The Touch
1683 Words
The Touch~
Sethlyan Callan
Glenayre, Aleron
“Young and proud. Lacking the wisdom to admit to fear.” Remembering our folly brings a sigh for how close we came to walking away. “We almost walked separate paths after that day, for no reason but our own stubbornness.”
Seth combed fingers through his wet hair on the lonely walk from the bath back to their bed.
Embers still glowed in the fireplace. A candle flickered on the table where they’d shared meals and built trust. Isobel was in bed with her back to him. Seth waited, hoping she was asleep under the blankets. If she sensed him there, she gave no sign.
The first night, they’d been too exhausted. Last night she’d claimed a headache. Tonight he lingered in the bath until the water grew cold.
The days were no better. Isobel was polite but reserved. Conversations were superficial. He had not so much as held her hand since the day of the hunt. With every day that passed since that peculiar kiss in the glade, he grew more reluctant to touch his wife. The strangeness that had passed between them had become a wall neither dared approach.
Seth snuffed out the candle and slipped into bed. When his arm went numb beneath him, he ignored the pinpricks so as not to risk waking her. Ashlon and his strange mindspeaking were unsettling enough. Having Isobel inside his head was too much. He wondered what she’d already read from his thoughts and how close she’d come to discovering the madness he hid from the world.
He stared into the darkness and ached from missing her.
A sniff broke the silence. He told himself it was naught. He wanted it to be naught. Then another sniff followed the first, unmistakable.
He rolled to his back.
“Don’t cry.”
With the scratch of a sparker, a candle flickered. Isobel got out of bed and tied on her robe. She drew a handkerchief from the pocket and wiped her nose, then picked up her light and headed for the door.
“Don’t leave.”
She stopped and waited without glancing his way. Seth knew he should say the words that could bring her back to him, but they just wouldn’t come.
“You have ordered me not to cry and not to leave,” she said. “I cannot comply with both.”
“Isobel, stay.”
The candlestick wobbled in her hand. Tawny wax dribbled to the rug.
Just say the words, boy.
He couldn’t.
Isobel’s shoulders rose and fell with a sigh, and she left him.
# # #
Seth brought the blade down hard, slashing through leather and wool. He swung again and again until he’d shredded the torso. Then he hacked away at the wooden frame underneath. Muffled muttering intruded on his private rage. He kept swinging, even as his arms turned to lead, and his breath came in ragged gulps.
“Sethlyan! Lord Sethlyan, control yourself.”
Ranald’s shouts pierced Seth’s hot-tempered daze. His arms dropped like ballast, and he grimaced at the senseless damage he’d wrought. There’d be no repairing this splintered mess, and it hadn’t made him feel any better.
Nice work. You butchered a practice dummy.
Ranald was inching his way out into the yard. A clutch of Glenayre’s guards eyed him nervously.
“Find something else to do. Show’s over.” Seth tossed the practice sword to the dirt.
“You’ve both gone completely mad,” said Ranald. “Lady Isobel is in her garden, ripping roses out of the ground. Roots and all.”
It was easy to imagine her like that, furiously attacking with her spade, green eyes flashing.
“Go to her, my lord.”
“She doesn’t want to see me.”
“Damned young fools,” said Ranald, discarding any pretense at deference. “Isobel needs you. It can hurt to heal.”
“I don’t want her doing any more healing. I want her back to normal.”
“Then adjust your definition of normalcy. You must make accommodations now we’ve discovered her gift.”
“The b****y hell I do,” he said. “I want my wife back, but I’ll be damned if I’ll have her inside my head.”
“She’s no more in your head than you are in hers,” said Ranald.
A distant rumble of thunder had Seth checking the sky. Clouds were gathering. A cold rain was coming, and the woman he’d married was stubborn enough to get herself drenched and sick to spite him.
“We have much to learn about this bond you’ve formed,” said Ranald. “But you have to help by actually talking to one another.”
Seth stalked off for the garden, his longcoat whipping about his knees.
“She already wintered it in,” he muttered. She’d pruned, mulched, and wrapped the roses. Messing with them now made no sense.
He stopped before two freshly dug holes. Raw and uneven. Open wounds in the ground. She’d attacked the ground with the same fury he’d attacked the practice dummy. He didn’t see her anywhere. He considered calling out but knew she wouldn’t answer.
Sounds of a muffled argument reached him. He followed it to the far end of the garden and dodged a spade as it came sailing over the wall. He recognized Isobel’s cursing from the other side. What was she doing out there? He pulled himself up and straddled the wall.
