“Firelight is warm and bright enough. And you can’t see the soot on the walls by it.”
Damned, foolish lass. Didn’t know the first thing she was doing, didn’t know what she was saying, didn’t know how every word sliced away more and more of the dead wood which encased the battered, ever-beating remnants of his heart. He sealed her lips with his own, hiding from her the single tear which squeezed out of one eye.He swallowed her low and eager moan, and then slid his lips down to the throbbing pulse at her throat. Damn the woman, she made his head soft. She made him want things he had no business wanting.
She made him dream again.
But now he had loving on his mind. He snapped the ties of his cloak and threw it across the ground. There’d be enough time later to tell her the full of the tale. As he softened one knee to press her down with him, a flicker of movement on the edge of the clearing caught his eye.
Octavius leaned against an oak. A grin split his face.
“Aren’t you a fine one,” Conor said, “hiding when you’re needed, and showing your face when you’re least wanted.”
The imp grinned all the more. “Is that all the thanks I get for what I’ve done for you?”
Conor felt a spurt of fury. What had Octavius and his kind ever done for him but play peg-games with his life and the life of the woman in his arms? Octavius and his mischief had put him through seven centuries of loneliness, and promised more to come. For even as he held her against him, his heart raw and open, he knew the end of this story.
Conor said, “Keep the door open next time I come knocking, Octavius.” That damned silvered door to the Otherworld that had always been bolted against him. “And then maybe we’ll talk about thanks.”
Octavius crossed his arms and looked ready to speak, but a rustling in the clearing revealed the outline of someone else amid the trees.
Dierdre rose from the circle of his arms. “Moira?”
“Child.” The word rolled out of Moira’s mouth holding all the softness of a mother’s tongue. “I’ll be off now. You’ve no more need of me now that you’ve finally got your brave warrior. It’s glad I am of that, for all that I’ll miss you.”
The wind whirled and whispered like the brush of silken veils. A feeble ringing sounded on the air, a haunting melody which ebbed and flowed. Conor felt the Otherworld close, closer than he’d ever felt it.
“This is a world of choices, Conor.” Moira’s eyes glowed like opals in the gloom. “Human choices, over which no creature of this world or the other has any real power. Did you not suspect that it was you who kept the worlds together, all these years, just by living?”
His mind stuttered, trying to absorb that, trying to understand.
“It’s been a heavy load you’ve carried,” she admitted, “all along not even knowing you were carrying it. Now listen.” The mists swirled, obscuring all but the glowing eyes, and the soft, strangely hushed voice. “Your mother made a brave choice when she conceived a child of the Sídh, at a time when we were all fading fast. The only way to bind the worlds was to forge a strong bond of spirit and flesh.”
Conor felt Deirdre quivering. But he could not look away from the creature called Moira, lest she disappear and leave him with another seven centuries of wondering.
She continued, “Your mother paid a price for her choice. She had to abandon you alone in a world which had begun to scorn our existence. In that moment, she laid the burden of keeping the worlds together on your shoulders.”
“And it would all have come to a fine end,” Octavius interjected from his lair in the shadow of an oak, “but it was your own arrogance which led you away from the path we’d laid—contrary, snarling creatures you humans are, always fighting what should be, and not listening to your wiser halves—”
“And you,” Conor growled, “didn’t think to tell me this before now?”
“Enough.” Moira’s voice was nothing but a breath of wind now. “Care well for that babe in her womb. She’s one more link forged in the chain.”
“Aye, good night, and good riddance to you.” Octavius jerked his hood over his head, and then winked at Deirdre. “Mayhap we’ll be racing one of these mornings, lass.”
Then the music stopped as if an iron door had slammed shut in a mead hall.
Conor stared where Octavius and Moira had been. Nothing remained but a silver glow limning the trees. He looked down at Deirdre and felt a sudden lightness in his heart.
“At last,” he whispered. “It’s done.”
Epilogue
It was a fine, soft day on Inishmaan.
The springtime sun blazed through the clouds and shimmered upon the cliffs. Galway Bay, almost too blue to look at, licked the graveled shore. Crazed by the scent of freshly caught mackerel, a flock of gulls screeched as they whirled in cirrus of wings above the fleet of curraghs bobbing just beyond the surf.
Deirdre stood with the other women of Inishmaan. Dried salt and sea spray streaked her arms from an afternoon collecting seaweed. She shifted the weight of the dripping basket on her hip, and then shaded her eyes against the flash of the ocean.
It was no surprise to find Conor in the thick of it all, standing at his full height at the bow of the lead curragh, riding the dips and swells with his knees, while he peered out to the roll of the oncoming waves.
“By my soul.” Red Sean’s young wife leaned toward Deirdre with a waggle of brows. “Don’t you have a man of a race that never owned a coward.”
Deirdre grinned and sank the weight of her basket into the sand, grateful for the easy camaraderie. Over the two years that she’d lived here, not one woman had staggered back in revulsion at Dierdre’s direct gaze.
