Dark visions gathered as unbidden as the squall ahead—of his father lying with Ethlinda’s dagger buried in his chest, of the spectacle of slain friends and crew members he desperately needed now, of Scanlan’s battered body, of Tor’s plaintive look before the dog lowered his head in a sleep from which he’d not awake. Each opened a raw wound, bleeding his spirit.
Now the storm swept toward him cloaked in swirling black robes like …
Like the queen’s.
For as long as Alric could remember, Ethlinda threatened him in the same manner, appearing when least expected, venting her rage, and slipping out of view to await her next chance to plague him. As a child, he’d thought she floated about on a silken swirl of darkness, like some sinister fairy.
“Something troubles you, little pretender?”
God help him, he could hear the witch’s taunt even now, that singsong drawl that scraped the spine with shards of ice.
“First your dog. Then your ship—”
Alric shook himself, nightmare becoming reality.
“And now your bride.”
Ethlinda—at least the old woman resembled the queen—stood back to the rail, holding Deirdre at knifepoint.
“Dee!”
“Hold, Gleannmara!” The queen snatched Deirdre’s head back even further by the braid wound around her free hand as Cairell broke from the bucket brigade. “In fact, everyone hold.”
Seeing the blade indent the smooth, white flesh he’d worshiped in what little time he and Deirdre had spent as man and wife, Alric addressed the bucket brigade.
“Do as she asks.”
“She’ll kill us all if we stop.”
The look Alric gave the enemy was enough to wither green oak, but when he turned back, the gaze that met Deirdre’s tore at her heart. She’d seen him look at the sky, watched his brow furrow, but what drew her to him could not be seen, only felt.
She’d wanted to soothe his torture, if with nothing more than a touch, but as she made her way to him, the bent old seasick woman had slipped on the deck.
Deirdre rushed to see if she was injured, but instead of a face shriveled by time, something far more hideous appeared. Dumbfounded to behold the streaked face of Galstead’s pagan queen, Deirdre became easy prey No longer bent or crippled, Ethlinda vaulted to her feet, seizing Deirdre’s long braid with one hand and brandishing a dagger with the other.
“You’re mad, woman.” Alric made a statement without any of the emotion Deirdre had sensed earlier.
“Oh, I’m more than mad, my little pretender.” Ethlinda’s laugh was colder than the blade at Deirdre’s throat. The metal warmed with each thrum of her pulse against it. If her heart pumped much harder, she’d surely feel the sting of its edge.
“I am livid,” the queen declared imperiously. “Thirty years of my life I waited for the day when I could cut out that old fool’s heart and hand it and his kingdom over to the son of the man he murdered. I choked on Lambert’s flaunting of his whore and his fair-haired bastard, but no … the little pretenderling rises like bile to spoil my delicious revenge. I want an eye for an eye!”
“Then take me and let the others go.” Alric knelt slowly depositing the hatchet and the spike of wood he’d made to plug the leak.
“No, Alr—” The blade at her throat nipped her flesh in warning, freezing Alric in place as he rose.
“You have always been full of yourself, little pretender. Do you think that your eyes alone will satisfy me?” the madwoman disdained. “I want them all.”
The woman literally trembled with seething. No human could summon the sheer evil of her presence. No human stood a chance against it.
It held them all captive in its web—all save one. The infant in Abina’s arms began to wail in protest of the elderly nurse’s tight hold. Deirdre felt Ethlinda stiffen behind her, imagined those painted eyes slanting toward the child as though to skewer its tiny heart.
Her breath hissed against the nape of Deirdre’s neck. “Silence the whelp.”
Abina shushed the baby girl, but she would not quiet. She wailed all the louder, in all her innocence of the danger. Her mother started up from the rowing bench.
“Stay put wench, or I’ll have it tossed over the side.”
Panic-stricken, the young woman looked across the deck to where Kaspar stood just as helpless.
Struggling to her feet, Abina began to sing, all the while rocking the distraught infant in her arms. “Thou, Michael the Victorious …”
Ethlinda’s voice exploded. “I said silence!”
