Page 9 of To Wed a Highlander (A Highland Magic Collection #3)

Chapter 9

M organa could think of nothing more exhilarating than traveling in the arms of a sprinting Berserker. It truly did resemble flying. By the time the sun disappeared, they’d reached Hadrian’s Wall.

“I’d thought we’d traveled forty miles or so at most,” Morgana marveled. “You had to have taken me at least a hundred and forty since Yorkshire in one night.”

“At least,” he mumbled, as they ventured into the wilderness beyond the wall.

Now, hours later, stars pricked the sky with pinpoints of light. Clouds gathered in the distance to the west, rolling with an approaching thunderstorm, and the moon glowed as a waning orb in the east.

“At this speed, you could have me to Loch Fyne by tomorrow night,” she calculated, enjoying the moist, chilly air contrasting with the warmth of his chest against her body.

“I will have to stop and rest, eventually.”

“Of course,” she said quickly, feeling a little foolish that she hadn’t really considered the mythical Berserker to be a beast of finite stamina. “How long can one such as you run?”

Her curiosity seemed to irritate him. “I told you I’d get you home as fast as I can. I’ll only stop long enough to eat and regain my strength.”

They’d had speared fish before leaving the side of the loch where they’d made love. Morgana looked up at the hard jaw of the man who carried her through the night. He’d been inside her only hours ago, caressing her skin as though it was the most precious thing he’d ever put his hands on. She wanted that back. Gods help her, now was not the time for such concerns, not with so much hanging in the balance, but all she seemed to be able to think about was the possessive worship in the Berserker’s eyes. And the steely disdain in the eyes of the man now carrying her toward home.

“I wasn’t questioning your word,” she clarified gently, though she had to speak with a little more force to counteract the rush of the air around them. “I’m merely curious. Exactly how fast and far can Berserkers run? I can’t say I’ve met one before.”

Her words seemed to mollify him enough to answer her question. “Most Berserkers move with supernatural speed, but usually in short bursts for battle or pursuit. We all have a specific strength that sets us apart from the others. Mine is speed and endurance.”

“Luckily for me.” Morgana beamed up at him with her most charming smile.

He didn’t answer.

Sighing, Morgana burrowed a little deeper into the warmth of his chest. She thought she felt a tightening of his hold around her legs and ribs, but wondered if she only imagined it. He was too surly a man to be the cuddling kind.

“For what it’s worth, I wanted to thank you for taking me home,” she offered, hoping to warm the ever-present chill of his company.

“I didn’t have much of a choice,” he mumbled.

“I suppose not,” she conceded. “But it’s important that you know I appreciate it, all the same.”

He didn’t look down at her, keeping his eyes affixed on some distant point in the darkness that only he could see, but she had the sense that she’d surprised him. No. Astonished him was more like it.

What a curious creature he was, to say nothing of the gentle, deadly beast that lived inside him. He was her lover. Her mate. And yet Morgana realized she knew nothing about him.

“What is your name, warrior?”

“Bael. Bael Bloodborn.”

“Bloodborn,” she echoed. “A…Berserker family name?”

He shook his head, leaping over a fallen tree and jarring her a bit with the landing. “Nie,” he answered. “I am the Bastard of Sigard Fjordson and his Persian slave. At the temple of Freya, we bastards have to earn our names through our deeds.”

“Bloodborn,” she whispered again, the name holding a more sinister meaning now. “I like the name Bael. It’s strong and bold. It suits you.”

“It’d be my name whether it suited me or not,” he said gruffly, but a small prick of awareness skittered along the fine hairs of her skin, telling her she’d alternately pleased and discomfited him.

“I think I like the name Bloodborn better than Fjordson,” she continued, enjoying the bit of warmth flowing between them. “It’s more, um, evocative, surely. And, er, I’m certain well-deserved. Also, there’s something to be said about being the first of your name, isn’t there? For example, you can forge your own legacy, that is, if you wanted to live long enough to do such a thing.” Morgana furrowed her brow, she’d taken a conversational turn there she hadn’t meant to.

“Bastards don’t leave legacies.”

“I don’t know about that,” she gently argued. “There’s a rather dangerous one bearing down on England as we speak.” She, of course, referred to William the Bastard, of Normandy.

He grunted, and Morgana decided to take that as a concession of her point. She was studying his jaw again, the way it connected to the sinew of his neck, tightening beneath her weight, but not straining.

A Persian mother? She could see it now. The dominance of his sharp nose in his otherwise aquiline features. The dangerous angle of his jaw where his Northman blood would want it to be square. The fullness of his lips. The blue cast when the moonlight glinted off his ebony hair. He wasn’t dark enough to be exotic, but neither was he cast from the same grey skies and long winters of the people of the north and west. His ancestors were kissed by the sun, and the burnished bronze of his skin likely retained that kiss year-round.

