Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (29 page)

They watched in silence
as the simple ceremony was completed and the clergymen filed away. The peasants came forward then. In the spot where the friar had stood they lay their gifts—a bag of grain, a tureen of milk, a haunch of some sort wrapped in cloth.

Conor
spoke in a low, grim voice. “Leaving gifts to appease an angry god?”

“You sound like the
nobility of the convent, mocking the ways of the common people. They’re giving the full of their hands, and the full of their hearts, and who’s to say it’s not for the good?”

He gave her a queer look.

“Now come.” She plunged anew into the thicket. “You owe me another game.”

It was a quiet man who sat across
from her when they returned to the grassy knoll. He played with less intensity, yet she still found herself scurrying across the board, usually chased by one or more of his men. This was not how she’d imagined spending the afternoon, bent in two over a chessboard and snagging her tunic upon bilberry shrubs. She grew impatient over the pace of the game, and especially over Conor’s brooding silence—a silence she had hoped to break, at least for a little while.

Finally, he snatched her king and rolled it in the palm of his hand.

She squinted at him. “On Lughnasa, you played with all the skill of a child. Are you making a fool of me, Conor?”

“Nay.”
He placed the king thoughtfully upon the wool cloak. “I think from the beginning you’ve been making a fool of me.”

Deirdre
frowned at him. Such a mood he was in. There’d be no sweet lovemaking upon the grass today. She jerked to her feet and waved her hand toward the stream. “Will you have me catching fish now? I can do that, too, you know, better than I can find bilberries.”

She’d have to crawl
out on the stones of the creek as in the old days, searching for the silver flash of dinner beneath the waters. Bunching her skirts in one hand, she searched the edge of the clearing for a pointed branch. And there it was, a perfect fishing spear, as straight as a hunter’s arrow, and as sharp as if she’d spent a morning honing the point.

She swept it up
. “The Little People are sharing in your mischief today.”

Without waiting for a response,
she trudged to the bank of the stream. Dropping the spear at her side, she swept up the length of her skirts and jerked them into a knot at her hip. Surely he’d stop her now, with the sight of her bare legs. But the silence behind her stretched, so she sullenly retrieved the spear and plunged into the water. The clear, swift current crept up her calves, as she nimbly stepped from stone to stone into the middle of the creek.

She stilled and bent her knees in the slightest of crouches, the spear upraised. The scattered bits of her reflection wavered, and then rocked upon the rippling water as she f
ocused on the pebbled riverbed. She thought of Jean-Jacques and the old days, when they would stand in the brackish water of the creek which fed the sea, feeling the salt dry tight upon their legs, searching for the telltale ripple of the water, while the linings of their bellies rasped hollow and hungry. Her heart cried out for Jean-Jacques now—how she wished he were here, in his proud manhood, so she could ask him about the strange ways of men.

She
pushed those thoughts away. She could not fish with tears blurring her eyesight. So she concentrated on her task. The sun beat upon her hair. A fly buzzed close to her ear, retreated, then circled again. A drop of perspiration ran from her temple to her cheek.

A
s she plunged the spear into the stream, her reflection shattered. She jerked the weapon up amid the spray. A fish arched its last upon the wooden point.

She tossed it, spear and all, upon the
bank. She splattered to shore, not meeting his eyes. She jerked free the knotted length of her skirts, and let the cloth fall over her damp legs. “So now you know I can spot a bush of bilberries from ten paces, and I can spear a fish. I can even milk a cow and do a bit of spinning. Life was not easy for two bastard children living with a tainted woman on the edge of a village. But I’m not complaining. I would willingly return to that life, if just for one moment I could be as happy now as I was then.”

His shadow fell over her. She
raised her face to throw her gaze at him like a spear—but her boldness fled as she saw his expression. Those eyes of gray, which always seemed as hard as stone, now glowed as soft and welcoming as the smoke of a hearth fire. And what was this? She raised her hand to trace his mouth, almost not daring to believe what she saw. Was that a smile hovering at the corners of his lips? The smile she hadn’t expected to see on his face for half a lifetime?

“This I promise you,
Deirdre.”  He curled his fingers over her hand. “You’ll never have to scrape for a living. You’ll never feel the bite of want again.”

His grip on her fingers faltered.
That strange, glorious feeling surged between them again. She knew it was love—for such a river of emotion flowing between a man and a woman could be nothing else.

He lowered his lips to her temple
. “You never gave me a chance to state my wager.”

They made love
pillowed on the soft grass with the scent of the earth around them, like two peasants on a tryst in the furrow of a field. They rolled about careless of their rumpled clothing, careless about everything but the need to feel the sunshine on their bare skin, and the heat of their joined bodies, and all with their eyes wide open so they could gaze upon one another in the wonder of it all.

