Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (31 page)

Then Moira
was off, waddling through the throng, wielding her elbows to knock a path clear. When Deirdre was sure her maidservant’s bleary eyesight could not distinguish between Deirdre’s gray cloak and the limestones of the house behind her, Deirdre murmured a silent apology to her faithful attendant, then whirled away and plunged into the shadow of an alleyway.

She barreled
without hesitation. Her foot skidded through something slick and she braced one hand against a wall until she regained her balance. The hand-warmer burned against her breast as she hefted it and veered toward the Rue Moyenne. From there, she plunged into yet another alleyway canopied by sagging, old houses, weaving her way farther and farther from the supposed safety of her father’s house.

She halted
at the Trévois canal as two boys herded a stream of pigs over the narrow bridge to pastures outside the city walls. She pressed back in the shadows of the eaves. She tugged her wimple free and pressed it over her nose to block out the stench of the sluggish canal water. In an alley nearby, men barked in harsh voices above the clattering of dice. Her gaze darted back whence she came, searching for Moira, or worse—for her father’s men. The trip through the city seemed farther on foot than it had looked when she’d bounced in the litter on the return from the Clunel manor house, but she did not turn back.

She had
to keep a promise to a dead man.

Nay
. The word came hard upon the thought.
Nay nay nay nay nay nay
. She let her head fall back against the wall, fighting off the despair. She would not grapple with this again. For three months she’d battled the ravens that pecked and clawed at her mind, ripping apart all she’d thought she’d understood, bloodying her memories, devouring all that she had believed in since birth—that her father loved her, that her Sight was a gift from the devil, that she was cursed. Her mind bore jagged furrows where all that knowledge used to be, furrows that needed to be filled with truth. A truth only her lover could give her, a lover who was said to be dead.

But
Conor could not be dead. She would feel it in her heart. All through the long, lonely months, she wondered if she’d finally gone mad. She’d wondered if she would end up in one of those wretched places where the insane were kept chained to the wall until they died of cold and hunger and neglect and the torments of their own minds. For today, the day she’d been waiting for, her heart raced as it did the first time she’d met Conor. The excitement made her blood course wildly through her veins, and every fiber of her being sang that despite the evidence of her eyes,
Conor is alive
. If she were wrong, then the world was not as it should be. If she were wrong, then she would have to go forward alone. For alive or dead, Conor had gifted her with a bit of himself, a life growing warm in her womb.

When the bridge cleared of swine, she plunged onward, following the pungent stench in the direction of the Rue de la Grande-
Tannerie. Her hand strayed over her belly, still firm and flat.
I’ll take you to Ireland somehow, child of mine. I’ll show you my Ma’s house between the woods and the sea. We’ll see how far the honeysuckle has trailed through the thatch these ten years, and we’ll find our shelter beneath that old roof.
With a quivering trill of excitement she felt the first flutter of movement deep inside.

She turned a corner and the stench put a stop to her whirling thoughts. The t
anneries stood side by side. The street reeked with fresh blood and dung and rotting carcasses. Men stood outside each shop, scraping freshly stripped hides and strewing bits of excess flesh into the streets. Flies swarmed in black clouds around steaming bowls of pigeon dung, which men vigorously rubbed into the hides, all while laughing raucously and making crude gestures with hands leathered to the shade of oak bark.

She rushed through the street
and held her breath until black spots exploded in her eyes. She stumbled against a wall and drew in deep, gasping breaths, battling down a wave of nausea until she could hold her breath again. Then she stumbled farther on, to the blessed wind funneling through the Tannery Gate—the gateway out of Troyes, and the beginning of the road to the Clunel manor house.

She wiped her clammy brow with her veil and
stepped aside to avoid a farmer’s cart. Against the wall a boy dozed, his donkey standing by his side.

Deirdre stopped in her tracks
. She blinked her eyes clear. The knee-cocked pose of that “boy” stirred a vague memory, a memory which crystallized as her gaze fell upon the flea-ridden straw strapped around his legs.

