All of them had been forced to forgo modesty in stripping off their outer clothing and hanging their garments over makeshift racks that the men had constructed out of fallen branches scavenged from a nearby stand of trees. The clothes-covered racks had the additional benefit of blocking the light of the fire from the view of anyone passing by, though the draped clothing also blocked much of the breeze from getting near the fire, and the little shelter had soon become heavy with smoke. The four of them had slept close together, wrapped in the two blankets that had come from the saddle bag.
Now fully awake, Aine dressed quickly. Even though the hem of her skirt was hopelessly stiff with dried mud, she was more thankful than she could say to be warm and dry. She glanced to where their companions still lay asleep on the floor, acknowledging what she owed to each of them. Then she went to stand beside Christopher. “Did you sleep?”
“William, Huw, and I took turns watching and keeping the fire stoked.” He turned his head to look down at her. “Are your clothes dry?”
“Mostly.” She pulled the cloak closer around her shoulders, knowing the men must have rotated the clothing on the racks to have dried them so evenly, but found the words to thank Christopher for his thoughtfulness sticking in her throat. “James never came back?”
“I didn’t expect him to. He had no real way to find us. I knew it when he left.”
Christopher’s straightforward statement nonplussed her. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I thought—” He stopped for a moment before trying again. “I wasn’t hiding it or protecting you from the truth. I thought you all realized it too.”
“It looked to me as if James intended to return.”
“But he hasn’t.” Again, the matter-of-fact tone of a man who had seen the truth and accepted it without complaint. “Do you know where we are?”
“South of Drumconrath,” she said, and then when he looked at her with narrowed eyes, she added hurriedly, knowing she’d come off as dismissive when she’d meant merely to jest, “I don’t know. I haven’t explored this part of Ireland like my brother has.”
Aine was sorry about that now, but she’d never run with the boys or wanted to. Some of her cousins and companions had been given free reign as girls, but Aine hadn’t ever joined them, not liking twigs in her hair or her dress dirty. When she was six or seven years old, she’d been given her first pair of boots, and every time she’d gone outside, she’d made sure to wipe off any stray blade of grass or dust that marred them. She’d loved those boots.
For most of her life, she’d lived at her family’s seat at Cloughoughter, some distance to the northwest and farther into purely Irish territory. Her family had wrested the castle from the O’Rourkes, who’d been the original builders. In light of that history, Auliffe O’Rourke’s action last night was less of a surprise than it might otherwise have been, and fully explained why Cloughoughter Castle had been built on an island in the middle of a lake.
In fact, given the constant enmity between the two families, she wondered that her father hadn’t been more prepared for attack. The O’Rourkes’ strength had been on the wane since their loss of Cloughoughter, but that should have been all the more reason to remain wary. It was always the cornered dog that was the most dangerous. She could excuse his lapse only in that of late he’d focused on his Saxon enemies, not his Irish ones, and it might never have occurred to him that the O’Rourkes would ally themselves with the Clares to defeat him.
“I was hoping you knew the country better than I did.” Christopher sounded, of all things, sad.
He was a good ten inches taller than she was, so she had to lift her chin to look into his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Besides everything, you mean?” All of a sudden Christopher’s shoulders shook with silent laughter, and he put the back of his hand to his mouth to contain it and not wake his friends. He chuckled to himself while she stood awkwardly beside him, made uncomfortable by his strange amusement and unable to join in because she had no idea what he found so funny.
After another few moments, he put out a hand to her. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude.” Then he gestured towards the hills and valleys before him. “Ireland is beautiful. I didn’t expect it.”
“And you find that amusing?” She shook her head. “A moment ago I thought you were sad.”
Now he took in a breath. “Yes. I am sad, and that’s why I laughed. I do that sometimes when things are awful. I wasn’t laughing at you or at Ireland, but at the situation we’re in. Killing over something so beautiful makes me sad, and if we can’t stop the killing here, it will go on for a thousand years.”
“I—” She paused, realizing that she’d been about to say the wrong thing. He wasn’t really talking about the war. He was talking about himself. “If you’re regretting the life of that man you stabbed at the fort, you had no choice but to do as you did. You know that.”
“There’s always a choice. In that case, the choice was to kill him or to be captured or killed myself. I chose to kill.”
“To save my life too.”
He took in another deep breath. “Yes. I don’t regret the choice. I do regret the need to choose.” He turned fully to her now, no longer looking at the view. “I dream often about Westminster, about crossing here from Avalon and killing Gilbert de Clare. They aren’t good dreams. And now I have another death to dream about.”
The conversation had veered into personal matters and exposed Christopher’s vulnerability in a way that she found disconcerting. But she tried to answer as best she could. “Most men dream as you do,” she said gently. All of a sudden, he seemed very young not to have known this already. “It’s why they drink themselves into a stupor every night. War has always been a part of my life. I was a little girl the first time my father came into the hall and beckoned to me that I should help him remove his armor. I could hardly lift his vest, and it was made of leather, not mail.”
