Lord of Legends

“Here,” she said, pushing a piece through the bars. “Try it.”

He took the fruit as delicately as a butterfly alights on a flower petal. Long, strong fingers lifted it to his lips. With strange fascination, she watched him eat it with a kind of sensual deliberation, as if he were savoring every bite. When he finished, she saw what might have been real pleasure in his eyes.

“More?” she asked. She adjusted the knife to cut another slice, and the blade slipped. She felt a stab of pain as the sharp edge cut into her thumb. Blood welled on her skin.

Ash reached through the bars and grabbed her hand, pulling gently until her own fingers were inside the cell, and drew them into his mouth.

Sparklers exploded inside her head. She gasped. His tongue rolled over her skin as if seeking the wound. She closed her eyes, incapable of moving as he licked between her fingers and laved her thumb almost tenderly.

Her senses returned too late, and she snatched her hand away. Heat flowed through her arm, into her chest, and continued on to her stomach and thighs. Her most secret place ached as it never had before, not even when she had been most in love with Donnington.

But there was another unexpected change in her body. She examined her thumb. It no longer hurt. More remarkably, the cut was gone, leaving only a trace of pink healing flesh where it had been.

Impossible.

She set the peach on the towel, nearly dropping it in her haste. Her fingers trembled as she picked up a chunk of bread and placed it on one of the blankets. She didn’t dare allow Ash to accost her again.

Her second approach was far more cautious. She laid the blanket on the ground, several inches from the bars. Then she backed away and watched.

Lithe as a panther, he crouched and took the bread. He lifted his head and continued to watch her as he ate, not wolfing the food as one might expect him to do, but eating with all the finesse of a courtier at a prince’s table. Mariah put the rest down for him and withdrew again, half-ashamed that she should still be letting her fear rule her.

If it were only fear.

Ash made a sound in his throat. Mariah jumped, recovered, and saw that he had finished the bread. She remembered the water but could think of no way of giving it to him … unless she found a way to open the cell door.

It was unthinkable. She still knew nothing about him and was no closer to learning.

“Are you very thirsty?” she asked.

He lowered his chin, the veil of hair obscuring his eyes, and shook his head. She felt only a little relieved.

Remembering the blanket, she shook it out, refolded it and placed it at the foot of the bars again. Ash didn’t touch it. That uncanny stare continued to follow her as she bent all her attention on selecting one of the books.

Will he understand? Or is this all just wasted effort?

No, not wasted if there was the slightest chance of discovering just how much he could understand.

She sat in the chair, the chosen book in her lap, and set the lantern a little distance from her feet. It cast eerie shadows about the room and provided the bare minimum of light she would need to read. Her hand still tingled from the feel of Ash’s tongue on her flesh, and several times her fingers slipped from the pages.

At last she found her place. She cleared her throat.

“‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon,’” she read aloud.

Ash cocked his head, dropped into a crouch against the wall nearest the bars and let his hands dangle over his knees. As she began to read about the girl whose destitute father had given her to a mystical white bear in exchange for wealth and comfort, she began to wonder why she had chosen this tale, in particular, of all those in the book, or why this book of the three she had brought.

And she wondered—as she related how the girl had been visited every night by the same handsome prince, only to be deserted each morning—why, instead of the great white bear, she saw another creature, pale and elusive as a ghost, a beast very much like a horse but a thousand times more beautiful, his eyes black as a moonless night, his broad forehead topped by a glittering spiraled horn.

Startled, Mariah lost her place and looked at Ash. He was listening intently, but otherwise neither his posture nor his appearance had altered.

The Donnington coat of arms. Why should it so vividly come to mind at this moment? No one could have looked less like such a magical creature than Ash. It was certainly beyond any possibility that he should guess what fancies tumbled through her mind, and he looked entirely unresponsive to the story she was reading.

He doesn’t understand. How shall I ever hope to—

Suddenly he stood, moved to the bars and opened his mouth. His lips moved without producing any sound, but he pointed at the book and then gestured toward Mariah’s face.

“What is it?” she asked, half rising.

He gave a sharp, impatient gesture, and something very near anger crossed his features … not the savagery of their first meeting, but an arrogant, impatient emotion, as if he were no mere prisoner but a prince himself.

“You wish me to finish the story,” she said.

He nodded and gestured again toward the book. With a sensation quite unlike the satisfaction she had expected to feel at his response, she bent to the pages once more.

She related how the girl lived in luxury but saw no other person by day and only the prince by night. The girl became very lonely. One night, she bent to kiss the prince as he slept but woke him by letting drops of tallow fall on his shirt. He told her that he had been cursed by his wicked stepmother to be a bear by day and a man only by night, but that now he would be forced to leave her and marry a hideous troll.

Glancing up again to gauge Ash’s reaction, Mariah saw that his lips were forming a word she could almost make out: troll. It was if he recognized that one word out of all those she had spoken.

The possibility encouraged her. She continued the story until she’d reached the end, where the girl, who had undertaken a long and dangerous journey to reach her prince at the castle East of the Sun and West of the Moon, had helped him to outwit the trolls who held him captive.

“‘The old troll woman flew into such a rage that she burst into a thousand pieces, taking the troll princess with her. The bear prince and his love freed all the trolls’ captives, took the trolls’ gold and silver, and flew far away from the castle that lay East of the Sun and West of the Moon.’”

She closed the book and let it rest in her lap, watching Ash out of the corner of her eye. Frowning, he walked away from the bars and began to pace the length of his cage with his long, graceful stride.

Suddenly he swung around, his nostrils flared and his eyes unfathomable. He studied her so intently that her stomach began to feel peculiar all over again.

“Why a bear?” he asked.

CHAPTER THREE

ASTONISHED, SHE JUMPED up, nearly upsetting the chair, tripping on her skirts and stepping on the fruit that still lay on the towel. “You … you can speak!” she stammered.

He lifted his head and tossed his hair out of his eyes. “I speak,” he said. His voice was a lilting baritone with a slight English accent, unmistakably upper-class. “I.” He hesitated, gathering his words. “I speak now.”

Now. Which implied a before, a time … when? Before she had come? Before he had been confined to this tiny prison?

Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you answer my simple questions?

But she didn’t ask aloud. She had made progress. If he had deliberately deceived her, it must have been because he hadn’t trusted her. All she’d done was read a fairy tale, and yet.

“Why a bear?” he repeated.

A whole army of questions marched through her mind, but the situation was far too chancy for her to ask them. The best thing she could do was play along.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s simply part of the story, the way the writer wanted to tell it.”

She could see the thoughts working behind his eyes. “But he became a … man.”

Excitement began to build in her chest. “Yes. When his curse was broken by the love of the girl.”