Deirdre

by Linda Windsor

  It was no wonder the villains took so little precaution. The two guards left behind would have no trouble keeping this assembly in order. Keeping an ear open for anyone returning, he made his way to the head table, his nostrils filling with wood smoke tinged with meat drippings and the piquant bouquet of the imported ales and wines—the scents of warmth and hospitality now tainted with that of death.

  Lambert was not among the dead … but Gunnar’s father was, as well as all of the king’s most trusted thanes, the Christian witans Alric had last seen Scanlan with …

  He scoured the great room for any sign of the coarse, gray robe the priest wore, then approached the table where he’d shared a drink with his crew earlier. Perhaps like Alric and Deirdre, Scanlan had left before the massacre.

  If only the Wulfshead’s crew had done the same, he thought as he closed the sightless eyes of his helmsman. This had to be the work of Ethlinda’s herbs. That Gunnar and Wimmer were not among the dead offered small comfort. Ironically, the drunkenness that threatened violence had protected rather than endangered Gunnar by forcing him and Wimmer to leave early A few others were missing, at least from the crew’s table. By God’s grace, they were sleeping in the bam with their steeds. Still, the roar of anguish building in Alric’s chest at those lost wedged like a battle mace in his throat, refusing quarter.

  Alric stumbled away from the corpses of the men he’d drunk with, fought with, lived with, and laughed with. God! The silent scream rose from his chest, half protest, half plea—all pain. Blinded by it, Alric broke into a run toward the connecting corridor to the king’s lodge, his weapon clenched so hard in his fist that his fingers throbbed. Fate kept the passage clear ahead of him as he rushed the entrance past two guards who lay slain where they’d stood.

  Like a tormented bull, Alric charged into the large room. “Father!”

  The queen crouching over the writhing form of King Lambert leaped away from the bed. The way the black silk of her gown billowed, she looked like a startled vulture. The round astonishment of her gaze strained against the pronounced slant of the paint she used to dramatize her eyes.

  “What have you done, witch?” Alric snarled, his scramasax balanced before him as he approached his father’s bed.

  “P … poisoned me,” Lambert moaned from the bed. “The witch has—” The man rolled on his side, retching to no avail, but the room reeked of his previous success.

  “How come you to be about at this hour?” Fully recovered, Ethlinda asked the question as though he were a visitor—unexpected but strangely welcome.

  “Kill her, Son … and kill her bastard. They plan to rule my kingdom as heroes for turning away their own army posing as the Welsh.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Lambert,” Ethlinda taunted. “This boy is a child of God now, a champion of justice … and justice is exactly what I give you for the murder of my son’s father.”

  “What?” Alric couldn’t believe his ears. Ricbert wasn’t the legitimate heir?

  “Ricbert is the son of Elwid, the champion your father slew when he attacked my father’s burgh and offered peace by accepting my hand.” The queen glared at the weak, gasping man on the bed. “And I have waited nearly thirty years to see him avenged. How does it feel, Lambert, to know your enemy’s son will rule Galstead?”

  Alric shook himself before Ethlinda’s evil aura trapped him like a helpless fly in a web of death. He started for her, one deliberate step at a time. There was no escaping his blade, unless she turned to smoke and vanished.

  “If you die, Father, then die knowing you are avenged.”

  “Alric!”

  The flicker of brightness in Ethlinda’s onyx gaze alerted Alric of danger behind him ahead of his father’s gasp. Dropping low to a squat, Alric heard the air slice over his head. The wind of the passing blade blew cool against his cheek. He sprang up, quick and hard, driving his scramasax into his assailant’s side, which was left unprotected by the momentum of the heavy long sword in his hands.

  With a howl of agony Ricbert stumbled, legs twisted beneath him. Beyond them the sword of Gleannmara clattered to the stone floor. Ricbert stared at Alric with disbelief, and when his knees gave way, Alric instinctively tried to steady him. Ricbert’s weight rested on the hilt of Alric’s blade, which had entered just under the rib cage and upward, skewering all in its path.