Incredulous, she seized one
of his gnarled hands. “Octavius, och, Octavius!”

The creature winked one black eye open
. “Aye, so it’s Deirdre of the Sorrows.” He pushed his hood off. “Could it be that it was me you yearned for all this time, and not that strapping, foul-tempered buck of a doctor?”

A shaky laugh escaped her lips
. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She drank in the sight of him, the rosy cheeks, the stains streaking his tunic, down to the last crumb speckled in his beard.

Octavius struggled to his feet and jerked his donkey alert.
“We’d best save the talk for the road. It’s a fair stretch of the legs to the manor house, and the sky’s been threatening rain all morn.”

Her smile dimmed
as she tried to absorb what he’d just said.

“Oh, t
he doctor told me about your promise before his demise.”  The dwarf’s grin turned wicked and he capped it with a wink. “Your father should be screaming like a horse fresh gelded by now.”

“I don’t know what you’
re talking about—”

“Aye, you do.”  Octavius squinted up at the clouds as he checked the fit of the donkey’s bit. “Are you going to mount or just stand about counting the lepers?”

She looked at the donkey and realized he’d been waiting for her
. She opened her mouth for an explanation, but was interrupted from behind.

“Praise be to God, praise be!”

Moira barreled out of a narrow alleyway, her black robes flowing out behind her, her arms outstretched. T
he donkey bucked. Deirdre clawed for the reins, but Octavius held them tight in his fist. And in that brief moment she noticed three things: Moira ran alone, Moira’s blind eyes were fixed upon them from all the way across the square, and Octavius waited for the elderly, red-faced servant, sporting a wicked grin.

Moira launched herself
against Deirdre. “Child, child, I thought I’d lost you for good. What are you thinking, racing off without me, wandering around with thieves and brigands—”

“Hush, Moira, your jabbering will bring the guards down upon us.”  Deirdre hardly recognized her voice, but the swift and sudden terror that she might be caught and hauled back to the prison of her room left her no patience for tender words. “I’m off to the Clunel lands, and I’ll not hear a word,” Deirdre added before Moira could speak the volumes shivering in her jowls. “It’s a promise I made.”

“
Did you think you were fooling me?” Those translucent eyes pierced her. “I knew you had something cooking in your head. Have I failed you once in all this time?”

Deirdre felt a
twinge of guilt. Maybe she should have trusted Moira. Though they never spoke of it, Deirdre knew Moira understood what caused Deirdre’s early-morning nausea, her fatigue, the loss of her monthlies. She’d been so busy wrestling with her own soul that she’d had no room left in her heart for trust. And it had always been Moira, even in the dark days after Deirdre’s mother had died, there had always been Moira’s cool white hands, Moira’s lilting song, Moira’s steadfast love.

The words tumbled out of
her. “I’m not going back.”

“I didn’t think so
.”

The maidservant grinned, a wide, yellow-toothed smile that crinkled her flesh and put an odd spark
le in her opalescent eyes. What a strange party they would be traveling about the countryside:  A young pregnant girl, a blind old woman, and a dwarf. At least now she didn’t have to worry about birthing this child alone.

“
And so it’s you!” Moira turned to a grinning Octavius and planted her hands on her meaty hips. “I should have known you’d have a hand in this, and not a word to me of the details! A fine way to see the job done.”

“It’s no fault of
mine that the lass held her tongue around you—”

“
Would it have broken a bone for you to come and tell me yourself, instead of having me worrying to death and waiting and waiting—”

Their argument dissolved into bickering, and Deirdre glanced from one to another in mild surprise, not knowing they’d passed more than simple pleasantries in the past.

“Come, both of you.” Deirdre jerked the reins of the donkey from Octavius’s hands and gestured to the gaping gate. “There’ll be time enough to argue on the road to Clunel.”

