by Kris Kennedy
“Break it up,” one voice broke through the mêlée. Balffe, the huge captain of the guard, waded through the mess evident at the top of the tower and stared over the wall. “Christ Almighty, Molyneux, you’ve killed him dead.” He looked back up and glared at the perpetrator. Hairy forearms folded over his chest as he waited for the pathetic explanation.
His patience was not tested. “He lost the wager and wouldn’t pay up.” The murderer’s voice lifted and fell unevenly, clear evidence of his overindulgence.
“And you’ve got more balls than wits or not enough of either, and I’ll not be paying for it. Go get him,” Balffe ordered, unfolding his beefy arms and striding forward, a mountain in motion.
“What?” The guard hooted and staggered backward out of the captain’s reach. “And be made into mutton by the Irish who stalk the castle walls?”
“Which would make you a sheep, you bastard.” The mountain took a step closer. “I don’t care if the godforsaken Saracens have left the Holy Lands and landed in Ireland.” He took another step forward. “I don’t care of they’re sharpening their scimitars and grinning at you, you rotting piece of dung—you’re going out there.”
Grabbing the man’s gambeson and mail covering between his thick fingers, Balffe hauled him up to eye level, a not average feat of strength. “You drag his body back inside, now, or I’ll hang you by your balls.” He flung the hapless guard down and pointed to several others. “You, and you, and you,” he ordered, “go with him.”
Muted curses followed the reluctant volunteers down the winding staircase.
“Come,” Finian whispered in her ear.
He gripped her wrist and tugged her to hover in the shadows by the crenellated barbican tower as the monstrous portcullis was raised. Creaking chains sounded and a dog barked. The men hauling the gate up grumbled contentiously—night duty was supposed to carry its own rewards, most notably an absence of tasks requiring attention.
The iron grate was finally high enough for the four men to pass under it and over the lowered wooden draw. What with their grumbling and cursing, and the gory interest in their morbid task from those above, neither the soldiers nor the watchers from atop the tower noticed the two hunched and hooded figures who glided out behind them. Nor did they espy the shadowy shapes as they turned away and dropped into a dry but remarkably noisome defensive ditch.
Senna felt Finian’s hand on the back of her head, pushing her down the side of the drop-off. She fell flat on her stomach. He dropped on top, covering her body with his.
“Hummphh,” she groaned as all the air was pressed out of her.
“Silence,” came his hissed reply.
“I can be nothing but, as you are lying on top of me—”
His hand snaked under her, sliding over parts of her body in the most startling ways, and came up by her mouth, which he overlaid with a broad palm.
She lay quietly as, above them, the soldiers grumbled in their efforts to retrieve the dead man. Grasping an extremity in hand, the foursome carted the mangled body over the draw and into the castle. The creak of heavy chains sounded again, and the barred gate clanged back into place. Silence descended.
“Up. Now, before their attention turns back.” Finian knelt between her legs and looked down at her flattened body, half submerged in the dirt. He pulled her out and turned her over.
Her face was covered with a fine film of dirt, her nose and cheeks red and creased. She was so covered with grime that the front of her tunic was barely distinguishable from the ground beneath her.
“That was close,” she whispered.
Finian held out his hand to help her rise. “Quite.”
He stood beneath, pushing her up over the side of the ditch. She finally curled her body over the lip. “Next time, all I ask is that I be on top.”
Finian, with one thigh thrown over the top, his arms flexed to support his weight, froze. An enormous grin spread over his features as he hauled himself up.
“As ye wish it, angel.”
Their hunched figures were but small, dark spots on the darker landscape as they crawled away from the castle. Finian led her to the edge of the road and they sped away into the night, disappearing into the vast Irish wildside.
Chapter 12
They halted briefly an hour later beside a wide, rushing stream, a tributary of a larger, more riotous river flowing some fifty steps away, behind a long, narrow copse of trees.
Finian knelt at the water’s edge and adjusted his tunic. His arms burned from the effort of lifting them overhead. By chance, his eye caught Senna. She was staring, her lips slightly parted.
