She had been. It had been his choice; no one in the Hall that day was likely to forget. She remained silent, her hands in her lap. He said, “When you leaped from the gallery I thought I saw a bird of prey descending for a kill. Later, when you doused me with water as I climbed the walls, I thought I saw a woman with a sense of how to play. I saw both things again in Paras Derval five days ago. Sharra, I did not come here to bed you.”
A disbelieving laugh escaped her.
He had turned to look at her. There was moonlight on his face. “It is true. I realized yesterday that I don’t like the passion of Maidaladan. I prefer my own. And yours. I did not come to bed you, but to say what I have said.”
Her hands were gripping each other very tightly. She mocked him, though, and her voice was cool. “Indeed,” she said. “And I gather you came to Larai Rigal last spring just to see the gardens?”
He hadn’t moved, but his voice seemed to have come very near, somehow, and it was rougher. “One flower only,” said Diarmuid. “I found more than I went to find.”
She should be saying something, dealing back to him one of his own deflating, sardonic jibes, but her mouth had gone dry and she could not speak.
And now he did move forward, a half step only, but it took him out of the light. Straining to see in the shadows, Sharra heard him say, carefully and masking now—at last—a tension of his own, “Princess, these are evil times, for war imposes its own constraints and this war may mean an ending to all that we have known. Notwithstanding this, if you will allow, I would court you as formally as ever a Princess of Cathal has been courted, and I will say to your father tomorrow what I say to you tonight.”
He paused. There seemed to be moonlight all through the room suddenly, and she was trembling in every limb.
“Sharra,” he said, “the sun rises in your eyes.”
So many men had proposed to her with these, the formal words of love. So many men, but none had ever made her weep. She wanted to rise but did not trust her legs. He was still a distance away. Formally, he had said. Would speak to her father in the morning. And she had heard the rawness in his voice.
It was still there. He said, “If I have startled you, I am sorry for it. This is one thing I am not versed in doing. I will leave you now. I will not speak to Shalhassan unless and until you give me leave.”
He moved to the doorway. And then it came to her—he could not see her face where she sat in the shadows, and because she had not spoken. . . .
She did rise then and, uttering the words through and over a cresting wave in her heart, said shyly, but not without a thread of laughter, “Could we not pretend it was not Maidaladan? To see where our own inadequate desire carried us?”
A sound escaped him as he spun.
She moved sideways into the light so he could see her face. She said, “Whom else should I ever love?”
Then he was beside her, and above, and his mouth was on her tears, her eyes, her own mouth, and the full moon of midsummer was upon them as a shower of white light, for all the dark around and all the dark to come.
It was cold in the open but not so very bad tonight, and there was a shining light on the snow and the hills. Overhead the brighter stars gleamed frostily down, but the dimmer ones were lost in the moonlight, for the full moon was high.
Kevin rode at a steady pace toward the east, and gradually the horse began to climb. There was no real path, not among the snow, but the ascent was easy enough and the drifts weren’t deep.
The hills ran north and south, and it wasn’t long before he crested a high ridge and paused to look down. In the distance the mountains glittered in the silvery light, remote and enchanting. He wasn’t going so far.