[Celtic Legends 01.0] Twice Upon a Time
Page 27
“This I promise you, Deirdre.” He curled his fingers over her hand. “You’ll never have to scrape for a living. You’ll never feel the bite of want again.”
His grip on her fingers faltered. That strange, glorious feeling surged between them again. She knew it was love—for such a river of emotion flowing between a man and a woman could be nothing else.
He lowered his lips to her temple. “You never gave me a chance to state my wager.”
They made love pillowed on the soft grass with the scent of the earth around them, like two peasants on a tryst in the furrow of a field. They rolled about careless of their rumpled clothing, careless about everything but the need to feel the sunshine on their bare skin, and the heat of their joined bodies, and all with their eyes wide open so they could gaze upon one another in the wonder of it all.
When the loving was over, they lay on their backs, Deirdre’s head cocked on Conor’s chest, watching the float of the clouds. Conor began to speak of his travels. He told her tales of a place where it never rained, where mountainous dunes of sand spread from horizon to horizon, and burned through the soles of the thickest boots. He spoke of a far northern land where it was night all winter, and all summer it was day. He spoke of the Cathay people who believed the soul was immortal, like Christians, except in a different sense. They believe that upon the death of a man, his soul enters into another body and, depending on how he has acted during his life, his future state becomes better or worse than his last.
He ran his fingers through her hair and told her more. He talked about people who willingly scarred their skin with designs, of dogs that pulled sledges across endless snow, of a land where the cattle were sacred and never eaten, of widows who threw themselves upon the pyres of their dead husbands, of men who turned over their womenfolk to every strange guest, of naked dancing girls dedicated to the service of gods in Hindu shrines.
She laughed, finally. “Now you’re making things up like a good Irishman.”
When the sun finally ascended to the treetops, they roused from their bed of grass and set their clothes to rights. The Clunel servants would be expecting them for the midday meal. Conor lingered over Deirdre’s hair, plucking the twigs and leaves out of it and combing it through with his fingers. Then they strolled through the high straight trees toward the manor house.
Just outside the Clunel garden, they stumbled upon Octavius snoozing in a low bough of an oak. He snored open-mouthed, drool oozing into his beard, with his hood pulled down over his eyes.
Conor stiffened to a stop. Dierdre strode toward the little man before Conor could wake him with an angry roar. She’d grown fond of the dirty little creature during these weeks in the country. She bent into the shadows and nudged him. He snorted and turned his face away. She nudged him hard enough to topple him off his precarious perch. He sputtered and spit into sudden wakefulness.
“Saints alive, can’t a man get a bit of sleep on a summer’s afternoon?” He struggled with his hood until he managed to pull it off. “Lass! Ah, never you mind, I did not know it was you.”
She was out of practice casting her gaze away after so much time alone with Conor, and so it was with a sudden start that she realized she was now meeting Octavius’s beetle-black gaze directly. Yet Octavius didn’t flinch.
He said, “I’ve been waiting here for the two of you for half the day, whilst you were traipsing through the woods with a never-you-mind. How’s a man supposed to find you in such a place, will you be telling me that?”
Deirdre’s neck began to prickle. “What is it?”
“Your father.”
“Papa!” Her hand flew to her unbound hair. “Is he here?”
“Aye.” Octavius cast a sly look toward Conor, standing as still as a stone. “And right now he’s hotter than a bog fire.”
Chapter Twenty
Conor stood rooted to the earth as Deirdre queried Octavius about the details of her father’s arrival. Conor clenched his hands into fists to prevent himself from lunging at the creature and choking the life out of him. He had not laid eyes upon the wretch since the night Octavius told the story of Deirdre and the three sons of Usnach. Octavius knew everything. And just when Conor’s mind was at its softest, just when his will had frayed to nothing, the wretch appeared, answering all of Deirdre’s questions, his beady eyes twinkling as if this were nothing but a peg-game.
