Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (20 page)

The coverings tumbled down with a cloud of dust. Thin stre
ams of light sifted through the cracks in the oiled parchment, threading a faint breeze. Conor yanked away the bed curtains. A black cat yowled and sprinted off the bed to dash into the shadows.

He glanced dispassionately at the small, supine figure
who lay swathed in wool and fur. His patient was a woman-child who looked as if she’d known barely eighteen winters, with softly rounded features and dark gold hair. Her breath came harsh through white lips.

“She’s been like this for weeks.” Monsieur
Mézières tugged a perfumed linen out of his sleeve and pressed it over his nose. “She collapsed when she heard that her brother had died in a hunting accident. She has lain in that bed restless and half-conscious ever since.”

Death glaze
d the girl’s skin like frost. Conor searched for her arm and then probed for her weak and irregular pulse. Higher up, by the crook of her elbow, scarlet slashes from recent bleedings mottled her skin. Conor let her arm drop to the bed. He knew by the limpness of her limbs and the Otherworldly expression on her face that, though she lay weak from leeching and bleeding, her true sickness was not of the body, but of the heart.

He’d seen this form of human misery before.

“I’ve already lost a son, Doctor MacSídh. She is my only heir.” The burgher’s voice grew gravelly with anxiety. “There is no price—none—too dear for her life.”

“My price is a bed.”
Conor seized the top woolen blanket and yanked it off the girl. “If you can offer room and board, then I’ll do what I can for her.”

There
was a moment of stunned silence while Conor yanked cover after cover off the bed.

The burgher said,
“That’s a paltry price for a doctor’s fee.”

“Not
compared to the king’s ransom the innkeepers of Troyes are asking for a cold straw pallet.”

He nodded shortly
. “You’ll have a bed, then. I’ll see to it. But if you heal my daughter, a king’s ransom will be yours. Think on that as you tend to her.” The burgher turned on his heel and headed to the door. “I’ve not yet met a doctor whose skills couldn’t be sharpened by the promise of gold.”

The door clicked shut behind him.
Conor rolled his forearm over his sweat-soaked face, and then barked for the maidservant to get rid of the covers. He planted his hands on his hips and glared at the small, shapely form of the woman lying in it.

H
e supposed he could bring this one back to health. Beneath the glaze of her skin, a flush ebbed and flowed. She was just at the age when the sap of life surged strongest. It would take little more than rest and broth and an end to the bleedings to drag her back among the living. He’d heal her body, for that was a matter of dispassionate skill, like untangling ship’s rigging or caulking a hole in the hull. But her grief was her own. He’d be gone from this place before the tentacles he’d felt rising from the muck of Troyes bound him to this house and these people.

She jerked, suddenly, in her sleep. He turned her face toward his. Her skin burned against his
fingertips. He’d have to call the maidservant back. He needed a pot of boiling water to mix with yew leaves.

He sat on the bed just as her eyes fluttered open.

And Conor tumbled down, deep, deep down through the centuries, into the whirling colors of a misty forest glade, into the soft ripple of laughter echoing amid the rustle of leaves, into a place where his blood pumped hard in his veins and his heart soared as unfettered as a sparrow gliding on a warm summer breeze. He clawed his fingers into the linens while his senses reeled in some sightless void, sucked into a vortex of memory. He knew these eyes like he knew the buck of a stallion beneath him, like he knew the sharp scent of summer’s green grass and blooming honeysuckle, like he knew the hills and valleys and growling gray mists of Erin.

Her eyes fluttered closed.

Conor sat still as stone.

For
one burning flash of a moment, he had stared into the eyes of Brigid.

“What’s this?” The maidservant clattered the breakfast tray upon a table
and searched the silent room. A hot breeze breathed through the window and fluttered a hem of linen across the black serge of the bed draperies. “Deirdre Mézières, are you hiding from me on such a fine, soft morning?”

From her hiding spot,
Dierdre saw a smile slip across the maidservant’s wizened face.

“Have you
no sense of fair play, child?” The maidservant walked across the room and tugged the draperies aside. “You can see me, lass—but to my aged eyes, you’re no more than a will-o’-the-wisp.”

“You’ve no shame!” 
Deirdre whirled out of the cloth, grinning. This was an old game. They’d been playing it near every morning since Deirdre had been weaned from her mother’s breast. “You have ears like an old hound, it’s a wonder I can keep my own thoughts from you.” Deirdre met Moira’s glazed eyes, their color long obscured by milky cataracts. “Now, an honest race, perhaps. That would be more sporting of you—”

“There’ll be no talk of racing.” Moira’s jowls shook like twin bowls of porridge. “It’s daft enough that you’re standing in your naked feet with the sun hardly over the horizon, and you not a week from knocking at St. Peter’s gate.”

Deirdre
rolled her eyes. “You’d give me castanets and a bread basket like a leper.”

“Haven’t you got the
devil in you today.”

