Hidden Jewel (Heartfire Series) (46 page)

Ailill had lost patients in the recent past, a great many of them just before leaving Scotland, when the devastating wave of what had come to be known as the Desolate Sickness had somehow crossed over the boundaries of the mortal world and the one in which she  had been raised. It was that which made the girl feel truly devastated, for, in her heart, she had believed that her love had succumbed to that same ravaging illness despite her best efforts to save him. But he was not dead; was, in fact, completely healed, and wished for her to know that he still loved her. That he still wanted her. Her heart had swelled with pleasure at hearing that from her mother's own mouth. Then the laboring lass, who had called herself Angel, of all things, had begun to bleed heavily before the babe had even worked it's way into the world. Unwilling to see another child die uselessly, Ailill had tried everything that she could think to try, every potion, every chant, her own healing gift, before resorting, in the end, to an emergency Cesarian, done as quickly as possible to save the life of the baby who's heartbeat rang strong and true through the fetoscope, though the mother was already gone. And she had. The babe was breathing on it's own beneath the soft covering, the young midwife's blood encrusted arms wrapped possessively around the bitty sleeping bundle. Ailill, only, knew the secret of the child's birth, the words whispered just before the dying woman succumbed, nearly taking her unborn babe with her.

Standing up, Annie stepped over and gently took the child from her hands. "Don't cry, Daughter of mine, you will see your love again soon," she stated with quiet certainty. "The Queen is, even now, working things to your advantage, though you'll have to make a few concessions, I would say, as you are still betrothed to the two brothers no matter what. Speaking of which, I believe that they are to be stuck with the sad job of burying yon poor lass there, since James is away with Fallon and I cannot just up and leave right now to give her a proper burial. Come on, get up. You need to bathe the blood of innocent death from your body; and you should burn the clothes in offering. They are ruined anyway. In the meantime, I'll clean up the bairn and make up some milk bottles for her before I send for the boys."

"Do ye take a few samples o' their lifeblood," Ailill reminded in a husky aside. "To help in determining the truth o' my suspicions, as well as the bairn's paternity."

"Yes, I planned to Abby-honey. Although we both know she's a Morna without the extra effort."

Leveling a hard look on her mother, thinking that she'd become too well hardened over the years, Ailill bit hard on her lip, quelling the snappy retort that wanted to spring forth. "It is worth the effort, Mother, if only for Duffy's sake," she whispered instead.

Moving slowly, almost painfully, Ailill stood to leave the room, too exhausted to think with any clarity, to even take much notice of the fact that 'the boys' were already there, both staring into the birthing room from the hallway with wide, troubled eyes at the sight of so much blood. It looked as if she had showered in it, the deep red spatters covered her from fiery head to leather clad toe; a slick, dark pool had spilled over the end of the bed, onto the polished oak floor. Instead of leaving the room immediately, though, she turned back and uttered a string of words in a strange language. The spilled blood of the innocent woman disappeared in an instant, the floor sparkling as if it had never been soiled, though the deep crimson proof was still heavily upon her person. Without a word of explanation, Ailill met the eyes of each man briefly before turning away with a visible shudder.

"It's mine."

Scattering another shovelful of dark, rich soil over the slowly rising mound, Micah looked up, meeting the dark eyes of his twin, noting instantly a look of pain that ran soul deep in the blue pools. Not sure what Jacob was even talking about, he shook his head in confusion and rubbed  a filthy hand over his sweaty brow, the motion leaving a dark brown smear above his eyes before he turned back to his task. "What's yours, Jacob?"

"The baby. It's mine."

"Huh?" Turning back, Micah eyed his twin querulously, disbelief drawing his full lips down into a thin pale line. "Annie said the girl was fairly new here. Livin' alone, in a shack down the road from Kiah. I doubt she's even been here long enough for it to be yours."

