Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (32 page)
Read Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) Online
Authors: Lisa Ann Verge
It was a fine, soft day on Inishmaan.
The springtime sun blazed through the
clouds and shimmered upon the cliffs. Galway Bay, almost too blue to look at, licked the graveled shore. Crazed by the scent of freshly caught mackerel, a flock of gulls screeched as they whirled in cirrus of wings above the fleet of curraghs bobbing just beyond the surf.
Deirdre stood with the other
women of Inishmaan. Dried salt and sea spray streaked her arms from an afternoon collecting seaweed. She shifted the weight of the dripping basket on her hip, and then shaded her eyes against the flash of the ocean.
It was
no surprise to find Conor in the thick of it all, standing at his full height at the bow of the lead curragh, riding the dips and swells with his knees, while he peered out to the roll of the oncoming waves.
“
By my soul.” Red Sean’s young wife leaned toward Deirdre with a waggle of brows. “Don’t you have a man of a race that never owned a coward.”
Deirdre grinned and sank the weight of her basket into
the sand, grateful for the easy camaraderie. Over the two years that she’d lived here, not one woman had staggered back in revulsion at Dierdre’s direct gaze.
A squealing blur dashed by her, launching a spray of pebbles. With a swiftness born of instinct, Deirdre lunged, seized a handful of blue wool, and h
auled her squirming daughter onto her hip.
“
Are you trying to get hit by a curragh, Aileen? Or would you prefer drowning in the sea?”
Aileen squirmed in Deirdre’s embrace. While Deirdre worked, the tod
dler had scoured the shore for treasures with the other village children. Now she flailed two fistfuls of shiny rocks and threw them toward the sea.
“Daidí, Daidí
!”
“Aye,
that’s your Da making a spectacle of himself.” Deirdre brushed at the sea spray beading on her daughter’s flushed cheeks. “But you’ll wait here safe and dry until they land,
a stóirín
.”
Dierdre
watched as the curragh surged upon a wave’s crest. Conor plunged the oars into the foaming water and pulled back so hard that his muscles strained against the sleeves of his tunic. Another wave loomed up behind him, surging high and fast, but before the first whiskers of foam frothed the peak, the prow of the curragh scraped the shore. Conor gripped the rim, leapt out, and dragged the boat out of harm’s way.
Only then did Deirdre release the breath she had not realized she’d been holding.
“Now you can go.” Deirdre set Aileen down and patted her daughter’s behind as the child darted off. Conor seized the toddler in mid-run and whirled her through the air. Conor was home, it was Beltane Day. There’d be no more work today.
She
was tucking the seaweed basket behind a cradle of boulders when a shadow fell over her.
“Wife, t
here’s a price to pay for not greeting your man proper.”
She squinted up at him.
His grin rivaled the blaze of the sky. Their daughter sat easily upon his shoulders, her arms flailing as she stretched up and tried to reach the gulls swooping across the shore.
Deirdre raised herself onto her toes and kissed
Conor’s salty lips, then whispered, “I’ll pay that price
, mo rún
.”
“Listen to you talking.”
He lowered his head and stole another kiss. “A convent-bred lass. In front of your daughter, no less.”
“T
he fairies did not leave that babe under the ivy.”
A lock of hair
fell onto his brow. Tenderly, she raked it through her fingers as she pushed it aside. Sunlight shimmered on a single silver strand threading through the lock. She wondered if he’d noticed the changes. She wondered if he noticed that as Aileen grew bigger and stronger, a few more crinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. Their daughter, that red-topped, squealing bundle of joy babbling now on her husband’s shoulders, was the next link in the chain, the strongest bond between this world and the other.
Not just
this daughter, but also the new child growing inside her.
She lifted her face and
Conor bent to kiss her, but a tiny, cowskin-covered foot got in the way.
“Down!”
Aileen battered Conor’s head as she caught sight of the village children with baskets full of mackerel. “Down!”
Conor hauled his daughter off his shoulders. With a flash of feet she was at the little boys’ sides, thrusting her hands into the baskets.
“Cruel wench,” Conor growled, thrusting Deirdre up against him anew, “to talk like that when you know the little lass won’t drop off to sleep until the moon is overhead.”
His kiss ta
sted of sea spray. Aileen came back and wiggled her way between their knees and twinkled up at them with her father’s gray eyes. Deirdre and Conor broke apart to the giggles of children and the knowing laughter of a cluster of islanders, who’d caught up with them upon the path.
“I
see who got the best catch of the day,” one of the men remarked.
“Aye,” one of the women added, “and well-hooked he is, I’m thinking.”
“Shouldn’t you both be saving that for the Beltane fire?”
“Only you, Patch
Peggeen, would save it for Beltane,” Conor retorted. “We’ve a Beltane fire around our hearth every night of the year.”
A priest stepped over the rock-pile fence
of the burial ground, just at the height of the path. His black robes battered his legs as he approached the crowd with a swift, lusty gait. “Was that pagan nonsense I heard coming from your mouth, Conor MacSídh?”
Deirdre shook her head.
“Don’t you be asking my husband such a question, Father. I won’t let you two debate nonsense over a skin of honey-mead tonight.”
The priest gave her a wink.
“Now there’s a good lass, keeping her man home and out of mischief.”
