Sing Me Home (22 page)

“If I’m a spy at all,” she said, “then I’m a spy for
you
.”

A murmur passed through the room. Colin watched the tendons in her neck flex. She wasn’t lying. Maura had never mastered that minstrel’s trick.

“Speak your mind then.” He wondered when his voice had become like this. Hoarse from barking orders. Hoarse from screaming warnings. Hoarse and harsh and unrelenting. “Lest you haven’t noticed, we have a war to wage.”

He pretended not to see the ripple of hurt that passed across her face.

“Today,” she stuttered, “Sir Maurice arrived at the castle. He told Lord William of your raids, of your capture of this stronghold.”

More truth. The capture of the Fahy castle was a fresh victory. It was his first mark of glory—more kindling on the fires of the illusion that Fergus had come back from the dead. In truth, it was the ever-weakening Brendan who deserved the credit, for though Colin had led the attack it was his cousin’s strategies that had guided his hand.

“Lord William is planning to gather a sizable army, if he must,” she said. “He is being pressed to win back this castle—”

“This is not news.” He seized a bladder of ale upon the table. “Caddell has been trying to crush the MacEgans since he came into the barony.”

“He doesn’t want war.”

“Doesn’t he?”

“He says he’s tired of it.” She glanced around the room at the men listening. “He claims it is the MacEgans who will not surrender—that your clan will fight to the bitter end, like your father before you.”

“So Caddell
did
send you here, to negotiate.”

“No.” She found interest in the rushes strewn by her feet. “He knows nothing of who you are, of what we …”

Her words stuttered to silence as a flush crept up her throat. He ignored it, for the eyes of the clan were heavy upon them.

He said, “Go on.”

“Caddell doesn’t give a fig about me,” she said, “or about what I do with my days. He certainly wouldn’t send me to do something as important as negotiate. I came here to tell you what I know, in the hopes that I can stop this madness and …”

Her throat flexed as she swallowed the rest of her words, but he heard them in his heart nonetheless. “You are still trying to save me from a hanging.”

She looked up at him with those confused hazel eyes and he felt his determination weaken.

He barked to the room, “Leave us.”

Then the men hiked weapons upon their shoulders, grasped wooden cups of ale, and strode across the rushes to the door thrown open to the sunshine. While it remained open, the light poured in around her. He saw how thin she’d become, how bright the loose strands of her plaits.

When the door finally closed, she crossed her arms in the silence. “Look at you,” she said. “Dressed up like a shiny new pot.”

“It’s my father’s chain mail.” As was everything else he lived and breathed these days, his father’s men, his father’s clothing, his father’s cause.

“I can’t help but look at you and think you’re prepared for a play. What happened to Arnaud and Matilda and the others?”

“They’re here.”

“Here?”

“Camped up on the hill,” he said, debating how much to tell her about his fears for their safety after Caddell caught her in his web. “Matilda’s time draws nigh, they needed to stop for a time. I offered safety.”

“There’ll be no more plays then, not for a while.” She cast her gaze over him again. “The armor fits you well.”

She did not speak those words as a compliment. When he’d first tried on the armor the closeness of the fit had struck him as strange, for in his mind his father had always loomed large. The armor might be the only thing that fit him well in this new life. For everything else he’d taken his cues from Brendan, who loved this clan better than any wife, better than any god, better than his own fading life.

He shook himself out of brooding. “Did he hurt you?”

“Your blue-faced warrior? No, though if I hadn’t shown him your brooch, he might have—”

“Not Aedh,” he interrupted. “Caddell.”

“Why would my father hurt me?”

Colin’s jaw tightened. He turned away from her and walked to the other side of the trestle table to compose himself.

He said, “Caddell never mentioned me to you, then?”

“He told me I couldn’t go about swiving minstrels anymore, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t specify which one.”

He glanced over his shoulder and the look that passed between them shimmered with remembrance. He tore his gaze away. He couldn’t think about the afternoon by the river, or the evening before they parted, when he took her against the wall like it was his last night on the face of the earth.

