Chapter 3
They ate in a not quite easy silence, both of them watching the child so as to avoid spying on each other. When Kari stretched her arms above her head and then scooped the boy back from investigating the pile of kindling she clearly deemed to be rather too near to the steadily burning fire for his baby safety, Constantine knew he had to try.
“He is very quick.”
“He has a name.”
Stifling a sigh, Constantine lay down and rolled onto his back. To his surprise, moments later he felt tiny hands patting his flank. He shifted a little and looked sidelong, straight into a pair of bright blue eyes, fringed with pale-as-moon-beam lashes. The boy again, always the boy.
“Do not touch,” warned Kari. “Valentine may never have turned from you, but you have no right to embrace him yet. Not when you believed your brother.”
She is jealous of Hadrian, as I was of Valentine. The realization shocked Constantine, making him jerk. Although his face felt as stiff as a mask, he smiled at the little boy. The child—Valentine—giggled and dropped his blond head onto his chest, clearly snuggling.
“Kari,” he breathed, not knowing what he was asking his wife.
“Our son is a loveable child,” she said. “He will go to anyone, even those he scarcely knows.” Her voice was mild, but he minded the rebuke and noted how tautly she held herself, how she leaned forward, ready to spring at him if he so much as breathed hard on Valentine.
“I am no monster,” he said gently. Valentine crawled onto his stomach and sprawled, his mouse-paw hands, gripping his tunic. Constantine checked his dagger was out of reach and flexed his stomach muscles, making the child bounce a little and giggle. “Nor is Valentine,” he added, smiling now as the boy, hearing his name, looked up.
“No, he is not,” agreed his wife.
Constantine flexed his muscles again, wanting to hear that sweet infant giggle afresh. The rest of his long limbs, he kept firmly in check, partly so Valentine would clamber over him some more, partly so that Kari would not half-gut him—as I am certain she would, either now, or later, in my sleep.
On that strange thought, both harsh and comforting—Kari is a woman who knows her own mind and is queen of her own lands. She protects those she loves—Constantine drifted into sleep. When he stirred, his wife and the child were gone but the fire was steadily burning and there were some freshly-cooked mushrooms spread out over a flame-warmed flat stone, waiting for him to break his morning fast.
• ♥ •
Kari breast-fed Valentine behind a screen of hazels, bare elders, and green holly bushes, all ripening with berries for Yule. Bowing her head in respect to the elder tree, the lady of the forest, she pondered on Constantine.
I do not want him beaten down. He is a knight and lord, so I owe him some pride.
I want him to explain why.
Was I hasty in returning to my lands?
“Kari?” Constantine had finished his mushrooms. He lifted the flat stone and, to her surprise and fleeting delight, kissed it. Rising from a crouch, he kicked out the fire with a half-smile, half-grimace and looked about, including upward into the tree canopy. So…he can learn.
“Valentine,” his lips mouthed and then he turned sharply, a deep flush running up the back of his neck, visible even through his crusader tan.
Perhaps I was too quick to leave him.
The anger she had nurtured did not shatter, but the ice in her heart melted a little.
We need to talk.
• ♥ •
When Constantine next spotted his wife in the living tapestry of the woods, she had her back to him. Though she knows I am near, or I am a fool. He admired her, enjoying the lush spark of feeling in his loins at the sight of the graceful curve of her spine. She knelt, bent over, and the slap of wet washing reminded him of other women he had spied, cleaning clothes beside the thin seasonal rivers of Outremer.
Nothing so trickling or feeble for Kari. She worked beside a pool, and Valentine played a drop-pebbles-into-the water game and chewed wild sorrel leaves on the next flat rock over from hers. The boy had a scrap of cloth to pummel and Constantine smiled, then frowned. Should she be teaching him women’s tasks?
“All men should know enough to clean their loin cloths,” remarked Kari, kneeling back on her heels. “Pass me your tunic and I shall wash it.”
“You would do that for me?” He did not ask her how she knew he was there.
“Of course.” She paused and he guessed she was blowing her fringe away from her forehead, although she had determinedly not turned about. “One more tunic is hardly a king’s ransom.”
Or an Emperor’s? he almost said, before he mentally hit the wall of their dispute. He dare not insult her by flirting. Swiftly as he could with his fingers numb and clumsy, he half-stripped and dropped his tunic onto the heap of clothes awaiting cleansing. “My thanks.”
