The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (29 page)

‘I am home now,’ he murmured, cradling her. ‘I am yours again.’

Rhiann tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come, and so instead she repeated his words in her mind, over and over, as his softly stroking hands drew her back into her body. And as the tension of the dream fled, her skin came alive, burning at every place that their bodies touched. He went to caress her again, his hand moving up from thigh to waist, but she said, ‘Wait,’ and struggled out from under him, pushing him back on the bed.

In the faint glow of firelight her fingers found the curve of his neck, just as she had seen it at the bonfire, and she pressed her lips there as she had longed to do. He gasped, but held still as she kissed her way along his collarbone and shoulder, reminding herself of every dip and rise in his form. To the soft place under his arm she moved, and across his chest, her hair brushing his neck and flanks. Then her lips found one nipple, and she sucked and kissed it tentatively at first, and then with greater force when he moaned and clasped her head.

Yet she never got to the other side, for as she moved over him he grasped her hips and pulled her down on top of him, and they joined easily. Then in the darkness she did not know where her skin and his ended, only that the exquisite burst of fire took them both by surprise, and melted away all the cold tears in her throat with its heat.

At the Dun of the Tree on the other side of Alba, Samana was enjoying no such soft reunion.

She watched Agricola eating by the blazing light of five oil lamps, which pushed the shadows to the far corners of her Roman-style dining room. She had thrown a blue wool robe carelessly around her nakedness, and her black hair fell down over the honeyed skin of one breast.

She knew she looked ravishing. And yet, after riding into her own dun in the middle of the night, wet and muddy, Agricola had paused neither to change nor bathe, but taken her almost brutally, with a single-minded fury.

Even before this southern expedition, he had been taking her this way with increasing frequency. The long nights of moans and gasping surprise were growing fewer, and instead he rode her mechanically, only interested in his own quick release.

Watching him eat now, Samana’s priestess mind mused that perhaps he saw her body as all Alba, and attacked her as a way to conquer what he did not yet possess.

This was a most uncomfortable idea, and abruptly she rose from the couch to pour more spiced wine into his green-glass beaker, allowing the robe to fall completely open, hoping that the old desire would ignite in his face now his immediate urgency was assuaged. Yet Agricola only continued to shovel the beef broth down in between gulps of wine, his eyes fixed on the wall painting behind her.

Samana sighed and rested the ornate silver ewer on a three-legged table, folding her robe closed. ‘Are you going to tell me anything?’ she asked gently.

At last Agricola looked at her, and then threw his spoon into the half-empty bowl, splashing broth all over her new dining couch. His breastplate and tunic were smeared with fresh mud and old blood, his grey hair ragged, stuck to his forehead by rain and mist.

‘The rebels were in far greater numbers than I could have foreseen,’ he admitted, his voice shredded with exhaustion. ‘And they were organized – they attacked us from the hills as we travelled up the valleys.’ Here Samana detected a dark flicker of memory in his eyes. It was fear, which she had never seen in him. ‘They killed half my men before I sounded the retreat.’

‘But why did you not get more soldiers from your southern forts?’ Samana ventured in a low voice, taking the empty bowl and placing it beside the ewer. The fine red tableware he had given her was rare and valuable.

The lines of age and weariness on Agricola’s face were deepened by the shadows of the lamps. ‘The barbarians gave us no chance, but hounded us from valley to mountain and back again. They did not seem to sleep, leaping from hill to hill like mountain goats, killing at night, their archers flying ahead to attack when we least expected it.’ He sighed heavily. ‘The prince of Erin’s skills have grown.’

Samana’s sip of wine stopped in her throat, and she had to force herself to swallow. ‘Prince of Erin?’ Her blood roared in her ears, but she schooled herself to stillness. Agricola could never know of her long-standing struggle over Eremon mac Ferdiad. He knew only that they had shared the bed furs, as she endeavoured to make Eremon join the Romans, when he first arrived in Alba. But Agricola knew nothing about the spell Samana had woven to lure the Erin prince to her bed, or how it had turned on its maker and ensnared her as well. Eremon might have escaped its clutches – she must assume that, since he had then scorned her! – but the potent mix of rage and desire would not leave her at peace.

