Fire Song Read Free

would have her, willing or unwilling, but he preferred her to want him, to accept him. The thought of forcing a lady was distasteful to him. She motioned him to a chair and he again noticed,with pleasure, the soft roundness of her breasts as she gestured with her hand.
    “You have not grown taller,” he said.
    “No, I fear it is my fate to forever be at the level of my father’s Adam’s apple. Would you care for some ale, Geoffrey?”
    He nodded and sat back comfortably in the high-backed chair. It felt like home already. It was not her father’s chair, but nonetheless it was solid and intricately carved, and lasting, like Belleterre itself. He watched Kassia give orders to a serving girl, her voice gentle and pleasingly soft. “Kassia is like her mother, Lady Anne,” his mother would snort upon occasion. “Soft and spineless and without spirit.” But Geoffrey knew she was wrong. Kassia was gentle because she had been raised gently. She appeared soft because her father treated her with unrelenting affection. He doubted if anyone had ever spoken roughly to her in her life, except of course, his mother. But she had spirit, perhaps too much for a girl. His eyes drifted down to her hips. So slender she was. He wondered if she would bear him sons without dying in childbirth as her mother had. His own mother had informed him that Kassia was late in developing into a woman, and he winced, remembering her crude discussion of Kassia’s monthly flow of woman’s blood, not begun until she had passed her fifteenth year.
    Kassia handed him a goblet of ale and a slab of cheese and freshly baked bread. “I am certain that Thomas will provide your men with refreshment.” She sat down across from him in an armless chair and looked at him with her direct gaze. “Why are you here, Geoffrey?”
    “To see you, cousin,” he said, breaking off a piece of bread.
    “My father would not approve.”
    “Your father is wrong not to approve. I have never done him ill and he is my uncle, and I am his heir.”
    “Nay, Geoffrey,” she said steadily. “I am his heir.”
    Geoffrey shrugged. “Let us say that your husband will be his heir.”
    She knew well what he was thinking and it angered her. She said, gazing straight at him, “ ’Tis so sad that my brother did not live. Then no man would look at me and at Belleterre as one and the same.”
    Geoffrey shifted uncomfortably, but managed a dismissing laugh. “You do not hold yourself in sufficient esteem, cousin. Believe me, I value you for yourself alone.”
    She wanted to laugh in his face for his blatant lie, but she felt a tingling of fear and rising gooseflesh at his words. Geoffrey was smooth as oil, but today his meaning was all too clear. He was eight years her senior and she remembered him clearly as a boy, tall and gangly and mean, particularly to her brother, Jean. She knew that her father had blamed Geoffrey for her brother’s drowning, and because her father believed him responsible, so did Kassia. Maurice had forbidden Geoffrey to come to Belleterre for five long, very peaceful years, until his sister’s merciless harping made him relent. But every time Geoffrey came to Belleterre, her father would mutter about vipers and bad blood.
    Kassia wondered now at Geoffrey’s motives, and decided to push him. “Yes,” she said agreeably. “I suspect that one day I will have to wed. But of course, my father will select my husband.”
    “Or perhaps the Duke of Brittany will.”
    “That could only happen if my father were dead.”
    “We live in uncertain times,” Geoffrey said smoothly.“Just last week one of my men, a strong fellow and young, fell ill of a fever that wasted him within a week. Yes, life is quite uncertain.”
    “Surely such a philosophy is not at all comforting,” Kassia said. “Do not you believe that God protects those who are good?”
    “You speak like a child, Kassia. God has little to do with the affairs of men. But enough of grim subjects.