Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (25 page)

Octavius plowed forward
. “The maidservant arranged that the two should meet in the woods near where Deirdre lived, and they did—”

“And,”
Dierdre interrupted,  “it was love at first sight!”

“
Ah, you know the tale, then!”

She nodded. “But tell it anyway.”

“Now Naoise, that young Ulster lover,” Octavious continued, “knew that the king was powerful and jealous. So he packed up and took Deirdre to Scotland where the wrath of the king could not touch them. There, they could live happily together. But the king was a proud sort, full of himself, and no ocean would come between him and his vengeance. So he sent a messenger to Naoise, and promised him the a full pardon for Naoise’s betrayal, if he came back to Ireland and brougth his wife Dierdre. Naoise missed his friends, so this was a great temptation.

“But Deirdre had a rare and wonderful gift, as sure as skill in spinning or weaving or telling tales. The night before the king’s messenger arrived in Scotland, Deirdre dreamed of Naoise’s death. The next day, she begged her lover not to accept the king’s pardon, for she knew
it was the vilest treachery.”

Deirdre
found herself leaning forward in her chair as the hairs on the nape of her neck rose in a delicious way. Deirdre glanced at Conor, but he did not even look her way. His gaze was fierce upon Octavius.

“But
, alas, like most men, Naoise paid no mind to his wife’s warnings. He refused to give up the fool’s gold offered to him just because of a woman’s dream. Men, so often, are full of pride. So no doubt you’ve guessed that the moment Naoise stepped upon Irish soil, he was captured and put to death.” Octavius sucked anew upon the thread. “It’s said that Deirdre, weeping, had to be dragged off her lover’s dead body.”

A log tumbled from the andiron and crashed into the flames. Wi
th the flaring came an odd glow, a silvery light, like she’d never seen from burning wood. But the story had ensnared her; it was as if she had no strength to turn her head and look into the mouth of the fireplace and see what caused such an unusual gleam. Octavius’s voice echoed as if he spoke beneath a great arching dome, rather than in the squat, broad-beamed ball of the Clunel manor house.

“You
see,” Octavius continued, “the king had his prize, but now she was called Deirdre of the Sorrows, for she spent her time a-wailing and a-keening over the death of her one true love, while a great war raged around them between the king’s men and those who vowed vengeance for Naoise. It did not take long before the king could bear it no longer. He sent Dierdre away, and on that very day, she dashed herself headlong from her chariot and died.”

“Don’t leave it at that,” she said, as Octavius stared into the flames and said no more. “There was a happy ending to the tale when my mother told it.”

“
Aye, of a sort.”  Octavius stretched out the thread between his two fingers, and raised it for all to see. “Out of Deirdre’s grave grew a great yew tree. The branches twined and spread across the wide countryside,” he said, winding one end toward the other, “until they found the branches of another yew, which had grown from the grave of Naoise.” He raised the opposite end of the string. “The branches meshed and entwined like two hands coming together, and in the end Naoise and Deirdre were one.”

Octavius
tied the ends of the string together.

“For this is
the way of the ancient Irish: Though a body dies, a soul does not. Souls are reborn again, and again, and each lifetime a soul seeks out those it loves, forever searching, like the branches of the yew tree, for its mate.” He stretched the string between his fingers in a perfect circle. “There is no rest for a weary soul until the circle is complete.”

Conor
’s book clattered to the floor as he towered to his full height. He glared at Octavius, who smiled with mischief.

“I’ll have a word with you, Octavius.”
Conor strode toward the stairs. “Alone.”

Octavius tucked the string away. He rolled with a jaunty li
ttle bounce to his feet. “Seems I’m after getting a bit of a talking-to.”

Then he pranced up the stairs
in Conor’s wake, his laughter trailing after him.

“Where’s Octavius?”

Conor watched as
Deirdre whirled with a start. Sunlight flashed on the circlet across her brow, the only tether to her waterfall of hair.

“Must you do that?”
She lifted her hands to her hips. Her scarlet surcoat, trimmed with gold braid, stretched across her breasts. “Can you not even manage a ‘good day’ before you frighten a lass out of her wits?”

“Are you hiding him
again?” Conor examined the ill-fitted masonry of the manor house, then the weed-choked garden, anywhere to avoid looking at the blinding light of her in the Lughnasa morning. “The cook said you’d found him.”

“H
e was here a moment ago, but I think he smelled your anger and went on his way.”

Conor
clamped down on his fury. Now that Conor knew the truth about him, the imp would scurry about and hide, taunt him from afar and leave nothing but mocking laughter in his wake.

“
I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s off to find another master.” She hefted a basket into the crook of her elbow. “Especially after the beating you gave him last night—”

“Is that the story he’s spreading?”

“How could you strike a poor unfortunate for doing nothing more than telling a story, pagan though it was?”

“
So you believe the tales of a lying thief.”

“With his word against yours,
it’s his I’ll believe. You’re always full of spit and fury.” 

