[Celtic Legends 01.0] Twice Upon a Time

by Lisa Ann Verge

  Aye, the streets of Troyes were no place for the likes of her.

  “Come and dance with me in the garden, then.” Deirdre spun away from the windowsill, pried the round of cheese from Moira’s grip, and dragged her into the center of the room. “We’ll pretend there’s an Irish piper, like the one Papa hired for Mama’s birthday all those years ago. Do you remember?”

  Deirdre herself only vaguely remembered, for it was a happier moment, a joyous instant in her childhood, but her thighs and her arms, her feet and her fingers, the long curve of her back—they all remembered how to dance. While Moira argued and scolded, Deirdre whirled around her and kicked up the hem of her tunic, abandoning herself to the music in her head.

  Finally, Deirdre gathered her skirts and darted toward the door. “Come, Moira, to the garden—”

  She stumbled to a sudden stop as she collided with a solid wall of a man.

  She staggered back and blinked up at the apparition. She had a swift impression of broad shoulders, of legs braced apart, of an exotic, broad-boned face flanked by unfashionably long hair. The rest was a blur, for from old habit she swept her lashes down to veil her own eyes from the stranger.

  “What’s this?” she demanded breathlessly, yanking her skirts straight. “What are you doing sneaking up on a woman with nary a ‘good day to you’?”

  Silence rang in the room like the aftermath of a clangor of church bells. The brute of a man standing before her seemed to suck the air from the room. She raised her lashes halfway, enough to see fine blue linen straining against the sweep of his heaving chest, enough to see the roped muscles of his forearms, and tight fists at his sides. A flash of memory came to her, of a tattered book one of the novices had hidden under a rock in the convent’s garden, of a brutish conqueror coming upon a princess in the woods and carrying her off to some deliciously unspeakable fate.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as the unlaced sleeve of her tunic slipped to her elbow. “Why didn’t you announce yourself?”

  “I thought you might know the sight of me.”

  His words were tense, but amid them lilted the warm breath of the Irish. She reached out and curled her hand around a bedpost. It had been so long since she’d heard the brogue of her homeland out of anyone’s mouth but Moira’s. The timbre vibrated through her so intimately, with a strain so hauntingly familiar, that memories flooded through her, of salt-spray tingling on her face, of growling gray mists, of the dense fragrance of blooming heather, of cows lowing on a warm hillside. The rush made her knees weak. She stifled a yearning to meet this Irishman’s gaze for the years had taught her well to hide her own gaze from the world.

  “Friend or foe,” she retorted, flexing her hand over the carved oak, “it’s not fitting to burst in on a woman like you did. My life nearly left me body at the sight of you.”

  “But it didn’t,” he growled, “and you standing there, as cool as morning, with your wits still about you.”

  “Wits are a woman’s only weapon.”

  “And yours still as sharp as ever.” He strode into her chamber as boldly as a husband. “Was I lured here just to feel the prick of your tongue?”

  “Lured here?” She clutched the bedpost with both hands, not understanding what he was talking about. “Who are you? What business do you have in my bedroom?”

  He clanked a bulky sack upon her bedside table with more force than necessary. “No words of welcome for me?”

  She’d remember a man such as this, even if she’d done nothing more than brush by him in a crowd on the way to Mass. Only a handful of men had made her acquaintance in all her life—priests and kin, all—and none dared to swagger into her chamber as if he owned the room and everything within. “Why would I welcome you? I’ve never seen the likes of you before.”

  “Child, child, have you no manners?” Moira stepped forward, her splotchy jowls shaking. “This is Monsieur MacSídh, the doctor I told you about.”

  Deirdre shook her head. Those rough laborer’s hands . . . surely they couldn’t be the ones she remembered grazing her skin so tenderly during her illness. “If he’s a doctor, then I’m a queen.”

  The stranger flung the contents of his sack upon the bed—a sandglass, a series of leather bags, flashing instruments, a small chalice. “Does your majesty wish to hear of my lengthy education? I know a tale of misery that would burn your ears with the telling.”

