She stopped by Donal’s room and spent the better part of an hour simply gazing at him. When she went down to her own room, Aunt Claudia was standing in the hall in her dressing gown, the candle in her hand casting sinister shadows on her face. Eden hurried past without a word.
Her bed was very lonely indeed.
Chapter 11
He had been so close to victory that he could still taste Eden’s desire on his lips.
Hartley ran for the forest, his body demanding a substitute for the activity it had been denied. His legs carried him more swiftly than any human’s; once he was beyond the park and the pasture behind Hartsmere he let his animal nature take control. A simple thought, and he was a great stag, the Horned One of the ancients, his antlers so heavy and broad that they rivaled the branches of small trees.
The magnificent red deer of this land rutted only in the autumn. Hartley recognized no such boundaries. So he endured the frustration of wanting and not having, pursuing only to find the pursued slipping through his fingers.
Yes, he had made her surrender her pride and her aristocratic principles. She had admitted that she wanted him. She had all but promised that soon she would be his lover.
But not his love. “I have had enough of what men and women call love. It has been burned out of my soul. Can you understand that, Hartley?”
Of course. He had not loved, could not love. Who better to understand? She became truly his equal, dispensing with any risk of guilt.
How very convenient that emotion need not enter into their liaison.
Hartley gave himself to the night, charging up the fell as if it were a hillock. Rabbits and hares dashed from his path, and a badger put its head out of its sett to observe the commotion. A fox watched him with laughter in its wise and curious eyes.
His subjects, all. They had come to his calling with the spring, repopulating the barren land. The birds and beasts had no mixed loyalties or fears of losing rank and privilege.
Hartley’s great lungs strained, giving him the strength to reach the top of the fell without once pausing in his gallop. At the peak, clothed in sedge, moss, and lichen amid the bare, jutting rock, he flung back his head and roared. The echo crashed down into the neighboring dale.
No other creature dared answer, not even the shepherd’s dogs. He pawed the stone hard enough to strike sparks. He tossed his head, challenging the stars themselves.
It was all so much posturing, and he knew it.
With a sigh he shed his animal shape and sat on a boulder. After a time the fox and a few rabbits crept up to him, settling at his feet. Faint rustlings told him where the wood mice and short-tailed voles hid among the rocks, too frightened to come out in spite of the truce Hartley’s presence invoked.
He sent a gentle thought toward the nearest tiny life. The mouse scurried up the rock, whiskers twitching anxiously, and settled in his palm.
“You see?” he said, stroking its delicate chest. “You are safe. As long as you remain well away from mortal men. As I should have done.”
The mouse sat up on Hartley’s hand and sniffed the air.
“It was only a kiss,” Hartley said. “Among humans, as among my kind, such are given and taken carelessly enough.”
Then why did he feel so powerless when Eden kissed him? Why had he been so easily set on the defensive, letting her control the conversation and its conclusion?
The kiss should have been merely a physical thing, a means to an end. Instead, it had strengthened his desire for her, driven him to distraction, and had proven nothing but that he had mastered neither her nor himself.
If he followed the path of those thoughts, he would begin to imagine a life that included Eden as well as Donal. Such a life as could only be lived in the mortal realm, for the time was long past when men were permitted to enter Tir-na-nog.