“Ye might want to turn away, lass,” he suggested quietly.
She spun so quickly her braid lifted in the air, then thumped against her back. The curls poking out at the bottom bounced in small, ruddy ringlets at the dip of her spine. He looked at them a moment, then turned back to the river.
“I’ll need but a trice.”
“Take all the time you need. And I’ve seen men before,” she added sharply.
“Umm.”
He tore off his léine, the traditional knee-length tunic, and tossed it over the boulder beside him, then waded into the frigid stream. Kneeling, he gave his body a rough but thorough scrub with the small, sand-like pebbles that covered the riverbed, washing away the stink of the prisons. His skin rippled prickly-hot at the freezing temperatures, and he dunked his head under the water. Coming up again, he shook himself like a dog, spraying water droplets. With the palm of his hand, he flipped his hair off his forehead and turned.
A tunic and pair of leggings came sailing over and landed on his face. He dragged them off. Senna’s back was still conspicuously toward the river, as if she were aiming it at him. But her head was turned in his direction slightly, so that her chin sat on her shoulder.
“You’ll want something clean and English-looking to put on,” she mumbled.
“My thanks.”
“And in any event, I didn’t have one of”—her hand waved vaguely in the direction of his hips—“those.”
Even from this distance, even through the moonlight, he could see her cheeks flush pink. And he did not have to see anything at all to know this was due the fact she was not fully turned away. She’d been watching him.
He pulled the tunic over his head. Once his leggings were on and laced, she turned. Her gaze didn’t quite meet his.
“Are we quite ready?” she asked in an imperious voice.
“I am ever ready, Senna. Why don’t you take off yer skirts?”
Her jaw dropped. Everything about her shone in the moonlight. Her bright, wide eyes, her lower lip, now wet as her tongue slipped along its fullness. That long, chestnut brown braid, which trapped the wild, rampant curls.
“M—my gown?”
He stepped closer. “Ye have leggings on under? And a short tunic? Aye. Then, off with it.”
Her cheeks flushed so brightly he could see it through the moonlight, but she was already pulling it over her head, huffing something incomprehensible while under its folds. He took it and threw it away, next to his léine, halfway behind a large rock on the streambed. It looked as if the clothes had been hidden, but poorly.
Quickly he took a head-to-toe appraisal of her—it was impossible not to, with leggings that skimmed her thighs so snugly—then he turned away and shouldered his pack again. But in the time it took to make the visual sweep of her body, he heard a small, quick breath slip out from between her parted lips.
“Let’s go, then,” he said.
She spun on her heel, took her very pink cheeks, and stalked away down the path they’d been following for the past hour.
“This way, Senna,” he called out softly, turning back the way they’d come.
Stones crunched as she spun. “Back that way? Why?”
“I’ve a mad notion to throw them off our scent.” He rubbed his palm across the back of his neck. “We’ve a long way to go, lass, and I haven’t the time to explain myself
to ye.”
She stepped up beside him with an impatient stride. “Then we walk. Can you not walk and talk at the same time?”
He looked down coolly. “Not so well as you.”
As they hiked quickly back up the creek side, he gave a brief synopsis of their next few days. “We have two rivers to cross—”
“A river?” She sounded deeply shocked.
“Two.”
“Two rivers?” she clarified, as if his meaning had somehow been unclear.
“Then a town, and—”
“Friendly?”
“Hostile.”
“Hostile?”
“Then leagues of open land before we reach safety.”
She walked silently and seemed to be figuring, determining which was the most important thing to focus on just now. “You mean Dublin,” she finally said. “We’re making for Dublin.”
He grunted. No, he did not mean Dublin.
He meant Hutton’s Leap. That was the most important thing right now: getting to the town of Hutton’s Leap before Rardove figured out what the Irish were up to, and went there himself.
