The Irish Warrior (9 page)

So the Irish dyers had worked their art in peace; but, growing wary, they closed the circle of initiates, allowing fewer and fewer to practice the craft, or even see the color, until finally the eye-shattering indigo was crafted only for the High Kings, only upon their coronation on the rock at Tara, a rare and royal privilege. Over time, the Vikings came, and the Normans, and the secrets were lost.

Until Rardove came. Twenty-one years ago, when Finian was ten, Rardove came and stole everything, including the title—although not the secret—of the Indigo Lands.

And now, for the first time since the Roman Empire fell, word was leaching out again: rumor of the Wishmés and their magnificent, consecrated colors.

So Finian waited to hear the words fall from Senna's lips, seeing the color of blue in his mind's eye. He felt a kinship with her, for her appreciation of their beauty, a feeling of connectedness he had not known for a long time. How would she choose to describe the shade his ancestors created in secret? Glorious? Astonishing, again? Pretty? Simply, ‘blue'?

He did not for a moment expect the word that
did
fall from her lips.

“Lucrative.”

He felt like someone had stomped on his chest. He lay down and shut his eyes. “Go to sleep, Senna.”

Throwing his forearm over his face, he hovered in the familiar state of half repose, half alertness, his mind wandering over paths of the past that were not restful at all.

 

Senna sat at the edge of the ridge. Blue-gray shadows still stretched long, but a russet-gold, grainy dawn light was nudging its way farther into the corners of a small hamlet far below.

She cast a furtive glance over her shoulder. Finian's hands were crossed behind his head, his head resting on his palms. Long black hair spilled out over his wrists and onto the grass. The skin on the underside of his arms was paler than the rest, the faint outline of carved muscles beneath pressed into the silky skin. His long body stretched out across the spring grass, his powerful legs crossed at the ankles. His breathing was deep and regular.

She crept closer and lay down, near him but not touching. She cradled her injured hand to her chest by habit more than pain. She put her head on the hard ground and smelled the cool dirt and pale green points of grass. She looked up into the sky and watched the day take its bright, wild shape. It was endless and blue. Mayhap too endless, too blue. Too much for her.

Even so, she was unable to still the excited pounding in her chest.

For the first time in a long time, she
knew
she was alive.

“I will kill her. I will flay her skin into strips and toast them over the fire.”

The steward Pentony watched impassively as Rardove, recovered from his sudden gut affliction, had been on his way out for a morning hunt when the maid brought the news that Senna was neither in her room nor the dye hut. A minute later, the guards from the prison came up as well, holding their bashed heads and groaning.

Rardove had flung his gloves to the ground and taken a few enraged spins around the room, shouting and cursing.

It was still dark inside the hall, a dreary, damp darkness. A thin sheen of moisture smeared itself across everything: musty bits of straw scattered across the floor, wary faces, a hound's glistening black nose, poised quivering in the air as the rumor of violence entered the room.

A faint gray dawn light shouldered its way through the windows slitted high along the walls, but the ashen illumination only accented sullen shadows lurking within the pits of the jagged stone walls. In the fireplace, a fire flared up in occasional bursts of enthusiasm, but even these flashes of brilliance finally succumbed to the raw dampness pervading the hall.

Rardove's roar drew his attention back. “Goddamned
bitch!
”

Pentony's hand surprised him by lifting to scratch at a phantom itch on his scalp, then along his inner arm. He stared down at it as if it were possessed. Restless movement connoted nervousness or agitation, both of which were as foreign to him as naïveté.

He forced his hand to hang at his side, its proper resting place. For nigh on thirty years his body and heart had been frozen, stilled from such dangerous revelations of emotion.

Such efficient invisibility had once allowed him entry into the highest places. Bailiff in the king's service and then cellarer for the abbot of Tewkesbury, the most powerful obedientiary in the abbey, he'd been in charge of the lands revenues and church patronage. He had overseen every aspect of the abbey, from the kitchens to the brewery, from maintenance of the buildings to provisioning of foodstuffs, fuel, and farm stock. All lay brethren, servants and tenants, had come under his direction. All monies were at his discretion.

Both positions had been prestigious and lucrative. His fall from the grace of God—or at least the prior of Tewkesbury—had been almost as great as his sin, but he regretted nothing. Certainly not parting company with men of God who wielded their piousness like a weapon.

He glanced down at his wayward hand again. It hung deceptively still, but he could feel the urge toward movement prickling up the inside of his wrist.

