken shape in Aileen’s nose, and he kissed it.
What’s the matter?
“I’ve been away too long. More than half his life. Gabriel cannot possibly recognize or remember me. I want to hold him, but I don’t want to frighten him.”
At that moment, the front door crashed open. A little boy stood in the doorway open-mouthed, clenching a piece of paper in his small hand. The same bluebell-colored eyes, the same dark hair but now falling in waves to his collarbone, the same chin as his own. The boy looked at him and down at the paper.
Léo’s heart stopped. There, on the paper that floppedaway from the boy’s clenched fist, staring back at him, was his own likeness. An exact rendering of his mercurial expression, the wrinkle of distrust in his eyebrow, his amiable mouth. A sketch of himself, as Aileen saw him. She had sent it to Gabriel.
Tears formed in Gabriel’s eyes, and he sprinted forward. “PAPA! Tu es à la maison!”
“Gabriel!” Sprinting through the arbor, he opened into an embrace as his precious boy launched himself into his arms, wrapping his legs around his middle and clinging to him.
“Papa…Papa…” Overcome, his taller, but still small son dissolved into sobs. “Tu m'as manqué! Où étais-tu?”
Léo tightened his arms around his boy, holding him close and kissing his cheeks. “I missed you, too, my baby. I was stuck somewhere; I couldn’t get out.”
