Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two

by Erinn Ellender Quinn

  George Knowles was still smiling, and Emily was proving to be as good a cook as her sister, although she was still learning how to cook for a crowd. The children did not care a whit if a meal was half an hour later than planned, and the adults in their little colony were wise and kind enough to say nothing but their sincerest thanks for her efforts.

  The orchard was done, and the corn harvest was progressing, with the cribs filling up with fat, yellow ears. Today Jason and the Captain had picked the hogs for the smokehouse; in a few more weeks, they would be curing bacon and sausages, and hanging enough hams to give some away at Christmas.

  The Captain put the lit brace of candles atop the mantle. Tiny flickers winked in the stones of Beth’s wedding band. It had been three weeks and four days and some hours since they’d knelt before the Jesuit priest and exchanged vows, yet it felt so much longer. Of course, being three months gone with child might have something to do with that.

  He saw her bemusement and cocked a brow. “Something I’ve done?”

  “Aye.” She put a hand on the increasing bulge of her belly and slanted a piquant smile his direction. “Something we both did,” she quipped. “I dinnae regret it, but if the bairn makes me tired now, I dinnae ken how I shall keep up with weans. Already I feel like an old married woman.”

  “Married, but twenty-one is far from old.” He brushed the curve of her cheek, lifted her hand, and kissed their ring. “And you are beautiful. Bless me, if you don’t get more beautiful each day. I, on the other hand, feel every bit of my age and then some. Please tell me you’ll do your circle here tomorrow night. It’s the dark of the moon, and I don’t like that Herne’s being difficult. Tonight was Samhain. Biggest night of the pagan year, and the bastard couldn’t be bothered.”

  “Aye,” she said. She’d considered going back tomorrow for the new moon ritual, but Herne’s absence tonight was telling. If she didn’t know better, she would think he was ashamed, or remorseful for what he’d done. And he should be.

  But enough of Herne. He belonged in the spring-fed glen and loping through the woods, whispering to the oaks and playing chase with Sophie. Here, in this house, and especially in this space, there was only room for one man: a braw, dark Irishman who’d known Blackbeard and sailed with Bonnet, who had rescued his daughter and rescued her.

  She didn’t know what the morrow would bring. Eventually they’d have to come to terms with Herne, if they were to have a measure of peace. But she would deal with that later. Tomorrow was another day.

  All Saints’ Day, when she planned to finish her penance and start fresh, not yet knowing what that meant, except beyond the darkness, it felt good, and rife with hopes and dreams.

  She smiled and caught her husband’s hand and pulled him to her. “If ye take me tae bed,” she murmured suggestively, admiring the closeness of his second shave, “ye may love me like a Frenchman….”

  The Captain smiled, and he did, quite thoroughly, until his body demanded more and he slipped into the harbor of her thighs and sailed the sea of love with her, like a tall ship in a fair wind, riding her to the brink and back, then taking her over the edge with him, loving her as Herne never could.

  Hail, Mary, full of grace….

  Married on the promise of penance, Beth prayed her wedding rosary. Odd, how it came back so easily, that part of it, anyway. The Aves, the Paternosters, addressing one, then the other, balancing male and female, the Creator and the Blessed Virgin, Mother of the Sacrificial Son, so close energetically to any number of other holy mothers scattered amongst the world’s religions. It was something she had never been able to get her parents to understand, that there didn’t have to be only one Adam and Eve, and that stories abounded of immaculate conceptions far older than the four Gospels and the one announced by Archangel Gabriel, depicted in artwork as wielding a white lily and bestowing the good news on a young Jewish virgin.

  All she had to do was read the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt have no other God before me. Admission that other, lesser deities existed; they just took second rank below the Creator. In circle, she acknowledged the Creator first, then his Lord and Lady, then whatever energies were in flux that season. Some Sabbats, like Lughnassah, focused more on one entity, like the god Lugh. Imbolc was Brigid’s time, as lambing season approached. Summer Solstice was the Oak King; Yule was the Holly King. Father begets the Son who becomes the Father who begets the Son, and so on and so on, in perpetuity.

