The Irish Warrior (2 page)

But now, even a feigned agreement with the worm would do nothing to save his men, only himself. Which was unacceptable. They would all leave, or none.

But either way, Rardove had best look to his back, for the Irish tribes were going to come down from the hills and besiege his castle from Lent until Yuletide. Then Finian himself would burn it to the ground, if he had to drag his bones out of the grave to do so.

“This shouldn't take long,” Senna de Valery murmured as she passed under the gates of Rardove Keep as the sun went down. It was four days after her ship had dropped anchor in Dublin and left her to her fate.

It had been a slow, long ride and Senna held her silence for most of its length, listening to the sounds of her new world: the host of riders accompanying her, creaking saddles, muffled voices, wind sighing over the Irish earth. Most of her time, though, was spent calculating how much money this business alliance would provide, if it came to fruition.

It was fresh hope, and that was practically priceless.

Forty sheep followed somewhere behind, the first installment of her bleating business proposition. Atop their sharp little hooves, her sheep carried the softest, most absorbent wool west of the Levant, a strain Senna had been perfecting for ten years, ever since she took over operations of the business from her father.

Wool was highly lucrative business. The fate of a dozen lesser crafts and a few minor princedoms rested on its commerce. Entire fairs in France were dedicated to the trade, sending coveted wool from England through the rich southern markets, straight to Jerusalem and beyond.

Senna wanted to nudge her way in to this market. If the wool being moved through the trade halls now fomented merchants' enthusiasm, Senna's strain would make them salivate. It was more absorbent, more silklike, more lightweight than any other wool out there, and required little mordanting to make dyes take.

She knew she had something special with her stinky, furry little sheep. She was simply running out of coin.

Rardove could give it to her. He had money that could save the business, the one Senna had spent the last ten years building up, while her father recklessly, relentlessly, inexhaustibly, gambled it away.

She stared hard ahead, trying to pierce the evening mists, eager for her first glance of Rardove Keep. Such purposeful peering had the added benefit of distracting her from the stench rising from her escort of burly, damp, leather-clad riders.

“Are the mists always so thick?” she asked the closest rider, pinching her nostrils as she moved closer to hear his reply.

He grunted and snorted back a sneeze. Or perhaps he said, “Most there's 'bout.” Either reply was equally illuminating.

Senna lifted her eyebrows and said “Ahh,” in a bright, cheerful voice, then reined a few paces upwind.

She could feel the eyes of the burliest soldier boring into her back. Balffe was his name, the captain of Rardove's guard. A block-chested warrior with a face like old sin, he hadn't taken his eyes off her for two days. And it wasn't leering, either; it was more like loathing, which was ridiculous, because she'd done nothing to him.

Yet.
She passed him an evil glare over her shoulder. He glared back.

Never mind the soldiers. She turned forward. Lord Rardove was the only one who mattered. It was of no account that she'd heard he was lordly in his manner or fair as an angel in his face, because she wasn't in the market for a husband. She was in the market for a market.

As they drew near Rardove Castle, wraithlike villages began revealing themselves through the fog, first as pale splotches through the mist, then as dark splotches upon the earth. Small, huddling huts and waterlogged fields bespoke poverty, as did the thin villagers who stared sullenly as they passed.

She began immediately estimating the number of villagers per wattle-and-daub hut, calculating how much fatter and richer they would be if her scheme was successful. They might even become prosperous. She wished she had her abacus to hand. It was so much easier to tally numbers with the device.

It was so much easier to tally numbers than to calculate the goodness of building an alliance with a man who thought it wise to starve the people who fed him.

The horses' legs moved through low-lying evening mists as they passed under the portcullis into the outer bailey. The air was cool. Sunset flamed in fiery red sweeps across the horizon. Through the glaring haze, all she could discern was the single spike of the castle's tower and the offal dripping down the keep walls from the privy chutes.

As they passed under the gate, shouts rose from one of the dilapidated huts, followed by the sound of fists hitting flesh.

Well. First impressions can be deceiving, she reminded herself, nose pinched firmly in her veil, and she was determined to have this be successful. Get the contracts, build the flock, and she would be able to sustain herself. Never to rely on anyone else's inabilities again.

“A vision of my lord's justice, my lady,” announced the knight at her side.

She pulled her mind from its reverie and glanced up to behold a gallows. It took a moment to comprehend what she was seeing: a dog dangling from the end of a rope.

Her mouth dropped open. “My lord wreaks justice on
dogs?
” she whispered in horror, and crossed herself.

