Riona

by Linda Windsor

  As Kieran broke over the ridge, his stomach turned at the sight of the carnage. The white leather tunics of Heber’s men dotted the moss-and rock-covered plain, their bodies bleeding scarlet. Bran dropped to his knees beside one of the fallen and began crossing himself and praying. The large warrior lying before the bard, drew up one leg unsteadily, as if trying to get up.

  Relief nearly tripped Kieran. The chief of the O’Cuillin, the clan that had remained behind to guard the rear of their attacking force, was alive. Thank God! God had done little for Kieran since he’d lost the innocence of his youth. In truth, since Kieran’s parents’ death by the plague, he’d cursed the Christian God of his upbringing more times than he’d spoken to Him.

  But for this, he had to give thanks.

  He didn’t deserve God’s favor, but the faithful Heber certainly did. Heber’s trials, of which there’d been many, never shook his faith. Kieran always said Heber had enough for the two of them.

  “If God’s not going to staunch his wounds,” Kieran said to Bran, “then stop praying and at least help me.”

  Tearing his cloak from over his head, Kieran made a pillow of it and tucked it under Heber’s head. The wounded warrior’s black hair stood out in stark contrast to the cerulean blue of Gleannmara’s colors—as did the blood soaking it.

  “And how many brigands did Eimar help cross over before they learned that striking your head was for naught?”

  Heber’s hand tightened around the hilt of Eimar, his sword, as if to make certain it was still there and ready. He tried to laugh, but choked instead. Blood trickled out the side of his mouth, fresh and ominous. When at last he could speak, his voice gurgled. “Up.”

  Kieran hastened to help his broad-shouldered friend sit upright. Undoubtedly, he bled internally. Sitting upright would at least help him breathe.

  It was then that Kieran saw the gnarled hilt of a dagger lying broken where Heber had lain. Instinctively, Kieran felt for its blade. As he feared, it was buried in the large warrior’s back, just below the shoulder blade. His tunic must have twisted in the heat of the battle, leaving a seam exposed for one very lucky thrust. The tendons of Kieran’s throat stretched fit to burst with the tortured cry of rage and agony he held back.

  “Kieran.” Bran glanced meaningfully as his elder cousin tried to find Kieran with his gaze.

  Cradling Heber’s head, Kieran eased him down like a babe and looked into his eyes. The ever-present twinkle was gone, replaced by a gripping desperation. No clever words of distraction came to Kieran’s mind. His eyes stung so mightily it was hard to focus on Heber’s face.

  “P … promises.” Heber let Eimar go, transferring his waning strength to Kieran’s arm. “Remem … remember the promises.”

  Was it only last night Heber brought up the possibility that not all of Gleannmara’s men would return to its precious soil? It felt like half a lifetime ago. Kieran had owned his friend’s thought to Bran’s musical rendition of an old tale of Irish warriors shipwrecked on a green island far to the north, beyond the ken of man. Had Heber had some forewarning of this fate instead?

  “Aye, I remember.” His blood curdled at what he must do, what he’d given his oath to do.

  “T-tell me.”

  Kieran sensed more than heard Heber’s words, for his lifelong friend was too weak to speak. His youthful strength soaked into the moss-covered ground beneath them.

  “Though I can’t carry you home, I’ll not abandon you to heathen soil.”

  “Merciful Father!” Bran cared not who heard his cry or saw the tears streaking his face.

  How Kieran envied the bard that freedom of manly constraint. His own pain longed to make itself known all the way to the halls of Gleannmara.

  “And—” Kieran went on after a brace of breath—“I will take your sister into the protection of Gleannmara as my wife.”

  Heber convulsed and swallowed his own life’s blood. “On your word.”

  “On my word as your brother in heart and soul, and as your king.” Where the detached voice Kieran recognized as his own came from, he had no idea. Surely not from the black sea tossing his emotions on its crest like the remnants of a doomed wreck.

  The reassurance was like a strengthening balm. Heber smiled and a familiar twinkle lighted in the depths of his gaze. “Then I shall see you and Bran on the other side. His tone was as light as when he’d teased his cousin Bran the night before for choosing a harp rather than a sword for his companion.

  With that, the light went out in the lifeless blue of his eyes, and they stared not at Kieran, but past him, unfocused to all that was of this earth.

