She flinched as though he had struck her, feeling the awful throb of yearning, the chaos of confusion. “I can’t change what is,” she whispered.
He was staring at her, and his love and need made him implacable. “I can,” he said quietly. “I won’t leave the valley, Siri, and I won’t give up. I’ll share you with the unicorns, but I won’t lose you to them. Your Guardians can strike me down for interfering with their grand plan, but they can’t make me stop loving you. Not in this life.”
Siri tried to escape the snare of his intense green eyes, and found it impossible. “You’ll destroy me.”
Hauntingly, Maggie’s words echoed in his mind. “You were born to destroy some woman…” And he reacted to that sting and to Siri’s painful whisper with suppressed violence. “Why? How? Dammit, how?”
“I was never meant to love.”
The lost note in her voice caught at his heart, and his frustration was a terrible thing. “If you were never meant to love, then why were you given the capacity for it? There’s so much love in you, Siri, so much caring; what kind of cruel being could demand that you never explore the absolute limits of your caring? Don’t you see? Love is innate to you; it’s as natural for you to care as it is for you to breathe!”
Achingly conscious of her inability to explain fully, Siri tried to explain what she could. “I was never meant to love a man.”
“Why not?”
“Man is an enemy.”
He reached out suddenly, covering her left breast with one large hand. And he held her eyes, watching them widen as she went utterly still, feeling her heart thudding unevenly and hearing the sudden rasp of her breathing as her nipple hardened beneath his palm. He fought an instant surge of his own desire, concentrating on what he had to say. “Enemy?” His voice was deep, hoarse. “Your heart is beating for me, Siri. Your body is responding to my touch. I’m a man, but not your enemy—and you know it. Your body knows it.”
Siri couldn’t breathe, couldn’t pull away from him. The warmth of his hand caused her breast to swell and harden, and she could feel the tight throbbing of her nipple. And more. The ache between her thighs was suddenly so sharp she almost cried out with it, and a molten heat filled her body. She had an almost overpowering urge to push herself more strongly into his hand, to grasp his other hand and put it, too, on her body.
She wanted to fall back on the ground and feel his heavy body cover her, join with her, possess her until the terrible hurting need was satisfied.
I can’t do this. Her lips moved stiffly to shape the words, but there was no voice. Only a whispery, raspy, aching sound. And her eyes, her lovely eyes, were a deep, rich violet color—and agonized. “I can’t do this.” This time, the words had a voice. A voice that was thick, suspended, anguished.
And for the first time, Hunter saw her tears. They trickled down her ashen cheeks, welling up from the bottomless depths of her eyes as if some inner barrier had been ruptured.
Slowly, his eyes locked with her suffering ones, he withdrew his hand. And then he pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly in an embrace that demanded nothing. Bewildered, he understood only that his insistence was tearing her apart for some reason she could not, or would not, explain.
This was not the time, he knew, to continue pushing her, even if he still had the will to do so. And for the first time, he lacked that will.
Chapter 8
A distant shout promising danger tore them apart as both reached instinctively for weapons. Siri was back on balance as that threat became obvious, and her tears dried slowly. There was not even time to feel relief in being able to shy away from her feelings one more time. They stared intently through the underbrush, both tense and alert, both, if not forgetting, at least pushing aside the turbulent emotions they felt.
“There,” Hunter said softly.
The Huntmen came slowly, making their way through the tall meadow grasses and gazing around them warily. They were armed with crossbows and knives and loaded with backpacks. Four of them came to a halt a few yards from the cabin, holding a low-voiced conversation among themselves as they gazed at it.
Siri’s head was tilted, her face taut, listening with more, it seemed, than just her ears. Then, softly, she said, “They know you came here, Hunter; your interest in the valley was noted with curiosity in the city before you left. They’re wondering if you’re still alive and, if so, why. They’re thinking you may have found more than Unicorns here. They’re thinking that maybe—” She broke off, a quiet, unconscious sound of disgust escaping her and her head jerking as if from a blow. The eyes she turned to Hunter were dark and unreadable. “They’re putting themselves in your place.”
