Claiming the Forbidden Bride. Gayle Wilson

old woman, who was still occupied with her examination of the goods in the cart. ‘I need to help my mother now. If that’s all right, drabarni,’ she added deferentially.

      Nadya was accustomed to such deference. After all, the Argentari were one of the kumpania’s most prominent families, and her own reputation as a healer was unsurpassed among their people.

      Nadya had almost nodded permission before she began to wonder why the girl was in such a hurry to be away. Her earlier anxiety resurfaced, causing her to pry her daughter’s fingers from her skirt so that she could get a good look at the little girl’s face.

      The smudges on Angeline’s dress and her disordered hair didn’t concern her. Released from the confines of the camp, her daughter tended to run wild through the fields that lay just beyond the great forest. Perhapsshe’d fallen, and Anis was afraid she would be blamed for the accident.

      ‘Did something happen during your walk?’

      The older girl’s downcast eyes flew upward. Her mouth opened and then closed, but eventually she shook her head.

      ‘Then why are you lying to the drabarni?’

      Until her grandmother’s question, Nadya hadn’t realized Magda was listening to this. She knew the old woman would be angry to have her bargaining interrupted. Still, Magda had grown to love her great-granddaughter with a fervour that almost matched Nadya’s own.

      ‘You think she’s lying?’ Alerted by her grandmother’s observation, Nadya examined the girl’s face.

      Anis’s gaze darted from one to the other, but it was Magda she answered, as befitted the old woman’s esteemed position in the tribe. ‘Nothing happened. I swear it, chivani.’

      ‘Be careful what you swear to, little one. Tell the truth, and I’ll see to it that no blame comes to you.’

      ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep,’ Nadya warned, kneeling to examine her daughter more carefully.

      By now she had recognized that her grandmother was right. For some reason the girl who’d been instructed to look after Angeline was lying.

      As Nadya put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, what she had failed to notice earlier became apparent. The child’s clothing was damp.

      ‘Why is this wet?’ she demanded.

      Anis licked her lips. Her eyes moved again to Magda. Whatever warning or promise of succour she saw there convinced her to tell the truth. ‘Because she fell into the water.’

      For a moment, the words made no sense. The only stream within walking distance ran through the small gorge it had cut into the chalk cliffs.

      ‘Fell? How could she possibly fall into the water?’ Even as she posed the question, Nadya’s hands were busy feeling along her daughter’s small, delicate body, searching for injuries.

      When she raised her gaze again, reassured that the child was apparently undamaged, despite her misadventure, the older girl had begun to cry, tears coursing down her reddened cheeks.

      ‘I asked how she fell.’

      ‘She started running, drabarni. Across the meadow. I couldn’t catch her. I tried, chivani,’ she added, pleading her case now to Magda. ‘I didn’t think about the stream. I didn’t think she could run that far.’

      ‘And she just ran to the cliff edge and fell off?’

      The girl hesitated, but her eyes had returned to Nadya’s face. Finally she nodded.

      Relieved that what could have been a terrible tragedy seemed to have ended with no ill effects, Nadya pulled her daughter close, once more made aware of the state of her garments. She rose, intending to carry the little girl to her caravan to get her into something dry.

      ‘And you pulled her out?’ Magda’s tone was of interest only and not the least accusatory. ‘How very brave of you. Perhaps I should give you a reward for taking such good care of my chaveske chei.’

      The older girl’s head moved slowly from side to side. Her eyes never left Magda’s, mesmerized by the old woman’s tone as the cobra is fascinated by the music of the snake charmer.

      ‘No?’ Magda asked kindly. ‘You don’t deserve a reward?’

      The side-to-side motion was repeated.

      ‘Because someone else pulled her from the water,’ Magda suggested softly. ‘Isn’t that the truth of this?’

      The answer was clear in the girl’s eyes even before she nodded. Although she was celebrated for her fortune-telling abilities, Nadya knew that whatever gift Magda had been born with was augmented by a keen understanding of human nature. She had read the truth behind the girl’s lies as if it had been written in a book.

      ‘Who?’ Nadya demanded.

      As if she had been following the conversation, Angeline took her mother’s hand and pulled, urging her to go with her. The wide blue eyes shifted from Nadya’s face to the line of beeches from which the two girls had emerged.

      Then, with her free hand, the child made the first sign Nadya had ever taught her. The one that carried the strongest possible warning she could ever have given her daughter.

      Gadje. The word used to indicate anyone not Romany.

      Nadya’s eyes met her grandmother’s. The old woman lifted her brows as if to ask, ‘What will you do now?’

      ‘Did you see him? The gaujo?’ Even as Nadya questioned the older girl, Angeline tugged at her hand, trying to draw her toward the woods.

      ‘She didn’t want to leave him. She made us stay by him all afternoon,’ Anis said, ‘but he was too heavy to move.’

      As Nadya struggled to make sense of the words, she realized that she was dealing with someone who was little more than a child herself. Someone into whose care she had foolishly trusted her daughter.

      ‘Are you saying that the man who saved Angel was injured? And you left him there?’

      ‘I tried to wake him, drabarni.’ The girl scrubbed at her tear-stained cheeks with grubby knuckles. ‘But it was late. I knew we should get back or you’d be angry.’

      ‘So you left him.’

      ‘He’s gadje,’ the child said dismissively. ‘Let them look after him.’

      ‘What if he’d said that about Angel?’

      ‘But drabarni, she’s…’ The words the girl had been about to offer in her own defence died unspoken.

      ‘Can you take me to him?’

      Looking after this gaujo wasn’t a responsibility Nadya wanted. Nor was it one she would ever have sought, despite her skills.

      Whatever else the injured man was, however, he was apparently Angeline’s saviour. Seeing to his safety was an obligation she couldn’t refuse. Not according to tribal law.

      Or, she acknowledged, her own sense of right and wrong.

       Chapter Two

      Darkness had fallen before they reached the escarpment where Angeline had fallen. Under Nadya’s direction, the men of the tribe had come prepared for that eventuality. Their hand-held torches led the way for the small procession that followed them down the steep slope to the stream.

      The light, horse-drawn cart they had brought to carry the gaujo, living or dead, back to camp had been left at the top. Under Nadya’s watchful eye, they searched the bank of the stream, softly calling directions to one another in the stillness of the sleeping countryside.

      Angeline