Upon his entrance, the dozen people on the main floor stopped what they were doing and stared at Christopher. One man, who’d been leaning against one of the posts that supported the loft, straightened and took a step forward. As he did so, everybody else seemed to fall back slightly. The man had red-brown curly hair and blue eyes, looked to be about Callum’s age, and was dressed in what even Christopher could tell was an expensive blue tunic that exactly matched the color of his eyes. It made him stand out among his men, most of whom wore one shade or another of yellow.
“I am Gilla O’Reilly,” the man said in accented English. “You are Christopher, David’s cousin, yes?”
Up until that moment, Christopher hadn’t decided whether or not to confess to who he was. If he admitted that he was David’s cousin, they could use him as leverage against David, but if he lied, they might kill him because they’d abducted the wrong man, and he was useless to them. So Christopher gave in to his instinct to tell the truth. “Yes.”
Gilla swept out a hand and said something in Gaelic to the onlookers, laughing as he did so. The other men in the room laughed too, and several women came to stand on the balcony and look down upon them. Maybe that’s where they were banished to while the men talked. Though, judging from the small children in sleeping gowns who were rubbing their eyes beside their mothers, it might just be that people slept up there.
Gilla gave a last chuckle, pulled out the knife he kept at his waist, and came closer. He held the blade point down as if he intended to stab Christopher, but like the man who’d cut the rope around Christopher’s feet, all Gilla did was slice though the bonds that held his wrists.
“Come. The man who killed Gilbert de Clare is welcome in my home. I will drink with the Hero of Westminster.”
Chapter Six
Beyond the Pale
Christopher
Christopher groaned inwardly, but he didn’t contradict Gilla, since being the Hero of Westminster appeared to be the only reason he wasn’t spending the night in a cell.
Gilla swung his arm in a sweeping arc, which seemed to imply that everyone was included in the invitation. Several of the women and children came down from the loft, and all of the men, including those who’d abducted Christopher, found seats either at the table or on benches or stools around the fire, chattering all the while in Gaelic.
A servant came up to Christopher and took his cloak to hang before the fire. He also shed his mail vest and underpadding and was given an undershirt and tunic like the other men in the hall were wearing. Christopher kept his pants, which were mostly dry, and his boots.
Gilla, meanwhile, put a hand at the back of Christopher’s neck and guided him to a bench next to a teenage girl, who twisted in her seat to look up at him. She had red hair the same color as Christopher’s own, green eyes, and a spray of freckles across her nose—and looked so much like an older version of his little sister that he just stared at her and had no idea what to say. She stared back at him too, and it occurred to him that if she looked like his sister, then he might look like her brother. And maybe that was another reason Gilla had cut his bonds.
Gilla spoke to her in Gaelic, and though she replied to him in the same language, her eyes remained fixed on Christopher. As Gilla said something else, for a second she had the same look Christopher’s mother always got when she was irritated, but then she nodded. Gilla patted her shoulder before moving to the head of the table, a good eight seats away. For a few seconds, Christopher had thought he was going to be the guest of honor, and he was relieved not to be interrogated by Gilla right away.
The girl, meanwhile, eyed him warily, and scooted over on the bench a bit more than necessary to make room for Christopher to sit down beside her. Though she could be anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years old, now that he was looking right at her, he thought she might actually be close in age to him.
Pretending to be relaxed, though that was the last thing he was feeling, he smiled. That seemed to make the girl even more worried, because her eyes widened for a second, and Christopher’s smile became a little fixed. But then she pressed her lips together in an almost-smile and grew much more business-like. She poured wine into a cup and set it between them, indicating that they would share it, and pulled a trencher from the stack in the center of the table. Setting it in front of the cup, she started piling food on it. Christopher had thought from the start that trenchers were the kind of thing that should have caught on a long time ago in Avalon among people worried about the environment. After a meal, you didn’t have to throw them away like paper plates or use any water washing them. Instead, you could eat them, give them to an animal, or compost them.
Right now he was looking at roasted mutton, onions, some other vegetables he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like, and three tiny potatoes. Potatoes had been introduced to this world a few years ago from Avalon (of course), and since the first crop had come in, every lord who crossed David’s threshold came away with a bag of potatoes, having been told to plant them. They’d obviously made it to Ireland, but too recently to be as common as they already were in England.
The food was a great distraction, and it meant that Christopher didn’t have to look directly at the girl. Finally, she broke the silence. “Don’t be afraid of my father.”
He almost laughed. That Gilla was this girl’s father explained a lot. She spoke perfect English with just a hint of lilt that reminded Christopher of how Lili, David’s wife, talked, though Lili’s accent came from Welsh. “I gather your father makes a habit of abducting cousins of the King of England?” Christopher was trying really hard to sound sophisticated—or like David might—and he thought the wording had come off just as he intended.
It really might have too, because, for the first time, the girl looked at him—really looked at him—and with less derision than interest. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re so calm about me being here.”
