“Is that the story he’s spreading?”
“How could you strike a poor unfortunate for doing nothing more than telling a story, pagan though it was?”
“So you believe the tales of a lying thief.”
“With his word against yours, it’s his I’ll believe. You’re always full of spit and fury.”
Conor swiveled in frustration. He should have seized the creature by the neck when he had the chance, instead of waiting upstairs in the eaves for nothing but bodiless footsteps and secret tittering.
“I’m off to the woods, Conor. If I’m not back by sundown, send a man to fetch me.”
His attention shifted to Deirdre’s swaying back as she headed toward the far edge of the garden. “And where do you think you’re going, woman?”
“I told you clear enough.”
“Who says,” he growled, following her since she made no attempt to slow her pace, “you can go off wandering alone in the forest?”
“And who in this place would dare to stop me? You?” She waved a dismissive hand, her words drifting back as she retreated. “This could be my land someday, and I’ve a fancy to see the vineyards I’m told grow just beyond—”
“You’re more likely to see one of the poachers who steal the Clunel deer, or a pack of ruffians working their way through the wilds to the Fair of St. Jean.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder, all rosy-cheeked from the kiss of the sun, all that flying hair and knowing eyes. Her gaze was like a blow to the chest. She looked more and more like Brigid each day, though her appearance had changed not one bit.
“Are you worried about me then?”
“Your father would skin me alive if you came to harm.”
“Then if you value your skin,” she argued, stepping over a break in the garden’s stone fence, “you’d best stay close.”
Blasted woman. He stalled as she dipped into the shadows. Her humming wafted back to mock him. He’d forgotten the bold way she’d state something, and then go about it with a never-you-mind. And now he stood, knowing he had no choice other than to go after her, wondering if he’d grown soft with the years, to follow her smallest whim and lope after her like a pup—or, more fitting, like a lamb to slaughter.
Not today.
Today was Lughnasa. He glared at the leaves swaying from her passing. Her humming faded into the rustle of the wind. A gust rose behind him, and laid his tunic flat against his back. He stood still as stone, resisting, even as something unwound within him and furled deep into those woods, toward the woman prancing alone under the arch of the trees.
No rest for the weary soul until the circle is complete.
Damn Octavius and his riddles. Damn himself for paying heed. And damn himself for standing here, letting the Lughnasa tides lap over him, heating his blood until they boiled the reason from his mind.
Lead the horse to the well, if you must, he thought, eyeballing the sky. The trick is in making him drink.
He bent beneath an overhanging branch. The womb of the woods closed over him. A buzzing began around his ears—a familiar swarming that raised not a bit of dust. High in the oaks the leaves rustled with life and saplings nodded at him like wizened old men. A splash of sunshine buttered the way, at the end of which he glimpsed a flash of her white undertunic as she kicked fleet-footed up the path.
Time lost meaning in this rustling world of deep green shadows and gauzy light. A branch nodded against his thigh and he thought it his sword, as much a part of him as the heavy torque lying upon his throat, and the sweep of his tunic slapping against his calves. Youth rushed through his blood and bones, the hard pumping of heart and lungs, the recklessness and the folly—a memory made real in this time of timelessness, new and old, full of mystery and full of knowledge.
He found her standing atop the hill on a smooth stretch of rock. The gently sloping lands of Champagne rolled out to the horizon. Silver threads of river wound around patches of forest, plots of golden grain, and paler stretches of low-lying vineyard. Chalky gray houses pitted the countryside, and here and there the ochre spires of rural churches pierced the treetops.
“Now this would be a fine place for a Lughnasa fire.” She unhooked the basket from her elbow. “Don’t you think so, Conor?”
“A week away from the eye of your confessor and you turn pagan already.”
“It was a fancy, no more.”
“And you’d have me cut wood for your pyre, wouldn’t you?”
