Free The Exile by Steven Savile Page A

hoping to disappear into it.
    She was a new day rising. She was a perfect clear blue summer sky. She was the pinpoint silver of the stars at night. She was the first flower of spring. She was the last leaf of autumn. She was the savage sea and the towering cliff. She was raw heart-stopping beauty.
    "My name is Sláine Mac Roth," he said, hoping that it might coax beauty into talking. She shook her head again, her hair falling in front of her face. He stared at her lips as they parted slightly with her frightened breath. He wanted to kiss those lips. He wanted to kneel down at her feet and worship. He wanted to offer her all the devotions her body deserved.
    He knelt and tried to take her hand, but she opened her mouth to scream and he backed off with his hands raised, palms out, trying to show her he meant no harm.
    "I'll go," he promised. "Just please, don't breathe a word. Don't tell a soul I was in here. They could hang me for this." As soon as he said it he regretted giving beauty his name for surely she would betray him to the king. "Sorry. Sorry. I just-" but he didn't know what he wanted to say. He couldn't find the words to express the confused mess of feelings surging around inside him.
    He edged back to the wall, hands in front of him all the way, turned and scrambled back out through the window. He landed with a thump, rolled and came back up to his feet. Without thinking about it, he pushed open the shutter and leaned back through. She was standing by the loom, the shuttle in her hand. Her azure eyes met his and he fancied he saw the ache in them even from here. "You have placed a claim on my heart, beauty," he said, flashing her a dangerous grin.
    "No," she said, coming over to the window. "It cannot be."
    With that she closed the shutter, barring it behind him.
    There was no point calling out to her - any noise would only attract Grudnew's bodyguards. Sláine gazed at the shuttered window and smiled. She had talked to him. He kissed his hand and pressed it to the wooden shutter. "I'll be back," he promised, his voice barely a whisper. It didn't matter that beauty wouldn't hear his words; she could surely hear his heart.
    He crept cautiously up to the curve of the roundhouse and peered around it. There were two guards but their attention was turned towards Murias. All he had to do was skirt the compound and come out a little further down the road and no one would be any the wiser. With one last backwards glance he dropped down into the gulley that ran alongside the river and shuffled forwards in an awkward crouch until he was far enough away to be safe.
    He didn't return to the others. With night coming he went in search of Brighid, almost banging her door down. The fear was bright on her face as she opened the door. In a single breath the Daughter of Danu relaxed and opened her arms to him. "Oh my beautiful boy, what's wrong?" She kissed him tenderly as he fell into her embrace.
    "I... I..." But he couldn't tell her. Instead, that night, as he offered his devotions to the Goddess it wasn't Brighid's face he saw beneath him as he buried himself in the warm flesh of the Earth Mother, it was Beauty's.
    Even when he closed his eyes.
    "What's wrong?" Brighid asked again, hours later.
    It was too dark for him to see her face.
    "Hold me," he said after a while.
    They lay in silence until he found the courage to talk.
    "I saw the Goddess today," he whispered, barely daring to give voice to the words.
    "You did?" Brighid said, smoothing his hair back from his brow. "Tell me about it. I would hear all about my mistress."
    "It was Dian's fault."
    "Ah, isn't it always?"
    "I crept into Grudnew's roundhouse, to smear poison oak in his loincloths." Brighid laughed. He liked the way she laughed. She laughed with all of her body.
    "Oh my."
    "She was in there. She was beautiful, Brighid. No, not beautiful. That's the wrong word. She was different. She was unlike anyone I have ever seen, but you know that, surely? You have seen the