Maire (37 page)

“Insult?
I’ll show you insult, Morlach.”

“No, Maire,” Rowan shouted.

“Hold, little sister.”

The warning did not deter her, but Declan’s quick hand did. He tightened his fingers about her arm until surely no blood passed. But he could not stop her words.

“Garret knows the amulet was missing! He rode with me the following day to look for it.” Maire scanned the gathering for sign of Rowan’s nephew. The young Cairthan’s face was not among them. “Where is Garret?”

Declan lowered his voice. “I saw him ride out with Brona early this morning.”

“Where were they going?”

“I didn’t think it my business to ask, the way the pup’s been taggin’ after the girl.”

Maire slandered Brona’s birth mother beneath her breath. Frantic, she pointed to one of Gleannmara’s guards. “Muirdach! Go find them! We’ll settle this and quick!” As the man loped off toward the inner rath’s stables, she addressed the high king.

“Just where is your impartiality, Diarhmott? The most common offender deserves a chance to speak for himself.”

Diarhmott shifted on his horse, seemingly unsettled by Maire’s accusation on one side and Morlach’s silent daggers of warning on the other. “He has had a hearing before me and my druid.”

So the high king had made up his mind. Maire rebelled at the very idea. “But I have witnesses—”

“Whom I will hear willingly if they come forward before the sentence is carried out.”

“You risk war, man!” she charged blindly. “Neither Cairthan nor Niall will give over our king without a fight.”

Rowan’s voice thundered, stilling Maire with its blast. “There will be no talk of war. I have been heard, Maire; it is up to me to prove my innocence.”

“But how?” She willed strength into her voice, where hope fell through. Her head shot up as Diarhmott’s last words registered.
Before the sentence is carried out.
“What sentence?”

The high king spoke with all authority due him. “Trial by fire, Queen Maire. Let the fire decide the innocence or guilt of Rowan of Gleannmara.”

Morlach leaned forward on his steed. His dark eyes glittered like those of a hungry cat about to pounce on its meal. “As the
Christian priest said at Beltaine, in the name of the one god, let the fire destroy all that is false and evil so than only purity and innocence remain.” The druid laughed at the color Maire felt draining from her face. “If your
husband
is innocent, Queen Maire, he’ll walk through untouched. His god will protect him.” Cocking his head sideways, he drawled, “You do believe in the Christian god, don’t you?”

G
leannmara’s hall was subdued. All who were perceived as a threat to Diarhmott’s justice had been gathered and stripped of their weapons. Though they were still allowed to sup in the hall, guards watched them with hawk eyes. Maire was assigned a guard of her own, while Rowan was locked in one of the storehouses that had been emptied during the winter.

Declan acted the host to their uninvited guests in her stead. Rather than take her evening meal with Morlach, Maire took her supper with Ciara and Lianna, who was neither better, nor worse. Hospitality be damned; she’d not feed with swine. If the druid satirized her to the other side, so be it, for what would life be in this world without Rowan?

Before their marriage, she’d been a shell of a female, structured by Brude’s teachings and Erc’s training. But Rowan had given her life. She was more than a warrior now, more than a queen—she was a woman. Where she once disdained being treated like one, she now reveled in it. To take Rowan from her would be to take away her heart and soul.

Her hopes of getting Garret’s testimony were dashed when Muirdach returned empty-handed. There was no sign of the Cairthan heir apparent or of Brona. When Maire wasn’t fretting over her husband’s fate, it was Garret that occupied her thoughts. As far as she was concerned, the lad was in the company of a murderess, even if Lianna was not yet gone. The women’s best efforts to treat her illness seemed useless, for the lass grew weaker by the moment.

When Maire and Ciara weren’t trying to make her comfortable, they prayed for some sort of deliverance from the black fate awaiting not just Rowan but Gleannmara. The ache in Maire’s heart was such that not even prayer gave her rest. It felt as though all three forms of the Christian God turned a deaf ear to her pleas.

Was ever there a night so long or a day so dark? Maire wondered as she walked toward the storehouse, a strapping guard on her heel like a dog. With Rowan’s death and his own triumph imminent, Morlach was feeling generous and allowed the queen her second request to see her husband. How she’d love to have spent the night in Rowan’s arms, at least one last time. Those Scriptures of his were right. She
was
created for him, to be loved and cherished as a part of him. The few months they’d shared together proved that again and again.