Hunter felt the tension of gritted teeth. “I can guess what they’re thinking,” he said, adding bitterly, “No wonder the touch of a man is something you fear!”
How could she respond to that? She couldn’t tell him that his touching itself brought no fear, but rather her own betraying reaction to that touch; she was forbidden to talk about the one absolute taboo of her life. In any case, by responding at all to his bitter comment she would only be keeping the wound raw between them. And that couldn’t be, with danger upon them.
Siri returned her gaze to the Huntmen, satisfied that they were occupied with unloading their packs and posed no threat for the moment. She didn’t want Hunter to dwell on his thoughts, didn’t want to confront that terrible pain yet again. And somewhere on the edge of awareness, she recognized a blankness in the valley, a place she couldn’t see or feel. It bothered her.
Seeking anything to distract them and keep the silence from growing unbearable, she said finally, softly, “Your people will have to find their dreams for themselves; do you understand that now?”
“Not entirely.” He divided his attention between the Huntmen whose rough voices and coarse words shattered what should have been the peace of nightfall and Siri’s closed face, so near and so distant.
“You can’t help them find what must live in their hearts.”
“Then my search has been for nothing.”
She heard the pain in his voice, and the innate healer in her had to respond to it. “No search is ever fruitless. You found much in yourself, I think. And you found the beginnings of your race here.”
“Yes, I found that.” His voice was harsh. “I found that my race destroyed a world, along with most of its history. I can return to my people in triumph, can’t I, Siri? I can return with a validation of our greatness as a race. Look what we’ve done! We killed the world that bore us! We wiped out a million or so years of our evolution and history, choosing not to remember how we almost destroyed ourselves.”
She kept her eyes on the Huntmen’s camp. “Is that why you said you would stay here?” The question was a difficult one, and Siri wasn’t sure she really wanted to hear the answer. “Because you believe as your ancestors did—that painful truths should be cast aside? Don’t you realize that your people should confront their history?”
“How?” He laughed shortly. “I have no proof, no evidence to hold up before them. I can only tell them what I have learned, and there’s so much I don’t know, so many pieces still missing. I can tell them we destroyed our world, but not when or how. What good will that do?”
After a moment, Siri said, “Knowledge is a resource, a valuable thing. The Guardians would have preserved it somehow. If you are meant to return that knowledge to your people, you will find it intact.”
About to object to her faith in her Guardians, Hunter had a sudden thought—and a chill of awareness. Was it possible? Slowly, he said, “In the city, there’s a huge building filled with books. Thousands and thousands of them. I never looked at them, but…If this is Earth, those books have to be about Earth, and more than ten thousand years old. And there’s an old woman, Maggie, who guards the library. Preserves it. She said that her mother also preserved it, and hers before her.”
Siri wasn’t surprised. The information made perfect sense to her. “A G
uardian, perhaps. Or a Keeper. She must be preserving the knowledge of your race, Hunter.”
Hunter stared at her, conscious of awe, and of his missed opportunity. “I was so near. I could have opened any book and learned more about my people. I could have found the missing pieces of our past, and all the forgotten myths and legends.” And now Maggie’s uncanny perception made sense, he realized, her seeming understanding of so much she should not have known. If she were a Guardian or, like Siri, a Keeper, then she was indeed something very special.
“You can still do that. You can take your people’s lost knowledge back to them, Hunter.” She looked at him. “Do you believe now that your quest was for nothing?”
Hunter’s mind was whirling with the possibilities, and he felt a new certainty in himself.
“You’ll go back, now,” Siri said very quietly. “You have an important reason to go back.”
He looked at her, and something inside him was breaking suddenly. Whether or not he gained the throne, he did indeed have to go back to Rubicon. “I can’t leave you.”
