“Alric?” Deirdre echoed to Abina, afraid to trust her own ears.
With a tight squeeze of her hand, the nurse replied, “Go to him, milady. He came back for you.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
I thought he was dead at first,” Cairell exclaimed, not for the first time that evening.
So had Alric. When his senses came back to him, he was wet, yet baked in warmth by the glare beyond his leaden eyelids. He heard the lap of the sea nearby and the squawk of the birds. The air was heavy with salt mist. Then someone began to shake him. He felt fingers pressed to his throat, probing for the blood pumping steady and strong. Cairell’s voice was most prominent in the frenzy of noises around him. Then came a sound that calmed the rest. Alric’s soul quickened in recognition of his other half’s voice.
He cracked open his eyes and saw her sweet face.
“He’s alive. Dee,” Cairell reassured the woman kneeling over Alric.
Just her nearness brought his senses to full alert. But her touch, the loving clasp of her hands about his face, the featherlight run of her fingers at his temples, the breath of her lips as she warmed his cold ones with them, broke the last of the otherworldly hold upon him.
His eyes opened fully to the face of an angel—an earthly angel.
“Welcome home, my love.” Joy radiated from her face, but something contrary grazed the eyes that spilled a shower of the heart upon his cheeks.
Given the strange things he’d seen and heard, he demanded to know the nature of it. “What is it?”
Deirdre’s mouth quivered in an attempt to smile and speak at the same time. “Your hair … it … it’s gilded with silver as bright as your eyes. Here—” she touched his temples, just as his mother had done earlier.
“It was as eerie a sight as I’ve ever seen,” the prince of Gleannmara told his humble host now. “There he was … washed up on the beach, laid out upon a hatch cover like a corpse, my sword folded in his hands.” Several noggins of ale had dulled the pain of Cairell’s injured arm and loosened his tongue considerably.
The man didn’t know the meaning of the word eerie, but Alric kept that to himself.
“How is your head?” Deirdre ran a tender finger along a gash that had taken several of Abina’s stitches to close.
“Numb,” Alric answered.
His wife had not left the side of the bed that had been made from two benches, a tabletop, and fresh stuffed pallet of straw by the brewy of the seaside village. Alric had to be carried by the men to the widow’s small tavern on the same hatch cover that brought him ashore. He’d gotten up well enough, but staying on his feet had been a problem. Every few steps the top of his head seemed to lift off like a wisp of ash caught up in the wind, and the next thing he knew, he was on the ground.
“The last I saw of the sword, I’d nailed that witch to the rail of the ship with it. I never thought I’d see it again.” Cairell swung around to address Alric. “How did you come by it?”
“Someone gave it to me.”
“Who?” Deirdre asked.
“Didn’t see him.” He had an idea, but it was so far-fetched, even he could not believe it. “I just felt the sword laid over me and my fingers folded around it.” It had to have been the faceless warrior or Orlaith. It certainly hadn’t been Ethlinda. Gooseflesh pebbled his skin at his last recollection of the queen, screaming in anguish, begging for mercy from—
“So you were laid out.” Cairell stared at Alric in awe.
Alric accepted the lifeline from the nightmare gratefully “Or I dreamed it. Given the size of this gash, I’ve lots of room for speculation.”
“I’d suggest we let Alric rest and take a healthy dose as well for ourselves.” Deirdre rose on that authoritative note. “Mistress Leary, I thank you for your hospitality I’ve never been better fed nor welcomed so warmly in any royal hall.”
The widow of the brewer, who’d established the small hostel more for the sake of the local fishermen than for travelers, puffed full of delight at the princess’s compliment. “Bless me, milady, ’tis I who am honored by the presence of herself and himself both, and they thought to be dead by the rest o’ the world.”
“And thank you for keeping our presence to yourself,” Alric said.
The widow came to earth. “All that know Gleannmara’s aiccid and his sister are them right here in this room, and here they’ll be stayin’ until tomorrow, just as you asked, milord.”
