Perhaps he had received some education that had encouraged pride above his station. Eden found herself balanced between the inclination to reward and dismiss him immediately, and an overwhelming desire to see his face.
My son. Hern leaned his head against the sweaty withers of the stallion and breathed in the homely, mortal scents of hay and dung, not daring to loose his shock and anger.
My son is here. With her.
They had lied to him. Lord Bradwell, his daughter, the aunt who had so disliked him, all their servants—five years ago they had deceived him when they said the child was dead. When they had buried him beneath their lifeless stone. And he, a lord of the Fane, had believed.
The night of the storm, when Eden had fled from the inn, Lord Bradwell had found his daughter and taken her home. The earl had implored Hern to stay away from Hartsmere after he had pursued them there. “She is very ill,” Bradwell had warned him. “She may lose the child.”
And she refused to see the man she’d known as Cornelius Fleming. She screamed, Lord Bradwell said, whenever his name was mentioned.
So he’d stayed away. If Eden rejected him, so be it. He would claim the child and consider the bargain fulfilled. But even that was denied him.
“Gone,” Lord Bradwell had said with feigned sadness when Hern had returned from his nine-month exile in the forest. “The child is dead. I beg you to leave my daughter to recover. I beg you…”
Stricken by unfamiliar grief, Hern had watched them lay the child to rest. Whatever the mortals had buried, with their pious and hypocritical ceremony, had fooled even him. He had smelled and sensed something of himself given to the earth.
But his senses had deluded him. Perhaps he had been so long in mortal lands, surrounded by the taint of mortal emotion, that he had lost the powers he once took for granted.
For the child had survived. He was with his mother, who had returned to Hartsmere with no apparent fear of encountering the boy’s father. Had Lord Bradwell told her that the horned creature she so despised had abandoned mortal lands forever?
Warm, soft equine lips brushed his hand where the halter’s buckles had burned his flesh. He had grown unused to cold iron while he slept, and now he must develop his ability to withstand its poison all over again.
“Aye, my brother,” he said, stroking the great flat cheek. “You know well enough of mortal hypocrisy.”
Atlas tossed his head.
“They’ve called us masters of intrigue, in their legends and stories. But they were adepts of the game from the moment the first of their kind walked this world.”
Like Lady Eden Fleming.
He had almost not known her. His memory, like that of all Fane, was nearly perfect, his senses keener than any beast of field or forest. He could remember every tree he had seen grow from sapling to grandfather, each animal that had ever come to his call, and every man or woman he had met in his long life.
How could he have forgotten so much of his mortal bride?
She had changed, as mortals did. Her face was no longer that of a willful child: starry-eyed, ingenuous, and naively certain of what she wanted. Now it bore subtle marks of experience and shrewdness. Lines born of laughter creased the corners of her eyes. Not that her beauty was marred in any way. It had merely been enhanced by the passage of the years.
He was sure that she did not recognize him. He had altered something of the appearance he’d assumed as Cornelius Fleming, roughening his features as befitted a servant or commoner, deepening the pitch of his voice. It did not occur to Lady Eden to look for her former lover in a mere laborer, or an inhuman creature in an ordinary man. She, like all mortals, was blind. And that made the situation so much easier for him. Hartley Shaw, as he must be while he remained in the mortal world, was of no possible consequence to so great a lady.
Or to her son.