Deborah Hale Read Online Free

her wanted to forget about the mine slaves, the bedgirls and slaggies and think only of herself and her beloved. But another part clung to the beliefs in which her wise guardian Langbard had raised her. Somehow, it felt as if she was fighting for her very soul…and for Rath’s.
    “Can you be so certain my dreams are not?” Her voice fell to a whisper. “That night at the inn in Prum, when I first told you of my quest to find the Secret Glade and the Waiting King, you thought that would be impossible. Yet here we are.”
    Rath made a sudden movement toward her, his mouth opened, as if pouncing to contradict her. But his words seemed to stick in his throat. He looked around at the swaths of lacy fern, the ancient, towering trees and the misty beauty of the waterfall, as though seeing it all for the first time.
    “Yet here we are,” he murmured.
    “How many times did my quest appear doomed, only to be saved at the last moment? Little by little I began to believe this was my destiny.” She held out her hand to him. “ Our destiny. If we have faith in it, I trust that whatever we risk to fulfill it may be difficult, but not impossible. I must answer this summons. Will you go with me?”
    Rath stared at her hand for a long, anxious moment. What would she do, Maura wondered, if he refused? Did she truly have the resolve to go on without him?
    At last a sigh shuddered through his powerful frame and he reached for her hand with a shrug of surrender. “Stubborn wench. If I could not let you go back in Prum, do you reckon I can now?”
    The force of her relief sapped every ounce of strength from Maura’s body. She pitched toward Rath, throwing her arms around his neck. “It will be well, aira. ” She used the ancient Umbrian word for dearest or beloved. “I know it will! Think how we dreaded coming here last night and the parting it would mean for us. Instead, the Giver blessed our union.”
    At length Rath drew back. “If the Giver had offered me a choice last night, between following the Waiting King to certain victory with you lost to me as his queen, or risking almost certain defeat with you by my side—this would have been my choice. Do not expect me always to behave in noble ways, just because you saw a crown of stars on my head. I am still an outlaw at heart, whose first instinct is to save his own hide and fill his own belly.”
    She would hear no ill of him, not even from his own lips. “Even when you were an outlaw, there was more of a king in your heart than you ever guessed, Rath Talward. The first time I saw you, you were rallying others to escape a Hanish ambush. If they had trusted in you and held together, instead of scattering…”
    Rath leaped to his feet, brushing away some bits of bracken that clung to his breeches. “Let us go, before my doubts get the better of me. Perhaps if we travel fast enough, we may outstrip them.”
    Before he had a change of heart—or she did—Maura rose and took his arm to begin their new journey. She only hoped they would not be rushing into an ambush of fate.

2
    A s Rath and Maura picked their way down the narrow stone step beside the waterfall, he strove to quench the memory her words had kindled in his mind. Of that day in Betchwood when he had failed to keep his outlaw band together long enough to gain the relative safety of the forest.
    He told himself he had done all he could. Those men had each thought and acted for themselves. When a few had taken fright and bolted, splintering the strength of their cluster, it had doomed the rest. That was why he preferred to act alone. He could always count on himself.
    But one man alone could not hope to defeat the Hanish army that occupied Umbria, any more than a single drop of rain could quench a wildfire.
    Spying a hollowed stone filled with water at the base of the rock staircase, he asked Maura, “May we stop long enough for a drink, at least?”
    She nodded, then stooped and gathered the clear water into her cupped