She’d certainly like to find out.

“Where are your mother and father now?” she queried, trying to imagine them waiting at home for him to return from raiding the Saxons.

“Dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” It sounded insufficient, even to her.

“Don’t be,” he droned tonelessly. “I’m not.”

That saddened her. She’d loved her parents dearly. Their loss was a constant ache, most especially since they were taken from her too soon by Macbeth.

More indirectly, by the Wyrd sisters.

“What about siblings?” she asked.

“What about them?”

“Do you have any?” He was being obtuse on purpose. Likely because he wanted her to be quiet. Well, it had never worked with Malcolm, she wasn’t about to let it work now.

“I am alone in this world, witch , is that what you wish to know?”

“Druid,” she corrected, automatically. “But I, too, have a name. It’s Morgana, and you can address me as such.” She gentled her voice, trying to be conciliatory. “I wasn’t trying to ask you painful questions. I was just trying to get better acquainted with you.”

“Well, don’t,” he barked. “There is nothing to acquaint yourself with. I kill people. That is who I am, that is what I do. Sometimes for money. Sometimes for survival. I go to war. I go to sleep. That is my life. I spill so much blood I bathe in it. I see it when I close my eyes. I took my first life the moment I came into this world, and I haven’t stopped since.”

“Your mother?” Morgana ventured.

The tightening of his jaw could have been a nod. It was too dark to be sure. Morgana was silent a moment, her heart bleeding over the emptiness emanating from him. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t rage. It was… nothing. A fathomless, bleak, and yawning chasm devoid of all but a century of blood and loneliness.

Was it possible for someone to be full of emptiness?

“Bael, I—”

“Don’t.” With a burst of speed, he made it impossible for them to talk as he barreled into the Lowlands of Scotland at an incomprehensible pace.

They didn’t stop until they’d chased down a sea storm. Lightning boiled the clouds building over a distant peak, smelling of brine and heather and something like singed darkness.

“I see a loch with a thick tree line.” He spoke for what seemed like the first time in ages. “We should rest there until we know what those clouds are going to do.”

Morgana wondered which loch he referred to, but she couldn’t see a blasted thing with the clouds covering the moon. Though, something told her dawn would be upon them any moment. She could feel it in the mists, in the condensation of water on the blades of long grass. It smelled like home.

Like the Highlands.

He set her on her feet and she gripped his powerful arms in order to steady herself while she gained her bearings.

“Stay here, I’m going to hunt,” Bael ordered.

“Don’t leave,” she pressed fretfully, worried that she’d angered him enough that he might not come back.

“I can’t run like that another day without food,” he said. “I’ll start a fire.” He left her, rustling around in the darkness for a time and then returning to where she stood, blindly following his movements with her hearing.

“What do you have to start a fire with?” she asked, wishing she wasn’t so ineffectual with nothing on her person but a torn dress and a pair of ill-fitting boots.

“You’re not the only one with magic, Princess.” Princess? Well, it was a good deal better than witch . She decided it was progress.

A pyramid of logs flared and leapt with light, throwing deep shadows against the Berserker’s dark eyes and painting the chiseled planes of his figure in stark relief.

Bemused, Morgana wandered toward the warmth of the flames blinking her surprise. “I had no idea you had fire magic,” she exclaimed, quite breathless. “What else can you do?”

“This is the extent of it.” he motioned to the stack of wood. “We can create and extinguish a moderate flame, but rarely can a Berserker wield fire.”

“What about water?” she asked, motioning to the loch, still a swath of darkness beyond the bank.

He shrugged. “I know a Berserker or two who can summon mists, or work curses. But our magicks are more for survival and combat than anything.”

“Fascinating!” Morgana exclaimed, lowering herself by the fire and resisting the temptation to take her hands from where they held her bodice together to hold out to the enticing warmth. “Tell me everything.”

He looked at her askance, which she was pretty certain he’d been avoiding since their little interlude by the other loch, both mile and hours past. His eyes skittered away from her, then back.

“My cousin, Kenna, can wield fire, but not ignite it,” she mused. “How incredibly useful a Berserker would be to her.”

She’d said the wrong thing. Again. She caught the distinct chill in his eyes before he turned away from her. “I’m going to get food,” he informed her.

“But, I can call fish from the loch,” she protested.

He was gone.

Berating herself, Morgana padded to the water’s edge and crouched down, meaning to pull some fish with her magic, just in the unlikely event that Bael’s hunt was unsuccessful. The glint of the firelight danced off the still loch, and the past called to Morgana like a wayward siren.

