Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series)

by Lisa Ann Verge

  She stumbled to a stop. She choked a branch of a yew sapling with her fist. The man turned his head slightly so she could see the light glazing the three-quarter profile of his face. A brother, she thought. A twin.

  Then he turned fully and fixed her with that tortured silver gaze. Her heart thumped to a stop.

  Conor.

  Twenty-two

  There she stood poised on the edge of the clearing, her hair tangled and loose, like some fairy-sylph clinging to the safety of the woods. The wind had painted her cheeks rose, but as their gaze locked and the still moments passed, the living color ebbed away.

  She kept her promise. He crushed the urge to cross the distance that separated them and drag her into his arms. Too many times in the life before, he’d bent this woman to his will by sheer force and overbearing arrogance. This time she would make the choice on her own.

  “There’s an ancient Irish tale I would tell you, lass,” he began softly, so as not to frighten her. “Perhaps your mother told it to you once.”

  He did not approach, but he trained every sense upon the slip of a girl hovering tense by the edge of the clearing.

  “A long, long time ago, when the priests had only begun to spread the word in Ireland, there was a woman named Sorcha, who was a powerful pagan priestess in Ulster.” His gaze followed the flight of a sparrow sweeping home to its nest before the darkness descended. “At the Samhain fires one year, she conceived a son. It was rumored that the child’s father was one of the Sídh—the ones you know as the Little People.”

  All around him, Conor sensed the change in the world—the salt-sweet breath of the wind, the mist creeping through the trees, the hushed whisper of creatures rustling in the wood’s shadows. His horse sensed it too, for it shook its head and pranced a few steps, trying to snort the smell of the Otherworld from his nostrils.

  “Sorcha died birthing that son, taking the secret of his true parentage with her. That boy grew to be a warrior, invincible in battle, determined in his arrogance to win a kingdom of his own.” He tried to keep the scorn from his voice. “He got his kingdom, eventually. But by the treachery of his enemies, he was killed. On the morning after the funeral, that man rose from the dead.”

  Her soft gasp cut through the clearing as keenly as it cut through his heart.

  “He was as shocked as you are. He struggled with a world turned upside-down.” He closed his hands into fists, remembering. “He had a woman he loved. A woman unlike any other. A woman,” he added, hoarsely, “who was no less than the other half of him.”

  He paced, not daring to glance in her direction, too cowardly to witness the fear or revulsion that might lurk in those beloved eyes.

  “She told him that the rumors which had haunted him all his life were true: That he was half-human, half-Sídh.” He forced his fists opened, spread his hands to the world. “She told him that he was as much a part of the world as the sea and the air and the grass, and there was no more reason for his existence as there was for why the moon waxes and wanes, or why the stars move across the night sky. He just was. And the part of him that came from the Sídh was the part that made him rise from the dead. She told me,” he said simply, “that I was immortal.”

  He heard her strange, strangled cry. He heard the sound of her footsteps through the dried carpet of leaves.

  “And so I lived,” he continued, his words rough, “roaming the world like a man half-dead, until—” a desperation coiled in his chest “—I lay my gaze upon the ailing form of a young woman, and saw in her green eyes the soul of the wife I had lost, my fairy-bride, the only woman I would ever love.”

  He turned, expecting to see nothing but the flutter of her robes in the distance and instead found her standing within arm’s reach, her face wet with tears.

  “Kiss me, Conor,” she scolded. “Prove to me you’re no apparition born of my twisted mind.”

  He captured her mouth, felt the shock of the contact ripple through her body and reverberate through his own. Lass, lass, lass, mo shearc. He dragged his arms around her body—so she could not fight, so she could not escape. He ran his tongue along the soft flesh of her full lower lip, all the while fearing this was his last taste. She wriggled her arms from where they wedged against his chest and wound them tight around his neck. Gasping for air, she broke contact and buried her face into his shoulder.

  By the gods. He seized a fistful of her hair. She believes.

  She believes.

