A Baby to Bind His Bride

A chignon, he thought.

It was a word the Count didn’t know. But it was also the proper term to describe how she had styled her hair. He knew that in the way he knew all the things he shouldn’t have, so he shoved it aside and kept on.

“Bring her to me,” he said before he thought better of it.

Then he thought better of it and still said nothing to contradict himself.

“She’s not your wife,” Robert said, scowling. “You have no wife. You are the Count, the leader of the glorious path, and the answer to every question of the faithful!”

“Yes, yes,” the Count said with a wave of his hand. What he thought was that Robert didn’t actually know if this woman was his wife. Neither did he. Because he couldn’t simply have appeared from nowhere in a shower of flame, the way everyone claimed. He’d understood that from the start. At the very least, he’d thought, if he’d simply appeared one day in a burst of glory, he wouldn’t have needed all that time to recover, would he?

But these mysteries of faith, he’d learned, were not something he could explore in public.

What he knew was that if he’d come from somewhere else, that meant he’d had a life there. Wherever it was. And if this woman thought she knew him, it was possible she could prove to be a font of information.

The Count wanted information more than anything.

He didn’t wait to see if Robert would obey him. He knew the other man would, because everyone did. The Count left the surveillance room behind and walked back through his compound. He knew it so well, every room and every wall built of logs. The fireplaces of stone and the thick rugs on the common floors. He had never thought beyond this place. Because everything he wanted and needed was right here. The mountain gave and the followers received, that was the way.

Sydney. Saint Petersburg. Vancouver. Reykjavik. Oslo. Rome.

What did it mean that he could suddenly see so many more places? Places not hewn from wood and tucked away in these mountains, with nothing to see in all directions but trees and weather? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

The Count made his way to his own private rooms, set apart from the dormitories where the rest of his people slept. He kept his expression blank as he moved, as if he was communing with the Spirit the way he was supposed to do, the better to discourage anyone from approaching him.

The good news was that no one would dare. They watched him as he walked and the more attention-seeking among them pitched their prayers even louder, but no one tried to catch his eye.

When he got to his rooms, he waited in the outer chamber. When he’d first started to come into awareness, to become himself, he’d recoiled from the starkness of these rooms. It had felt like a prison, though he knew, somehow, he’d never been in one. But now he’d come to prefer it to the relatively cozier rooms on the other side of his doors. Stark-white walls. Minimal furnishings. Nothing to distract a man from his purpose.

It was between him and his conscience that he’d never quite managed to feel that purpose the way everyone assumed he did.

He didn’t have to wait long for them to bring her in. And when they did, the starkness of the walls seemed to make the shock of her black clothes that much bolder in comparison. Everything was white. The clothes he wore, loose and flowing. His walls, the hardwood floor, even the chair he sat in, like an ivory throne.

And then this woman in the middle of it all, black clothes, blue eyes and unbent knees. This woman who stared at him, her lips slightly parted and a sheen in her eyes he couldn’t quite read.

This woman who called herself his wife.

“I do not have a wife,” he told her when his followers had left them alone at last. He told himself there was no reason his anticipation should make him so…restless. “The leader has no wife. His path is pure.”

He stayed where he was, sitting on the only chair in the room. But if standing there before him like one of his supplicants bothered her—though, of course, his followers would all be prostrate before his magnificence rather than stand and risk his displeasure—she didn’t let it show.

In fact, the look on her face was something that edged more toward astonishment. With an undertone he was fairly sure was temper—not that he’d seen such a thing with his own eyes. Not directed at him.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

That was all she said. It was a harsh little whisper, nothing more.

And the Count found himself fascinated by her eyes. They were so tremendously blue it made him think of the breathless summers here, and they were filled with a brilliant, diamond-cut emotion he couldn’t begin to understand.

“I do not kid,” he said. Or he didn’t think he did. He was certain he never had, anyway. Not here.