Anam Cara

Available Friday, Sept. 5, 2008

Excerpt

“Who are you?” she asked. “Clearly, you are not what you seem.”

He toyed nervously with the end of her braid. “I am Branwyn ap Owen, a minstrel and bard. Nothing more.”

“I do not believe that.” She retrieved her hair. “You touch me much too easily, Branwyn ap Owen. You act as if you have done it before, and I do not like it.”

Her bluntness surprised him, although the why of that eluded him. She was always direct. The first time they met, she’d said only dead men made war for money or glory. She thought him too vital, too alive to fight for Rome.

“My apologies,” he said. “Ye look like a woman I once knew.”

“In the biblical sense, apparently.” Her voice was acidic, and the absurdity of her jealousy rode over him, left him feeling bruised. If she only knew… He sighed and sipped the wine. His curse was to remember. Like most souls, she forgot the past, although some part of her always recognized him, always remembered what he’d done, always pushed him away.

“Who is she?” she asked.

“Was.”

“She is dead?” Her question floated on an unexpected swell of music.

“Many times o’er,” he said as the music sighed and faded only to burst anew, like a soul unable to tear itself from the fabric of this world. The furrow between her brows reappeared, and he resisted the urge to smooth it away. Instead, he concentrated on the brilliance that flowed so effortlessly from his brother. Music was a means to an end for Bran, an occupation that hid his true nature and the fruits of a talent that ebbed and flowed with frustrating inconsistency. He enjoyed music second only to sex, but it was not his heart’s desire. She was.

He drank away the rest of that thought.

“He is good,” she commented lightly. “You are still better. He lacks the measure of living that you have. The difference tells in your voices. You live the songs; he merely sings them.”

He glanced at her, and the wine in his gut soured. The quest to love her had cursed many lives between them. Likely, it would bring no ease to this one. “If ye can hear that ye have a good ear for music.”

“I cannot sing a note.”

He stared sightlessly into the trees, seeing the years ahead. For Aedan, music would one day define him. It would be his damnation and salvation both, if he survived the next few months. “He will soon gain the measure of sorrow that you miss from his voice,” he said.

“Do not speak such darkness.” He flinched when she laid a hand on his arm. Her fingers were warm, slightly rough, and his blood danced beneath them.
“Aedan is clearly new to your keeping. Adults always worry about the young, and you are no different. You do not truly see death or destruction; you just think you do. You need to learn to keep your worries penned.” She gave him a small laugh. “You should have seen me when Tess was a babe. I saw danger and death everywhere I looked.”

He forced a friendly laugh. His seeing was true, but he would not argue it with her. His time here was too precious. “So onto more pleasant topics. Why do ye no’ live in Carlisle?”

“For the same reason I left the nunnery. I do not want to spend my life trapped behind a wall, even if ’tis a protective one.”

Absently, she began to pull at her braid, slowly loosening it as she talked. Bran watched, certain she was unaware of what she did, or its affect on him.
“I thought I would die from lack of open space in the cloister. Monks can leave the monastery; some orders even encourage it. But nuns are hidden. They do not attend the fairs or the tournaments. Visitors are sent away. To be shut up all day and all night, imprisoned by cold, damp stone, to never sit in the woods or walk under the full moon or swim in the sea.”

His eyes never left her hair, the ends of which were beginning to flutter with the breeze. “Surely, it was no’ so bad.”

“’Tis a loss of freedom worse than being bound to the land. You are a bard. Imagine what it would be never to walk outside the confines of this inn and garden again.”

“But I am a man.”

“And you think a woman has no taste for freedom just because she is not a man?” She grinned and took the chalice from him. “I think your wine has loosened my tongue.”

“Be ware then. Ye words have the flavor of a song about then. I just may have to compose one for ye.”

She quirked a smile, and the breeze seemed to kick up around them. Bran’s mouth dried as he watched the wind take her hair. It swirled like a wildfire around her face and shoulders, dancing in shades of copper and crimson. His fingers ached in their need to weave themselves through the silky colors. The combination of heat, wind and night was dangerously seductive. Unwilling to resist, he wove a sheaf of hair around his wrist, using it to pull her closer.
She yielded, for a moment, then on a sigh pulled herself from his grip. How many times in how many lives had she done the same?

Liza brushed dust off her palms in an anxious gesture. “That is my sign to leave. I am too old to be sitting on a wall being wooed while there is work to be done.”

“Liza, do no’ leave just—”

“There is work waiting for me, Bran.” She looked at him directly, daring him to continue. “I am une femme sole.”

“Femme sole?”

“Woman alone.”

“I ken the words, but ye say them like they have weight beyond their meaning.”

“They do. ’Tis a legal term, meaning I am in business for myself and no man is responsible for my debts. It also means that no man has claim to my profit, or to my body.”

“I make no claim to ye, Liza. I only ask.”

The blunt words were more hers than his, more direct than he preferred, yet they had the power to change the path beneath his feet, their feet. He sensed the dangerous brew of desire and apprehension stirring within her, then she drew away.

“I am bound to give you succor and shelter, both for your actions on my behalf and because you are a guest in my house.” Her voice was brittle, soft. “But you came here a stranger, and you will leave as such. Do not ask such of me again.”