“That’s conjurer’s smoke, Irish, and you know it.” He lowered his voice though they spoke in Irish. “You can’t mask what you are from me.”
“I won’t mock your mask, if you won’t mock mine.”
“I’ll agree when you start taking off your mask in the dark.”
Stormy gray eyes sharpened to silver. Yes, woman, it’s not so easy, is it, to drop the mask. She lowered her eyelids, the fairness of her lashes stark against her freckled cheeks. He scoured her features still, and the questions which had tormented him all these nights rose with sudden fierceness. Who are you, Aileen? What are you? It had been more than lust he’d felt that night—else he wouldn’t have reeled away and let her go.
Like to be a saint.
She was no saint. She banked too much passion in that skinny body. But she was some sort of enchantress for him to be staring at her in the middle of the bailey whilst his own brother stood still nearby, listening—every soul watching him arguing with this Irish witch who was all angles and bright red hair, all prickles and defiance.
The stable boy tugged a fresh horse into the yard. He seized the reins as the horse tossed its head. She eyed the great beast as if it was some mythical creature, and he remembered she was peasant–born. She’d probably sat on nothing bigger than a plow horse.
She was more afraid of the horse than of him.
She had that all wrong.
He said, “A pity this palfrey is so fierce.” The horse snorted, bared his yellowed teeth, and thrust his muzzle into Rhys’s side with bone–jarring force. “We have no choice but to mount him. All the others are too exhausted from the hunt.” The horse nuzzled an apple out of a pocket inside his cloak, tossed his head, and then neighed in soft thanks as it chewed the apple’s flesh. “I warn you, watch for his hooves,” Rhys continued, as the horse rubbed its snout lovingly against his cloak. “He’s been known to give swift, clean kicks. And to bite, too, if you don’t please him.”
She frowned as the horse made soft noises and bowed its head to be scratched. “For all your mockery, the horse seems tame enough.”
“I’ve got a strong hand upon him.” He drew the reins taut. “But a single sudden move from you will send him bucking.”
“Are all horses so skittish? Or is this one more prickly than the others?”
“The finest breeds are the highest strung.”
She drew herself up and then strode around Rhys to where the lackey kneeled. Clutching the saddle, she cried out as the lackey all but launched her into it. Her seat met the leather with a jar, and then she grasped the saddle as the beast skittered.
Her knuckles whitened.
“He has to get used to the feel of you,” Rhys said, lowering his voice. “To the smell of you.”
He pried her fingers off the edge of the saddle and planted her hand on the pommel. “Foolish, stupid beasts they are, then.”
“A spiritless horse is worth nothing.”
“If I were to have a horse,” she said, keeping an eye on the beast below her, “it would be a Connemara pony, strong–backed and docile.”
“You want a common workhorse.”
“Better than one who bucks out of a simple fear of the unfamiliar.”
“A rare horse that would be.” Rhys swung up behind her as the beast settled. “There’s no greater fear than that of the unknown.”
He thrust his hand under her arm and flared his fingers across her flat belly. Her buttocks slid against his loins.
“Easy.” He spoke into her hair as the horse sidestepped beneath them. “The ride will be easier if you relax.”
Easier for her, yes, but not for him, no, not for him. He kicked his mount and turned it toward the open gate. By God, the woman did have an ounce of flesh upon her, and now it pillowed against him as they rocked in rhythm with his horse. That hair … it smelled like warm heather.
He nudged the horse across the short yard and down the path toward the base of the hill, but the pace gave him no ease. It increased the sway of her stiff back against his chest, the feel of her, bird–boned, ramrod–straight, trying desperately not to press against him. The wind eased in the valley and he brushed his face free of the clinging tendrils of her hair. He caught a strand through his fingers. As bright as new brass and radiating an inner heat.
He flicked it from his hand. Foolish fancy. It was just hair, just a woman’s hair, of a color and texture he’d never seen before Aileen the Red.
