“But somehow, love must be possible. Just because you and Lilith couldn’t—”
“We’re not talking about me.”
They stood silently and listened to the echoing of the falling water around them.
“Fine,” Roland said at last, “then what about Daniel and Lu—”
“What about them?” Cam roared into the waterfall. His face turned red with sudden fury. “If they’re your models, go ask them for advice.” He shook his head, disgusted. “We all know what will become of them anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
Now Cam turned clear green eyes on Roland. And Roland flushed to find himself being pitied.
“In the end,” Cam said, “he will abandon her. He has no choice. He is no match for this curse. It will outlast him and undo him.”
Roland’s wings bristled. “You’re wrong. You have grown too close to Lucifer—”
“That couldn’t be further from the truth,” Cam hooted, but when he spun around, Roland noticed the branding on the back of his neck. The tattoo reached just beyond the high collar of his cloak. Unmistakable.
“You wear his mark now?” Roland’s voice trembled. He didn’t have one. Would never hope to be offered one. Lucifer only branded certain demons, demons with whom he wanted a special relationship.
“Cam, you can’t—”
Cam caught Roland’s face in his hand and held tight. They stood close, locked in an intimate grip. Roland didn’t know if they were enemies or friends.
“Who came to whom to ask for advice, Roland? We are not talking about me and the way I conduct myself. We are talking about you and the pitiful love story that you are going to have to end.”
“There must be a way to—”
“Face it: You wouldn’t have come to me if you didn’t already know the answer.”
Of all the things that Cam had told him that day at the waterfall, his parting words were the hardest ones: Yes, Roland had already known the answer he sought. He’d just hoped that someone would tell him otherwise and save him from having to do what had to be done.
When he came back to tell her, Rosaline seemed already to know. He climbed to her balcony, but she did not rush to kiss him. Her face stiffened in suspicion as soon as he came into her chambers.
“I sense a change in you.” Her voice was cold with fear. “What is it?”
Roland’s body ached when he saw her look so sad. He did not want to lie to her, but he could not find the words.
“Oh, Rosaline, there is so much I could tell you—”
Then, as if Rosaline remembered his loquacious poems, she demanded: “Answer me in one word. What does our future hold?”
That had been more than a thousand years ago. And still, Roland cringed now, thinking back on what he’d told her. He wished he could smash this memory and the moment with it. But it had happened. And you couldn’t change the past.
He had given Rosaline her one word:
“Farewell.”
He’d wanted to say, “Forever.”
But Cam had spoken truly: Forever wasn’t possible between a woman and a fallen angel.
He’d fled before she could beg him not to go. He thought he was being valiant. But life had taught him that he wasn’t. He was devastated and scared.
After that, Roland had only seen her once more: two weeks later, when he’d hovered out of sight of her castle window and watched his love weep for one full hour.
After that, he vowed never to cause anyone pain in love. He disappeared.
It became his way.
Roland brushed something from his cheek and was stunned to find it was a tear. Though he’d wiped a million briny drops from other cheeks, he could not recall a time when he himself had cried.
He thought of Lucinda and Daniel, of their eternal devotion to each other. They did not walk away from their mistakes—and over the centuries, they had made many of them. They returned to those mistakes, revisited them, worked through them, until something had at last clicked in this final life, when she was reincarnated as Lucinda Price. It was what had driven her to flee into her past—to find the solution to the curse. So that she and Daniel could be together.
They would always be together. Always have each other, no matter what.
Roland had no one.
Silently, he rose to his feet and made his own Valentine’s pledge. He would scale the wall to Rosaline again—and redeem himself the only way he knew how.
FOUR
LOVE’S PUPIL
Back up the outer wall, a second slink along the stone parapet, and then the final sheer ascent to the turret and its balcony and Rosaline once more.
By the time Roland again reached the balcony, the sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows over his shoulder. Announcers shifted and coiled within the shadows, a way of whispering We are here, but they left Roland alone. The temperature had dropped, and now the air carried hints of smoke and a coming frost.
He imagined entering the turret via the balcony, stealing through the twilight-dark halls until he found her in her room. And then he pictured her expression:
Images of her staggering backward in amazement, joy plain on her face, hands clenched to her exquisite breast …
But what if she was angry?
Still angry, five years later. It was possible.
He shouldn’t rule it out.
They’d shared something rare and beautiful, and he’d learned that women felt deeply when it came to love. They felt love in ways Roland could never understand, as if their hearts had extra chambers, vast infinites where love could stay and never leave.
What was he doing here? The wind wove its way beneath his steel armor. He shouldn’t be here. This part of his life was over. Cam might have been wrong about love, but he wasn’t wrong about how time had changed Roland.
