[Authoress' Note: An excerpt from the novella I'm writing, "Star-Crossed and Stricken." The setting is a rainy, almost Scottish moor and the civilization a merge of magic and very crude machinery. Told first person by the man, a supporting character for the most part, who narrates most of the story.

Excerpt: Pain, Fear, and Doubt

I don't.I don't understand. Do I?

Yes. No.

I don't understand.

She doesn't mean it; I know she doesn't. She is casually cruel, that is her way, she is temper and fire, but comes so often to tenderness-I have watched her go from a terrible fury at another and turn to look at me, and in those few seconds all of the wrath of the world goes out of her gaze to look on me in tenderness. She loves me, doesn't she? She tells me so, and if Grianne does many things, she has never lied. She does not need to. She has never hid anything from anyone, thought or belief, even before those that she ought hold her tongue to. Why lie to me?

She tells me so. Delilah says she does, and Delilah would know-she is Grianne's mother, after all, and loved me once, in compassion, with all of the sweet gentleness that her eldest daughter possesses, if Grianne's is shown to few and Delilah's to most.

Delilah, however, has no temper. It was Grianne's father-now off at war-who gave her that, a good, laughing, kind-hearted and honest man, he who gave her this fire.

Grianne has always been fickle of temper, and she is beautiful, striking, like a dangerous flame, captivating, wild, the reincarnation of some ancient warrior queen. Boys and men fall in love with her as she passes, and yet she does not even lower her proud dark eyes to acknowledge them. Not that she spiteful and pitiless to them-she hides from them as much as she seems to be harsh. She simply does not know how to react. The most handsome, the most powerful, the wealthiest-all of these men-dashing, strong, charismatic, horse-riding, sword-wielding, bright-haired, blue- eyed, influential and cultured, lordlings and kings who come to make her their spoiled bride-peruse her, and she flees, elegantly, before their touch.

And comes running into my arms.

I do not know what she sees in me deserving of love. I am old enough to be her father. I am ugly-hideous, deformed from birth, sickly, pale, dressed in black and keeping to myself, hidden away among my books and machinations instead of riding across the moors hunting and fêting. I am intellectual, clever, watchful, dark, lonely, abandoned, and a coward-when the war came, I hid. Lurking, skulking, white-faced schemer, they would call me, I, who did not go to war to defend my homeland, I, who stayed in my little stone cabin and poured over ancient scrolls, lost in my machinations of vengeance for those who killed my mother, drove her from our town after she delivered such a heinous, wicked fiend as I with my vile face into their perfect world.

What does Grianne see in me? Or did she, I should say-she has not come for days. A stoic such as I should not care; I should return to my plotting, my grand designs. I sit at the desk and take out a quill-I draw her face instead of the careful mechanics of some trap, pen her intricate features, the black, smooth, feathery hair-so much like her mother's. I did love Delilah, once. She and Grianne have been the only creatures to ever love me- my mother, after all, tried to kill me for having her sent from the village, and my father was a drunken sailor whom I never knew. I trace my fingers knowingly over the lips of the portrait, full, clever.

She always was intelligent, Grianne, running circles around the town boys, just like her unorthodox mother who raised the girl with intellect and skill, despite being just that-female. Grianne can have anyone she wants, and yet she satisfies herself with the black serpent of Dalryda-I do not understand how she could look beyond my face-for it is more boundary than mere unattractiveness-if it was intelligence in a man that she desired.

I love Grianne. I do, so much, more than she will ever know, more than anyone will ever know. Mayhap she resents me for having chosen my loathsome carcass over the golden youth of the village, but I have not bound her to me-she is free to go any time she chooses to a brighter fate, and she knows I would not hate her if she did so, for she would be happy, and that is all I care about.

I love her so much, beyond description.

