The Burning Stone
He moves forward quickly. “Are they bothering you?” he asks her, catching Hathumod by the sleeve before she can step forward into the firelight.
“Nay, my lord,” she says, and her surprise is the surprise of the guileless child who is asked if she has ever laid an offering before her grandmother’s gods. “They’ve done as you said. They’ve chosen their place. They’ve come to hear the teaching.”
2
IN the evening light, the stones looked like shrouded clerics standing watchfully at the top of the slope. Waiting for what? Since the fiasco at the old cottage, she and Sanglant had searched many times among the boulders in the high meadow but had found no path. Jerna still nursed Blessing, but her voice was gone; stolen, perhaps, or closed off by Anne’s magic, who had used the daimone to lure Sanglant away and then made sure she could not be used in that way again.
Her braid stirred. Wisps of loose hair fluttered on her neck. Was that a rising breeze, or the touch of one of the servants? Had Jerna followed her? She didn’t look.
That observation, of course, had made all the difference.
He had his tunic off his shoulders, gathered by his belt at his hips so that his chest and back were bare. With his ax balanced along his shoulders, he looked a tempting sight. He swung down the ax, kissed her, then the baby, then pressed against her as if to kiss her again. The sheen of sweat on his body must have been cooling rapidly as the night breeze rose; surely he was cold, or perhaps he just didn’t notice. She was trembling, but not from cold. She touched a finger to his lips and just so slightly pushed him back.
“Ai, God,” he said, sounding frustrated.
Yet surely he was no more frustrated than she was. They had already done things they ought not to have done, not with the situation as desperate as it was. She could not risk getting pregnant again, not now.
He was silent for a long time. Then he moved up behind her onto the level shelf of ground, which was not more than two strides square. He was careful not to touch her, but she felt him nevertheless. He might as well have been making love with her, his presence lay so heavily on her, but that was her own desire speaking through her body. He understood the risks, too. He was the one who, when she had finally recovered her strength, had pointed out that a second pregnancy and labor might be as debilitating as the first and that to be completely sure that she was strong enough to escape at a moment’s notice, they must make sure she did not get pregnant.
At moments like this, she wondered if it were a sin to hate the woman who had brought her here and thrown her in a cage only slightly less repressive than the one Hugh had shut her in. Yet was it truly less confining just because the hand that held her had a softer touch?