He should climb back down, get on his horse, and find Daniel.
Only … he couldn’t.
What could he do?
He could grovel.
He could drop to his knees and bow before her, beg for forgiveness. He could and he would—
Until this moment, he had not even realized he wanted her forgiveness.
He was near the balcony now, trembling. Was he nervous or excited? He’d come this far, and still he didn’t know what he would say. A few lines of a poem formed in the habit’s corner of his heart …
Let no face reside in mind
But the face of Rosaline.
No—this was where he’d gotten into trouble with her before: She didn’t need bad poetry. She needed bodily, reciprocal love.
Could Roland give that to her now?
The red curtain rustled in the wind, then parted at the bold touch of his fingers. He concealed himself behind the stone wall but craned his neck until his gaze entered the bedroom where he used to sit with her.
Rosaline.
She was glorious, sitting in a wooden chair in the corner, singing under her breath. Her face was older, but the years had been kind: She had grown from Roland’s girl into a beautiful young woman.
She was glowing.
She was spectacular.
Yes, Roland knew he had made a mistake. He’d been green at love and foolish, cynical and unsure that what they had could last. Too quick to heed Cam’s bitter pronouncements.
But look at Luce and Daniel. They had shown Roland that love could survive even the harshest of punishments. And maybe everything up until this moment—accidentally coming back to this era, agreeing to help Shelby and Miles, riding past Rosaline’s old castle—had happened for a reason.
He was being given a second chance at love.
This time, he’d follow his heart. He was ready to bound in through the open window.…
But wait—
Rosaline was not singing to herself. Roland blinked, looking again. She had an audience: a small child, swaddled in a feather quilt. The child was nursing. Rosaline was a mother.
Rosaline was some man’s wife.
Roland’s body stiffened and a small gasp escaped his lips. He should have been relieved to see her looking so well—the happiest she’d ever looked—but all he felt was powerfully lonely.
He rolled heavily away from the balcony door, slamming his back against the tower’s curved wall. What kind of man had taken the place Roland never should have left?
He dared another look inside, watched as Rosaline got up from the chair and laid the baby in its wooden cradle. Roland closed his eyes and listened to her footsteps fading like a song as she padded out of the room and down the hallway.
This couldn’t be the way it ended, his last sight of love.
Fool. Fool to come back. Fool not to leave well enough alone.
Instinctively, he followed her, crawling along the turret’s shallow ledge to the next window. He gripped the wall with his abraded fingers.
This chamber, next to the room where he’d seen Rosaline, used to belong to her brother, Geoffrey. But when Roland leaned in to peek through the curved pane, there were women’s clothes hanging by the window.
He heard a man’s low voice, and then—in reply—Rosaline’s.
A young man sat with his back to Roland at the edge of a damask-covered bed. When he turned his head, his profile was handsome, but not devastatingly so. Smooth brown hair, freckled skin, an honest sloping nose.
A woman lay sprawled across him on the bed, her blond head nestled in his lap in the casual way of two people who were as comfortable with each other’s limbs as they were with their own. She was weeping.
She was Rosaline.
“But why, Alexander?”
When she raised her tear-streaked face to look at him, Roland’s heart caught in his throat.
Alexander—her husband—stroked his wife’s tangled blond hair. “My love.” He kissed her nose, the last place Roland would have gone had he had access to those lips. “My horse is saddled. The men await me at the barracks. You know that I must leave before nightfall to join them.”
Rosaline gripped the white sleeve of his undershirt and sobbed. “My father has a thousand knights who can take your place. I pray you, do not leave me—do not leave us—to go and fight.”
“Your father has already been too generous. Why should another man take my place when I am young and able? It is my duty, Rosaline. I must go. When our crusade is done, I will return to you.”
She shook her head, her cheeks pink with fury. “I cannot bear to lose you. I cannot live without you.”
Roland’s heart stuttered at the words.
“You won’t have to,” Alexander said. “I give you my word: I shall return.”
He rose from the bed, helping his wife to her feet. Roland noticed with renewed jealousy that she was pregnant with another child. Her belly protruded under the fine ruched gown. She rested her hands on it, despondent.
Roland would never be able to leave her in a state like that. How could this man go off to war? What war mattered in the face of love’s obligations?
Any heartache she might have felt for Roland five years ago paled in comparison to this, because this man was not only her lover and her husband—he was also the father of her children.
Roland’s heart sagged. He could not abide this. He thought of all those years between this medieval heartbreak and the present he’d come back from—the centuries he’d spent on the moon, wandering lost through its crags and pocks, abandoning his duties, just trying to forget he had ever seen her. He thought of the void of time he’d surrendered inside the portal that connected July to September, abandoning everything the way he had abandoned Rosaline.