  Then, in that moment of surrender, it seemed that something amid the heavens and the earth readjusted, like a cart wheel gone wobbly finally bumping into place. It happened so swiftly that Conor wondered if he had imagined the subtle movement of the sky, the almost indiscernible change in the pitch of the wind’s whistle.

  “It’s a fine dance you’ve led me all these months,” she mumbled against his cloak. “Did you think my heart wouldn’t know you still walked about, living and breathing?”

  “But would you listen to it? Would you believe what I am?”

  “I don’t care why or how you are here, Conor. As long as you take me with you wherever you go.”

  He squeezed her tight. He tilted his face back to the flat, slate sky. “It’s a hard life you choose.” He blinked to stanch the swell of an unmanly wetness in his eyes. “There are no oil lamps on Inishmaan.”

  “Firelight is warm and bright enough. And you can’t see the soot on the walls by it.”

  Damned, foolish lass. Didn’t know the first thing she was doing, didn’t know what she was saying, didn’t know how every word sliced away more and more of the dead wood which encased the battered, ever-beating remnants of his heart. He sealed her lips with his own, hiding from her the single tear which squeezed out of one eye.He swallowed her low and eager moan, and then slid his lips down to the throbbing pulse at her throat. Damn the woman, she made his head soft. She made him want things he had no business wanting.

  She made him dream again.

  But now he had loving on his mind. He snapped the ties of his cloak and threw it across the ground. There’d be enough time later to tell her the full of the tale. As he softened one knee to press her down with him, a flicker of movement on the edge of the clearing caught his eye.

  Octavius leaned against an oak. A grin split his face.

  “Aren’t you a fine one,” Conor said, “hiding when you’re needed, and showing your face when you’re least wanted.”

  The imp grinned all the more. “Is that all the thanks I get for what I’ve done for you?”

  Conor felt a spurt of fury. What had Octavius and his kind ever done for him but play peg-games with his life and the life of the woman in his arms? Octavius and his mischief had put him through seven centuries of loneliness, and promised more to come. For even as he held her against him, his heart raw and open, he knew the end of this story.

  Conor said, “Keep the door open next time I come knocking, Octavius.” That damned silvered door to the Otherworld that had always been bolted against him. “And then maybe we’ll talk about thanks.”

  Octavius crossed his arms and looked ready to speak, but a rustling in the clearing revealed the outline of someone else amid the trees.

  Dierdre rose from the circle of his arms. “Moira?”

  “Child.” The word rolled out of Moira’s mouth holding all the softness of a mother’s tongue. “I’ll be off now. You’ve no more need of me now that you’ve finally got your brave warrior. It’s glad I am of that, for all that I’ll miss you.”

  The wind whirled and whispered like the brush of silken veils. A feeble ringing sounded on the air, a haunting melody which ebbed and flowed. Conor felt the Otherworld close, closer than he’d ever felt it.

  “This is a world of choices, Conor.” Moira’s eyes glowed like opals in the gloom. “Human choices, over which no creature of this world or the other has any real power. Did you not suspect that it was you who kept the worlds together, all these years, just by living?”

  His mind stuttered
, trying to absorb that, trying to understand.

  “It’s been a heavy load you’ve carried,” she admitted, “all along not even knowing you were carrying it. Now listen.” The mists swirled, obscuring all but the glowing eyes, and the soft, strangely hushed voice. “Your mother made a brave choice when she conceived a child of the Sídh, at a time when we were all fading fast. The only way to bind the worlds was to forge a strong bond of spirit and flesh.”

  Conor felt Deirdre quivering. But he could not look away from the creature called Moira, lest she disappear and leave him with another seven centuries of wondering.

  She continued, “Your mother paid a price for her choice. She had to abandon you alone in a world which had begun to scorn our existence. In that moment, she laid the burden of keeping the worlds together on your shoulders.”

  “And it would all have come to a fine end,” Octavius interjected from his lair in the shadow of an oak, “but it was your own arrogance which led you away from the path we’d laid—contrary, snarling creatures you humans are, always fighting what should be, and not listening to your wiser halves—”

  “And you,” Conor growled, “didn’t think to tell me this before now?”

