by Ann Vremont
She sat up and reached for her clothing. “What is it?” she asked.
“Raids,” he answered. “More than half a dozen in the last few hours.”
“Was anyone—” she began but he cut her short with an ominous look that told her she would rather not hear the answer. The heat of the Bloodstone bore against her chest like acid on sheet metal. Again, she heard screams, but this time it was the wailing of women greeting the dead and dying that Cenn’s soldiers had carted from the surrounding settlements.
“I must leave you for a short time, Aideen,” Cenn said as he slipped his cloak on. “A counterattack must be coordinated, we have to flush these demons from the darkness.” His gaze fell on the Bloodstone’s pouch and his expression hardened. “When I get back, we must talk…” he faltered as he contemplated what he was about to ask of a woman. “I would not ask you…”
“You do not need to ask me,” Aideen assured him. “I could not bear for you to go without me.”
Cenn embraced Aideen and covered her mouth in a kiss that promised to remain with her for an eternity. When he finally broke from her, he swore a quick return. Aideen put the bar on the door after he left and rummaged through his clothing for pants and sturdier footwear. She could ride a horse but she had no intention of doing so in a chiton. All the pants were overlarge and trying to cinch them with a sash did no good. In frustration, she put the woolen dress back on and sat in front of the fire. Another premonitory prickling of the scalp, this time of Cenn injured, his blood mixing with the muddy soil of the marsh, seized her and she fell to the floor.
When she recovered from her faint, Aideen grabbed a cloak and left the room. She half-expected to see a guard outside the door but no one was there. She followed the winding staircase down to where it split into two separate staircases. One would lead her toward the hall, the other, according to the maid who had escorted her to the ceremony, to the kitchens. She started down the stairs to the kitchens and was met by the same maid.
“My lady,” the girl gasped as she encountered Aideen on the narrow steps. “I was coming up to see if you needed anything.”
“I do,” Aideen answered and took the girl by the elbow. “I…” she paused when she realized she did not know the girl’s name. “What is your name?”
“Niamh,” the maid said. Her answer matched the low tones with which Aideen had asked the question. “Is something the matter?”
“I need a book,” Aideen answered. Niamh provided her with a blank stare and Aideen searched her mind for an explanation. She mimicked leafing through the pages of a book. “Sheets of blank lambskin with leather binding,” she said. The image of Cenn’s book filled her mind and she pulled Niamh closer until her lips were pressed against the girl’s ears. “But red leather.”
Something familiar gleamed in the girl’s eyes. “Is it a secret?”
“Yes,” Aideen answered and clutched at the sleeve of Niamh’s dress. “Please, do you know where I can find such a book?”
Niamh looked up and down the staircase before she nodded her head slowly. “I do, my lady, but I am not supposed to go to that part of the cashel,” she whispered. “No one is.”
Despite the girl’s air of reluctance, Aideen knew Niamh would not refuse her. “But it is the prohibition of Lord Crom that stays you?” Aideen asked. Niamh answered with a slow, affirmative nod of her head. Encouraged, Aideen pressed on. “But I am his wife. He does not intend, I assure you, to deny me access.”
A conspiratorial smile played at the corners of Niamh’s mouth and she took a step back down the staircase. Aideen hesitated but the girl motioned her to follow. As they reached the bottom of the steps, Niamh flattened her body against the staircase wall and stopped. She inched her head around the corner and made sure that the short bridge of kitchen floor between their staircase and the opposing one was not being observed.
“Run!” Niamh whispered urgently and bounded across the floor and up the other set of stairs.
Aideen dashed across the opening and silently raced up the staircase to reach Niamh. The staircase split, one branch climbing higher, the other descending into darkness. Niamh took the path to the right, leading Aideen deeper into the cashel’s bowels. With the cashel’s scarcity of wood, Aideen was surprised to see the occasional torches that lit their way, offering welcomed patches of light between stretches of inky black. When they reached the last of the torches, Niamh took it from its sconce and grabbed Aideen’s hand.