The soldier looked at her in confusion. “Lord Rardove stands yonder.” He pointed to a broad-shouldered, blond-haired giant of a knight who stood gleaming in the setting golden light.

Wrenching her horrified gaze away, Senna looked to the condemned man standing beside him. His head was up, his face expressionless, next in line for the noose. She stared into his eyes and knew, with utter certainty, he was innocent of any crime.

Turning back to her prospective business partner's glittering eyes, Senna saw he knew it, too.

Her hand shot into the air. She pushed herself up in her stirrups, about to call out. The soldier at her side smacked her arm back down.

“Do not,” he snapped,
“interrupt.”

A shiver of coldness unfurled inside her body, a thin banner of fear. She lifted her chin as they clopped dully across the cobbles and under the gate to the crumbling inner bailey. She barely noticed being helped out of the saddle and propelled toward the mossy round tower.

“Rardove Keep, my lady,” said the knight as he escorted her up the covered stairwell.

“Yes, I see,” she murmured as he ushered her over the threshold into a small antechamber. A maid hurried up. It was dim inside, damp and echoing. Cold. A long, shadowed corridor stretched away into the distance. There might be anything at the end. Kitchens. More stairs. A dragon.

Swallowing thickly, Senna fumbled with the brooch fastening her cloak.

“Welcome to Rardove Keep, my lady.”

She jerked her head back up at the sound of the voice.

“I am John Pentony, Lord Rardove's seneschal.”

Shoving back the hood of her cape, she peered through the dim light to find the speaker. Tall, thin, and gaunt, he was a ghostly, balding figure with almost lidless eyes, moving toward her.

She tried to step forward, but her feet were rooted to the ground, her tongue to the roof of her mouth. He pierced her with an unreadable gaze, then a smile creaked over his face, like a hinge unused to the movement. The maid blinked, her fingers frozen in a nervous twist before her waist. The jagged smile stayed on the seneschal's face and for half a minute they all stood, staring in silence.

Then his cold eyes marked a slow slice downward to the maid. She half curtsied and slipped between him and the doorframe. “I'll see to your rooms, mistress,” she whispered.

The steward's eyes were washed of emotion as he turned back. “We are pleased you have arrived.”

“Yes, I—I thank you.” She flicked her gaze around the now empty hall. “We?”

The steward paused. “Your arrival was earlier than expected.”

“Oh, well, not so early as to miss…” She faltered. “To miss what I saw at the gallows.”

Empty, ashen eyes appraised her, level and flintlike. “They were Irish rebels, my lady.”

“The dog?” she queried sharply, against her much better judgment. “The dog was an Irish rebel? He looked more Welsh to me.”

One almost invisible eyebrow arched up, forming a ladder of small, upside-down crescent moon shapes across the steward's high, smooth forehead. Then he looked over her shoulder and nodded at someone or something in the shadows behind her.

A huge mastiff, Senna imagined glumly, growling and slathering, waiting for the newest arrival to step wrongly and be thrown to him for dinner. That shouldn't take long.

A stone stairway disappeared into the gloomy distance behind Pentony's angular figure. Through the gray miasma of smoke and stale air hovering in the hall, the maid was returning, her slim shoulders pushing through the fog. In truth, the castle was a blurry echo of energy, reverberating in dim, cold pulses.

She shook off a shiver and turned back. “Where will I be meeting with Lord Rardove?” she asked briskly. “I have the account books here.” She indicated a small chest by her feet, which the soldier had carried in.

“Lord Rardove asked that you be shown directly to the mollusk fields.”

She drew back. “To the
what?
” She'd heard exactly what he said.

“The mollusk fields. The beaches.”

“I know nothing about mollusks. Or their beaches.” Which wasn't precisely true. Or true at all.

He regarded her somberly. “They're where the mollusks live.”

“Why ought I visit them?”

Her high-pitched, startled responses finally gave the wraith-steward pause. “We were under the impression you knew something of dyeing, my lady.”

She clutched her fingers to her collar. Another opening closed off. “I am here to discuss a joint venture in wool. I know nothing of dyeing,” she assured him, in what she hoped were firm tones. Convincing tones.

“And yet, your mother—”

“I am nothing like my mother,” she said sharply. “I know nothing of dyers or dye making.” My, she was telling a lot of lies of a sudden.

Pentony's figure, already freed from excess movement, stilled further. “I will inform my lord of that.”

“Please do,” Senna replied in her haughtiest tone, perfected in dozens—nay, hundreds—of meetings with merchants and shippers and abbots of fair-towns. In general, it was intended to subdue anyone thinking bargaining with a woman meant easy terms. In this case, it hid belly-chilling fear.

