Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series)

by Lisa Ann Verge

  The door suddenly squealed open. Moira backed into the room, her arms bowed under a teetering pile of linens.

  “Ah, you’re here, Moira. Not a moment to spare.” Deirdre stood up, draped the woolen cloak over the stool, and reached for her alms purse. “Put those linens aside, it’s nigh Terce and Mass will be starting soon.”

  Moira tumbled the heap upon the bed. “We’ll have time to make Mass if we leave when we hear the bells—”

  “I don’t want to battle crowds.” Deirdre tied the fringed silk purse to her girdle and adjusted the sag. “Today every sinner in Troyes will be out worshiping, praying for forgiveness.”

  “Not all Christians are as pious as you, child. There’ll be plenty of room for everyone in that cathedral, even if it is All Hallows’ Eve.”

  She felt a quiver at the name. She’d been counting the hours through Michaelmas and the interminable weeks of the harvest, all while planning, scheming, preparing. But now, finally, the scent of baking soul-cakes wafted up from the kitchens below. Now, the wood was piled high by the hearth. Even in this pious place, a long night’s fire would burn to keep evil from entering the house. For it was All Hallows’ Eve. The night of the Dead, when the ghosts of the departed revisit the earth.

  The maidservant snapped out a linen and let the cloth billow down over the feather mattress. “There’s something special about this day, I’m thinking. Do you think it’s because it’s the old Samhain’s Eve?”

  A flush rushed to the tips of her ears. “It’s just another name for the holy day, it’s the same no matter what name you call it.”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing else you’d want to do besides stand in a cold, drafty church? God will forgive you for missing a single Mass, if you’ve something else in mind, like a walk in the country, perhaps—”

  “You’ve been talking to my father.”

  “Your father hasn’t given me a moment of peace, asking about your health, all the while with me standing there with linens toppling out of my arms.”

  Deirdre could imagine him pacing the length and breadth of the main room, his arms behind his back, his wrist fisted in his other hand, while Sir Guichard taunted and laughed and guzzled more of her father’s finest wines. She could imagine her father mentally counting the clinking drain of his sous, secretly cursing her for “ailing,” all the while interrogating Moira about her state.

  And she knew what Moira said. Moira told him that she was weak, listless, still in mourning for her dead fiancé. She told him that she wasn’t sick enough for a doctor—though her father would never trust another one—but too fragile to marry. That’s what Moira had said that first day back in Troyes. Back when her father wanted again—already—without a single word to her—to set a date for the wedding with Sir Guy.

  Deidre was grateful for that. Really, she was. But today, today her forced confinement would end. Today, she would join the world of the living again.

  “You’d best wait until the bells,” Moira continued, bending to tuck the edge of a linen under the mattress. “If he sees you up and about, looking all flushed like you do right now, you’ll have yourself married to that drunkard before dinner.”

  No, Moira.

  She’d never consent to marry the Sire de Clunel. She knew that not from her Sight, which had failed her in these turbulent months, but from the surety of her own convictions. The distortions that had warped her perceptions most of her life had dissipated during the ride to Troyes nearly three months ago, when she had gazed upon her father lounging across from her in the silk-draped litter and seen him for who he truly was: A heartless man bent on ambition at any cost.

  It was a cruel twist of fate, really. Where once she had been blind, now she could see. And where once she could see . . . now she was utterly blind.

  “I won’t wait a second more.” Deirdre grabbed her kneeling pillow and hooked it under her arm. “I’m going to church now, and I will pray at Mass that my father will find wisdom enough to set Sir Guichard out on his rump.”

  “It’s plain that I won’t have any peace until you’re there.” Moira snatched the pillow out of Deirdre’s grip. “But you’ll wear a veil and a wimple and you’ll walk hanging on to my arm every step of the way, do you hear me?”

  Cold autumn air blasted them when they left the house, blessed with having just missed the burgher. Despite the bite of cold, the Grande Rue swarmed with people. In a few days, the second yearly fair—the fair of St. Remi—would begin, and already the wide avenue clattered with the ruckus of banging hammers as the merchants set up their stalls. Deirdre eyed some tattered men loitering on the far corner and then curled her gloved hands over the hand warmer Moira had pressed her to carry. The hollow metal sphere which cocooned a few warm coals would make a fine weapon, if she needed one.