The road cut through city pastures swarming with cattle, sheep, and pigs. Beyond, the hillocks dotted with thatched-roofed houses ceded to forests of beech and oak, pitted here and there with great fields stripped of grain and vineyards long harvested and chopped back for the winter. Huddled in her cloak, Deirdre dozed atop the lumbering donkey as the
hand warmer clutched against her belly cooled. The sky growled above like a wary hound.

For lunch, Octavius pilfered a tunic
full of late-harvest apples from an orchard of forgotten trees. Deirdre crisped into the skin. A spray of juice dribbled over her chin. She washed the tangy flesh down with sips of clear, icy water gleaned from a roadside stream. The simple meal soothed her troubled stomach and infused her limbs with new strength.

When they finally neared the Clunel manor house, the
setting sun glazed the land amber. Deirdre slid off the weary donkey. Her knees gave way as she hit the hard dirt. She gripped the donkey’s matted coat until she regained her balance. She peered down the road to the stingy curl of smoke rising from the chimney, and battled with the wind for the hair that had come loose from her veil.

Without a word to her companions, she tucked her hand-warme
r into one of the donkey’s bags and then plunged into the forest. She felt bereft, unsettled at the changes in the land. No more did greenery burst from the ground and drip from the boughs overhead. No more did brilliant stalks of flowers trim the base of trees. The thin, dry remnants of leaves rattled in the breeze, tore loose, then spun down from the boughs to join the carpet of their kin. The change of season had stolen her bright summer woods away.

She
nosed her way closer to her destination, recognizing a gnarled tree here, a cluster of stones there, the ribbon of the tumbled-down fence that marked the edge of the Clunel garden. Vaguely, she wondered how she was ever going to find her way out of the forest in the dark of night—and realized she would be sleeping on the hillside tonight, awash in the grief that even now threatened.

Her hood tumbled down. She tore off her veil and fingered free the wound plaits, leaving a trail of silver hairpins, remembering, with a catch in her breath, a l
ong-lost trail of silver bells. Urgency tightened inside her. She raced over the ground, careless of the shadowed gullies beneath her feet. Moira and Octavius followed behind, for she heard the patter of their feet. A mist began to curl up from the roots of trees, kissing her cheeks with its chill, cooling the heat of unexpected tears.

All
that would greet her at the end of this race was an empty place that had once echoed with laughter and overflowed with love. She had yearned to see it, but with each step her control melted a little more. She clutched saplings, using them to pull herself up the slope to the bare, open hill.

Then she heard the gentle whinny of a horse.

A saner woman would falter in her pace upon hearing the sound of another’s presence in woods rumored to be rife with poachers and thieves. A saner woman would usher Octavius up ahead, to see who invaded the sanctity of the clearing where she and Conor had first made love. But a saner woman would not be racing about the woods at the twilight of All Hallow’s Eve on a promise made to a man whose heart had long stopped beating.

The horse loomed into sight. The beast pawed the exposed ro
ck, snorted twin streams of mist. His black head turned her way with a flicker of ears. A few paces beyond that massive horse, a man stood with his back to her, the embroidered edge of his scarlet cloak billowing with the evening breeze. The last ember of sunset blazed on the horizon and streaked his hair with flame.

She stumbled to a stop
. She choked a branch of a yew sapling with her fist. The man turned his head slightly so she could see the light glazing the three-quarter profile of his face. A brother, she thought. A twin.

Then he turned fully and fixed her with that tortured
silver gaze. Her heart thumped to a stop.

Conor
.

There she stood poised on the edge of the clearing, her hair tangled and loose, like some fairy-sylph clinging to the safety of the woods. The wind had painted her cheeks rose, but as their gaze locked and the still moments passed, the living color ebbed away.

She kept her promise
. He crushed the urge to cross the distance that separated them and drag her into his arms. Too many times in the life before, he’d bent this woman to his will by sheer force and overbearing arrogance. This time she would make the choice on her own.