  Yesterday was Samhain, the time when the Veil is thinnest between this world and the next, which made it easier for denizens of the Otherworld to slip through, and for spirits to manifest. Tonight’s new moon would be especially powerful because of it. The dark of the moon was the time for release work but also the time to work with the most protection, to keep safe in the absence of light, and to survive the darkness intact.

  Beth wasn’t sure what drew her to the stables. Maybe it was because something evil had followed in the wake of the Deirdre, and young India was still having problems. Helping with the horses was beneficial, but India had seen something horrific, and the scars on her heart and mind were palpable to Beth.

  The oldest Knowles daughter was helping Sean muck stables, taking turns loading the wheelbarrow and ferrying it out to the composting area where the manure could break down, until the time when George and Israel would spread it as fertilizer in the fields. Rotted sheep dung was ideal for the vegetable gardens, and went on its own little piles.

  India was just coming back from the last load and saw Beth inside. She acknowledged her with an awkward bob, somewhere between lad and young lady, and pushed on by. Two steps later, she stopped. Forsaking the wheelbarrow handles to grip her stomach, she gasped, and doubled over in pain.

  “India?”

  Beth reached for her, but when she would have touched her, something warned her not to. Sean came out and helped the girl to a bench, and when Theo came running, Beth sent him to fetch her midwife mother.

  Jannet Gordon took one look, crossed herself, and turned an ashen face to Beth. When Sean and Theo stepped away, Beth knew that this was not a matter of bad food or early menses or any one of a number of disorders that trouble a stomach. She looked past her mother’s shoulder and saw the scratches and bite marks appearing on the girl’s arms where she’d rolled up her sleeves to work, and she understood that although Laurent Dubois was dead, the evil that had driven him survived, and had found India to be the choicest morsel among them, traumatized as she was by the discovery of her mother’s body. She was already at the most vulnerable age, but what frightened Beth was who might be next. Pubescent children aside, she knew that the one most open to attack, or possession, was her husband.

  Beth’s teacher had seen this happen and explained that such assaults often looked like stomach pains. The solar plexus was an entry point for spiritual energy, and whatever evil gained entrance would have to be pulled out from there. India wasn’t possessed that Beth could tell, but there was no doubt the girl was under attack, and needed a prayerful healing.

  Beth put her rosary around her own neck and surrounded herself in divine white Light. She wrapped her mother in the same, and each person and animal in the stable, hoping to prevent further damage.

  Theo ran to find George, and Beth ran for her mother’s holy water.

  Bind and banish. Bind and banish. The litany echoed in Beth’s head, echoed until she felt the thing detach, bound so it could do no further harm, by what, she could not say; taken away from this plane of existence, to where, she did not know, except to understand that it was forever gone from here.

  When it was done, and India was safe, Beth went to the sacred spring to cleanse the taint of evil that she could smell, clinging to her like a bad memory. She asked permission to enter; receiving it, she walked into the pool fully clothed. She immersed herself completely, like an ancient baptism, staying until she knew the last trace of it was gone, and she was clean enough to go home.

  Downstairs, Beth cast her new moon circle,
enclosing the Captain and Sophie and Philip with her in its space. She wove her magick, more binding and banishing, performing the release work that still needed done, clearing, detaching emotion from the traumatic memories that held them in place, that had allowed evil to attack a child. Outside the house, the wind kicked up, howling, and sabers rattled in the distant trees, and down in the Knowleses’ cottage, India’s bite marks started to fade, and for the first time since finding her mother’s body, she was able to sleep nightmare free.

  The Captain, of course, had questions that Beth could not begin to answer. What was it? Where had it come from? Where had it gone? How had it taken hold of Laurent Dubois and driven him to madness?—for no sane man could have committed the acts he’d done.