Although why made no sense. She'd made no mention of being a dyer. Heaven forbid. Hard to believe anyone even knew that remote history.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with her. This was a business arrangement about wool. It had nothing to do with smelly little shellfish that, if crushed and mixed just so, by a true craftswoman, could create the most astonishing, wondrous shade of indigo—

Nothing whatsoever to do with her.

“Tell Mary”—Pentony's gaze indicated the trembling maidservant—“or myself of any needs you have.”

With another slight bow, he turned to leave.

“And Lord Rardove…?” she couldn't help asking, hating the quiver in her voice.

Angular ashen eyes glanced back to her, containing the expected chill. It was the faint glimmer of a genuine smile that surprised her.

“You will no doubt be joyful to hear he is to return soon.”

The enigmatic Pentony left, cricking his neck to pass under the low archway, and Senna let the maid hurry her out a far door. She barely paid attention, instead enjoying a few moments of pointless rumination about Rardove's apparent proclivities for torture and very thin attendants, and what that might mean for her.

And the unsettling knowledge that someone thought she knew something of dye making.

They reached a small building.

She had her life's mission, and it was not about getting her skin discolored. It was not about coming in after days spent in a dye hut, sniffing out the trail of some new concoction that would create green the shade of ice, or a new red the hue of hot blood, with hair wild, huge smiles, and hugs and—

Nothing whatsoever to do with her. That was her mother's mad passion. Not hers. Senna had no passions. She had a business.

“The dye hut, my lady,” the maid said, and swung a door open.

Senna came out of her reverie with a start. “Oh, no. I am not—I cannot—”

She froze and looked around her, peering at the trappings of a nightmare.

The room was large and essentially empty but for one long wooden board laid across three trestles, creating a table like that in a great hall. Only this one didn't have trenchers and saltcellars on it. It had vessels and pots filled with bugs and mosses and drying seaweed.

Tall, narrow urns were scattered around the room beside squat, tublike clay containers, filled with dried flower blossoms and mosses—lichens picked gently off trees, their long spindly fingers stretching up over the lip of the urns. Roots. Tiny bugs, died and dried. Crushed shells. Light gray iron salts and brick red madder. Scales and sieves, and mortars for grinding. Only these did not grind flour. They were for making dyes.

Senna backed away, her hand at her throat. The room smelled like an old summer memory, rustling-soft and comforting. Potent, like garlic cooked too long at the bottom of an iron pot. Memories of Mama at her work, crafting dyes, but always a soft smile for Senna whenever she crept in to sit beside her. Mama's hair, braid coming loose and trailing down her back like a red stream, her cool hand on Senna's small, hot head.

Senna's breath came short and clipped, little choppy waves overtop an ocean of awfulness.

Her hand went unconsciously to the small, loose pages tucked into a pouch at her side. The only thing left of her mother's, this packet of letters. Senna had given up trying to recall her mother—given up wanting to—twenty years earlier, at the moment she'd understood what had happened: she'd been abandoned.

It beggared the imagination, then, the cost of understanding why these penned notes and sketches of her mother's were the only things she'd brought with her. And the abacus, of course.
That
held no surprises.

It struck Senna now that perhaps she ought not to have sent her small, armed escort back to England. But it might take weeks, a month, to complete the arrangements with Rardove, and she paid by the day for such men. She'd not even brought a maid; but then, that was because she didn't have one. Not anymore.

Even so, what good could her small escort have done? How many soldiers had she seen patrolling the walls? Far too many to resist whatever Rardove might wish to do.

Do not be foolish,
she chastised herself. Foolish to think Rardove would endanger this highly lucrative business venture. The trunk of gold and silver coins she'd espied under the trestle table was not so valuable as the deal she was offering him: wool.

Still, such logic did little to allay the anxiety crawling through her belly. She started gnawing on her fingernails, her mind engaged in terrified pirouettes.

“Mistress Senna?”

She spun to the door, teeth at her thumbnail.

“Lord Rardove has returned. He wishes to see you in the hall.”

Her hand fell limply to her side.

 

Muted revelry drifted up to the small bedchamber Senna had been shown to. A small, thinly cushioned bed mattress hung by straps of leather from the aging bedposts, for support. Two armless chairs, a table and a fireplace bespoke comfort, but in reality it was a small, unkempt room smelling faintly of rot.

This would not be her room for long, so it hardly mattered. She took a deep breath and ran her hand over her tunic. It was dark green with a mist green overtunic, designed to fit her upper body snugly. Ten years old, it had been worn for every contract signing she'd done in that time, and was starting to show the strain. The elbows were worn and the stitching at the waist and wrists badly frayed. Embroidery of pale hues bound the worst offenders, but still, it was old. Plain. Perfect.