Isobel steadied herself on the steep bank as he startled her. Her predicament was apparent. From inside the garden, the wall was no higher than his chest. On the far side, the bank dropped away steeply, making her return climb much higher than when she went over. In her own fit of temper, she’d stranded herself.
Isobel glared up at him. Callan pride flared, and he scowled back.
“What are you doing out there?” he demanded.
“Transplanting roses.”
Thorny nubs that might have been roses evidenced being freshly planted in the poor, unamended soil at the base of the wall.
“They won’t survive the cold there.”
“They’re too weak for this clime anyway. The rootstock will survive.”
Seth understood without asking. Isobel meant to let the hardy native Alsa rootstock reassert its strength over the weaker plant grafted to its shoulders. He couldn’t disapprove.
Alsa roses had an exuberant beauty to them. The indigenous rose bloomed only a short while in the spring, but when it did, hundreds of perfect ivory blooms covered the dense shrub. The Alsa rose was a wild beauty with cruel thorns he could appreciate from a tactical perspective as well. If her plantings took hold, after a year or two, no one would climb that wall from the outside.
“You finished your planting. Now you seem in need of rescue.” He pulled off a glove and reached down for her. Her gaze fixed on the gold hawk on his finger, the ring she gave him the day they wed.
“I would climb until my hands bled before I asked you to touch me,” she said.
The intensity in her rebuke struck him like a rock. He’d lost her already. But pride can bring on a great stupidity in a man. Seth leaned back astride the wall and folded his arms.
“Climb, then,” he said.
Isobel wiped her hands on her skirt and found a toehold. She made it a foot off the ground, slipped on her hem, and fell back on her bottom.
“All you have to do is ask for help,” he said.
Isobel peeled off her gloves and started up again. She made it much higher this time, an impressive feat considering she was in a gown and heeled slippers. Then her grip slipped on a slick patch of moss. Seth winced as she slid back down the rocks.
Thunder rumbled again. The rain was coming. He could smell it.
“Please let me help you, Isobel.”
He reached for her again. Begrudgingly, she grasped his arm and dug her fingers into his sleeve. He tightened a grip on her elbow and pulled her atop the wall with him. They both looked down to where her fingers clutched the wool of his longcoat. When he looked up, she met his eyes.
No flood of emotion. No torrent of thoughts.
It was irrational to be disappointed.
He needed to kiss her, to prove the strangeness was gone. When he reached for her, she recoiled, lost her balance, and nearly fell off the wall.
“Damn it, Isobel. Do not flinch from me,” he said. “I have never, will never, strike you.”
“Damn you, Seth Callan. You hurt me just the same. I needed you, and you left me.”
“It was you who walked out on me last night. I told you to stay.”
“You commanded me to stay. I am not one of your collies!”
Isobel’s fists clenched, and Seth’s breath came fast and heavy. They sat atop the wall, seething at one another. A cold wind picked up ahead of the rain. It slapped the tail of his longcoat against her skirt, like a child craving her attention.
Isobel turned away first.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” she said softly. “The voices. The touch. I’m frightened.”
Seth swallowed hard. He couldn’t admit his own fears to her. He was afraid he wasn’t strong enough to protect her. Afraid she would discover he wasn’t as honorable as she thought him to be. Afraid of losing himself to her, never again finding the respites of solitude that quieted the Other no one else could hear.
Pride is your only madness.
“You want no part of this, I know,” she said. “But I didn’t spend years trying to dredge up some peculiar gift like Ashlon. I don’t know how to undo it.”
Her fire left her, and Seth glimpsed the fragile heart beneath her fury. He had been so busy running from his own fear he had left her to face hers alone.
“Ranald is studying this… this…bond,” he said. “He’ll sort it all out for us.”
“For us? What us? You’re repulsed by me, or afraid of me, or both.”
A fat raindrop splattered on the wall behind her.
“And who wouldn’t be?” She pushed up her sleeve and held up her wrist. “Whose blood flows in my veins? Jenna Camran Iverach’s. And whose? I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am.”
Seth decided then he would take his chances, would do whatever it took to bring her back.
He reached for her bare wrist. The moment his skin met hers, a wave of grief knocked the breath out of him. He held on and braced for more. And more came, not as words or thoughts, but as feelings he knew by taste, by smell.
The bitter taste of loss. The acrid stench of fear.
It could have been her fear or his, but it was theirs now. When the sensations finally passed, he still held her wrist, and a hard rain poured down around them.
“I’ll tell you who you are, Isobel Callan. You are mine, and I am yours. If you’ll still have me.”
Chapter 44
- Writer
