still fresh. The second time she’d found the emerald-tipped feather of a woodcock. She kept the flower and feather in her apron pocket, and often her fingers stole inside to touch the evidence that Rand had gone seeking her. Evidence that he wasn’t just a dream conjured by her troubled mind. Evidence that one man found her desirable.
But today a token would not suffice. Encased by the icy armor of betrayal and confusion, she needed Rand—his generous strength, his tender smile, the liquid velvet of his voice. She needed to gaze into the same green depths of his eyes.
He was there.
Lianna checked her horse, dismounted, and tethered the palfrey to a bush where Charbu grazed. Rand sat leaning against the cross. His winsome smile reached across the distance that separated them, to beckon her.
Her heart lifting, she hesitated, then approached at a slow walk. The scene was almost too perfect for her worldly presence to disturb. Rand sat cross-legged, surrounded by an arch of trees and meadow grasses that nodded in the breeze. An errant shaft of sunlight filtered through the budding larch boughs, touching his golden hair with sparkling highlights. In his lap he held a harp. The fingers of one hand strummed idly over the strings. Stepping closer, she saw that his other hand cradled a baby rabbit. I nearly slew its mother, she thought absurdly.
Rand’s eyes never left her. At last he spoke—to the rabbit, not to Lianna. “Off with you, nestling,” he said, and set the creature down, giving it a nudge with his finger until it scampered away. Then he laid aside his harp and stood.
She stayed rooted, frozen by new and awesome sensations that pulsated through her like the wingbeats of a lark. Rand was a deity in a dream garden, and suddenly she feared to enter his world. Lazare’s duplicity and her uncle’s scheming had soiled her. She couldn’t belong here.
But that was Belliane, an inner voice reminded her. To Rand she was Lianna, brave and unsullied in her anonymity.
He stepped forward, put out his hand, and brushed his knuckles lightly over her cold cheek, an inquiring gesture, one that demanded a response.
The restrained tenderness and gentle warmth of his touch melted the ice encasing Lianna. Thawed by his kindness, a single tear emerged, dangled on the points of her lashes, then coursed down her cheek. He traced its path with his thumb, caught the second with his lips, and then the broad wall of his chest absorbed the hot floodtide that followed.
Stricken by her grief without understanding it, Rand wrapped the small, shuddering girl against him. Whatever he’d expected—a shy smile, a tentative greeting—was swept away by the depth of her naked emotions. For long moments he stood holding her, stroking her tense back, her rounded shoulders, bending to touch his lips to the wind-cooled silk of her hair. “Hush, pucelle,” he whispered. “Please don’t cry anymore.”
He’d felt guilty coming here, giving in to an impulse he knew he should not indulge. Now her need drove away the guilt and filled him with a powerful sense of rightness. Although pledged to Lianna’s mistress and bound to style himself the girl’s overlord, he could not withhold his comfort.
He tightened his throat against speaking further, for to speak now would be to admit to emotions he had no right to feel. Instead he cradled her small, quaking body against him.
At length her weeping subsided. She clung to him, kept her face buried in his tunic. When Rand curved his fingers under her chin and lifted her face to his, she stiffened and resisted. But the gentle force of his will won out, and he found himself staring into the battered silver of her eyes.
The pain there was so deep, so vivid, that he felt as if a fist had reached down inside him and squeezed his heart.
“Tell me, pucelle,” he whispered.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
His finger caught the sparkling drop of a tear from her cheek and brought it to his own lips; he tasted the faint, bitter salt of her grief. “I’d break a hundred lances if the deed could drive the sadness from your eyes.”
That brought a tiny smile. “I am no damsel in a chanson de geste. I need no dragons slain for me.”
“What do you need, Lianna?”
“A friend.” Her voice sounded faint, as if she were reluctant to confess such a human necessity.
He touched his lips to her hairline, breathed in the light scent of her fragrance. Soon enough he would be forced to betray the childlike trust that softened her features. “I’ll be your friend, pucelle,” he said.
She unwrapped herself from his embrace. Long, loose strands of her hair clung to his arm, linking them. Gesturing at his harp, she said, “Sing me a song.”
He smiled. “I was prepared to break lances for you.” He brought her to sit by the cross and took the harp in his lap.
Fascinated, Lianna watched his strong hands close around the frame of ashwood worn smooth by years of handling. Long masculine fingers caressed the gut-spun strings, bringing forth a sweet shiver of sound. The tones lifted to mate with the spring breeze, and Lianna felt an odd sense of intimacy, as if the notes were whispered in her ear. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms about them.
He sang an old troubadour’s lay of unrequited love. He had a voice like none other she had heard—vibrant, clean as rain, powerful as the wind singing through the crags.
Only when a breeze cooled her cheeks did she realize she was crying again. But the new tears came on a release of pain, as if Rand’s singing had drawn a thorn from her flesh.
He watched her expectantly. She swallowed. “How can you sing like that? As if—as if your soul were touched by God.”
Laughter rippled from him. “Not by God. By you.”
They weren’t touching, but Lianna felt as if she’d been caressed. I think I love you, he’d called to her, and she’d wondered about that for days, questioning his honesty and her own worthiness of it. No man had ever said those words to her, had those feelings for her. Did he still feel affection for her, or was the emotion only a passing fancy? She feared to ask, but what she saw in the pure, liquid green of his eyes made her hear the words in her heart over and over again.
He set down his harp and walked to her horse. “Let me guess,” he said, stroking the palfrey’s satiny neck. “You’ve stolen a horse and you’re running away.”
“I am allowed certain liberties,” she said quickly, leaping up to join him. His eyes were so clear, so all-seeing. Did he know she lied? She felt guilty deceiving him. Quickly she justified it. This knight-errant would never befriend the Demoiselle de Bois-Long; no one ever had.
He ran his hand over the palfrey’s withers and down her leg, pushing aside the grass to examine the iron curve of her shoe. “The horse is well tended.”
“Of course.” Lianna’s chin lifted. She tolerated no sloth in her stables. Catching Rand’s curious look, she added, “The marshal is most exacting.” Only, she thought, because he knew she’d put him out to the rye fields if he shirked his duties. She tugged at Rand’s hand. “Let’s walk.”
Gratified by her lightened mood, Rand followed. Her hair played in the breeze like threads of moonlight spun by fairies. As they fell in step together, the hem of her heather smock brushed against his leg, sending a sweet, forbidden thrill to the center of him. The browns and greens of the new season colored the landscape, and he forced his attention to the pollarded willows and stunted poplars that nodded in the wind.
“I’m convinced this was a pirate path of the Vikings,” she said, leading him over the hill that sheltered the glade. “I used to play Helquin the Huntsman when I was a child.”
He smiled. She spoke as if her childhood were long past, yet in his eyes she was a child still. “Who is Helquin?”