‘Yes,’ Agricola bit out. ‘I saw him … I think. Someone was directing them, at any rate, or we would have crushed the rabble of fishermen I expected to find. They had a leader, and a good one.’ He wiped his hands on the grimy edge of his knee-length tunic, rubbing intently at the ingrained dirt. ‘It has taken me two months to get back, and altogether I lost three-quarters of my men – two thousand soldiers! Domitian has not returned my Ninth Legion units, and he may well not do so at all when he hears of this!’

Samana was dry-mouthed with shock, and a deeper fear. She had never seen Agricola defeated. She knelt by his side. ‘My lord, you still have many, many more men than the prince of Erin. And he is no match for you in battle; you must know that!’

Agricola’s gaze came back from far away, and he gained some hold of himself. ‘I do know that,’ he agreed, scratching the grey stubble on his neck. ‘But I cannot let them band together like this. I must pick the tribes off, one by one.’

‘Starting with the Epidii?’ Samana was suddenly breathless. Perhaps Eremon’s enslavement of her could be over soon.

Agricola frowned down at her. ‘You do not start with the strongest; you start with the weakest. Divide and conquer has been the Roman strategy for two centuries now. It should not be difficult to shatter his support – after all, what is he but an exile, an upstart?’

‘He is close to the Caledonii king,’ Samana whispered.

Agricola shrugged, suddenly sure of himself after his moment of weakness. ‘Our intelligence hinted that the outcome of the war council last year was not good for the rebels. We must assume that although the Erin cub has wriggled his way into the Caledonii king’s graces, he enjoys little other support. He is a foreigner – with a talent for war, I grant you – but no Alban, nor will he ever be.’ He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and rose. ‘I must see to my men and horses.’

Samana placed a hand on his iron breastplate, over his heart. ‘Won’t you stay? We have only just begun to know each other again.’

Yet Agricola only snorted, tucking his war helmet under his arm and picking up the greaves he had discarded when he took her. ‘My men and I have shared much these past months. I must be with them, not lounging in luxury with you.’ His tired mouth quirked. ‘Or have you learned nothing of leadership from me, my dark witch?’

Hiding her fury behind a bland smile, Samana waited until he left and then flung herself on to the couch. She tapped the silver spoon on the edge of the empty bowl, her thoughts churning.

Since the death last year of Calgacus’s son, Samana had no more informants of her own to call on. The tide of battle had swept far beyond her and her own allies. All she’d been relying on these past moons were her abilities to please Agricola in bed, but even these were growing less powerful. A primal panic writhed inside her.

If bedding him no longer bound Agricola to her, and she had no information to sell, what good was she to him? If she wasn’t useful, he could easily cast her aside, and she’d lose her chance of becoming queen of Alba. She gazed around at all the fine things in the room, so different from the dark, smelly roundhouses of her own people. There were wall paintings, clean floor tiles, dining couches covered in linen, three-legged braziers instead of smoky fires, silver and red tableware, and jewelled goblets and platters. All this, she could lose.

Samana rested her forehead in her hands, rubbing her temples with frustration.
Think!

Then something scratched against her eyebrow, and she pulled her hands away and spread them out. On the third finger of her left hand was a gold band, her priestess ring, the mark of her initiation into the Sisterhood, engraved with the three moon faces of the Goddess.

Samana grew utterly still as she stared at it. Perhaps it was time to find other sources of information with which to please Agricola.

Suddenly energized, she called for a servant to boil water for a scented bath. Though it was still before dawn, she wanted to scour the stink of Agricola’s sweat and streaks of filth from her body before he came to her again.

Stretched on the ground, Rhiann nestled her cheek into Eremon’s thigh as he sat on the flat-topped outcrop beside the Horse Gate. His shield had been shattered in the Novantae rebellion, and he’d just had Bran make him a new one of alder and oak, with a tanned hide stretched across the frame. Now he was painting over the yellow background with his own red boar emblem.

Eyes closed to the cool sunshine, Rhiann heard him sigh as he tapped the bristle brush on his knee. ‘I hope that is a contented sigh,’ she remarked.

‘I’m as content as I can be,’ Eremon answered. ‘Gelert has left us, after all.’ The dun had woken to the news that the chief druid had disappeared, leaving no word of his destination.

Rhiann’s jaw tightened. ‘Don’t invoke his name,’ she begged.

For a moment, Eremon’s hand rested on her forehead. ‘He is gone,
a stór
, to the gods know where. Perhaps using Urben like that was his last attempt to gain a greater hold over this tribe and, like the others, it failed. Perhaps he wishes to try his luck elsewhere.’

