Long Lost - Prologue

Still a little bit of your song in my ear
Still a little bit of your words I long to hear
You step a little closer to me...
So close that I can't see what's going on
- Cannonball, Damien Rice

Britain circa 500AD – The Dark Ages

How brutal love was.

The scent of blood blew across the killing ground, thick and wanton, invading her breath, swarming through her mind like the flies that were already beginning to gather on the still bodies. Her stomach lurched but she swallowed until the nausea was nothing but a faint distraction.

He was waiting for her as she had known he would be, regardless of the outcome of this war they had caused. She hadn't thought she would feel so torn, so uncertain. Sunlight made an idol of him, cupping his face and figure with golden fingers.

The aftermath of a battle was always ugly and this one was no exception. She moved among the dead, taking in the carelessly sprawled bodies, the empty, open faces, lime-wood shields splintering under her feet, the grass slick with blood. Her back was straight and her stare unflinching as though she were a princess, gazing down into the flat eyes of those who could not look back.

Beside her, her escort clanked and held their iron-tipped spears ready - a golden convoy, too bright against her dark skin and hair. None of them wanted to be here, were not prepared to refuse their warlord.

It was to another warlord she went now, treading through carnage to see him for the last time.

We are both still living, you and I. We would not fight with something so cheap and endless as words, so we danced with swords and spears, we threw armies into our battle and we made death our advocate.

Here is the parting of our ways – in the parted flesh of our dead, because we could find no peace in each other.

All I did, I did for love and lack of love.

The wounded thrashed and twitched, words burbling between their lips - prayers, pleas, nonsense. Her attendees peeled away from her then, casting a cursory eye over their wounds and trickling water into their mouths. Those who screamed and sobbed were silenced with a quick knife.

She walked on, her feet daubed with blood and dew. The hem of her dress trailed through the mud, she a dark goddess to the smoky sight of the dying.

Here and there, she glimpsed a face she knew, pale and baffled within the sea of slaughter. She wanted to walk on, to turn away, gods, how she yearned to, but...

All I did, I did for love and lack of love...and for my love, for my lack of love, you are dying in a muddy field.

She bent down to those familiar faces, stooping in the dirt to clutch their hands and speak stupid, meaningless words that were meant to be comforting. There was no one to comfort her, to speak the old lies and hide the horror.

This could not happen again. She could not stay, or there would be war and love and no difference between the two. It would never end - it could never end. Love conquers all, some fool of a poet had said once, not knowing how right he was.

They died with their fingers tangled in hers, listening to her lies.

She looked at the battlefield that love had made, at all these men conquered by love. They lay in clumps and chaos, as fragmented as the bloody pieces of her heart. She had done this.

Omnia vincit amor. How true. How terrible.

X - X - X - X - X

At last, she reached him. He had no guard, nothing except a short Roman sword that hung at his side. It was the only hint that he'd ever had another life, away from Britain and her cold stony shores.

Somehow, he had become a man loved by his people, but no longer by her. His carefree smile was in place, hiding whatever lay behind those obscure, watchful eyes.

"Warlord," she said, stopping well short of him. She didn't want to be too close: she didn't dare to be snared by the silken brush of his hand, to be drugged and drunken on the seduction he wielded so effortlessly.

He answered her in Latin – she knew how he despised Englisc, considering it crude and dissonant.

"Lady." The sarcasm on the word sliced her, but she could not show it. "Radiant as ever."

She would not bother with fake courtesies. "Are you pleased with your handiwork?"

Darkness in his eyes, and clenched behind his wicked smile. "How bitter you are. You began this, Lisanor. I just finished it. Let's end this foolishness."

"The folly was all yours." It was over, truly over – this was not the man she had loved; this stranger was a warrior, a man of sharp words and casual passions. "Winning a battle will not win me."

His frown did nothing to lift the amusement from his eyes. "It was all for you, Lisanor, all of this – do you think I care whether Aelle thieves a few more fields? Let the Bretwalda have his sticks and stones...but he cannot have what is mine."

"I am yours no longer," she hissed, all the venom and anguish of the years exploding from her, needing to hurt him, to make him feel the betrayal that bled her dry even now. "I will never be yours again – even if the seas boil dry and every single star falls screaming from the sky, I will never be owned again."

"Was it so terrible to belong to me, as I belonged to you?" he snarled back, a wild light leaping into those shadowed eyes, the first hints of his wolfish nature creeping out. "Was I wrong to think you the better part of my soul? When you wept in the nights, did I mistake pain for joy? I have loved you, Lisanor, and I would love you again."

Lies and lies, superbly manufactured. Had it always come so easy to him? A dreadful sadness sank through her like lead weights because even knowing the depth of his deception, part of her wanted to believe him still, to follow his vision as so many others had.

"You have lied to me, and you will do so again. Aelle has never made me weep," she answered, and that was not the truth. Aelle did not frighten her as this volatile warlord did – there was no wolf simmering within his pale skin, waiting to burst forth in clawing rage. There was no coldness in Aelle, no detachment or slow, merciless amusement.

It had not been Aelle who ripped her from her family and sold her into slavery. That was what she would not say: that was what she had never been supposed to find out. Aelle had not masqueraded as her saviour, her sacred lover; Aelle had no lies, only bluff truths and warm, rowdy temper.

She squeezed shut her eyes, trying to crush tears into dust.

All those lies – lies about soulmates, lies about himself, but worst of all, lies of love, sickly honeyed words that had never meant a thing. And even now, he played the game, played her like a harp, plucking her heartstrings, picking out her pain with such finesse it almost seemed lovely.

"Will his death make you weep?" he enquired, a deadly huskiness creeping into his voice, the first words of the wolf. "I doubt it, somehow. You don't love him, Lisanor – you can't throw me aside so easily. Your heart just isn't that fickle. But will you let him die for you?"

She had known this would be his ultimatum.

"I don't love him. But that will make it all the easier to leave him."

Triumph sparked in his eyes.

"And leaving you..." she continued, "...why, that will be even easier a second time."

The sword was flashing in his hand before she could move, but quick as he was, her guards were faster – one of them dragged her back as a ring of bristling spearheads ringed the warlord.

Fury had dashed the triumph from him. His lips skinned back, and the rumbling snarl that came from him was nothing human, but he didn't move. Those spears might not kill him outright, but one of her guards was hefting an axe with a coldness to his eyes that met and matched the warlord's rage.

"I will find you," he swore, his voice echoing with hints of moonlit nights and howls, maybe with something of yearning too. "If it takes a thousand years I will find you."

"You won't." Unexpected pity and all-too-expected grief stung her.

"Does love mean nothing to you?" he shouted, shaking within the confines of his iron cage. "Do I mean nothing?"

She met his eyes for the last time, remembering when she thought she saw the end of her days in them.

"You mean everything," she answered. "But even if it takes a thousand years, I will forget you."

She turned on her heel, crossing her arms across her chest to conceal her trembling hands. The years ahead would be filled with travelling, with suspicion and the gnawing loss of him, with the dull ache of betrayal. She knew that already.

And knowing, she did all she did for love and lack of love. She would learn to forget and maybe, maybe to find a truer love, though she thought that she would never again feel that same wildness, that howling passion.

And she knew that through all the years, his promise, his threat would follow her. One day he would find her, and then...

Fleeing that first love, fleeing that blood-soaked battlefield, she shivered.

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall

X - X - X - X - X

AN: Englisc - a name for the language spoken by the indigenous Britons at the time.
Bretwalda - a title taken by a Saxon lord of the time. Meaning 'lord of the Britons'.

Thank you for reading! Comments, thought and criticisms would be much adored.