Page 6 of Forbidden

Amber said nothing.

“God’s blood,” Erik muttered, “why are you being so difficult?”

“God’s blood, why are you being so dense!”

Shocked by Amber’s unaccustomed anger, he simply stared at her.

“Do you know this man’s name?” she demanded.

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to—”

“Have you forgotten Cassandra’s prophecy?” Amber interrupted.

“Which one?” he retorted. “Cassandra sheds bits of prophecy like an oak sheds leaves hard kissed by frost.”

“Spoken like a man who has never seen beyond his own hands.”

“The sword master praised the length of my reach,” Erik countered, smiling thinly.

Amber made a frustrated sound. “Arguing with you is like wrestling shadows.”

“Cassandra used to mentionthateven more often than she mentioned casting pearls before swine. Her wisdom, my swine, of course.”

For once Amber wasn’t swayed by Erik’s quick wit and wry tongue.

“Hear me,” she said urgently. “Listen to what Cassandra saw for me at my birth.”

“I’ve heard what—”

But Amber was already speaking, words tumbling out, retelling the prophecy that had been born with her, casting a shadow across her life.

“’A man with no name may you claim, heart and body and soul. Then rich life might grow, but death will surely flow.

“’In shades of darkness he will come to you. If you touch him, you will know life that might or death that will.

“’Be therefore as sunlight, hidden in amber, untouched by man, not touching.

“‘Forbidden.’”

Erik glanced broodingly at the stranger and then at the girl who was indeed like sunlight captured within amber, colors of golden brightness defined by a single dark truth: simple touch could cause her great pain.

Yet he was going to ask her to touch the stranger. He had no choice.

“I’m sorry,” Erik said, “but if spies of Dominic le Sabre or the Scots Hammer are abroad in Stone Ring Keep’s land, I must know it.”

Slowly Amber nodded.

“But most of all, I must know where the Scots Hammer himself is,” Erik continued. “The sooner Duncan of Maxwell is dead, the safer Lord Robert’s holdings in the Disputed Lands will be.”

Again Amber nodded, yet she made no move to touch the man who lay senseless at her feet.

“No man gets to this stranger’s age without having a name of some sort,” Erik said reasonably. “Even slaves, serfs, and villeins have names. ’Tis foolish to fear Cassandra’s prophecy.”

The pendant on Amber’s palm burned like trapped flames. She stared at it, yet saw only what she had seen before. Sacred ring. Sacred rowan.

Shades of darkness.

“So be it,” Amber whispered.