“It’s a fine time,” Conor snarled, surprising Deirdre into silence, “to be showing me your face, Octavius.”
“What would you have me do?” The wretch discovered a patch of his lower back that needed scratching and set to it with vigor. “I’ve been following you like a shadow long enough.”
“Don't bicker, please.” Deirdre brushed at the snags in her hair. “My father’s here, and fit to be tied.”
Octavius bowed. “Then I’ll be off, lass, to leave the two of you alone.”
Conor took a step toward him. “You’ll not be getting away this time—”
“I can only interfere in the ways of the world so much. The rest is in your hands.” Octavius waved a dirty finger high in the air before darting around him. “You’d find that out yourself, if you stop fighting against what should be.”
What should be. Conor stared after the wretch, his mind full of what should be: Thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years with his woman, living on a barren rock of an island, watching the work wear her down, watching the light in her eyes slowly dim, watching her die in his arms. And yet he wanted those thirty, forty, or fifty years. He wanted the glut of moments, one after another, a whole new lifetime of seconds tumbling upon one another. By the gods. . . he wanted to be there again. He wanted to catch her last wheezing breath against his body, even knowing that he’d suffer more the second time around.
“Come.” Deirdre’s look was searching as she laid her hand on his arm. “I love my father, but he is not a man of patience. It would not bode well for us if we make him wait longer.”
She’d pulled her hood on. A thin, pink scratch traced the curve of her flushed cheek. Bits of leaves and soil clung to her throat and streaked across her tunic. What a mussed little fairy-sprite, he thought, fresh from her dew-laden bed, clear-eyed, soft-lipped.
What a fragile creature, and how innocent of the world.
“Why do you hesitate?” Her fingers slipped off his arm as his silence lengthened. “Am I to think you’ve changed your mind, Conor? That you won’t marry me after all?”
“You are mine, Deirdre.” He supposed he’d known since the moment she blinked open her eyes that he would never have the strength to walk away. “You’ll always be my wild heart.”
Her smile lit up the world.
“But,” he added, tracing the flush on her cheek, “you must make me a promise.”
“Anything.”
“Do you love me, woman?”
“Isn’t it as plain as the nose on my face?”
“Do you trust me?”
She searched his face, puzzled. A cow lowed somewhere in the distance. On the road beyond the manor house, a farmer shouted and snapped his whip over a lazy ox’s back. “With my own life, Conor, I trust you.”
“Then listen carefully to what I’m about to say.” He rapidly calculated how much time it would take for him to travel to the coast and back, to make all the necessary arrangements. “This is the promise you will make me: Three months hence, you will meet me on the hill where we first lay together.”
“Three months? We’ll be long married by then—”
“There is a day called Samhain,” he interrupted, “the first day of your November. On its eve we shall meet there.”
“I know of the day—it’s All Hallows' Eve.” She crossed her arms. “Why would you have me traipsing about the woods on the day when the souls of the dead fly free?”
He started. Such was the way of the ancient Celts. Had the Christians absorbed that belief, too, or had she just learned it through some folklore still surviving among the people of Ireland?
“You’re thinking of my betrothal to Sir Drunkard. You don’t understand, my father loves me—”
“It’s not that.” Her words struck daggers in his heart, for he knew the pain of the betrayal to come. “The future is uncertain, and we must prepare for the worst.”
“But I’ve the gift of the Sight.”
She spoke the words with pride, and he thought, if nothing else, I have gifted her with courage.
“Your power is uncertain when it comes to your own fate.” He put his finger to her lips. “Argue with me no more.” He felt time slipping away like the last grains in a sandglass. “Just promise me: No matter what happens this day, or in the days to come, no matter what you see or hear or feel, you will come to the hill where we first laid together, on Samhain’s Eve.”
“On my mother’s grave, I swear it.”
He grasped her face and kissed her lips, and her eyes, and her temple, and filled his head with the scent of her hair, his palms with the feel of her skin, her breast, her yearning, and he stole a few more moments, just one more, and yet another.