The woman, her son, and her daughter-in-law stood like soldiers at attention with the mission awarded them. Alric heaved a melancholy sigh. “I would reward each of you handsomely had not my fortune gone down with my ship.” Every bit of wealth he had at hand to purchase land for his people—coin, jewels, documents—had been in the Wulfshead’s hold. “Until I’m able to replenish my loss, you have my heartfelt gratitude.”
He didn’t feel the loss for himself, which was not like the man he had once been. Deirdre—and her God—had changed all that.
“The gratitude of Princess Deirdre’s own husband is ample enough for this woman,” Mistress Leary assured him. “You and your Sassenach kin have brought home Gleannmara’s children. I’d shame me ancestors if I didn’t make ye welcome, from prince to the wee poppet there.”
Cairell was set to send a messenger ahead to Gleannmara’s hall, where a royal funeral service and the crowning of his newly elected cousin was to take place on the morrow, when Alric stopped him. Unable to explain the urgent need for secrecy, he asked his brother-in-law to indulge his instincts. Whether it was due to respect or the increasingly bizarre circumstances of their journey to date, the young heir apparent relented.
After the tables were broken down and put to rest against the walls, the women and children settled on the floor of the large room for the evening. The men slept in the separate kitchen with the staff—all save Cairell, and Alric, the latter of whom insisted on giving up his raised bed for a pallet next to Deirdre. The infant was the last to surrender to the night, whimpering for one last feeding. Finally only the occasional snap and crackle of the banked fire in the center of the room disturbed the chorus of slumber.
“Will you ever tell me what happened to you?” Deirdre whispered softly stroking the wing of silver at his temple.
Alric held Deirdre in his arms as tenderly as the new mother across the room held her precious babe. Her head rested on the shoulder that had been shredded by one of the demons in his hallucination, her arm across the slash its companion had cut across Alric’s abdomen. Except that there was neither broken flesh nor sign of any injury save the one on his head.
“I promise, I will, anmchara … when I can make sense of it myself.” He’d likely struck his head on the ship’s rail as he was hurled into the sea. All he knew for certain was that he’d been saved against all odds by a power beyond his understanding—that of the God he’d cried out to—and that one boot had been lost between one world and the next.
The fields around Gleannmara’s rath and the church built by King Kieran nearly a century earlier were dotted with tents and with the banners of the visiting guests. The late Fergal had already been laid to rest in the crypt beneath the church, but such was Gleannmara’s prestige that the formal service had to be scheduled to allow for the dignitaries to make the journey Bishops from Armagh, Kildare, Deny, and Glendalough were there to take pan in the ceremony on behalf of the high king and to acknowledge and crown the newly elected successor to Gleannmara’s throne.
Kyras O’Dubhda, champion of Gleannmara and second cousin to the lost crown prince, was a natural choice. His fighting and leadership skills and his blood tie to the royal line made him so. Still, the news that Cairell had been so readily replaced shook the young prince to the core. He’d come prepared to mourn his father, not have the throne passed by him with so little decorum.
What spun Deirdre’s head was that Dealla, her father’s grieving young widow, was to marry the strapping king-elect following Kyras’s crowning.
Not that there would be
one, Deirdre thought as the royal party made its way toward the towering whitewashed gates, where the blue and gold of Gleannmara waved boldly against the sky in welcome. To her right, Alric, much recovered after a night’s rest, rode on one of the borrowed steeds from the village. Cairell rode to her left.
Neither man seemed himself. Pain from his arm gave Cairell cause to wince if he moved it the wrong way, but he was determined to ride in as a king, not as an invalid in the wagon that trailed them with men. In case Alric’s instinct that the news of Cairell’s survival might not be well received, the women and children remained behind. The wagon was borrowed to expedite their journey to avoid embarrassment for all concerned.
“Stay close to me when we get inside,” Alric told Deirdre as they approached the gates. Already trumpets heralded their arrival, but their identity was yet to be revealed.
Deirdre studied her husband. “Have you seen something?”
“I exercise precaution before what is surely to be a terrible upset for some.”
Aside from the “I love you more than life itself that Alric whispered in her ear at the first stir of morning, this was all he’d had to say during the journey. Each glance she stole at him found him lost in thought.
