Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (26 page)

“What part of Ireland would you
be thinking of?”  He plucked a sliver of wood off his tunic and tossed it into the grass. “All I remember of that place are gales and cold and rain.”

“
We had our share of storms, living by the sea. But they made the glorious days all the more fine.”

“Spoken like a child who never had to keep the wood dry for a long night’s fire.”

“You’d have made a somber priest.” She slapped the rest of the bread onto a square of cloth, folding it firm even as she tucked the amber memory away. “In the brightest day you’d stand in the shadows and call it gloomy.”

He shifted his weight upon his elbow, avoiding her eye. “
Don’t expect fair words from me.”

“It’s a long road that has no turning,
Conor.”

“You should know by now that I’m a crusty, old man, not fit company
for a young lass.”

“
You’re not an old man.”  She felt the heat of a blush rising to her cheek. She tucked the bread back in the basket and tugged out a square board wedged in the bottom. “And even if you were, what difference would that make? Mama was fond of telling me to take the old dog for the hard road, and leave the pup on the path.”

He glanced at the checkered board she tossed carelessly between them,
and then raised a brow as she clanked another bundle of cloth atop it.

“
Were you planning to play with the little people,” he asked, “when you packed that in your basket this morning?”

The heat of her cheeks intensified.
Well now he knew for sure that she’d had every intention of luring him into the Lughnasa sun and away from the wretched shadows of that hovel of a manor house, away from the perked ears of curious servants, away to a place where she could murmur the secrets of her heart, if she dared to trust him.

“You’ll make them angry if you mock them.”  Defiantly, she tugged open the knot and upturned the cloth to let the chipped wooden pieces scatter over the board. “There’s no telling what sort of mischief they’ll think up on such a day as today.”

“I’ve got a fair, fine idea of it.”

“Besides, why would I think that you’d play me a game of chess,” she argued, setting up the wobbly pieces, “when you’ve refused my request twice already?”

“I’ll challenge you, lass.”

She knocked over a piece with her knuckle. “W-What?”

“You heard me.” He rolled up and braced himself with one hand
. A shock of dark hair fell over his forehead, a stark contrast against the brightness of his silver eyes. “I won’t avoid your challenge any longer.”

The sudden
wild recklessness of his gaze cut her to the quick. She vowed she’d never understand the ebb and flow of his moods—for moments ago he was as distant as the churches in the valley, and now his attention focused upon her like a ray of light she’d once seen burn a smoking hole through a fallen leaf, after passing through a pair of spectacles abandoned in the cloister’s garden.

She said,
“Aren’t you a strange one, changing your mind like the wind.”

“State your color, lass, before the wind shifts to the north.”

She reached across the blanket and clutched a handful of stones lying amid the grass. “This set is worse for wear, like everything else in the house of Clunel. You’ll have to use a stone for one of your bishops, and I’ll use two more for my castles, for I have none.”

S
o in silence they played chess. They sat so still that two blackbirds, burrowed deep within the leaves, dared to lilt their full lay, apparently ignorant, Deirdre thought, of the charged currents fluxing between the man and woman below them.

How deep the
shadowed hollow of his throat. How long and firm the stretch of his collarbone. How large his hands. Broad-palmed, strong-fingered. Scars nicked small, white lines across their backs. Yet how well he used them, like a lute-player, plucking what he needed from amid the bristled pieces on the board and moving with quick, sparse gestures to the new spot, without the clumsy tremors she’d expect from a man with such callused, worker’s hands.

She imagined those han
ds would rasp against her skin like the brush of a cat’s tongue.

She seized
the flagon of wine to take a sip, surprised to find it heavy, when surely she and Conor had already drank the most of it. She tried to concentrate on the board rather than the man. She was an indifferent player. Though she had learned the way of it in her youth, the game was frowned upon within the halls of the cloisters—for amid the better classes, it was the custom to play it for wagers. Only in the months before Jean-Jacques’s death, those few precious months they’d shared together in Troyes, had she rediscovered the joy of it. Now, with this man breathing over her, the fate of the wooden kings and queens on the board held little meaning.

Conor
seemed distracted as well. For his interest was over his shoulder, to the quicken rimming the open slope of the hill, to the sway of a low bough brushing against the feathery spray of a fern, as if searching for danger, and she wondered with a spurt of shame if she were just imagining the rivers of trembling sensation flowing between them, or if they were the amorous imaginings of a girl left too long in the cloisters.