  Her face was lowered, so all she saw were the scattered implements and the blur of his form, but she sensed his fury as she would sense the blistering of the summer sun. What a snapping brute he was. But she wouldn’t be cowed by it. She had no reason to fear in her own room, in her father’s own house. Papa would kill with his own hands anyone who dared to do her harm.

  Besides, with her gaze always fixed to the ground, she’d long learned to read moods by the curl of a finger or the pace of a man’s breathing. The fury emanating from this hulking doctor roared in all directions. He raged not at her but at the whole wide world.

  “It’s no wonder I didn’t know you.” She only had flickering memories of the doctor, a presence that retreated into the shadows whenever she struggled into consciousness. “You’ve been tending to me about a week, and not until now do I meet you, and this is how you do it, barging in bristling like a cock?”

  “Did you expect a wooing, woman?”

  “I expected good manners—”

  “I won’t be simpering and groveling at your feet like a poor bard at a queen’s table.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.” Her blood raced. It seemed like an eternity since she’d crossed wits with anyone but Moira, even longer since she’d done so with a man—and then only her brother. “I’ll have none of your wooing, thank you very much,” she continued, thinking that the devil was in her tongue today. “If your loving is as blunt as your speech, monsieur, I’m thinking you’ll have no art at all.”

  Moira barked, “Child!”

  The doctor turned and sloshed some wine into a chalice, stirring it vigorously. His knuckles grew white with tension yet his fingers trembled. “Drink this.” The doctor thrust out the chalice straight-armed. “It will keep that thorn bush of a tongue in your mouth.”

  Something in the way he uttered those words made her fingertips stray to her suddenly tender, throbbing lower lip.

  Vanity was a sin. But many times during the lonely years in the convent, she had unwrapped her mother’s silver mirror and lifted it to the daylight streaming upon her face. She’d parted her lips, examined her teeth—one in the front slightly crooked—then ran a hand down her figure, taking some comfort in knowing she’d been gifted with her mother’s fine skin and a lush form—convincing herself that she was a pretty young woman, if a mite too rounded, bound to turn the head of a good man someday. But eventually, inevitably, she’d meet her own eyes straight on and wonder what men feared in those seemingly ordinary green irises. What was it about her gaze that made men and women so uneasy, that sent priests into secretive fits of self-crossing, that sent servants dodging out of her way?

  Then her features would recede in the reflection, blurred by hot tears, puckering into the countenance of one of the gargoyles that leered out from over the door of the church. She knew, yes, she knew. She’d been told that there was always a mark: a mole, a wart. A demon could never hide entirely in a woman’s heart.

  Suddenly, the doctor strode to her side, seized her hand, and slapped the warm chalice into her palm. “Drink,” he repeated, “and be done with it.”

  He stood before her, waiting. The heat of his body engulfed her in a prickly warmth, like the weight of roiling gray thunderclouds on a crackling hot summer day. He smelled of the outside—of rich earth and rain, of sweat and something else, something indefinable, something she’d instinctively call man. The restlessness which had boiled in her blood through the morning found an unlikely outlet in their nearness, for now she felt breathless, light-headed . . . vitalized.

  She drank the sweet brew a
nd thrust the empty cup at him. She pressed the back of her hand against her chin to soak up a drop which had slipped out of her lips. Her stomach made an unpleasant lurch. “Is it poison you serve me? It sours in my stomach.”

  He snatched the chalice from her hand. “All sweet things turn as bitter as gall over time.”

  “Can you not forgive me for not recognizing you, doctor? Or is there another burr in your braies that I know naught of?”

  “You play games with me, like a kitten with its prey.”

  “There’s no woman alive who’d mistake you for a mouse.” They shouldn’t be arguing as if they’d been married fifty years when they’d only just met. She wasn’t helping, of course. A gentle answer quells anger, Mama had taught her, but this man’s overwhelming presence muddled her senses. “Listen to us, snarling at each other like curs.” She put her hand on his forearm and felt the hot, furious pounding of his pulse beneath her fingertips. “I ask your forgiveness if I was rude when you came in. I owe you the debt of my life, doctor, and for that, you may call me Deirdre.”

