The old king lowered his eyelids in greeting, no more. Conor chose to ignore the slight. The old husk of a man looked as if one good, stiff wind would shatter his bones into powder. With a flick of a finger, Conor commanded a bondswoman to offer his guest meat and mead. King Flann lifted the flat palm of his hand as she stumbled forward.
Conor’s nostrils flared. “Refusing my hospitality, Flann?”
The elderly king made a sparse gesture to the two black-robed priests flanking him. “We fast today.”
Conor nodded for the bondswoman to step back into the shadows. Strange ways these Christians had, denying themselves food in a time of plenty. At least now he could dispense with the formalities.
He said, “I’ve summoned you here to celebrate with us this night.”
Flann’s features soured as if he’d gulped a cup of four day-old milk. “Do you mock an old man? Your Lughnasa is a pagan feast, of no interest to a Christian.”
“And what of a wedding feast?” Surely the old man already knew. Conor had made no secret of it as he rode into the ring-fort today. “Is that of interest to a Christian?”
The old king bowed his head. “Marriage is a sacred thing.”
Conor glanced beyond Flann to the two Romans hovering in the shadows. Conor had suffered the priests’ attendance in his kingdom because a conquered people took comfort in their presence. He cared not what gods a people worshipped, as long as they remained loyal to him. Now he understood that these wretches had kept the truth from the old man, forcing Conor to be the first bearer of the tidings.
Conor said, “I’m to be wed this night.”
King Flann raised his brows. “For a third time? Your other wives, I’m told, are still living.”
“I’ll be wedding your daughter.”
The revelers jostled in nervous curiosity. Smoke from the fire on the far end of the hall whirled and eddied around the smoke-hole, casting a wavering light between the kings. Conor waited for the old king’s well-wishes, growing impatient for them, his thoughts already halfway to the sacred circle of oaks.
Aidan surged forward. “Do you have nothing to say? The king honors you and your clan by choosing to marry your daughter.”
“You are mistaken.” The jeweled chains about Flann’s neck clanked as he shook his head. “I have no daughter.”
A frisson rippled through the crowd. Somewhere, a cup clattered to the floor. A bagpipe, accidentally crushed, wheezed a discordant breath. Conor dragged himself back from a distant place and glared at the old king.
“Think again.” Conor swaggered off the dais and towered over the old king, who stared at some unfocused point beyond the hall. “Think hard, Flann, and maybe I’ll forgive the lapse as a trick of your fading memory. Brigid, you called her, when she was born to your second wife. Niall’s sister and your only living kin.” He lowered his voice to a pitch which had raised the hairs on many a man’s neck. “Tomorrow, your banished daughter will become queen. I’d advise you to bless our union.”
The old man stank of decay and musky herbs, and the pink flesh of his scalp shone through his thinning mane of hair. Conor stilled the primitive urge to shake him. He was nothing but a sick, ignorant old man, mired deep in the ditch of his own digging. Conor banked his frustration with Flann, as well as with Brigid, for forcing this duty upon him. She could not help but cling to a young girl’s distorted memories.
Flann repeated, “I have no daughter.”
The crowd staggered back, farther away from the two kings. One of the priests grasped Flann’s sleeve, but the old king raised a regal finger, and the priest released him.
Conor just wished the old king was worthy of a challenge. “What is it, Flann? What can you not bear? The thought of a pagan wedding under a moonless sky? Or the bitterness knowing I shall have what women I please, while you must send your own child away?”
“It’s pity I have for you. Your soul will burn for eternity.”
“I think it’s the thought of my pagan blood mixing with the blood of a daughter of your own loins. It’s the thought of a son with my face and my gods and your crown—”
“She will bear no sons.” Flann’s red-rimmed eyes burned like twin holes in the husk of a charred tree. “Thirty-one summers you’ve seen, King Conor. No child of yours has ever taken root. None ever will.”
The scrape of Conor’s sword rang in the room. A woman’s shout pierced the shocked silence. The priests lunged for Flann as Conor raised his arm, but Aidan clamped both hands on Conor’s wrist, and, carried by the momentum, Aidan flew in front of Flann, knocking him into his priest’s arms and stopping the blow before it could connect.
