one side of his face. His hair was dishevelled and his clothes were awry, and she saw to her horror that he had blood on his mouth.
‘You’re hurt,’ she said, removing her glove and lifting her hand to see to his wound.
He caught it, stopping her, and all of a sudden they were not in the forest, they were nowhere, in some strange realm where only they two existed, and where every inch of her needed him. She looked into his eyes and something shot between them, connecting them, joining them, making them one. She felt the hunger in him, she saw the longing in his eyes and her heart stopped beating. Then he wrenched himself away.
‘What is it?’ she begged him. ‘What’s wrong? Why won’t you tell me?’
‘I should never have let her do this to me,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘but then, if I hadn’t, I would never have met you.’
There was a low murmur like the sea coming towards them and the red glow was getting closer.
‘We must go,’ he said.
He took her hand again and together they ran through the forest, snaking through the tree trunks and jumping over gnarled roots until they came to the cottage door.
Darcy knocked swiftly and quietly in a distinctive tattoo. The door was opened at once by a woman carrying a candle, which gave out only the smallest light. She said something to Darcy in a foreign tongue and he thanked her, then took Elizabeth through the house and out of the door at the other side. A barn lay ahead, and a man was leading a couple of horses, both saddled and ready to go.
Elizabeth looked at her horse with some apprehension. It was no gentle mount, but a large and restive looking creature, and it had a man’s saddle on its back. There was no help for it, she had to mount. Darcy lifted her into the saddle, then mounted his own animal, and they set off. She could barely hold the horse, but she hoped it would become less restive when it had run off some of its energy.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Across the mountains,’ he said.
‘But the Count—’ she said.
‘—Will survive,’ he said. ‘He has survived worse.’
His horse shot forwards and Elizabeth’s animal followed, and they were swallowed up by the dark.
Chapter 8
The night was long and wearisome. The horses were strong and not used to their riders, so that Elizabeth could only hold her mount with difficulty. The saddle was uncomfortable, and it was not long before her arms and legs were aching with the unaccustomed exertion. At last her horse began to tire and she was able to relax a little, which came as some relief, but the road seemed endless and she longed for journey’s end.
To begin with they rode side by side but, as the road narrowed, Darcy began to ride ahead of her, stopping at each junction to consider the way.
‘Haven’t you been here before?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, I have, but not for some time,’ he said, looking down three roads. ‘This way I think.’
‘You think?’ she asked in a dispirited voice.
He looked at her with sympathy.
‘Tired?’ he asked in concern.
She sat up in the saddle.
‘No,’ she lied, ‘I have never felt better.’
He smiled at her blatant but courageous lie and there was admiration in his eyes, then he laughed, and she laughed too. It was a bright sound in the deserted forest, ringing through the trees, and it heartened them, until it was answered by the desolate howling of a wolf, and then their laughter died.
Darcy turned to the right and Elizabeth followed him.
The road now began to wind downwards until it reached a hollow, where ice was already starting to form on the shallow pools of water which had collected there, but once through the hollow, it began to climb steadily. The horses had to pick their way carefully as the road began to narrow and finally dwindled into a path.
The branches of the trees closed in on them from every side, and when the path became a track, the trees were so close that the branches reached out and groped at Elizabeth as she passed, snagging her cloak and tangling in her horse’s mane. The animal whickered nervously and began to roll its eyes. For all its fatigue, it became jittery and tried to turn back, and Elizabeth had to struggle to keep it moving onwards, threading its way through a tangle of tree trunks and