“Far be it for you to dirty your hands with a common man’s work.” She strode to the shade of a tree and dropped the basket beneath it. “In any case, you’ve nothing but your ire to do the cutting, though I’ve no doubt your anger is hot and sharp enough to slice wood.”
“I’d do better using your tongue.”
Something rustled on the edge of the forest. He glanced over and a dull gleam caught his eye. Striding over, he tore away the woodbine twisting between a yew and an oak sapling and then hefted up a rusted axe.
A gleam lit her eyes. “A gift from the little people.”
He stretched his fingers over the warm grip. How predictable the gods. How lacking in imagination.
“More pagan rubbish.”
“That’s not pagan,” she insisted. “The little people are angels. Moira told me herself.”
“Angels.”
“It’s the truth.” She shucked off her cloak and straightened the sweep of yellow cloth over the grass. “Moira told me, and she’s as good a Christian as you’d find.” She plumped a hip on the cloth and began unloading the basket. “When Satan sinned, so the story goes, the angels divided up among themselves—between those who stood with him, and those who stood with God. But there were some who wanted nothing to do with the battle, and so they stayed out of it altogether. So when Lucifer was tossed from Heaven with his minions, those angels had a punishment of their own: they were banished to the Earth. So they live among us to do their good, or their mischief, more often than not.”
“Then let’s not disappoint them.” He wrestled off his surcoat and threw it in a blue heap upon the ground. “I’ll give them a pyre to mock all of Christendom.”
He grasped the heavy-headed axe and heaved it around, hacking the blade into the oak sapling, once, twice, thrice, until it snapped and thudded to the ground.
Is this what you want then, old gods of mine? A tribute to forgotten deities. Mayhap that is why you keep me earthbound: I’m one last faithful to do your bidding. The last of the faithful to mock.
Then the yew crashed to the earth. Golden light flooded into the clearing. He tucked the saplings one under each arm and headed to the height of the rock, raking the earth behind him with their crowns. He tossed the wood across the open plain. As he snapped off bough after bough, slivers of wood flew and embedded themselves in his clothes, his skin, and his hair. He bound the branches into bundles with their own stripped bark.
He felt her gaze upon him as he worked. Power surged through his sweat-soaked body and pumped liquid force into his burning muscles. Did you think me an old man, wife? Did you think time would rob the marrow from my bones? He tossed the bound branches aside and set to the other tree with fury. When it was denuded of boughs, he searched for the axe he’d tossed carelessly aside.
She thrust a flagon in his path. “It’s hard work tearing a tree limb from limb.”
Grasping the flagon by the neck, he tipped it and swilled his fill. Cool rivulets ran down his neck.
She said, “The nuns at the convent often punished me for my wayward tongue. One of them said that the devil lived at its root.” Her gaze flickered to his chest and then quickly away to the carnage of the trees splattered over the hilltop. “I hope that it wasn’t me on your mind when you set to this task with such fury.”
He suppressed an angry sigh. It was his rage against the gods which kept him snarling. He harbored no hate for her, didn’t she see that? It was love for her that kept him here, when he knew he should be far away. It was love for her
that kept him from reaching out and tilting up her chin, touching those soft, full lips, and drowning in the salt-warmth of her kiss.
A breeze slipped a tendril of white-gold hair across her mouth. She brushed it aside absently, her lashes dark against her cheeks.
Something inside him cracked.
He strangled the neck of the flagon. “You must know you have nothing to fear from me.”
Her shoulders lifted and fell in an exaggerated sigh. “I’m glad of that, Conor MacSídh. For a moment my mind was full of imaginings. I thought you might be a black-hearted knight, posing as a doctor to have your way with foolish young women.”
He handed her the flagon, then reached down and hefted up the axe.
“Nay, Conor.”
Her soft, white hand fell upon his arm. How small her hand, how hot her touch.
“Leave it be now. Come into the shade.” Her hand slipped off. She gathered her skirts and headed toward the blanket of her cloak. “I’ve food and wine enough for two . . . if you’ve the stomach to share it with me.”