  Bran helped Kieran lay their fallen comrade out. As Kieran took Eimar from Heber’s side, he was aware that the septs and subsepts of Gleannmara had gathered around them, waiting, watching. The bard could not speak for crying, yet, when he crossed himself and took up the harp, which lay discarded nearby, his voice rang as clear as the strings with a song.

  Part hymn, part eulogy, Bran’s composition was worthy of the ancient poet Ossian himself. When honor was done to Heber and the bard’s petition for the receipt of his soul into heaven by God and Creator of all things was ended, Kieran raised Eimar above his head with both fists.

  Now he could scream. It increased the force of the blade he brought down with unfettered fury and anguish. Heber had known—as had they all—that the warriors could not carry back the bodies of their slain to the Dalraidi stronghold of Dunadd for proper Christian burial. Well they knew that the heathens would mutilate their fallen enemies, so all Heber asked of Kieran was to take the essence of a man, of all that he was …

  His head.

  TWO

  Tuath of Gleannmara in Ireland, a few weeks later …

  The morning sun emerged from the purple mist hovering over the eastern horizon, its thirsty rays lapping at the dew-kissed hillsides of Gleannmara. From the trees, birds as varied as the colors of green on Erin’s landscape greeted the new day with song. Nearby, a brook, sprung from the bosom of its mother mountain, danced over a rock-studded path that wound down to a sibling river and on into Father Sea. The royal hill fort itself commanded the view over pastures dotted with brown, gray, and purple heathers and bright gorse and fields tilled in infant green rows straight as a warrior’s sword. As if yawning at nature’s wake-up song, Gleannmara’s double-wide gate slowly swung open.

  Kieran and Bran rode through, Kieran atop Gray Macha, a magnificent blue roan. With a streaming black mane and tail, the gray was a warrior’s horse, strutting in a proud, eager gait. Taking three steps to the roan’s every two was Bran’s smaller steed, Bantan, a broad and sturdy creature with a shaggy coat still thick from the retreating winter. The animals moved in unison, making it clear to any watching that this was not the first time they’d traveled together, their nostrils flaring with frosty breath, the smaller deferring to a half-length behind the larger.

  “Faith, good Kieran, ’twas a better plan last eve to depart at break of day,” Bran reflected. He rubbed his hands together to warm them in the cool spring air.

  “Hah!” Kieran snorted. “Just a fortnight away from the wet and chill of Dunadd and you’re shivering like hound passing briars.” Of course, he felt no warmer himself, but would not let on to his friend. What the bite of the early spring air didn’t take out of him, the homecoming celebration the night before had. Still, he resisted the urge to pull his fringed cloak of blue and gold closer.

  “Aye, and with each tremor, pain streaks lightning white across this mead-soaked blackness of a mind.”

  Kieran shook his head in wonder. Drunk—which they both had been more often of late—or sober, the poet in Bran could not be silenced. His gift of gab was part of the reason the young O’Cuillin had been turned out of monastic life. With the blood of the ancient bards running thick in his veins, Bran had not been content to leave Holy Scripture as it was. Embellishment came as naturally as breathing, so thus stifled, he left with the blessing of his ecclesiastical teache
rs. It was God’s loss and Kieran’s gain, for in Bran’s company there was never a boring hour.

  “Due penance, that’s what this is. Moderation is a virtue—one that eluded me last night.”

  “One among many.” Kieran reached over and plucked a long, flaxen hair from the bard’s fringed cloak of scarlet and blue weave. It was no surprise, given the way the cook’s daughter had curled at Bran’s side like an expectant, ever-patient cat, waiting for his passionate rendition of their adventures in Scotia Minor to turn to a fervor more suited to her needs.

  “Ah, Ailyss—”

  “Alma.” Kieran corrected.

  “So it was.” Bran agreed without seeming to suffer a single pang of conscience. He readily admitted he was born with a colt’s tooth, and that weakness made him more suited to ply the feminine heart than her soul. After one year of clerical study, Bran abandoned the constricting life his priestly father had chosen and joined Kieran and Heber on their quest for adventure. At the memory of his foster brother, Kieran sobered. He chewed a curse till its bitterness paled the aftertaste of last night’s celebration. He would have spat, but his mouth was too dry. Picking up a skin of weak ale, he uncorked it and shot it into his mouth. What spilled on his cheek he wiped away with his sleeve.

