The Irish Warrior (27 page)

Finian escorted her to the king, not looking back to see if she followed. He could hear her well enough, and he couldn't show her his eyes just now or else the thin screen of control he'd erected by dint of controlled fury would be kicked to the ground, and he'd be naked before her, his every yearning and shame exposed.

He showed her to the king's bedchamber, which, like most bedchambers, doubled as an office. The antechamber held a fireplace, a cistern, a small table, and a few low benches. Finian invited her to sit, which she declined, invited her to eat, which she declined, and offered drink, which she vehemently declined.

“Whisky?” Finian suggested, trying to offer something that would alleviate a bit of the furious hurt in her eyes. Or perhaps lessen the blows to come.

She aimed him a withering look. “I think not.”

“'Twill go easier…” He didn't finish. Senna did not take lesser blows. She stood straight, with that tilt of her chin, and got punched back by the waves of the world. And every time, she stood up again. Senna would not appreciate a ‘lessening.' He could not change that. He did not want to.

The king was sitting back, watching their charged interchange. Abruptly, he leaned forward. “Why do you not sit with me, lass?”

She angled her chin up, lifted her skirts and sat. Finian shook his head.

“How much do you know about the Wishmés, Mistress Senna?”

“Nothing a'tall. As I told
Lord Finian.
And Rardove.” She folded her hands primly on the table in front of her. She looked as prim as an iridescent dragonfly. “No one seems to believe me.”

“I believe you,” Finian gruffed. The king lifted an eyebrow and he subsided. He propped his shoulder on the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. Senna glared at him.

The king handed the dye manual to Finian. Senna was glowering directly into his eyes though, boring into them with silent fury, so she didn't witness the transfer.

“You wouldn't be able to decipher this, then, would you, lass?” the king prompted.

It took her a while to drag her enmity from Finian's eyes. The king pointed to the manual. She saw the pages and visibly started. She got to her feet in shock.

“Why, that is my mother's.” Finian let the pages go when she reached for them. “Where did you get this? 'Tis Mama's.”

“I know,” he said thickly.

She looked up at him, her face pale amid her dark flaming hair. “You know? Where did you get it?”

“From my conduit. Red.”

If possible, she looked even more stunned. Her free hand swung out slowly, as if it were moving through water, until it made contact with the table behind her.

“Red?” she whispered. “But…that's my father.”

 

“He was a spy,” Finian explained.

They were standing, he by the wall, Senna by the table, where she'd been when the realizations hit her. The king had left them alone. The room was small, but warm. That is all Senna was certain she knew in the whole world, except that Finian was holding her gaze and not letting go.

“Your father was an Englishman,” he said in that solid, earthy voice, slowing her down, pulling her back when her body was ready to float away, “but also a spy against King Edward and his ambitions. And,” he added, “I suspect your mother was, too.”

“Spies,” she whispered, unable to acclimate to this knowledge in a normal tone of voice. This required whispers, like all secrets do. “I don't understand.”

But she did. Some small, young part of herself understood exactly what he meant. Too many nights trying not to listen to arguments that didn't sound like debtors' arguments. Too many explanations that never came. Too many Scotsmen.

“My mother was Scottish,” she said, as if that would explain…what? “Her mother—my grandmother—was sent to marry an Englishman. The family had just enough noble blood to be commanded about suchly. But my mother always called on Scottish saints to reprimand me, and claimed Scotland as her own. And my father—” Her voice broke. “My father always said, ‘As falls Elisabeth, so fall I.'”

Her eyes filled with tears. Finian's face shimmered through them. “Why did they not tell me?”

He watched her for a long minute before speaking, and while she waited, her heart slowed. She felt calmer. “Perhaps they didn't want you to get caught up in it,” he finally suggested. “Get hurt by it.”

“Oh,” she said sadly, “I do think that has already occurred.”

“Yer mam is dead, Senna.”

“I assumed as much,” she said with as much cold dignity as she could wrap around her. No tears. Not for being left, never again. “Twenty years have passed. 'Tis quite reasonable to assume she might have—”

“She died trying to escape.”

She looked away. Angled her eyes so they regarded the one part of the floor uncovered by rushes, underneath the king's chair, where he'd kicked them away. The stone looked cold.

