Read Online By Possession by Madeline Hunter - Free Book Online Page A

him publicly. He would not risk the king's disfavor by committing an open murder that might inflame the opposing barons. If the quiet opportunity came his way, that was different, but in that perhaps nothing had changed. The truth regarding that suspicion should be clear soon enough, but barring such a chance Simon would bide his time.
    So the immediate future depended upon the king and the law and the customs of the realm. If those failed him then the choice would be faced squarely, but he suspected it would be a bigger choice than Raymond or Moira saw. At least he would face it in London, where he might better learn the odds and risks. He would face it while Moira's peace would help him to think more clearly. And Simon's quiet opportunity would be harder to find or arrange in London.
    Contemplation of what awaited unsettled him, and he paced back to the fire. He paused at the cart and looked in.
    She rested on her side, one hand in a loose fist by her face as a child might sleep, her dark hair making a nest for her head.
    He had planned to make this a fast journey, but that would not be necessary now. He could stay in London for as long as it took, because the reason beckoning him back to Darwendon would be with him.
    He should let her go when they arrived in the city, release her to the life she claimed as her right, but he could not. If she found her stonemason he should allow her to wed, but he would not. A man who had been enslaved should be sympathetic to her quest, and he was, even though her status was not that of a slave and he knew the difference all too well. For one thing, if she were a slave she would have been in his bed from that first night, and he would not be peering over a cart wall at her, battling his desire.
    He might be sympathetic, but that weighed little against that desire, or the peace, or the inexplicable possessiveness that had made him kill three men for trying to defile her.
    He roused her at dawn and got them back on the road in quick order. Moira found some dried grasses among the trees with which to make a cushion on which to sit. She looked like some harvest goddess perched on a bed of hay beside him, reminding him of ceremonies that he had seen in the Baltic lands. It was at planting and harvest that the oldest rituals were performed by Eufemia's people, rites that alluded to an ancient time when their supreme deity had been a woman and not a man, when the physical vitality of the earth had possessed more importance than the vast abstractness of the sky.
    They rode past more woods, and he thought about those years among the Baltic people. The experiences seemed more familiar to him now than the memories of his own family and land. They believed that every shruband plant, every stream and pool, even every rock, was a home to a spirit. After a few years he had come to understand. After he had lain with Eufemia he could sometimes sense the spirits quivering in the growth around him, speaking a primitive language to his soul.
    The trees now flanking the road contained none of that. If there had ever been spirits in the land of England, they had long ago left or been silenced. Here the rocks were for moving or chiseling, the streams for washing and drinking, the trees for cutting and burning. Eufemia's people performed their ceremonies in the open air, surrounded by the spirits. The Christian God was worshiped in buildings constructed by clever, intelligent masons who deformed the stones with tools and logic.
    He glanced at the woman who had concluded she should marry such a man. Her head was bent and she sniffed herself, making a little grimace. Long fingers plucked at the cloth over her breast, pumping it slightly to let air flow. He had driven the cart off the road at sundown yesterday, not worrying whether there was water nearby, but he knew it was not the day's sweat that she smelled so distastefully.
    She noticed him looking at the swells appearing and disappearing beneath the puffing