Erinsong

by Mia Marlowe

  She gasped, but didn’t cry out.

  Her breasts shone pale as moonstones, unbearably soft mounds, each topped with a sensitive tip, deep rose and quivering for his touch. He laid his head between them and decided, promise or no, he might just die, after all.

  Her hands fluttered over his shoulders, a pair of butterflies teasing along his spine. He found a nipple and took it into his mouth, his tongue swirling frenzied patterns around the sensitive flesh. She squirmed beneath him, murmuring his name.

  It made him feel like a god.

  Jorand fumbled with his trews, his patience quickly waning. Brenna’s eyes drank him in as he bared himself to her, a soft smile on her angel mouth. She gave a low groan when his hand slid up under her hem.

  Oh, the feel of her, all slick with need.

  She opened herself to him, a warm, wet haven that molded around him to fit more perfectly than the finest knife-sheath. He slid into her up to the hilt, straining to be accepted in total, all his faults laid bare, just as he was.

  She grasped his buttocks and pulled him closer yet.

  Heat. Friction. Each stroke took him closer to the edge. Long past the point of being able to stop, he opened his eyes and looked down at her.

  Her face was alight with passion, her skin glistening in the moonlight. She was close to the edge. He felt the start of her release in the mounting tension of her body.

  “Come with me, love,” she breathed as waves of delight rolled over her, arching her back to meet him.

  He cried out as his seed burst forth inside her, his frame racked with spasms. When it was done, he let his weight settle down on her, content to bury his nose in her hair and breathe her in.

  He meant to say something, to tell her how he loved her, but by the time he rolled off her, Brenna was already breathing with the relaxed rhythm of deep sleep.

  Jorand brushed a wayward strand of hair from her forehead. When he touched her cheek, the corner of her mouth lifted in a fleeting smile, but she didn’t stir.

  He didn’t mind. He drank in the sight of her, relaxed with spent passion, the starlight playing over the hollows of her cheekbones. He longed to kiss her again, but didn’t want to wake her. He closed his eyes, imprinting this vision of her on his memory, just in case this was the last time he’d see her thus.

  He settled beside her and drew her into the circle of his arms. Then he wished he could pass silently from this waking dream into a deep dreamless sleep, but he knew it would be hours before he let exhaustion claim him. He’d made a promise to Brenna he might not be able to keep.

  He’d promised not to die.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “I hoped we’d be there before now.” Jorand reined in his mount and dropped back on the trail to ride alongside her.

  “Aye, but ye weren’t counting on me having mending to do, I’ll wager,” Brenna countered, a wicked grin lifting the corners of her mouth as a wave of remembered passion surged over her. In the early morning light, she’d stitched up the front of her tunic and kyrtle. She was a dab hand with a needle, but the repair still meant getting a much later start for the last leg of their journey.

  “I’d say I’m sorry about your clothes, but you’d know I’m not.” He leaned over and kissed her, his mouth warm and firm. Her lips tingled when he pulled away.

  “Well, and if it comes to that, I’m not feeling a bit sorry meself,” she admitted. Blood sang joyously in her veins. Jorand was hers. Hers alone. And they were within a pinch of finding her sister’s lost bairn.

  If she were any happier, she’d sprout wings and fly the rest of the way.

  Brenna and Jorand topped the last hill and looked down the velvety green slopes rushing to the river Shannon. The clans who lived near Clonmacnoise had been busy in the weeks since the raid. The wooden skeleton of a new chapel rose in the center of the desecrated abbey. The pounding of hammers and the steady thrum of two-man saws rent the air. Clonmacnoise had been washed clean of the reek of smoldering fires, and now the smell of newly hewn wood and cut thatch greeted the travelers.

  Brenna and Jorand skirted round the abbey and wound their way to Murtaugh’s little croft. The old man was seated on a stump outside his doorway, pipe in hand, soaking up the last remnants of the day’s sun.

  “Murtaugh, we’re back!” Brenna called out as she dismounted and tied up the piebald cob she was riding.