  Without a backward glance at her father’s house, Deirdre plunged into the stream of humanity just as the church bells of terce began to clang. A schoolboy with close-cropped hair barreled by her, swatting at anyone who got in his way with his Latin grammar book. The cathedral loomed up at the end of the street, shooting its limestone spires to the sky. Deirdre tugged Moira out of the flow, toward a poulterer’s shop on the south side. Geese, tied to the apron of the stall, honked and gabbled. A pastry peddler cried his wares above the clangor. Deirdre’s pace faltered as the spicy scent of hot apples and buttery dough wafted over her.

  Moira tried to tug her back. “What are you doing, child? The bells are near done—”

  “Moira, fetch me one of those pastries before church.” Deirdre tucked the hand warmer under her elbow and dug one-handed into her alms purse. “They smell like a bit of heaven itself.”

  “You can’t be eating before you take Communion.”

  “Save it for after Mass then. But we’d best buy it now before they sell out.” She pressed a few deniers into Moira’s hand. “Get one for yourself, too, now go on.”

  Moira squinted into the crowd, trying to pick out the shape of the peddler’s cart with her foggy sight. “By God, what I do for you, you contrary child!”

  Then Moira was off, waddling through the throng, wielding her elbows to knock a path clear. When Deirdre was sure her maidservant’s bleary eyesight could not distinguish between Deirdre’s gray cloak and the limestones of the house behind her, Deirdre murmured a silent apology to her faithful attendant, then whirled away and plunged into the shadow of an alleyway.

  She barreled without hesitation. Her foot skidded through something slick and she braced one hand against a wall until she regained her balance. The hand-warmer burned against her breast as she hefted it and veered toward the Rue Moyenne. From there, she plunged into yet another alleyway canopied by sagging, old houses, weaving her way farther and farther from the supposed safety of her father’s house.

  She halted at the Trévois canal as two boys herded a stream of pigs over the narrow bridge to pastures outside the city walls. She pressed back in the shadows of the eaves. She tugged her wimple free and pressed it over her nose to block out the stench of the sluggish canal water. In an alley nearby, men barked in harsh voices above the clattering of dice. Her gaze darted back whence she came, searching for Moira, or worse—for her father’s men. The trip through the city seemed farther on foot than it had looked when she’d bounced in the litter on the return from the Clunel manor house, but she did not turn back.

  She had to keep a promise to a dead man.

  Nay. The word came hard upon the thought. Nay nay nay nay nay nay. She let her head fall back against the wall, fighting off the despair. She would not grapple with this again. For three months she’d battled the ravens that pecked and clawed at her mind, ripping apart all she’d thought she’d understood, bloodying her memories, devouring all that she had believed in since birth—that her father loved her, that her Sight was a gift from the devil, that she was cursed. Her mind bore jagged furrows where all that knowledge used to be, furrows that needed to be filled with truth. A truth only her lover could give her,
a lover who was said to be dead.

  But Conor could not be dead. She would feel it in her heart. All through the long, lonely months, she wondered if she’d finally gone mad. She’d wondered if she would end up in one of those wretched places where the insane were kept chained to the wall until they died of cold and hunger and neglect and the torments of their own minds. For today, the day she’d been waiting for, her heart raced as it did the first time she’d met Conor. The excitement made her blood course wildly through her veins, and every fiber of her being sang that despite the evidence of her eyes, Conor is alive. If she were wrong, then the world was not as it should be. If she were wrong, then she would have to go forward alone. For alive or dead, Conor had gifted her with a bit of himself, a life growing warm in her womb.

  When the bridge cleared of swine, she plunged onward, following the pungent stench in the direction of the Rue de la Grande-Tannerie. Her hand strayed over her belly, still firm and flat. I’ll take you to Ireland somehow, child of mine. I’ll show you my Ma’s house between the woods and the sea. We’ll see how far the honeysuckle has trailed through the thatch these ten years, and we’ll find our shelter beneath that old roof. With a quivering trill of excitement she felt the first flutter of movement deep inside.