Then the priest was gone with a wave of his hand, striding at full speed down to the shore to meet the curragh which would take him back to the north island before the
Beltane fires flared scarlet in the night.
With Aileen dancing a weaving trail before them, Deirdre and Conor climbed to the top of the path.
When she and Conor had first arrived, the villagers had warned them away from building within the wind-worn, rambling circle of tumbling stones. It was common talk that the ancient ruins upon the hill were inhabited by fairies. They’d seen their footmarks upon the cliff, they’d told them, and strange, airless gusts of wind swept the place—but Conor was adamant that Dun Conor was home.
She’d known it was her home, too, the moment she had laid eyes upon the height, safe, guarded, strong.
Arms around one another, Conor and Deirdre paused at the edge of the rock-pile fence. Primroses clung to the stones and waved in the briny breeze. Cows lowed in the field as they feasted on green and stubborn grass. Across the bay, the Connemara mountains rose purple from the deep blue water and the rhythmic wash of the tide against the cliffs lulled them with soft music.
Aileen raced through
an opening in the fence, giggling and twirling in happy delirium. Deirdre wondered when the lass would show the full of her fairy blood. She wondered if it would come upon her in secret, or if it would, like Deirdre’s own gift, wait until the brink of womanhood before it manifested.
Conor
’s gaze followed his daughter’s antics. “Full of life, that one.”
“Aye, she dances like the wind.”
Suddenly, rising from a crack in the stones beneath their feet, a frantic little gust whirled, salt-sweet and humid. Deirdre and Conor shared a secret smile as that gust veered off toward their daughter, who squealed and whirled with it.
Conor murmured,
“It’s good to know that there’s still some magic in the world.”
Above, the silhouette of two swans soared and dipped and twirled, weightless with the wind beneath their wings.
I hope you enjoyed TWICE UPON A TIME
!
Don’t miss the other books in the Celtic Legends Series
THE O’MADDEN: A Novella
Also
available—the Novels of
Lisa Verge Higgins
THE PROPER CARE AND MAINTENANCE OF FRIENDSHIP
ONE GOOD FRIEND DESERVES ANOTHER
FRIENDSHIP MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER
RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS, coming March 2014
SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY, coming March 2015
More coming soon from Lisa Ann Verge!
DEFIANT ANGEL
BLAZE OF PASSION
MY LOVING ENEMY
THE HEART’S DISGUISE
HEAVEN IN HIS ARMS
WILD IRISH ROSE
SWEET HARVEST
LOGAN’S WAY
LOVING WILD
Would you like to know when the next Lisa Ann Verge book is available?
Sign up for email Book Alerts!
And visit Lisa at:
***
Prologue
The Year of Our Lord 1275
It was a frightful visitor who came to us that strange Midsummer’s Night.
It could have been yesterday, I remember it so well. Twilight had blackened the crags of my lord’s kingdom. The dying gasps of the pagan fires still glowed upon the hillsides. I’ve been the keeper of this house for enough years to turn my hair white, yet never had a visitor come so high in the mountains in the midst of night. And none welcome for these past five years, mind you, with all the changes in the house of Graig. So you can imagine how I nearly leapt out of my skirts when someone banged at the door fit to split the wood.
I knew that the entire household was snug inside. They’d scurried back to their hovels from whatever pagan things they do at those fires on Midsummer’s Night, like rats to their holes in a storm, not one of them brave enough to risk seeing whatever demons are set loose after the sun sets. I myself was hanging another sprig of St. John’s wort over the doorway to the kitchens to guard against demons and the like.
At first I thought to ignore the banging. No good news comes after dark, you know, and the master.... well, it’s no secret that the master wouldn’t take kindly to having his refuge invaded. Faith, the master was no fit company for wolves these days
. It was not always that way, you know. But now I feared—even not knowing who stood behind that door—for the poor unwitting creature’s health. No man deserved the full wrath of this Lord of Graig.
But you see, I’m Irish born, Welsh bred, and Celtic to the bone, and found myself padding through the rushes nonetheless to pull the door open in welcome.
An Irishman, he said he was. Snarling and snapping at the delay, and me wondering how to keep him quiet so as not to disturb the master in his chamber at the other end of the hall. I spoke as kindly as I could and ushered the visitor to the center hearth, offering him a bit of mead and oatcake. Only then did I get a straight look at him. He was a strange spark of a man, too limber and sprightly for the wild night. There was a brightness to him, like to outshine the fire that the girls work day and night to keep burning. I found myself lingering until he barked good and loud for the mead I’d promised him.
Then the far door banged open and my heart leapt to my throat, for the master tore out of his chamber breathing fire like the dragon that’s said to live amid the caves of Snowdon. He caught sight of the visitor and I scurried out, not wanting to be burned by the hot edge of his tongue.
Faith, it’s true I had no business lurking in the shadows with my ears cocked, me being no more than a servant in the house of Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Lord of Graig. But I’ve earned my meddling, you see, having been with this house long before the present lord took his first squalling breath. I’ve known the family as if it were my own. I’ve watched through the good years and now, yes, in the darkest. So I took no shame in peering around that splintered old wall. Surely it was my duty to stop the master from tossing the Irishman out into the cold. We’re still Welsh, after all, no matter what curse God has put upon this lord and this house. I’ll see myself begging in some English village before the Graigs deny hospitality to anyone whose shadow darkens the door.