Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (15 page)

“Kneel!” Conor’s voice cut through the silence. “Kneel at the sight of your king.”

A thin line separated reverence and fear. For one sweet second, she dared to hope for a different world, for a place Conor could mold to his will, a place where the
Sídh
could run without fear even in the light of day, a place where Druid fires light up the night, a place where he and she would be honored for their gifts. She pressed close against his back and dug her fingers into his arm.

Then she heard the whisper of
witch, witch, witch,
and that hope shriveled and died.

S
omeone amid the mob threw the first stone. It struck Conor on the face. Droplets of blood oozed out of a welt in his cheek.

“The unholy creature bleeds.” A
idan raised his voice to the crowd. “What has died once can be killed again.”

The second stone hit her. She stumbled back, stunned, but
Conor’s hand curled around her arm, dragging her up, lifting her behind him, even as he knocked Aidan’s sword away. Something wet slid down her face. The buzzing surged. Shouts rang out. Stones hailed upon them.

The madness was unleashed.

“Stay close.”

Conor
’s sword was useless against the deadly rain. She clutched his cloak and buried her head in protection. She heard the clang of rocks against the metal. She felt him flinch as a stone hit an old wound. She knew he could not fight so many, and the moment he showed weakness, they would descend upon them. There would be no protection from the knives and swords and spears and the hardness of a stone in a woman’s hand.

Conor
was immortal, but she was not.

Cursing,
Conor shrugged off his cloak and threw it over her. She burrowed in it, trying to muffle the blows of the stones as he broke away from her. She sank to the ground. She heard the neighing of a horse—Aidan’s horse—heard Aidan’s cry, heard the hard thud of a body as it fell from a horse and hit the earth. The hail subsided. Through the folds of the cloak she saw her husband wrestling with his foster-brother, their swords clanging against one another, Conor driving him back, away from the horse who neighed and reared, skittish so close to the flashing blades. Aidan lunged. Conor, off balance, threw himself aside, but not soon enough. Blood blossomed on his tunic.

“
No!”

She surged from the protection of the cloak, running mindlessly, pushing Aidan,
knowing that if he thrust again while Conor was off balance, Conor would collapse, die, not for long, but long enough for Aidan to deal with her. She felt a burn on her side as Conor tugged her away. He struggled to capture the horse’s reins as he fought, his teeth bared, his sword singing. Aidan was fighting for his life. The crowd cried out behind him, urging him, thirsty for blood, the stone-throwing, for the moment, forgotten. This was single combat between warriors. Even in a time of madness, this ritual would be honored.

Conor
screamed something to her. She stumbled to her feet, faced the flashing hooves, the white, gnashing teeth of the horse. She’d only ridden a horse once in her life—behind Conor when he returned with her to the ring-fort. She ducked and swarmed around the horse, grasping his mane, ducking his foaming mouth, nearly crumpling in two when one of his flashing hooves grazed the softness of her side. Beyond the horse, she could still hear Conor and Aidan fighting. Digging her nails into the horse’s back, she heaved herself upon him, clinging to his sweat-soaked coat, swinging one leg over his back. She held on by gripping fistfuls of the stallion’s mane.

Below, the
battle-rage was upon Conor. She had never seen him like this. There was no mercy in his eyes, no hesitation in the slash of his sword. Both men bled, but though Conor fought with one hand wrapped around the reins, Aidan was the first to stumble. Conor lodged the point of his sword in the hollow of Aidan’s neck as the man fell to the ground.

Conor said,
“Yield to me.”

Ai
dan spit at him.

“Don’t be a fool.”
Conor lifted his sword so the light flashed off it. “Do you love that rod of kingship so much you’d make me kill you for it, when a hundred thousand kingdoms lay before our feet?”

“
You won’t win a kingdom,” he said, tilting his head toward the rapt, hovering mob, “by tearing that rod from my dead body.”

Conor
removed his sword from Aidan’s throat and let the tip trail against the earth. He glared at the crowd and then he turned and looked at her. Brigid’s heart lurched. Those eyes, once so clear and sure, now clouded with angry confusion. Aidan spoke the truth: A king was considered the embodiment of his people, responsible not merely for his own conduct as a ruler, but for the fertility of the land and for protecting his tribe against blight and plague of every sort. No unwanted king would rule long.

Conor
finally understood the futility of his fight.

Then h
e lurched forward. Conor clutched his leg with a grimace and stumbled around to face his foster brother, rising from the ground. Blood seeped into Conor’s tunic and filled the palm of his hand. He swung his sword to parry Aidan’s strike, and then swung again. Aidan stumbled back with the force of the blow, and then lost his balance as Conor lunged again, and again, until Conor found flesh, and buried his sword deep into his foster-brother.