  His fingers wound around her wrist and strangled it until needles of pain shot up her hand. “This time, lass, I won’t be fulfilling your maiden’s fancy.”

  A flush worked its way up her cheeks. “And what do you mean by that?”

  “It means I’m no fresh-faced boy anymore to be trapped by the sight of a woman’s dancing.”

  She yanked her arm free. “Did you think I danced for the likes of you?”

  “I know you better than you know yourself.”

  “A burgher’s daughter can dance when she pleases.” Cat’s fur rasped against her ankles, and Deirdre swept up her pet, hugging him close. “I danced for myself and the glory of the morning, not for some brutish stranger who doesn’t have the manners to knock upon a lady’s door—”

  “He’s brought you from the jaws of death, child,” Moira scolded. “Don’t be complaining about his ways.”

  “How do we know he’s a doctor?” She glared at her maidservant as he strode back to the bed and began clanking implements back into his pack. “It’s an odd doctor who slinks away like a thief whenever his patient awakens.”

  “You have no more need of me. You are cured from what ailed you.” The doctor scoured a silver spoon with the rough weave of the sack. “A blind man could see you no longer grieve your brother’s passing.”

  Her fingers froze in the cat’s fur. Pain flooded through her. He’d pierced her heart as deftly as a knight slipping his broadsword through a crack in an opponent’s armor. Jean-Jacques had been dead barely a month. What he didn't know is that she’d been grieving for much, much longer.

  “So you have a cure for grief?” She spoke around a lump lodged in her throat as she dumped the cat back into the rushes. “Faith, you must talk to Papa. You could make a fortune in these sorry days for such a potion.”

  “Forgive the poor lass, doctor,” Moira interrupted, still tugging new linens over the bed. “It’s her nature to be like this. It’s not callousness, no, it’s a blindness to sorrow. She’s had so very much of it since her mother died.”

  “Moira, have you no stockings to mend?” Deirdre seized a belt of tiny bells lying upon the chest. “Surely you have linens to soak or—”

  “I’m defending you, lass.”

  “I won’t wear my heart on my lips when I’ll be grieving until the end of my days.” She clasped the belt about her hips and and then tilted her chin at the doctor. “You haven’t cured me at all, doctor. Have you no other potion to give me now?”

  “Time.”

  He spat the word. Then he laughed—a short, ugly laugh, totally without humor.

  “You won’t prescribe me milk of pulverized almonds or barley waters sprayed with oil of roses?” She paced to the table littered with perfume bottles and the breakfast tray and seized her prayer book, slapping it into the cup of her palm. “You won’t fill my ears with talk of melancholic humors and hectic fevers and the passing of stars? You won’t even play the pretense?”

  “The stars care not what happens on the earth below. And of the two of us, it’s only you who might be playing the pretense still.” In two steps he was by her side, his voice harsh as gravel. “Look at me, woman.”

  She jerked, but he seized her arm and held her fast. Something proud within her swelled and straightened. The doctor spoke as a man who could command armies, not as a healer. But she was no foot-archer to answer his whims.

  She said, “I’m no maidservant to be ordered about—”

  “You don’t know the pith of a person until you look him in the eye. Look into mine. I won’t ask again.”

  A breeze gusted through the window and the light dimmed, as if a raincloud passed across the sun. She wondered why Moira bundled linens and did nothing while this doctor gripped her hard.

  “It’s my father who pays your fee.” She tightened her grip over her prayer book. “I will not be commanded.”

  He seized her chin and thrust her face up. The cup of his hand lay hard on her throat. Her breath faltered. How callused his fingers, how hot his grip. She stubbornly set her gaze upon the dent in his bristled chin. Deirdre heard the maidservant’s quiet humming as she worked around the bed.

  “You tease and shift your eyes about,” he growled, “but I will see them, and you will see mine, and we both will see if we can be rid of the mischief the gods have wrought.”

  She heard none of his words. The recklessness which had simmered in her blood since morning finally boiled over. It would be no less than he deserved, mauling a helpless woman like this. So she raised her lashes up, up, past the bristle of his chin, beyond the tight, white lips, up, up, and then she threw her gaze at him like a spear.