“Escape from where?”

“From Rardove.”

She wobbled. Her knees went weak. A dull thrumming started in her head. She started sliding down the wall. Her spine bumped over the uneven rocks. “No. Not Rardove.”

“Aye. Rardove.” He pulled her to her feet, brushed her bottom off for her, and sat her on a bench. “And now, mayhap because of what your mother and father did, the king of England is marching for Ireland.”

She looked up, startled. “King Edward? Marching here?”

“Aye.”

“That's
madness,
” she spat, for some reason furious. “Cannot one war be enough for him?”

“Not when those are at stake.” Finian indicated the manual. “The secret of the Wishmés. Look.”

She shook her head.

“Senna, this ye can't avoid simply because ye do not wish it to be.”

She shook her head again, but Finian touched her chin and stopped the movement. He held out the book.

“Look.”

She took the book.

It looked just like the drawings on the sheaves she'd received from an unknown Scottish uncle on her fifteenth birthday, on the occasion of her betrothal.

And then, of course, she'd seen the book itself once, too, in her father's hand, as he hurried down the stairs one night to join the arguing men.

She turned the pages slowly, recognizing her mother's familiar hand in both the letters and the sketchings. She turned the pages slowly, then faster and faster. A shiver skimmed over her. The pictures were highly erotic. The formulas, the measurements and alignments, were remarkable. The computations vaguely terrifying.

She forced herself to look up. “What is this?” It was a flat query, like her heart felt right now. Stomped on and flattened.

“That is the secret of the Wishmés. They are weapons. They explode.”

“Oh, dear God.” Slowly realizations settled down on her, like rings on a tree, aging her. “No. My mother did not make weapons.”

Finian was relentless though, pushing past her denial. “She did. She rediscovered the ancient formulas and then she wrote them down. And she did this, too.”

He handed her a child's tunic. Her fingers slid over it, touching what she could hardly see. It shimmered and almost flickered in his hand. Her heart was hammering in her chest and she had no idea why. “What is that?”

“Perfect camouflage.”

“God save us,” she whispered, touching it. “How?”

“With a certain dye. In a certain weave. On a certain wool.”

Her fingers started shaking. “On
my
wool.”

“Aye. Yours. Yer mother started the strain, did she not?”

She shook her head and found she couldn't stop. She just kept shaking it, back and forth. “No. She would not do that. My mother would not make weapons—”

“The explosions the Wishmés produce can bring down a castle, Senna. And that?” He gestured to the fabric. “With that, ye could get
inside
any castle. Anytime, anywhere. Anyone.”

She stared at the tunic, then briefly touched the edge. “It looks like a child's tunic,” she said dully.

Finian crouched in front of her and rested his fingertips on the top of her knee, a light, steady touch. “I thought the same. 'Twas for a little girl.” He closed his fingers around her hand. “Would keep her safe as anything.”

“Oh,” she whispered with a watery laugh. “I suspect her coming home might have done that better.” She swallowed and shifted on the small bench. “And Sir Gera—my father?”

“I knew him as Red.”

She looked at him bleakly. “So did we.”

The rushes under her feet were crunchy. The weight of Finian's hand on her knee was warm and comforting. “Red is the name he used to call my mother. Mama's red hair,” she said, and like that, she was swept up by a vivid memory of her parents, so that every sense was awakened.

They'd been swimming in the pond at twilight, when Senna, four years old, was supposed to be abed. Father sitting on the bank, leaning back on his palms, murmuring something. Her mother smiling and lazily making her way over to him, one pale, graceful arm stretched out in the green water, her long red hair streaming out behind. The world had smelled like roses and moss that night as Senna tiptoed out the back gate, and the white moon rose through the willow tree.

She took a deep breath and let the memory go. It floated away. She was back in a strange room, a hard bench beneath her, Finian's watchful, guarding gaze on her.

He prompted her gently. “Ye said he used to call yer mother Red.”

She nodded. “It became a joke, to call Father that instead. All the Scottish uncles and Mama did so. Father, with his dark locks. What happened to him?” she asked abruptly.

He sat back on his heels, still crouched before her. “Ah, lass. He died.”