  “Enough.” Moira’s voice was nothing but a breath of wind now. “Care well for that babe in her womb. She’s one more link forged in the chain.”

  “Aye, good night, and good riddance to you.” Octavius jerked his hood over his head, and then winked at Deirdre. “Mayhap we’ll be racing one of these mornings, lass.”

  Then the music stopped as if an iron door had slammed shut in a mead hall.

  Conor stared where Octavius and Moira had been. Nothing remained but a silver glow limning the trees. He looked down at Deirdre and felt a sudden lightness in his heart.

  “At last,” he whispered. “It’s done.”

  Epilogue

  It was a fine, soft day on Inishmaan.

  The springtime sun blazed through the clouds and shimmered upon the cliffs. Galway Bay, almost too blue to look at, licked the graveled shore. Crazed by the scent of freshly caught mackerel, a flock of gulls screeched as they whirled in cirrus of wings above the fleet of curraghs bobbing just beyond the surf.

  Deirdre stood with the other women of Inishmaan. Dried salt and sea spray streaked her arms from an afternoon collecting seaweed. She shifted the weight of the dripping basket on her hip, and then shaded her eyes against the flash of the ocean.

  It was no surprise to find Conor in the thick of it all, standing at his full height at the bow of the lead curragh, riding the dips and swells with his knees, while he peered out to the roll of the oncoming waves.

  “By my soul.” Red Sean’s young wife leaned toward Deirdre with a waggle of brows. “Don’t you have a man of a race that never owned a coward.”

  Deirdre grinned and sank the weight of her basket into the sand, grateful for the easy camaraderie. Over the two years that she’d lived here, not one woman had staggered back in revulsion at Dierdre’s direct gaze.

  A squealing blur dashed by her, launching a spray of pebbles. With a swiftness born of instinct, Deirdre lunged, seized a handful of blue wool, and hauled her squirming daughter onto her hip.

  “Are you trying to get hit by a curragh, Aileen? Or would you prefer drowning in the sea?”

  Aileen squirmed in Deirdre’s embrace. While Deirdre worked, the toddler had scoured the shore for treasures with the other village children. Now she flailed two fistfuls of shiny rocks and threw them toward the sea.

  “Daidí, Daidí!”

  “Aye, that’s your Da making a spectacle of himself.” Deirdre brushed at the sea spray beading on her daughter’s flushed cheeks. “But you’ll wait here safe and dry until they land, a stóirín.”

  Dierdre watched as the curragh surged upon a wave’s crest. Conor plunged the oars into the foaming water and pulled back so hard that his muscles strained against the sleeves of his tunic. Another wave loomed up behind him, surging high and fast, but before the first whiskers of foam frothed the peak, the prow of the curragh scraped the shore. Conor gripped the rim, leapt out, and dragged the boat out of harm’s way.

  Only then did Deirdre release the breath she had not realized she’d been holding.

  “Now you can go.” Deirdre set Aileen down and patted her daughter’s behind as the child darted off. Conor seized the toddler in mid-run and whirled her through the air. Conor was home, it was Beltane Day. There’d be no more work today.

  She was tucking the seaweed basket behind a cradle of boulders when a shadow fell over her.

  “Wife, there’s a price to pay for not greeting your man proper.”

  She squinted up at him. His grin rivaled the blaze of the sky. Their daughter sat easily upon his shoulders, her arms flailing as she stretched up and tried to reach the gulls swooping across the shore.

  Deirdre raised herself onto her toes and kissed Conor’s salty lips, then whispered, “I’ll pay that price, mo rún.”

  “Listen to you talking.” He lowered his head and stole another kiss. “A convent-bred lass. In front of your daughter, no less.”

  “The fairies did not leave that babe under the ivy.”

  A lock of hair fell onto his brow. Tenderly, she raked it through her fingers as she pushed it aside. Sunlight shimmered on a single silver strand threading through the lock. She wondered if he’d noticed the changes. She wondered if he noticed that as Aileen grew bigger and stronger, a few more crinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Their daughter, that red-topped, squealing bundle of joy babbling now on her husband’s shoulders, was the next link in the chain, the strongest bond between this world and the other.