  White-hot lightning arced between them. She felt the jolt from within. The clear, silvery depths of his eyes were as familiar to her as prayer. She felt she would have known this man anywhere, though in life she’d never laid eyes upon him before.

  Strange.

  Foolish.

  They stared at one another in some timeless void, snared, motionless. His eyes fluxed with emotions she could not all name—a roiling mixture of the shock and denial she always saw in men’s eyes—but there was more. Looking at this man was like teetering on the edge of a cliff and staring down at the storm-tossed sea, jagged with violent eddies and swirling whirlpools. Yes, that was what she remembered, the turbulent gray Irish sea of her childhood, with wind-whipped waves beckoning beyond the breakers, with gulls wheeling above, cawing mournful cries.

  Then Deirdre’s breath rushed back into her lungs with the sharpness of a hundred thousand knives. She probed his gaze and defied him wordlessly to hold her own still. And he did, as no man had ever dared. A seed of fluttering wonder blossomed in her heart, for among the passions raging in his eyes, not one among them was fear.

  With a groan, he released her chin and seized her arms. He pulled her up close, close enough to feel the angry heat of his breath on her face, close enough to see the bristles on his cheek and chin, close enough to see the gold sparks in his silver eyes. He smelled of sunlight and sweat and, strangely, like steel, like chain-mail links warmed by the sun—oddly familiar, for it sent a sharp and sudden ache spearing deep through her, and for one brief moment she ached for the touch of his lips so sharply that her body began to quiver.

  Her senses reeled. He deepened his search into her gaze, probing, questioning, and she felt the force of his examination as if his broad, callused hands raked over her naked skin. Her legs were no longer capable of holding her full weight. Had any man ever looked into a woman so intimately? She felt as if he saw through all the ugliness and evil shining through her eyes into the part of her soul, buried deep, deep within, that was still good, that was still pure, the part that defied all who called her evil.

  This was the reason she’d been wrapped as taut as wool upon a spindle these past days. Here was a man who did not stumble back at the sight of her “devil’s eyes.” One man--the only man. Now she
filled her lungs with the smell of him, gorged her sight upon his height and breadth, and felt her heart flutter on wings as light as air that for once, for once, God had smiled upon her.

  He shook her, suddenly, hard. “Damn you, woman.”

  Confusion rippled through her senses. This was not the soft voice of a lover, this was not a lover’s nail-tight grip upon her arms.

  He said, “Damn your eyes.”

  Words rumbled in her throat, but her tongue lay too stiff to murmur them. Not you, nay, not you, doctor—you can look into my eyes without flinching—surely you among men can see past the horror—

  “Aye, woman, secrets lie in those cursed eyes—I know those secrets better than you do.”

  Then the moment of hope which had risen in her heart shattered like ill-made glass. Ice seeped through her veins, chilling the vestiges of her euphoria. What a fool she had been. The madness racing in her blood had weakened her defenses and blinded her to the danger. Now another fear stirred in her. Perhaps this doctor had been sent to determine the truth—to seek out the worm of Lucifer in the heart of a young girl.

  And destroy it.

  “Here’s one secret I know.” He shook her. “You dreamt of your brother’s death while he still lived. There’s no use shaking your head, I know it was that which put you in your sickbed. Tell me this now: Did you dream of me, woman, before my coming?”

  Later, much later, when she relived this moment in her mind until the fabric of the memory frayed, she wondered what fount of self-possession had kept her from sliding into a trembling heap onto the floor. Was it the firmness of his hands on her arms? Or was it, as she suspected, the stark terror of being found out which forced her to keep her wits about her?

  At the moment, she did not think. She couldn’t, for it seemed that the bells of Easter morning rang in her ears. The world around her spun and slowed, and in the second her eyes closed, something cold bit into the back of her neck and sucked her into the horror of memory. Against the veined inside of her lids, she saw it all again—the fire-lit room, the monotonous chanting from the shadows, the frankincense burning her nostrils, strange hands clawing the flesh of her wrists.