By night her mother gives her a black mare and cloak and sends her out to my cabin, allows her to flee-for Delilah must be careful; she is glad her daughter loves me, but many of the village are not, and would slay us both if they knew that the girl gave herself gladly and nightly to a traitor and a slithering villain. Grianne rides over the emerald moors by a dim moon through the trees, rides up to the stable and the stone house on the side of my hill, a fine distance from the village, a forty-minute ride on good steed from the river. She comes in wind or rain, in bitter cold and drowsy warm, and rides to me, shuts up her horse in my stables-they only hold a single other horse, for I am no rider-and comes laughing and twirling through my halls, past the shelves and shelves of books, the delicate designs of revenge, the vases and silks I've collected over the years from dead foes, calling out my name in her river-voice, rich and strong and melodic. She releases her cloak as she dances into my study, where I sit in my chair, my torso turned around as my body faces the desk, and the black velvet falls to the floor. She gives me a careless grin, strong white teeth flashing in the half-light of the study, turning her head to the side with joyous expectancy. Candlelight flickers on her olive green dress, satin. I rise from the chair and wood and red velvet creak, and reach my hand out towards her-she takes it, and I wrap my slender arms around her and kiss her bowed head and feathery black hair, and she speaks to me in low tones from my chest. She twines her nut-brown fingers through my ice-white ones and whispers in my ear, kisses the lobe, teases it with her teeth, looking at me with her navy-colored eyes brimming with adoration and tenderness.

Ye gods, I love her so much, and despite anything she may say or do at moments of her fickle whim, I know she loves me in return. As I remember it, that first night, it was she who seduced me, not the other way around.

For all I love her though, I cannot change her; nor would I, if any think so. It is the fire in her I love, even when that fire turns haughty or dispassionate. She is careless, sometimes, I will admit; like now, careless with the many hearts she acquires, but this has been the first time she has been careless to such an extremity with the single heart she kept-mine.

I do not know what to think, now, though I know she loves me-I went away, for a short time, really, riding my black gelding across the moors to a border-country, searching for a man with a tome I wished to own, whose magics may indeed assist in the destruction of my enemies-Delilah's enemies, too, really, though she has never asked for me to destroy them. I owe Delilah that much, to give her the rest of her life in peace, to destroy those who call her whore and foul adulteress and spit upon her and her paganism and learned daughters when she goes into town. Delilah, pale and dark-haired and pretty, who rode across the moors to bring me books and food and company and solace as her daughter brings love now. I was Delilah's lover once, when we both were young, eighteen and twenty-two, before she was wed-then she married, and bore children, and after six years her husband went off to war. It was an agreement between them, that any lovers they took during that absence-which has been ten years now, since the war began and he went off to fight, three since she last saw him-were not to be used against each other upon returning. It was to me she brought herself, after the first two years of solitude, alone in her home raising two children, Grianne and her elder twin brother Aubrey, off of the single income she earned from breeding horses and poetry sold in the village. I became her lover once more, Delilah, who had been my first, the first and nearly only to see past this distorted face to love what she could beneath. Delilah is thirty-six now, as I am forty and Grianne is seventeen, and Delilah has delivered twice since her husband left-one is Miranda, my daughter, I assume, and the other, Rosemary, gotten when her husband was on his first and only leave. I do not think the man will return again alive.

I rode for several weeks to go and return, and when I did, I found Grianne in the company of another-a young man, twenty-eight, and when I rode through the village-it is the only way to do so, to cross into the moors and my home-I espied them by a hall. His arm rested on her shoulder, possessively, like hunting leopard, and his low grin and hooded eyes were savage and ruthless-indeed, whatever cruelty she had ever shown anyone was dwarfed by the sheer malice in the man's predatory gaze. He looked upon my Grianne, my dark beloved, as though she were a fiery mouse upon which he intended to dine. As I rode down the path and saw them enter the tavern together, he shot me a single triumphant glance. I do not know how he knew I was there, he merely did, and I hated him suddenly. I had never known I myself would feel so jealous over Grianne, but I knew jealousy now, keening and emeraldine. I turned my horse a bit too hard then, making it turn so that I could return a wrathful gaze upon the feline man, and the animal lurched and whinnied-Grianne spun and stared at me suddenly.

I do not know what I saw in her eyes. Hatred, loathing, bitterness, resentment, horror, disgust. Whatever it was, it veritably roared for me to get my vile carcass from her presence or I would never see her again. I showed no confusion-I am a Stoic, I show nothing but to Grianne and Delilah, and certainly would not do so in front of this stalking man-but she knew it was there, nonetheless.