A wave of raucous laughter came rolling up the stairs. Bawdy curses rode within like flotsam. “Are they always so…jubilant?”

The maid met her eyes. “Always, miss.”

The maid stitched the thin sleeves tight, then pinned her hair up, creating a soft but complicated pile atop her head. She draped a veil of the palest green over the concoction and corded it with a slender silver circlet, and they stared together at Senna's dull reflection in a small, polished metal handheld mirror.

“You look as fine as a queen,” avowed the maid, then added, a bit less firmly, “if you are a bit pale.”

“I am as wan as an undyed tablecloth,” Senna agreed sourly.

No matter her looks. This was about business. And that is what she did best.

She picked up the most recent ledger of accounts, cradled it in her arm like a babe, and swept down to the great hall, ignoring the way her breath came speeding out in unsteady little gusts. She had a great deal of experience keeping such panic at bay. She would do so now as well. Everything was manageable, given time.

She lifted her chin, crossed the threshold of the riotous hall, and froze like ice.

The room was smoky and crowded. A burst of laughter exploded from one of the crowded tables. A barely clad woman tumbled off a soldier's lap and the drunken group roared again. Arcs of mead curled into the air as their tankards crashed down on the rough-hewn tabletops. One of the coarse, leather-clad barbarians spit something wet and copious into the rushes, then leaned down to haul the woman up by her elbow.

Senna sucked in a breath. Numbers. Think of numbers. The number of coins Rardove was offering (a thousand French
livres
). The number of months left to pay off her shipping debts (not a one). The number of years she'd waited in an empty hall for someone, anyone, to walk through it and save her.

To her relief, a knight approached and, extending his arm, nodded toward the dais. Curious but detached faces watched, and the hum of activity dimmed as she passed. Blanching under the unfamiliar scrutiny, her step faltered. Angry with herself, she jerked on the arm imprisoned in her escort's grip, digging his ribs in the process. The knight grunted and released her.

Lord Rardove stood talking with his men at the far end of the dais. Even facing away, he was an imposing figure. Tall and wide-shouldered, he wore a midnight blue shirt and chausses that burned a dark background against his blood red tunic: the colors of Rardove. One hand went to the sword belted at his waist, toying idly with the hilt. Rardove might be nearing fifty, but any gray hairs were undetectable amidst the blond. He looked every inch the warrior lord.

She swallowed a ball of fear. Perhaps it was the Irish warriors shackled on the floor in front of the dais that made him puff out his chest and strut so. Please, God, let it not be for her.

Her nerve liquefied in her gut at the exact moment Rardove turned to her.

“Mistress Senna,” was all he said, and his gaze held hers for half a moment, in a perfectly civil pause. But to Senna, it felt as if he were ripping apart her gown, assessing her like a mount, deciding if she was worth the cost.

Then a smile cracked the surface of his handsome face, and it was as if a window had splintered. He went into motion, crossing the dais.

“My deepest apologies I could not greet you myself earlier,” he said, his voice rich and low with chivalrous smoothness. He took her fingertips. “I shall have to make it up to you.”

She fought the crazed urge to slip her hand free and run screaming from the room. “There is no need, my lord,” she murmured.

“I hope you have been made comfortable.” He released her fingers. “Your trip was pleasant?”

“Quite.” She tried to smile back. “The mists are thick.”

He nodded. “Ireland.” He spread out his hands, palms up. The smallest smudge marred his broad hands. It was dark red. Like dried blood. “Ireland holds many things behind a veil.”

Her smile became more genuine. If he had the sensitivity to speak suchly, mayhap 'twas not all bad. Mayhap the Irishry
were
rebels, as Pentony said, unlawfully defying their overlord. Mayhap she could engage in business with this man without too much trouble—

“I hear you do not wish to see the mollusks.”

Her smile faltered. “Nay, my lord. 'Tis just, I do not know that business.”

“Is it not yours?”

Her smile collapsed entirely. “No, my lord.”

Rardove said nothing.

“I deal in wool.”

“Oh, I am interested in your wool, Senna. Quite. Exceedingly.”

No sense of relief followed these softly spoken words. Quite the opposite: a shiver walked down her spine. So, he was a harrier, was he? One who preyed on smaller creatures. She had had ample experience with such men. Squaring her shoulders, she said firmly, “Well good, my lord. Just so we understand, then. I deal in wool. Not dyes.”

“That is too bad, Senna. For you.”

“My lord?”

“I need a dye-witch.”