***
They ate in silence as they sat upon the sun-warmed wool with thrushes warbling in the bushes. Deirdre broke off a piece of bread from a loaf still warm from the oven, and lazily chewed it as she watched Conor from beneath lowered lashes.
She worked down the rising tide of a flush. She was feeling like a twittering, young girl, and all because he lay stretched out, his elbow sunk into the ground, draped in nothing but his undertunic. Sweaty and gritty, too, and smelling like heat and salt and something else disturbing and primitive.
At least it was a fine change from the creature she’d watched moments ago, hacking away at the trees, his teeth bared, with sweat dripping off his face. Why hadn’t she noticed before those bulging muscles, or the fine, brawny stretch of his shoulders, or the leanness of his waist? He had a man’s figure worthy of a knight’s mail, and he was still young enough to catch any lass’s eye. Why hadn’t she noticed before that not a gray hair streaked his head? That only the faintest fanning of lines edged his gray eyes? Others in the manor house—and in Troyes, as well—deferred to him like a man of much age. Yet laying as he was at his ease at the edge of her cloak, the collar of his tunic pulled to reveal a stretch of collarbone, he was a man at his youthful prime. She wondered why she and everyone else perceived him as a man older, wizened, grizzled, and battered more than a bit by the roll of time.
Around them danced a breeze. She felt it slip through her, whirling up strange, new emotions in the still places in her heart. She placed before him a bowl of new berries with sweet clotted cream. He ate the wild fruit slowly, sparsely, without comment. Maybe that was what gave him the air of a worldly man. He savored his pleasures instead of gobbling them up before they were well tasted.
She followed the drift of his gaze over the rolling land. In one of the distant, ochre spires, a church bell began to ring, joined by still another, a calling of the faithful to Mass.
A memory came to her like a whisper.
“In Ireland,” she began as the chimes shimmered through the air, “Me, Mama, and my brother used to live a bit away from the village, in a sliver of forest between the river and the sea. On Sunday mornings, my brother and I used to race through the woods on our way to church—for we were always late—and the bells used to toll from afar and ring through the air like living things.” She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the fragrance of heather. “On a fine, soft day like this, Conor, does it not remind you of Ireland?”
“What part of Ireland would you be thinking of?” He plucked a sliver of wood off his tunic and tossed it into the grass. “All I remember of that place are gales and cold and rain.”
“We had our share of storms, living by the sea. But they made the glorious days all the more fine.”
“Spoken like a child who never had to keep the wood dry for a long night’s fire.”
“You’d have made a somber priest.” She slapped the rest of the bread onto a square of cloth, folding it firm even as she tucked the amber memory away. “In the brightest day you’d stand in the shadows and call it gloomy.”
He shifted his weight upon his elbow, avoiding her eye. “Don’t expect fair words from me.”
“It’s a long road that has no turning, Conor.”
“You should know by now that I’m a crusty, old man, not fit company for a young lass.”
“You’re not an old man.” She felt the heat of a blush rising to her cheek. She tucked the bread back in the basket and tugged out a square board wedged in the bottom. “And even if you were, what difference would that make? Mama was fond of telling me to take the old dog for the hard road, and leave the pup on the path.”
He glanced at the checkered board she tossed carelessly between them, and then raised a brow as she clanked another bundle of cloth atop it.
“Were you planning to play with the little people,” he asked, “when you packed that in your basket this morning?”
The heat of her cheeks intensified. Well now he knew for sure that she’d had every intention of luring him into the Lughnasa sun and away from the wretched shadows of that hovel of a manor house, away from the perked ears of curious servants, away to a place where she could murmur the secrets of her heart, if she dared to trust him.
“You’ll make them angry if you mock them.” Defiantly, she tugged open the knot and upturned the cloth to let the chipped wooden pieces scatter over the board. “There’s no telling what sort of mischief they’ll think up on such a day as today.”
“I’ve got a fair, fine idea of it.”