She reached into the woven basket and took out a piece of fruit, biting into it without tasting it, just to settle the roiling of her belly. Only after the thing was half-eaten did she realize it was a ripe, red apple—and she wondered at the curious thing, when she’d not remembered packing it, when she was sure not a single apple
tree in all of Champagne had yet dropped its fruit.

She looked up to make a mention of it to
Conor, but his face was averted again, to the shivering tremble of a bush on the rim of the woods.

Then she looked at the board and saw it with a sudden
, piercing clarity. “Checkmate.” She moved a bishop to knock over Conor’s king, and then seized that king in triumph. “Still looking for ruffians, Conor? You would have done better to keep your mind on the game.”

He blinked at her
. His gaze was like the gathering of clouds before a storm. His pegs were scattered all over, the ones she’d captured lying upon the cloak at her knees.

She softened her voice. “If I’d known you
were so new at it, I would have taught you a trick or two.”

He
frowned at the board. “It’s just a game.”

“Yes, a game
,” she argued, “and you’ll have to fulfill the wager.”

“There was,” he growled, jerking to his feet, “no wager.”

“Then I’ve the right to set it, and you’ve the right to call another game.”

“W
hose rules are these you’re spouting?”

“It
has always been the way we’ve played, my brother and I—”

“I’ll fi
nish your pyre,” he said, marching to the scattered bundles of wood, “and we’ll be done with it.”

“
I won’t waste my win on a pyre,” she called after him, rising to her feet. “I have another task that’ll take every bit of your strength.” 

“What, then?” He wrestled the bundles of wood into the shape of a pyre even as he spoke, “Would
you set me to the thatching? Or better, the same trials as the sons of Tureen?”

“No
.”

She paused on the edge of the shadows, the grass warm beneath her shoes.
He stood stretched to his full height, his hands tense at his sides. Recklessness seized her and flooded her with courage.

Then she closed her hand over her
captured king.

“The price,
Conor . . . is a kiss.”

Once, in his early wanderings, Conor had stumbled upon a Scottish village destroyed by sea raiders, the skeletons of the thatched ruins still smoldering. Whilst he searched for survivors among the dead, he stumbled upon a Norseman’s abandoned weapon. It was a twisting spear. Its shaft was coiled about with cord so that when thrown it spiraled and skewered the iron point deep into its victim. Such a weapon as this would bolt through the air with a hiss and a whirr, audible only when it was too late.

“Is that all you want, woman?” The words passed through his throat like gravel. “Just a kiss?”

A breeze riffled her hair
off her shoulder. “A man of your age should know the way of it, I’m thinking.”

Oh, he
knew the way of it. He couldn’t thrust the thought of it from his mind or his memory. Both assaulted him now as he stood with the sun beating upon his head, whilst the woman he’d lain with more times than a man could count stood in the cool shadows with a beckoning shine in her eyes.

He’d seen that gleam a hundred thousand times across the space of a room, behind the sweep of lashes, abo
ve the curve of a knowing smile, amidst the scent of sleep and sex beneath a hot cocoon of furs. His blood rushed to his loins. The gates he’d kept so long closed in his mind burst open under the flood of memories. He remembered the flash of a naked limb, the tumble of her blazing hair upon the green grass, the softening of her spine in surrender, the sweet grimace of her features as he joined his hot flesh to hers—tight, deep—the cries in her throat, the throb of her pulse against his tongue. And her laughter, her sweet, throaty laughter when it was all done and over, when he lay upon her heaving and her soft arms slipped around him and held him close, and the dampness of their bodies merged them into one flesh again. He remembered the playful teasing, the touching of nose to cheek, the nip of teeth on shoulder, soon dimming to the soft talk of the day, to the sharing of their worlds.

He jerked where he stood, for deep within keened the loon-cry of his sou
l, silent to all but his ears. For though over the years he’d slaked his human lust between a maid’s legs when the hunger was upon him, never again had he shared with any creature the soft talk of the day.

He and Brigid had
had plans then. First to build a grand ring-fort upon the height of the hill and call it Dún Conor. Then of making land to grow barley, for bread and ale. Then to fashion straw hives for bees to make honey and mead. Even at the end they’d been planning to buy another bull and put the old one to rest, and to give that bull a new herd of cows.

He’d not made a single plan in seven centuries after the day she died
. Not a single decision truly of his own making. He’d let his whims and his moods drive him and the four winds buffet him to all the corners of the Earth.