She bobbed her head. “Himself didn’t abduct you. They did.” She gestured across the table to where some of his captors were sitting. One of them was the man who spoke English, and he raised his eyebrows at the girl, since it seemed he had overheard.
Christopher frowned, understanding by context that the girl was referring to her father when she said Himself. He shook his head. “They’re his men. They were acting on his orders.”
“Maybe.” She glanced at him. “Are you responsible for the actions of every one of your men? Is David responsible for yours?”
“Touché.” Christopher didn’t have any men, but he didn’t think right now was a good time to say so, especially since he felt like he’d been holding up his end of the conversation really well so far.
The girl laughed unexpectedly. “What do you mean by that?” But before he could answer, she added, “I’m Aine, by the way.” She pronounced the name ‘awn-yeh’.
“Christopher.” He held out his hand to her, thinking they would shake.
“So I understand.” She looked at his hand, still laughing and clearly puzzled, but when he didn’t lower his hand, she touched her fingers quickly to his. Then she looked at him curiously. “Aren’t you going to answer?”
Christopher stared at her, confused. Then he remembered that she had wanted to know why he’d said touché. Before his French lessons had begun, it had been pretty much the only French word he’d known, though he and his friends had used it all the time. “It comes from sword practice,” he said, deciding instantly that fencing would be another word she wouldn’t know. “If one fighter touches another’s body with the weapon, that’s a point or a score, and you’re supposed to say, touché!”
Aine gave him a dark look. “So you said it to me because you scored a point?”
“No, because you did.”
That seemed to please her, because she looked down at the trencher with a smile hovering around her lips. She still looked a ton like his sister, but she was pretty, and he hadn’t spent so much time with pretty girls lately that
he wasn’t happy to please this one or keep her talking to him.
He tipped his head and worked on channeling David again. “You said that I don’t need to fear your father. Given that I’m here against my will, why would you say that?”
She shrugged. “If Himself was going to have you killed, he wouldn’t have let you sit at his table.”
“Because of the Irish rule of hospitality?”
She laughed again. “No, because it would be a waste of good food.”
Christopher stared at her. Even with the laughter, he was having trouble figuring out whether or not she was joking.
Once again, she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and when she noticed the concerned look on his face, she smiled, put down the spoon, and turned directly to him. “If my father was going to kill you, he wouldn’t have had you sit by me.”
Christopher looked away from her to stare at the food she’d loaded on the trencher. He was feeling even more queasy now and didn’t want any of it, but he stabbed at a piece of mutton anyway to cover his uncertainty. The conversation continued to swirl around him, a confused mash of Gaelic, and he chewed and forced himself to swallow. Unfortunately, by looking away and eating, he’d killed the conversation, so after a minute, he decided that he should be the one to try again. “If your father didn’t order his men to abduct me, why did they? What did they hope to gain?”
Aine frowned. “Do you hold yourself so cheaply?”
Christopher opened his mouth to reply, thinking to say of course not, but then he thought better of it. He didn’t feel like exchanging any more barbs with this girl. “Are you saying that your father will want a ransom for me? This is about gold?”
She gave a brief shake of her head. “I—” She pressed her lips together, perhaps thinking better of her frankness.
“Or are you saying that I’m here so your father can make King David do something he doesn’t want to do?” That was Christopher’s worst case scenario, but the one he’d assumed was true from the start.
Aine scoffed. “David wouldn’t.”
That was an odd response. She should have been defending her father’s honor, not David’s. “I know that, but why do you?”
“We—” She stopped again, her face flushing. Then she took a sip of wine, swallowed, set down her cup, and cleared her throat before answering. Her color had cooled a bit by then. He couldn’t figure out why she would be embarrassed until she said somewhat stiffly, “David is an honorable man.”
Christopher paused, noting how she again had said David’s name without including his title. He’d noticed people doing that since he’d been in Ireland. And yet, it didn’t seem to be out of disrespect. More, it implied that they knew him so well that they didn’t need to clarify who he was by calling him King David or Lord David. He was just David, because there was only one.
“Yes, he is.” He considered mentioning that David was married, but thought maybe changing the subject was a better idea. “Aren’t we on Geoffrey of Geneville’s lands?”
“Oh no.” She shook her head. “Not here.”
That didn’t do anything to help Christopher’s understanding, but he was glad he’d gotten her to speak straightforwardly again about something.
“Then where are we?” The clearing where he’d been captured was on a ridge north of the Boyne River. Admittedly he didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, but it wasn’t as if they could have thrown him in the back of a car and driven for an hour.
“East Breifne.”
Again, that wasn’t helpful, but Christopher nodded knowingly and took a stab at his location. “That’s west of Drogheda?”
“Northwest.” Aine had been taking a drink from their shared cup, and she swallowed and put it down. “Twenty miles. The closest village is Drumconrath.”
