“This,” he began in awkward Irish, “doctor’s house?”
She didn’t answer, not at once. He wasn’t a mainlander. Though the mainland Irish was a garbled dialect, she could understand it well enough, and this man spoke with an unfamiliar accent. An Englishman, perhaps, but they mostly kept to themselves. And such a finely dressed one as this would surely send a lackey to do his bidding. She knew there were several ships anchored in Galway Bay. No telling where they came from, or who sailed upon them. Any man who asked the mainlanders for a doctor would be told to come here, to the house of Conor of Inishmaan.
Her insides rumbled in unease. A gift and a curse, it was, Da’s skill as a doctor. It brought too much of the world to their door.
The stranger motioned east, in the direction of the path that led to the shore. “Need … doctor,” he said. “Man hurt… .”
A briny breeze gusted, skidding a few turnip peels across the table and upending a basket of wool set aside for spinning. Aileen glanced at her mother, expecting her to right the tumble of wool, but her mother stood still, her fingers curled around the cutting–knife, a crease of worry deep on her brow. Then Aileen realized that Ma stared at the stranger as transfixed as herself, without making a move to offer the man hospitality.
Aileen snagged a bladder of honey–mead off the wall and pinched the last oatcake into a bit of linen. “This is the doctor’s house.” She held the offerings out to him. Above the scent of the stew meat bubbling in the pot over the fire, she smelled him, some sweet perfume—exotic and odd on a man.
He glanced at the offerings and took the bladder of mead. He made a shrugging motion with his other sleeve. Aileen looked at his arm and realized that the sleeve hung loose below the level of his wrist.
An awkward moment passed while she stared at the nub where his hand should be. The man lowered the bladder of mead long enough to grant her a forgiving smile.
It was the kindness of that smile that got her. He looked honest enough, clear–eyed and open–faced, with enough humor to understand and accept her moment of awkward surprise. Aileen knew she’d never lose the tightening in her gut whenever she came upon an outsider—too much had happened to her to expect that. But she fancied that she had enough sense to gauge a man’s character by looking into his eyes. How much of a threat to two strong women was a one–handed man?
“My father is off tending the cows in Connemara.” She slipped the crumbled oatcake onto the trestle table. “He won’t be back until nightfall. You say that there’s a man hurt?”
The man nodded over the neck of the bladder. He swung it toward the path to the shore. “Man hurt … bad.”
“Then you’ll have to make do with the doctor’s daughter.”
Aileen reached for her cloak as her mother made an anxious, breathy sound. Aileen mentally told her mother to be calm as she hefted a battered bag full of herbs and linens onto the table. Aileen always took her father’s charges when her father was out. And this stranger hadn’t specifically asked for her, as some of the mainlanders did with a hush in their voice and a shuffle in their gait as if Aileen would turn them into frogs with the strike of a single glance. There was a good chance this stranger had heard Da’s name only, and not the whispered tales of Aileen the Red.
“What’s he going to think of us, Ma?” She spoke to her mother in the thick Inishmaan dialect, so the stranger could not understand. “You didn’t even offer him honey–mead.”
“He’s an outsider.”
“It was you who taught me never to deny hospitality to any man who comes to this door.” Aileen rifled through the bag and counted the linens. “He’s not the first outsider I’ve set to heal, nor will he be the last.”
The man slipped the bladder upon the table and wandered out the door to wait. Aileen lifted a small linen of herbs and sniffed it before she nodded and tucked it back into the bag.
“You’ll be careful, Aileen?” Her mother leaned over and righted the basket of wool. “Your gift … it’s fine, but powerful, child, so powerful.”
“Don’t worry.” It had been a good ten years since Aileen had discovered her faery gift, long enough for her to learn how to hide it well. Long enough to know that if she allowed herself to live always in a state of terror among outsiders, she’d only make herself crazed. “I’m not like the Widdy Peggeen, Ma, foolish enough to dance naked in the surf every sunrise.”