When the loving was over, they lay on their backs, Deirdre’s head cocked on
Conor’s chest, watching the float of the clouds. Conor began to speak of his travels. He told her tales of a place where it never rained, where mountainous dunes of sand spread from horizon to horizon, and burned through the soles of the thickest boots. He spoke of a far northern land where it was night all winter, and all summer it was day. He spoke of the Cathay people who believed the soul was immortal, like Christians, except in a different sense. They believe that upon the death of a man, his soul enters into another body and, depending on how he has acted during his life, his future state becomes better or worse than his last.

He ran his fingers through her hair and told her more
. He talked about people who willingly scarred their skin with designs, of dogs that pulled sledges across endless snow, of a land where the cattle were sacred and never eaten, of widows who threw themselves upon the pyres of their dead husbands, of men who turned over their womenfolk to every strange guest, of naked dancing girls dedicated to the service of gods in Hindu shrines.

She laughed
, finally. “Now you’re making things up like a good Irishman.”

When the sun finally ascended to the treetops, they roused from their
bed of grass and set their clothes to rights. The Clunel servants would be expecting them for the midday meal. Conor lingered over Deirdre’s hair, plucking the twigs and leaves out of it and combing it through with his fingers. Then they strolled through the high straight trees toward the manor house.

Just outside the Clunel garden, they stumble
d upon Octavius snoozing in a low bough of an oak. He snored open-mouthed, drool oozing into his beard, with his hood pulled down over his eyes.

Conor
stiffened to a stop, but she strode toward the little man before Conor could wake him with an angry roar. She’d grown fond of the dirty little creature during these weeks in the country. She bent into the shadows and nudged him. He snorted and turned his face away. She nudged him hard enough to topple him off his precarious perch. He sputtered and spit into sudden wakefulness.

“Saints alive,
can’t a man get a bit of sleep on a summer’s afternoon?” He struggled with his hood until he managed to pull it off. “Lass! Ah, never you mind, I did not know it was you.”

She was out of practice casting her gaze away after so much time alone with Conor, and so it was
with a sudden start that she realized she was now meeting Octavius’s beetle-black gaze directly. Octavius didn’t flinch away.

He said, “I’ve been waiting here for the two of you
for half the day, whilst you were traipsing through the woods with a never-you-mind. How’s a man supposed to find you in such a place, will you be telling me that?”

Deirdre’s neck began to prickle. “
What is it?”

“Your father
.”

“Papa!”
  Her hand flew to her unbound hair. “Is he here?”

“Aye.”
Octavius cast a sly look toward Conor, standing as still as a stone. “And right now he’s hotter than a bog fire.”

Conor stood rooted to the earth as Deirdre queried Octavius about the details of her father’s arrival. Conor clenched his hands into fists to prevent himself from lunging at the creature and choking the life out of him. He had not laid eyes upon the wretch since the night Octavius told the story of Deirdre and the three sons of Usnach. Octavius knew
everything
. And just when Conor’s mind was at its softest, just when his will had frayed to nothing, the wretch appeared, answering all of Deirdre’s questions, his beady eyes twinkling as if this were nothing but a peg-game.

“It’s a fine time,”
Conor snarled, surprising Deirdre into silence, “to be showing me your face, Octavius.”

“What would you have me do?” 
The wretch discovered a patch of his lower back that needed scratching and set to it with vigor. “I’ve been following you like a shadow long enough.”

“Stop bickering, please.” Deirdre brushed at the snags in her hair. “My father’s here, and fit to be tied.”

Octavius
bowed. “Then I’ll be off, lass, to leave the two of you alone.”

Conor
took a step toward him. “You’ll not be getting away this time—”

“I c
an only interfere in the ways of the world so much. The rest is in your hands.” Octavius waved a dirty finger high in the air before darting around him. “You’d find that out yourself, if you stop fighting against what should be.”

What should
be
. Conor stared after the wretch, his mind full of
what should be
:  Thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years with his woman, living on a barren rock of an island, watching the work wear her down, watching the light in her eyes slowly dim, watching her die in his arms. And yet he wanted those thirty, forty, or fifty years. He wanted the glut of moments, one after another, a whole new lifetime of seconds tumbling upon one another. By the gods. . . he wanted to be there again. He wanted to catch her last wheezing breath against his body, even knowing that he’d suffer more the second time around.

“Come.”
Deirdre’s look was searching as she laid her hand on his arm. “I love my father, but he is not a man of patience. It would not bode well for us if we make him wait longer.”