A squealing blur dashed by her, launching a spray of pebbles. With a swiftness born of instinct, Deirdre lunged, seized a handful of blue wool, and hauled her squirming daughter onto her hip.
“Are you trying to get hit by a curragh, Aileen? Or would you prefer drowning in the sea?”
Aileen squirmed in Deirdre’s embrace. While Deirdre worked, the toddler had scoured the shore for treasures with the other village children. Now she flailed two fistfuls of shiny rocks and threw them toward the sea.
“Daidí, Daidí!”
“Aye, that’s your Da making a spectacle of himself.” Deirdre brushed at the sea spray beading on her daughter’s flushed cheeks. “But you’ll wait here safe and dry until they land, a stóirín.”
Dierdre watched as the curragh surged upon a wave’s crest. Conor plunged the oars into the foaming water and pulled back so hard that his muscles strained against the sleeves of his tunic. Another wave loomed up behind him, surging high and fast, but before the first whiskers of foam frothed the peak, the prow of the curragh scraped the shore. Conor gripped the rim, leapt out, and dragged the boat out of harm’s way.
Only then did Deirdre release the breath she had not realized she’d been holding.
“Now you can go.” Deirdre set Aileen down and patted her daughter’s behind as the child darted off. Conor seized the toddler in mid-run and whirled her through the air. Conor was home, it was Beltane Day. There’d be no more work today.
She was tucking the seaweed basket behind a cradle of boulders when a shadow fell over her.
“Wife, there’s a price to pay for not greeting your man proper.”
She squinted up at him. His grin rivaled the blaze of the sky. Their daughter sat easily upon his shoulders, her arms flailing as she stretched up and tried to reach the gulls swooping across the shore.
Deirdre raised herself onto her toes and kissed Conor’s salty lips, then whispered, “I’ll pay that price, mo rún.”
“Listen to you talking.” He lowered his head and stole another kiss. “A convent-bred lass. In front of your daughter, no less.”
“The fairies did not leave that babe under the ivy.”
A lock of hair fell onto his brow. Tenderly, she raked it through her fingers as she pushed it aside. Sunlight shimmered on a single silver strand threadin
g through the lock. She wondered if he’d noticed the changes. She wondered if he noticed that as Aileen grew bigger and stronger, a few more crinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Their daughter, that red-topped, squealing bundle of joy babbling now on her husband’s shoulders, was the next link in the chain, the strongest bond between this world and the other.
Not just this daughter, but also the new child growing inside her.
She lifted her face and Conor bent to kiss her, but a tiny, cowskin-covered foot got in the way.
“Down!” Aileen battered Conor’s head as she caught sight of the village children with baskets full of mackerel. “Down!”
Conor hauled his daughter off his shoulders. With a flash of feet she was at the little boys’ sides, thrusting her hands into the baskets.
“Cruel wench,” Conor growled, thrusting Deirdre up against him anew, “to talk like that when you know the little lass won’t drop off to sleep until the moon is overhead.”
His kiss tasted of sea spray. Aileen came back and wiggled her way between their knees and twinkled up at them with her father’s gray eyes. Deirdre and Conor broke apart to the giggles of children and the knowing laughter of a cluster of islanders, who’d caught up with them upon the path.
“I see who got the best catch of the day,” one of the men remarked.
“Aye,” one of the women added, “and well-hooked he is, I’m thinking.”
“Shouldn’t you both be saving that for the Beltane fire?”
“Only you, Patch Peggeen, would save it for Beltane,” Conor retorted. “We’ve a Beltane fire around our hearth every night of the year.”
A priest stepped over the rock-pile fence of the burial ground, just at the height of the path. His black robes battered his legs as he approached the crowd with a swift, lusty gait. “Was that pagan nonsense I heard coming from your mouth, Conor MacSídh?”
Deirdre shook her head. “Don’t you be asking my husband such a question, Father. I won’t let you two debate nonsense over a skin of honey-mead tonight.”
The priest gave her a wink. “Now there’s a good lass, keeping her man home and out of mischief.”
Then the priest was gone with a wave of his hand, striding at full speed down to the shore to meet the curragh which would take him back to the north island before the Beltane fires flared scarlet in the night.
With Aileen dancing a weaving trail before them, Deirdre and Conor climbed to the top of the path. When she and Conor had first arrived, the villagers had warned them away from building within the wind-worn, rambling circle of tumbling stones. It was common talk that the ancient ruins upon the hill were inhabited by fairies. They’d seen their footmarks upon the cliff, they’d told them, and strange, airless gusts of wind swept the place—but Conor was adamant that Dun Conor was home.
She’d known it was her home, too, the moment she had laid eyes upon the height, safe, guarded, strong.
Arms around one another, Conor and Deirdre paused at the edge of the rock-pile fence. Primroses clung to the stones and waved in the briny breeze. Cows lowed in the field as they feasted on green and stubborn grass. Across the bay, the Connemara mountains rose purple from the deep blue water and the rhythmic wash of the tide against the cliffs lulled them with soft music.