  “So ye be.” He peered at her from under his scraggly brows, his sharp-eyed gaze raking Jorand as well. “I see ye still have the Northman in tow. If he saw ye safe to Dublin and back, I expect he might be worth the keeping.”

  Jorand’s lip twitched with suppressed amusement. She let Murtaugh’s backhanded compliment pass without comment. “Where will we be finding the abbot?”

  Murtaugh jerked his head toward the open cottage door.

  Brenna spied Father Ambrose huddled over a makeshift desk inside Murtaugh’s one-room croft. The sexton had evidently been evicted and Father Ambrose had transformed the gardener’s home into his private chambers until new ones were prepared for him in the rebuilt abbey.

  Father Ambrose looked up when she stepped over the threshold. He’d dropped a stone or two in weight. His formerly pudgy cheeks now hung in flaccid jowls, making him look like an aging hunting dog. But his eyes were clear, and he no longer had the haunted look he’d worn when she’d last seen him. Father Ambrose didn’t cross himself when Jorand followed her into the cottage, though he might have surreptitiously made the sign against evil with his left hand for a moment.

  “Well, child.” He laid aside the stylus he was writing with and fixed her with a hopeful look. “Were ye able to retrieve it?”

  “Aye, Father.” Brenna placed the oilskin packet on the desk as carefully as if it contained Germanic glass. “We brought most of it.”

  “What do ye mean—most of it?” A deep cleft formed between his brows as he tore open the package and rifled through the loose folios with a lack of delicacy that made Brenna want to jerk the Codex back from him. “Ah! The fiends! They’ve kept the jewels, then.”

  “Aye,” Brenna said. “But we have the most important part still intact. The Word of God is surely the true treasure of the Skellig-Michael Codex, and it is restored to ye entire. We must be thankful for God’s mercy.”

  “His mercy might spare the part that would pay for rebuilding Clonmacnoise,” the abbot muttered under his breath.

  Brenna knew the Codex had been an important draw for pilgrims from the whole of the island and a valuable focus for donations as well. A look passed over the abbot’s face, hard as flint and, had it been anyone but Father Ambrose, Brenna would have said she recognized the gleam of thwarted avarice. Then Father Ambrose seemed to remember he was not alone and quickly recovered himself. “Ye have the right of it. Thank ye, Brenna, and ye too, Northman. Go now in God’s peace.”

  He gathered up the Codex and stashed it on one of the shelves that had lately held the sexton’s vines and seedlings. When he turned around, he seemed startled to see Brenna and Jorand still there. Father Ambrose sketched a hasty blessing.

  “Off ye go then.” He waggled his fingers in a gesture of dismissal.

  “Father, have ye forgotten your promise? We brought ye back the Codex.” Brenna couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d slapped her. “Ye must tell me where to find Sinead’s bairn.”

  The abbot harrumphed loudly and made a great show of blowing his nose. “Our agreement was conditional on the return of the Skellig Michael Gospels. Ye must admit, the Codex is somewhat less than it once was.”

  Jorand closed the distance to the abbot in a few strides, snatching up Father Ambrose by his cowled cassock and slamming him against the back wall of Murtaugh’s little house. Dust jarred loose from the rafters and rained a spatter of mud chips and old thatch on them. “You’ll tell her what she wants to know and quickly. Or perhaps you’d like to be less than you once were as well.”

  Father Ambrose blanched, and his eyes rolled uncertainly. Br
enna put a restraining hand on Jorand’s arm. In response to the commotion, Murtaugh had slipped into the cottage behind them. The abbot had reneged on his promise, so she didn’t have much sympathy for him, but Brenna didn’t want to see Jorand do the sexton any damage should Murtaugh decide to rush to Father Ambrose’s aid. But Murtaugh just looked on, sucking on his pipe with an air of expectancy on his wizened face.

  “There’s no need for ye to do him harm, husband,” she said, her voice mild as milk. “I’m sure the abbot will see the wisdom of keeping to his part of the bargain.”

  Jorand lowered the priest till his feet touched the dirt floor once more. He stepped back a pace to give Father Ambrose room to breathe, but Jorand’s eyes still glinted with the promise of mayhem if his wishes were ignored.

