The Valiant (The Valiant #1)(3)

Lost.

I would be completely lost without Mael.

My pulse surged loudly in my ears, and my fingers tangled in his long hair as I drew him down to me again. Mael’s full weight pressed me back into the damp grass, and his broad hands slipped beneath me, fingertips slowly sliding from my shoulders all the way down to the small of my back. My spine arched as he lifted me up off the mossy ground, wrapping his arms around my torso and pulling me close to his chest. His mouth traveled from my lips to the side of my throat, beneath my ear—and then I heard myself gasp, first with surprise and then in protest, as he suddenly tore himself away from me.

The breeze that now flowed between us prickled my skin as Mael threw himself onto his back with a sigh. He lay there for a moment, chest heaving and face flushed, and I wondered if we’d done something horribly wrong. It was the first time I’d ever kissed anyone like that.

But then he rolled his head toward me. His gray eyes flashed dangerously.

“Today,” he said in a ragged voice.

“Mael?” My head spun dizzily.

“This morning.” He sat up and rolled back onto his knees in front of me, grasping me by the shoulders and pulling me toward him. “This very morning, Fallon.”

I gazed at him in wary confusion. “What about it?”

“I’m going to go to Virico, and I’m going to ask him for your hand.” The words tumbled from him in a rush. “Now. So that he can announce it tonight at the feast of the Four Tribes. In front of everyone and—”

“No!”

“What?” Mael said, faltering. “Fallon—”

I shook my head a little wildly. “My heart . . . it’s already yours, Mael,” I said. “You don’t need to ask for my hand—”

“Yes,” he said, adamant. “I do.”

“You can’t have it!” I felt a tiny shiver of panic in my chest. “Not yet.”

“I thought . . .” He groped for words as his cheeks reddened. “I thought you—”

“I do.”

How could I explain it to him? It wasn’t that I didn’t want him. I did, even if I’d only just begun to realize how much. But there was something I wanted . . . needed first.

I needed the chance to earn my own name.

I bit my lip. “It’s just that tonight my father is going to make me a member of his royal war band. I know he is.”

I watched as Mael’s face clouded over. The feverish moment of our kiss was slipping away.

“Please, Mael.” I reached up a hand and pressed it to his cheek. “You have to wait for me. I can’t let anything stand in the way of this. I’ve worked too hard. I don’t want to give Virico any reason not to give me that honor.”

Mael pulled away from my touch. “Sometimes I wonder if you care more for your sword than for me,” he said.

“How can you even say that?” I snapped, ignoring the small voice in my head that hissed the very same thing. “You’re already a member of the war band! You would deny me the honor and glory of fighting at your side?”

That stung. I could see it in his eyes. “No,” he said. “I would never deny you that, Fallon.”

I reached for his hands. “Just wait a little while, Mael, until I’m a true warrior. We can go to my father then, and we can have everything we ever wanted—together.”

“All right,” Mael said finally, his familiar grin returning. “I’ll wait, Fallon, as long as it takes. But maybe we can make the wait feel shorter.”

Then he kissed me again, and for once, I forgot all about arguing with him.





II



THE DAY’S AFTERNOON was bright and brilliant and all the more beautiful for my having spent its morning kissing Mael in the Forgotten Vale. But inside my house in Durovernum—the house that I once shared with Sorcha—it was dark. I let the heavy leather door curtain fall closed behind me and moved through the room lighting the lamps.

Over the years, Sorcha had collected more than a dozen of the things—shining, delicately wrought metal or carved alabaster or clay painted with jewel-bright glazes—and hung them from the ceiling poles in our cozy little house on chains of different lengths. My favorite was the one shaped like a bird, with bits of blue and green glass set into the wings that made it glow with a fey light. The lamps had mostly come from far away, as had most of my sister’s precious things, brought over in ships by traders from places across the sea. Places like Gaul and Greece and Aegypt. And Rome.

As much as Sorcha had taken delight in professing her hatred for Caesar at any opportunity, that hate hadn’t influenced her fondness for fine and decorative things from the lands his legions had conquered. Just another one of my sister’s many contradictions, I suppose. I once saw a mosaic in a trader’s stall, and that was what imagining Sorcha was like—a multitude of sharp, shining pieces that, taken together, made up a whole image. Told a whole story.

As I lit the last of the lamps, I thought about the day they’d told me my sister was dead, killed by the Romans. The women of the tribes of Prydain—Cantii and Catuvellauni, Trinovantes and Iceni—could choose to fight alongside the men or not. Many did and with such skill that they were feared as much as the men—more so, even. The legions thought that the women warriors of the Island of the Mighty were demons, aberrations whose corpses they burned in heaps after battles so that their black souls could never escape to inhabit another body. Of course, I knew just how ridiculous that was. A primitive superstition. The fighting women of the tribes of Prydain were as good as they were because they worked at it. I worked at it—hard.