Page 62 of Forbidden

“Yes?” she said, stilling a shiver of response.

“Nothing. I simply like whispering your name against your bright hair.”

Pleasure expanded through Amber. Without thinking, she lifted her hand to touch Duncan’s cheek. The faintly rough texture of his skin where beard lay just beneath the surface pleased her. The strength of his arm around her waist pleased her. The heat and resilience of his chest pleased her.

Duncan pleased her to the center of her soul.

“There is no man like you.”

Amber didn’t know she had spoken the thought aloud until she felt a tremor ripple through Duncan’s strength.

“Nor is there a woman to equal you,” he whispered as he kissed the palm of her hand.

When Duncan bent to put his cheek against Amber’s hair, the delicate scent of sunlight and evergreens swept through him. She smelled of summer and warmth, of Scots pine and a clean wind.

The fragrance was uniquely Amber. He could not get enough of it.

Amber heard the hesitation in Duncan’s breathing, sensed the piercing pleasure that he took from her simple presence, and longed to be free of prophecy.

But she was not.

“A pity the warmth won’t last,” Amber said raggedly.

Duncan made a questioning sound as he nuzzled a wisp of hair that lay against her neck.

“Erik was right,” she said, her voice quick, almost frightened. “A storm is coming. But it simply serves to make the sunlight more precious.”

Reluctantly Duncan lifted his head and looked to the north. A thick line of clouds loomed there, held back by a southerly wind. Overhead, the sky was a sapphire bowl arching above fells whose rocky peaks wore a pearly cowl of cloud.

“It won’t storm by sunset,” Duncan said.

Amber said nothing.

“Perhaps by moonrise,” he added, “but I think not.”

Duncan looked over his shoulder once more. Behind them a narrow crease cut into the rugged highlands that rose between Sea Home and Stone Ring Keep. The crease was the beginning of Ghost Glen, named for the pale-barked trees clinging to its steep sides, and for the haunting wail of autumnal winds.

No other rider was following Duncan and Amber down the ridge they had just descended. No other rider was visible ahead, where land and sea mingled to make Whispering Fen. The way they would take to the fen was unmarked, known only to the amber girl who fitted so perfectly in Duncan’s arms.

There had been no sign of habitation at all on this side of the ridge. No cart road, no smoke lifting above a clearing, no plowed fields, no drystone fences, no deer parks, no mark of axe on trees. Small, steep-sided, stitched together by the fey conversations of a brook, Ghost Glen held neither hamlet nor farm nor walking paths. It was a place of ancient forest and primeval silence.

The land was both savage and oddly innocent, removed from the strife of the Disputed Lands. Had Duncan not seen standing stones grouped in solitary glades, he would have sworn no other person had ever passed this way.

Yet people had lived here once. Some named them Druids. Some named them sorcerers. Some named them not men at all, but devils or gods.

And some—the few who might know—called those vanished people Learned.

“Egbert won’t follow us,” Amber said as she felt Duncan twist to look behind once more.

“How can you be sure? He is lazy, but not blind. We left a trail.”

She hesitated, wondering how to explain to Duncan the combination of knowledge and instinct that made her so certain they were safe from intrusion here.

“Egbert can’t follow us,” Amber said. “Even if he weren’t afraid, he wouldn’t be able to see where we went.”

“Why not?”

“He isn’t Learned,” she said simply.