She’d pulled her hood on. A thin, pink scratch traced the curve of her flushed cheek. Bits of leaves and soil clung to her throat and streaked
across her tunic. What a mussed little fairy-sprite, he thought, fresh from her dew-laden bed, clear-eyed, soft-lipped.

What a fragile creature, and how innocent of the world.

“Why do you hesitate?”  Her fingers slipped off his arm as his silence lengthened. “Am I to think you’ve changed your mind, Conor? That you won’t marry me after all?”

“You are mine, Deirdre.”  He
supposed he’d known since the moment she blinked open her eyes that he would never have the strength to walk away. “You’ll always be my wild heart.”

Her smile lit up the world.

“But,” he added, tracing the flush on her cheek, “you must make me a promise.”

“
Anything.”

“Do you love me, woman?”

“Isn’t it as plain as the nose on my face?”

“Do you trust me?”

She searched his face, puzzled. A cow lowed somewhere in the distance. On the road beyond the manor house, a farmer shouted and snapped his whip over a lazy ox’s back.. “With my own life, Conor, I trust you.”

“Then listen
carefully to what I’m about to say.” He rapidly calculated how much time it would take for him to travel to the coast and back, to make all the necessary arrangements. “This is the promise you will make me: Three months hence, you will meet me on the hill where we first lay together.”

“
Three months? We’ll be long married by then—”

“There is a day called Samhain,” he
interrupted, “the first day of your November. On its eve we shall meet there.”

“I know o
f the day—it’s All Hallow’s Eve.” She crossed her arms. “Why would you have me traipsing about the woods on the day when the souls of the dead fly free?”

He started. Such was the way of the ancient Celts. Had the Christians absorbed that belief, too, or had she just learned it through some folklore still surviving among the people of Ireland?

No time to wonder. “Just promise me, Deirdre, and trust me. Fate has many surprises, and not all of them are good.”

“
You’re thinking of my betrothal to Sir Drunkard. You don’t understand, my father loves me—”

“It’s not that.” Her words struck daggers in his heart, for he knew t
he pain of the betrayal to come. “The future is uncertain, and we must prepare for the worst.”

“
But I’ve the gift of the Sight.”

She s
poke the words with pride, and he thought,
if nothing else, I have gifted her with courage.

“Your power is uncertain
when it comes to your own fate.”  He put his finger to her lips. “Argue with me no more.” He felt time slipping away like the last grains in a sandglass. “Just promise me: No matter what happens this day, or in the days to come, no matter what you see or hear or feel, you will come to the hill where we first laid together, on Samhain’s Eve.”

“On my
mother’s grave, I swear it.”

He
grasped her face and kissed her lips, and her eyes, and her temple, and filled his head with the scent of her hair, his palms with the feel of her skin, her breast, her yearning, and he stole a few more moments, just one more, and yet another.

And so it was
when they heard a man’s voice raised in the garden just beyond the woods. Deirdre broke away, flushed and panting, whispering “Papa! It’s Papa!” She raked her hair back and fumbled with her slipped neckline and tumbled hood. She gasped when she glimpsed a flash of black through the trees and an elderly woman dressed in common robes waddled into the little clearing.

“
Moira!”Deirdre launched herself upon the old woman’s bosom.

“Lass, lass,” Moira exclaimed, patting her
charge’s bare head. “What are you doing idling here, with your own father pacing a furrow in the ground waiting for you?”

“I was coming, I was.
” 

“
Not dressed like this I hope.” She entangled herself from Deirdre’s arms and plucked at something clinging to her tunic. “Look at you. You’d think you were a child of ten summers who’d spent the afternoon in the bog—not a fine burgher’s grown daughter. Your father is waiting for both of you in the garden, but you can’t greet him looking like that. Let’s slip upstairs and get you changed—”

“No,”
Deirdre said, “Conor and I must see Da together—”

“No, go with Moira,
” he interrupted. He would spare her what was to come. “I need to speak to your father alone. You can join us after, for the celebration.” 

How easy the lie rolled off his tongue, and how easily she swallowed it.

“My dowry is twenty thousand
livres
,” she said, heading down the path. “Don’t let my Da cheat you out of a bit of it.”

Conor
found the burgher pacing between rows of unkempt weeds. The burgher’s scarlet cloak lay tossed across an old stone bench. Waves of heat rose from the paving stones. The burgher ground to a halt as he caught sight of Conor approaching him through the shadows.

Dierdre’s
father dug his thumb beneath his jewel-studded belt. “So you’ve finally chosen to bless me with your presence.”

A barely perceptible nod was
Conor’s only greeting.

“I am not the type of man who takes kindly to be
ing made to wait for underlings.”

Conor
bent over and swept up a stick, hiding the ruddy fury rising to his face, remembering when he had once faced her father as a king.