“This way, Lady.”
The passage that Niamh led Aideen down ended in a stone wall.
“What is the meaning of this, Niamh?” Aideen asked. “I do not have time for tricks.”
“Patience, my lady,” Niamh said and handed the torch to Aideen. “A wall is not always a wall.”
“No, sometimes it is a banana,” Aideen nervously quipped as she watched Niamh shove against the door with all her weight. The Bloodstone’s heat, already at the point of being unbearable, seemed to burn more fiercely against her skin.
Niamh responded with a confused frown and an impatient jerk of her head in the direction of the wall. “Help me push, my lady.”
Aideen added her weight to Niamh’s efforts and they were able to coax the wall forward a fraction less than a half-meter. Niamh took the torch and slid through the narrow opening first. Feeling the darkness pressing in on her, Aideen quickly followed behind the maid. Once past the wall, she found Niamh standing in the middle of a chamber. The light from the torch coldly glittered in the girl’s dark eyes.
“Niamh,” she said, her voice growing alarmed. “How is it that you know about this passage?”
“I showed it to her.”
The voice that answered was followed quickly by the sound of a sharp blow to the back of Aideen’s head. She stumbled forward an instant before falling to the ground. There was a vicious pull against her throat as the pouch was ripped from her neck. Sidestepping Aideen’s outstretched arms, her attacker took the torch from Niamh and bent down. Dhonn’s face, contorted in triumph, shifted in and out of focus.
Dhonn looked up at his newest protégé and smiled. “How did you get her down here so quickly?”
“She was desperate to find some bound lambskin,” Niamh answered dully. “It was easy, really.”
“You…you are supposed…” Aideen struggled to find the words but her brain seemed to be pounding against the back of her skull. Warm blood oozed through her hair and she stopped straining to look at Dhonn. She rested her head against the cool flagstone, the torch’s feeble light all but gone from her dimming vision.
“I am supposed to be in my rooms,” Dhonn agreed. “Guarded night and day.” He gestured in the direction of the small passage Niamh and Aideen had created. “One of many, my dear chit.”
“Tell me.” Aideen’s words, muffled by her impending unconsciousness, were lost against the stone floor.
Dhonn bent closer to her and cocked an ear in her direction. “What was that?”
Aideen’s fingers inched across the floor but he caught her intent and raised the pouch above his head.
“No, Lady,” Dhonn laughed as he waved the pouch in the air. “I cannot risk your touching the Bloodstone, can I?”
Aideen pulled in a deep breath of air and forced the partial accusation past her lips. “From the beginning…”
Dhonn smiled down at Aideen. That he was supremely confident in his victory was evident in his voice when he answered her. “Yes, Etain, from the beginning. I have plotted to take first the seat of power Crom holds and then to spread my glory and rule throughout the five provinces, and I have an army of demons with which to conquer. Yes, from the beginning I have planned this, and here we are, very near to the end.”
“No,” she said and struggled to rise.
“You sound so sure,” Dhonn mused and forced her back down with a rough push against the middle of her back. “Why is that?”
“I know something you do not.”
“You know several somethings that
I do not know,” he grunted and stood. “But I intend to pull them from you one way or another, starting with Crom’s true name.”
Dhonn placed the Bloodstone’s pouch around his neck and handed the torch to Niamh. From his pocket, he pulled an umbrella-shaped dagger. Aideen noticed with detached appreciation that the center blade was surrounded by three hinged blades that pointed toward the knife’s hilt. To make sure she understood the dagger’s purpose, Dhonn unfolded the three secondary blades and made a withdrawing motion.
“A rather pleasant toy,” he said. “Provided you are on the right end of the blade.”