Nonplused, Abina glanced up. “You said to quiet the child. I am only obeying your command.”
The baby’s mother joined in. “Conqueror of the dragon, be thou at my back …”
Deirdre dared not breathe. She could already feel the warm trickle of her own blood at the hollow of her neck, but she sang with her heart. Ethlinda groaned behind her. Or was it a growl?
Certain death was a whim away, for Deirdre at least. She would not be the queen’s instrument of destruction for the others. With an urgent Father to Him who would receive her, Deirdre met Alric’s gaze. Silently, she mouthed her love for him, watching with breaking heart as he registered what she was about to do.
The child, who defied evil with complete innocence, wailed like death’s banshee above the drum of the pulse in Deirdre’s ear.
Abina and the new mother, maybe even others now, sang.
“Thou, ranger of the heavens—”
Deirdre raised her eyes heavenward, ready to end the standoff one way or another, when the thickening canopy of clouds split overhead, exposing a great chasm of light. Transfixed, she watched as a bolt of fire shot downward, straight at the Wulfshead. It struck like a giant hammer, as if to drive the mast through the bottom of ship, throwing several to the deck. An eerie blue fire danced up and down the pole, the sail evaporating in a loud puff of flame.
Ethlinda swayed backward against the rail, as if to draw away from it. The pressure of the blade slackened, and Deirdre seized the heavenly opportunity. Grabbing Ethlinda’s wrist with both hands, she wrung it with all her strength. The knife fell away in the ensuing struggle, but Deirdre never heard it strike the deck.
It was as though the deck had fallen out from under them, taking the rail with it. Beyond the pale of Ethlinda’s face, a yawning mouth of seawater opened wide, large enough to swallow them all. It shouted back Alric’s fear-stricken “God, no-ooo!” and then closed its hungry jaws over the shuddering ship.
Letting go of her adversary Deirdre reached back in the direction of her husband’s voice. Something struck her from behind. Ethlinda? It didn’t matter.
It hurled her through the watery abyss toward the open arms of all that mattered in this world and the next.
THIRTY-SIX
With the crack of thunder, Alric’s heartbeats became minutes. Memories were dealt like cards flying from the hand of a master. A blinding flash of light. Deirdre struggling with Ethlinda. The jolt of the deck beneath his feet. People screaming. The rogue wave that rose like a gaping monster beyond the rail. Deirdre pulling away, running toward him. And the jeweled bolt, hurled past the corner of Alric’s eye, by Cairell of Gleannmara. Ethlinda grasping its hilt in disbelief as Deirdre reached the safety of Alric’s embrace. Then the cold jaws of the sea closed over them.
“I love you,” Deirdre had said. Nothing else seemed real as water closed around Alric, as every shadow and shape became a nightmare vision.
God save us or take us, but keep us together.
That was what he recalled praying. So why was it Ethlinda he saw in this shadowy mire? Who, or rather what, were those hideous creatures tugging at her, laughing at her obvious torment? Alric had never seen the like. How he could see in the briny bellywash of the rogue wave that had swallowed them never crossed his horror-struck mind.
The creatures’ voices were haunting as the cold scream of the flat stone settling on the uprights of a departed’s cromlach. Nothing he saw belonge
d to the living. Was he dead then?
The two dark figures, which appeared more real than the life he’d lived before this moment, dragged Ethlinda and her pitiful screams for mercy deeper into the water. He heard a clamor below him that scraped the very marrow from his bones. There were more … hordes of them, coming from the black unseen of the sea floor.
He had to find Deirdre. He twisted away from the vision of the queen’s struggle but of his wife—nay his life—he saw nothing. The water slowed the hand reaching for his scramasax. It wasn’t there. One of the demons—yes, that had to be what they were—brandished the weapon in its hand. Where was Deirdre? Ignoring the slash of his own blade across his chest, Alric twisted and swam toward what appeared to be the surface of the water. She would be where the light was. Her love would guide him.