The dying man’s wail cleared the air and left nothing but its own echo in the silence. With a muffled cry,
Conor drew out his sword. Blood washed it and dripped from the tip. He stood over Aidan grasping the bloodstained sword until the last frothy gurgle of life bubbled from his foster brother’s lips.

Brigid shifted on the horse, clutching her injured side, struggling against faintness. The
crowd stirred. She whispered Conor’s name. He lifted his head, dazed, staring at her from some far place. A stone flew and hit her injured side. Then, somehow, he was on the horse, her cheek pressed against Conor’s sweat-stained back, her arms wrapped around his waist, and he was swinging his sword, cutting a path through flesh, kicking the steed into life beneath them, until he stretched out toward freedom.

The horse’s great, loping strides jarred her bones,
but she hardly felt the pain. She was lost in a foggy place, her mind not all her own. All she knew was the smell of Conor’s sweat beneath her cheek, the thunder of his heart in his chest. She heard, in the great distance, the last furious cries of a thwarted mob.

They were free, they were free,
and they were alive.

They rode mindlessly, through deep forest, throu
gh sloping valleys, over ridges, following the path of a stream until it merged with Lough Riach. They rode until foam gathered around the horse’s mouth, until his great, black sides heaved between their legs. When he would go no farther, Conor turned him toward the shores of Lough Riach, dismounted, and let him drink his fill.

She
was not sure where they were, perhaps on some northern shore of the lake. She had a sudden flash of the Sight, of many places like this: unfamiliar, temporary watering holes they would pass from, one to another, until they all seemed the same.

Conor
stood with his back to her. He stared out over the still surface of the water. In his hands he held the bloodstained sword with which he had cut down his foster-brother. With a mighty heave, he sent the heavy weapon whirling through the air. It spun and twirled, catching the morning’s light, before the lake swallowed it.

Brigid knew he would never wield a sword again.

When he returned to her, his eyes were shadowed. He noticed the blood on her tunic and her face as if for the first time.

“It’s nothing,” she lied. She had long begun to
feel the aches and bruises and cuts. Her head throbbed, and the flesh wound on her side burned. To distract him, she nodded to the blood on his tunic. Some of his old wounds had opened.

His voice was
flat. “I shall live no matter what wounds they inflict.”

She lowered her face. In the course
of a day they had become exiles. Brigid knew the feeling well; she had been an exile for half her life. But to Conor, the loss of a kingship and the loss of Aidan was too fresh a wound to bear, especially in the wake of his broken dreams.

His hands curled into her waist, careful not to dig into t
he slash on her side. “We are safe here. They’ll not look hard for us beyond the borders of Morna. You must be tended to—”

Her sudden cry cut him off. She doubled over, a cramp closing like a fist in her abdomen. She heard him bark her name through the red haze of pain. Something deep, deep inside her tore away. Warm liquid bathed her legs.

“No!” Brigid pressed her thighs together. She flung her head back to scream at the skies.
No, no, not the innocent! Let him live, let him live!

She sank to the ground. From somewhere in the canopy of leaves above c
ame the airy wail of the
bean sí
. With a keening cry of anguish, Brigid railed against the truth. The
bean sí
song of days ago had not been for her father, nor for Conor.

It
was the death song of her unborn child.

The cliffs of the Aran Islands crested out of Galway Bay, their backs curled against the fury of the ocean. Heather and bracken and tufts of grass clung to the stone, defying the salt spray, the icy fogs, and the gales that clawed at their roots. Froth-crested waves thundered in and out of caverns, and the screeches of gulls and cormorants echoed over the islands as the birds wheeled over the breakers.

Conor
flexed his stiff fingers over the oars. He eyed the wedge of sand on the shore behind him, the sole landing point amid the cliffs on the lee side of the middle island. Brigid leaned into the steering oar, her knuckles white with the effort of keeping the prow of the curragh facing the roll of the oncoming sea. The boat—nothing more than cow skin stretched over bone—bobbed on the water like a nutshell.

Wave after wave surged underneath them to crash upon the sand.
Conor watched the struggle of the distant waters, counting the time between each wave’s crest and furrow, eyeing the swirling foam. After months traveling through the western shore of Erin, he had grown expert at handling these native boats and at reading this sea. One wrong wave caught unawares or broadside, and the hungry ocean would suck this fragile vessel into its womb.

He saw his opportunity. Barking a swift order,
Conor plunged his oars in the water. Before the swell of the last wave had eased beneath them, Brigid twisted the steering oar, and the prow swung around toward the shore. The boat leapt and hurled through the spray. Conor’s shoulders burned as he battled against the tide, straining to propel the boat toward the slip of sand before the next wave crashed down upon them. As the rib of the vessel crunched the sand, Conor leapt out, seized the rim, and yanked the curragh far away from the surf as the boggy shore sucked at the soles of his feet.