The guards admitted Maire inside the dark chamber. It smelled of mold and last year’s fodder. After a moment to adjust her eyes to the lack of light, she spied Rowan sitting on the earthen floor, his wrists and ankles chained. Not caring who watched, she ran to him and threw her arms about him tightly.

“I have missed you sorely these last weeks, husband.”

“And I never knew nights to be so cold, muirnait.”

Beloved.
That and more, Maire kissed him and he gave back as good he got, for not even iron could keep their souls apart, nor could onlookers dampen the love that flowed one to another. Still on her knees, Maire had yet to release him from her embrace. His warmth was like a balm to this terrible anguish knotting in her chest. Her voice broke to spite her brave facade as she raised her face to his.

“Oh, Rowan, what will we do?”

He kissed her wet cheeks, one, then the other. “We must pray and trust God to do what is best for us and for Gleannmara.”

“I
have
prayed! My knees are so sore, I can hardly walk, but
nothin’s changed. I’ve heard no voice, nor seen any sign that God is with us.”

“Ach, Maire, how can I help you understand?” He rolled back his head and looked at the darkness of the domed thatch overhead. “Just because you believe in God doesn’t mean that evil will leave you alone. Satan is always ready to strike, to test just how much you do believe.”

“The prince of darkness?”

Maire wondered if Morlach were not this Satan in human form. Tentatively, she caressed Rowan’s brow where an ugly gash of congealed blood told of his harsh treatment.

“The very one,” he answered, wincing.

“I hope you gave them that did this a taste of your sword and muscle.”

“Actually,” he chuckled, more in wonder than humor, “I didn’t fight at all. I could see the cromlech was built to fall on my shoulders when they ignored Eochan and Lorcan’s oath that I’d been with them since I left Gleannmara.”

“Don’t even speak of a stack of gravestones.” She put her finger to his lips, unable to bear the thought. “Husband, there is a time to be peaceful and a time to fight. Crom’s toes, this smacks of fightin’ time to be sure.”

Even as she voiced her angry words, Maire knew that a fight was futile. Morlach had manipulated things so as to make it treason to do so.

“I don’t think I can stand to watch you burn for somethin’ ye didn’t do.”

“I don’t want you to, Maire, and there is always the chance that I won’t.”

Maire drew back, wanting to believe. If ever there was a time for God to send His angels or spirits, this was it! She’d fight with them and not even flinch at what they were. Spirit or flesh, she’d take anything or anyone to save the man she loved.
Father God, I beg You, do something.

Rowan interrupted her prayer. “God has protected His
faithful from fire before. Three Christian men were tossed into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow to gods other than the one God. They emerged without so much as singed hair.”

“He’d do this for you?” Maire couldn’t see Rowan’s gaze well in the darkness of the enclosure, but she knew he embraced her with it. It took away the damp morning chill.

“Aye, if that is His will.”

“But—”

“Time’s up, milady. They’re lighting the fires already.”

Maire ignored the guard. “But why wouldn’t it be His will? What manner of God is it that would allow one of His own to suffer?”

“The same who gave up His only son to the cross so that you and I might be saved.”

“But—”

“’Tis time, milady.”

“Has Garret been found?” Rowan asked quickly as the guard eased Maire away by the arm. “And Lianna… how does she fare? And mother?”

There was so much more they needed to talk about, needed to say. Distressed beyond measure, Maire shook her head. “Muirdach took the men of his clan but could find nothing of Garret or that evil-hearted Brona. The scent that has Lianna lyin’ abed near death was intended for me! Brona offered it to me to tempt you into my bed—” She broke off at the surprised lift of Rowan’s brow. A sheepish color flowed to her cheeks, but Maire didn’t mind admitting her desire for her husband’s attention.

“You have been nothing but temptation since first I saw you in my dreams,” he assured her. “Before we even met.”

“Before
we met?” Maire was taken back. He’d
dreamed
her? Surely that meant something.

“I should have known when I first recognized you that you were the one God chose for me, but, fool that I was, I fought it because I thought it would be too good for this servant. Ah, to think of the time I wasted.”