“And goddamned Irish
savages!
”

The baron's bellow bounced around the room, followed by a wine goblet. Pentony watched as he turned his rage on a more likely and responsive victim, wincing as Rardove's boot thudded against a dog's ribs. The hound leapt up, yipping, then slunk away. Another pewter cup bounced off the wall and sounded a flat
clang
before it fell as quiet as the dog.

“As God is my witness,” Rardove said into the sudden silence, “I will kill them both.”

“My lord,” Pentony murmured, “I have readied the men to search.”

Rardove barked in harsh laughter. “How in God's name did she do it?”

“The men are at the gate, ready to be gone on your command.”

“She is a goddamned
sorceress,
I tell you, bedeviling plans years in the making. I had O'Melaghlin right here”—an angry flick of his finger indicated the cellars below—“and I would have had that damned recipe. Now he's gone, and he's got my dye witch.” Rardove cursed again. “Search her room. And send a contingent north to find them.”

Pentony took a step forward. “They may not be going north, my lord.”

Rardove rounded on him. “Not go north?” he shouted. “In which direction does the Irish king O'Fáil live? His foster father?”

“North.” Pentony said it flatly, as if not a single emotion was present. Which none was. It had been too long. “I am simply saying we ought not to underestimate O'Melaghlin. If you send a few men sou—”

“And where did they find that scrap of O'Melaghlin's tunic?”

“Along the Bhean River. To the north.”

“Exactly. O'Melaghlin is chief councilor to the O'Fáil. He's their spy, their negotiator, their goddamned battle commander. He's their
fycking head.
” He flung his gloves on the table and snatched up a jug of wine. “He went north.”

He didn't even bother pouring it into a cup, just lifted the fluted lip to his mouth and drank, then slammed the vessel back on the table.

“And if he finds out who Senna is, that she is the last in the line of Wishmé dyers…?” He smashed his fist on the table again, making plates skip. “And if King Edward finds out?”

This was asked rhetorically, Pentony assumed, or else he'd have given a reply. But they both knew quite well what the king of England would think if he found out Rardove had been keeping secrets. That he'd found a dye witch and was trying to make the recipe without the king's knowledge.

Seeing as Edward had granted Rardove the land twenty-one years ago for this express purpose, on Rardove's express promises, he would not be pleased at all.

Rardove never should have let King Edward in on the secrets of the dyes. Royalty was best enjoyed from a distance.

But then, without the promise of the dyes, King Edward would never have granted Rardove the land in the first place, not after the renegade Rardove had marched in and seized the land without royal permission. The promise of perfecting the Wishmés into weapons was the only thing that stayed the king's hand and invested Rardove with the barony.

Now matters had turned desperate for the English king. The Scots were showing their rebellious side. Banding together, signing treaties of mutual aid with France, they were all but declaring war. The old inducements—burning, plunder, swords through the heart—all seemed to have lost their persuasive power. Edward needed a special weapon to herd the Scots back into the fold. Rardove was to give it to him.

The Wishmés were a battle commander's alchemy. Awe-inducing in shade, they were also violently incendiary. Powdered and heated, they created an explosion that could burn so fast and hot it would incinerate a man. Or a building.

Or…Scotland.

There was no way Edward could win a long-lasting military victory against the Scots, not if the barbarians kept fleeing to the hills at the first sign of pitched battle.

But he
could
start blowing things up, in small batches, things like recalcitrant nobles and native aspirants to the throne of Scotland.

He would not be pleased to discover Rardove was trying to perfect them as a weapon behind his back.

“What do we know about that other contingent of Irish?” Rardove snapped. “The one we captured?”

“He broke,” Pentony reported with distaste and, to his surprise, realized he didn't know if the distaste was more for the breaking, or the means by which he was broken. “It seems that while you were…meeting…with O'Melaghlin, he was on his way to a rendezvous with Red. The outlaw.”

Rardove's head snapped around. “While O'Melaghlin was here.”

“Drawing your eye.”

“You are suggesting he was here to
distract
me?”

Pentony shrugged. “Perhaps.”

Rardove emitted another series of foul curses, then turned to the matter at hand. “The Irish were to meet with the spy-bastard Red? About what?”

Pentony didn't bother to comment. How could they possibly know the purpose of the meeting? And in any event, Red was not the outlaw's true name. No one knew that. But Red's intrigues were renowned, for all that they usually concerned faraway Scotland and England, and the man had been like a phantom for almost twenty years, foiling plans of King Edward in his campaigns against the Scots. Now Red was turning his attention to Ireland? That could not be good. For King Edward.