It seemed like an invasion of privacy, somehow, but as she cupped her hand in the water and held it up to the light, she knew that what she would see in this pool would give her the key to unlocking the Berserker’s heart.

* * *

A woman with hair the color of a spring poppy wove a tapestry in a longhouse adorned with scroll work and animal furs. She hummed to herself a lovely tune while motes of dust and wool glinted in the late-afternoon sun. Her tranquility never faltered even as a giant warrior, his tattoos glowing from skin the color of burnished copper, ducked inside and stalked to her, hauling her to stand and pressing her against him.

“Accept me, woman,” he crooned against the hollow of her neck, pausing to press a playful kiss on her rosebud mouth. “Or must I spend another night persuading the words from your lips on sighs and screams?”

“Bael,” the woman laughed, glancing surreptitiously around the longhouse, as though checking if they were alone. “What are you doing here in the middle of a training day?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Bael’s shoulder flexed with a movement of his hand, and the woman’s bodice was untied. “I am seducing my mate.”

She pushed at him, ineffectually. “Won’t they miss you at the temple?”

Bael paused in his passionate exploration of her clavicle to pull back and look at her. “What do they have left to teach me at the temple? I’m their fastest warrior. One of their deadliest. They would rather I focus on claiming my mate. It makes me less of a liability.”

“About that.” She reached up and pulled her bodice together fingers stuttering as she worked to retie it. “I don’t think we should be together during the day like this, someone might see.”

Bael’s dark eyes lit with suspicion, and beneath that, fear. “My Berserker accepted you as his mate last night,” he said more seriously. “Once you accept me, you’ll live in my house, sleep in my bed, bear my children. Who cares if anyone sees us? Let them stare.”

She turned back to her weave, strumming lines of wool. “Our children,” she murmured. “Won’t they be dark, like you?”

Bael crossed thick arms over his chest. “Does that matter?”

“Of course it matters. Do you want your children to be laughed at? Do you want them to be outcasts—Persians— like you are?”

“I’m a bastard, not an outcast, Heida. And I’m only half Persian.”

She didn’t look at him as she said the words that distinguished the light in his eyes. “Do you think someone… like you should be having children? Should even be mated at all?”

Bael seized her arm, forcing her to meet his dead gaze. “I am mated. To you. Or don’t you remember begging me to pledge my life to yours last night as I fucked you into oblivion?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Heida’s fingers blithely worked on her weaving, and she lost herself to the project, effectively shutting Bael out. “And truly, you should have known that a daughter of Jarl Thorsen would never be allowed to mate with a Bastard. Berserker or no Berserker.”

Bael’s eyes widened with panic and rage. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he grit out. “I’m bound to you. For the rest of your life. There can be no others for me. Only you, until you die, or I do. Do you understand what that means?”

“I understand that you can prolong my life exponentially,” Heida postulated.

“It means that if you do not accept me—”

Placing a finger over Bael’s mouth, the woman managed to look both condescending and cold with a tinge of regret for show. “Maybe that’s for the best. You can devote yourself to the temple, and visit me from time to time should you like to lie together. But when I marry, it will be to someone worthy of a daughter of Thorsen. I have heard today that Prince Bjorn of the Vale is looking for a wife, and may ask me to be his. Which would make me—”

Morgana cried out as her hands were seized in an iron grip, the water showering everywhere with the force of the movement. Bael’s lip curled into a snarl as he finished the cruel, selfish woman’s words. “A Princess .”

Sensing somehow that a struggle would only incite him further, Morgana curled her hands into fists. “I’m not like her,” she declared.

“You’re more like her than you think,” he growled. “You bound me to you against my will. You manipulate me to do what you want.”

She jerked ineffectually, trying to free herself from his unyielding grip. “I may be a Princess, but I don’t care about your parentage.”

It was clear from the look on his face that he didn’t believe her. “Your brother would. Your father would have. And you would bend to their will once they found you a lordly husband with overflowing coffers and pretty manners.”

“You obviously don’t know me very well.” Morgana rolled her eyes. “I find pretty manners boring.”

His eyes flared in the firelight. “You would rather me treat you like the barbarian I am? Because let me warn you, Princess , I doubt you could handle the demands I’d make of you.”

Impulsively, Morgana lifted to her toes, bringing her lips as close to his as she could, letting the tips of her breasts, bared by the torn dress, tease the smooth flesh of his chest. “Try me,” she challenged in a throaty whisper as her heart rate spiked in tandem with his.

She didn’t miss his intake of breath, nor could she ignore the violent response of his body to the nearness of hers.

“You’re toying with a dangerous beast,” he warned.

“I’ve already tamed the beast,” she shot back. “Now I just need to persuade the man.”

“ Never ,” Bael vowed before his lips took hers with quelling force.