  “Here, here, share, good fellow.” Bran reached over and took the skin, helping himself. “I’ve yet to ken what quirk of nature it is that the sweet, overwetting of the pipes results in such acrid drought.”

  “Have you given any thought as to how I should tell Riona about her brother’s death?”

  Heber of Dromin was not the only warrior who did not return from the Dalraidi raids with the Gleannmara contingent, but it was his loss that pained Kieran the most.

  A somber curtain fell over Bran’s boyish, aristocratic features. He shook his head, his eloquence muted with a prolonged sigh.

  As Kieran had been forced to inherit the kingship of Gleannmara, so Heber had been forced into leadership of one of its septs by the premature deaths of his parents. Built like his father, Murtagh, his great frame shook with his belly laugh, and the Sidhelike twinkle in his eyes could melt with earnestness or harden with fierce temper in a blink. With a wit sharp as his sword, the Dromin chief of the O’Cuillin clan had been a worthy ally and formidable foe. He was likewise the natural heir to his father’s position as champion of the tuatha Gleannmara.

  Or had been. Now his remains lay buried with his sword, Eimar, among the sleeping saints and fallen warriors of the Dalraidi royalty of Scotia Minor.

  Bran had sung a final tribute to Heber’s life and death, a piece worthy of such a kingly soul, while Kieran seethed. He was more bitter than ever at the God who took the good and left the lesser of His children unmolested.

  “Better you send Colga with the news,” Bran snapped in contempt. “ ’Tis that sniveling’s fault.”

  “You speak ill of your cousin?” Kieran’s tone was as dry as his tongue. Three strapping cousins born the same year, the sons of three brothers, left together to fight for glory and reward. Now there were two. The glory price was too high.

  “Colga broke the rear guard and ran like a scalded pup for the trees. Faith, I saw it myself.”

  “Because he saw another band of Brits coming up the hill.” Kieran repeated the O’Cuillin cousin’s account as though trying to convince himself. “They were conjured by their druids, no doubt, to cover the real threat approaching from the other side. He and his men rushed to meet them and were lost in the bloody fog.”

  “It was as much a spell as you are a princess! I saw no one. Colga was trying to cover the fact that he’d wet himself in fear when the Scots charged. I shudder to think the same cowardly blood runs in my veins. My uncle is a fine smith, but his son has more ambition than courage to carry a battle out.”

  “Maybe not.” Lost in thought, Kieran watched a small gold crest fly to a perch in an oak. Immediately it set upon some unsuspecting insect. Boldness might also be a prerequisite of manipulation. “Soon as he realized the trickery, he brought his men back to our aid.”

  Colga wasn’t the sort to attack directly. The only time the young O’Cuillin bested Kieran in training, he’d taken weasel-like advantage of Murtagh’s shout for the exercises to cease. Kieran didn’t know what hit him until he regained consciousness with Colga bemoaning how he’d not heard the champion’s bellow to quit.

  “Colga will likely become the new chief.” Kieran cast a speculative glance at Bran. “Unless you’ve a mind to challenge him.”

  “Me?” Bran burst into laughter. He almost sounded like Heber. “I’d rather cast my vote for Riona.”

  Kieran almost smiled. Heber had been as merry as he was large in stature. His younger sister was fiery. Heber would tease and laugh. Half his size, Riona would launch into him, eyes spitting blue fire, her wild raven hair a flying mantle over her face and shoulders. How the young men in Murtagh’s charge loved to tease her. The heir to Gleannmara’s throne was no exception. Kieran even took bets on how easily he could flush the flawless porcelain of her delicate face with color enough to shame the roses in her mother’s garden.

  If he were not king of the tuath and overlord of Gleannmara’s various clan lands, Kieran would allow Riona to rule her clan holdings. Educated as well as her brother, O’Cuillin’s daughter had the judicial, academic, and spiritual strength of an able ruler. Even now she increased her education and spirituality at the abbey of Kilmare, where she awaited Heber’s return from war. But Dromin needed a strong-bodied chief as much as a wise one—one who could muster the clan warriors and lead them in battle as Heber had done.

