Maire (11 page)

“In as much as I am not required to offend or abandon the Lord, my God,” the Welshman repeated. “’Tis no less than I agreed to when the bargain was struck, druid. I stand by my honor to keep it.”

For an immeasurable length of time Brude studied the upstart, then offered, “As we stand by ours.”

A collective sigh of relief, Maire’s included, surrounded them. The spirits surely protected Rowan ap Emrys, or Brude would have reduced him to a blubbering idiot before all.

“And you, Queen Maire, will you share your laughter, your dreams, and honor Emrys?”

“I will,” she replied, swallowing the stipulation she was about to blurt out about when he deserved them.

“I’ll have your hands.”

Maire put her right hand out, palm up beside Rowan’s. Brude neatly sliced Rowan’s dominant finger first. He then squeezed a single droplet of his blood into a silver cup of wine. A similar cut was made across her finger. It stung, but she refused to flinch. She stared as a scarlet drop of her blood fell into the cup.

“The marriage of your blood is like the marriage of your spirits,” Brude announced in a louder voice. “Drink.”

He offered Rowan the first sip, then Maire. She inadvertently licked away the mustache dealt by the druid’s shaking
hand. He turned and poured the remaining contents over the fire. With a hiss, the wine was quickly evaporated.

“I will have the symbols of your vows. Yours for protection,” he said to the groom.

The sword Rowan surrendered at Emrys was handed to him hilt first. Bracing agilely as the ship veered to one side, Rowan placed the blade on the deck between them and the druid.

“And yours for hearth and home.”

At Brude’s prompt, Maire took up the sword she’d inherited from her mother and laid it across the other sword, forming an
X.

“No broom for our queen,” someone remarked behind them.

A hint of a smile tugged at the corner of Maire’s lips. The bride usually contributed a broom, representing hearth and home.

“It seems we’ll have a well-protected home.”

These were not only the first words Rowan had spoken directly to Maire that day, but his first as her husband.

“So it appears.” Maire offered her hand to him for the dance. A piper struck a note as Rowan clasped it with his own. The instrument filled the air like the lark’s joyous welcome of new day.

This nonsense meant nothing to him or his God, but that didn’t mean that Rowan could not appreciate the beauty and grace of the woman whose feet moved like graceful butterflies, lighting between the crossed blades just long enough to spring over the next. A wreath of mistletoe crowned her glorious titan hair; she was a vision of femininity, surely one of God’s most exquisite creations.

It was hard to believe that the delicate hand he held as they danced a pattern around and over the swords had sliced his rib
cage with a blade, much less that it could wield a sword that would tax some men’s strength to lift. A flash of a smile revealed teeth that would shame the finest pearls, and the challenge tossed from the demure slant of her green eyes as she caught his gaze and as quickly let it go was enough to warm a statue to the core. Her Celtic blood fired every motion, every look, with the passion of the ages.

The piper gave out before either Maire or Rowan would admit fatigue. With a gallant bow, Rowan stepped back for Eochan to take over the pattern dance. Having pretended to sip from the wedding cup to avoid breaking the Lord’s law against drinking blood, he eagerly accepted a noggin of drink. While draining it, he was surrounded by well-wishing warriors who’d been ready to take off his head the day before.

Scotti hospitality was instilled in them before they had memory. Such was the temperament of these people, as quick to embrace over a barrel of wine as to fight over it. At least it was the temperament of most of them. They made good allies and formidable foes.

Instinct drew Rowan’s gaze to the ship’s rail, where Declan wore a scowl as dark as his features were fair. Cup in hand, the Scot could not tear his gaze from Maire as she danced first with one of her clansmen and then another. Though it nagged at Rowan for reasons beyond his ken, he could not blame the man. There was something about Gleannmara’s queen more dangerous to Rowan than her sword. It struck contrary sparks of fear and anticipation against the tinder of his senses, as though, were he not careful, even his heart was at risk.

C
onsummated!”

