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. Her stomach lurched but she swallowed again, and again, until the nausea was reduced to a wavering presence.

 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, so sad to lose his careless contempt and bold smile. Sunlight made an idol of him, cupping his face and figure with golden fingers.

 Here is my farewell caress, she thought, her heart a hot and shameful thing that drummed the unpleasant truth into her soul. Here is the parting of our ways, the end of us.

 The aftermath of a battle was always ugly and this one was uglier than most. She moved among the dead in a slow walk, taking in the carelessly sprawled bodies, the empty, open faces, lime-wood shields splintering under her feet. She walked like a princess, her back straight, her stare unflinching, gazing down into the flat eyes of those who could not look back.

 Her escort clanked beside her, iron-tipped spears ready, a ghostly golden convoy, too bright against her dark skin and hair. None of them wanted to be here, but none were prepared to refuse their warlord.

 It was to another warlord she went now, gliding 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.

 The jagged end of a spear protruded from a man's breast, driven in so cleanly that no blood showed. So too had her heart been pinioned, held prisoner to pain, to bitterness, to the same slack submission.

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

 Now and then, they came across the wounded, words burbling between their lips, prayers, pleas, hope and despair mixing in their dying mumblings. 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, sent across the bridge of sighs.

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

 Here and there, she glimpsed a face she knew, pale and baffled among 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 you have given your life for my lack.

 She bent down to those familiar faces, stooping in the dirt to clutch their hand and speak stupid, meaningless words that were meant to be comfort. There was no one to comfort her, to speak sweet lies and hide these horrors from her.

 This cannot happen again. I cannot stay here...or there will be war and love and no difference between the two. It will never end, it can never end.
 
 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 smoky, 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?"

 His eyes were black pools, falling away into mellow, luscious darkness, and they echoed the wicked curve of his mouth. "How bitter you are. You began this, Lisanor. I just finished it. It is done...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."

 Even as he frowned, the smile remained, his sweet, lying mask. "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, wanting to hurt him, to make him feel the jagged shards of betrayal and neglect 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?"

 You have always confused pain and joy, she wanted to say, a dreadful sadness sinking through her like leaden weights. Sometimes I cannot decide if you even know the difference.

 "Aelle has never made me weep," she answered, but 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.

 And 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, an exquisite, poignant melody.

 "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 seeped through his eyes, the savage glee of the hunter mingled in there - somewhere - with the long-lost passions of the man. Lies and lies, superbly manufactured. Had it always come so easy to him?

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

 That triumph shattered, wiping the smile from him once and for all. Without it, he looked startlingly young, a fleeting glimpse of the boy he must have been once, before the wolf consumed his heart.

  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.

 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?"

 You meant everything, she thought. But I meant nothing to you. Why do you persist in this sham?

 She met his eyes for the last time, remembering when she had thought she saw the end of all 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 fleeing his hot and hungry clutches, 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 barren battlefield, she shivered.