“Och, don’t I know it. I’m full of foolishness today. Your Da has been away on Connemara for too long. Still, you’ll be forty summers, lass, before I’ll stop worrying about you. That’s the burden and the joy of being a mother. You’ll know it someday.”
“Still hunting for grandchildren?” Aileen tugged another bladder of mead off the wall so her mother would not see her face. “Look to your other daughters. I won’t have a man bossing me about and telling me what to do. I’ll live my own life, thank you very much.”
“Life does not always take the path we’ve chosen—”
“You’re sounding as maudlin as old Seamus in his cups.” She tucked the bladder into her bag. “Why should my life be any different? I want it to be so. It shall be so.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if the world turned upon a girl’s whim. What a simple place the world would be then.” Her mother glanced out the door to the expanse of the island, and beyond to the sea, lost for a moment in the horizon beyond the stranger’s shoulders. “But there are greater powers, Aileen, with wills of their own, and there’s no telling how they’ll weave the path of your life.”
That froze Aileen in her own tracks. Ma’s faery–gift was the Sight. It showed in the swirling green gaze her mother always hid from outsiders. It had always been an uncertain magic, its secrets not revealed for the asking. Now Aileen wondered if Ma had had a vision. But when Ma turned her swirling green eyes upon her, her mother did it with the softest of smiles.
“Don’t go listening to me, I’m all about today. Go.” She kissed her daughter’s cheek and nudged her toward the portal. “There’s someone down there in need of your healing.”
“I’ll be back in time to help you with the spinning.”
Aileen shrugged off her mother’s odd mood and set off to follow the stranger’s sure and long–legged pace. It was thatching–time upon the island. Long ropes of braided hay stretched golden across the fields. Below the sheer cliffs, Galway Bay licked the rock with tongues of froth, siphoning up thinning whorls of sea mist. It was indeed a fair, fine day, she thought, looking about her at the rare sight of the sharp horizon, and at the low bed of mist clinging to the shore. She’d long convinced herself that the Heaven in the clouds the priest spoke of must be very like Inishmaan on the morning after a gale.
Aileen filled her lungs with the clean salt–spray as she descended the cliff. On one part of the path, she caught sight of a crescent mark dug into the mud. The faeries had been here this day, she thought, playing ball amid the rocks. When she returned home later, she’d tell Dairine about this. She’d wind a fine yarn of a story around it to get her wild youngest sister to settle before going to bed.
The coarse sand sank beneath her pampooties as they finally reached the shore. Through the shifting sheets of mist, she caught sight of a single boat dragged up close to the cliff face. A man paced beside it.
Her steps faltered. A big man, this, bigger than the one who had fetched her from home. The sea wind slapped his cloak as if he felt no cold and the pale mists swirled around him as if he were an Otherworldly visitor stepping out from between the veils. The man ceased his pacing and stormed toward them with all the force of a charging bull. It was then that she saw the mask, a leather mask tanned night–black, slashing across his face from forehead to jaw, making him look all the more inhuman.
Her throat closed in an uncertain fear.
Her guide gave way to the man, who stopped several paces before her. Eyes the color of blue winter ice scoured her from the shadows of the mask. She stilled the urge to reach up and tuck a sprig of her red
hair back into the braid which hung down her back. It would do no good. Her hair never stayed in its bounds, even in the calmest of weather. Still he glared, a harsh, lingering look that made her feel as if he burned the clothes from her body and found her lacking.
Aye, so she was no beauty, and aye, she didn’t look like much of a doctor. She was well used to not being accepted for what she really was. She tilted her chin and returned the look in kind.
As for him—he was a warrior. She’d recognized the sure gait and the arrogant cast of his broad shoulders before she’d even noticed the beaten bronze scabbard of the sword hanging from his belt. The mask, too, spoke of a warrior’s vanity. She’d seen his kind paint themselves up with blue woad and fancy themselves with chain mail and embroidery before they went off to do their killing. A battle he’d waged, no doubt, and killed enough innocents to satisfy his blood–lust for the morning. Now he brought a wounded man here, one of his own, hoping to patch him together so he could fight another useless fight on another bloody day.