Maire looked at the wizened druid, certain she’d misunderstood. After all, the noise of the revelry had escalated with each barrel tapped and drained dry that day. In truth, her head felt as though it were light as the cherub white clouds of summer. Her dress, damp from the wild dancing, clung to her frame, though her throat was wrung dry and her voice hoarse from song. Her incredulous echo of the druid’s word came out, tweaked by strain.

Brude, whose strong voice, even after the sun and moon’s full cycle of song, never failed, repeated himself. “The union must be real. Morlach will not be bluffed. I’ve stayed his hand as long as I can, but even now the east wind picks up again.”

Maire glanced uncertainly at the sails. They were puffed like a well-fed babe’s cheeks, straining toward Erin. The seamen aloft scrambled like cats in a tree full of birds working the ropes and chains to make the most of the favorable weather.

“Are you saying Morlach has summoned the east wind?”

“It does go against the natural pattern.”

“But who is to say that we still do not coast on the fair wind of our victory?”

“Are you willing to take that chance, Queen Maire? Erin was nigh on three days journey behind us with the natural pattern, yet she will be barely two on return, should the east continue to fill our sails. By the new sun, our homeland will rise on the horizon.”

That was good news to Maire. She had no love of the sea.
Thankfully, she had not given into the heaving sickness that had threatened her their first day out. Warriors bigger than she had been brought to their knees by it. Celt to the bone, even in their misery, they’d made it a competition, turning the sickest into a weak-kneed, grinning victor.

“By all the natural elements, we should not set foot on Erin’s soil till the third daybreak. The ship’s crew is wary and demands to know the meaning of this strange wind.”

“I wasn’t aware Clon’s men noticed anything but their share of the booty.” That was what Eochan had to promise the Dal Raidi captain. The closing of a tin mine had put the trader in dire need of goods, so he was amicable to a mutually beneficial adventure.

“Do you think Morlach will not know he is being tricked?”

“By my mother’s gods, Brude, what would you have me do? Lay with Emrys before the eyes of all? We made the vows. We danced the dance.”

She felt the fire of anger in her cheeks. Give her an enemy with weapons she could see and feel the bite of, not one who conjured spells and changed the patterns of the universe.

At Brude’s answering silence, she gave in to exasperation. “Then cast a spell to blind Morlach!” Crom’s toes, she’d worried about Rowan changing his mind but never dreamed Brude would be insistent on such a thing.

“If Morlach is indeed the reason for our speedy return, I cannot compete with such magic.”

“A sacrifice then.” How foolish she’d been! But there’d been so little time to consider all consequences when the deal was agreed to.

“The blood of your innocence, Maire. That is the only sacrifice that will stand.” Brude reassured her with a knobby hand on her shoulder, but it did not help the panic running amok in her mind.

“I’ve no training—”

“To become what you already are requires no training. You were born a woman.”

“But I told him this would be in name only. ’Twould be dishonorable to change now.” Honoring the verbal agreement had stood Rowan well during the wedding rite, when he’d changed the wording to suit his purpose. Maire hoped against her last hope it would stand now.

“From the way his gaze mated with yours during the pattern dance, I don’t think he’ll mind a change of heart.”

Maire wanted to pretend she didn’t know what the druid was speaking of, but she couldn’t. The unsettling awareness of each other, which charged across their arm’s length as they’d moved in unison over and about the crossed symbols of their marriage, flared anew. She could hear the sudden rush of blood past her temples above the clamor of drink, dance, and song surrounding them. How could it rise so strong when she felt her pride sinking to the pit of dark defeat?

But she was queen first, warrior second, and woman last. She had no choice but to protect her people in whatever manner she could. Since hers was not the saving sword of Gleannmara’s, she must seal the union with the man who possessed the key. Foolish hopes of love, even courtship, were a luxury not often afforded a queen.

“It isn’t my heart I’m changing, Brude,” she answered at last. “Only my mind. And that I’m doing for Gleannmara, nothing—”

“Man overboard!”

The warning from the loft above fell like a sobering blanket upon the celebration below, settling first upon a few, then upon all. Men scrambled to the sides of the ship, straining to peer at the rolling green water in search of the floundering soul.