  She explained what she knew of the nature of evil, and how people who failed to grasp it, or ignored, it, did so at their own peril, especially when executing criminals. Unless protection was in place, and clearings done, whatever evil resides within is freed upon the host’s death. She sensed that whatever had found its way here was an ancient evil, and Laurent was but its latest host. It had gone where he did, listening to his dark thoughts, seeing through his eyes, waiting for the moments it would bend him to its will. It was not of this world. It should not have been here, and to allow it to stay was unthinkable.

  The work that Beth had done earlier, in the stable, was done to see it gone. She wanted Laurent to be its last host. Not being a priest, and having no training in evictions of that level, she worked by instinct only, calling on the forces of good, who work beyond the boundaries of manmade religions, but she had felt the power of her husband’s love in her rosary and had worn it around her neck so that the silver crucifix, carrying the energy of the blood of Christ, with her husband’s protection in the wedding ribbon above and St. Blaise watching below, was over her solar plexus, protecting her own portal.

  In a week’s time, India had recovered enough to return to her chores in the stables, and Jason had begun filling the smokehouse with bacon and hams. Emily used her own receipt for sausage that met with the approval of everyone except Sean—not because he was surly; he just preferred a hotter pepper in his links.

  There were hams to give at Christmas, and Hugh Jackson, the new overseer, arrived the first of January, a widower whose fair sixteen-year-old daughter Opal had the young men all moonfaced. Next season would see Harry Maxwell finally come, giving them a second jockey with Patrick O’Flaherty, and the Captain secured a replacement stablehand when he bought the indenture of eighteen-year-old Urs Korte, fresh off the boat from Germany, adding a Lutheran to the mix and a sparring partner for Sean.

  March would see the quickening of Emily Knowles’s baby, the marriage of Rebecca Denning and Israel Waters, and the birth of the new young master, Brendan Michael O’Malley, born with his father’s black hair and his mother’s blue eyes. News came soon after, that in the West India Islands, the Captain’s daughter Christiana had also given birth. The Captain’s first grandchild, Lucien David Vallé, had arrived in February, making the nephew older than the uncle.

  Ian was tempted to toast his good fortune. He had a son and a grandson, foals coming left and right, a village of bondservants whose fortunes flourished with his, and a wife who made circles of love in their home. A wife who, when she sensed that he missed the sea, would tease him into bed with promises of soft pink lips and pomegranate breasts and shapely ankles and pretty, pretty feet, reminding him of the passionate man that he was.

  And one night, when he felt a familiar craving and considered pouring himself a glass for old times’ sake but chose instead to drink from his wife’s lips, he realized that Jamaica was no longer his turning point; that when he considered his life, everything—the before and the after—would forevermore be measured from the first lucid moment in the overseer’s cottage, when he’d seen Beth and her fox sleeping, curled together on the floor. His wounds had healed enough, that his life now hinged on her. The before and the after, it all came back to Beth, his pi-rette, who talked to bees and communed with horses and whispered to trees, whose clever hands and kind heart had saved him, who had given him the greatest gift a man could possess, and that was hope. As long as he had Beth, as long as he had hope, he knew that they would make it through, the two of them, together.

  Herne, you hear that?

  Somewhere in the distant woods, sabers rattled.

  Epilogue

  “Please, Beth,” the Captain begged her. “Be careful where you tread. And if he’s not there, don’t wait for him. Those are his woods. He’ll know you’re in them the moment you step beyond the orchard.”

  “It’s been nigh unto three years since we agreed tae it. We dinnae ken what he’ll do, what he’ll want.”

  He hadn’t wanted their first born. Honoring their agreement, she had taken Brendan to the oak grove before March was done, and Herne had absolutely no interest in their new baby boy.

  Two years later, Beth had healed enough from her second lying in to make the trek again. Their daughter was born at Beltane; her christening name was Elspeth Maire O’Malley, but they would call her Bess. Not Black Bess, though. For better or worse, Bess had her mother’s wild red curls; from out of her father’s green glass eyes, there looked a wise, old soul.

  Gathering her precious bundle, Beth walked through the blooming orchard and into the woods and took the baby to her sacred place. And she thought: If Herne wants this, he must come to us.

  She cast a circle and the oaks whispered, and suddenly, he was there.