She wondered why she was mustering so much hate for a man who had not yet said a single word.
Then he said, “You are Aileen the Red.”
It was a statement, not a question, and he spoke the Irish as purely as any mainlander. Aye, those rumblings of distrust had been right. So he knew her name, and by the look in his eye, he knew the story behind it.
A shiver shook her spine, but she stifled the chill. She jerked her chin toward the one–handed man. “He asked for a doctor. My father couldn’t be here. You’ll have to settle for me.”
“You are the great healer.” His lips curled. “You, a bit of a girl.”
“It’s clear enough you are not the wounded man.”
“You wouldn’t have the strength or the stomach to pluck a bird for dinner—”
“But it’s not dinner I’m making here, is it?” She peered around him and saw no one else. She set her gaze upon the boat pulled up on the shore, thinking the wounded man must be inside. “I’ll see to your man well enough. It’s either me or no one.”
Then I’ll see you off this island. We don’t welcome killers on Inishmaan. She brushed by him, and it was like brushing by a ridge of limestone. She stilled the urge to massage her own bruised shoulder. She would do her healing, masking the true nature of it as she always did, and then she would return to the warmth of her mother’s house, and curse this man and his ilk for their arrogance and their scorn.
The boat was cocked away from her so she could not see the inside until she seized the rim and peered over. Her pack slid off her shoulder, snagging the collar of her tunic. She clutched it to her arm until her knuckles turned white. In the belly of the boat there was nothing but coils of hemp.
She swiveled her heel into the muck. Her one–handed guide was staring at his master with an odd look in his eye. He muttered something in a garbled tongue—a strange language, like Irish but spoken as if through a mouthful of rocks. The warrior ignored him and kept his gaze fixed upon her. His hands curled into fists at his sides.
Fear froze her to the sand. A thousand stories flooded her mind of pirates who seized women from the shores of Connemara, women who were never seen again. She’d heard the tales a hundred thousand times in her youth. As she grew she scoffed at them as stories meant to keep young ones abed. Even as terror gripped her, she scolded herself for her foolishness. What would a pirate want with her? She was thin and awkwardly tall, her plain face, her hair a tern’s nest. Perhaps that was why this warrior stood so silent before her, brooding and fierce, eyeing her figure and wondering if he could find a price in some exotic port for such a shapeless, freckled, bone of a woman.
What a joke it would be upon Aileen the Red, she thought, to be cast back by the pirates in disdain like a rabbit too thin to be worth the work of slaughtering.
Pride rose in her, and she welcomed it to stem the fear. “The tide is coming. Are you to lead me to your wounded, or are we to stand here until this sand is beneath the sea?”
The guide said something again, but the warrior shook his head once. Then he came to her, his boots sure in the sand, his black hair rising above his shoulders by the force of the breeze and floating around a face that could have been carved from the stone of the island.
The rim of the boat dug into her thighs. Such eyes as his had never known the meaning of pity.
He reached behind her to heft up a roll of hemp.
“It’s you or no one, Aileen the Red. So be it.” The first coil of rope scraped her neck. “Say goodbye to Inishmaan.”
Chapter Two
Aileen clenched the matted fur of the donkey as the beast swayed his way through a breach in the mountain terrain. She’d been riding for half a day, since they’d set anchor off the shore of this strange land. Her stomach gurgled and dipped as if she were still locked in that dark hold while storms battered the ship. Now she swallowed bile and set her sights on the men ahead of her, on the winding upward path, the trail of the pale white sun across the leaden sky … on the world she’d been forcefully taken to, for reasons she still did not know.
In all her life, she’d never ventured farther than a few settlements along the mainland of Connemara. In all her life, she’d never been away from the white–frothed roar of the sea. Here, silence deafened her, yet it was a silence punctuated with the screech of unfamiliar birds, the rattle of wind amid the dry–leafed treetops, the echoing scrape of hooves on stone. Her head pounded with unanswered questions. And it pounded, too, with the cloying, musky scent of the wooden thickets which flourished in the crook of the valleys—a heavy perfume which made her ache with longing for the clean fragrance of the sea.