Brigid dragged a chapped hand through her hair as
Conor lifted her out of the boat. Her swirling green gaze avoided his and instead took in the sight of the island. Sea spray soaked the cliffs. Above, a confusion of white-winged birds cawed and screeched at this unexpected invasion. The grays of coming rain shrouded the bay beyond, yet the thinness of the clouds threw a silvery light on the sea and land.

“It’s the very edge of the world, Conor.”

He squinted towards the purple outline of the Connemara hills, the only sight of the mainland. Any curragh which dared to approach this island would be seen long before it neared. Once it arrived, that boat would lay vulnerable while it waited for the sea to give it leave to land. A man could ask for no better fortress than this rugged island, no better gate than this slip of shore, no better moat than this treacherous northern sea.

“It’s fitting,” he
said, “that we’d find the end of the world.”

All through Erin, Brigid with her flaming hair and he with his height were too e
asily recognized as the witch of Morna and the king she’d summoned from the dead. The tale had snapped at their heels, growing more and more fantastic, and so they battered about like leaves in a gale, finding no rest, no peace, no sanctuary.

Until now.

“Well, I’ll tell you something for nothing.”  Conor dragged the boat higher on the shore and snugged it into the lee of a boulder. “They won’t be driving us away any farther than this.”

“I thought there could never be a more forsaken place than
the wilds of Connemara. Is there not a tree on the whole place?”

He shook his head.
His gaze shifted to her upturned face, the long, white arch of her neck, the tightness about her lips.
Aye, my wife, look where my folly has brought you. A place fit for nothing but gulls and seaweed.

She murmured,
“It will take a fine bit of work to get a cow to the top, I’m thinking.”

“You’ll be getting your cow
.” He nodded toward a hump of black land across the white-capped sound. “I’ve seen a herd of cattle upon the heights of the north island. No doubt the owners will be glad to trade a few head for the price of some knives and wool.”

She
hefted a sack containing all their worldly possessions out of the boat. “I don’t like having neighbors so close.”

“It’s a
fearful channel which separates the islands. They won’t be visiting.”

He might have added that a flock of
priests lived there, but he said nothing. These past months, words between them were painful, sharp things. They concentrated their thoughts outward, to the world raging around them, and thus avoided the grief and the guilt between them. Besides, she had no reason to fear those monks. The Romans had separated themselves from the chaos and comforts of the world—just as they were now forced to do.

She cast the sack upon the sand
. “I worry if there’s even enough grass between those rocks to feed a calf.”

“There’s enough to sustain a few head,” he argued. “If I must, I’ll swim them over to the next island to graze. There’s nary a soul upon that island, like to this.”

“We’ll have to make land, too.” She busied herself with hefting logs of peat out of the bottom of the boat. “With seaweed and sand and clay, like the Connemara men do, so we can be planting some barley for ale and porridge—”

“No more of
this.” He seized the peat and tossed the pile back into the boat. How it burned in his gut to hear her talking of bondswomen’s tasks, to see her fine, woolen cloak stained with salt and streaked with soil, his wife, his queen. “Leave a man’s job to a man. Come with me and look about the island.”

He gestured her toward the rocky tumble that served as a path to the top of the cliff
. With effort, she settled the hem of her cloak over her arm and led the way. He allowed his gaze to linger upon her bowed shoulders, upon the fragile column of neck, revealed as the wind battened back her tangled hair. An aching jab speared through him, like a sword slice through an old and infected wound.

She paused on a small ledge.
“Will we be making our house out of stones upon this cliff,” she asked, “and plug the holes with seaweed?”

“It will be a sturdier house t
han ever you had in the woods of Morna.”

But there will be no soft oaks’ shadows, and no honey
suckle blooming, and no scent of green summer grass
. His arrogance and price had taken all that from her, too.

“There will be no lack of fish
.” She eyed the slippery, shell-encrusted rocks thrust out in ledges toward the sea. “Or ducks. Or limpets or periwinkles or mussels or cockles.”

The surf crashed and roared, drowning out her words. A hooded crow screeched and darted down from its nest on the ridge, and then swept up to dart down again.

She hefted her soggy cloak higher on her arm. “It will take a fine bit of scratching and sweating to make a life here.”

“It was
you who once said that a bit of hard work never harmed any man.”

“It’s a good thing you’ve had
some practice at the thatching.”

His gaze flew to her profile, to the barest shadow of a smile playing about her lips.
Soft words, these, yet probing and sore. For a moment they shared a bittersweet memory of a sun-lit glade rich with the scent of honeysuckle.

His callused hands curled into fists. “It was a poor enough job I did of it
even then.”

“It’ll be a sight to se
e, the King of Morna hewing stone and cutting peat and wielding a fishing spear.”