“You have to. You must complete your journey.” Only her simple faith in any part of her Guardians’ work enabled her to speak calmly and quietly; the thought of him leaving tore at her like a vicious animal. “It was meant that you find your people’s history, because you did. And meant that you return it to them, because you can. It’s your destiny.”
“Come with me.” His voice was deep, cracked.
“I can’t.”
“Siri—”
“I can never leave this valley.”
“The unicorns won’t need you in the Winter.”
“I can never leave this valley.”
He heard the truth and certainty in her voice, but was unwilling to admit defeat. “Then I’ll come back,” he told her fiercely, uncaring in that moment that his decision, should Boran not have survived the Quest, could leave Rubicon’s throne empty for good. “I’ll take the knowledge to my people and then return here as soon as I can.”
Siri wondered if he would. She felt cold. Returning her attention to the Huntmen’s camp, she said, “We’ll have to wait until they settle down for the night before making a move. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” he said, and both of them knew he was talking about much more than food.
She ignored that. “I’ll get something,” she murmured and slid away through the forest.
Darkness fell, only a faint light provided as the moon rose. Siri found and gathered late fruit from the trees and showed Hunter how certain roots, when carefully peeled, provided a crunchy, satisfying meal.
They talked only occasionally, both preoccupied and troubled. Both aware of the desire that words would never conquer. And they listened to the sounds of intruders as the Huntmen fouled the clean valley air with their coarse voices and crude laughter.
“Did the cards foretell my coming?” he asked her once.
“Yes. A green-eyed man, hungry for truth.”
Memories, some indistinct and some clear, jostled his thoughts as he remembered back to his first day in the valley and his delirious moments of awakening. “I saw Cloud, I think, before you came. You didn’t hide the unicorns?”
“Yes, except for Cloud. He refused to be hidden with the rest that day, and wouldn’t tell me why.”
“No wonder you were angry when you found me.”
“I was angry from the moment I knew you were coming.”
He nodded, then frowned. “It seems odd that he would have refused you. And his attitude toward me…He accepted me very quickly, considering how many others have come here to hunt the unicorns.”
Siri also frowned. “Yes. Very unusual. But I’m sure he had his reasons. Now that I think about it, I remember that the old Keeper told me once that Cloud sometimes knows even more than the cards.”
“What could he have known? That I didn’t come here to harm them?”
“I don’t know.” She was still frowning. “Something similar has happened only once before. Cloud asked me to trust King—and he wasn’t even disturbed when King took Sasha’s horn and left the valley.”
“King didn’t kill Sasha?”
“No. That happened before he came, at the beginning of the Summer.”
It was a subject never discussed between them before, and now Hunter knew the answer to something that had puzzled him—why Siri had trusted the Huntman enough to enable him to steal the horn. Because Cloud had asked it. His mind took up her musing, and he thought about that before he said finally, “If it hadn’t been for that horn and King, I probably wouldn’t have come up here. I’d heard rumors of unicorns nearby, but I was so disgusted by what the city itself held that I was on the point of leaving when a vendor offered me what he claimed was an aphrodisiac made from the horn of a unicorn. That led me to King.”
After a moment, Siri said slowly, “Cloud could have known your destiny; the Unicorns have a stronger awareness of the Guardians and their purposes than I ever could. Perhaps Cloud knew that your time here was a part of your destiny. His wisdom is so old, and so certain.”
“It’s amazing that he’d want to help any of my race.”
“The race that created him? No matter what else happens, they never forget that.”
It was a humbling thought, but Hunter nonetheless felt unsettled by the implications. “I don’t know that I like being a pawn of fate,” he said finally.
Her eyes wandered toward the Huntmen’s distant fire. Her gaze sharpened, probed. Then she was rising soundlessly to her feet. “Wait here,” she murmured and melted into the darkness of the forest.
Hunter turned a quick, hard stare toward the Huntmen, his heart lurching as he counted only three forms huddled about the fire. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed to keep him seated and watching the camp, and even then his ears and his mind focused and strained toward the forest behind him.