And so it was when they heard a man’s voice raised in the garden just beyond the woods. Deirdre broke away, flushed and panting, whispering “Papa! It’s Papa!” She raked her hair back and fumbled with her slipped neckline and tumbled hood. She gasped when she glimpsed a flash of black through the trees and an elderly woman dressed in common robes waddled into the little clearing.
“Moira!” Deirdre launched herself upon the old woman’s bosom.
“Lass, lass,” Moira exclaimed, patting her charge’s bare head. “What are you doing idling here, with your own father pacing a furrow in the ground waiting for you?”
“I was coming, I was.”
“Not dressed like this I hope.” She entangled herself from Deirdre’s arms and plucked at something clinging to her tunic. “Look at you. You’d think you were a child of ten summers who’d spent the afternoon in the bog—not a fine burgher’s grown daughter. Your father is waiting for both of you in the garden, but you can’t greet him looking like that. Let’s slip upstairs and get you changed—”
“No,” Deirdre said, “Conor and I must see Da together—”
“No, go with Moira,” he interrupted. He would spare her what was to come. “I need to speak to your father alone. You can join us after, for the celebration.”
How easy the lie rolled off his tongue, and how easily she swallowed it.
“My dowry is twenty thousand livres,” she said, heading down the path. “Don’t let my Da cheat you out of a bit of it.”
Conor found the burgher pacing between rows of unkempt weeds. The burgher’s scarlet cloak lay tossed across an old stone bench. Waves of heat rose from the paving stones. The burgher ground to a halt as he caught sight of Conor approaching him through the shadows.
Dierdre’s father dug his thumb beneath his jewel-studded belt. “So you’ve finally chosen to bless me with your presence.”
A barely perceptible nod was Conor’s only greeting.
“I am not the type of man who takes kindly to being made to wait for underlings.”
Conor bent over and swept up a stick, hiding the ruddy fury rising to his face, remembering when he had once faced her father as a king.
“Have you no excuses?” The burgher’s blunt-cut hair swung with anger. “I expect some light and oily words to ease a patron’s anger—or have you lost your tongue entirely?”
Conor leaned a shoulder against a tree and used the stick to flick off a clod of mud clinging to his heel. “You come unexpected, Mézières.”
The burgher’s chest inflated in affront. “Did I hear you correctly?”
“A note announcing your arrival would have been preferable.”
“You dare to lecture me on etiquette?” The words came out hoarse, sputtered. “You, who came to me dirty and unkempt off the streets of Troyes? You, who in three weeks has not once sent a single word to me about my own daughter’s welfare?”
“Your daughter is doing very well.” Conor slung the stick into the woods. “So tell me, why should I spend three deniers sending you a message about the health of your daughter, when you can damned well afford to make the trip here and see her for yourself?”
The burgher’s blue eyes narrowed to slits. Color flooded out of his face. The heat rising from the paving stones shimmered between them. The shrill buzz of summer insects swelled, held, and then ebbed away.
“I’ll assume,” the burgher began, trailing his fingers over the embroidered stripe running down the center of his surcoat, “that all the weeks you’ve spent in this rotting hovel, amid the surly peasants of this uncivilized countryside, is the sole reason for your insolence.” The burgher’s gaze roamed over Conor’s dirty clothing. “You obviously know no better, but a Mézières will not suffer such conditions as this—and no daughter of mine will be left unchaperoned and unattended in any woman’s house, be she noble or not. Because of the indignities you have undoubtedly been forced to suffer in my employ, I will overlook your behavior.”
How easily the man could set aside an affront if he wanted more from someone. How easily he could ignore the truth in favor of what he willed the truth to be. Witness Sir Guichard’s dissipation, Deirdre’s defiance of the betrothal, Conor’s own insolence. This burgher ignored them all, for they went against his wishes. It was no wonder the burgher had grown rich. He possessed all the ice-blooded cunning of the merchants of the Far East.