She dared a fleeting glance, and for a moment he saw h
is reflection in her eyes. His three-colored cloak hung ragged from so many nights sleeping in it, salt-stained and snagged from leaping in and out of the curragh. His neck lay bare of the golden roped torque, for it marked him too clearly a king in any land. A frayed strap of leather had taken the place of his belt of beaten gold.

He turned
his gaze away. “I’m a king no more.”

His
hand strayed to his hip, naked of the weight of his sword. Again he felt it, that shifting of the world beneath his feet, as if this ledge had cracked from the island and lurched into the sea. Even months after he’d tossed the bloody sword into the lake, he walked as if he’d lost a limb. He’d been fed his first solid food on its tip. He’d grown up with the weight of it slung across his hip, or firm in his grip, marking his life by the battles he’d won with it. He’d conquered a kingdom by it. And now he’d murdered his foster-brother by it, knowing Aidan—or any other mortal—could never best him.

“Well, I’m a queen, so d
on’t you be telling me I married less than a king.” She turned and headed up the path. “It will take a strong man with a strong back to conquer this island. No less than a king will do.”

Brave words these
, but he had no ear for them. He knew he was a king no more. He was a man of flesh and bones and blood and something else, something wispy and impossible to grasp, even with his thoughts. He had abandoned more than a shining blade of steel in the north end of Lough Riach that morning after Samhain. He’d abandoned Conor of Ulster, Champion of the O’Neill, King of Morna. Now he did not know his name. He felt like a boat at sea without oars. His hands craved the grip of something, even if it were no more than a stone-pick or a fishing spear.

A
gull keened a lonely cry above him. He glanced up the slope to where Brigid climbed, growing more distant with each step.

“Will you be standing
there all day, Conor?” She tossed the words over her shoulder without pause. “You can’t climb a cliff by scaling it in your mind.”

***

Conor grunted up the narrow path which lead to the height of the cliff, hauling the basket of seaweed upon his back. Ribbons of seaweed draped over his shoulders like a mantle. With a swipe of his forearm, he wiped the sweat off his face, and then eased his way to where he and Brigid were building their house.

The beehive-shaped dwelling of stone swelled from the earth
. The Connemara people called these
clocháns.
As he rounded it, he glimpsed Brigid perched amid fields of drying seaweed, gazing up into the air while shading her eyes. Conor trudged to the peat fire, then ripped apart the rope tied around his waist and let the basket of seaweed thud to the ground. She did not budge from her musings.

“It’s enough
of working for one day,” he said, loud enough to be heard. “Soon it will be dark.”

She did not acknowledge his words. He trudged through the
field of drying seaweed, wiping his sticky hands upon his cloak. How pale she looked. Her skin was as translucent as the strange light which came upon this island after the passing of a gale. Considering all the hard work they’d done these past weeks, piling the stones one upon the other to make a dwelling fitting for man and strong enough to withstand the forces of the sea, it was no wonder she was pale. Brigid worked as hard as an ox, losing weight, her bones jutting through her skin and looking fragile enough to break. They both worked so hard they spoke of nothing but work, and at night they fell instantly into the bonds of sleep, while the abyss yawning between them stretched wider and deeper.

When he
approached, she nodded toward the sky and murmured, “Look.”

A
bove, two white swans wheeled in the sky. They stretched their wings and soared on a breeze. Beyond, on the horizon, boiling gray clouds threatened.

“Fey swans,
” he said, “to be flying out here with a storm coming.”

“They don’t b
elong here.”  The wind battered her long braid over her shoulder. “They belong in a cool lake with calm water and plenty of reeds to hide among.”

“They’ll s
urvive well enough, and if they don’t, we’ll be dining on them.”

She granted him a swift, harsh glance. “We’ve not come so far from the world that we’ll be feasting on swan’s meat to survive.” She eyed the birds anew. “Do they not remind you of the Children of Lir?”

His nostrils flared, as if he smelled anew the wood fires of a smoky mead hall, the strum of a harp, the lilting voice of a royal poet, the warm circle of comfortable camaraderie.

He said gruffly, “I remember none of
the tales.” This must be what it is like to age, he thought, for memories to cut like blades.

“They were tur
ned into swans,” she said, “and condemned to live amid the harsh seas for hundreds of years.”

“How fanciful you’ve become, wife, seeing magic in birds
that’ve done no more than lose their way.”

“They’ve
built a nest on the ledge of one of the caverns.” Her features softened. “Like the Children of Lir, condemned to walk the earth as swans for hundreds of years—exiled from Erin—until a prince of the north married a princess of the south—”

“Will you be telling me,” he interrupted,
“how you discovered this nest of theirs?”

Her trance faltered
. She discovered a sudden interest in the patch of seaweed at her feet. “I found it as I looked for eggs amid the rocks.”

Anger shot through him. “I told you, woman, there will be no prancing about those cliffs—”