“Well, not that expression. Dagda’s toes, Duey, you’d scare grown warriors to their graves.” She used both hands to smooth out the furrows on his brow until she had him smiling. Something that betrayed a set of deep dimples in his cheeks. “There now! That’s what would melt the coldest heart. No woman could ever resist a smile so sweet.”
“Sweet? You’ve gone completely daft.” Standing, he tugged playfully at her braids. It was an action so out of character for Du and yet so completely normal for an older brother that it warmed her heart.
“In spite of what you think, Duey, you are a kind man. A good man. And a fair one, to boot. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.”
He didn’t speak, but the expression on his face was unlike anything Mara had ever seen. It was one of pure affection. “So what do you want?” There was a teasing note beneath those gruff words.
“Pardon?”
“I know you, Elf. You never compliment me unless there’s something you’ve got your heart set upon.”
A blush stained her cheeks. “Who says I want anything?”
He gestured toward her face. “That does. So tell me already.”
Clearing her throat, she reached for more thread and refused to meet his gaze. “I want to marry.”
His eyes flared red.
As if sensing it, she glanced up and tsked at him. “Nay, you cannot disembowel him, brother. He has not laid a finger to me for fear of what you’ll do to him. He’s barely spoken to me.”
“Then how do you know he wishes to marry you?”
She arched a brow. “Am I that intolerable?”
“You know what I mean.”
Smiling, she wrinkled her nose at him. “I do, and we have spoken. He’s merely a quiet man. Like you. He wishes to ask you himself, but is terrified of how you’ll react. So I told him I’d approach you first to keep you from lashing out and gutting him before you’ve had a chance to acclimate to the idea of it.”
His nose twitched as if he were holding back a deluge of curses or an outburst. But after a few heartbeats, it settled down to a fierce tic in his jaw. “It’s what you want?”
“It is.”
“I suppose if you change your mind later, I can always kill him then.”
“Du!”
“What?” he asked innocently. “I’m king here. Can do as I please.”
Shaking her head, she laughed. “You’re incorrigible.” Then she sobered and met his gaze. “Have we your permission?”
“Only if he asks me himself. Then I shall give it.”
“Without a gutting?”
“Aye.”
She arched one brow.
Making a sound of supreme annoyance, he flung his hands out. “Fine! No denutting, either. Though that’s being unfairly cruel to me, just so you know.”
She laughed again. “You’ll survive.”
“And he’d best be good to you or else I’ll tear him to pieces.” Duel went over so that he could lean down and kiss the top of her head.
“Love you, Du.”
He growled in response, then stepped away. “Don’t you dare think for one minute that I’ll allow you to move away from here. He’s to move in with us. Final word on that.”
“Whatever you say, dearest.”
“Mean it, Elf. No planting of any rocks will be done. I won’t have it. You keep you-know-what caged and around your neck or else I will have his nuts planted at my feet.”
“Aye, brother.”
Mara blinked as the scene faded. She wasn’t sure why Elyzabel’s harthfret had taken her there.
Not until it flashed again and she saw the image that had driven Duel to madness.
Against Du’s words and threats, and at the insistence of her fiancé, his sister had planted her stone in the nemeton where Mara had been born.
“Why here, my love?”
Mercyn smiled at Elyzabel. “I was born in this forest. While my father’s hall may be gone now, he told me that this would always be my home. That the trees here would shelter me and mine. So I wanted a piece of you placed here so that they can watch over you, too.”
But it was a trick. He didn’t want Elyzabel as his wife. He wanted vengeance against Du for his own family, who’d been slaughtered during a raid that had been led by Du’s father. The same raid that had destroyed that hall.
A vengeance Mercyn had known he couldn’t take until Elyzabel was separated from her harthfret and brother.
That was how they’d managed to kill her—especially since she wasn’t fully Deruvian, but rather half. Separated from her stone, she’d been unable to regenerate. They’d raped and slain her as a human woman.
And left her floating in the lake where they knew Du went in the mornings to read. It was the cruelest thing they could have done.
Mara gasped out loud as she saw his sister’s brutalized, naked body as Duel had found her. Tears blinded her at their cruelty.
No wonder he’d gone insane. Through his sister’s harthfret, she could feel his anguished shouts as he sprang from his horse and called her name. Feel his heart shattering the moment he gathered her frail body into his arms and held her like a baby against his chest, willing her to open her eyes and live again.
But they’d seen to it that she couldn’t.
Never in her life had Mara seen anyone so heartbroken. Heard more sorrow as he shouted his misery to the heavens and demanded the gods spare his sister and take his life in her stead.
No one had answered him.
That was the Duel she’d met as he’d torn her nemeton apart in an effort to find the ones who’d taken from him the only person who had ever given him kindness without cruelty or condition. The sole heart he’d held sacred above all others.
The only person or family he’d had in the entire world.
“Oh, Du,” Mara breathed as she finally saw the truth of him. All he’d ever known was pain and loneliness. Heartbreak. Betrayal.
No one had held him when he’d ached. Or grieved. No one. He’d gone through it all alone. Without friend or family.
With her cursing and damning him every step of the way.
That was why he’d hesitated that day in the forest. Even after everything they’d done to his sister, he’d refused to harm her. Because deep down, in spite of Mara’s Deruvian magick and his desperate need for vengeance and blood to assuage his sister’s death and his own guilt for not protecting Elf, he’d known that Mara was weaker than him. That she couldn’t defend herself against him any more than his sister had been able to fight off her attackers.
And rather than see her harmed or lay another innocent in her grave, he would have walked away and left her alone. Because, in spite of his ferocity, it wasn’t in him to harm anyone who couldn’t fight back against him.
Du was not the savage beast she’d proclaim him.
It’s all my fault.
All these centuries, she’d blamed him for something she’d done to herself.
The truth slapped Mara hard and furiously. Duel wouldn’t have gone after her sisters. He hadn’t been burning the women. It’d been the men he’d attacked. They alone had been the ones he’d wanted to slaughter. Because they had been the ones who’d attacked his Elf.
He’d been in so much pain. And no one had reached out to help him through it. So he’d lashed out, needing relief, and had sought it through the only means he knew. Violence and vengeance.
Why didn’t I see that before? Why hadn’t she seen him before this?