“Besides, why would I think that you’d play me a game of chess,” she argued, setting up the wobbly pieces, “when you’ve refused my request twice already?”
“I’ll challenge you, lass.”
She knocked over a piece with her knuckle. “W-What?”
“You heard me.” He rolled up and braced himself with one hand. A shock of dark hair fell over his forehead, a stark contrast against the brightness of his silver eyes. “I won’t avoid your challenge any longer.”
The sudden wild recklessness of his gaze cut her to the quick. She vowed she’d never understand the ebb and flow of his moods—for moments ago he was as distant as the churches in the valley, and now his attention focused upon her like a ray of light she’d once seen burn a smoking hole through a fallen leaf, after passing through a pair of spectacles abandoned in the cloister’s garden.
She said, “Aren’t you a strange one, changing your mind like the wind.”
“State your color, lass, before the wind shifts to the north.”
She reached across the blanket and clutched a handful of stones lying amid the grass. “This set is worse for wear, like everything else in the house of Clunel. You’ll have to use a stone for one of your bishops, and I’ll use two more for my castles, for I have none.”
So in silence they played chess. They sat so still that two blackbirds, burrowed deep within the leaves, dared to lilt their full lay, apparently ignorant, Deirdre thought, of the charged currents fluxing between the man and woman below them.
How deep the shadowed hollow of his throat. How long and firm the stretch of his collarbone. How large his hands. Broad-palmed, strong-fingered. Scars nicked small, white lines across their backs. Yet how well he used them, like a lute-player, plucking what he needed from amid the bristled pieces on the board and moving with quick, sparse gestures to the new spot, without the clumsy tremors she’d expect from a man with such callused, worker’s hands.
She imagined those hands would rasp against her skin like the brush of a cat’s tongue.
She seized the flagon of wine to take a sip, surprised to find it heavy, when surely she and Conor had already drank the most of it. She tried to concentrate on the board rather than the man. She was an indifferent player. Though she had learned the way of it in her youth, the game was frowned upon within the halls of the cloisters—for amid the better classes, it was the custom to play it for w
agers. Only in the months before Jean-Jacques’s death, those few precious months they’d shared together in Troyes, had she rediscovered the joy of it. Now, with this man breathing over her, the fate of the wooden kings and queens on the board held little meaning.
Conor seemed distracted as well. For his interest was over his shoulder, to the quicken rimming the open slope of the hill, to the sway of a low bough brushing against the feathery spray of a fern, as if searching for danger, and she wondered with a spurt of shame if she were just imagining the rivers of trembling sensation flowing between them, or if they were the amorous imaginings of a girl left too long in the cloisters.
She reached into the woven basket and took out a piece of fruit, biting into it without tasting it, just to settle the roiling of her belly. Only after the thing was half-eaten did she realize it was a ripe, red apple—and she wondered at the curious thing, when she’d not remembered packing it, when she was sure not a single apple tree in all of Champagne had yet dropped its fruit.
She looked up to make a mention of it to Conor, but his face was averted again, to the shivering tremble of a bush on the rim of the woods.
Then she looked at the board and saw it with a sudden, piercing clarity. “Checkmate.” She moved a bishop to knock over Conor’s king, and then seized that king in triumph. “Still looking for ruffians, Conor? You would have done better to keep your mind on the game.”
He blinked at her. His gaze was like the gathering of clouds before a storm. His pegs were scattered all over, the ones she’d captured lying upon the cloak at her knees.
She softened her voice. “If I’d known you were so new at it, I would have taught you a trick or two.”
He frowned at the board. “It’s just a game.”
“Yes, a game,” she argued, “and you’ll have to fulfill the wager.”
“There was,” he growled, jerking to his feet, “no wager.”
“Then I’ve the right to set it, and you’ve the right to call another game.”
“Whose rules are these you’re spouting?”
“It has always been the way we’ve played, my brother and I—”
[Celtic Legends 01.0] Twice Upon a Time Page 23