He gasped for air as his head broke the surface, but one of the demons grabbed his foot, pulling him back down. Salty death seeped into his lungs, burning, smothering. Something bit him, tearing at the flesh of his shoulder. He twisted in agony, kicking at the claws tugging him deeper into the darkness. Reaching up with his good arm, he prayed. God, if I can just get to the light …
A hand shot down into the water. A strong forearm locked with Alric’s, pulling against the tug of the demons at his feet. His joints were afire with the strain, as though at any moment he would be pulled into pieces.
That was the Wulfshead floating calm above him, wasn’t it? Thank God at least the passengers were safe. Only he and Ethlinda had been washed over, he realized. Heartened, Alric used his free leg to kick at the gnarled claws tugging at the other. The two creatures would not give up their hold, but the boot did.
Shooting out of the water as if he’d taken wing, he collapsed in the arms that drew him into the boat. At first he thought his fair-haired rescuer was Cairell of Gleannmara, but this man was bigger, a magnificent specimen of a warrior with armor fashioned of pure gold. The sun glanced off it so brightly that Alric could not see his face. Was this the archangel of the hymn? Was the beating in Alric’s ear his pulse or this stranger’s wings …?
“And so Moses led Cod’s people out of bondage to the old ways to freedom in a new life, like you, muirnait.”
The sea seemed to fall away around him. Nothing seemed to exist but the voice and a form he knew so well.
Alric blinked. Orlaith smiled down at him. “Mother?”
As she was given to do, she fingered a lock of his hair. “Your father and I are so proud of you, my derling princeling. At last you have accepted your birthright.”
Alric shook his head. He was hallucinating … or he was in heaven.
A melancholy smile lighted upon his mother’s lips. She gently tucked the golden strands behind his ear. “But you must return to your flock. They need you.”
His flock? What flock?
“They need to know that God chose them when they quickened in their mother’s womb. They did not choose Him. Like a loving Father, He waited for His willful children to listen.”
“I’m not Moses.” Would that he’d had more certainty in his declaration, but certainty eluded him in this strange place.
Orlaith chuckled. “Of course not, muirnait.” She tickled his nose with the curled tip of his hair. “Now get you back to your bride. She needs you.”
Deirdre. Relief flooded through him. He hadn’t lost her.
Leaning over him, Orlaith placed loving hands at his temples and brushed first one eye and then the other with her lips, just as she had when she’d tucked him in as a child. “Sweet dreams until tomorrow, muirnait.”
She even said the same words. He couldn’t open his eyes to watch her leave. He felt something heavy laid upon his chest. Unseen hands folded his fingers around the hilt of a weapon, as if he was being prepared for burial.
Then someone’s palm rested over his eyes. It was a larger hand than his mother’s, and stronger, though just as gentle. Be thou the eye and champion of Gleannmara.
What manner of madness was this? The charge was made, yet Alric had heard nothing. It burned into his memory. The heat was a consuming one, warming him all over at once, thawing his senses, but not his body.
Like a vessel loosed from its moorings, Alric floated on a sea of light somewhere between two worlds. Which shore lay ahead and which behind, he could not discern.
It didn’t matter. The consolation that Deirdre waited for him was his wind. With God as his star, Alric would find her.
Deirdre stood on the storm-ravaged beach with the other battered and weary souls, watching numbly as the remains of the Wulfshead washed off the pile of rocks where Cairell and Wimmer had steered it in its death throes. Twice they’d counted heads and twice reached the same miraculous conclusion—all save two were accounted for.
She wouldn’t accept that Alric was dead. He was simply missing.
Her hope was built on a Rock far greater than that which had paved the way from certain death to the safe harbor of Gleannmara’s shores. It would not give way like the sand crunching beneath her feet, as she carried a makeshift sling to where Wimmer set her brother’s arm with a piece of wreckage. The men had made trip after trip from the crippled ship to the beach, helping the women and children ashore first, then carrying what goods they could salvage before the Wulfshead broke up completely. On the last, her brother slipped and fell into a crevasse, jamming his shoulder and breaking his arm.