The valley opened up to winter grazing grounds flecked with cattle and sheep. Rhys veered his horse west, toward a pass that wound its way around a ridge of slate gray mountains. The birds had long abandoned these slopes, and the boughs of the dense oaks and birch rang with silence. Beneath a sky striped with reedy gray clouds, the land lay brown and black with winter heather, gray with exposed stone.
They rounded a cut in the hill and cantered out into a patch of woodland surrounding a near–perfect circular lake. A peasant woman, kneeling by its edge, upended a basket full of hazelnuts as she stumbled to her feet. At the sight of them the woman’s ruddy face paled to the hue of porridge. With a hiss of a command, she thrust her arms out to a small boy playing with sticks in the mud. The boy glanced up under a flop of bangs, and then darted like a squirrel behind his mother’s skirts. The two stood, frozen like sentinels, as Rhys kicked the horse into a gallop and swept by.
“Aren’t you a haughty lord,” Aileen muttered, as they continued on through the thin forest. “Not even stopping to greet your own people, leaving them standing there as frightened as if they’d seen a ghost.”
“No, not a ghost. Y Tylwyth Teg. The faery folk.” He barked a wry laugh. “I wager the story will reach the homestead before we even return.”
“What story?”
“The story of the black–faced beast.” With a shrug of his shoulder he sent his cloak snapping behind him. “The beast and the flame–haired faery he carried off upon his winged mount near Llyn Dyffryn.”
“So this is Llyn Dyffryn,” The lake lay as still as silver, shattered only by the reflection of yew branches stretching out from the shore. “But it’s as cold and dead as a witch’s heart here. Marged tells me Llyn Dyffryn is a sacred place.”
“There isn’t a lake or a cataract or a crag on all of Wales that doesn’t stink of faery–stories, and Marged knows every last one of them.”
“Something about a man who abducted a faery.” She ducked her head as they swept under an overhanging branch. “He bound her in chains of silver so she couldn’t slip away to her home.”
“Makes the mind reel to think of how that story came about.”
“What do you call the Otherworld—Tír na nÓg?”
“Annwn.”
“Yes, Annwn.” Her tongue tangled in the word. “That faery longed for Annwn so much that she sang a song of sorrow until he was moved to undo the chains.”
“And then he sang a song of sorrow so sweet that she chose to stay.” He snorted. “The moral being to sing for forgiveness after cruelty.”
“Faith, that poor woman by the lake. No wonder she looked as if she’d faint on the spot.”
“I have that effect on women.”
“I think you take pleasure in playing the beast.”
Rhys yanked the reins to one side, leading the horse around a stretch of muddy ground. Yes, woman. I take pleasure in the sight of men turning their faces away, of the flutter of hands as people make the sign of the cross as I pass. There’s such joy in watching children race screaming to burrow their faces in their mothers’ skirts.
“Fighting superstition is as futile as fighting the wind.” Rhys’s knees tightened into the horse’s ribs. “A lesson you should learn.”
“I’ll have none of your lessons, thank you very much. Your people have taken to me well enough.”
“My people don’t know the truth.”
“Your truth is a slippery thing.”
“How long do you think it will be,” he argued, curling his fingers into her
abdomen to press her weight against him, his palms memorizing the curve between her belly and hip, “before they see what I see with my own eyes? How long will it be before they bring you gifts in trembling hands, as if you were a sacred pool nestled in these hills somewhere?”
“You’d have me dancing at midnight by the light of the moon.”
“You should revel in their adoration instead of fighting it.”
“Adoration.” Her voice was husky. So he was not the only one affected. “Such a pretty word for saints.”
“It’s finer than fear, Irish.”
“It’s but a mask for fear. You do know of masks, don’t you?”
He grunted, his breath ruffling her hair. It was a pity she hated him so much. In many ways, they were two of a kind, both outcasts in a world rife with superstition.
He shifted his grip, took hold of a bit of hip. “We have that in common, at least.”