“To the larboard!” came the direction from above, sending those who’d gathered to the right over to the left. Elbows and shoulders collided in the confusion exacting grunts and curses.

Eochan was the first to spy the unfortunate. “Cling to this, lad!”

With bearlike strength, the warrior lifted the empty wine
keg he’d been sitting on and heaved it over the side. Maire squeezed through the crowd to her foster brother’s side and watched the cask splash into a deep rolling trough, where it bobbed as if on the tongue of a gaping watery mouth.

“I don’t see—”

A golden head surfaced beside it, gasping for air and cutting her off in midsentence.

“Declan!” she shrieked, recognition and horror colliding.

She rose on tiptoe as if that might help her to see better as her foster brother clawed his way toward the floating barrel. Someone steadied her from behind. The voluminous folds of Declan’s brat worked like an overblown monster against him, holding him in place. He might as well have tried to pull himself up a rope of air, for all the progress he made. Then his head disappeared beneath the foamy surface again, and Maire strangled as though she were with him.

“Throw him a rope!” someone shouted along the rail.

“Aye, hand it to me and I’ll take it to him!” Eochan vaulted up on the ship’s rail with amazing agility for his size and turned to catch the heavy line tossed his way. The whip of the rope past her face shattered her numbing fear. Reason rallied. Maire stayed his arm in protest.

“Ye can’t swim any better than him.”

“He’s my brother!” the man bellowed back at her, as though that would give him the skill he needed.

He was her brother as well, but Maire had heard too many tales of well-meaning men drowning with the victim. She knew she was no match for the waves on her own, much less with the weight of another dragging her down. Eochan was no more at home in the water.

Declan broke the surface again, shoving against it as if to lift himself from it. He coughed up water, unable to cry for the help he needed. Where the swelling sea left off, his hair closed about his face to smother and blind him to the presence of the barrel, floating just a body’s length away.

Eochan leaned forward, tearing out of Maire’s grip, but instead of diving into the water, he sprawled backward as though an unseen ram had driven into his chest. Landing upon the deck amid the feet and legs of his clansmen, he shouted in outrage, but the man who’d thrown him aside was already in the water. It wasn’t until his head broke the crest of a swell a few feet from the thrashing Declan, that Maire recognized him.

It was Emrys, his wet shoulders glistening in the setting of the sun. He moved as if he’d been born to the sea, with fins for feet and arms. With long powerful strokes, the Welshman closed the distance between him and the thrashing Scot, but Declan went down again, just before Rowan reached him.

It felt as if a team of oxen were pulling at her chest, Maire was so drawn to the drama unfolding below. Rowan rose like the sea god himself, his upper torso shooting above the water. With a mighty lung full of air, he dove into the deep again after her foster brother. Maire leaned further over the rail, her own breath corked in her chest.

Brude!

Not even her fervent plea for the druid to use his powers escaped, but she felt the responding cold of his hand upon her arm, drawing her back. She’d never known the old man to have warm hands.

The riggings clapped and billowed above with the crew’s effort to slow the ship, but the scene between her and the spot where the two men had gone down was as still as the mosaic pictures on Emrys’s villa walls. A whispering wave passed through it, distracting her gaze until Maire wondered if she was searching the wrong place for signs of movement.

Please!
She pleaded in silent desperation, not really knowing which spirit, if any, would listen.
Please!

“There they are! By the barrel.”

The sea had played a sleight of hand with her eyes. Maire moved toward the stern and fixed her gaze to where Rowan struggled to shove his uncooperative comrade’s upper torso
over the slippery barrel. Declan’s face was out of the water, but it appeared to do him no good. The water had bleached the color from his skin, leaving a ghastly pallor. The color was not unfamiliar—Maire had seen it too many times—that which had lived in the young Scot’s carcass had fled to the other world.

“Toss me the line!”

Two lines went out simultaneously at Rowan’s hoarse command, one landing short of its mark; the other struck his shoulder. In an instant, it was in his grasp. He wrapped it around one muscled arm, keeping Declan’s head and shoulders over the barrel with the other. Once it was secure, he devoted both hands to stabilizing the barrel and shouted for the men at the rail to haul them in.