  “Mother!” The prince’s wail waned along with his strength as Alric wrestled him to the floor. “I’m slain.”

  With no time to savor the moment, Alric withdrew his blade with a mighty pull. Ricbert screamed and curled on his side, no longer a threat, as Alric spun to face a very deadly one … the queen.

  She was nowhere to be seen, as if she had turned to vapor and risen through the smoke hole in the roof over them.

  His father lay clutching the hilt of the dagger she’d plunged into him. “Never felt … felt like he was mine.” Bile and blood trickled down the king’s thick beard. His breath was labored and pained.

  Alric knelt by the royal bed. “I will track her down and give her the death she deserves.”

  Lambert snorted, as if he saw humor in this most dire of circumstances. “I won.”

  The blood that rose in his mouth choked him. Alric lifted him by his shoulders to a sitting position. Clearly Lambert was out of his senses.

  “Don’t try to talk.” Alric wiped his father’s mouth tenderly, but the action felt awkward. To his recollection, the closest thing to affection Lambert had ever shown him was praise—a clap on the back at best. Life had forged a formidable wall of social and political taboo between them.

  “Look at ’im …”

  Struck by the pity he thought he heard in the king’s voice, Alric looked at where Ricbert wriggled toward the sword of Gleannmara.

  “Not fit to carry a king’s sword,” Lambert disdained. He coughed, his grip tightening on Ethlinda’s dagger as though that alone held his spirit within his dying frame. Having seen more than one man spend his last breath with the removal of a fatal blade, Alric let the weapon stay where it was.

  “He couldn’t swing it straight with both hands.”

  Ricbert moaned, collapsing with the verbal stab the king thrust at him. Tears spilled as freely down his cheeks as the blood seeping through his fingers.

  “You are my heir, Alric, always were … in my heart.”

  Alric tightened his embrace, stumbling for a reply “That’s because of Mother.”

  “Yes, derling, the best of us both.”

  Derling? Alric tensed uneasily His father couldn’t be speaking to him. He’d never called anyone derling but Orlaith.

  “I’ve done many—” Lambert coughed—“many wrong things, but our son …”

  Alric followed the man’s gaze to the foot of the bed but saw no one.

  “He was the key to my … our kingdom. Should have listened to you … should have—”

  “Father—”

  “Lemme finish.” Lambert rolled his eyes up at Alric, although the pupils were all but hidden beneath the sag of his eyelids. “Don’t be like me, Son. Love is … only kingdom worth living for.” A flash of alarm seized his features, and he tried to rise. “Your bride. Where is your bride? You have to save her. That witch will—”

  “Deirdre is safe.”

  “Then go to her, lad. Leave this cesspool on earth. Now!” Lambert’s breath became rapid with an infectious panic. Go! We’ve won. That witch brought your mother to me, but she’ll take Deirdre from you. Take up the sword and save your bride.”

  Lambert’s arm was straight as an arrow now aimed at the door. He sat upright without the support of the pillows, as if he were about to chase Alric from the room.

  Ricbert’s still outstretched hand lay no more than a finger’s curl from the jeweled hilt of the Gleannmara sword—a finger’s curl and a lifetime. Alric knelt and picked it up. A bolt of energy surged up his arm. The black sea of anguish that tossed in his brain calmed, and Abina’s warning bobbed to the surface again, echoing as th
ough she stood right at his ear and repeated it.

  “Don’t let your taste for revenge keep you from your bride and birthright, Son.”

  Wonderstruck, Alric turned back to the bed in time to see Lambert snatch Ethlinda’s twisted blade from his chest and smile. Alric had never seen such joy, certainly not on his father’s face. His eyes all but glowed, like stars catching the light of a full moon on a cloudless night. As though lowered by angels, Lambert, still smiling, eased back on the pillows, his last breath a long, contented sigh.

  It spoke volumes, not to Alric’s ear, but to his heart. His father was with his beloved.

  Now it was time for Alric to join his.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The fog blanketing Galstead proper had tinged the night with gray, where the scattered lamps and torches glowed as though looking through from another world. It swallowed sound like a thick carpet as Deirdre and her party made their way through the pitch-black tunnel down a seemingly bottomless incline in the globe of light from Abina’s lamp.