No. She yanked her woolen cloak away from her nose. Forcefully, she breathed out the last scent of salt clinging to the woolen fibers. Dreaming was a perilous path, more perilous than these narrow ledges of crumbling rock. If she thought about little Dairine waiting for a bedtime story while the peat fire crackled down to embers, she’d soon be hurling herself off the donkey into the river below.
Besides, she had more important things to do than wallow. She had to remember every roaring cataract, every river, the pattern of the craggy horizon—for when she escaped this place, for when she returned home. Never mind that the jagged peaks loomed over her like stone palisades, and never mind that for all her skill, the ocean was a moat she couldn’t swim. Never mind that in all her life, she’d never been lost or alone in a strange land, among outsiders who gave her long, measuring glances when they thought she wasn’t looking.
I will survive this.
She chanted the words in her mind all through the afternoon. When she thought the air couldn’t get any thinner and the sun had set, casting the hills in shades of purple, she glimpsed a silhouette of a dwelling perched on a crag.
By the time they plodded through the open gates of the wooden palisades, her exhaustion blocked out all but the hot crackle of pine torches and the stench of sweaty beasts. She slid off the donkey and jarred her heels against the paving stones, then stumbled after a man who beckoned her toward a small hut nestled against the palisades.
The room smelled of fresh–cut rye. Her guard muttered something in his garbled tongue, clattered a tallow candle upon a cask, and shoved the door closed behind him. Pushing a rat’s nest of hair off her forehead, she collapsed onto a bulging sack.
She woke to the crack of a door being kicked open. She tumbled off the sack of grain and slid into the rushes. She squinted at the silhouette looming in the portal.
Torchlight flooded around him and gleamed on the leather of his mask. The open neckline of his tunic sagged as if he’d been tugging on it. He choked the neck of a bladder in one hand.
He said, “Comfortable, little captive?”
She struggled to her elbows. No daylight filtered through the walls. The tallow candle the guard had left her had long sputtered out, and streams of fat congealed along the wooden lathes of the cask. She wondered how long she’d been asleep. She wondered how
long he’d been drinking.
“Welcome to Cymru. You’ll know it as Wales.” Liquid splattered on the ground as he swayed. “Do you find the accommodations to your liking?”
She became aware of the bunching of her tunic around her knees, the raw imprint of sackcloth upon her cheek, the bits of straw knitted into her hair. She shoved her tunic over her ankles and struggled to rise.
“If there’s anything else you need, my lady, to make your stay pleasant.” He swung the bladder toward her as he swaggered in another step. “Some ale, mayhap, to quench your thirst after the long journey—”
“Don’t you mock me.”
“I’m showing you some fine Welsh hospitality.”
She couldn’t make out his features with the light pouring in from behind him, but there was no mistaking the scorn in his voice.
“If this is Welsh hospitality, I’ve no mind to see how you treat your enemies.” She looked down her nose at the bladder swinging in his hand. “I see you’ve finally found some courage to face me.”
He lifted the bladder to his lips. His throat flexed with each gulp, and when he was done he wiped his mouth with his forearm and held the bladder out to her. “In need of some courage yourself, Irish?”
“Not for the likes of you.”
“Good.” He slammed the bladder on a cask. “It’ll make the task easier if you’re not trembling in fear.”
He stumbled outside and seized something off the wall of the hut, then thrust a torch of flaming rushes before him as he returned, filling the room with light. An autumn wind whistled through the walls, buffeting the torch as he made his way toward her.
She stumbled against the casks which lined the back wall of the hut. His night–black hair hung wild and locks of it lurched up from the ties that held his leather mask tight against the right side of his face. Other ties dug angry red imprints across his forehead and neck. He stopped close enough for her to feel the heat of the torch against her face, close enough for her to smell the scent of ale on his breath.
The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) Page 2