“Where were they to meet?”

Pentony shook his head in reply. “We do not know. The Irishman died before he could say.”

Rardove shook his head, perhaps disgusted at his soldiers' inability to moderate the severity of their beatings with more finesse. He snapped his gaze to Pentony. “What are you waiting for? Send for Balffe. He goes north, to capture O'Melaghlin and the bitch.”

The soldiers were gone within twenty minutes, draped in armor and swords and their lord's rage. The huge, hulking figure of Balffe, riding at their head, was the last thing Pentony saw as he watched from atop the gate tower.

Thick-quilted gambesons and a layer of boiled bull-hide provided the first layer of protective bulk for the men. Then came the mail hauberks, small, overlapping iron rings that covered the torso and hung to midthigh, slit along the sides to allow for movement. Overlaying this they wore steel breast-plates and backplates, riveted in place. Steel helms covered their heads, saving for the ominous slitted eye openings. Steel greaves and poleyns for covering legs, shins, and feet completed the ensemble.

They were outfitted for war.

Pentony watched until the only upright figures on the landscape were the trees on a distant plain. He wondered what Senna had been wearing when she snuck out of the castle last night.

The gaping tear in her tunic was the first thing Finian noted through his half-opened eyes. The next thing he saw was the rounded tops of her breasts.

She was kneeling beside him, leaning over him, close to his face. Her hair, freed from its braid, tumbled down like a silken, if slightly dirty, curtain. Instinct kicked in and he stretched his arm out, to pull her down.

“Don't you think it's time we start for Dublin?” she asked.

His arm fell away. “What?”

She sat back, knees bent, feet beneath her buttocks. She was bright, her cheeks a bit reddened from the sunshine of the day. “Dublin. Oughtn't we be on our way?”

He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around, getting his bearings. Almost evening, closing in on Vespers. He took a deep breath, yawned, and pushed his fingers through his hair.

“We're not going to Dublin, Senna. I thought I told ye that.”

She gave a clipped nod, as if she were barely up to the task of humoring him. “I recall something of the sort. I thought you were in jest.”

“Is that so? If someone disagrees with ye, they must be joking?”

One pert eyebrow arched up. “When they say ridiculous things, indeed, I suspect a jest.”

He leaned forward until their noses were barely a foot apart. “Listen well then, lass, for 'tis no joke: we're not going to Dublin.”

She practically flung herself backward. “But why not?”

He sat back. “Use yer fine-looking head. Do ye not suspect the king's highway is exactly where Rardove will go looking for ye?”

“Well, I—” she began, then paused. “It might be where he'd look for me, Finian, but do you not think
this
way, deeper into Irish lands, is exactly where he'll go looking for
you?
”

He considered her a moment. “Ye must have been a sore trial to yer mum, Senna,” he said, then lay back down and shut his eyes.

“I was a sore trial to me Da,” she snapped, mimicking his Irish accent.

“We're not going to Dublin.”

“You are serious.”

“As mortal sin.”

She was quiet, but in the ominous way a powerful wind might be, on the other side of a ridge, before it rushed over the top and bent trees beneath its fury.

“My business cannot manage without me,” she warned.

“Then I suppose ye oughtn't have come to Eire.”

He thought if she could have stabbed him in the heart just then, she might have. “I came for business,” she explained icily.

“Ye came for money.”

She sputtered, which he suspected was more due to an overwhelming excess of responses, rather than a lack.

He kept his eyes shut and tried to sleep. Tried to recapture the half-resting state of repose that marked his nights and substituted for sleep.

He'd been up for regular reconnaissance throughout the day, and Senna had been awake, too. He knew, because every time he'd risen, her gaze followed him, although her body never moved, rigid as a post kicked to the ground, arms clamped to her sides. She ought to be tired. But just now, she may as well have been pounding on his chest with her fists, for all that her energy had abated.

He finally sighed. “Ye're like a spring wind, Senna. Ye never stop pushing. We're not going to go tripping down the king's highway to Dublin. Ye're mad to think so.”

“No. I'm mad to have ever believed you.”

“I never said I'd take ye to Dublin.”

“But I asked you to!”

“Och, well, ye ought to have found another guide, then. One more well suited to being ordered about.”