Aidan looked at him with wild eyes. “Would you kill her father as well as her brother?”
The words penetrated the blood-red haze of his battle lust. He shook off Aidan’s grip and stepped back, his heart pumping, his chest heaving with thwarted murder, the hilt of the sword scalding his palm.
The priests helped the old king to his feet. Dirty rushes clung to his blood-red cloak, but the old man did not deign to wipe them off. Conor nudged Aidan aside and stood so close to King Flann that his words left spittle on the old man’s hair.
“For my wife’s sake—for the queen—I grant you your worthless life.” Conor scraped the tip of his sword across the king’s golden torque. “Heed me: You are forbidden to speak to her, to speak of her, even to lay eyes upon her—except to crawl begging for her forgiveness. If you disobey me, I shall tear out your heart while you still live and feed it in pieces to the wolfhounds before your dying eyes.”
Conor whirled on his heel, strode the length of the hall, and hacked the woolen curtains of his chamber aside. Aidan followed as the rumbling in the room rose to a roar and the priests hurried the old king out of the hall. Conor speared his sword into the mountain of pelts.
“You’re bewitched for sure,” Aidan said from the doorway, “to let a man who said such a thing live and breathe.”
He curled his hands into fists. Blood lust still thrummed through his veins. “For a woman gifted with the Sight, in this, Brigid is blind.”
Aye, Brigid . . . waiting for him in the circle of oaks. A muscle flexed in his cheek. He wondered if she sensed this moment, if she saw it with her Sight—if, even now, she stood trembling, alone, the illusions she’d nurtured for too many years shattered around her. He seized his sword and slung it through his belt loop.
Brigid no longer needed a father. Tonight, she’d take a husband.
Conor shunted aside the ripped woolen curtains.
Two steps into the mead hall, Aidan clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“To her.”
“Now? Alone?” When Conor did not answer, Aidan shook him hard. “Listen to me. She’s Flann’s daughter, no matter what that old fool said this night. Think, man.” Aidan stepped in front of him. “You cannot gallop alone into the dark of the woods with anger blinding you like this. You’re going to wed the sister of the man you killed on the field of battle, the daughter of the man whose kingship you stole. How do you know they’re not in league, the two of them?”
Conor brushed away his foster-brother’s hand. “I have a bride waiting. Neither gods nor man will keep me away from her any longer.”
***
Brigid sensed his approach long before the silhouette of a rider loomed on the hill against the Lughnasa fires.
A gust of wind buffeted her torchlight. She tightened her grip around the shaft. The torchlight was no more than a spark compared to the glare splashing down the hillside from the raging pyres. Yet the shadow of the rider did not hesitate. He swaggered off the beast, snatched the reins, and with a flap of his cloak strode down the hill.
Her husband had arrived.
Her blood swelled hot. Her breath thickened in her lungs. The furtive, midnight breezes caressed her skin as warm as a baby’s breath, yet suddenly she trembled. She began to pace, casting wary glances with each pass at the descending, broad-shouldere
d shadow. Och, the Sídh danced boldly tonight, sparkling around Conor and silvering the twisting path with Otherworldly moonlight. The music of the fairy wind thrummed in the air. Her ears roared with the giggling snatches of voices, with the tinkling bells and wispy aromas of the Otherworld. She could not think with such a din, but she knew it was more than the shifting of the worlds that churned her thoughts.
She sank the torch through the pelt of grass, deep into the yielding earth. The moon-dark tides surged in her blood—hotter and hungrier than ever before. The hollow of her palms, her throat, the shadows beneath her cheekbones, and the taut arches of her bare feet . . . all the empty places tingled. She closed her eyes and sucked in a lungful of the midnight air, letting the flux and flow of the tides inundate her senses, letting it lead her through the mysteries to come.
So it was when, moments later, she heard her husband’s husky, welcoming words.
“Who do you dance for, bean sí?”
