Deception's Princess (Princesses of Myth) (31 page)

“You’d better hurry if you want to see the birth, Lady Maeve. Cera says they’re coming
really
fast.” She turned to leave, taking the lamp with her.

“Hey! Wait! I can’t dress in the dark,” I exclaimed.

“Oh?” She blinked and yawned, rubbing her eyes. “Right … sorry.”

I didn’t waste time picking and choosing what to wear. I laid hands on the nearest piece of cloth big enough to cover my
body, stuck a few strategic brooches through the material, and was ready to go. Sabha goggled at the weird picture I made.

“You’re only wearing a cloak?”

“The twins won’t care,” I replied, and off we went.

We ran past Father, seated by the hearth with some of his men. He looked deeply worried, but he smiled wistfully and held out his arms when he saw me.

“Sit with me, my spark,” he pleaded. “Keep me company while we wait to hear how your mother fares.”

“I can’t, Father,” I called over one shoulder. “She wants me with her.”

“But I
need
you with me!” he cried plaintively as I slipped past the door hide and into their chamber.

Lady Íde caught me as I darted in. The room was aglow with many lamps. The smell of burning fat blended sickeningly with the smells of sweat and blood. I tried to push past Mother’s friend, but she held me tightly and refused to budge.

“Steady, child,” she said. “There’s not a lot of space in here.”

“But I want to help.”

“Then you should have come sooner. It’s over.”

I stared at Lady Íde, my whole body suddenly icy with dread. It took me an agonizing moment before I realized her face was serene.

“Oh my, I’ve frightened you. Forgive me.” She released her hold and lovingly tucked back my sleep-tousled curls. “When I said it’s over, I only meant that the babies have been born. Our women are getting them cleaned up and warmly wrapped while Cera looks after your mother. I don’t think any of us expected them to be born
that
fast.” She chuckled. “There’s
nothing here for you to do, unless you’d like to go tell Lord Eochu that Cloithfinn and the babies are all alive, all well.”

“All boys.” Mother’s weary, happy voice came from behind Lady Íde. “Come here, my dearest. See your new brothers.”

Cera was right about Mother giving birth early, but both she and Mother were wrong about how many babies would be born: there were three.

When I carried that news to Father, his roar of joy was so loud it felt as though he’d made the walls of the great house shake. His men joined in until our home held the din of a pitched battle, as deafening as if we were surrounded by horses galloping, chariots rumbling, men beating spears against the rims of their shields, and countless, thunderous war cries, enough to deafen the gods.

Lady Íde stormed into the midst of this tumult to scold them all for upsetting the babies. “They’re newborn and small. They need sleep if they’re going to grow healthy!”

“Small?”
Father took her around the waist, tossed her at the rafters, caught her as she fell, and swung her around until both of them staggered, when he finally set her back on her feet. “There’s nothing ‘small’ about my sons. They’ll grow tall and mighty enough to cast shadows across all of Èriu, mark me!”

“Maybe so,” Lady Íde replied, shaking her disheveled gown back into order. “But right now they’d rather have milk and sleep. We’ll want three good, reliable wet nurses here before sunrise. Can your men see to that or are they useless old dogs like you, all howl and no hunt?”

In ordinary circumstances, she would have paid for giving Father so much cheek, regardless of whether she was Mother’s
closest friend. On this night our world was left standing on its head and she could get away with anything. He was too drunk with happiness to care. He dispatched ten men to seek wet nurses, then strode into the chamber where his sons were waiting.

Father named the boys Bres, Nár, and Lothar, but people took to calling them the
findemna
, the fair-haired triplets, because they’d been born with golden hair like Mother’s. They thrived, and by the spring equinox, Cera pronounced them so well bound to life that their delayed birth-feast could be celebrated.

It was a grand event, a festival graced by the presence of many highborn guests, a triumph. Three of our most trusted and competent fosterling girls were given the honor of carrying my brothers around the hall so that all of our guests could admire them. Harpers made the air resound with the exploits of gods and heroes so that the infants might develop a taste for glory to partner their taste for milk. The lavish gifts Father bestowed on everyone attending secured his reputation for generosity. From that day on, any bard who dared to describe Lord Eochu as a tight-fisted king would be hooted down and called seven kinds of liar.

Cera left us a few days after the feast. Father and Mother sent her home with a hundred cows and three gold bracelets. Before she left, she came looking for me.

“I couldn’t go without making peace between us, my lady,” she said.

Her words startled me. “I didn’t know we’d quarreled, Cera.”

“Not a quarrel, but an injustice. I haven’t been fair to you.
I live far from Cruachan, and share a farmstead with my daughter and her husband. Our friends and kin know that I’m Lady Cloithfinn’s chosen midwife, so whenever there’s news of the High King’s family, they see that it reaches me.” She frowned. “They brought me lies about you, Lady Maeve. I don’t know where they found such rubbish, but they stuffed my ears with it before I came here.”

I could guess where the tales had come from. They’d sprouted from Lord Morann’s insinuations and spread like creeping thistle. I could shrug off the lie “Lady Maeve put dead insects in my shoe,” but what if it grew into something like “Lady Maeve put a rotted swan in the stewpot”?

And what if those false, ugly stories flew as far as Avallach? It had been months since Odran left me, but even if we never met again among the living, it was somehow extremely important that he never hear anything shameful about me.

“Never mind that anymore, Cera,” I said with an assurance I didn’t really feel. “The important thing now is that you know who I really am and you’ll speak of it to others.”

She brightened. “I will, my lady. And if I could root out all the falsehoods told about you, I would.”

I took her hands. “They’ll die out soon enough on their own.”