  “ “Tis not that, not at all.” Sweat popped out on Father Ambrose’s broad forehead, and he mopped his brow with a grimy kerchief. “I’d hoped to spare ye more grief, my child.”

  “Where is me sister’s bairn?”

  “The babe is dead,” he said flatly.

  “You lie. I’ll not believe it.” Brenna balled her hands into fists, longing to lunge at the abbot herself. White-hot anger flared inside her. If he were anyone else, she’d have scratched his eyes out. “The bairn can’t be dead.”

  Father Ambrose just looked at her, a mixture of pity and suffering benevolence on his face.

  “How could you send us in search of the Codex if the child were not still alive?” she demanded.

  The abbot’s gaze flicked to Jorand. “You had a Northman with you. I saw the slimmest of chances that the abbey could recover one of its lost treasures. I regret that I had to trick you into doing the right thing, but I’d do it again for the good of the Clonmacnoise.”

  No. Brenna opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She felt as though someone had kicked her in the ribs and knocked all the breath from her lungs. Not trusting her wobbling knees to support her any longer, she sank down on the three-legged stool by the abbot’s desk.

  “... never any real chance at life, given its sire, so we might well consider its passing a blessing. In times like these, we must call to mind ...”

  The abbot droned on about God’s mercy and the inscrutability of His perfect will, but Brenna heard none of it. Only the echo of the child’s birth cry, a lusty wail half remembered, like something from a feverish dream, resounded in her ears.

  A weight settled on her shoulder—Jorand’s hand, she realized. She knew he was trying to console her, but like Rachel in Ramah, she would not be comforted, for the child was not.

  “Was it a boy or a girl?” she asked, neither knowing nor caring that she interrupted Father Ambrose as he was working into the moral of his sermonette.

  “There’s no need to trouble yourself any furth—” the abbot began.

  “Sinead bore a lad,” Murtaugh said. “A bonnie wee manikin with a tuft of red on his little head.”

  “Enough.” Father Ambrose scowled at the sexton.

  “But how? How did he die?” she asked.

  The abbot’s eyes flared a warning at Murtaugh, then turned back to Brenna. “Let the past be, my child. No good will come from—”

  “Where is he?” Brenna demanded. “Ye must at least tell me that. Where does he lie?”

  The abbot’s thick lips flattened into a hard line. “All the indigent poor are gathered to God in one place.” He turned around as though he couldn’t bear the sight of Brenna one moment longer. “Grieve, if ye must, at the Potter’s Field.”

  ***

  The graveyard of Clonmacnoise was a peaceful place, rows of headstones and standing crosses, some so covered with moss and weathered by rain and time, the inscriptions had faded to no more than dimples in the stone.

  There were many fresh mounds, the loamy soil bare and dark against the green. Old Murtaugh had been busy with burials for those whose bodies had not been consigned to the flames. Mother Superior. Brother Bartolomeo. Sister Mary Patrick. Brenna ticked off the names as she passed their final resting places. Many of the cemetery’s new occupants had been her friends, but she couldn’t think on that now.

  One grief at a time, she told herself as she trudged through the silent rows. If she let the enormity of the loss sink in, she’d be done for.

  She stopped before Sinead’s grave. Brenna had seen to it an ornate cross was erected for her sister before she left Clonmacnoise to return to Donegal. Grass covered the mound thickly now.

  “Oh, Sinead,” she said with a sob. “I’m so sorry.”

  She’d failed her sister, and there was no way to make amends. She had no flowers, nothing to leave at the graveside. Then she reached up and clasped the silver cross necklace that had belonged to their mother. She draped it over her sister’s headstone.

  “Ye were the first true bride among us,” she said softly. “Mother sends this to ye.”

  She turned away and continued her mourning march. Her step slowed even further as she neared the far corner of the patch of consecrated ground.

  Potter’s Field.

  It was a gaping mass grave, where the bodies of the poor and unknown were stitched into shrouds and dropped in. The pit reeked of the lye used to mask the miasma of putrefaction, but a hint of the sweet stench of corruption reached her nostrils. Brenna’s knees buckled and she sank to the ground near the lip of the pit.