  She turned a corner and the stench put a stop to her whirling thoughts. The tanneries stood side by side. The street reeked with fresh blood and dung and rotting carcasses. Men stood outside each shop, scraping freshly stripped hides and strewing bits of excess flesh into the streets. Flies swarmed in black clouds around steaming bowls of pigeon dung, which men vigorously rubbed into the hides, all while laughing raucously and making crude gestures with hands leathered to the shade of oak bark.

  She rushed through the street and held her breath until black spots exploded in her eyes. She stumbled against a wall and drew in deep, gasping breaths, battling down a wave of nausea until she could hold her breath again. Then she stumbled farther on, to the blessed wind funneling through the Tannery Gate—the gateway out of Troyes, and the beginning of the road to the Clunel manor house.

  She wiped her clammy brow with her veil and stepped aside to avoid a farmer’s cart. Against the wall a boy dozed, his donkey standing by his side.

  Deirdre stopped in her tracks. She blinked her eyes clear. The knee-cocked pose of that “boy” stirred a vague memory, a memory which crystallized as her gaze fell upon the flea-ridden straw strapped around his legs.

  Incredulous, she seized one of his gnarled hands. “Octavius, och, Octavius!”

  The creature winked one black eye open. “Aye, so it’s Deirdre of the Sorrows.” He pushed his hood off. “Could it be that it was me you yearned for all this time, and not that strapping, foul-tempered buck of a doctor?”

  A shaky laugh escaped her lips. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She drank in the sight of him, the rosy cheeks, the stains streaking his tunic, down to the last crumb speckled in his beard.

  Octavius struggled to his feet and jerked his donkey alert. “We’d best save the talk for the road. It’s a fair stretch of the legs to the manor house, and the sky’s been threatening rain all morn.”

  Her smile dimmed as she tried to absorb what he’d just said.

  “Oh, the doctor told me about your promise before his demise.” The dwarf’s grin turned wicked and he capped it with a wink. “Your father should be screaming like a horse fresh gelded by now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “Aye, you do.” Octavius squinted up at the clouds as he checked the fit of the donkey’s bit. “Are you going to mount or just stand about counting the lepers?”

  She looked at the donkey and realized he’d been waiting for her. She opened her mouth for an explanation, but was interrupted from behind.

  “Praise be to God, praise be!”

  Moira barreled out of a narrow alleyway, her black robes flowing out behind her, her arms outstretched. The donkey bucked. Deirdre clawed for the reins, but Octavius held them tight in his fist. And in that brief moment she noticed three things: Moira ran alone, Moira’s blind eyes were fixed upon them from all the way across the square, and Octavius waited for the elderly, red-faced servant, sporting a wicked grin.

  Moira launched herself against Deirdre. “Child, child, I thought I’d lost you for good. What are you thinking, racing off without me, wandering around with thieves and brigands—”

  “Hush, Moira, your jabbering will bring the guards down upon us.” Deirdre hardly recognized her voice, but the swift and sudden terror that she might be caught and hauled back to the prison of her room left her no patience for tender words. “I’m off to the Clunel lands, and I’ll not hear a word,” Deirdre added before Moira could speak the volumes shivering in her jowls. “It’s a promise I made.”

  “Did you think you were fooling me?” Those translucent eyes pierced her. “I knew you had something cooking in your head. Have I failed you once in all this time?”

  Deirdre felt a twinge of guilt. Maybe she should have trusted Moira. Though they never spoke of it, Deirdre knew Moira understood what caused Deirdre’s early-morning nausea, her fatigue, the loss of her monthlies. She’d been so busy wrestling with her own soul that she’d had no room left in her heart for trust. And it had always been Moira, even in the dark days after Deirdre’s mother had died, there had always been Moira’s cool white hands, Moira’s lilting song, Moira’s steadfast love.