Where was the fourth? Had Siri prodded him away from his fellows, or was she, as a warrior, simply taking advantage of the Huntman’s recklessness?
Hunter gritted his teeth and waited. Long silent moments. The valley was eerily quiet. When would the Huntmen notice one was missing? The moonlight dimmed abruptly as clouds scudded across it. The valley possessed its own safeguards, perhaps, spreading darkness in a tactical blanket. Where was Siri? She had only a knife and—
A sound? His imagination? The faith, keep the faith. His love, his need to protect, could not stand between her and what she must do. Never that. Never that.
Where was she?
A Huntman stirred, glanced toward the woods. Hunter’s heart caught in his throat, his body tensing in readiness. No. No, even at a distance, he saw the uncaring shrug and the lapse into stillness. A long time now. Too long. Much too long. His heart was ticking away an eternity of moments. There was a desperate, swelling need for more time with her. But the cards…damn the cards! Goddamn them. Any god. Every god. If the price were his soul, he’d buy more time with her.
Where was she?
The camp was restless. More glances toward the woods. Anxiety and fear coiled and writhed icily in Hunter’s belly, crawled like a snake in his veins. The camp’s small fire danced mockingly before his fixed gaze. His vision tunneled, the forest closed in behind him, hugging his back like some softly chortling, lunatic presence. The Reaper loomed high above, unseen but felt, heavy anger at the Huntmen’s escape from it creating a palpable sense of oppression over the valley.
Anxiety coiled tighter and tighter, constricting his breathing, squeezing his heart in gripping talons. She was protecting the unicorns—No. A race of mystical, magical, ancient people. The Unicorns. She was protecting the Unicorns. It was what she was bred for, born to.
Her right.
Her choice.
Another Huntman rose, hitching at the belt and knife he wore, bravado in the gesture of scorn for his companions’ uneasiness. Harsh, mocking laughter. And then he was striding boldly toward the woods.
Hunter rose to a crouch, h
is eyes following the second man. But he’d promised not to interfere unless two left the camp at the same time! Every instinct fought against that promise; only the awareness that his presence could fatally distract her caused him to ease back down, staring toward the silent, still camp. Chafing against the bonds of waiting. Listening. Hearing only the gloom of the forest and the silence of the meadow and The Reaper’s brooding anger. Smelling the fear of the Huntmen, and their greed. Feeling Death on the wing somewhere behind him in the forest, dressed in the deceptively gentle feathers of a Keeper of the Unicorns. Tasting the bitter bile of his own fear for Siri, thick and hot in his throat. Feeling the slow, heavy, constricted beat of his heart. Sensitized by tension, his flesh tightened and chilled and crawled. His eyes were hot and rasped dryly against the lids.
Insanely disjointed, scenes tumbled past the focus of his mind’s eye. His own dimly remembered battle with Death. Siri standing stiff and angry by his bed…reading cards before the fire…spitting in fury and pride when he had belittled her life…soft-spoken and musing after a Unicorn Dance…instinctively healing a jagged cut from a careless knife…cold with fear after a prophecy she could not or would not see…agonized by his insistent desire.
Ahhh, God, how he loved her!
Then he heard the cry. Muffled, it nonetheless raised the hairs on his scalp and the nape of his neck. The cry of an animal, brutal and sharp, in pain and fear.
Before Hunter could even absorb the sound or his own rapid, fearful response, she was just suddenly there, moving with the predatory silence of a warrior, and Hunter’s spring-coiled tension found release in a draining rush of relief. He caught her fiercely in his arms, holding on tight to the flesh-and-blood reality of his love.
Siri drew back, surprised that he would worry about her and too unsure of her own control to remain in his arms for long. She was wary of touching him, nervous that there was too much between them to allow even a simple touching. And she felt the shock and building anger in him even before his fingers lifted to touch the already livid bruise high on her cheek, barely seen in the darkness.