“I’m not dead to the world
yet.” Deirdre darted to the window, and then swiped away what remained of the oiled parchment to lean out into the summer sunshine. “When Papa summoned me here from the convent I thought my banishment was over.”

“
Banishment,” Moira chided as she waddled back to the tray laden with food. “Listen to you talking—”

“
Are you going to tell me that these last three months I’ve been anything other than an exile in my own father’s house?”

“It would not be right for you to be walking
free, not with this house in mourning.” Moira sliced a wafer out of a hard round of cheese, and then waved the knife at her charge. “This is your sickness talking.”

“I’m as strong as a Turk.” Deirdre listened to the sound of
life
drifting over the roof from the street. People thronged about, laughing, gossiping, and calling out to one another in languages she did not understand. Dogs yipped, the crank on the well creaked, the peddlers sang about their wares. “If I don’t get outside soon, I’ll explode like a barrel of tar put to flame.”

She teetered farther out on the ledge, digging her hips into the ridge of the stone sill, trying to cool the hot rush of her blood
. Moira wasn’t wrong. She’d lost her senses prancing about her room like a fey child and yearning for a freedom that could not be. All last night she had tossed and turned, as anxious and fretful as a caged thing, and this morning she’d woken with a fire in her blood, with no sense to it at all. She’d sooner stop the rain from falling, or the wind from blowing, than sit quietly in her shadowy room with her sewing and her lute on a morning such as this.

Something is going to happen.
The knowledge had hovered on the edge of her consciousness for days, yet she had not dared to give it more than an instant’s thought—until now, when the certainty tingled in her fingertips.

“
Don’t be leaning out of the window with the sun streaming through your shift, showing all the gifts the good Lord gave you.”

“I’ll dress, then.” Deirdre tumbled back on her heels, spun
into the room, and dropped to her knees in front of her carved wooden chest. She threw open the lid and snatched stockings and a blue tunic shot through with gold threads. “Then it’s to the fair for me—”

Moira pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead. “I don’t know which saint to pray to anymore.”
She clattered the knife upon the tray and snatched the tunic from Deirdre’s hands. She held the cloth close to her face to check it for tears and snags. “The fair’s crowd is not for the likes of you.”

“
Who is, then?” Deirdre plopped down on a stool by the side of the hearth and yanked her shift to her hips, stretching each leg into her stockings. “Da says I’m too good for the other bourgeois, as the only daughter of the richest burgher in Troyes. And yet I’m not good enough for noblewomen.” She stood up and snatched the blue tunic from Moira’s hands. While she wrestled her arms into it, she gravitated back to the window like a seal rising to the surface of the sea for air. “I won’t sit in this room anymore living always between two worlds.” She shimmied the tunic down her legs and jerked her chin toward some hidden street beyond the garden. “Mayhap in that crowd I’ll find one of my own, if such a creature exists.”

“Child,
they’re burning heretics again today at the fair. Two Albigensians brought up from the south, and one little lass accused of doing the devil’s work by preventing the candlemaker’s lard from setting.”

Deirdre dug her fingers into the
windowsill. Moira was right: She’d been told that crusaders milled about, outfitting themselves to join King Louis in the Holy Land. The Grand Inquisitor had come with heathens from Languedoc, to show all of Europe the evil lurking even in its most Christian heart.

Aye, the
streets of Troyes were no place for the likes of her.

Still,
defiance surged in her. She yearned to taunt the world—anything,
anything
to feel free of shackles, if only for a moment, if only for
this
moment.

“C
ome and dance with me in the garden, then.” Deirdre spun away from the windowsill, pried the round of cheese from Moira’s grip, and dragged her into the center of the room. “We’ll pretend there’s an Irish piper, like the one Papa hired for Mama’s birthday all those years ago. Do you remember?”

Deirdre herself only vaguely remembered, for it was
a happier moment, a joyous instant in her childhood, but her thighs and her arms, her feet and her fingers, the long curve of her back—they all remembered how to dance. While Moira argued and scolded, Deirdre whirled around her and kicked up the hem of her tunic, abandoning herself to the music in her head.

Finally,
Deirdre gathered her skirts and darted toward the door. “Come, Moira, to the garden—”

She stumbled to a sudden s
top, her skirts snapping around her legs, as she collided with a solid wall of a man braced in the open portal.

She staggered back and blinked up at the apparition. She had a
swift impression of broad shoulders, of legs braced apart, of an exotic, broad-boned face flanked by unfashionably long hair. The rest was a blur, for from old habit she swept her lashes down to veil her own eyes from the stranger.

“What’s this?” she demanded breathlessly, yanking her skirts straight. “What are you doing sneaking up on a w
oman with nary a ‘good day to you’?”

Silence rang in the room
like the deafening aftermath of a clangor of church bells. The brute of a man standing before her seemed to suck the air from the room. She raised her lashes halfway, enough to see fine blue linen straining against the sweep of his heaving chest, enough to see the roped muscles of his forearms, and tight fists at his sides. A flash of memory came to her, of a tattered book one of the novices had hidden under a rock in the convent’s garden, of a brutish conqueror coming upon a princess in the woods and carrying her off to some deliciously unspeakable fate.