She nodded. Of course he'd died. He'd lived a dangerous life, not of dissolution or excess, as she'd thought, but of intrigue and valiant causes, and heartbreak. He was committed to stopping Edward from subsuming his wife's homeland by simply opening his royal mouth and swallowing. Her father had been committed and in love, even after Mama was dead.

“My parents loved each other,” she said dully. All this time, thinking her mother had abandoned them. Had not loved her father. What a shame.

“He wasn't alone, Senna,” Finian said, and his quietly spoken words broke through the ether of her memories. “I was with him at the end.”

Of course Finian was with him. Of course he had stayed. “That is good to know,” she said, hearing the unfamiliar catch in her words.

“He spoke of ye, Senna. The last thing he said was about ye. Told me to keep ye safe. Protect ye above all else.”

She bit her lower lip. And what was she to do with that? It was probably sooth. Why would he want her hurt? He had loved her in his own way, she was certain. But what her parents had had, she now realized, encompassed only them.

After her mother's death, that devotion had gripped her father like an eagle on a fish, with great, curving talons, piercing any attention that wished to wander from this one screaming fact: his wife had been killed.

Of course, she'd been more than wife. Or more than solely a wife. She'd been compatriot, inspiration, spy-lover. How could a child compete with that?

And the one left behind could, she supposed dully, spend the next decades of his life pretending to be something else, letting vengeance and intrigue hold sway, while small children fell off the edge of his particular map, nothing more than sea monsters, while his dead wife, his Jerusalem, was inked at the center of it all.

And how did the sea monsters then decide to care?

“Finian?” she said thickly.

He was still crouched before her, watching her face and waiting. His forearms leaned against the edge of the bench, his palms lightly grasping her hips. One thumb stroked slowly, probably without him even realizing.

“Thank you for not letting my father die alone.”

“Ye're welcome, lass.”

And that released the tears. She leaned forward until her forehead touched his, trying to make the hard bones of him steady her spinning head. Dimly, she heard the door open, then a set of footsteps draw to a halt, but Finian did not move away. His touch helped, but it didn't shut down the waterfall of emotions. And with the cascade of tears came images from her mother's book. They flashed and tumbled through her mind.

As the fragments spun through her thoughts, rotating into position and sinking into her memory, she realized something wasn't right. Or rather, wasn't complete.

She pushed back from Finian. “Let me see that manual.”

He handed it over. She flipped through it, to the end. Then back a few pages, then slowly again, forward to the end.

“What is it?” Finian asked, a note of urgency in his voice tamped down but still audible. “What is wrong?”

She looked up. “This is missing pages.”

“How do ye know?”

She held it out. “See, here. 'Tis torn.”

He ran his thick thumb over the faint, worn edge of a softly torn page.

“How much would that matter?” the king asked from the doorway.

She got to her feet and walked over. She flipped to the end and held the manual open between them. “See these numbers? And this grouping of words and symbols? They are ingredients.”

The king looked at her, then Finian. “I thought you said you knew nothing of dyeing.”

She heard Finian get to his feet. She gave a small shrug. “'Tis true. I've no notion how I know such a thing. I simply…know.”

“'Tis in the blood, legend says.”

Senna sighed deeply. “I am terribly tired of legends and things of the past. I do not know how I know these things. I simply do. And I can assure you the instructions on this page end too abruptly. There are more pages, and they are missing. And the
computare
for this”—she pointed to the shimmering tunic on the bench—“are on those missing pages.”

Finian drew a sharp breath. The king looked at him, then the fur on the sleeves of the king's robe brushed against her arm as he turned to Finian.

“Anyone could have them,” the king said. He started out the door, although Finian did not move. “But it must be someone Red knew well. Assemble a small group of experienced men, Finian, men who know how to keep their heads down and their ears open. We have another contact who might have heard—”

“I know where they are,” Senna said in a clear voice. She felt like a bell ringing Prime. “I know where the missing pages are.”

The king turned back in shock.

“Where?” Finian asked in a terrible, hollow voice.

“Rardove Keep.”

Finian closed his eyes. Senna stared at the wall.

The king said simply, “We have to get them back.”