“We’ve not a thing in common,” she retorted, “not a thing. I have no reason to hide behind any mask. Do you really think I spent my days at my home receiving gifts from frightened people and denying the superstitions of the ignorant? Nay. In Inishmaan I’m loved, aye, but not for the reasons you think. I’m adored as the daughter of a good man and a strong woman, as the sister of seven siblings who don’t wage war with me over marriage–portions.”
“You’re a lucky woman.”
She shoved an elbow in his gut as she twisted on the mount. “I left behind an ailing mother, a babe of a sister who’s come to expect a story from me each night, and others. All have long given me up for dead. Such luck as this I can better do without.”
Her back was cold, her thin neck taut and corded where he wanted to lower his head and bite. A strange emotion knotted in his gut. He was well used to being hated. His presence bred it. He’d promised that she’d be well rewarded for her trouble in the end. What was done was done, and there was no going back and changing it. He didn’t have the luxury of regret.
He brooded in silence as he urged the horse through a narrow pass which led to a sliver of a valley. The church was little more than a chapel of rubble–and–stone snugged between the jagged edge of a mountain and the trickle of a stream. A wattle–and–daub hut served as the chaplain’s quarters, surrounded by a stone fence made of lean layers of slate. The chaplain, a stringy man with a ruddy face, emerged from the doorway as they approached.
Rhys yanked his horse to a stop and dismounted. He seized her by the waist and dragged her down off their mount. He set her on her feet as the chaplain approached while she struggled to dislodge her tunic from a loose stud on the saddle. He held her longer than he had to whilst she glared up at him with accusing eyes, whilst he wondered what it was about black robes and the sight of a polished wooden cross that had a man grimacing under the weight of all his sins.
He heard himself say, “I’ll send a message to your family.”
The shock rippled through her frame, like a bolt of lightning through a sapling. He saw the fury that followed it and caught the wrist of her hand before she could slap his face.
She jerked to free her hand. “How cruel can you be?”
“I will do it. That I swear.”
“You’ll be telling my family where I am, too?”
He hesitated. He could not offer that much. “Your family will know that you’re safe.”
“How are you to achieve this miracle, oh great Lord Rhys? Any man you send will be seized by my father and be forced to tell the truth.”
“Money is a powerful thing.”
Rhys knew that money would buy a man willing to travel to Galway to pay someone else to deliver the message. The ‘how’ was easy. The better question was why, and he wasn’t sure he could answer it.
“A simple message,” Rhys warned her. “You are safe. You are in good health. And you shall return in the spring.”
“You expect me to believe you will do this for me?”
A gust of cold mountain air cut between them. Only a fool would expect gratitude from this woman.
“I see no silver chains on these arms.” He loosened his grip on her wrist. For all her snarling wit, she had the fragile bones of a bird. If he held too tightly, he could crush these bones like kindling. “You eat well, you sleep close to a fire, and you grow rich with my people’s gifts. Yet you fight me and fight me, and wear a cloak that would better serve as a sack for oats. You’re an intelligent woman, Irish. Stubbornness will avail you naught. A practical woman would see the prospects winking in her future.”
“We’ve already made a bargain.”
“Then consider my promise a bribe.” He stepped back and shoved her toward the priest waiting nervously just outside his door. “Mayhap my generosity will increase the power of your salves.”
He could only hope it would. Because in all the weeks she’d been here, there had been no change in his condition.
None at all.
***
Aileen sat on the floor of the mead–hall and cracked a branch off the end of a pine bough. A cinnamon–spice scent burst from the wound. She scraped off the resin beading along the bark, and then let it ooze into a bowl. Later, she would coat short wicks in the sticky resin and float them in bowls of oil. Then she’d set them aflame to fill the mead–hall with the fragrance of Christmas.
She called out to a maidservant teetering upon a stool, gripping a braided garland of holly. “Higher,” she said, searched her growing Welsh vocabulary as the girl blinked at her blankly. “Uchel.”
The door swung open and a blast of air swept Aileen’s hair off her shoulders. Marged marched in with another maidservant trailing behind her. The housekeeper made it halfway through the mead–hall before she took note of her surroundings.