  The words tumbled out of her. “I’m not going back.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  The maidservant grinned, a wide, yellow-toothed smile that crinkled her flesh and put an odd sparkle in her opalescent eyes. What a strange party they would be traveling about the countryside: A young pregnant girl, a blind old woman, and a dwarf. At least now she didn’t have to worry about birthing this child alone.

  “And so it’s you!” Moira turned to a grinning Octavius and planted her hands on her meaty hips. “I should have known you’d have a hand in this, and not a word to me of the details! A fine way to see the job done.”

  “It’s no fault of mine that the lass held her tongue around you—”

  “Would it have broken a bone for you to come and tell me yourself, instead of having me worrying to death and waiting and waiting—”

  Their argument dissolved into bickering, and Deirdre glanced from one to another in mild surprise, not knowing they’d passed more than simple pleasantries in the past.

  “Come, both of you.” Deirdre jerked the reins of the donkey from Octavius’s hands and gestured to the gaping gate. “There’ll be time enough to argue on the road to Clunel.”

  The road cut through city pastures swarming with cattle, sheep, and pigs. Beyond, the hillocks dotted with thatched-roofed houses ceded to forests of beech and oak, pitted here and there with great fields stripped of grain and vineyards long harvested and chopped back for the winter. Huddled in her cloak, Deirdre dozed atop the lumbering donkey as the hand warmer clutched against her belly cooled. The sky growled above like a wary hound.

  For lunch, Octavius pilfered a tunic full of late-harvest apples from an orchard of forgotten trees. Deirdre crisped into the skin. A spray of juice dribbled over her chin. She washed the tangy flesh down with sips of clear, icy water gleaned from a roadside stream. The simple meal soothed her troubled stomach and infused her limbs with new strength.

  When they finally neared the Clunel manor house, the setting sun glazed the land amber. Deirdre slid off the weary donkey. Her knees gave way as she hit the hard dirt. She gripped the donkey’s matted coat until she regained her balance. She peered down the road to the stingy curl of smoke rising from the chimney, and battled with the wind for the hair that had come loose from her veil.

  Without a word to her companions, she tucked her hand-warmer into one of the donkey’s bags and then plunged into the forest. She felt bereft, unsettled at the changes in the land. No more did greenery burst from the ground and drip from the boughs overhead. No more did brillian
t stalks of flowers trim the base of trees. The thin, dry remnants of leaves rattled in the breeze, tore loose, then spun down from the boughs to join the carpet of their kin. The change of season had stolen her bright summer woods away.

  She nosed her way closer to her destination, recognizing a gnarled tree here, a cluster of stones there, the ribbon of the tumbled-down fence that marked the edge of the Clunel garden. Vaguely, she wondered how she was ever going to find her way out of the forest in the dark of night—and realized she would be sleeping on the hillside tonight, awash in the grief that even now threatened.

  Her hood tumbled down. She tore off her veil and fingered free the wound plaits, leaving a trail of silver hairpins, remembering, with a catch in her breath, a long-lost trail of silver bells. Urgency tightened inside her. She raced over the ground, careless of the shadowed gullies beneath her feet. Moira and Octavius followed behind, for she heard the patter of their feet. A mist began to curl up from the roots of trees, kissing her cheeks with its chill, cooling the heat of unexpected tears.

  All that would greet her at the end of this race was an empty place that had once echoed with laughter and overflowed with love. She had yearned to see it, but with each step her control melted a little more. She clutched saplings, using them to pull herself up the slope to the bare, open hill.

  Then she heard the gentle whinny of a horse.

  A saner woman would falter in her pace upon hearing the sound of another’s presence in woods rumored to be rife with poachers and thieves. A saner woman would usher Octavius up ahead, to see who invaded the sanctity of the clearing where she and Conor had first made love. But a saner woman would not be racing about the woods at the twilight of All Hallow’s Eve on a promise made to a man whose heart had long stopped beating.

  The horse loomed into sight. The beast pawed the exposed rock, snorted twin streams of mist. His black head turned her way with a flicker of ears. A few paces beyond that massive horse, a man stood with his back to her, the embroidered edge of his scarlet cloak billowing with the evening breeze. The last ember of sunset blazed on the horizon and streaked his hair with flame.