  As long as it took, it should have put them out at Chesreton’s gate, Deirdre thought, when at long last they emerged at the bottom. At least the eerie mist wasn’t as smothering as before. The air they inhaled now held the promise of light. Restless, Cairell took up the watch, while Tor eyed him from the leash Abina clutched tightly in her arthritic hand. Deirdre helped the nurse to a seat on a flat rock as the old woman called upon heaven for angels to surround and deliver Alric safely away, if it be God’s will.

  Deirdre could not consider the possibility that it was not. She turned away from the nurse with her own plea. Father, You have brought us together. It can’t possibly be Your will that we part now. Surely You’d not use our hearts so unconscionably. Surely …

  “You really love him.”

  Realizing that she’d voiced her protest, Deirdre met her brother’s gaze. “With all my heart, Cairell. God has taught me … taught Alric and me,” she amended, “so much that we might make a good match in heaven’s eye, I will cherish Alric to my dying day.”

  Cairell scoffed. “He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  “Nay he’s a wolf in Christ’s light.” She would not let her brother’s words ruffle her.

  “He’s a pirate, a thief—”

  “He’s a warrior protecting his father’s shores—” the old nurse spoke up—“by seizing ships bound for Scotia Minor with arms and supplies to be used against his country And not the least different from the Dalraidi vessels that ply the Northumbria coast with the same purpose.”

  Cairell was clearly taken aback. “She speaks Irish?”

  “I am of the Dalraidi,” Abina informed him, head high. “Captured along with my mistress, Princess Orlaith of the same.”

  “Alric’s mother.” Deirdre smiled at her brother’s shock.

  “My Alric was educated by the finest teachers the Irish have to offer and certainly learned better manners than you, young man … speaking before me in a language you presumed me to be ignorant of.”

  The corners of Cairell’s mouth struggled between humor and consternation. “My apologies, milady.”

  With a righteous sniff, Abina returned to her prayers.

  “But it still doesn’t change the fact that he chose to fight with our enemies.” Obviously Cairell was still unconvinced of Alric’s worthiness.

  “He fought with honor for what he believed in, just like you and your friends, Cairell.”

  “With all due respect, miladies, neither of you have seen the handiwork of Northumbrian honor.” Cairell thumped his chest with his fist, taking his simmering rage upon himself. “I, and my less fortunate friends, have.”

  His firsthand account of Ecfrith’s attack on Ireland’s coastal monasteries was enough to blanch Gleannmara’s green hills. Worse still was the plight of slaves taken. “Mostly children, Deirdre.” Cairell could not stem his disgust. “I and those who survived were taken because one of the children inadvertently called me Prince Cairell to warn me of an attacker at my back. Even so, there were four of us trying to form a fighting circle, and the devils never did figure which of us was the prince.”

  “What was the name of this brigand who took you?” All Deirdre had was the letter from a Frisian trader, who’d demanded the church deliver the ransom.

  Cairell shrugged. “’Twas a group. They spoke so fast, I couldn’t understand most of their babble.”

  “Your sister speaks our language flawlessly,” Abina boasted to the prince. At Cairell’s skeptical glance, Deirdre nodded.

  A frown furrowed his brow “You never studied it.”

  “It was a miraculous gift from God.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “Scanlan told me … and so many souls have been saved, even the king—”

  Tor barked, giving them all a start. Jumping to his feet, Cairell looked into the mist.

  Heavenly Father, let it be my Alric coming to me. Her Alric. The memory of his possessive ardor and sweet embrace in its aftermath would remain with her forever.

  Cairell knelt to press his ear to the ground, then stood. He cut Tor a contemptuous glance. “Tell me why we brought that drooling creature with us again? ’Tis likely it was his slobber he heard smacking the ground.”

  “Tor is Alric’s—” Deirdre broke off, recalling how the dog had come to her defense against Alric in the chapel. “Our dog.” The beast had grown on her affections.