“Will you not pay your wager
, Conor?” A tremor of shame shook her words. “Is Doctor MacSídh not a man of honor?”

It
was not his will that set his feet upon the sunny path between them. It was something stronger, something more powerful. He saw the little king in her hand fall to the ground, but she made no effort to retrieve it. He stopped before her. He felt the pull and suck of her gaze, the roaring in his ears.

Why had he not noticed
the faintest spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose? Or the glints of red in her golden hair? And what was that which lay upon her throat? A tiny mole, dark and distinct against the cream of her young skin. That was new, and yet like all else, it was
hers
. He laid his finger upon it. His knuckles grazed the line of her throat. He heard her sharp intake of breath. Her breasts rose and fell as she struggled for air grown suddenly thin between them.

From the distance came
the sound of lyres. It was the same music which had vexed him throughout the chess game. Fairy music mingled with tiny voices raised in shouts and laughter, the stamping of dancing feet and the slosh of liquid as the
Sídh
sipped honeysuckle nectar from cups made of foxglove blossoms.

He ignored it—
just as he ignored the furtive breeze which swirled around his ankles. The rush of his blood blocked his attention from all else but the woman before him. He rubbed the back of his hand up her throat and rested it in the warm nook of jaw and chin. She turned her face into his knuckles like a kitten.

The sunlight pouring through the leaves dimmed, bathing her skin in a pale luminescence. How dewy her skin, how unmarked by the passage of time, how unscarred by worry and work and pain. How baldly
her hope cried out in her eyes. So innocent and eager. He turned his hand over and engulfed her cheek. He resisted the siren’s call of those lips, full and pillowy. The fragrance of her made him teeter on the edge of drunkenness—it was all too much. A feast lay before him. He wanted to count the hairs upon her head, bury his face in her throat and breathe the scent of her rising from every hollow until he knew the full of her with his eyes closed, as he already did, as he already did.

A strange shadow fell across the hilltop. The leaves above them rustled.
Conor worked his hand beyond her cheek, into the temptation of her hair, behind the curve of her ear. A strangled noise came from her throat and her heavy lids dipped over her eyes, as she swayed into him, her hands flat upon his chest.

So it was a kiss y
ou wanted, lass, a simple kiss. Nothing but a trifle of an embrace on a summer’s day.

How innocent
she was not to understand the power of a kiss. He curled his fingers deep in her hair, remembering a day upon Inishmaan when a gale roared outside the
clochán
, and they’d made love by the glowing heat of a peat fire, her hair wrapped around his wrists in playful silken bondage. He remembered another time when he’d run through her hair a comb made from the antlers of a king stag, when her hair was still long but as white as snow. She didn’t have the strength to plait it as she pleased, and he not the skill, and so he’d combed it for long hours while she dozed upon the furs.

Now his wife of old
blinked her eyes open, a soft confusion lurking within the depths, a wordless question. He could not answer for the dryness of his throat. So they stood for a timeless moment, staring at one another across the chasm of two worlds, knowing it could be closed with a simple kiss.

Then s
omething in the shifting of the dappled light caught her attention. Her eyes widened as she looked around to the hazy gray veil closing in on them, to the living greenery melting away to a ghastly leaden hue, and then up to the pewter cloudless sky. In the trees nearby, a flock of birds burst into squawking, and with a flutter of wings took sudden flight.

Her fingers curled into his chest
as she moved closer. He drew her body within the circle of his protection.

“
Conor . . ..” She shivered with more than the embrace. “Something . . . something is happening.”

Aye, something was happening. Something he knew was folly, yet something
he didn’t have the strength of will to escape from. He thought he could fight it all—the gods, his fate, the power of the love of this woman. Now she stood in the circle of his embrace, her head beneath his chin, with the wind tangling their tunics. The rage of a passion long-suppressed surged against the bonds of reason until a webbing of a hundred thousand fissures spread through his resolve.

“
Look at the sky.” She tugged on his cloak. “What is this that happens around us?”

It
’s the world turning over again, wife, and here we stand in the sweetest part, and me, fool that I am, knowing better... and still standing powerless.

“It’s the passing of the moon across the face of the sun,” he heard himself murmur.
He did not tell her there was nothing to fear. For what followed hard upon the sweetness of their kiss was betrayal, exile, death.

Eternal loneliness.

Conor felt the thought tear apart and flutter to the four winds.

