Nat’s side ached, and he still felt hot, but a day out amongst the clouds had revitalised and settled him.
‘Will others come?’ Her voice was small.
‘Not now.’ Already the light was falling. Another hour and it would be gone completely.
When she smiled, he smiled back, his aching bones crying out for a warm soak in a mineral pool. She dipped in her fingers, the ruined hand swallowed by opaque water, nestled in heat.
‘You have been here before?’
‘A long while ago.’
‘Is your home near?’
This time he merely shook his head and sat down, taking off his boots and placing his socks carefully within the leather so that they did not get damp.
She was watching him, her eyes filled with delight. A joyous Sandrine was so different from the one he more usually saw, the dimples in her cheeks deep and the quiet creases of laughter charming.
‘Put your clothes under mine when you have them off. That way they will stay dry.’
Within a moment he was naked, wading into the water and dipping down. She had turned away, allowing for privacy, but he did not care. Closing his eyes, he waited till she joined him.
‘I cannot ever remember feeling so good.’ Her words were quiet as she lay back, spreading her hair across the surface, like a mermaid or an enchantress, the colour in each strand darkened by the water. She had not pushed off from the bottom for every other part of her body save her face and neck was hidden from him.
Most women of his acquaintance would have simpered and hesitated, a lack of clothes precluding all enjoyment. But not her. She simply took what was offered with a brave determination, the mist beading her eyelashes and small drops settling on her cheeks and lips.
‘It is said in these parts that this pool contains the soul of a sea sprite who lost her lover.’ Another flight of ridiculous fancy. He grimaced.
‘How?’
‘The sprite changed him into a merman so that they might always be together, but his jealous wife threw flames upon his form and he dissolved into steam.’
‘Water and steam. They still live together?’
Sandrine’s hand came up from the pool and she cradled both elements. ‘Legends and science. My mother would have peered into this pool to see what lived inside of each drop.’
‘The new and unseen frontier of science?’
‘You know of this? She looked puzzled and faintly incredulous.
‘When I am not killing people I can be found reading.’
Her laughter rang across the quiet, echoing back. ‘A warrior and a scholar. If you were to go to the salons of the wealthy, Nathanael Colbert, you would be besieged by women. Celeste would have been one of those had she lived.’
‘How did your cousin die?’
‘By her own hand. Baudoin’s brother Louis was her first lover and when he was killed she had no more heart for life.’
‘Difficult for you. The one left.’
She did not answer, but in her eyes there was such grief that he moved closer and took her hand, waiting till she regained composure. All the things that she did not say were written in hard anger upon her face.
‘How did this happen?’ His thumb traced the line of her ruined finger because he knew that to speak of such travesty would be a balm.
‘Baudoin and his brother were always at odds with one another over my cousin. Once, when we first came to Nay, I tried to drag Celeste back from getting involved in an argument and Anton slashed out at me.’
Anguish solidified inside of him, and he attempted for her sake to push it down. ‘I see you holding it now and then, rubbing at the finger that is missing?’
She smiled. ‘It hurts sometimes, a phantom pain as if it is still there.’
The small fragility of her hand made the wound seem even more mindless. The ring of his mother’s that she wore was far too big and he touched it.
‘I will have it resized, Sandrine. So you do not lose it.’
Puzzlement in her eyes was tinged with surprise. ‘I should not expect you to honour a marriage that was forced upon you when you were too sick to resist.’
‘The church may disagree.’
Their world stood still, steam the only thing moving between them, up into the growing blackness. Their shared night-time kiss also shimmered in the promise.
‘A poor reward, no doubt, for all your endeavours to save me.’ The grasp of her fingers slid about his own.
‘Ah, but it could have been worse. You might have been old or ugly or had the tongue of a shrew.’
She laughed.
‘No. I think on balance I was not at all hard done by.’
The lustrous colour of her hair caught at them, claiming him, binding them as one.
* * *
Alive.
She was still alive and so was he and she was pleased her attempt to escape him had come to nothing. In the silence above the world she allowed her head to rest upon his chest, listening to his heart.
The beat of vitality against her ear, the course of blood and hope and energy. It had been so long since she had been held this way, with care, like a porcelain doll shimmering in the wind. With only a small nudge she might shatter apart completely and she did not want to move. No, here she wanted to know what it felt like to breathe in the sensual and be rewarded by its promise. The lump in her throat thickened. She did not love Nathanael Colbert and he did not love her back but they were man and wife, a pair beneath the gentle hand of God, and in this, His place, a natural pool of light and water and warmth.
For so long she had been fighting alone. For all the months of Nay and then the year before that, her mother’s death embedded in her sadness.
Could she not let it go for one moment on a hillside in the wilds of the Pyrenees and in the company of a man who looked at her as if she was truly beautiful?
No ties save that of a marriage that would never be real. If she survived this flight to Perpignan she would return to England, ruined by all the accounts that would follow her, she was sure of it. But would she ever again be offered the chance of this?
The skin across his arms was brown and hard, the indigo of his tattoo strangely distorted in the water. She touched it now, traced the curl of serpent with one finger and then leant her mouth to the task.
Tasting him.
He breathed in deeply, and Cassandra felt the power of which Celeste had spoken all those months before. Not a limited sovereignty or a slight one. When her fingers slipped higher to his face she outlined the features: his nose, his cheeks, the swell of his lips and the long line of his throat.
His eyes watched her, fathomless, twin mirrors of the sky and the water and the mist, but fire lurked there, too, and it was building.
‘I am only a man, Sandrine. So take care that you do not cross boundaries you have no wish for me to traverse.’
‘What if I do?’
There, it was said and she would not take it back, not even when the flicker of wariness crossed into grey and she saw in his soul the first thought of ‘why?’.
If he asks, I shall walk straight out of this pool.