Groaning in exasperation, Jacob dropped his own shovel. The metal clanged sharply when it bounced off a rock half embedded in the grass covered earth. "Look," he said, stepping over to where Micah was standing. Long fingers splayed wide, he counted backwards, naming the months as he did. "See. I slept with her not two days after we moved into the cabin, during the mid-Winter festival. The baby is mine."

"Y'all can't count, Jacob. Pregnancy lasts nine months; it's only been seven since then. It ain't yours." Micah's tone held a touch of derision. Rolling his eyes at his twin's self-gratifying audacity, he turned away.

"It- she, it is a girl-baby, was born early, at least six weeks early. Annie said so."

Rounding on his brother in sudden irritation, Micah growled at him. "Everyone knows that's one of the nights when everyone screws everyone, Jacob! The festival ain't nothin' but a mass orgy, the last big hurrah until Beltain. That baby could be
anyone's
, and y'all damn well know it!"

Jacob's eyes glittered ferally, teeth gleaming in a ferocious sneer that gave him a wolfish air. "
She's Mine
!" he roared at the top of his lungs, the muscles of his neck bulging with the effort to control his raging temper. "The girl was a virgin...
I
took her virginity, Micah, just like you took Ailill's. I
liked
her, she reminded me of McKell.
I spent the entire fucking night with her
! Is that clear enough for ya?"

Dumbfounded, Micah could only nod. The girl
had
looked vaguely familiar when he had seen her face, before it was covered in a fresh winding cloth by Ailill and her mother as they prepared the body for burial, though, at the time, he hadn't known why. And then, suddenly, the reason struck him like a slap in the face.

It was highly unusual for Jacob to bring any girl home with him; usually he was content to either lift his kilt where he stood or to go home with whomever his conquest happened to be at the time. During that festival, though, he had brought a girl home; a small, dark haired girl with aqua-blue eyes and full, pouty lips. He had thought her to be very pretty, Micah recollected, seeing again the light eyes peeking out from behind Jacob's back like a startled doe as he passed by after Jacob had kicked him out of their room for the night.

The noise alone would have been enough to wake Micah from a drug induced coma. The very pretty young woman had been a screamer. Remembering that his father had been away for the night, at his own sordid affair no doubt, Micah could easily recall the relief he had felt when his brother had at last exhausted his supply of erotic pleasures on the excessively noisy girl. Not wanting to chance having her there when Kiah came home, a highly satisfied Jacob already dead to the world, Micah had walked the embarrassed girl home in the dark hours of pre-dawn, holding her chilled, bone-thin arm with a firm grip to keep her on her feet as he walked across the snowy fields using only the pale moonlight to see. The girl had held his hand tightly and thanked him in a softly drawled accent before she went inside her own one-room shack; the same girl who's pale belly had had to be sliced open like a dead fish in order for Ailill's tiny hands to retrieve the life within the lifeless womb. Eyes darkened with the truth of the memory, so blatant before him, he spun toward his twin with a look of absolute reproach.

"Why, ya damn fool bastard! What the
hell
were ya
thinkin
'?" 

Violently, Jacob shoved past, stalking away with stiff movements, and Micah stared after him in surprised silence, unsure of  what to make of this new twist on the ever changing drama which seemed to be making up their lives with Ailill; wondering whether they would suddenly be left without her because Jacob had developed a terrible case of satyriasis since McKell had died. It seemed to Micah that his twin had indiscriminately slept with nearly every woman he had met since that fateful day and he couldn't help but question, in his own troubled mind, how many other children Jacob might have sired using nothing more than natural good looks, a strong sexual appetite, and a willingness to please anyone who managed to catch his eye as he strove to forget his own heart.

More exhausted than she realized after a long, heartrending night spent on an emotional roller coaster ride, Ailill dozed off where she sat, the overstuffed sofa in the cozy living room soft enough to lull her into a blissfully dreamless sleep. The infant, exhausted herself after voraciously gulping down two ounces of Annie's specially made baby formula, was cuddled belly-down against the warm fullness of Ailill's breasts as if it came naturally to the young woman, an everyday occurrence despite her already full lifestyle; as if being a mother figure was one of the many Fates allotted her, though one, by the look of it, which she would much more readily accept without question.