She
traced something upon his chest. Narrow crescents of sunlight peppered his cloak. Then she blinked up at the sky, at the sliver of sun, which hung now like a two-day-old moon in a spangled purple sky.

She said,
“I’ve dreamed of this very day.”

“I’ve dreamed of it too.” 
He sensed the shifting of the veils, the rush of the Otherworldly breeze between the thinning doors, the sparkling of the
Sídh
as they raced about, set free to roam. “I dreamt of it a long, long time ago.”

“Kiss me, Conor.”

High in the sky pinpricks of light flickered around the black disk of the moon-sun, poised, as if time w
ere momentarily arrested. They extinguished, one by one, until the last stubborn bead winked and died. In that moment of darkness, streams of pearly white light furled out from the black sun like fairy’s wings, their phosphorescent trailing across the indigo sky.

He
looked down upon this woman in the time between the times, and he saw the face of Brigid.

Seven hundred years of waiting.

His head dipped toward hers. He felt the rush of her breath against his lips.

Even a
n immortal could not struggle forever.

***

She waited forever, studying the inscrutable emotions fluxing across his face, wishing she could plunge into his heart and ease away all the anguish. Now as he lowered his head, all the impressions jumbled atop of one another. He raked his hand through her hair, dragging her head back and tilting her lips up to meet his. His hot, ragged breath billowed against her cheek. He gripped her back and rasped his bristled chin against her cheek—

O
h!

The dream had prepared her for the hot, metallic m
oon burning in the twilight sky, for the ghostly silence and the eerie blue-green light swirling around them, but no wisp of a vision could prepare her for the first touch of his lips against her mouth.

The
languor penetrated her bones like a hot stream of honey. His lips were firm and sure, but they moved with the ease of possession, suckling each ridge, nipping deep into the corners of her mouth. She did not know how to shape her mouth beneath his. She angled her lips to his, but he drew back, away, to suckle on another curve, to draw between his own lips the fullness of one of hers. Then his lips slid beyond, to the hollow of her cheek, then higher, over the tilt of her cheekbone, and she felt an urge to cry out with the frustration of ignorance—to cry out for more.

The vision had been but a pale mockery of this. The memory of the dream drifted away from
her, like the softening of the sharp, midsummer shadows in the moments before the moon had eclipsed the sun. By some reflex she balled Conor’s tunic in her fists. This time, she vowed, his face would not melt into the darkness. This time, the fog would not come between them and separate them again.

Rising from the softly rolling countryside, church bells
suddenly tolled, a dim clangor ringing through the silence. They seemed to peal like tiny chimes all around her—like the bells she’d once heard on a Christmas carriage, jingling with joy into the night. She tried to speak her heart—she loved him, she’d waited for this moment forever, she’d missed him—nay, there was no sense to that, for how could she miss a man she’d only begun to know? Her mind was all a-muddle and before she could even murmur his name, he hushed her with his own lips.

Then there it was again, the warm, fluid weakness that seeped through the pi
th of her. She slipped her arms over his shoulders before she melted into a puddle at his feet. Then, just when she thought she couldn’t bear the sweetness any longer, he slanted his face and parted his lips.

Sh
e’d not heard of such a thing. She’d not dreamed of it even in her wildest convent dreams. In her surprised stillness he coaxed her into parting her own lips, so their breath mingled between them. He tasted of wine and the lingering tartness of wild berries, and of something else elusive and strong. Eagerness, need. Craving the flavor, she parted her lips further, and found herself welcoming, with a racing heart, the brush of his tongue. At his gentle probing, at the unexpected, unknown intimacy, some primitive sensibility roused within her. His arms hardened around her.
I’m safe here, safe with this man
. No one could harm her, no one would dare. Here she was wanted, needed, loved.

Happiness
flushed through her. She thrust her hands through his hair and cradled his head, drawing him so close that her nose dug deep into his bristled cheek. Their mouths locked. All those years of fervent prayer . . . her anguished pleas had been answered after all. Here stood the man of her dreams, the man who would bring joy into the lonely hollow of her life.

Their lips separated as he hef
ted her up against him. Her circlet, knocked askew by his loving, tumbled off her brow and chimed to the ground. Blindly she kissed his brow and burrowed her cheek in his hair—how soft, how fragrant—only vaguely aware that he was carrying her somewhere. She sensed only the roll of his gait. The furrowed bark of a tree pressed against her spine as he leaned her down upon its slant. Her head fell back. He took the curve of her chin into his mouth, and then, the arch of her throat.