“So where is my daughter?” The burgher spread a hand glittering with rings toward the sagging house behind them. “Has she, like the mistress of this mockery of a noble house, deigned not to greet a mere burgher? Or is she just keeping me waiting, like the insolent doctor I hired to treat her?”
“I sent her away.”
One finely combed brow arched.
“She’s safe in the manor house. We need to talk, you and I.”
“There is only one thing we must discuss.” The burgher clasped his hands behind his back. “Deirdre has had her convalescence in the country as you advised. I trust she is strong enough for a wedding.”
“She is indeed.”
Conor strolled toward the stone bench. He took a seat and crossed his leg over his other knee. He eyed the burgher’s belt, the sagging alms purse, the decorative sheath of a dagger, and the protruding gold hilt—aye, that knife was a delicate little thing, but it would do the job. Then Conor threw his arm across the back of the bench, so his tunic stretched tight across his body. The burgher’s gaze fell to the blue streaks, the handprints Deirdre had left upon Conor’s chest after picking bilberries.
Conor allowed himself a rogue of a smile. “Always into something, your daughter is. Which is why she’s off dressing more properly to greet you.”
Conor smiled into the strained silence, broken only by a flock of birds rising up screeching from the deep woods. This moment of confrontation was a long time coming. Revenge was a sweet, savory dish—and now it lay before him. Conor glanced over his shoulder, toward the manor house. Deirdre was not near. What will be done will be done, and it didn’t matter if he took his fill of vengeance now.
“There’s something about this wild, uncivilized countryside you hate so much, Mézières.” Conor brushed off some nettles sticking to his boot. “Such a place brings out the most primitive urges in men and women, and that’s the way it should be, I’m thinking.”
The burgher stood as mute as one of the deep forest’s ancient oaks, his pupils constricted to pinpricks, the thinnest sheen of sweat beginning to bead on his forehead.
“Men construct too many buildings to worship in,” Conor mused, taking more than a measure of enjoyment in the burgher’s swelling shock, thinking, this vengeance is for Deirdre, too, for what you’ll do to her in the weeks to come. “We should be worshipping each other in the open air, like the Irish at Samhain, and there
should be no more talk about it. You being a man, with a bit of a past of your own, you’ll know what I’m talking about.” Conor shifted his shoulders and let his hand, dirty with nettles, fall again upon the scarlet cloth of the burgher’s cloak. “Just so you don’t think I’m an utter rogue, I fought against this thing between us. I thought I was too old for her. But your daughter is a woman of great charm and great beauty.” He gestured vaguely to the shaggy old oaks, to the blue white sky. “We being all but alone out here, well, it’s no surprise that nature took its course.”
The burgher swiveled with the crunch of gravel and showed Conor his back. The hem of his robes trembled in fury. His fingernails, shaped into perfect rosy crescents, dug deep into his sleeves.
“Am I to understand,” the burgher said in a tightly controlled voice, “that you have taken my daughter’s innocence?”
“I prefer to think of it as giving the lass a bit of knowledge and experience.”
That is for the agony you will cause her in this life, and twice for the agony you have caused her in the other.
The hem of the burgher’s robes rippled anew, the silver embroidery flashing. A dog barked somewhere beyond in the next holding. Monsieur Mézières eased his hands down to his elbows, and then grasped his wrist behind his back. He began a slow, deliberate pacing.
“Congratulations, Doctor MacSídh.” His throat flexed as if he struggled to pull out the words. “Your deception was flawless, your treachery, unimagined. This ruse should earn you a good, long time in Hell.”
For a flash of a moment, Conor reluctantly admired the burgher’s control. Another father might have raged the moment he’d understood, he might have attacked him blind with fury, or called men to do it for him, but this burgher assessed the situation and the cost, as if he were bargaining for dangerous wares on the back streets of Baghdad. Or a king upon whose smallest decision hung the fate of thousands.