“I agree with the need for caution,” Cairell said, his attention fixed ahead of them. “If I hadn’t been so excited just to get home alive, I’d have thought of it myself. The prospect of power can make men do things they wouldn’t ordinarily think of. Kyras undoubtedly will be disappointed and he does have a temper.”
Without a close look, no one would recognize Deirdre’s brother in his tattered clothing. Or her for that matter. If Helewis could see her wedding dress now. Deirdre smiled, recalling how radiant her friend had been, waving from the dock beside her new husband. Father, You have been so good and faithful. Surely You pave the way for us now.
“Halt, there. Only them by invitation are to enter the rath this day, by order of the queen.” One of the guards gathered at the base of the tower gate strutted, adorned in his best tunic, toward them. Cairell stopped him still in his tracks with his ringing words.
“Lew LongLegs, are you telling me I need an invitation to my own home?”
The man halted, staring, mouth agape, eyes bugging as though to spring from his head.
“He’s no ghost, Lew, and neither am I,” Deirdre hastily assured the stricken man. Lew had guarded the main gate for as long as she could remember. Now he was a senior member of the staff, one who reported for duty only on special occasions—like the crowning of a new king.
Coming to life, the older gentleman made short the distance between them with the stride for which he’d been named. “God be praised, what I wouldn’t give for your athair to be seein’ what I see! I’m pure tired of mournin’, milady, pure tired,” he reiterated, “but how—?”
His thick, gray-white brow knitted over a beak of a nose. She’d giggled once as a child at the impressive volume of his sneeze, only to have Lew declare that his loud snout made him the perfect sentry. He needed no trumpet.
“God works in strange ways, Lew.” Cairell waved his arm toward Alric. “This good Saxon prince and his men have brought us home, and just in time I hear.”
Lew’s pale blue gaze widened even more. With an oath of excitement, he waved at his fellow guards. “Let them through. ’Tis Cairell, and the lady Deirdre, back from the dead!”
Word spread like ripples across a pond, preceding them as they proceeded. Lew LongLegs led the bedraggled party himself. Familiar faces flocked to both sides of them, mirroring images of shock, then thawing to joy as Cairell and Deirdre rode through the buildings and stalls that had outgrown the original rath. By the time they reached the great hall, where the crowning of the new king was about to take place, the clamor of welcome had reached a roar.
A company of Kyras’s personal guards burst out of the round stone tower Deirdre’s grandfather had built to replace the old one of wattle and wood. Weapons brandished, they charged down the earthen ramp to the common, slowing upon seeing a single rider break from the group to meet them. Cairell sat straight and proud, one arm in a sling and the other resting on the jeweled hilt of a sword worth more than all the steeds among his followers.
“Make way for the rightful king of Gleannmara!” At Lew’s glad shout and upon recognizing Cairell, the soldiers parted in ones and twos. Weapons at rest, they knelt as Cairell led his ragged procession into the hall itself. When Cairell reached the great stone hearth in the center, he circled to the left and Deirdre to the right, their eyes fixed on the dais. Two-hundred-year-old columns carved by Gleannmara’s first king held up the velvet canopy over the throne. At the throne’s base, a tall, brown-haired warrior in rich robes rose from his knees before the bishops, who’d come from the most prestigious sees in all Erin.
Kyras blanched at the sight of Cairell, as though he’d truly seen a ghost. Aside from the clip-clop of Deirdre’s steed coming to Cairell’s side, not a sound broke the breathless hush of the room. The scene might have been a painting but for the bishop of Armagh conceding to wipe the perspiration from his brow. Standing above them was Dealla, the grieving queen. Was the grief in the tear-ravaged eyes that met Deirdre’s real, or was the woman a consummate actress?
“God’s timing is most remarkable and never without blessing.” The queen spoke with an admirable composure.
Descending in a float of dark violet robes, walking past the landing where the holy men were about to ordain Kyras as Gleannmara’s new king, she came before Cairell and knelt. “Gleannmara welcomes her king and his sister home.”
