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with no covers and wore only a sheer oatmeal-colored night rail that molded to her body. She was full-breasted and rounded in the hips. Even in the dimness, he knew she possessed a pleasing female form.
    He held the candle to her face.
    The blood bled from his own.
    "Is she not beautiful, Lord Trevallyan?" Grania rasped behind him.
    "Aye," he whispered, truly moved by the beauty of the girl. She was porcelain pale with black hair that hallowed around her shoulders in erotic disarray. Her nose was slim, even regal, and placed perfectly in an oval face of heart-breaking delicacy. Her lips were full, sweetly curved, impossibly red; gruesomely tempting a kiss, even though...
    Trevallyan crossed himself and stared into the girl's vacant velvet-blue eyes. She was indeed a beauty, an incomparable beauty. No doubt, there had been a time when this woman had laughed and run in Lir's sweet clover. He had dreamed of a woman like her once. She had come to him in the mists, her ethereal beauty untouchable, unforgettable. Still, in his dream, he had reached out his hand to feel her warmth and make her real, but she had hid from him in the mist, and his fury had mounted, for the hand that he so desperately sought was always just out of reach. Never did he imagine he would finally hold it. Only to realize it was stone-cold.
    The young woman had been dead perhaps two days.
    He touched her cold cheek, running his thumb down skin as smooth as cream, as lifeless as marble. Her unblinking, sightless stare tore at him, and he cursed Death that had laid waste to such youth and beauty. She was perfection; raven-haired and creamy-skinned; the kind of woman praised by the bards. It was difficult to believe she was gone, her eyes never more to sparkle with warmth, to hold a man captive to the gypsy soul within.
    Niall hadn't wanted to go along with this foolish geis, and yet now, staring at the impoverished beauty, lying like a statue on the pathetic rope bed, he felt an unwelcome and irrational bitterness. As absurd and foolish as it was, he felt a strange regret, as if somehow fate had cheated him. He could now go on with the rest of his life, unhampered by imagined witchery and the silly superstitions of old men, but he had no doubt that the memory of this beautiful girl would haunt him for a very long time.
    He stared down at her one last time, unable to drag his sight away. A chill ran down his spine as his imagination took hold. He couldn't shake the vision of her alive, her eyes filled with fire as he chased her through the standing stones, caught her, and kissed her in a shimmering lake of blue flax. The fourth part of the geis said that he must win her love, and in Brilliana's case, he could see relishing that task.
    And that he would have won her, he had no doubt, for he was young and even he knew he was pleasing to the female eye. She might have been the woman he'd been looking for, the woman to be his wife, his lover, his companion, the woman to carry and nurture his children. He might have had all of that. Instead, he couldn't shake the dreaded notion that it all was taken from him. Brilliana, the woman the geis had brought him to see, was dead, removed from this earth forever. All chances, all hope, spent and gone.
    Driven by forces he little understood, he leaned down and brushed her cold lips with his, as if for once wishing for faerie tales and the life-giving magic of kisses.
    He straightened, and her eyes still stared soullessly toward the leaking thatch. Resigned, he covered her cold, implacable face with a tattered blanket.
    "How did she die?" His words were oddly dispassionate. A lie. He looked back at Grania who had started to weep into her gnarled old hands.
    " 'Twas a long and suffering death, my lord. I saw it once in a vision, and though I did all to prevent it, her will was her own. " She wiped her eyes with her dirty black apron.
    "How did she die?" he asked again, his voice emotionless, drained. He longed for the solitude of