The hem of her saffron cloak slapped her ankles as she whirled to a sudden stop. Only then did she realize she’d flattened a circle of grass with her dancing. A looming shadow separated from an oak. Conor paused on the edge of the sacred circle, one foot braced on a knotty, risen root, the light blazing his hair into fire.
“I dance for my king, and my husband.” She bowed down in obeisance. “I dance for you, Conor.”
“It’s glad I am of that.”
She straightened. “It’s the last merry dance I’ll be leading you, I’m thinking.”
His face was swathed in shadows, but she sensed his amusement like a sweet glow that ebbed quickly into something hotter, something heavier. The anxious wind faded like a bellows breathing its last. A fern swayed. A knocked pebble sputtered across the ground, and then an unearthly stillness seized the air.
Suddenly, Brigid felt as if she were looking down upon the two of them, knowing with stark clarity that this night was planned by some higher power before there was time or men or reason. In the brief moment of wisdom, she wondered whether this was a vision of the night to come, or whether this evening, this act, was simply elemental: If she sensed no more than man claiming woman, a ritual as old as time, or some greater joining. As quickly as the vision came it slipped from her grasp, and she stood still in the circle of oaks.
Conor loomed over her and all thoughts of the world ceased. A shock of hair shaded his brow, but could not dim the sparks in his silver eyes. Impatience thrummed from him like the strum of a hundred thousand lyres. She grasped her brooch—his first gift to her—and tugged it off. Her cloak slipped off her shoulders and pooled at her feet.
The cool night air tightened the blue woad where she had painted the ancient symbols of fertility upon her thighs, belly, and breasts—the only covering she wore beneath the saffron cloak now puddled around her ankles.
A hiss of surprise was all she heard before he swung his iron-muscled arm around her waist and drew her against his chest. She bent back for him like a water reed to a gale, sensing with some deeper wisdom his need to lay claim to what had been denied to him for so long. He palmed her chin with a calloused hand, rasped his fingers down the column of her throat, and then grasped the swell of her breast as she arched with a muffled groan into the hot cup of his hand.
The moon-dark tides flooded her senses, blinding her, deafening her to all but the man who held her upright in his grasp. She moaned in protest as he dragged his hand away from her aching breast to explore further. He swallowed the sound with his lips.
This was not the gentle kiss of the afternoon—nay, not this heated mingling of flesh. He nudged her mouth open to suckle her lips, then her tongue, to draw out the pith of her soul. She tightened her fists over the linen of his tunic. Were it not for his hold, she’d slip to the ground as fluid as a raindrop off the sloping hollow of a fern.
Just as suddenly as he had grasped her he tore his lips away. “You are mad, woman.” He grasped the bones of her hips and hiked her against his loins. “Have you no sense at all, what you do to a man?”
The threads of his tunic nipped at her swollen, heavy breasts. The hollow of her loins yearned for his heat and his hungry strength. “Teach me, mo rún.”
“By the gods . . ..” His fingers dug into her hips, as his gaze traveled over the white arch of her throat. “An innocent bared for the slaughter.” With rough hands he clasped the spare flesh of her buttocks and flattened her against him, forcing her to stop her mindless gyrating. “For your own sake, stop the teasing, Brigid.”
She knew she should cease her wriggling—for his shoulders tensed beneath her hands as he struggled to restrain a power she knew nothing of. But her thighs trembled and passion churned in her blood. All sense of self-preservation had deserted her the moment he’d touched her. Now, his arousal pressed solid and thick against her belly, throbbing, and her body ached to draw the sap of life deep into her womb.
“Is there no ceremony?” He jerked back as she raised her mouth for a kiss. “No words to be spoken?”
“Och, Conor,” she said, pressing so close the jewels of his belt bit into her belly, “you’d think you were the virgin, with all your talk.”
He seized her and shook her until she lifted her gaze. “It will not be an easy fit—and I am not a patient man.”
The wind returned, breathing through the boughs above them with a sweet, high sound, like the sighs of fairy-children. Brigid traced his clean-shaven jaw with her fingers. Aye, rough-edged he was, but gentleness lurked in this warrior’s heart.