The mission had been two pronged from the start. Finian’s task was to probe Rardove’s cunning, as well as take on the hazardous job of providing a distraction while another Irish warrior was sent to Hutton’s Leap to retrieve the dangerous, coveted dye manual that contained the secret of the Wishmés.
Finian now knew that warrior’s head was being sent to The O’Fáil in a box.
No time for grief or rage. Just focus on the mission. Someone had to retrieve that dye manual before it fell into the wrong hands. Rardove’s hands.
Finian was the only one who knew the mission had failed. Therefore it had just become his mission.
Senna, of course, did not know this, as she had no idea they were actually on a mission.
“Is that…is that one of the rivers?” she asked, her words tentative.
A slim, pale finger pointed at the sparse tree cover that separated this tributary from the main rushing river, perhaps forty paces off, as the slip of land they were on slowly narrowed until it became but a diving board into the raging river.
“Aye. That one.”
“And how wide is this riv—what was that?”
A low howl rose up through the dark air, like the nighttime was haunting itself. Another howl came, filling the darkness with its mournful sound. She looked at Finian, her eyes wide and frightened.
“A wolf,” he explained gently.
“We haven’t many of them in England anymore,” she whispered back.
Another low howl came and Senna tripped backward, until her back was pressed to his chest. A startlingly attention-getting maneuver. He was vaguely impressed such an unconscious move should imbue such sensuality. “Are they close?”
“Aye.” It was always harder to detect panic within a whisper, but Finian was fairly certain the telltale tremble was there. “Are ye ready to go now, lass?”
“Quite.”
They didn’t say much as they retraced their steps to the banks of Bhean’s River. Woman’s River. It was well named, for it was wild and stunning in its beauty and ferocity. Dangerous, with wicked currents. Deep, an onrushing power to it.
It was autumn, though, and the summer had been dry. While the farmers lamented the fact of it, tonight Finian gave thanks to all the gods he could think of, old and new, because it meant they could cross without needing the bridge at Bhean’s Crossing, which was only half a mile from Rardove Keep.
Still, the Bhean was deep. Deep enough to warrant caution. Deep enough to drown in. Especially if one cracked his skull on the rocks when he fell. Or she fell.
He stopped at the edge. The moon was bright. “How are ye with rocks, Senna?”
Confusion marked her face until she followed his pointing finger. It cleared, into fear. A jagged row of boulders of various sizes zigzagged across the river like huge stepping stones.
“Finian. You cannot be in earnest.” She considered him suspiciously. Then she looked back at the river. “You’re asking us to jump those? Those rocks? Those rocks.”
Nothing had changed about his original query, but her voice became more flatly incredulous. “Why, Finian, some are as widely spaced as my body is tall. The force required…” Her voice trailed off. “And the rate of the current…” She trailed off again, looking across at the dark, rushing river.
She was probably reckoning rate and velocity at this very moment, he realized dimly.
“If ye’re too frightened, Senna—”
“I’m not frightened,” she snapped. “I’m never frightened. I’m…figuring.”
“Ah.” He held his breath. If she said she couldn’t do it…
Her chin came up. “I can do it,” she said, rather loudly. “I used to climb them all the time, you know.”
He smiled as a little warmth flared in his chest. “I didn’t know, Senna,” he murmured, shifting the pack on his shoulders. “But I’m glad of it. Now, do as I do, just as I do it.”
He hopped onto the closest rock. It had a low, broad surface. He quickly hopped to the next one, not two feet away, and turned. “Now yerself, Senna.”
She closed her eyes and leapt. Finian lifted a hand in protest, but by then she’d already landed, knees bent. She opened her eyes and looked up triumphantly.
“Well done,” he said, giving her the congratulations her self-satisfied, never-climbed-a-rock-before smile required. After which he added, “Never do that again. Eyes open, always.”
He turned to the next boulder. Fifteen. Fifteen to cross. Not so many, except that they kept getting higher and more steeply pitched as you went, until the last one towered like an armored sentinel on the river’s western edge.
“Do they seem to get bigger as we go?” she suddenly asked.