“Have you no excuses?” The burgher’s blunt-cut hair swung with anger. “I expect some light and oily words to ease a patron’s anger—or have you lost your tongue entirely?”

Conor leaned a shoulder against a tree and used the stick to flick off a clod of mud clinging to his heel. “You come unexpected, Mézières.”

The burgher’s chest inflated in affront
. “Did I hear you correctly?”

“A note
announcing your arrival would have been preferable.”

“
You dare to lecture me on etiquette?” The words came out hoarse, sputtered. “You, who came to me dirty and unkempt off the streets of Troyes? You, who in three weeks has not once sent a single word to me about my own daughter’s welfare?”

“Your daughter is doing
very well.”  Conor slung the stick into the woods. “So tell me, why should I spend three deniers sending you a message about the health of your daughter, when you can damned well afford to make the trip here and see her for yourself?”

The burgher’s blue eyes narrowed to slits.
Color flooded out of his face. The heat rising from the weed-edged paving stones shimmered between them. The shrill buzz of summer insects swelled, held, and then ebbed away.

“I’ll assume,” the burgher began, trailing his fingers over the embroidered stripe running down the center of his surcoat, “that all the weeks you’ve spent in this rotting hovel, amid the surly peasants of this uncivilized countryside, is the sole reason for your insolence.” The burgher’s gaze roamed over
Conor’s dirty clothing. “You obviously know no better, but a Mézières will not suffer such conditions as this—and no daughter of mine will be left unchaperoned and unattended in any woman’s house, be she noble or not. Because of the indignities you have undoubtedly been forced to suffer in my employ, I will overlook your behavior.”

How easily the
man could set aside an affront if he wanted more from someone. How easily he could ignore the truth in favor of what he willed the truth to be. Witness Sir Guichard’s dissipation, Deirdre’s defiance of the betrothal, Conor’s own insolence. This burgher ignored them all, for they went against his wishes. It was no wonder the burgher had grown rich. He possessed all the ice-blooded cunning of the merchants of the Far East.

“So w
here is my daughter?” The burgher spread a hand glittering with rings toward the sagging house behind them. “Has she, like the mistress of this mockery of a noble house, deigned not to greet a mere burgher? Or is she just keeping me waiting, like the insolent doctor I hired to treat her?”

“I sent her away.”

One finely combed brow arched.

“She’s safe in the manor house. We need to talk, you and I.”

“There is only one thing we must discuss.” The burgher clasped his hands behind his back. “Deirdre has had her convalescence in the country as you advised. I trust she is strong enough for a wedding.”

“She is indeed.”

Conor strolled toward the stone bench. He took a seat and crossed his leg over his other knee. He eyed the burgher’s belt, the sagging alms purse, the decorative sheath of a dagger, and the protruding gold hilt—aye, that knife was a delicate little thing, but it would do the job. Then Conor threw his arm across the back of the bench, so his tunic stretched tight across his body. The burgher’s gaze fell to the blue streaks, the handprints Deirdre had left upon Conor’s chest after picking bilberries.

Conor allowed himself a rogue of a smile
. “Always into something, your daughter is. Which is why she’s off dressing more properly to greet you.”

Conor
smiled into the strained silence, broken only by a flock of birds rising up screeching from the deep woods.This moment of confrontation was a long time coming. Revenge was a sweet, savory dish—and now it lay before him. Conor glanced over his shoulder, toward the manor house. Deirdre was not near. What will be done will be done, and it didn’t matter if he took his fill of vengeance now.

“There’s something about this wild, uncivilized countryside you hate so much, Mézières.” Conor brushed off some nettles sticking to his boot. “Such a place brings out the most primitive urges in men and women, and that’s the way it should be, I’m thinking.”

The burgher stood as mute as one of the deep forest’s ancient oaks, his pupils constricted to pinpricks, the thinnest sheen of sweat beginning to bead on his forehead, his fingers curled around a gold chain draped around his neck.

“Men construct too many buildings to worship in,” Conor mused, taking more than a measure of enjoyment in the burgher’s swelling shock, thinking,
this vengeance is for Deirdre, too, for what you’ll do to her in the weeks to come.
“We should be worshipping each other in the open air, like the Irish at Samhain, and there should be no more talk about it. You being a man, with a bit of a past of your own, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”  Conor shifted his shoulders and let his hand, dirty with nettles, fall again upon the scarlet cloth of the burgher’s cloak. “Just so you don’t think I’m an utter rogue, I fought against this thing between us. I thought I was too old for her. But your daughter is a woman of great charm and great beauty.” He gestured vaguely to the shaggy old oaks, to the blue white sky. “We being all but alone out here, well, it’s no surprise that nature took its course.”