“There’s a price to pay for every pleasure.” She tugged off his brooch and tossed the jeweled ring toward the torchlight as the heavy wool whooshed off his shoulders. “Love me, my husband. In that, you will make me your wife.”
The violence of his kiss forced her head into the bulwark of his shoulder. Her eyes fluttered closed. His tunic smelled of wood-ash from the mead hall. Dizzy with his kisses—hot and wet and ravenous—she wound her arms around his neck and plunged her fingers beneath the rope of his gold torque, holding on to him so as not to collapse at his feet. She had never felt the quivering shock of lips against lips—now she feasted upon the sensation until every nerve on her body throbbed.
Linen snarled as he fumbled to shed his clothing, then his tunic gave way with a tear. She tried to help with his belt, but her hands trembled so that he yanked them up and planted them on his shoulders. He pushed away from her to rid himself of the tangle, but her groan of protest froze in her throat as the naked, white-hot flesh of his chest seared her from loins to breast.
There was blindness in his eyes as he hooked her knees and pressed her down in the circle of flickering torchlight. It would be enough to strike fear in any woman’s soul to have such a broad-shouldered, lean-hipped tower of muscles pressing her against the ground. But all was a muddled storm of sensation: the damp grass beneath her, the heaviness of his body upon her, the strange pulsing of the earth against her limbs. Their lips joined, merged, separated, explored, and then came together again. His fingers rasped over her tight nipples. She broke the kiss and gasped, then choked upon her own moan as he lowered his head and sucked the swollen tip into his mouth.
It was not enough. It was never enough. The more he touched, the more she craved his touch. She raked her fingers through his hair, pressed his head closer. His teeth scraped the taut, aching nub, as he slipped his hand between her thighs and yanked the willing limbs open to the brush of the night air.
She arched off the ground with the unfamiliar invasion of his touch. He murmured something, something harsh and vibrating with frustration, but she could not hear for the roaring of her blood. He touched her again, gentler now, but it was not enough. She needed more and told him so, tilting her hips against his hand and sweeping her fingers down the length of his chest, seeking his root.
She’d barely closed her fingers around the thickness of him before he jerked back and stopped the deep stroking of her womb. His knees nudged hers apart, and he rolled between them. His hands t
angled in her hair and his lips joined hers again, and again, eager, ravenous, undeniable, while below, at the core of their bodies, the hot tip of him pressed against her.
Then he froze.
She dragged in a ragged breath. It was all happening so fast, so fluidly, in a moment they would be one. She ached at this suspended stillness. He brushed the faint grimace of frustration on her brow, and she blinked her eyes open to look at him.
Perhaps the torch flared, or perhaps it was nothing but her overwrought mind, but it seemed in that moment as if the arched canopy of leaves above them shone brilliant and gold, and it seemed as if a hundred thousand birds sang amid the boughs, but it was only a passing thought, for her gaze fixed upon Conor lowering his head toward her. It was as if he sipped from some sacred chalice, as he brushed the barest of kisses against her mouth.
Then he lifted his head again. His eyes blazed the purest silver she’d ever seen. His own thoughts fluxed clearly in those eyes, and suddenly she realized that he, too, came to this place an innocent. For however many women he had lain with in the past, however well he knew how to rouse a woman’s body, before this night, before this moment, he had never given of his soul.
He kissed her again, greedily, and then again. She slipped her hands around his back and held him tight. She felt his control shudder. He spread her legs wider with his knees. The burning shaft sank deeper. She thought she’d die of wanting if he did not fill her womb.
With a groan he stretched his length into her. She cried out, but it was not from the tear of pain—like the swift bite of lightning upon the land—but from the glory of the heat of him filling her up. He pulled back and out—she raked his shoulders with her nails to take him in again—and he plunged deeper. Still their bodies moved, and moved, his breathing harsh in her ear, his words unintelligible. Something coiled tight within her with each powerful thrust, and she thrashed her head, the night dew bathing her cheeks. This was the joining, this was life—she was the moist, welcoming soil beneath the drive of the falling rain. She felt herself buoyed up, up, up—with him, against him—until they could rise no more, and with one choked cry, she tore open just as the heat of his seed filled her.
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