Most were gone now. Hern had taken the English name of legend and retreated to this final haven amid the crags and valleys.
He was the last of the last.
In his solitude, he had become strange and lonely. He kept company with neither Fane nor man. And when at last he chose to return home, he knew the coin with which he must buy passage back into Tir-na-nog: a half-mortal child to bring strength to the thinning blood of the Elder Race. His child.
The one he had made with Eden Fleming did not survive. She had betrayed him, and doomed him to exile once more. Oh, yes, he had hated her. And that hatred was stirring again. All he need do was give way to it, leave the forest, stride down the fell, and look for her. When he saw her…
No plan formed in his mind. He had never imagined that this moment would come, that she’d dare return. He had expected her to be dead and gone when he woke, in the way of all mortals.
He willed his antlers away and leaned his forehead against the oak. He was weary, so weary, and the only cure was the green fields and endless forests of Tir-na-nog.
“Home?” Tod asked. “Will you make another mortal child, so that we can go home?”
Make another child? Oh, he had thought of it, after Lord Bradwell broke his vow. But to do so would have required a virtual rape, or the seduction of another suitable female, and he had no will to do either. He had preferred sleep, one that might have lasted an eternity, to dealing again with treacherous mortals.
But now?
Hern pushed away from the tree and took in a deep lungful of cold winter air. It was tainted with decay, disease, sorrow. The wreckage of two thousand years on earth.
The taint was within himself. He would be rid of it only in Tir-na-nog.
And there was but one way to return to the Land of the Young.
“We shall see, Tod,” he said. “We shall see.”
With a single thought, he clothed himself in the garb of a common man and went to find her.
Chapter 3
Their first breakfast at Hartsmere was made up of burned toast, tough ham, and cold tea, but Eden hardly noticed. Even the drafts, cobwebs, and gloom of the low-beamed dining room did nothing to dispel Eden’s happiness.
Donal sat at the noticeably wobbling oak table with her and Aunt Claudia, and was given the adult privilege because he had no nurse or governess to look after him. And, most importantly, because Eden didn’t want him out of her sight.
She tried not to stare or seek signs of his father in the boy. The green eyes were unavoidable, of course. But she fancied that his chin was a little like her own. And he was a perfectly normal child.
Good God, he had come from her. She touched her abdomen in wonder. She was his mother. He had called her that, not once, but twice. And she swung up and down on a seesaw of joy and terror.
How could she become a good mother to this boy? How could she expect him to love her, an utter stranger?
It had taken precisely an instant for her to love him—a kind of love she had not known before, perhaps the only kind left to her. She grieved for the years they had been separated, the priceless moments that had been lost. And she agonized over what he might have suffered in Ireland with people who had so easily sent him away.
She and Donal hadn’t yet discussed his foster parents and how he had come to Hartsmere. He had hardly spoken at all, though he ate with a will. He watched her with that same guarded, thoughtful stare, so far beyond his years. Judging. Deciding, perhaps, if she was worthy.
She would make herself worthy. For the first time in her life, she would stand and fight for what she wanted, something she believed in: her son and his love. She’d make up for the years he lived in poverty, separated from his true family and the life he should have known. And if she must pretend that he was her cousin’s child and not her own, at least she knew the truth.