“It’s good to see you, anyway,” she said, swinging Nutmeg’s basket off her shoulder to place it on the trestle table, “even if you are as garrulous as Padraig used to be when he was woken up too early in the morning.”

In his memory he heard the ringing of the pipes—not the discordant clash of the pipes of war but the free-reeling music of moonlight and passion—riffling up memories of a lightness of heart, a lightness of being. He tightened his jaw to shut it out of his head.

“So I’m to believe,” he said, mustering up some control, “that you’ve come here to betray your father to me.”

“He’s been a father less than a season, and less than kind.”

“But you embrace him as your father nonetheless.” He had enough worries upon his mind without thinking of Maura lost in the castle at Shrule, a lonely outcast among the English. “You set off from a convent just to find him.”

“I set off searching for something,” she said. “Clearly I hadn’t the faintest idea what I’d find.”

Just then, her squirrel nosed the hinged lid of the basket. She leaned in and spoke soft words to him. The pet scrambled out of the basket, freezing when he caught sight of Colin, and then the beast darted for a piece of bread abandoned upon the table.

Colin stared at her braided hair and her silks, clinging so close to her curves, and then forced himself to look into that hurt-filled face as he asked the question he couldn’t hold back anymore.

“Is there a babe?”

When he’d given that brooch to her, he had hoped that she would conceive a son to carry on his name. Now he hoped she hadn’t, for all he had to leave that son was a hard life in the hills and a desperate, bloody, endless conflict.

She startled at his question and then stared down at her own belly. She gripped it, thinking, and then she shook her head no.

“That’s for the best.” The words came out like stones. “A little loving on a summer’s afternoon, a taste of paradise upon the road, and no consequences at all.”

She grabbed a cup, took a deep gulp of ale, and then wiped a drop off her chin. “You were a much better liar, Colin, when you were playing the minstrel.”

He felt like a harp’s string that had been twisted, played, and twisted again, still not striking the right tone, and so twisted, twisted some more, stretched too tight between the posts.

“Colin, hear me.” She placed the ale back down and rounded the table. “You once told me that having a family can be a terrible burden. You are right. I don’t want to be a Caddell.”

She approached too close and a buzzing rose in his ears like the humming of a hundred thousand bees. Beyond the walls rose the murmurings of his men, the jangle of harness, the neighing of horses, the twang of a bowstring, the creak of boiled leather hauberks. All he had to do was lean forward and take those ripe wet lips she offered up to him. He could make her his again—she wanted it, too. His blood rushed as it did before battle, his loins hardened as it did after the battle was done, when he wanted to beat his chest and scream victory to the skies and slake all that fiery energy with a woman.

Suddenly her hands were gripped in his, and he looked down at them, seeing her ring wink in the pale glow of the fire.

“I’ll throw it out,” she said. “I swear it. I can play many parts in minstrel’s plays, but I can’t play the part of an English lady.”

“You don’t have to, Maura.”

Something in her eyes flickered. He looked into that innocent face and realized that he couldn’t keep the truth from her any longer.

“You are not William Caddell’s daughter.”

***

Her mind felt like an egg broken and set upon by a whisk. Somehow Colin maneuvered her to the bench before her knees gave out. On that hard wooden surface she landed, jarring herself to the teeth, trying to absorb another piece of impossible information like a cake soaked with spirits still swimming in more.

She smelled something bitter and looked down to find he’d thrust another cup of ale under her nose.

“Drink.”

It was a command, not a request. She sucked down the ale in a gulp and a half and felt the warmth of it sweep through her veins. She stared at her slippers and wiggled her toes idiotically, as if she wasn’t sure they were still a part of her. Nutmeg, sensing the drama, clambered onto her shoulder.

I’ve always known.

Hadn’t she sensed it all along, from the moment Lord William had approached her in that great hall, and that midwife had rushed, wimple flying, out of the shadows? She remembered feeling as if she’d stepped into some other minstrel troupe’s play. She’d struggled to play along. She’d taken up her part because that’s what was expected of her, that’s what she was supposed to do.

But in her heart, always in her heart, whispered the thought
this cannot be.

This cannot be.

She reached up to give Nutmeg a scratch. “I am a fool.”