  The rule went by right to the nearest male kin of the same father or grandfather, according to the clan’s vote. Their cousin Bran would be fine, if he’d apply himself. The only other choice was Colga, unless the O’Cuillin clan chose someone of a more distant relationship, thus breaking three generations of the O’Cuillin rule. It pained Kieran to return Gleannmara’s debt to Murtagh and Heber with such a loss.

  “Besides, I record acts of heroism. I don’t perform them.” Bran plucked at the velvet case containing Aingeal, his harp. The strings responded with muted indignation, straining to agree with their master.

  “You could sing the heathen out of his paint with such a weapon,” Kieran suggested wistfully. Much as the part of him nurtured by his Christian upbringing yearned to think otherwise, he knew now there was little difference in the druidic power of satire and the priestly power of prayer. Not believing in them rendered them useless. To Gleannmara’s young king they were no more threat than that insect the gold crest had devoured earlier.

  “As I recall, a blade was not an ill fit for your hands when you plied yourself to it. ’Twas you that taught us the sword song.”

  The sword song was something Kieran did believe in. Not every warrior performed the deadly orchestration to an unheard melody of weapon and limb. It was irony that a cleric’s son heard the blade sing through the air, each movement making a different sound. Indeed, it was Bran who put the sounds together so that sword and body executed movement in a continuous, lethal harmony of aggression and defense.

  “Aye, so I did. But that was desperation, friend.”

  Most of the warriors in training scoffed at the curious tune the bard hummed as he faced off with their seasoned tutor. But after an hour had passed and neither had gained more than a nick of the flesh, Murtagh called a truce, curious as to his poetic nephew’s secret. Most agreed it was some sort of bardic spell, but Bran would not take credit for it. It was a gift from the Almighty he said, to protect those with willing ear to listen, faith to follow, and heart to praise Him for it. Something incredible, be it faith or bardic spell, allowed the cleric’s son to remain a sword’s length from Gleannmara’s champion for an hour without a sound thrashing.

  It was ironic that Heber, for all his piety, had tried his best to hear Eimar’s song and succeeded only now and then, while Kieran, a prodigal if there ever was one, picked it up at once, amazed
at what his ears reported. Even in the thick of battle, the haunting song of Melchior—the sword his late father bestowed upon the prince in his thirteenth year—rang and sang. The vengeful hymn of steel was not unlike the monks’ bells accompanying their melodic chants. One invoked death; the other, life. Both claimed victory.

  But when Eimar ceased to sing, Heber ceased to live. Eimar’s last sound was a scream, or had that been Kieran’s own voice slicing through the air as he severed Heber’s head in Celtic tradition. After he wrapped it with the tenderest of care in his own bloodstained cloak, Kieran turned and carried it past his men, no longer able to hold back the tears streaming down his unshaven, battle-weary face.

  Faith, he still bled from the raw memory. Through the haze that stung his eyes afresh, Kieran glanced over at his companion. He couldn’t make out Bran’s face, but he knew he’d not revisited the past alone. He heard the bard’s whispered words—shapeless, at least to the human ear.

  Kieran swallowed the gall that rose to the back of his throat, certain it contained shards of glass razing him from stem to gullet. “Best speak to that nag of yours, friend, for all the good your prayers will do. I wager that silver brooch you admired among Gleannmara’s reward that Gray and I will be waiting for you at the ford.”

  With a click of the tongue, Kieran signaled the roan to the race. The warhorse, a breed for which Gleannmara was renowned, plunged ahead with a mighty leap that would have unseated any but the most skilled equestrian. That horse and rider had been inseparable since the first was foaled showed, for they were bonded—poetry of motion. Living up to his namesake—Gray Macha, the loyal steed of the Tain’s warrior hero Cuchulain—the stallion plowed up clods of soft earth with his hooves and cast them in his wake.

  This was more like it. Give him the fingers of the wind through his hair to soothe his tortured mind … give him the response of the powerful horse at the slightest pressure of his knees and the jar of the earth beneath them over the hopes that a fickle God might grace him with favor. Young and naive, Kieran had given God a chance once, and for all his earnest submission and belief, he’d watched his mother and father die of the plague that made him a king at twenty. Heber’s faith rewarded him with becoming a corpse, run through with wounds, his life’s blood soaking a foreign soil.