  Not just this daughter, but also the new child growing inside her.

  She lifted her face and Conor bent to kiss her, but a tiny, cowskin-covered foot got in the way.

  “Down!” Aileen battered Conor’s head as she caught sight of the village children with baskets full of mackerel. “Down!”

  Conor hauled his daughter off his shoulders. With a flash of feet she was at the little boys’ sides, thrusting her hands into the baskets.

  “Cruel wench,” Conor growled, thrusting Deirdre up against him anew, “to talk like that when you know the little lass won’t drop off to sleep until the moon is overhead.”

  His kiss tasted of sea spray. Aileen came back and wiggled her way between their knees and twinkled up at them with her father’s gray eyes. Deirdre and Conor broke apart to the giggles of children and the knowing laughter of a cluster of islanders, who’d caught up with them upon the path.

  “I see who got the best catch of the day,” one of the men remarked.

  “Aye,” one of the women added, “and well-hooked he is, I’m thinking.”

  “Shouldn’t you both be saving that for the Beltane fire?”

  “Only you, Patch Peggeen, would save it for Beltane,” Conor retorted. “We’ve a Beltane fire around our hearth every night of the year.”

  A priest stepped over the rock-pile fence of the burial ground, just at the height of the path. His black robes battered his legs as he approached the crowd with a swift, lusty gait. “Was that pagan nonsense I heard coming from your mouth, Conor MacSídh?”

  Deirdre shook her head. “Don’t you be asking my husband such a question, Father. I won’t let you two debate nonsense over a skin of honey-mead tonight.”

  The priest gave her a wink. “Now there’s a good lass, keeping her man home and out of mischief.”

  Then the priest was gone with a wave of his hand, striding at full speed down to the shore to meet the curragh which would take him back to the north island before the Beltane fires flared scarlet in the night.

  With Aileen dancing a weaving trail before them, Deirdre and Conor climbed to the top of the path. When she and Conor had first arrived, the villagers had warned them away from building within the wind-worn, rambling circle of tumbling stones. It was common talk that the ancient ruins upon the hill were inhabited by fairies. They
’d seen their footmarks upon the cliff, they’d told them, and strange, airless gusts of wind swept the place—but Conor was adamant that Dun Conor was home.

  She’d known it was her home, too, the moment she had laid eyes upon the height, safe, guarded, strong.

  Arms around one another, Conor and Deirdre paused at the edge of the rock-pile fence. Primroses clung to the stones and waved in the briny breeze. Cows lowed in the field as they feasted on green and stubborn grass. Across the bay, the Connemara mountains rose purple from the deep blue water and the rhythmic wash of the tide against the cliffs lulled them with soft music.

  Aileen raced through an opening in the fence, giggling and twirling in happy delirium. Deirdre wondered when the lass would show the full of her fairy blood. She wondered if it would come upon her in secret, or if it would, like Deirdre’s own gift, wait until the brink of womanhood before it manifested.

  Conor’s gaze followed his daughter’s antics. “Full of life, that one.”

  “Aye, she dances like the wind.”

  Suddenly, rising from a crack in the stones beneath their feet, a frantic little gust whirled, salt-sweet and humid. Deirdre and Conor shared a secret smile as that gust veered off toward their daughter, who squealed and whirled with it.

  Conor murmured, “It’s good to know that there’s still some magic in the world.”

  Above, the silhouette of two swans soared and dipped and twirled, weightless with the wind beneath their wings.

  I hope you enjoyed TWICE UPON A TIME!

  Don’t miss the other books in the Celtic Legends Series

  TWICE UPON A TIME: Book One

  THE FAERY BRIDE: Book Two

  THE O’MADDEN: A Novella

  Also available—the Novels of Lisa Verge Higgins

  THE PROPER CARE AND MAINTENANCE OF FRIENDSHIP

  ONE GOOD FRIEND DESERVES ANOTHER