“There’s an ancient Irish tale I would tell you, lass,” he began softly, so as not to frighten her. “Perhaps your mother told it to you once.”

He
did not approach, but he trained every sense upon the slip of a girl hovering tense by the edge of the clearing.

“A long, long time ago, when the
priests had only begun to spread the word in Ireland, there was a woman named Sorcha, who was a powerful pagan priestess in Ulster.” His gaze followed the flight of a sparrow sweeping home to its nest before the darkness descended. “At the Samhain fires one year, she conceived a son. It was rumored that the child’s father was one of the
Sídh
—the ones you know as the Little People.”

All around
him, Conor sensed the change in the world—the salt-sweet breath of the wind, the mist creeping through the trees, the hushed whisper of creatures rustling in the wood’s shadows. His horse sensed it too, for it shook its head and pranced a few steps, trying to snort the smell of the Otherworld from his nostrils.

“Sorcha
died birthing that son, taking the secret of his true parentage with her. That boy grew to be a warrior, invincible in battle, determined in his arrogance to win a kingdom of his own.”  He tried to keep the scorn from his voice. “He got his kingdom, eventually. But by the treachery of his enemies, he was killed. On the morning after the funeral, that man rose from the dead.”

Her soft g
asp cut through the clearing as keenly as it cut through his heart.

“He
was as shocked as you are. He struggled with a world turned upside-down.” He closed his hands into fists, remembering. “He had a woman he loved. A woman unlike any other. A woman,” he added, hoarsely, “who was no less than the other half of him.”

He
paced, not daring to glance in her direction, too cowardly to witness the fear or revulsion that might lurk in those beloved eyes.

“She told him that the rumors which had haunt
ed him all his life were true: That he was half-human, half-
Sídh
.” He forced his fists opened, spread his hands to the world. “She told him that he was as much a part of the world as the sea and the air and the grass, and there was no more reason for his existence as there was for why the moon waxes and wanes, or why the stars move across the night sky. He just
was.
And the part of him that came from the
Sídh
was the part that made him rise from the dead. She told me,” he said simply, “that I was immortal.”

He heard
her strange, strangled cry. He heard the sound of her footsteps through the dried carpet of leaves.

“
And so I lived,” he continued, his words rough, “roaming the world like a man half-dead, until—” a desperation coiled in his chest “—I lay my gaze upon the ailing form of a young woman, and saw in her green eyes the soul of the wife I had lost, my fairy-bride, the only woman I would ever love.”

He
turned, expecting to see nothing but the flutter of her robes in the distance and instead found her standing within arm’s reach, her face wet with tears.

“Kiss me, Conor,” she scolded. “Prove to me you’re no apparition born of my twisted mind.”

He
captured her mouth, felt the shock of the contact ripple through her body and reverberate through his own.
Lass, lass, lass, mo shearc
. He dragged his arms around her body—so she could not fight, so she could not escape. He ran his tongue along the soft flesh of her full lower lip, all the while fearing this was his last taste. She wriggled her arms from where they wedged against his chest and wound them tight around his neck. Gasping for air, she broke contact and buried her face into his shoulder.

By the gods
. He seized a fistful of her hair.
She believes
.

She believes.

Then, in that moment of surrender, it seemed that something amid the heavens and the earth readjusted, like a cart wheel gone wobbly finally bumping into place. It happened so swiftly that Conor wondered if he had imagined the subtle movement of the sky, the almost indiscernible change in the pitch of the wind’s whistle.

“It’s a fine dance you’ve led me
all these months,” she mumbled against his cloak. “Did you think my heart wouldn’t know you still walked about, living and breathing?”

“B
ut would you listen to it? Would you believe what I am?”

“I don’t
care why or how you are here, Conor. As long as you take me with you wherever you go.”

He s
queezed her tight. He tilted his face back to the flat, slate sky. “It’s a hard life you choose.” He blinked to stanch the swell of an unmanly wetness in his eyes. “There are no oil lamps on Inishmaan.”

