Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) (5 page)

“Glenna? Why wou
ld that gentle soul be hiding my name from you?”

“The same
reason every last man in Morna denied that you existed—even when I held my sword to their throats.”

“So it’s grown as bad as that, has it?” She dunked a linen into the cloudy herb mixture, sloshing it around with more force than was necessary. “That explains the honey, then. I suppose it was too much to expect them to give it out of the goodness of their hearts. I suppose I’d sooner see cows fly than see them change.”

“You’re speaking nonsense.”

“I’ve got you to thank for a pot of fresh heather-honey, Conor of Ulster. Your sword put the fear of the gods in them.” She lifted the linen and wrung the water out of it. “Yesterday I passed by the sacred pool near the shores of Lough Riach, and wasn’t there a pot of the finest honey you’ve ever tasted, just waiting by the edge? Now, if it were Lughnasa day, or Imbolc, or Beltane or Samhain, it’d be no surprise at all, for on those sacred days they all sneak out from beneath the eyes of their priests and lay their mutton and mead and cream by the pool, as they did in the old days, though I think they’ve all forgotten the reason for it.”

“Nay, they haven’t.”
Conor squeezed the leathery neck of the mead-skin. “They bring gifts to appease an angry goddess.”

“They bring gifts so I won’t make their cows leave off milking, or curse their unborn childre
n with twisted limbs or blinded eyes, as if I would ever do such a thing, even if I knew the way of it. Their fear has fed me for seven years.”

She approached him with the damp linen. She felt his perusal upon her body like the kiss of the sun. She brushed his blood-matted hair away from the cut. Her fingertips tingled as she touched his skin, as she threaded them through his hair which gleamed like the warm, rich wine the priests craved so, and which felt as soft against her palm as the finest brushed wool.

Had it been so long since she had touched another human being that she had forgotten the feel of a man’s skin? The heat and bristled texture of it, the faint, salt-sweet scent, and the swift pump of blood close beneath the surface? The dampness of clear sweat slicked her fingers as she traced his smooth brow. His eyes gleamed up at her like the smoky surface of a shaded, sacred pool.

A faint buzzing filled her ears. His exotic, broad-boned features, the deep dent in the middle of his chin,
and the dark stubble on his cheeks... they all faded away like a reflection in a smooth pool grown turbid. Words barely born faded and died in her throat. His eyes captured her, compelled her into silence, so she did not protest when his hands boldly encircled her waist.

His voice rasped low and husky
as his hands explored the narrowness of her rib cage. “It’s a strange man who fears a lass like you.”

“The priests are strange men,” she heard herself say, even as a voice in her head screamed,
pull away
. Until now, she did not realize how much her body craved human touch. “With their fasting and their scorn of women and their heads shaved like the bearded full moon.”

His
palms rasped down her curves to settle on her hips. “I’d sooner cut off my own sword hand than live with no meat nor ale . . . nor women.”

Something in the way he said the word brought her to her senses. Women, is it? Well,
Brigid of the Clan Morna was no common, loose-skirted slave for him to plow and seed. She pressed the damp cloth hard against his temple, knowing the bitter herbs seared the raw flesh like a branding iron.

She said,
“It’s no compliment to those who follow the old ways to have you acting like the only bull in a new herd of cows.”

“Have pity on a man.” 
He squeezed the flesh of her hip. “Beneath these rags you’ve a body men would kill to possess. Is that why the priests banished you?”

“
The priests didn’t banished me,” she said. “They made my father cast me out.”

She turned away too abruptly
and heard the tearing of cloth as his finger caught in her tunic. She ignored the sound and crouched down by the bowl, steeping the linen and wringing out the blood.

“Your father
,” he said darkly, “is a fool.”

“Speak not of my
father so.”

“Only a coward listens to the fears of lesser men.”

“The foreign priests wield powerful magic. How else could they sweep over Erin so quickly?”

“Fire worship still rages in Ulster.”

“Maybe the priests have not found their way there yet.”

“The Ulster chieftains
allow the priests’ presence in their mead halls only to hear about the world beyond. They don’t betray their own blood like your father.”

She
pressed the newly soaked linen against his wound. The idea that there might still be a place in this world where someone like her might belong filled her with a fierce yearning. But even as the emotions swelled in her throat, she crushed them, for it was her father that Conor scorned, her beloved Da, just a victim of the priest’s water magic, still her father and her king. And the man she tended was an Ulsterman, a sword of the O’Neill, the murderer of her brother.

“You know nothing of it.” She slung the linen toward the bowl of herb water. The needle flashed in the
light as she tugged it from her sleeve. “You were not there when Da lie near to death on his pallet. You were not there when the black-robed priests forbid my Ma from tending him.”

“
I’m suspicious of any man who doesn’t know the taste of a woman—”

“Mayhap there’s power in k
eeping out of a woman’s thighs.” She jabbed his purple, angry wound with the needle and drew the linen through. “The priests did their water ritual upon Da as he lay ill, when he had no defenses.” She pierced the other side of the wound. “When he awoke they told him he was one of them, and if he broke the rules of their God, his soul would burn in their hell for an eternity.”

“
For this, he sent away his only daughter.”

“
Not right away. Da laughed at them and scorned them, just as you do.” She felt his skin grow warm beneath her hands from the effect of the herbs, and she squeezed the edges of the wound together. “But then a bloody flux affected the cattle that year, and pellets of hail as big as stones ruined the barley in the fields, and the people of Morna began to die with some strange affliction.”