“No.” He dropped to one knee before her, startling Nutmeg into dashing away again. “He played it masterfully. You had no reason to think he’d concoct such an elaborate lie.”

Colin was being kind. She had every reason to disbelieve Lord William Caddell. The story was more preposterous than any that Maguire Mudman could come up with. But she’d been blinded by the one part of her that
wanted
it to be true—the part of her that ached for a loving mother, a kind father, siblings to share a life with, escape from the veil or marriage to the butcher’s son.

She couldn’t look at Colin. “How can you be sure he’s lying?”

“There are many attendants in a highborn lady’s birthing chamber, especially upon the birth of the first heir. Among them are the unnoticed, like young Irish servants.” He gave her a half-smile. “Some were MacEgans.”

“Oh.”

“And that so-called midwife,” he said, shrugging. “Sometimes it takes one traveling player to recognize another.”

“I should have seen through him when he first spoke to me—”

“Your innocence saved you. Once Caddell got you away from that crowd, he must have seen that you weren’t play-acting. I don’t know why else he’d keep up the pretense all this time.”

“I thought he was protecting my honor.” She remembered the sound of the bolt sliding on her bedroom door. “But really, I was his prisoner.”

“I spent every night of these past weeks wanting to storm that castle and get you out.” Colin’s grip tightened. “Tell me he didn’t touch you.”

“Caddell came to my room every evening,” she explained, “but only to give me lectures on how a lady should behave.”

Perplexity wrinkled his brow. “No more?”

“No more.” She rubbed her head as she tried to make sense of why this was happening. “If he took me prisoner … it must be because he knew about us, he knew he could use me against you.”

“The messenger on the road,” he said, slipping onto the bench beside her. “He must have caught a glimpse of me—of us—and then sent spies to observe.”

Her heart tripped. “Then he knew you were in the hall that same night.”

“Yes.”

“He must have known,” she continued, “that stepping close to me would protect him, that you wouldn’t kill him if he stood so near.”

“Yes.”

“Why the ruse?” She shook her head, struggling to understand. “If he knew you were here, why didn’t he just send men to seize you in the town, or in the castle?”

“He’s up to something.” Colin stood up and began pacing in the rushes, his mind turning. “Did he truly introduce you to Sir Maurice?”

“On the second or third day of my stay. He’s introduced me to many other of his vassals as well.”

“So he’s maintaining the ruse that you’re his daughter.”

“He grows irritated with me,” she said. “He always looks at me as if I’m a squirrel that won’t dance to his tune.”

“His men melted into the woods when my men attacked. They hardly put up a fight when I took this castle.” Colin rubbed his jaw, trying to figure out the mystery. “For years my father looked upon this occupied castle and wanted it more than anything else. This was the heart of MacEgan lands, the jewel in the crown. It burned in his gut that it had been lost.” Colin turned an eye on her. “Letting you come to me must be part of his plan.”

“He made sure I was listening when he mentioned you at the dinner table.” She felt very small, very insignificant, very stupid. “He must have hoped—or guessed—that I would leave. That I would seek you out.”

“He’s crafty as a fox, Will Caddell. My cousin keeps saying that the Englishman has some grand plan to herd us into a slaughter. But if there’s a grand plan that includes giving up this castle, I can’t make any sense of it.”

Colin kept pacing, drawing circles in the rushes with his boot, his mind very far away. Maura felt very small, and no smarter for her travels than the day she stepped out of the gates of the convent.

“Lady Sabine was right,” she said softly. “The world
is
dangerous, and full of trickery.”

“There’s a reason at the bottom of every trick.” Colin stopped in the middle of the hall. “But you can’t always know it unless you play along.”

“Play along?”

He approached, and the look in his eye made the back of her knees soften like butter in the summer sun.

“A captured daughter,” he said softly, “will fetch a fine, high ransom.”

Ransom.

She tried to focus on his familiar blue eyes, the ones that so often had crinkled in laughter, and ignore the gleam of the chain mail on his shoulders.

“You won’t send me back,” she said, her voice quivering. “You won’t make me his prisoner again.”