“Firelight is warm and bright enough. And you can’t see the soot on the walls by it.”

Damned, foolish lass. Didn’t know the first thing she was doing, didn’t know what she was saying, didn’t know how every word sliced away more and more of the dead wood which encased the battered, ever-beating remnants of his heart. He sealed her lips with his own, hiding from her the single tear which squeezed out of one eye.He swallowed her low and eager moan, and then slid his lips down to the throbbing pulse at her throat. Damn the woman, she made his head soft. She made him want things he had no business wanting.

S
he made him dream again.

But
now he had loving on his mind. He snapped the ties of his cloak and threw it across the ground. There’d be enough time later to tell her the full of the tale. As he softened one knee to press her down with him, a flicker of movement on the edge of the clearing caught his eye.

Octavius
leaned against an oak. A grin split his face.

“Aren’t you a fine one,”
Conor said, “hiding when you’re needed, and showing your face when you’re least wanted.”

The
imp grinned all the more. “Is that all the thanks I get for what I’ve done for you?”

Conor felt a spurt of fury
. What had Octavius and his kind ever done for him but play peg-games with his life and the life of the woman in his arms? Octavius and his mischief had put him through seven centuries of loneliness, and promised more to come. For even as he held her against him, his heart raw and open, he knew the end of this story.

Conor said,
“Keep the door open next time I come knocking, Octavius.” That damned silvered door to the Otherworld that had always been bolted against him. “And then maybe we’ll talk about thanks.”

Octavius crossed his arms and looked ready to speak, but a rustling in the clearing revealed the outline of someone else amid the trees
.

Dierdre
rose from the circle of his arms. “Moira?”

“Child.”
The word rolled out of Moira’s mouth holding all the softness of a mother’s tongue. “I’ll be off now. You’ve no more need of me now that you’ve finally got your brave warrior. It’s glad I am of that, for all that I’ll miss you.”

The wind whirled and whispered like the brush of silken veils. A feeble ringing sounded on the air, a haunting melody which ebbed and flowed
. Conor felt the Otherworld close, closer than he’d ever felt it.

“This is a world of choices, Conor.” Moira’s eyes glowed like opals in the gloom. “Human choices, over which no creature of this world or the other has any real power. Did you not suspect that it was you who kept the worlds together, all these years, just by living?”

His mind stuttered, trying to absorb that, trying to understand
.

“It’s been a heavy load you’ve carried
,” she admitted, “all along not even knowing you were carrying it. Now listen.” The mists swirled, obscuring all but the glowing eyes, and the soft, strangely hushed voice. “Your mother made a brave choice when she conceived a child of the
Sídh
, at a time when we were all fading fast. The only way to bind the worlds was to forge a strong bond of spirit and flesh.”

Conor
felt Deirdre quivering. But he could not look away from the creature called Moira, lest she disappear and leave him with another seven centuries of wondering.

She continued,
“Your mother paid a price for her choice. She had to abandon you alone in a world which had begun to scorn our existence. In that moment, she laid the burden of keeping the worlds together on your shoulders.”

“And i
t would all have come to a fine end,” Octavius interjected from his lair in the shadow of an oak, “but it was your own arrogance which led you away from the path we’d laid—contrary, snarling creatures you humans are, always fighting what should be, and not listening to your wiser halves—”

“And you,”
Conor growled, “didn’t think to tell me this before now?”

“Enough.” Moira’s voice was nothing but a breath of wind now. “Care well for that babe in her womb. She’s one more link forged in the chain.”

“Aye, good night, and
good riddance to you.” Octavius jerked his hood over his head, and then winked at Deirdre. “Mayhap we’ll be racing one of these mornings, lass.”

Then the music stopped
as if an iron door had slammed shut in a mead hall.

Conor
stared where Octavius and Moira had been. Nothing remained but a silver glow limning the trees. He looked down at Deirdre and felt a sudden lightness in his heart.

“At last,” he whispered
. “It’s done.”