Morrigan's Cross (Circle Trilogy 1)

“Yes, we will. Here.” She lifted her camera. “It’s a place that cries for pictures. And the light’s gorgeous.”

She moved off to choose her angles. She’d make him a present of one, she decided. Something of her to take with him. And she’d make a copy of the same shot for her loft.

Imagine him studying the photo while she studied hers. Each of them remembering standing there on a summer afternoon with wildflowers waving in a carpet of grass.

But the idea of it hurt more than it warmed.

So she turned the camera on him. “Just look at me,” she told him. “You don’t have to smile. In fact—” She clicked the shutter. “Nice, very nice.”

Inspired, she lowered the camera. “I’m going to set it up on timer, take one of us together. She looked around for something to set the camera on, wished she’d thought to bring a tripod.

“Well, I’ll have to mix a little something in.” She framed him in. Man and stone and field. “Air be still and heed my will. Solid now beneath my hand, steady as rock upon the land. Hold here what I ask of thee. As I will, so mote it be.”

She set the camera on the platter of air, engaged the timer. Then dashed to Hoyt. “Just look at the camera.” She slipped an arm around his waist, pleased when he mirrored the gesture. “And if you can manage a little smile…one, two…”

She watched the light blink. “There we are. For posterity.”

He walked with her when she retrieved the camera. “How do you know how it will look when you take it out of the box?”

“I don’t, not a hundred percent. I guess you could say it’s another kind of hope.”

She looked back at the ruin. “Do you need more time?”

“No.” Time, he thought, there would never be enough of it. “We should go back. There’s other work to do.”

“Did you love her?” Glenna asked as they started back across the field.

“Who?”

“The girl? The daughter of the family who lived here.”

“I didn’t, no. A great disappointment that was to my mother, but not—I think—to the girl. I didn’t look for a woman in that way, for marriage and family. It seemed…It seemed to me that my gift, my work, required solitude. Wives require time and attention.”

“They do. Theoretically, they also give it.”

“I wanted to be alone. All of my life it seemed I never had enough of it, the solitude and the quiet. And now, now I’m afraid I may always have too much.”

“That would be up to you.” She stopped to look back at the ruins a last time. “What will you tell them when you go back?” Even saying it tore little pieces from her heart.

“I don’t know.” He took her hand so they stood together, looking at what was, imagining what had been. “I don’t know. What will you tell your people when this is done?”

“I think I probably won’t tell them anything. Let them think as I told them when I called before I left that I took an impulsive trip to Europe. Why should they have to live with the fear of what we know?” she said when he turned to her. “We know what goes bump in the night is real, we know that now, and it’s a burden. So I’ll tell them I love them, and leave it at that.”

“Isn’t that another kind of alone?”

“It’s one I can handle.”

This time she got behind the wheel. When he got in beside her, he took one last look at the ruin.

And, he thought, without Glenna, the alone might swallow him whole.

Chapter 17

It plagued him, the idea of going back to his world. Of dying in this one. Of never seeing his home again. Of living in it the rest of his life without the woman who’d given new meaning to it.

If there was a war to be fought with sword and lance, there was another raging inside him, battering the heart he’d never known could yearn for so much.

He watched her from the tower window as she took pictures of Larkin and Moira sparring, or posed them in less combative stances.