She swiftly turned her head like a heron spotting a fish and glinted a smile. “Watch, and then you can do your own loin cloth.”
He felt a blush charge into his face, then chuckled as his heat was met by an answering glow in her cheeks. He offered a bow and crouched, waving at Valentine who burbled in reply, some baby-talk he could not understand. But he should not forget Kari. “I am all attention.”
For an instant, shock made her rose-pink mouth a perfect circle, and then by some unseen, unknown agreement, both of them twisted about to the pile of clothes, shy as virgins. In a way, with what has passed between us, we are. So tiny steps, infant steps, even, like Valentine, are what are needed between us.
When truly naked, and blessing the warmth of the low winter sun and the mild day, Constantine spoke above the pounding. “I do trust in your fidelity. I always did.”
Kari gathered up her son and turned. Her piercing stare struck him like an icy breeze but he refused to shield himself, in any way. “You have a strange way of showing it,” she remarked.
To his mortification, her very coolness had the opposite effect on him, and his treacherous body responded. Even her glancing at his arousal had no dampening result. “Missed you,” he mumbled, feeling like a randy page of twelve.
“So it appears.” Kari plucked the soaking clothes from the stone and moved toward the hazel bushes. “Help me drape these over the branches,” she called back, a warble entering her tones as she added, “Watch out for brambles.”
He copied what she did, ignoring the harsh ache in his loins and the smarting prickle in his bare foot when he trod onto a nettle. Nimble as a dipper, Kari worked beside him, at times waving the wet sleeves at Valentine so the boy riding on her hip giggled.
“He is an amiable child,” Constantine said, when his painful arousal had subsided and he could concentrate on speech again.
He had thought every woman enjoyed hearing her infant praised, but his wife stiffened. “Are changelings said to be unnaturally good? Did your brother tell you that?”
“Kari—”
She darted away from him. In another instant, he realized, she would have vanished into the woodland like a genie into its bottle.
“You cannot stay here,” he burst out, in a greater panic than he had ever felt on crusade. Battle he could predict, could even flourish in, but these affairs of women were strange to him. He settled on the practical—surely as a mother she would appreciate that? “Come back to the manor.”
She quivered, head to foot, as if she had been shot by an arrow bolt and tightened her grip on Valentine. The baby, sensing the tension, began to wail.
“Sssh, all is well, little man, sssh.” Kari rocked him.
“What will happen to you both, come the real winter?” Constantine asked quietly. “You have done well, I admit, for these past weeks, but later on, when the days are shorter still, and colder? When the snows come?”
“You have told me similar before, by the top of the waterfall, and I have answered. Certainly, my son and I are safer here than in your walls.” She said walls as if they were a prison. Perhaps they are to her, and I never understood. “With your brother.”
Too late, Constantine told her the one thing he should have done when had first found her by the waterfall. So badly have I done this!
“Hadrian, my brother, has returned to crusading,” he began, but she interrupted.
“He wanted you to leave again, go with him, did he not? Desert your wife, your pregnant wife again, and your son. Why not? ’Tis only a daughter of Eve and her changeling—Sssh, little man...”
Valentine hiccupped and stared up at her with big, wet eyes.
Something tight and sharp turned in Constantine’s chest. They were Madonna and child, mother and son, and he had hurt them. “You left, before I could tell you that Hadrian had departed—in spite of his urging that I should go with him.” Old and newer resentments flashed through him, along with a jealous exclusion, and overwhelmed both his shame and sense. “Ever since I went to Outremer, you have changed, Kari, and not for the better. Never give me time to explain, blast away like lightning, and storm off. We cannot all be as quick-witted as you.”
Her blue eyes went blacker than a moonless winter night. “So you desire obedience as well as fealty?”
Bad, bad, warned his husbandly sense, but he still spoke. “A little would be luxury.”
“Of course, my lord, I would not have your presence polluted, but if it t’were me, I would put some clothes on before you go back to your manor.”
Somehow, somewhere, she and Valentine vanished as she finished speaking, leaving the soaking clothes and fading into the faded greenery and brown tints of the season like ghosts. Constantine yelled and pleaded, flung on his dripping clothes and rampaged through the woods like a charging boar for the rest of that day, but to no avail.
His wife and youngsters—both Valentine and the child in her belly—were gone.
What have I done?