“A common enough year.
”

“
Yes. Except that year none of the old Druid enchantments worked to save the people.” She tugged on the thread to bring the flesh together, wondering how he could sit so calmly when she knew her ministrations stung. “The priests began to whisper that it was because Da continued to sin that the wrath of their god was upon Morna.”

“W
hat was his sin? Eating a fresh haunch of lamb on a holy day? Drinking too much of the mead, as a king should?”

“My Ma was Da’s second wife, and the first one still lived
. Their ways say that a man can only have one at a time.”

“
What are all the maidens and the widows of the warriors to do if a man could only have one wife? How is one woman to run a king’s house by herself? And how’s a king to run a kingdom without sons?”

“
It was but an excuse.” She jabbed the needle in rhythm to her anger. “It was upon me they cast their fear. I had the devil in my eyes, they said.”

“
Have pity on them, lass. It’s a hard thing for a man to look at you and be forbidden to touch you.”

The clearing filled with a sudden buzzing,
and the odor of crushed summer grass tickled her throat.

“Whatever it was,” she rushed on, “they demanded
that I be banished with my mother. My father resisted them for as long as he could. But soon all the clan cursed and spit upon my Ma and myself, and in that light, Da had no choice but to cast us out—”

“A man always has a choice.”

“A man, maybe, but not a king. A king is responsible for the health of his tribe.”

“I am a king, and I would not send my daughter to
live among the wolves.”

She bit the thread
in two. This Ulsterman was setting her mind racing, and he had no right. Her father was under the influence of those black-robed strangers. He feared to make any gesture of love to her, lest they cast some curse over his people. She forgave Da for it. She remembered the tears on his face the day she and her mother left the ring-fort forever.

“
You are a king but three days.” She dabbed beads of blood with the corner of her sleeve. “And you have no children to sacrifice.”

He
nudged away her hand and shot to his feet. His silver eyes cut through her. “I’ve killed men for daring to say those words.”

In her frozen surprise, Brigid supposed
that this was how a man looked upon the field of battle, with blood lust hardening his eyes to pewter, the sun setting his hair aflame, with his arms so taut that the blue trails of veins throbbed upon the corded muscles. His voice still echoed through the forest, and she found herself thinking of the famous Ulster King Conor who owned a magic shield, which roared like the stormy sea whenever he was in mortal danger.

S
he wondered why, in the face of such fury, she felt only awe. “Would you strike at my heart, Conor, for the truth it whispers to me?”

His chest heaved
. “It was your Sight which told you that.”

“Oft
I don’t know what it tells me until I speak the very words.” She shifted her eyes to the sword gripped in his hand. “I’ll temper that, though, for I’ve no wish for me or mine to feel the bite of your steel.”

He glanced at the sword as if he did not remember how it had leapt into his hand.
“I would never strike a woman.” He sheathed it. “Since your Sight told you I have no sons, your Sight can tell me why.”

“You’ll have me do
the work of the gods, then.”

“N
either of my two wives—fat, healthy women, both—has ever borne me a child. Worse—neither has ever taken with child.” He glared beyond the treetops to the hidden horizon. “And though I’ve plowed every fertile womb from Ulster through Connacht, never once has a woman, high-born or low, come to me swelling with my babe.”

“
It’s common knowledge that if ye seed too thinly, the rain will wash it away, and you’ll never have a good harvest.”

“I
t’s not for the trying that I fail.” He swung around, his sword clanking against the studs on his boots. “I’ve fosterlings a-plenty living in my ring-fort in Ulster, but none of them are my flesh and blood. A king needs sons, else he’s half a man, and there are whispers enough about the strangeness of my birth.”

“There’s many a man conc
eived around the night fires of Samhain,” she argued, “who knows not his father’s name.”

“You know of my birth.” 
His gaze was long and contemplative. “Were you of my tribe, woman, you’d have the Druid’s seat of honor by my right hand.”

Brigid felt her loyalties shifting in ways that made her uncomfortable
. “Conor of Ulster, I have told you nothing you don’t already know.”

“Tell me when I will have a son.”

“The visions can’t be had for the asking.” She jabbed the needle into the neck of her tunic and sloshed the herb-water onto the grass. “I’ve no control over them. My mother died long before she could teach me the full of the old ways. My visions come when they wish: an apple won’t fall until it’s ripe.”

“I’ll kiss it out of
you, then.” He crossed the distance that separated them in two long strides. He clutched her shoulders. The bowls in her hands clattered to the earth. “If the visions don’t come, then at least I’ll slake this burning in my blood since the moment I laid eyes upon you.”

“No.”

He stopped a breath away from her lips, his eyes aflame, her body pressed against his tunic. She smelled the honey mead upon his breath, the sweat and salt of his skin. Something inside flared as hot and molten as the smith’s ore in the fire pit, but she forced her legs to straighten, she forced their bodies apart.

“You’ll not force me,
Conor.”

“You feel the slow burn, lass. I see it in your eyes.”

“I’m a king’s daughter. Banished or not, no man will treat me like a common slave.”

“There will be not
hing common about this.” He pressed his loins against her. “I’m hard just at the smell of you.”

“S
o would be any man too long in war.”

“Yield to me, woman. I’l
l stoke that fire in your belly as I stroke the secrets between your legs—”

“Those secrets are my secrets, to be given when I please.” She struggled away, stumblin
g. “I’ll have a proper wooing or I’ll have none of you at all.”

She could not believe she had spoken the words,
but now they hung on the air. This man was not the one for whom she was destined, yet something had prompted her to state such a thing. Perhaps the gods had sent this man—the only man she’d ever known who wasn’t afraid of her eyes—to ease her loneliness while she waited for her destined lover.