Aileen raced through an opening in the fence, giggling and twirling in happy delirium. Deirdre wondered when the lass would show the full of her fairy blood. She wondered if it would come upon her in secret, or if it would, like Deirdre’s own gift, wait until the brink of womanhood before it manifested.
Conor’s gaze followed his daughter’s antics. “Full of life, that one.”
“Aye, she dances like the wind.”
Suddenly, rising from a crack in the stones beneath their feet, a frantic little gust whirled, salt-sweet and humid. Deirdre and Conor shared a secret smile as that gust veered off toward their daughter, who squealed and whirled with it.
Conor murmured, “It’s good to know that there’s still some magic in the world.”
Above, the silhouette of two swans soared and dipped and twirled, weightless with the wind beneath their wings.
THE END
I hope you enjoyed TWICE UPON A TIME! With every novel, I try to deliver to you what I crave in every book I read: A sense of being swept away on a magical, passionate adventure with a strong and wonderful man. Thanks so much for letting me share my story.
In the mood for another passionate, magical historical romance? Check out an exclusive excerpt from the next book in The Celtic Legends Series THE FAERY BRIDE, just ahead!
Don’t miss Lisa's other passionate romances--including more novels in The Celtic Legends Series
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Enjoy this excerpt from THE FAERY BRIDE, Book Two in the Celtic Legends Series....
Prologue
The Year of Our Lord 1275
It was a frightful visitor who came to us that strange Midsummer’s Night.
It could have been yesterday, I remember it so well. Twilight had blackened the crags of my lord’s kingdom. The dying gasps of the pagan fires still glowed upon the hillsides. I’ve been the keeper of this house for enough years to turn my hair white, yet never had a visitor come so high in the mountains in the midst of night. And none welcome for these past five years, mind you, with all the changes in the house of Graig. So you can imagine how I nearly leapt out of my skirts when someone banged at the door fit to split the wood.
I knew that the entire household was snug inside. They’d scurried back to their hovels from whatever pagan things they do at those fires on Midsummer’s Night, like rats to their holes in a storm, not one of them brave enough to risk seeing whatever demons are set loose after the sun sets. I myself was hanging another sprig of St. John’s wort over the doorway to the kitchens to guard against demons and the like.
At first I thought to ignore the banging. No good news comes after dark, you know, and the master.... well, it’s no secret that the master wouldn’t take kindly to having his refuge invaded. Faith, the master was no fit company for wolves these days. It was not always that way, you know. But now I feared—even not knowing who stood behind that door—for the poor unwitting creature’s health. No man deserved the full wrath of this Lord of Graig.
But you see, I’m Irish born, Welsh bred, and Celtic to the bone, and found myself padding through the rushes nonetheless to pull the door open in welcome.
An Irishman, he said he was. Snarling and snapping at the delay, and me wondering how to keep him quiet so as not to disturb the master in his chamber at the other end of the hall. I spoke as kindly as I could and ushered the visitor to the center hearth, offering him a bit of mead and oatcake. Only then did I get a straight look at him. He was a strange spark of a man, too limber and sprightly for the wild night. There was a brightness to him, like to outshine the fire that the girls work day and night to keep burning. I found myself lingering until he barked good and loud for the me
ad I’d promised him.
Then the far door banged open and my heart leapt to my throat, for the master tore out of his chamber breathing fire like the dragon that’s said to live amid the caves of Snowdon. He caught sight of the visitor and I scurried out, not wanting to be burned by the hot edge of his tongue.
Faith, it’s true I had no business lurking in the shadows with my ears cocked, me being no more than a servant in the house of Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord of Graig. But I’ve earned my meddling, you see, having been with this house long before the present lord took his first squalling breath. I’ve known the family as if it were my own. I’ve watched through the good years and now, yes, in the darkest. So I took no shame in peering around that splintered old wall. Surely it was my duty to stop the master from tossing the Irishman out into the cold. We’re still Welsh, after all, no matter what curse God has put upon this lord and this house. I’ll see myself begging in some English village before the Graigs deny hospitality to anyone whose shadow darkens the door.
Oh, and the two went at it, the master and the Irishman, my master roaring his displeasure and the little man talking back with no mind to the danger to his own hide. Octavius, he said his name was, recently come of Ireland, though what he was doing wandering in this place so far from sea or road was a puzzle to all. He was having none of my master’s rudeness—none at all. Never did I hear any man talk to my master the way this little tattered fellow did. He even made my master pause a moment with the shame of finding such a harsh welcome in a fellow Celt’s house.
Then my lord made to stomp off to that lair of his he lets no one into, when Octavius called out and made a comment on the lights he saw upon yonder lake. Ah, you know the one, the enchanted lake with the faery isle my master has been trying for years to build a castle upon. The Irishman was trying to engage my master in conversation, after all the harsh words that had passed between them! The little man began talking of faery rings and dancing lights and all such things—not a strange conversation for a Midsummer’s Night, for all the people of Graig had been talking of the old days this night. But my master interrupted the Irishman as I knew he would. My lord scoffed as he does at all un-Christian imaginings and mocked the little man, which sent the Irishman to true temper at last.
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