As though pinched into action, not unlike a recalcitrant child in chapel, Kyras hurried forth to join her. “Indeed, I echo our queen’s welcome most fervently ’Tis truly a miracle.”
“It’s good to be home,” Cairell declared. “And yes, good champion, it is more miracle than the imagination can conjure.”
Deirdre joined the collective sigh of relief when he motioned the two to their feet. She wasn’t certain what she expected to happen. Alric had been so insistent that they be prepared for trouble … but then, he was accustomed to the backstabbing of Galstead. This was Gleannmara of the just, enemy to greed and ambition.
“Help me off this steed, friend,” Cairell said to the man, who, but for a few moments, would have worn the royal torque the bishop of Kildare held in his hands.
Before Kyras could reach her brother, Alric was between them, a fierce apparition that had not been there a heartbeat before. “You extend your trust too freely, Irish.” His voice fairly growled his emotions—warning for Cairell, derision for Kyras.
Cairell wrestled his startled horse into submission with his one hand, but Alric stood like an immovable wall, oblivious to the danger of the steed’s pawing hooves. His withering gaze would not leave Gleannmara’s champion.
“Alric, what are you doing?” Deirdre gripped her own steed’s reins. Her husband had not been himself since they’d found him on the beach. Something had changed in him, more than the silvered hair at his temples. She slid off her horse.
He didn’t spare so much as a glance in her direction. “Stand back, wife!”
Dealla fell away with a gasp, following the orders intended for Deirdre. “Who is this madman? What does he mean wife?”
“My guards will skewer you, if you do not stand down now,” Kyras threatened.
True enough; Gleannmara’s finest spear throwers stood ready round the dais. Only Kyras’s proximity made them hesitate.
“No!” Deirdre rushed to Alric despite his warning. “Hold your weapons. My husband is not well,” she explained to Dealla and Kyras.
“You married this man?”
“Aye,” Deirdre answered her stepmother. “And he gave up everything to save Cairell and me. But we were shipwrecked, and he was struck on the head—”
“I am clearer of mind than I have ever been, milady,” Alric informed her calmly “And of eye.” Still, his steady burning gaze had not wavered from the
face of Kyras O’Dubhda.
“Then you can see that you are no match for the armed men who surround you,” Gleannmara’s champion pointed out.
“No, I am not. But the God of truth is, and it is He who protects me. The deceiver and those he deceives cannot see His heavenly ranger.”
Deirdre shot a panicked look at Cairell, who approached Alric from the other side.
“Alric,” he ventured hesitantly. “Brother …”
It was the first time she’d heard Cairell call Alric brother. She thought she saw the cold set of her husband’s features flicker with something other than the pure contempt he had for a man he’d never seen until today.
“If you do indeed consider me your brother, Cairell of Gleannmara,” Alric interrupted, “then hear my story that you may see this cur for who he really is.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Unintimidated by his doubt-ridden audience, Alric gave a short account of the merchant who’d boasted in a Dublin tavern that a king’s ransom sailed on the Mell, bound for Scotia Minor. If what Alric suggested was true, that the merchant was indeed Kyras O’Dubhda, then black treachery was afoot.
“You lie, Saxon!” Where shock blanched Kyras O’Dubhda’s face before, purple rage mottled it now.
“I have committed many sins, but lying is not among them.” Alric’s reply was soft, but well Deirdre knew the beast was far more dangerous when it was quiet. And when he smiled, the blood of his prey broke into shards of ice … if the prey possessed any will to live.
The conflict appeared unsolvable without violence, even death. Kyras was the type who would not afford himself the luxury of fearing death. Deirdre’s blood was shot with dread as her dark-haired cousin turned to Cairell.
“You will believe this thieving, murdering pirate over me? Cairell, we fought shoulder to shoulder when the Ulstermen tried to enforce unfair tribute.”
Rallying behind their champion, the clan chiefs of Gleannmara, as well as their attending allies, began to stomp on the slate floor of the keep. As the support grew louder, the Saxons rushed to stand with Alric. King’s law prohibiting weapons on such occasions—and God’s grace holding tempers in check—was all that kept violence at bay.
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