Deirdre (43 page)

“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 drawn 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.

“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.”

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.