“Soon as we get our breath, the men are going to start searching the shoreline,” Cairell assured her, wincing as she helped him into the sling. “Kaspar and I are going to head for the fishing village down the coast and get help. It can’t be too far, if my bearings are correct.”
Deirdre nodded. She feared that if she said anything, she’d burst into tears. She gave her brother a hug and watched as he started up the beachhead.
“We should never have left Chesreton,” someone complained.
“God has deserted us!” Kaspar’s wife shivered, clutching her nursing baby to her bosom.
“Nonsense.” Abina sniffed. “God never deserts His children. ’Twas the work of angels that righted the ship and guided us upon yon rocks.”
“I ain’t never been much of a believer of nothin’,” Wimmer spoke up, “but they was no land afore us before that squall took us up and turned us nigh upside down. Sure, nothin’ big as that loomin’ on the horizon.”
Deirdre looked with others at the gentle rise of the coast upland toward Wicklow. Crowned in white clouds, her homeland seemed to stretch into heaven itself and reach down through emerald hills with knobby fingers of stone into the sea. Like a mother reaching for her children, Gleannmara nestled them in her sandy bosom. Deirdre inhaled the salt air, no longer cold, no longer weary.
“God brought us home,” she said to no one in particular.
“I’m thinkin’ something friendly moved us here,” Wimmer agreed. Gleannmara beckoned them; God delivered them.
“It was a miracle none of us were washed over,” the thatcher chimed in. He caught himself too late. At Deirdre’s disconcerted glance, he looked at his feet. “Barrin’ the cap’n, I mean.”
“Oh, my Alric is alive.” Abina’s declaration was bright, and she winked at Deirdre. “I know it.”
“Have you seen something, milady?” one of the others asked.
Abina was milady now. Of the lot of them, only she and an innocent babe had had the courage to defy Ethlinda’s evil spell. She’d rallied them as one with her call to the heavens.
What’s more, the heavens had answered.
All eyes shifted to where the nurse climbed to her feet with the aid of Wimmer’s strong arm. Her splotched dress fell around stiff legs that had walked more miles than any of them, yet she straightened without so much as a hint of the pain that usually plagued her swollen joints.
“Young man,” she answered, shaking the sand off absently “When you get to be my age, you rely less on what you can see and more on what you believe to be.” She motioned the group up from the beach with draw
n hands.
“Are we going to sing again?” the little boy who’d become sick over Alric’s feet asked his mother.
Abina laughed the laugh of a young woman, not one whose voice had grown brittle with age. “Nay child. We are going to pray! Nothing from memory, mind you,” she warned, taking Deirdre’s hand in hers. “I want you to form a circle of hands, that’s right … all save our new mother. You and the wee one step inside.”
One or two of the people grumbled beneath their breath, but no one ventured to cross the gray-haired milady.
“Now, I want each one of you to thank God for something you have right now. I’ll start.”
What a strange spectacle it must have been, a circle of drenched survivors, the few things they’d salvaged scattered around them. Overhead the midday sun bathed them in a blanket of warmth, soaking up the last remnant of their nightmare’s chill.
“Father, who created us and never turns a deaf ear to our pleas, I shall sing Your praises in regal robes someday at Your throne, but for now, hear me, soaked and bedraggled, but ever so grateful for the hand that delivered us from evil in our hour of need.”
Abina stopped and nudged Wimmer, who cleared his throat uneasily “Thank ya that the rudder didn’t crack till we was hard upon the rock.”
“Thank you for sparing my little boy …”
“… my precious daughter …”
“… my husband …”
“… my wife …”
“… my doll …”
“… my granny …”
“… my new shoes …”
Around the circle the prayer traveled, gaining conviction with each addition, be it great or small. God had spared the significant as well as the insignificant. When at last it came Deirdre’s turn, she spoke without hesitation: “My Alric.”
“Alric!” A voice other than her own sounded off from the ridge of rocks behind them. It was Kaspar, jumping up and down and beckoning excitedly “Alric!” he shouted again.
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