“Not a bit of it. ’Tis the moonlight. Tricks the eye.”
“Oh.”
He pushed off, propelling himself to the next boulder. This one wasn’t far at all, but it had a steeply sloped top, like a barn roof. He landed, one foot on either side of the pitch. Arms out, swaying, aware of every whipped muscle in his legs and back, he balanced himself. He blew out a long breath and leapt again, leaving the boulder free for Senna.
Behind him, he heard a small sound over the quiet rush of water. A prayer, spoken in a whispered, feminine voice. “Please, dear Lord.”
He turned just as she jumped. For a moment she hung in space, both legs bent, as if running in midair, then landed with a thump, knees sharply bent, but with a foot planted firmly on either side of the rock.
Standing atop two boulders, in the moonlight, their eyes met. Finian nodded firmly. Senna, panting just a little, from exertion or fear or both, gave a small smile. Almost as if she were encouraging him.
A corner of his mouth curved up. He turned to the next one.
And so they made their leaping, slipping, flying way across the boulders of Bhean’s River. Until the last.
A full four feet away, and easily a foot higher than the one Finian stood upon, it required a running leap. Which they had no room for.
“Come, Senna.” He gestured with his hand, stepping to the side to give her room to land beside him on his boulder. He grabbed her hand as she landed, pulling her up beside him.
The rising moon lit up the currents of the river below like small, steely gray snakes. On either side of the water lay low, flat land. To the west stretched the perils of the king’s highway, but beyond that, the safety of hills Finian had known since his youth. To the east flowed English lands. North, lay Rardove. And four feet away hunkered the biggest boulder on Bhean’s River, renowned for its sentinel-like granite edifice.
He could tell Senna’s face had paled, even through the moonlight. “Do ye think ye can jump it?”
“Of course.”
“Senna.”
She started to protest, then shook her head slowly. Silver, moon-cast glints gleamed in her eyes. “I don’t know, Finian. ’Tis a long way. I ca
nnot say for certes.”
He nodded. “Then I’m going to throw ye.”
Her mouth fell open. “What?”
“What’s yer other plan?” he asked sharply.
“I—” She shook her head. “I haven’t one.”
He didn’t even pause. He swept a boot behind her, shifting to stand sidewise, facing her. Her lithe body trembled. Small, fast pants shot out of her mouth. Finian spread his legs wide, crouched down, grabbed under her arm, and slid his other hand between her legs, lifting to her crotch.
“Don’t try to help,” he ordered. “Do not push off. Don’t move. All ye have to do is land on yer feet. Aye?”
The contours of her profile were frozen. “Aye.”
“Ready, girl?”
“Jésu, Finian,” she whispered. “I’m ready.”
He focused all his attention and, tensing his already wearied legs and arms and shoulders, and tightening every muscle along the length of his burning back, he flung her across the churning water straight at the boulder.
Chapter 13
Senna couldn’t help it; she pushed off, too.
That may have been what threw her slightly off course, offset the trajectory of Finian’s mighty toss. Whatever it was, she landed with a sickening thud chest-first, almost to the flat, top surface of the boulder, but not quite. Instead, she clung to its slanting side, like a fly on a wall.
Her cheek was planted into the rock. She clung to the hard, impermeable surface of the stone, her good fingers clutching desperately for any small crags. She found them aplenty, all jagged, knife-sharp things. Her benumbed, wounded fingers weren’t necessary for gripping, but their incapacity seemed to sap the strength from the others.
But her blood, that was hot and ferocious. It pounded through her body. Everything coming out of her—breath, effort, curse—was hot, panting fury as she lifted her legs and arms, scrabbling up the side of the stone face.
She gained the summit and flung herself over the lip, sprawled out like a dead thing. Her arms and legs were on fire, her knees bruised and torn, arm muscles screaming, her lungs burning. She lay for a moment, feeling the cool face of the stone under her feverish cheek. Then she pushed up to her elbows and peeked over her shoulder.