  To end thus... unnamed... unloved... unmourned. How could she have let Sinead’s babe come to this? The lad may have had an ill-getting, but the blood of Sinead Ui Niall flowed in his veins as well. If only she’d defied the abbot and fought for the child when it was born....

  “Sweet Jesus, forgive me,” she whispered, praying as much to the little ghost that had hovered near her for the past year and the memory of her beloved sister as to Christ. Brenna wrapped her arms around herself to keep from flying in all directions. Her pulse throbbed in her ears and she swayed in time with the steady rhythm. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her breath came in a rasping sob as she gave vent to her grief in a banshee’s wail.

  Jorand’s strong arms wrapped around her. He knelt by her side, holding her as she cried. His breath slid hot and comforting across the back of her neck and she finally quieted in his embrace. He smelled of sun-warmed wool and stiff sea breezes. Vibrant. Alive.

  She dissolved into fresh spasms of despair.

  “Brenna, my love, be easy.” He stroked her hair, pressing her to his chest. “There’s naught you can do for the bairn now. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “I am sick. Sick at heart.” She beat her fists against her thighs, and he caught up her wrists to keep her from hurting herself. “If only I’d fought to keep him...”

  “What? You think you could have kept Death from claiming him?”

  She met his steady gaze. That was exactly what she thought.

  “My people believe a man’s death is determined before he is even born, fixed by the Norns, the three weavers of human fate. Run from Death on the sea and he will find you in the forest,” Jorand said with certainty. “Do Christians think they can cheat Death, then?”

  “No,” she said soberly. “No, we cannot cheat death.” She swiped her cheeks. “But we live in hope. I must live in hope that in the resurrection, I will be allowed to hold the babe. And I will place him in Sinead’s arms for the first time.”

  A pained expression flitted across Jorand’s face, and she knew they were truly joined. He felt her grief.

  “Brenna, let’s leave this place,” he said, closing his hands around both of hers in a doubled gesture of prayer. “Let me take you away from here. The world is bigger than you can imagine. We can forget the grief of this island and start fresh together somewhere else. We’ll go to the Hebrides or the Faroes, or even back to Sognefjord. I’ll give you children, Brenna, a whole houseful of them, I promise. Only say you’ll come away with me.”

  She ran a knuckle over his cheek. What was it she recognized in his anxious eyes? Fear? Not in a Northman, surely. Then the truth stab
bed her, a thin stiletto to the heart. “Ye fear I’ll depart, like me mother, into the deep darkness over the loss of the bairn.”

  He looked down and then back at her with a swift nod.

  “Ye must understand. A small piece of me heart will always be here. It cannot be otherwise. I owe as much to Sinead.” She clutched at her chest, feeling the rhythm of her heartbeat under her breastbone. She was amazed it was so steady. Despite all she’d been through, she still breathed, still felt her regular heartbeat.

  “But I’m not so fine a lady as me mother to be completely undone by loss. I have more of the Ui Niall stubbornness in me than Connacht sensibilities.” As if to give lie to her words, tears coursed freely down her cheeks and stung the corners of her mouth. “The wee bairn who rests here will have a small piece of me. ‘Tis fitting that he should. But the rest of me is yours till I die.”

  “Then you’ll come away with me.” Brenna felt relief roll from him in caressing waves.

  “No, love, I cannot go,” she said. “Not to any foreign land. I’m born of Erin and bound to her shores. But I will travel with ye to stop Thorkill from overrunning me island. We cannot let him have his way with the people of this land.”

  The look of shock on his strongly hewn features told her he’d all but forgotten about Thorkill. Now that she’d reminded him, a gritty air of resignation and determination settled over him once more.

  “No, Brenna,” he said. “You can’t come on this raid. It’s too dangerous.” He didn’t need to add especially this time, but Brenna heard it hovering in the air anyway.

  “Then I’ll wait in Dublin for ye to return.”

  “In the same town as Solveig?” His brows shot up in surprise.