“As you can probably tell, I didn’t grow up with war.” Christopher touched the red dragon on his chest, David’s personal crest. It was another indication of how much higher Christopher’s station was than hers. Perhaps in the king’s household, these thoughts were discussed all the time. David’s intelligence and wisdom were well-known, and while she had joined her countrymen in their admiration of him, before meeting Christopher, she hadn’t had a context for his life.
Having grown up among men for whom killing was as natural as breathing, she couldn’t imagine what it might be like to live with men who both knew how to kill and yet could talk about it the way Christopher did. She had never met anyone who allowed a stranger such as she to see what was in his heart. Among the O’Reillys, men were strong at all times or they were nothing. The only exception would be when they’d drunk too much or allowed themselves to be moved by a ballad sung in the hall of an evening. In the latter instance, they were usually drunk too.
And, given Christopher’s actions today, she didn’t entirely believe that he had as little experience as he claimed. “Is that because there is no war in Avalon?”
Christopher looked at her sideways. “How do you know about Avalon?”
“We all know.” Her brow furrowed in puzzlement. “How could we not know?”
He raised his hands and dropped them in a gesture of surrender, before answering her first question rather than her second. “I’ve always been David’s cousin, but I wasn’t raised as royalty. For a long while my mother pretended that David wasn’t a king at all, but I spent my childhood dreaming of coming here to fight alongside him.”
“And now that you stand at David’s side, is it as you dreamed?”
Christopher guffawed. “No.” Then he tipped his head back and forth, amending his initial denial. “Yes and no. I have learned more about life and about myself than I would have thought possible. But from the first instant I got here, I’ve been in way over my head.”
Aine hadn’t ever heard that turn of phrase before, but she thought she understood wh
at he was saying. “You feel like you’re drowning?”
“Every day.” He was totally sincere.
“I think you shouldn’t say such things about yourself because they aren’t true. I’m alive and in one piece because of you. You did kill a man, but you did save me.”
“That is the one part about all this that I don’t regret, but I’m pretty sure you would have gotten yourself out just fine without me.”
Aine looked away. While she was grateful for his actions and found Christopher’s honor compelling, she found his frankness off-putting. He’d told her more about himself in the few hours she’d known him than most men might say in a lifetime. She wasn’t used to knowing so much about what went on inside a man’s head—and she wasn’t sure she liked knowing.
Christopher cleared his throat, drawing her attention back to him. “I didn’t tell you that your father saw us right before we left the hall.”
“What—what do you mean?”
“Over the heads of the men between us, just for a second, we met each other’s eyes. It wasn’t like he nodded, but I got the message that he was counting on me to get you out. So I did.”
For the first time since they’d escaped from the fort, Aine smiled. Her father was known as a hard man, but she knew that he loved her, and when asked, he’d been known to say that she was his most treasured possession. If he’d died at Clare’s hand last night, he’d gone to his grave knowing that she lived.
“Do you miss it?”
“Miss what?” Christopher said.
“Avalon.”
“I do.” Christopher’s answer came quickly, but then as he looked at her, the lines around his mouth and eyes smoothed, and he appeared less stretched and thin with tension. “But I’m not ready to go back. There’s still too much to learn here.”
“I can teach you Gaelic if you like.”
He smiled that sweet smile of his that she’d seen only a few times. “I didn’t quite mean that, but I’d be happy to learn.”
Then Christopher seemed to shake himself, and his tone became much more straightforward. “We should get moving.” He strode to where William and Huw were sleeping and poked at Huw with the toe of his boot. “Wake up.” When Huw didn’t stir, he bent to shake first him and then William. “Come on. It’s time to go.”
“What? What?” Huw sat up with a start. “Are we in danger?”
“Not seemingly at the moment,” Christopher said.
“Has James returned?” Huw ran his hand through his hair to tame it, his expression serious. Now that she had a chance to look at him by the light of day, he was older than Christopher, into his twenties by the look of his morning beard.
“He has not,” Christopher said shortly.
William rose from the blankets fully dressed, which made sense if he’d taken his turn watching in the night. All he had to do was pull on his boots, which had dried, like their cloaks, before the fire. He looked at Aine intently. “Can you get us to Trim? Or at least headed in the right direction?”
“I will try.”
“Some would say that there is no try.” Christopher picked up the pack and swung it over his shoulder. “But I think that’s all we have any right to ask.”
Chapter Fourteen
Trim Castle
David
“Get in! Get in!” David reached down a hand to his father while his mom grasped the back of Dad’s tunic and Callum pushed up from below. They hauled him in first and then Robbie Bruce, though what he was doing by himself at Trim Castle David didn’t know and couldn’t guess. They fell in turn into the bottom of the boat.
The white rowboat was approximately ten feet long and five feet wide, one of those flat-bottomed boats found everywhere. The iron fittings for the oars were well worn from years of use, but Geoffrey de Geneville had taken care of his domain, and the overlapping strakes that formed the hull didn’t leak. The water that had accumulated in the bottom of the boat was coming entirely from the rain, which continued to fall, and from Robbie’s and Dad’s dripping wet clothes.