She
tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as the unlaced sleeve of her tunic slipped to her elbow. “Why didn’t you announce yourself?”

“I
thought you might know the sight of me.”

His words
were tense, but amid them lilted the warm breath of the Irish. She reached out and curled her hand around a bedpost. It had been so long since she’d heard the brogue of her homeland out of anyone’s mouth but Moira’s. The timbre vibrated through her so intimately, with a strain so hauntingly familiar, that memories flooded through her, of salt-spray tingling on her face, of growling gray mists, of the dense fragrance of blooming heather, of cows lowing on a warm hillside. The rush made her knees weak. She stifled a yearning to meet this Irishman’s gaze for the years had taught her well to hide her own gaze from the world.

“Friend or foe,” she retorted, flexing her hand over the carved oak, “it’s not fitting to burst in on a woman like you did. My life nearly left me body at the sight of you.”

“B
ut it didn’t,” he growled, “and you standing there, as cool as morning, with your wits still about you.”

“Wits are a woman’
s only weapon.”

“And yours still as sharp as ever.” He strode into her chamber as boldly as a husband. “Was I lure
d here just to feel the prick of your tongue?”

“Lured here?” She clutched the bedp
ost with both hands, not understanding what he was talking about. “Who are you? What business do you have in my bedroom?”

He clanked a bulky sack upon her bedside table with more fo
rce than necessary. “No words of welcome for me?”

She’d remember a man such as this, even if she’d done nothing more than brush by him in a crowd on the way to Mass. Only a handful of men had made her acquaintance in all her life—priests and kin, all—and none dared to swagger into her chamber as if he owned the room and everything within. “
Why would I welcome you? I’ve never seen the likes of you before.”

“Child, child, have you
no manners?” Moira stepped forward, her splotchy jowls shaking. “This is Monsieur MacSídh, the doctor I told you about.”

Deirdre shook her head
. Those rough laborer’s hands . . . surely they couldn’t be the ones she remembered grazing her skin so tenderly during her illness. “If he’s a doctor, then I’m a queen.”

The
stranger flung the contents of his sack upon the bed—a sandglass, a series of leather bags, flashing instruments, a small chalice. “Does your majesty wish to hear of my lengthy education? I know a tale of misery that would burn your ears with the telling.”

Her face was lowered, so all she saw were the scattered implements and the blur of his form, but she sensed his fury as she would sense the blistering of the summer sun.
What a snapping brute he was. But she wouldn’t be cowed by it. She had no reason to fear in her own room, in her father’s own house. Papa would kill with his own hands anyone who dared to do her harm.

Besides,
with her gaze always fixed to the ground, she’d long learned to read moods by the curl of a finger or the pace of a man’s breathing. The fury emanating from this hulking doctor roared in all directions. He raged not at her but at the whole wide world.

“
It’s no wonder I didn’t know you.” She only had flickering memories of the doctor, a presence that retreated into the shadows whenever she struggled into consciousness. “You’ve been tending to me about a week, and not until now do I meet you, and this is how you do it, barging in bristling like a cock?”

“Did you expect a wooing, woman?”

“I expected good manners—”

“I won’t be simpe
ring and groveling at your feet like a poor bard at a queen’s table.”

“
I wouldn’t expect you to.”  Her blood raced. It seemed like an eternity since she’d crossed wits with anyone but Moira, even longer since she’d done so with a man—and then only her brother. “I’ll have none of your wooing, thank you very much,” she continued, thinking that the devil was in her tongue today. “If your loving is as blunt as your speech, monsieur, I’m thinking you’ll have no art at all.”

Moira barked,
“Child!”

The doctor
turned and sloshed some wine into a chalice, stirring it vigorously. His knuckles grew white with tension yet his fingers trembled. “Drink this.” The doctor thrust out the chalice straight-armed. “It will keep that thorn bush of a tongue in your mouth.”

Something in the way he uttered
those words made her fingertips stray to her suddenly tender, throbbing lower lip.

Vanity was a sin. But many times during the lonely years in the convent, she had
unwrapped her mother’s silver mirror and lifted it to the daylight streaming upon her face. She’d parted her lips, examined her teeth—one in the front slightly crooked—then ran a hand down her figure, taking some comfort in knowing she’d been gifted with her mother’s fair, fine skin and a lush form—convincing herself that she was a pretty young woman, if a mite too rounded, bound to turn the head of a good man someday. But eventually, inevitably, she’d meet her own eyes straight on and wonder what men feared in those seemingly ordinary green irises. What was it about her gaze that made men and women so uneasy, that sent priests into secretive fits of self-crossing, that sent servants dodging out of her way?

Then her features
would recede in the reflection, blurred by hot tears, puckering into the countenance of one of the gargoyles that leered out from over the door of the church. She knew, yes, she knew. She’d been told that there was always a mark: a mole, a wart. A demon could never hide entirely in a woman’s heart.