Christopher let out a breath. A horse could easily canter ten miles an hour but couldn’t maintain that pace for two hours. It had been growing dark when he’d been captured, roughly five o’clock in the evening, and his internal clock told him that it was past nine now. That made sense. Even if the company had been mounted, with him thrown over his horse’s withers, upside down and unconscious, it could have taken them more than four hours to go the twenty miles they’d had to ride.
Mostly, people here kept track of time by the position of the sun and went to bed at night when they were tired. They slept a lot in winter and less in summer. With the spring equinox coming up, night and day were getting near to even. While time and counting time didn’t mean the same thing to medieval people as it did to him, it still took the same amount of time to ride from point A to point B here as in Avalon. It also meant that the people in the hall were awake kind of late. Maybe they’d been waiting for the company to return.
“What’s your father going to do with me now that I’m here? What did he say when I came in that made everyone laugh?”
“Are you afraid they were laughing at you? I assure you they weren’t. He merely explained that a man sprung from such ancient roots deserves the benefit of the doubt.”
“Ancient root?”
“From the line of Mac Ecra, the man you call Arthur.” She leaned into him and lowered her voice. “I confess I wasn’t entirely truthful with you before. My father also said that he founding having you here useful because he could learn more of David by observing you.”
Christopher looked down at his food. “So in that sense, David is responsible for the behavior of his men—or at least will be judged by it.” He was beginning to understand why David hated the legend that had grown up around him. They created an impossible ideal in people’s minds, which could never be lived up to.
Aine looked at him again, half-laughing. “Isn’t it enough to know that you’ll live, Hero of Westminster?”
Out of nowhere, the rage that had been building inside Christopher for the last nine months threatened to overwhelm him. He was tired of being useless and mistaken for a killer. His hands clenched into fists and his jaw tightened, which was the only way to hold back the seventeen angry replies that clogged his throat.
To be captured and helpless—and the object of this girl’s amusement, even if it wasn’t malicious—was one straw too many. Since he’d come to the Middle Ages, he’d pretty much done what he’d been told. He’d learned a lot, but he’d been dragged from France to England to Wales and to Ireland in David’s shadow, all the while being known solely for the death of a man he’d killed by accident in the first seconds of being here.
Aine must have sensed the change in him because she stopped picking at her food and looked at him closely, without the half-mocking smiles she’d been directing at him up until now. She put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. No, it isn’t enough, and it wouldn’t be for me either.”
Christopher took in a shaky breath and let it out.
Then Aine added, “Please don’t try to fight my father’s men. You have no weapons, and you cannot win.”
“It might be worth it to try.” It was a bravado reply, but he’d spoken it through gritted teeth and without managing yet to clear the anger from his face. He really did know better than to fight or to try to escape from a hall with thirty armed men looking on, but Aine didn’t know that.
Looking worried—even a bit like she’d suddenly found herself next to a rabid dog, Aine glanced towards Gilla, who was sitting at the head of the long table. He’d been talking continually to his men, but for the first time that Christopher had noticed, Gilla looked steadily down the table at him. Then he nodded, which prompted Aine to grip Christopher’s wrist. “You can have your answer if you want it. Himself is ready to speak to you.”
Christopher pressed his lips together, not trusting himself to say anything, and stood. Aine came with him, still holding his wrist, which felt odd. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have wrenched himself away, but it wasn’t like she was holding his hand either. Maybe wrist-holding meant something to the Irish culturally—or maybe she thought by holding on to him, she could pr
event him from leaping at Gilla and biting his neck.
The thought actually made Christopher laugh inside, and he relaxed a little. Objectively, the day had gone downhill from the moment they’d spied Comyn’s men sailing up the Boyne River. Ending the day in a cell would pretty much round things out perfectly.
At Christopher’s and Aine’s approach, Gilla scooted back his chair so it was kitty-corner to the table. He waved a hand, and the two men who’d been sitting closest to him on either side of the table stood up and left. One went out the main door, and the other took Christopher’s seat farther down the table.
“Sit.” It was an order, and Christopher didn’t feel as if he was in a position to disobey—or had a good reason to. He sat in the chair Gilla indicated, and Aine let go of his wrist to sit opposite him, somewhat behind her father, since Gilla had turned his chair towards Christopher’s side of the table.
“My men tell me that they captured you at Drogheda. What were you doing there?”
Again, Christopher wracked his brains for a reason not to answer truthfully and didn’t come up with anything. “Watching Red Comyn sail his ships up the Boyne.”
Gilla’s mouth fell open slightly, and he turned to speak in Gaelic to Aine. She nodded and answered. Gilla looked back to Christopher. “My men have been scouting the area for weeks. We’ve known John de Tuyt has been up to something, but our spies have not been able to discover what.” His eyes narrowed. “They didn’t say anything about Red Comyn.”
Christopher was pleased that he’d hit a home run at his first at bat. “Maybe they should have been paying better attention to the dozen ships at Drogheda’s dock instead of abducting me.” He knew he was coming off as belligerent, but he couldn’t help it. He was angry—at himself for getting captured and Gilla’s men for doing the capturing. “What in particular have you seen Tuyt doing?”
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