Slowly, Micah sat down, careful not to jostle Ailill, loathe to wake his love because the dark half moons beneath her eyes spoke of much more than mere exhaustion, the crease between her cinnamon brows only a small sign that, even in sleep, her mind was troubled by her own suppositions as to the mysterious visit from the tall, elfin Highlander, who was truly as darkly beautiful as Micah knew, deep in his heart, himself and his twin to be. He and Jacob, both, had heard the byplay between her mother and herself, drawn down the hallway after they had arrived by the sharp scent of freshly shed blood; a whole freaking lot of it. The sound of voices had stayed the brothers only a few feet from the door, both young men  unselfconsciously eavesdropping on a conversation which had obviously been thought private. When he'd realized that she was crying, really crying, releasing a flood of emotional tidewaters, Micah had wanted badly to go in and comfort Ailill. Jacob had stopped him with a quick shake of the head, his twin wishing to hear all of what Ailill might reveal in her husky, cathartic ranting, Jacob's own face paling at the realization of what he was hearing; the suppositions running rampant in his mind, though he had never told Micah a thing about any of it; had never lain with the dark haired girl again.

Jacob's child.

Even as the thought whispered at the back of his mind, Micah tried to dispel it. One thing only could reveal the truth, as far as Jacob's involvement was concerned, and he leaned in close to the swaddled newborn, nostrils flaring wide at the scent of Ailill's natural pheromone mixed with the sweet smell of the milk which had dribbled out of the side of the tiny, perfectly shaped mouth, carefully extricating the hand sized bundle from Ailill's sleep slackened arms to look for the proof of his brother's claim. Moving the edges of the soft blanket aside, he stared in open-mouthed wonder at the tiny, perfectly formed being laid bare before his eyes. A girl she most certainly was, he could not help noticing, and with a shock of silky black hair that, almost by itself, proclaimed her paternity to be that of the unapologetically dominant Morna genes. Oh yes, he knew the tales Ailill had revealed had at least a modicum of truth to them. That much he'd gleaned from the constant dream visits from his supposed brother, Tiernan MacDuff.

It had been many years since he had held a baby, but he remembered, quite vividly, that his own siblings, especially his little sister, Noelle, had looked exactly like this one when they had been born. His gaze traveled slowly over the tiny body, taking in every minute detail. Ten fingers, ten toes, each one tipped with paper-thin nails. Long black lashes swept open and then shut after the dark colored eyes focused and lit briefly on his face, as if she knew by instinct that she was safe in his care. No longer able to put off the reason he had picked the infant up in the first place, Micah's eyes moved directly to her slightly protruding belly, blinking in disbelief at the sight of smooth, ruddy flesh, unblemished by the birthmark he had been expecting to see. Looking back and forth across the tiny torso, still not seeing what he knew in his heart should be there, he sat back wearily, uttering an inaudible sigh of discontent. He was torn between a sense of relief, that the mark was not there, and confusion, as to why it was not. Micah knew his twin. Jacob had spoken plain enough. The newly born girl was his; he would not claim it as truth if it were not, in fact, true. Therefore, by all rights, the five dots should have shown up plain as day on the baby whom his twin had started. He did not understand it at all, and he realized, quite suddenly, that he did not understand most things going on in his life of late. Life with Ailill was proving to be a never ending series of intriguing riddles and unanswered questions. It was becoming annoying, to say the least.

The baby squirmed ever so slightly and he took one last look, still not quite able to believe his eyes, before Micah carefully swaddled her in the square of buckskin and laid her across his own chest, a smile hidden behind his closed eyes, in the upturned corners of his mouth, as the soft belch that had been about to make her cry came burbling up with surprising volume. The softness of her, the absolute vulnerability in the too small body, the featherlight weight upon his broad chest, filled the man with a sudden sense of possessiveness unlike anything he had as yet experienced in his life and he clung to the feeling with a mental grip that sent his mind reeling.