LITMIR.BIZ

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Alejandra’s cheeks and in the long dark strands of hair that had escaped from the fastening beneath her hat.

      He wondered if she had killed before. The faces of the many men he had consigned to the afterlife rose up in memory, numerous ghostly spectres wrapped about the heart of battle. He had long since ceased to mourn them.

      The enforced rest had allowed his heartbeat to slow and the breath in him to return. Even the tiredness was held temporarily at bay by this new alertness. They were not French, he was sure of that; too few and too knowledgeable of the pathway through the foothills. A band of men of the same ilk as El Vengador, then? Guerrillas roaming the countryside. He could hear a few words of Spanish in the wind.

      ‘It’s the Belasio family,’ Alejandra explained as he looked up. ‘On their way back to their lands.’

      ‘You saw them?’

      She smiled and shook her head. ‘I smelt them.’ When her nose sniffed the air he smiled, for the rain and wind had left only wetness across the scent of winter and earth and she was teasing. Still, the small humour in the middle of danger was comforting.

      ‘They are armed partisans, too?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Then surely we would hardly be enemies?’

      ‘There are no hard and fast rules to this kind of warfare. We have guns they want and your presence here would have been noted.’

      ‘Me?’

      ‘There is money in the exchange of prisoners. Good money, too, and it is difficult to hide the blue of your eyes. You do not look Spanish even though you speak the language well.’

      He swore. ‘Where are we going?’

      ‘Corcubion. It is a small harbour two days away.’

      ‘I thought I had heard Muros?’

      She shook her head and stood. ‘My father and Adan are insistent on the closer port given your condition. Come, the Belasios are gone now and the trees are not far.’

      * * *

      Thirty minutes later they stopped beneath the pines. It was full dark and the rain had gone, though the intermittent drips from drenched boughs above were heavy.

      ‘We will leave again at first light.’ Adan, the older of the two men, stated this as he bedded down in the lee of a medium-sized bush and the other man joined him. A good twenty yards away Alejandra stayed at Lucien’s side.

      He knew there was bread in his bag and he pulled out the crust of it and began to eat. Any sustenance would see him through the next day and he needed all the energy he could muster. He wished he still had his silver flask filled with good English brandy, but it had gone with the rest of his things. The French, probably, when they had first caught him.

      He did have a skin of Spanish red wine and he drank this thankfully. Alejandra simply sat there, neither eating nor drinking. She looked tired through the gloom and he handed her the skin.

      Surprisingly she took it, wiping the mouth of the vessel with her sleeve when she had finished before giving it back.

      ‘Do you want bread, too?’

      She shook her head and arranged her bag as a pillow, fastening the cloak she wore about her and curling into sleep.

      Overhead a bird called once. He had heard very few on the march up with the British in the lower valleys of the Cantabrians. But outside Lugo he had shot a substantial owl and sucked the warm blood from its body, because there was neither wood nor safety to cook it and he had not eaten for three days. Then he had plucked the breast and stuffed the feathers in his ruined boots to try to ward off frostbite.

      He breathed out. Hard. It was relatively warm here under the trees and he had food, drink and a soft bed. The pine needles formed a sort of mattress as he lay down on his back and looked up. His knife he placed within easy reach, just outside the folds of his jacket.

      ‘You are a careful man.’ Alejandra’s words were whispered.

      ‘I have learnt that it pays to expect trouble.’

      ‘It is my opinion that we will be safe tonight. The noise of the eagle owl, the birds you heard cry out before, is why we stop here. They roost in the trees above and are like sentries. If anything moves within a thousand yards of us, they will all be silent.’

      ‘A comforting warning,’ he returned softly, and her white teeth flashed in the darkness.

      * * *

      ‘Spain is like a lover, Señor Howard, known and giving to those who are born here. The bird sounds, the berries, the many streams and the pine needles beneath us. It is the strangers that come who change the balance of the place, the ones with greed in their eyes and the want of power.’

      She saw the way he stretched out, his knife close and a sense of alertness that even sickness and a long walk had not dimmed.

      She knew it had been hard for him, this climb. She had seen it in the gritted lines of his face and in the heavy beat of his pulse. His silence had told her of it, as well. It was as if every single bit of his will was used in putting one foot in front of the other and trudging on. The wine might dim the pain a little. She hoped it would.

      He had removed his hat just before the light had fallen and the newly dyed darkness of his hair changed the colour of his eyes to a brighter blue. If anyone at all looked at him closely, they would know him as a stranger, a foreigner, a man to be watched.

      ‘It is mostly downhill tomorrow.’ The words came even as she meant not to say them, but there was some poignancy in one who had been so very sick and whose strength was held only by the threads of pure and utter will. He would not complain and she was thankful for it.

      On her part all she wanted to do was sleep. His presence at the hacienda had left her fretting for his safety, mindful of her father’s propensity to do away with problems and so for many nights she had barely slumbered.

      Here at least Manolo and Adan were a good way off and Lucien Howard’s knife was sharp. There was some ease in being next to him as well and she had made sure to place her blanket roll between the captain and the others. It was as much as she could do.

      The birds above called and insects buzzed about them, zinging in the night. The music of a quiet forest unthreatened by advancing armies or groups of the enemy.

      She felt the warmth of Lucien Howard’s shoulder as she turned away and slept.

      * * *

      Lucien woke as the first chorus of general birdsong sounded. Alejandra was still asleep, her arm across his as if the warmth had brought it there in a mind all of its own. One finger was badly scarred and another had lost a nail altogether. The hand of a girl who had seen hardship and pain. The lines he had noticed before on her right wrist showed up as multiple white slashes in the dullness.

      He remembered all the other hands of the women of the ton with their painted nails and smoothness and he wanted to reach out and take her fingers in his own with a desperateness that surprised him. In sleep she looked younger, the tip tilt of her nose strangely innocent and freckles on the velvet of her cheeks.

      A wood nymph and a warrior. When a spider crawled up the run of her arm he carefully brushed it away. Still, she came awake on the tiniest of touches, from slumber to complete wakefulness in less than a blink.

      ‘Good morning.’

      She did not answer him as she sat, her hair falling in a long tousled curtain to her waist, the darkness in it threaded with deeper reds and black.

      He saw her glance at the sky. Determining time, he supposed, and marking the hour of dawn. The steel in her knife’s hilt had left deepened ridges on the skin of her forearm, so close had she held it as she slept. When her glance took in the empty clearing she looked around.

      ‘Where are the others?’

      ‘They went to the

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