She drew back. “I do not
order about.
”

He watched as she ripped her gaze away and stared across the small clearing, her hands twisting around each other with great, unrelenting pressure. The edges of her palms turned white from it. She suddenly sat forward, her spine rigidly straight.

“I
shall
go to Dublin,” she announced imperiously. “At once.”

“Is that so?”

“'Tis.”

“Ye'll be going alone, then.”

She swallowed but did not shift her gaze away from the no-doubt fascinating profile of a tree trunk. “How much will it cost?”

He gave a short bark of laughter. “What?”

“How much money do you want?”

He sat up slowly. “To take ye to Dublin?”

She gave a clipped nod, still staring away from him. But he stared at her very hard. The back of her hair was starting to glow from the dipping orange sunrays.

“Whatever ye've got, Senna, it would not be enough to make me go to Dublin.” He threw himself down again, coiled anger pushing through him. “English,” he muttered. “And their coin.”

She sighed in a resigned way. He felt hope.

“So be it, Finian,” she said in a reasonable, therefore highly suspect, voice. “I understand your reasons for not taking me. I accept them.”

He examined her more closely. She looked exhausted, like she'd been…escaping from a violent, enraged baron. Her eyes looked wide awake and alert, though. Quite alert. A bit too alert. Hectic, in fact.

“What are ye saying?”

“You cannot take me to Dublin, and I cannot traipse about the Irish countryside. I must get home.”

Indeed, her eyes were far too bright. She was losing her mind.

“Ye've lost yer mind.”

She scowled. “I know where the highway is.”

“Oh, ye do, do ye?”

She nodded. “I have that sort of mind. It remembers things.”

“Oh, aye? And do ye also remember where the quicksand is?”

She looked startled. “Quicksand? I don't believe I encountered quicksand.”

“Och, well, it'll be hard to find then. And the wolf den? Do ye know where that is? And how about Rardove's village, a few miles south, the one you'll pass through when ye're marching down the highway?”

She looked rattled, but determined. “I wasn't going to walk down the middle, waving my arms about,” she said sourly.

He wiped his palms over his face, a few vigorous strokes, to bring blood to his head and help him sort this out. “Senna, ye've lost yer mind.” He got to his feet. “I cannot go to Dublin. And therefore
ye
cannot go to Dublin. And I think ye know that.”

She stared away from him with great purpose.

He sighed. “Ye look determined.”

“A bad habit.”

He leaned his buttocks back against a large rock. It was warm from a day of sunshine, heating the backs of his thighs. “I'd have to bind ye if ye tried, Senna,” he said in a reflective tone, “and that would slow us down considerably.”

The smallest flicker crossed her face. More determination? Laughter? The urge to haul off and hit him? He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, then flung it down.

“Fine, then,” he announced curtly. “Go. The way to Dublin is fair lined with swords. What road does every Saxon knight use? Upon what highway does yer fine king's governor travel? And tell me, which is the easiest road up north? Soldiers, merchants,
cows
travel the road to Dublin, Senna. And the first two would spit and roast a monk as quick as turn ye over for the reward Rardove's sure to put out on ye.”

“They'll never recognize me,” she insisted. “I can blend in.”

He eyed her head skeptically. “With that hair?” Her hand shot up to touch her scalp. “Och, not a bit of it, Senna. That sort of magnificence will mark ye like a scent across the path of a fox. And a ship? Ye think ye'll gain berth on a ship?” He snorted, ignoring the bright pink blush rushing over her cheeks. “Ye'd be raped before ye hit the end of the quay. And anyhow,” he added, more mildly at her shocked gasp, “I like yer company.”

She jerked, startled, he was sure, by the rapid succession of compliment, threat, and veiled admission of…something.

“Cannot yer father manage your terribly important business for a bit?” he demanded irritably, to shove off the…something.

“
I
manage the business.”

“Och, ye've made that abundantly clear, lass. And what does yer father do, while ye're managing his business so awfully well?”

“Gamble.”

Finian felt his mouth opening in amazement, not so much from the news, for that was common enough, but from witnessing the brittle pain it nailed onto her spirit like a stake. Her body had gone stiff. Hard, no dents, she suddenly looked impermeable, like stained glass. Many bright colors, all seared in place.

He pursed his lips, then said gently, “Ah, Senna. That bug stings hard.”

A blindingly bright smile ripped up the corners of her lips. “I know.”

His heart did a little tumble. She was a woman-child, and whatever hurts she spoke of now, he was certain many more lurked in the shadows of her heart. Every penny that came in, counted in her silent ledger, must have been a coin measured against the rest of her life.