Her hands flew to her face. “By God, may the Saints preserve us!”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Aileen uncurled from the pool of her skirts and scraped her sticky hands against one another. She looked at the drape of the plaited spruce boughs upon the walls, the heap of cut greenery in the corner, the waxy ivy twined around the roof–beams, and the bits of holly scattered in the rushes. “I’ll hear nothing about hares to spit or butter to churn or laundry to be boiled today—not until this job is done.”
“Aileen, what have you done?”
“Putting a little life in this place, that’s what I’m doing.”
“By the blood of Christ—”
“Don’t you even think of stopping me.” Tiny spines bit into her palm as she picked up the unbraided tail of the holly to ease the weight for the maidservant lifting it. “The meanest peasant in Graig has his house filled with greenery by now. It’s shameful that this hall remains as bare as a cave. And bad luck as well, you should know it better than any other.”
She braided the holly then glanced over her shoulder to the two men whittling by the fire, their ears cocked to the argument. “You two. Go get that plough, will you? I fear my Welsh is lacking, Marged, for if I understood correctly, the girls were telling me you Welsh have a tradition of placing a plough under the trestle table during the season, and wetting it with ale when you drink.”
“Aileen, you don’t—”
“It’s done, Marged, and that’s that.”
Her palms stung. Still she worked the holly, lengthening the garland until it curled upon the rushes. It was bad enough that not a single bard had drifted to this remote corner of the world in all the time she’d been here. The winter evenings were dreary, sitting by a sputtering fire whilst the wind howled outside with no poet to recite the histories or no bard to pluck a harp. Was Christmas to be no better?
Nay. She couldn’t bear it. With every drift of a snowflake against her skin, every breath of the snapping cold air, every bell rung at Sunday Mass, the memory of Christmases past roared back to her. The blaze of a peat–fire crackling high in the cottage, the spice of fresh–cut greenery. Niall plucking his harp and Cairenn singing sweet as an angel. Ma and Da dancing in bare feet, each of them savoring a precious cup
of the sweetest, most potent honey–mead, and all of them staring curiously at the gifts wrapped in oilcloth piled up in a corner. They all wondered what exotics Da had bartered for over the year with the men on the foreign ships that drifted into Galway Bay. They remembered the fine things of years past, the gray fur, the cask of wine from Aquitaine they’d shared over two weeks, wrinkling their noses as it turned to vinegar, and once, the tang of a strange fruit, one sweet orange orb for each of them. And always the stories, the stories told by the fire whilst they dozed in the warmth of family.
Something hot dripped onto her hand and she realized it was a tear. She unclenched her fingers from the holly garland. Damn the day she’d promised to remain here until spring. How was she to know her gift would fail her? How would she know Christmas would come and she’d still sop his skin with salves that did not a bit of good, still stand in the darkness with that living breathing blaze of a man and hurry through the healing, unnerved by the lack of power in her fingers.
Hiraeth, Dafydd had called it. The ache of homesickness cramped like an empty belly. Three weeks had passed since Rhys had sent one of his men off to Aberffraw in search of a merchant ship to Ireland. Three weeks. Her family may have received Rhys’s promised message by now, if the messenger found a ship quickly, if the weather permitted, if the ship anchored in no other port along the way. She seized the vision in her head of her mother rejoicing at the news and of Da’s silent, stoic relief.
“Nay, Aileen, I can’t have this.” Marged spoke the words loudly enough for her voice to carry to every corner of the room. “Take it all away, I say!”
Aileen glanced up in surprise and then thrust out a hand to prevent the maidservant from descending the stool. “We’ve been at this far too long to be stopping it now.”
“What’s done must be undone, and quickly, quickly.”
Marged seized the girl by the leg. The girl stumbled down off the stool and sent it clattering across the stones.
“You, start on this.” Marged jabbed a finger at a servant winding ivy around a roof beam. “And you, unwind that and set it out to be burned.”
The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) Page 11