S
PRING MADE OUR
land lovely. My brothers grew bigger and more demanding every day. I tried to do my part in helping Mother raise them, but Father was taking no chances about the boys’ care. He recruited a small army of new servants to support the wet nurses and to aid the ladies already looking after our three princes.

And somehow, in the midst of so much joy, I vanished.

Mother didn’t see me go. She no longer needed to remain abed, but since the boys’ arrival she had become even more withdrawn from me than when she was awaiting their birth. Her waking world centered on them.

If I tried to become a part of it, I was pushed aside. Whenever I volunteered to join the group of women serving my brothers, they shooed me away.

“Thank you, Lady Maeve, but we have all the help we need.”

“This job is for one person, milady.”

“Don’t waste your time with us, dear. Spend it with girls your own age.”

“I’ll send for you if you’re wanted.”

“Haven’t you got something else to do than pester me?”

I tried speaking with Mother about it tactfully, on one of the few occasions that she and I were able to talk alone, but her response wasn’t what I’d hoped for: “What a good sister you are. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to look after the boys, but not now. Your brothers are the long-awaited princes of Connacht. Even if they can’t inherit Eochu’s rank, they can grow up to earn it, and your father will strive to see that they do. The women watching over Nár, Lothar, and Bres know that, so they work to earn royal favor from Eochu now and will eventually work to earn it from the boys themselves. That’s not something most people want to share.”

“They’re jealous, then? Of
me
?”

“Of anyone who might take their reward. Let them be, Maeve. The king already favors you.” She smiled.

How could I tell her that she was wrong? Ever since my brothers’ birth, I had become a phantom to Father. The man who’d implored me to sit with him on the night the boys were born, crying, “But I
need
you with me!” now needed no one but them. He marked every event since their arrival by linking it to one of their
magnificent
accomplishments. When our bard Devnet returned at last from his wanderings, Father said, “Ah yes, he came back on the day Lothar learned how to turn himself onto his stomach. I remember it very well.”

The final stone on the cairn that buried me from sight came when a pair of visitors arrived at Cruachan. I knew
them—young men, minor kings from the south, two of my most ardent pursuers—and braced myself for renewed assaults of courtship.

These never happened. Our guests greeted me politely and then gave all their attention to food, drink, Father, and the boys. One of the young men did make a halfhearted attempt to steal a kiss, but when I refused he didn’t bother making a second attempt. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

Then I realized it wouldn’t matter if I reacted either way. My father had sons to inherit the lordship of his lands, even if none of them ever rose to be High King. I was no longer the prize of prizes, great Lord Eochu’s favorite child, the princess who would bring her husband Connacht for a wedding gift. It was a
kind
of freedom, becoming unimportant—the wrong kind.

And so I floated along the surface of life at Cruachan, unheeded and unneeded. Filling my days was harder than you’d think. There was only so much spinning, weaving, sewing, and embroidering I could do before the repetitive ordinariness of my tasks made me careless. I stabbed my fingers so many times that my blood spattered the cloth like yew tree berries. I lost skills I’d previously mastered. My spindle became a nest of knots; my loom looked like the web of a drunken spider.

Mother doesn’t need me. Father doesn’t see me. What am I doing here at all?

It became harder and harder to smile. The only times I found cause was when Devnet sang, especially one of his comical songs. My favorite was about how the foremost kings of the
land challenged each other to fight for the honor of having me in their households but each met a ridiculous death on his way to the battlefield and I had to be fostered by a flock of swans. In the last verse, my foster parents taught me how to fly, and I became the queen of Èriu by burying my rivals with droppings from the sky. I wasn’t the only one who liked it. Father called for it at every meal. Poor Devnet grew sick and tired of so many repetitions and declared, “I wish
I’d
died in a landslide of swan dung before I composed it!”

Our bard’s songs were only occasional diversions; they couldn’t fill my days. I found myself wandering the battlements more often, seeking forgetfulness in solitude. The trouble was, as long as my eyes could be drawn to the willow by the stream, to the path that eventually led through forest and over bog to the crannog, to a sky where Ea no longer flew, I was never really alone.

Where was the magic strong enough to let me banish memories? If I tried to empty my mind of them, striving to think about nothing at all, I failed. The oddest little things would twitch me out of my reverie: two guards talking about the best way to skin a hare, someone calling the name of our fosterling Guennola, the sight of a cloud curved like a kestrel’s wing. Then the dull ache came, the persistent pain that blurred my eyes whenever I remembered Master Íobar’s cold cruelty, Father’s refusal to utter the smallest protest, and Odran—

I couldn’t think about him. It hurt too much, and when I tried to push the pain away, it slipped through my fingers and buried itself in my heart.

I was seated on the top of the ringfort walls, chin on knees,
when I heard a piping voice exclaim, “Here she is, Master Devnet! I found her!”

I turned my head to see Donal trotting toward me with our bard coming along behind him at a more sedate pace. I’d seen the boy nearly every day since I’d contrived to free him and his sister from Lord Áed, but it was still a happy surprise each time I saw him. The former slave boy no longer had a pinched, half-starved look and he wore the blue-gray tunic of a free person proudly. His sister was equally happy in her new life, and rumor claimed she’d soon be married to the same young man who was teaching her brother a warrior’s skills.

Boy and bard settled themselves down on either side of me without a word of greeting. The sentry on duty gave us an inquiring look but went about his business. He wasn’t the only one touched by curiosity.

“What brings you up here, Devnet?” I asked at last. “If you need me for anything, just say the word.”

“I’m here for the boy’s good,” our bard replied. “He has a burden on his spirit. His sister noticed and came to me for help because she couldn’t make him talk about it and we bards have a reputation for charming away silence. I succeeded in learning what ails him, but only you can heal it.”