A shiver ran from Rhiann’s legs, pressed into the damp turf, up her torso. ‘If he did have something to do with the shipwreck,’ she ventured in a low voice, ‘then he must have some connection with Maelchon.’

Eremon’s stroking fingers stilled. ‘I sometimes wish your mind ran less quickly, Rhiann.’ He sighed again. ‘I too have thought this, yet if that is the nest to which Gelert has flown, there is nothing we can do. After all, that is as far from us as he can go, so let us be happy with that.’

Rhiann opened her eyes and blinked in the sun. Pressed against Eremon’s crossed leg, all she could see was a patch of sky between his arms, the blue deepening as leaf-fall took hold of the land, and beyond that, the top of the palisade. And there stood Conaire, who had barely moved for three days, waiting for Caitlin.

Eremon rubbed at a stray speck of paint on the boss in the centre of the shield. The bronze disk had been skilfully cast into a flattened boar’s face, with large eyes, snout and curving tusks. ‘Eremon?’ Rhiann tilted her head. ‘Will the baby be safe here with Lorn?’

Eremon tapped the brush handle on his knee again. The boy is a babe, and cannot claim his hall until he reaches manhood. By then Lorn’s time will have passed; and as under your strange kin laws his own sons cannot be king, I think he will leave it be. He got what he wanted, in the end.’

Rhiann pursed her lips. ‘Perhaps Lorn thought you would use Conaire’s son to keep him away from the kingship, but you have proven you will not.’ She kissed his wrist, looking at him upside down. ‘For all my fears, you have an answer.’

Eremon’s eyes glinted back, and with one swift movement he pulled out from under her and pinned her on the grass, the dripping brush poised in one fist. ‘And what answer do you have for me?’ he murmured, pressing his lips against hers. When their tongues met, she wound her fingers in his thick hair and crushed him closer, until they were both breathless.

Laughing, she whispered at last, ‘What was the question?’

His green eyes danced as he looked down at her. ‘How much do you love me?’

A shout at the gate forbade Rhiann from answering that, and she saw immediately that Conaire had disappeared. Struggling upright, she pulled her cloak out from under Eremon’s leg, sending him sprawling and narrowly missing the scattered pots of yellow and red paint.

‘It’s Caitlin!’ she cried. ‘Come on!’ She threw her bundled cloak over her shoulder and, leaving Eremon to disentangle his limbs, scrambled down the rock cleft to the path.

At the gatetower, she nearly ran into Conaire’s back, for he had come to a sudden halt. Peering under his arm, Rhiann saw that the few people outside the gates had drawn back, and the raucous ball-and-stick game taking place on the river meadow had been suddenly arrested, as the boys crowded together, muddy and curious. Then, across the open space of stamped-down earth, Rhiann saw Caitlin approaching, the swaddled child tucked into her arms. Behind her came Eithne, holding the two horses. Conaire’s shoulders quivered once, and then again.

To Rhiann’s immense relief, Caitlin’s face was no longer pale, but touched with the healthy flush of the sun. She had come in one of Linnet’s finest dresses, of pale blue wool edged with white mink, fastened on the shoulders with gilded brooches. Her hair was washed and combed, unbound and flowing, and her neck was clasped with a deer-headed torc.

She was beautiful, but by far the greatest beauty was in her eyes, because of the love there. Rhiann swallowed the lump in her throat, as Eremon stepped up beside her. She risked a glance at him, and felt his fingers close on her own. When she looked back, Caitlin was standing before Conaire, and had shifted her son into her hands. Now she raised her arms, until the child was balanced precariously before his father.

The guards on the tower had fallen silent, looking down, and those inside the gates were respectfully still, even if they couldn’t resist whispering behind their hands. Everyone was straining to see what Caitlin would do. The only movement came from the babe, who squirmed in his linen swaddling clothes, kicking one foot free.

‘My lord,’ Caitlin said distinctly, gazing up at Conaire, ‘your son.’

Rhiann could not see Conaire’s face, yet his arms slowly came out, and at the moment he took his son in his huge hands, a sigh rippled over the onlookers. Then Conaire raised the babe awkwardly. ‘I name him Gabran, after my grandsire,’ he declared, his voice cracking with emotion. Suddenly the baby wobbled and let out a loud squawk, before bursting into cries. People laughed, and the tension was gone.