And her father was a fool.

“Senna,” he said carefully.

Woodenly, she looked over, the edges of her mouth still tipped up in that false smile, like a painted marionette.

“Men are fools,” he said in a low voice. “Ye're to remember that, above all other things.”

She was quiet for a moment; then, to his surprise, she laughed. And such a laugh it was. Quiet. Pretty. Natural.

“Truth, Irishman, I suspected as much,” she said, a smile dipping into her words like an oar, pushing them along. “But 'tis good to have it confirmed by one of their kind.”

Ah, this one was a keeper. For someone.

“I suppose I can spare a few days,” she allowed in a regal tone, as if it were up to her whether they came or went from Dublin. “But I can't spend too much time with you, traipsing about these hills. My reputation, you understand.”

“Before the next full moon, I'll have you bundled on a ship, Senna. My reputation cannot stand the strain of it either. Being seen with an English wool merchant?” He gave a little shudder.

She laughed, but his gaze lingered on her dirty face and limbs, her hair, long free of its confining braid, and her bright, intelligent eyes. A cord of worry unraveled in his heart. This woman had more wits, more bravery, more ingenuity than most battle commanders he knew, yet there appeared to be no one to seek her out, worry about her.

Just someone who, in all likelihood, wanted to kill her right now. And the man who'd abandoned her to him.

And Finian was to sail her away to England? To what end? Her father's home couldn't be an option any longer, not after this escapade. Neither was wandering the Ulster hills for twenty years. Travel, then? To where? With what money?

With no resources, no family to hand, and no connections, she was in a more precarious situation than if she'd stayed in the squalor of Rardove. She belonged nowhere.

Still, he decided as he reached for the leather straps of the bag she'd shoved on his back before leaving the prison, to say she was without resources was to be more foolish than the swiving bastard who had beaten her beautiful and burning body.

“Now, tell me, lass,” he said, hoping to entertain her, whatever was required to keep her smiling, because it was a travesty what someone had allowed to be done to her, so that she could ice over with such chilling efficiency. “What have ye put in these bags ye've made us carry all these miles?”

She moved through the springy turf, her footsteps soft and muted. She stopped in front of him. He looked up, trailing his gaze over her filly-long legs, hugged tight by the hose, over her curved hips, and up the length of untamed curls.

“Rocks?” he asked. “All yer pretty baubles?”

One chestnut eyebrow arched up. Indomitable. He grinned.

“I don't believe in baubles.”

“One doesn't believe in them,” he said, amused. “They simply are.”

Her other brow arched up, as doubtful and pretty as the first. “I wouldn't know.”

He snorted. “I'll show ye, one day. Now, what's this?” He reached in and extracted a lump of putty soap. “Soap?”

She crossed her arms over her chest with one eyebrow hitched a little higher, silently inviting him to continue his survey.

Next out was a pair of breeches and a tunic, and he barked in laughter. “Ye've had us lug around clothes?” He was indescribably touched. “'Tis the epitome of a womanly thing to do,” was all he said.

“A womanly thing?” Her voice was deep with suppressed laughter.

She stood with her hands on her shapely hips, her hair tumbling down around her, and he was shocked at the jolt of commingled desire and tenderness that coursed through him.

She was smiling, her teeth bright white against the dirtiness of her face. But her lips were still rosy and aching to be kissed, her breasts still full, her legs still strong and primed to be wrapped around his hips, he thought helplessly, running his hand through his hair as he bent back to the bag.

“What else might a man have brought?” she pressed.

“Och, mayhap weapons—”

“But I did. Did I not find you your very own sword, master? And a knife for us both, and a belt full of arrows?”

“That ye did.”

“Tell me, then: what else would a proper-thinking man have provisioned for?”

“Foodstuffs,” he suggested, a dark eyebrow arched in vague warning.

“You'll find them there,” she said sweetly, tilting her head to the side. Her tunic slipped farther down her arm.

“But ye might have fit more, had ye not brought the clothes,” he tried to explain.

“Mm.” She tipped her head to the side. The sight of the pale smooth skin of her shoulder drew his eye briefly, then he looked back to her decidedly mischievous eyes. Mischief suited her. “Anything else, man?”

“Nay. A man would be traveling lighter, there's the difference,” he grumbled.

“Then dig farther and see what else a woman brought.” Her voice danced with laughter.