  Herne would never show himself to her. That was an agreement they had come to long ago, before he’d let Laurent into the woods, and she’d had to find a way to banish the evil that had come with him. It had been long enough, she’d nearly forgiven Herne.

  Every time since that she had come here and he didn’t, she had told herself to let it go, and let the past be just that. Each turn of the wheel, each full and new moon, moved them further into the future, and her latest hope was the little princess in her arms.

  “Ye may hae heard the oaks talk of Beltane.” Her water had broken the minute the circle was dissolved. She’d barely managed to make it back. “Here’s the cause of all the excitement.”

  She opened the light blanket, revealing her daughter’s face, three weeks old and filling out nicely, despite coming a bit early because she wanted to be born the first of May.

  “Herne,” she acknowledged him first, in deference to his being more than human. “This is Bess. Bess, this is Herne.”

  Nothing. Nothing. Not until she pulled back the cover and took off her daughter’s tiny cap and let him see the wild red curls, and the baby opened her green glass eyes and looked exactly where Beth imagined Herne to be.

  Yes.

  And that was it. Herne had chosen. Beth would honor their agreement to share one child with him. In return, Herne would protect them all, even the Captain, and would especially guard the one with the heartsight to see him.

  Wee Bess, so new and still so close to heaven that she saw its angels. Bess, who would grow to run with foxes and learn to talk to bees and commune with horses and whisper to trees, who one day would go into the night-dark woods to draw down the moon and maybe, just maybe, would be brave enough to say yes and dance with starlight in her hair.

  The Beginning….

  Author’s Biography

  Erinn Ellender Quinn is the romantic side of author Nia Farrell, one of Mr. Blackthorne’s Wicked Pen Writers and a multi-genre author who is published in erotic romance, nonfiction, poetry, music, articles, and children’s books, with one documentary screenplay under her literary belt. She’s an old soul and a period reenactor who’s been into corsets for centuries, although she wears them more to Civil War events these days.

  Erinn has been involved in the metaphysical community for over twenty-five years. She is a Reiki Master and crystal healer whose work encompasses this and other lifetimes.

  Erinn was fortunate enough to meet her soulmate early on.
She married her high school sweetheart, raised two children, and began writing at her husband’s suggestion. She has been published in erotic romance since 2015 (writing as Nia Farrell). Ride the Wind marks her debut as romance novelist Erinn Ellender Quinn.

  Author website http://niafarrell.wordpress.com

  Newsletter sign-up http://eepurl.com/b1PtzD

  TOUCH THE WIND SERIES

  by Nia Farrell writing as Erinn Ellender Quinn

  Planned release order:

  TOUCH THE WIND (Prequel to Ride the Wind), December 1, 2016)

  Christiana Delacorte has loved Justin Vallé since her misspent youth, sailing disguised as a boy. When she hires the French privateer to rescue her father, she’s delighted that his price includes her presence in his bed. They don’t know that her father is bait, and that the real target is Justin.

  REAP THE WIND (February 1, 2017)

  Kidnapped by Laurent Dubois, then rescued by Justin Vallé’s men, Michel Bethany Lovett must choose between Irish captain Tristan O’Dea and Rafe Quintanal, the son of a Spanish spy. Rafe is a dark, brooding Lucifer with hellfire burning in his eyes. She’s a vicar’s daughter hungry for a taste of forbidden fruit.

  DARE THE WIND (April 1, 2017)

  Irish sea captain Tristan O’Dea still feels the sting of rejection when he sails to Havre with an offer of safe passage for his commander Justin Vallé’s family. Vallé’s widowed half-sister Jessenia Bougeureau is living at the mercy of an unscrupulous man. Rescued by Tristan, free to choose, she makes him an offer he cannot refuse.

  CHASE THE WIND (June 1, 2017)

  Comfort McBride is an unwed expectant mother and the ship surgeon’s daughter. James Kincaid is secretly in love with the captain’s wife. They aren’t each other’s first choice, but together they have a second chance.

  CATCH THE WIND (November 1, 2017)