His dark hair fell forward on his brow as he lapsed into a moment of regret. Maire wanted to brush it back with her fingers, but the guards held her more tightly. Then, as if snapping out of his thoughts, he raised his gaze to hers. Their souls embraced.

“But we were destined to be together, Maire, here at Gleannmara… even on to the other side.”

Destined? Maire closed her eyes, wondering if some unseen plan of God was afoot. But she wasn’t a druid. She sensed no spirits. She was a woman about to watch her love die a horrible death. All she felt was abandonment, and it tore at her with unmerciful claws.

“The other side?” She spat her pent up frustration with the words. “’Tis
now
that worries me, Rowan. What will I do without you
now?
What will Gleannmara do if I am forced to enter some unholy alliance with Rathcoe?
What about now?”

“Enough, milady, you must leave,” the guard insisted, his hand tightening on Maire’s arm. Sympathy affected his voice and his grasp upon her arm, but it was only the slackening of his grasp that registered.

She tore away from him in anger, but it was with desperation that she threw herself at Rowan and clung to him as though to life itself. Words failed her, lost in this stew of anguish and fury seasoned with hopelessness.

Rowan kissed the top of her head gently, his voice betraying his own pain. “Ah, muirnait, I wish I could make you understand that the eternal life on the other side is more important than this temporary one.”

Noble words, to be sure, but they made no sense to Maire—not now, not when facing life without her beloved. She couldn’t accept it. She
wouldn’t.
“No, it
isn’t,”
Maire shouted rebelliously as the guards combined their efforts to restrain her. “I swear, I’ll kill Morlach on
both
sides of this green earth, if I have to.”

As she was dragged to the door, a flurry of activity in the
yard gave her captors cause to hesitate. Beyond them, Tara and Rathcoe’s occupying soldiers spilled from the hall toward the gate of the outer rath.

“What’s the fuss?” one of her guard shouted.

“It’s the Cairthan formin’ up on the hill,” one of the running soldiers called back. “They line the horizon thick as wild geese at Samhain.”

Excitement sent Maire’s heart soaring. Between the Niall
and
the Cairthan, they far outnumbered the small force Morlach and the high king brought with them. She tore out of the grasp of her guards. She’d waited for the right moment, for a sign to take matters into her own hands. In a flash, her stinger flashed free of its hidden sheath in her breastplate. It was at the guard’s throat before he could recover.

A ferocious “Noooo!” from her husband checked its edge just shy of breaking flesh.

“One move, one excuse and I’ll lay open your neck like a slaughtered pig,” Maire growled at her victim. “Now you, unlock those chains.”

“Best do as she says, man,” the startled guard said to his partner. “There’s no quarter in this one’s eyes.”

“Put away the knife, Maire.”

Surely Rowan jested. He was a blade’s length from freedom. “We can take them, Rowan!”

“And commit high treason.”

“But—”

“The blood shed today would mean more tomorrow, and more the next, Maire—and the end of Gleannmara. Many are pledged to Diarhmott. Would you fight them all?” Rowan shook his head adamantly. “I will have no blood shed on my account. It’s madness to take on the high king. You must tell Lorcan the same.”

Certain Rowan had taken leave of his senses, Maire’s gaze shot toward him. Before she could express her incredulity, much less challenge him, a terrible blow exploded on the back
of her head. She saw red and white pictures of it competing for her vision, but in the end, darkness prevailed.

As she regained consciousness, her head swam in a black sea of pain, exceeded only by that in her heart. Slowly, Maire dragged herself up from the bed where she’d been placed next to Lianna. Disoriented at first, she shook the young woman to no avail. Lianna’s eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, her white face cold as snow to the queen’s touch.

Sickness churned in Maire’s belly as she reeled away from the dead maid. First Brude, now her cousin. Through the fog of faces in her aching head, the image of Rowan arose to replace them all.

Rowan.

Panic seized Maire as she stumbled outside and saw how dark it was. Not even the sun wished to dignify the day, for the sky was overcast with clouds. Gradually it came back to her, the attack from behind when she’d tried to free Rowan. It was hard to tell how long she’d been unconscious.