Fear pushed aside the pain that threatened to wrap Aideen in darkness. Her pupils dilated until no trace of the mossy green irises remained. In the dim light, she tried to focus on the pouch and calculated her chances of success should she make a desperate grab at it. Dhonn backed away from her. His hand clutched at his chest and she could see smoke rising from the fabric of his overshirt. In the distance, she could hear someone calling her name. But the voice was too far. She didn’t dare shift her attention from the stone.
Dhonn slapped at his chest with his free hand. His own pupils widened in fear as he heard the voice and recognized its owner. Light filled the room as men pushed the stone inward and entered the hidden chamber. Aideen realized the voice that called her name belonged to Cenn. Her gaze broke from the Bloodstone’s pouch just in time to see the forward thrust of Dhonn’s arm as he stabbed the vicious dagger into Cenn’s chest. A spell, ancient and terrible, parted the flesh, pushed past the ribcage and buried the blade in Cenn’s heart. The words were cast in reverse as he pulled his arm back, Cenn’s heart trapped in the vicious dagger’s claw.
“No!”
The scream that ripped from Aideen’s throat carried a maelstrom of liquid fire with it. Dhonn’s flesh ignited at her cry and he fell to the floor to quell the flames even as the heat peeled the skin from his face. The heat evaporated the leather pouch that hung from his neck and Aideen reached through the fire engulfing him to snatch the Bloodstone. New energy and purpose pulsed through her at the stone’s touch. Her hand began to glow bright red, like when she would hold a powerful flashlight to it as a child. The stone whispered its true name to her in a long forgotten language. It was the Stag’s Heart, grantor of life and death, keeper of eternity.
With the power of the stone pounding in her hand, she turned to Cenn’s fallen form. She could read his final feelings on the death mask into which his face had frozen. Determination, surprise, regret, all spoke to her in an equal voice. She knelt down, her hand delving into his parted chest. She reached the hollow where his heart should have been beating and she released the Bloodstone. Cenn’s flesh grabbed at her hand as the Bloodstone began to close the wound. The stone encased itself in new tissue and tapped its steady rhythm against the broken ribs and rent muscle. Slowly, the blue pallor of death receded from him and he drew a choking breath of air into his lungs.
The men who had rushed into the room with him backed slowly from their revived leader. The word unnatural mingled interchangeably with miracle as they looked to one another for confirmation of what had just happened.
“Aideen?” The words came out in a harsh croak. One hand fluttered against his chest and he looked at her.
“Rest,” she coaxed. “I will get some men to carry you to our rooms.”
“I cannot. I must prepare the soldiers,” he argued and struggled to sit up. He saw that she didn’t understand and he grabbed her by the shoulders. “Do you not hear them?” he asked frantically. “The drums…listen to them beating!”
“It is just the Bloodstone, no more than that,” she tried to assure him. “You must learn its rhythm.”
“No,” he protested with a vigorous shake of his head. “They are beating…the war drums are beating. It has begun.”
Chapter Nine
The war drums were beating. Their heavy menace pounded through the air for seven days. The noise was incessant, the drummers untiring. Search parties went out but the sound seemed to come from every quarter of the earth. The enemy’s location went undiscovered and the cashel’s occupants were left with the grim realization that the enemy sought first to destroy their spirit and weaken their minds before it turned its attention to their flesh.
During the week, Cenn spent most of his time in a makeshift war room planning for the cashel’s defenses. When Aideen was able to coax him back to their room, he was forced to sit down at the table with a new red leather-bound diary.
“Woman,” he said, irritation oozing from every pore. “There are better things to be doing with our time alone. The drums could stop at any moment.”
Aideen put her hand to his chest where the Bloodstone’s rhythm had become Cenn’s own heartbeat. She closed her eyes and listened with her mind. She shook her head. “Not yet. They will not stop yet and no attack will come until after there is silence,” she assured him. “And you are almost to the end.”
“I do not remember what comes next,” he said.
