“No matter how much I want the races reunited, I cannot fake a sacred mating.”
But the expression on Donnach’s face said he wasn’t so sure.
* * *
It was nearly time for latemeal when Una came out of the trees, flying toward her parents’ hut in her eagle form.
Bryant’s breath caught at the beauty of the bird. He’d tried to get her to shift for him in his not-dreams, but she had refused.
His wolf let out a yip of recognition he was unable to keep inside. The eagle’s direction of flight changed and she swooped toward them with a cawing reply, but then she flew up high in the sky.
“There is your ladylove now,” Donnach teased.
“How do you know it’s her?” Bryant was sure of the bird’s identity, but his wolf was drawn to the Éan shifter with a primeval connection he made no attempt to deny.
How could his friend be so certain, however?
The other Balmoral soldier rolled his eyes, his expression mocking. “She’s an eagle. You just got through telling me so earlier today. Since arriving we’ve seen few enough of them in bird form. The fact she started off flying toward her parents’ hut was a dead giveaway as well, don’t you think?”
Bryant could but nod, his attention fixed on the bird of prey swooping through the air, coming closer and closer to his hut with each figure eight she flew. It was as if she was drawn to him, but could not make herself come closer . . . or stay away.
He willed her to give in and come to him, to show his wolf that she recognized the connection between them after denying him last night.
But the bird continued to fly. Perhaps if Bryant took his attention from her, she would feel the confidence she needed to approach.
This Una was so very different from the one in their nighttime visits. That Una had allowed him near without smelling of rank fear; she had even let him kiss her.
He and Donnach had long since finished dressing their kill of the morning. They now worked on tanning leather from a deer Bryant had taken down the week before.
Bryant went back to it.
“Playing hard to get?” Donnach teased.
“Hoping she will come closer if she doesn’t think we are watching her.”
“You do have it bad,” the other soldier opined with something between envy and disgust.
The sound of flapping wings came just before Una landed on the branch sticking out from the hut’s wall. All of the huts had them. Bryant hadn’t understood what the branches were for when he’d first noticed them. Now he did.
The branches were a place for the Éan to perch when they did not wish to shift back into their human form.
His eagle looked interested in the skin and Bryant smiled up at her. “’Twould make a lovely pair of boots, would it not?”
Una cocked her head to one side, then dipped it as if looking pointedly at his bare feet.
He just shrugged. Like many Chrechte among the Balmoral, and some humans, too, he preferred to go without footwear. Though he had a pair of carefully crafted, snug-fitting boots for winter lined with rabbit fur.
A gift from his father that Bryant would not dream of refusing to honor by wearing, though he did so only on the coldest days of the year.
The leather he tanned now was not for himself, but he did not think he should mention he meant to use it as a courting gift for the reticent Éan woman.
“You have a beautiful bird,” he complimented. “I have never seen an eagle so fine.”
Her wings opened, spanning and then laying back against her side, but even her bird’s eyes reflected the confusion of the woman within. She was not used to receiving compliments and that was a shame.
“You do not think a wolf could find the eagle form lovely?” Donnach guessed, surprising Bryant.
He had not considered that possibility, but he would be the first to admit (if only to himself) that his brain was not the first thing engaged when Una was near.