Embers by Helen Kirkman Page B

had said it to underline the closeness of his tie to his kindred. He wanted her to know that that was indissoluble.
    Kin ties.
    It was I who first found out you were alive, not your Northumbrian… Ask him about that…
    But she could not. She forced Cunan's voice out of her head. She knew Brand was not hers. She had always known. .
    She knew it to the depths of her soul.
    He leaned over her, power locked in shadows, despite the traces of fever and exhaustion, despite the wound that would have taken his life but for his brother's love.
    "Hear the ending. When I found Wulf, your lover had tried to buy him back. The request was refused. So Hun came, with all his followers, and with the wolf heads he had hired, so he could take my brother back by force."
    The ending… She knew it beyond doubt.
    "But you were there. You killed him, before he could harm your brother again."
    The gleaming eyes never wavered.
    "Yes."
    She was not able to tell the man she loved that she was deeply, savagely glad that Hun's evil was gone.
    "You have to know how things are. Your lover died at my hand, by the sword you held in that room at the nunnery. This time, I was there. This time I could save my brother. It was not revenge. It was justice. If there can be a difference."
    "There can—" She stopped the words. She would not look at his eyes. He would see through her.
    "What truly makes justice is the fact that after all that happened my brother found a happiness neither you nor I are capable of. He found someone who loved him."
    She buried her face in her hands. But through all the pain of bitterness, ran the strand of fierce gladness—that something had been redeemed for the future, beyond any hope she had ever had, and beyond anything she had ever deserved.
    The bitterness and the gladness seemed to fuse inside her, into a determination that would admit no boundaries. If such things could be redeemed out of the bleakness that filled the world, then it was proof that she had made the right choice.
    The debt she had left to pay was the one that would assure the future.
    Redemption.
    "Can you understand that kind of justice?"
    Yes
. The word screamed in her head. Her hands balled themselves into fists against her mouth. There was silence of an intensity that penetrated through flesh and bone while the ripples caused by that word spread out, washing over both of them.
    "Can you?"
    She regathered the threads of her will. The only possibility of redemption for Brand did not lie with her. It was impossible to repay the boon that fate had granted to one brother by damning the other to live on through the nightmare.
    Somewhere outside these walls was Goadel. He wanted her. If she cast herself on Brand's mercy now, he would protect her with his life, whatever she had done to him. Because that was how he was. She could not allow it. She had seen him almost die already.
    "Tell me what goes on in that beautiful head of yours, Alina. Did you fall out with Hun before he died?"
    She could feel the same bone-eating intensity in his voice that had filled the silence. She forced her hands away from her mouth, straightened her hunched shoulders so that she might appear careless.
    "No. It is your turn for disappointment. I had made my choice and this time I was happy with it. I have told you I regret what happened to your brother because he should have had no part in this. I am glad he is…well. But do not flatter yourself that it changes what I wanted."
    "And just what, exactly, did you want?"
    The great black shape of him was closer to her now. She could feel it breathe. Feel the thinly stretched edges of the control that held all that limitless power in place. Her mind sought desperately for the right words to say, the words that would fill the terrifying dark and the silence. The words that would convince a mind that had more depths than she yet knew.
    She fell back on fragments of truth.
    "What I wanted was my place in Me. And I wanted to please my