  “Ah.” Accepting his sister’s explanation as an impugning explanation, Cairell settled against a large stone, staring off in the direction Tor had indicated. “I should have taken Scanlan,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Alric will bring him.” The blade of alarm that had wedged in her chest the moment she was awakened to the sound of Alric and an unseen attacker struggling twisted with guilt. “If the poor soul’s not among the dead.” Scanlan had made some serious enemies. She’d been praying selfishly for Alric, forgetting Scanlan. Please, God, let him live. He’s done far more for You than I.

  “I left three good men behind as it is.” The pain in her brother’s voice was as thick as the fog. He shook his head. “They wanted to cover for my escape, but I refused … until I heard what had happened to you.”

  “What happened to you?” Deirdre leaned next to her brother on the stone.

  In bits and snatches, between stopping to listen, Cairell told Deirdre the incredible story. The four captives were kept hidden, as though their captors did not want their comrades to know about them. Imprisoned in the hold of the Saxon ship and fed worm-eaten bread and sour wine for a week, they were at last smuggled by night to a prison in an old stone tower near the eastern sea from which the invaders had first come.

  “It was a ruin; its stench was faded so that we could smell the salt air and hear the gulls.”

  Deirdre shivered at the thought of being confined in the hold for more than a week. Her stomach still turned with the memory of her fear and the fetid air in the hold.

  “Then someone arrived with the news that you and my ransom had been captured by Alric of Galstead, and that one of Ecfrith’s thanes was asking questions about me. The next thing we know, we overhear the guards talking about putting us on the next Frisian vessel bound for France. Thanks to ill-fitted shackles, I slipped overboard the first night out and swam to shore off the Essex coast. Surely God provided my way here, for I found an army forming to march on Northumbria. With my Latin, I passed as a traveling bard—”

  Tor erupted suddenly in a barking frenzy, this time pulling at the leash so hard that Abina lost her grip.

  “Tor!” Deirdre called out to him.

  The dog disappeared into the fog, in the direction of a distant thunder.

  “Alric?” She glanced at Cairell expectantly but his shrug told her he had no more idea than she.

  He hurried to Abina’s side to help her to her feet. “We’ll take no chances,” he answered shortly. “Into the tunnel.”

  Having explored this hillside inside and out
as a child, Alric knew exactly where he was, but Tor’s throaty roar was a welcome sound to his ear. He reined in Dustan and gave the dog a chance to find him. The rain clouds and mist delayed the light of dawn, and hence the attack being mustered southeast of the walls. Even more of a blessing, the guards who’d been frightened away at the gate were remiss in regrouping and summoning help against the demons who’d materialized in the fog. As a result, the neatly executed escape with Wimmer and the handful of men who were in the bam had turned into a motley exodus of villagers with their women and children, as word spread of what had happened. Alric could no more abandon them than his wife’s kin.

  It was a miracle Scanlan lived, much less that he was able to tell them what had happened. Badly beaten and partially scalped in the manner Ecfrith’s men had done to so many of the Celtic clergy the young man was a mass of cuts and bruises swelling by the moment. Just which of the priest’s bones had been broken was impossible to tell. Scanlan told Alric he owed his life to Juist. Ethlinda ordered her henchmen to subdue Scanlan while she scalped the crown of his head, and then left him to Juist and her men to finish him off. Evidently reluctant to take the life of a priest, no matter what God he served, the senior witan stopped the soldiers just before Scanlan lost consciousness for the first time.

  “We must focus on the unseen,” the priest mumbled, seizing Alric’s arm. “What we see is temporary.” He drifted in and out of his senses as the villagers placed him in a cart, while Alric and what other men they could muster stood by, weapons ready for any Mercian attempt to stop them.

  “There’s the mutt,” Wimmer pointed out as Tor bounded out of the mist, tail wagging.

  Moments later, Alric found the entrance to the cave and hailed the remainder of his party Cairell emerged first, sword ready but Deirdre rushed past him, her face awash with relief.

  “Alric!”

  Her voice truly was music to his ears.