Conor
swiveled in frustration. He should have seized the creature by the neck when he had the chance, instead of waiting upstairs in the eaves for nothing but bodiless footsteps and secret tittering.

“I’m off to the woods, Conor. If I’m not back by sundown, send a man to fetch me.”

His attention sh
ifted to Deirdre’s swaying back as she headed toward the far edge of the garden. “And where do you think you’re going, woman?”

“I told you clear enough.”

“Who says,” he growled, following her since she made no attempt to slow her pace, “you can go off wandering alone in the forest?”

“And who in this place would dare to s
top me? You?” She waved a dismissive hand, her words drifting back as she retreated. “This could be my land someday, and I’ve a fancy to see the vineyards I’m told grow just beyond—”

“
You’re more likely to see one of the poachers who steal the Clunel deer, or a pack of ruffians working their way through the wilds to the Fair of St. Jean.”

She
glanced at him over her shoulder, all rosy-cheeked from the kiss of the sun, all that flying hair and knowing eyes. Her gaze impacted upon him like a blow to the chest. She looked more and more like Brigid each day, though her appearance had changed not one bit.

“
Are you worried about me then?”

“
Your father would skin me alive if you came to harm.”

“Then
if you value your skin,” she argued, stepping over a break in the garden’s stone fence, “you’d best stay close.”

Blasted woman
. He stalled as she dipped into the shadows. Her humming wafted back to mock him. He’d forgotten the bold way she’d state something, and then go about it with a never-you-mind. And now he stood, knowing he had no choice other than to go after her, wondering if he’d grown soft with the years, to follow her smallest whim and lope after her like a pup—or, more fitting, like a lamb to slaughter.

Not today.

Today was Lughnasa. He glared at the leaves swaying from her passing. Her humming faded into the rustle of the wind. A gust rose behind him, and laid his tunic flat against his back. He stood still as stone, resisting, even as something unwound within him and furled deep into those woods, toward the woman prancing alone under the arch of the trees.

No rest for the weary soul until the circle is complete.

Damn Octavius and his riddles. Damn himself for paying heed. And damn himself for standing here, letting the Lughnasa tides lap over him, heating his blood until they boiled the reason from his mind.

Lead the horse to the well, if you must, he
thought, eyeballing the sky. The trick is in making him drink.

He bent beneath
an overhanging branch. The womb of the woods closed over him. A buzzing began around his ears—a familiar swarming that raised not a bit of dust. High in the oaks the leaves rustled with life and saplings nodded at him like wizened old men. A splash of sunshine buttered the way, at the end of which he glimpsed a flash of her white undertunic as she kicked fleet-footed up the path.

Time lost meaning in this rustling world of deep green shadows and gauzy light. A branch nodded against his thigh and he
thought it his sword, as much a part of him as the heavy torque lying upon his throat, and the sweep of his tunic slapping against his calves. Youth rushed through his blood and bones, the hard pumping of heart and lungs, the recklessness and the folly—a memory made real in this time of timelessness, new and old, full of mystery and full of knowledge.

He f
ound her standing atop the hill on a smooth stretch of rock. The gently sloping lands of Champagne rolled out to the horizon. Silver threads of river wound around patches of forest, plots of golden grain, and paler stretches of low-lying vineyard. Chalky gray houses pitted the countryside, and here and there the ochre spires of rural churches pierced the treetops.

“
Now this would be a fine place for a Lughnasa fire.” She unhooked the basket from her elbow. “Don’t you think so, Conor?”

“A week away
from the eye of your confessor and you turn pagan already.”

“It was a fancy, no more.”

“And you’d have me cut wood for your pyre, wouldn’t you?”

“F
ar be it for you to dirty your hands with a common man’s work.” She strode to the shade of a tree and dropped the basket beneath it. “In any case, you’ve nothing but your ire to do the cutting, though I’ve no doubt your anger is hot and sharp enough to slice wood.”

“I’d do better using your tongue.”

Something rustled on the edge of the forest. He glanced over and a dull gleam caught his eye. Striding over, he tore away the woodbine twisting between a yew and an oak sapling and then hefted up a rusted axe.

A gleam lit her eyes.
“A gift from the little people.”

He stretched his fingers over the warm grip.
How predictable the gods. How lacking in imagination.

“More pagan rubbish.”

“That’s not pagan,” she insisted. “The little people are angels. Moira told me herself.”

“Angels.”

“It’s the truth.”  She shucked off her cloak and straightened the sweep of yellow cloth over the grass. “Moira told me, and she’s as good a Christian as you’d find.” She plumped a hip on the cloth and began unloading the basket. “When Satan sinned, so the story goes, the angels divided up among themselves—between those who stood with him, and those who stood with God. But there were some who wanted nothing to do with the battle, and so they stayed out of it altogether. So when Lucifer was tossed from Heaven with his minions, those angels had a punishment of their own: they were banished to the Earth. So they live among us to do their good, or their mischief, more often than not.”