"You know where to find me," I told her, and my voice was honeyed venom and thick winter wind.

She gave me a crisp nod, and the man tightened his harsh grip on her shoulders-I saw her wince.

I rode home and locked myself in my study.

I do not know if she came that night or not, or the next.

I have been here for three days, not having left my library or study to eat, sleeping on the chase lounge under one of the wrought-iron windows, boiling and brewing in my own contempt and jealousy.

What has changed her?

I hate her.

I am a liar.

I love her, I love her, I love her. I would forgive her anything and more, if only she came to me. She is a good person-I am not so witless as to have love erase flaws, and speak this in earnest. It is not like her to act so harshly to me, with disgust, of all hatreds. She is courageous and passionate and kind. I do not understand this change at all-I was gone a matter of weeks, no more!

I don't.I don't understand.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Grianne has come, has returned to me. I do not know how I doubted her. She loves me, she always has, and Grianne does not lie, definitively. She sleeps in the other room, the chamber of red and amber silks and velvets I made for her, rather like her mother's green, blue, and black room down the hallway, sleeping away the tears and anguish and hoarse sobs-strange, I have never known Grianne to cry like that, where she knelt at my feet and completely bowed to whatever clemency I would offer her, gripping my bone- white fingers and weeping without defense. I have always thought myself to be the submissive figure in our relationship, I, coward, who is beaten whenever the townsfolk catch me about unmounted. But I see in Grianne not the fighting woman she so often is, but a frightened, abused child as well.

Grianne does not lie, and she has the bruises to prove to me how her life changed from the time I left to the time I returned.

That man, the predatory fiend, the hunting leopard-Artrian, is his name, a new lordling, fostering with a provincial family. He descended into the village-hunting prostitutes, Grianne spat in sobbing contempt-and his eyes fell upon her, my dark and radiant angel. He hungered for her beauty and charms, but she would have none of it-I think, honestly, and mean no arrogance, for one such as I who is monster and despised by all the world, bruised and beaten, can know no arrogance, that but for me, she would have gone to him. He was intelligent and handsome, this man-if it had been my intellect that brought her to me, and she had to overlook my fiendish face to be kept in such company as that, this man offered intelligence with full virile attraction. But Grianne refused, loyal to me.

And the man grew angry.

For all of Grianne's power and courage, she is just a girl, seventeen, slender and strong, but not strong enough to fight off a full-grown man in the throes of violent coveting lust.

Only her family believed she had been raped-village girls, once her friends, turned their backs on her. Who would believe that she had not consented to the attentions of this powerful, handsome peer of the realm? If she had denied before, it had been, in the eyes of the people, that the other men were not good enough in both attractiveness and intelligence (strange Delilah and her queer daughters, who prized intelligence), but here, the man possessed both, in extremities. Only Delilah, Grianne's brother Aubrey, Aubrey's wife Nathalie, and Grianne's two younger sisters believed her, and that was not enough to arrest this princeling for his crime, which no one but we believed he had committed.

She looked at me with contempt, I pried from her sobbing, guilt-stricken words, in the village, that I had not been here to prevent it, that I came now and saw her as his plaything, her will to fight against him broken. What damnation it must have been for her, that I should see her as that! I learned also that Artrian, when she had spat that she had a lover-"Finer than all the stars in heaven and more cunning than all the kings of hell!" she whispered raggedly-the man laughed and told her that if I came to her and tried to take her from him, he would kill me. Horror in her eyes not from my face, but from the fear I would die.

Grianne, how did I doubt you? And how did you doubt me?

We are more in love and love with such grace and compassion and lasting adoration, the likes of which have never been known by all of the great tragic heroes and heroines of all of the tales you read from my ancient books.

I love you.

Gods damn me to that hell whose denizens you liken me to if I cannot keep you safe now, if you did not embrace me stronger than you had ever before when you confessed to me what had occurred.

Even though I know, from the change in your gait, from the strange illness paling you so, that even as you sleep in the bed I made you at this very moment, you are unwittingly carrying his child.

~*~

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