The Dane, Magnus, clambered in next, followed by Callum. He hardly needed any assistance, which prompted a sour look and comment from Dad. “You would show me up.”
“It’s because I practice climbing into boats all the time.” Callum pushed back his hair and huffed a breath as he sat beside David on the seat. He picked up one of the oars, as if rowing a boat was something he did every day too , and set to work.
David laughed at their exchange, more relieved than he knew how to express that his father and Callum had gotten out of the castle in one piece. As far as he could tell, neither was wounded either. And whatever their experience had been, it seemed to have solidified the relationship between them. Not that they hadn’t been on good terms before, but Callum was David’s friend and companion and spoke virtually no Welsh. His initial experience in this world had also come in the process of trying to capture David’s mother and father—not perhaps the greatest start to, or foundation for, a friendship.
“What about the rest of our men?” David looked towards the walls. He saw a few heads, but nobody seemed to be following. Nor had anyone launched a boat after them.
“They’re fighting. We had to leave them to it.”
His father leaned forward and put a hand on David’s shoulder. “They weren’t outnumbered.”
David pulled on his oar, feeling cowardly for fleeing. “How did this happen?”
“A portion of the delegates and their retainers ambushed us.” Callum gave a summary of what had gone on in the great hall. “I used five bullets. I have five left.” He briefly set down the oar to check the gun and its clip. Long gone were the days when guns and ammunition weren’t waterproof—as Callum had proved years ago when he’d fallen into the Thames following David’s parents.
“You were right not to shoot more than you had to,” David said.
Dad nodded. “You should know that the insurrection looks to be an alliance of various Irish and Norman forces—and Scottish too, though what role they could be playing in this I can’t say.”
“A lot of things had to go right for them to have achieved so much.” Callum nudged David with his elbow, and they turned the boat towards the river, which fed the moat. Because of the near constant rain, both the moat and the adjacent river were full. Geoffrey had taken advantage of the high water to open the sluice gates that controlled the water level in the moat in order to flush out the castle’s waste, which (as was the case for most castles) was disposed of in the moat. “This is my fault. After France, there’s no excuse for allowing this to happen.”
“You can’t protect yourself completely from allies,” David said. “I trusted Clare implicitly. This is different.”
“This is a dozen lords conspiring together,” Dad said. “You couldn’t know.”
“We shouldn’t have come, not without a better spy network.” Callum shook his head, even as he pulled on the oar in unison beside David.
David tried again. “You brought your gun to the hall, and it was your caution that had Mom and me hiding in the church. It was your foresight that set up the postern gate as a rally point and means of escape.”
They coasted the boat through the open sluice gate and into the main channel of the river. Following the current, they set off downstream, towards Drogheda.
Callum spoke again. “I don’t know enough about the players to tease out the specifics, and I don’t know who is the driving force behind the attack, but it wasn’t the Burghs, Butlers, or Fitzgeralds.”
“What about Theobald de Verdun, William de Bohun’s uncle?” David said.
Callum gave him a rueful look. “He was targeted in the first wave and fell early on.”
“Geoffrey de Geneville is dead too,” Dad said. “This wasn’t his doing.”
“Part of me is relieved to hear that, but—” David shook his head. “I liked him.” The adrenaline that had gotten him this far was starting to ease off, leaving him exhausted. Fortunately, th
ey weren’t pulling against the current, so he didn’t have to do much to keep the boat going in the right direction.
He glanced behind him at his mother, who was sitting beside his father in the bow. Her face was pale, and she was looking weepy. He glanced away, knowing he didn’t have time for emotion, but it was right below the surface for him too. He faced the rear to look at Magnus. As tall as David, as a Dane should be, he was twice as wide as Robbie, who was shivering next to him in the stern of the boat. “How did you escape?”
“I was in the loo.” Then he gave David a wolfish grin. “Nobody but you and your father were interested in hearing what I had to say anyway, so I was taking my time.”
“I guess it was your lucky day,” Callum said.
“Red Comyn is involved,” Robbie blurted out. “Yesterday evening, we watched a dozen ships flying his colors sail up the Boyne River to Drogheda. He was met by John de Tuyt. James and I rode down to the dock and spoke to them. Comyn claimed to be inspecting his wife’s lands here in Ireland.”
David stared at Robbie. “Why am I hearing of this only now?”
Robbie took in a breath. “Because when we got back to where we’d left Christopher guarding the horses, he had disappeared—along with the horses. He’d been abducted by Gilla O’Reilly’s men. We had to go after him.” His look was pleading, begging David to understand. “He got away. Last I saw he was okay.”
Robbie, like many young people in Britain, had adopted okay as the catch-all word it had become in Avalon. Its use had started ten years ago with the arrival of David and Anna, but by now it was everywhere, though David was pretty sure Robbie’s adoption of it was Christopher’s fault.
David would have teased Robbie to put him at his ease, since the story was so preposterous that David couldn’t be angry, but Robbie was too distraught. As the young man had told his story, David had stopped rowing, and with only Callum’s oar in the water, the boat started to go off course. Callum nudged him, and David blinked and began again to row.
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