“Then
let’s not disappoint them.” He wrestled off his surcoat and threw it in a blue heap upon the ground. “I’ll give them a pyre to mock all of Christendom.”

He grasped the heavy-headed axe and heaved it around, hacking the blade into the
oak sapling, once, twice, thrice, until it snapped and thudded to the ground.

Is this what you want then,
old gods of mine? A tribute to forgotten deities. Mayhap that is why you keep me earthbound:  I’m one last faithful to do your bidding. The last of the faithful to mock.

The
n the yew crashed to the earth. Golden light flooded into the clearing. He tucked the saplings one under each arm and headed to the height of the rock, raking the earth behind him with their crowns. He tossed the wood across the open plain. As he snapped off bough after bough, slivers of wood flew and embedded themselves in his clothes, his skin, and his hair. He bound the branches into bundles with their own stripped bark.

He felt her gaze upon him
as he worked. Power surged through his sweat-soaked body and pumped liquid force into his burning muscles.
Did you think me an old man, wife? Did you think time would rob the marrow from my bones?
He tossed the bound branches aside and set to the other tree with fury. When it was denuded of boughs, he searched for the axe he’d tossed carelessly aside.

She thrust a flagon in his path
. “It’s hard work tearing a tree limb from limb.”

Grasping the flagon by the neck,
he tipped it and swilled his fill. Cool rivulets ran down his neck.

She
said, “The nuns at the convent often punished me for my wayward tongue. One of them said that the devil lived at its root.” Her gaze flickered to his chest and then quickly away to the carnage of the trees splattered over the hilltop. “I hope that it wasn’t me on your mind when you set to this task with such fury.”

He suppressed an angry sigh. It was his rage against the gods which kept him snarling
. He harbored no hate for her, didn’t she see that? It was
love
for her that kept him here, when he knew he should be far away. It was
love
for her that kept him from reaching out and tilting up her chin, touching those soft, full lips, and drowning in the salt-warmth of her kiss.

A breeze slipped a tendril of white-gold hair across her mouth. She brushed it aside absent
ly, her lashes dark against her cheeks.

Something
inside him cracked.

He strangled the neck of the flagon. “
You must know you have nothing to fear from me.”

Her shoulders lifted and fell in an exaggerated sigh
. “I’m glad of that, Conor MacSídh. For a moment my mind was full of imaginings. I thought you might be a black-hearted knight, posing as a doctor to have your way with foolish young women.”

He handed her the flagon, then reached down and hefted up the axe.

“Nay, Conor.”

Her soft,
white hand fell upon his arm. How small her hand, how hot her touch.

“Leave it be now. Come into the shade.” Her hand slipped off. She gathered her skirts a
nd headed toward the blanket of her cloak. “I’ve food and wine enough for two . . . if you’ve the stomach to share it with me.”

***

They ate in silence as they sat upon the sun-warmed wool with thrushes warbling in the bushes. Deirdre broke off a piece of bread from a loaf still warm from the oven, and lazily chewed it as she watched Conor from beneath lowered lashes.

She worked down the rising tide of a flush.
She was feeling like a twittering, young girl, and all because he lay stretched out, his elbow sunk into the ground, draped in nothing but his undertunic. Sweaty and gritty, too, and smelling like heat and salt and something else disturbing and primitive.

At least it
was a fine change from the creature she’d watched moments ago, hacking away at the trees, his teeth bared, with sweat dripping off his face. Why hadn’t she noticed before those bulging muscles, or the fine, brawny stretch of his shoulders, or the leanness of his waist? He had a man’s figure worthy of a knight’s mail, and he was still young enough to catch any lass’s eye. Why hadn’t she noticed before that not a gray hair streaked his head? That only the faintest fanning of lines edged his gray eyes? Others in the manor house—and in Troyes, as well—deferred to him like a man of much age. Yet laying as he was at his ease at the edge of her cloak, the collar of his tunic pulled to reveal a stretch of collarbone, he was a man at his youthful prime. She wondered why she and everyone else perceived him as a man older, wizened, grizzled, and battered more than a bit by the roll of time.

Around them danced a breeze. She felt it slip through her, whirling up strange, new emotions in the still places in her heart. She placed before him a bowl of new berries with sweet clotted cream
. He ate the wild fruit slowly, sparsely, without comment. Maybe that was what gave him the air of a worldly man. He savored his pleasures instead of gobbling them up before they were well tasted.

She f
ollowed the drift of his gaze over the rolling land. In one of the distant, ochre spires, a church bell began to ring, joined by still another, a calling of the faithful to Mass.

A memory came to her like a whisper.

“In Ireland,” she began as the chimes shimmered through the air, “Me, Mama, and my brother used to live a bit away from the village, in a sliver of forest between the river and the sea. On Sunday mornings, my brother and I used to race through the woods on our way to church—for we were always late—and the bells used to toll from afar and ring through the air like living things.” She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the fragrance of heather. “On a fine, soft day like this, Conor, does it not remind you of Ireland?”