As she had done several times during the week, Aideen moved behind him. Her stomach pressed against his back and her arms rested over his shoulders so that her hands covered the center of his chest. “Listen to the stone,” she commanded. “It remembers everything.”
Cenn blinked against the memory then began to write the closing paragraph of his diary.
Exhausted, I swore I would not seek the sorceress again until I had further rested, but her body calls to me. And so I dared to summon her again tonight. Ah, sweet temptation. She drives all thought of the Bloodstone from my mind although she holds it to her as she dares to command me. She stood before a silver bowl, smoke dancing against her pale white skin. Pink nipples erect and begging to be suckled. A golden triangle pointing down to paradise. My tongue grows thick at the thought of tasting the sweet nectar that flows from between her legs. I swear I will have her and the stone.
“I still do not understand how you came by my diary or the condition to which it had degenerated in the space of a few days or why I must recreate it,” he said, repeating the question he had asked her more than a dozen times since the drums began.
As she had on the other occasions, she hesitated while she considered how much, if anything, she could tell him. She understood the paradox of the diary that had helped bring her to Cenn having been destroyed. She knew, too, his fate and her own. Both were approaching with a dismaying speed, Cenn’s slightly faster than her own. Her hand moved from his body to briefly caress her stomach. The fate of the child after her time in Kenmare ended remained unclear, but she would have nine months to plan for its care and to plan for the day the Bloodstone would return to her. Already, she was filling the pages of her own diary, a book of magic and ceremony to protect her descendants through the centuries until the circle was complete.
“You said that we are bound for eternity,” she answered once again. “This will make it so.”
“That is not enough of an answer, Aideen,” he said and turned to her. He pulled her onto his lap and hugged her to him. “Why does the stone not speak to me as it spoke to you? Why does it only offer you mumbled half-answers?”
Aideen shrugged her shoulders and buried her face against his chest. Half of what she wrote in her own diary made no sense to her, her hand guided by another. Pushing despair aside, she breathed in the intoxicating odor of wool and heather and his distinct masculinity. “Perhaps because answers will not help against the inevitable.”
She felt him tense beneath her and she cupped his face, covered it with calming kisses. “Do not worry, love, the power the Bloodstone has granted you will carry the battle. Do not doubt this.”
Cenn responded with a worried grin that turned suggestive. He pointed to the diary on the center of the table. “The book is complete, woman,” he said and redirected his outstretched finger toward the mattress. “Now, do you not think that I deserve a reward for my efforts?”
Cenn carried Aideen to the bed. With reverent fingers, th
ey undressed one another. Their bodies twined together in a slow, luxurious series of caresses, thrusts and kisses. No haste corrupted their love and they touched one another as if all of time extended before them. When at last they surrendered to sleep, they did so in one another’s arms. And sometime in the middle of the night, as Fate—her heart flooded with regret—looked down on the lovers, the drums stopped beating.
BOOK 3: NEW BLOOD
Chapter One
Aideen opened her eyes to find herself in the small storeroom of her antiques shop. Images of the Bloodstone’s vision still flitted before her and she flung the stone from her. Not images, she told herself and looked at the diary on the worktable, hallucinations. Like the mold in King Tut’s tomb that killed everyone.
Still, Aideen could not escape what she had witnessed through the night. She saw herself sitting in the cashel’s hall. The sun, so long absent from Kenmare, poured brightly through the shuttered windows. The doors were thrown open and the men streamed in, bodies on litters trailing behind them instead of the fog that had so often insinuated itself in their footsteps. She felt her heart breaking as one of the litters was placed before her. Aideen had known that the Bloodstone would abandon Cenn once victory was assured but the horror of its infidelity came crashing down on her as she saw the headless body. She put her hand on his chest and felt that the Bloodstone, too, was at rest. She looked around and observed that no bodies of the enemy had been dragged into the hall. Those soldiers who had survived the battle shuddered and jerked as they described otherworldly warriors that had vanished or self-destructed in the returning daylight.