Sing Me Home (10 page)

Envy pierced him to the bone.

“You go to strangers to ask questions about a ring,” he said, tightening his grip on her hand, “but you didn’t think of asking me.”

“What would you know about such a thing? You and Padraig are the only true Irish in the troupe, and you’re all wanderers to a man. I need to travel through towns, seek some similar insignia. I need to speak to villagers, local people on the road to the shrine. Or,” she added with a lift of a brow, “a blacksmith who might know something of the forging.”

“That blacksmith of yours knows ironwork, not the working of silver and gold.”

“He knows more than I know.”

“This troupe has been to France, Gascony, Normandy, England. We know more than you can possibly imagine.”

She went mute, her jaw tight as she stood with her back against the wall. He eyed the crest upon the ring, worn to flatness, nothing visible but a scratch of even lines that looked something like the rays of the sun. The pattern looked familiar. He struggled to remember where he might have seen such a thing … but it became difficult to focus on the ring. The scent of heather seeped out between the wattles of the candle maker’s hut and clouded around them. It roused memories of fresh grass and how it smelled crushed under a woman’s back. He found his thoughts wandering to the softness of Maura’s breasts, his gaze to the poke of her nipples tightening under her tunic. He found himself thinking of things better meant for a man with a sturdy, profitable trade and a secure future.

“Well?” She leaned toward him. “Do you know something about it, or are you just using this as an excuse to play finger games with my hand?”

Such stormy hazel eyes, such sun-struck curls poking out from beneath that white coif. A whiskey-brown fleck of a beauty mark lay just above the arch of her left brow. Her skin looked so soft it seemed that a breeze would bruise it.

He didn’t think the world could hold such innocence.

He spoke softly. “What do you want to know about this ring, Maura?”

Her lashes swooped down to cast shadows on her cheeks. “You’ll make me say it,” she said, “and then you’ll mock my foolishness.”

“I will not.”

A breeze siphoned in from over the walls of the city and whirled in the cleared space, raucous with peddlers’ cries, soldiers’ demands, the clatter of wheels over pebbles, the laughter of children. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth.

“Let me guess then,” he said. “You joined us to travel through Ireland, hoping to find the owner of this ring.”

“No, I didn’t have hopes as high as that.”

“But you’d hoped to learn something.”

She shrugged. “It was a better plan than sitting in a convent, forever wondering from whence it came.”

“So this pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory is nothing but a story.”

“Not exactly.” She kept taking the pink flesh of her lower lip between her little white teeth. “Around the time I was found on the convent steps, a large group of pilgrims came through Killeigh, stopping for a while to rest in the fields. They were on their way back from St. Patrick’s Purgatory.”

“You assume your mother was among them.”

She shrank into herself a bit, the hollows of her shoulders deepening.

“So you decided to walk the same pilgrim’s road.” He rubbed a thumb across her knuckles. “To search for the insignia. On a silversmith’s shop, or hanging from the post of an inn. To ask questions of strangers in the hopes they’d remember a detail from over twenty years ago.”

She tilted her chin, but her voice came out small. “I didn’t realize that the world would be so … big.”

Colin thought of the roads of Gascony, the vineyards of Bordeaux, the woods outside Paris, the cobbled lanes of London, the bustle of Dublin and Wexford, and swallowed the laugh that rose in his throat because ignorance was not a sin, and should never be mocked.

“I wouldn’t take the veil,” she said suddenly. “So the lady Abbess kept insisting I should marry the butcher’s boy. He’d been courting me at the kitchen door for months, with no encouragement by me.”

Colin didn’t like the kick of jealousy he felt at the thought of some dirty grunt ogling Maura in a back courtyard.

“Oh, he’s a fine enough man,” she continued, “and he has a good trade, but I was given this ring, you see. Once this had been given to me, how could I just go on with my life, pretending the ring didn’t mean anything?” She sought answers in his face. “How could I
not
set out to find the truth?”

He let go of her hand and found himself cradling her face in his hands so that she couldn’t look away from him anymore.

Soft, confused hazel eyes.

“The world is big, but it’s not so strange, Maura.” He eased her deeper under the thatch overhang. “Babes are left on convent steps more often than you think. That’s the desperation of unwed mothers bearing their lover’s children, or families who cannot feed another mouth. Only in stories do you hear of midwives spiriting away children born of noble patrons, tucking a token in their swaddling clothes.”

She flinched. “I don’t fancy myself of noble blood.”

“I would.”

Such soft skin. Her brows arched like wings. Freckles like tiny constellations on the swell of her cheekbone. Hazel eyes bright with question. A face with curves like a carved stone angel, except living, pliable, warm.

She whispered, “You think I’m a fool.”

“No.” He watched her eyes flutter, her lashes glinting amber in the light. “I think you are the last bit of innocence on the face of the earth.”

“Ignorance, you mean.”

“I admire the courage that sent you out of that convent.” He ran a thumb across the tear that fell from her eye, wishing he could leave her believing in impossible coincidences. “But happy endings are rare, Maura. As much as I would give one to you, if I could.” He pressed a thumb on the indentation in the middle of her lower lip, stopping the words that rose to her mouth. “Abandoned children never find their true parents. And minstrels never turn out to be kings.”

Emotions rippled across her features, dismay and desperation and shame. Guilt needled him. He hadn’t wanted to bring her pain. He wanted to tell her it could be a great gift to be unburdened of family expectations, never to carry the encumbrance of some long-set destiny. He wished he could teach her to embrace her freedom, and give herself over to what life was meant for.

Capturing moments of joy.

His gaze fell to her lips and a feeling he couldn’t identify rushed through him, so strong and fierce that he wanted to kiss her with the same intensity that he craved a bite of the first red apple in September.

Instead he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against hers, feeling the heat of her skin against his, the slight hiss as she drew in a long, deep breath. He wondered what the hell he was doing, rolling his thumb down the curve of her breast, only to lift his hand and bury it in the curls lying against her neck.

It was all muddled in his mind. Everything had been muddled since he’d visited the site by that pond where his father had died, since he’d seen that damn traitor O’Kelly riding high on his horse. It was this English town, this Irish countryside, the knowledge that he was hurtling toward an inevitability he’d avoided for ten long years just when he had a reason to slow it down, to stop it—if just for a moment.

If just for this moment.

A passerby bumped him from behind. Colin tore his face away from hers, long enough to see that her hazel eyes, usually so sharp, were now as mellow as honey mead.

He thought,
one kiss.

One simple kiss.

Her lips quivered under his mouth. Sweet and eager, guileless and innocent, she was like a flower raising its face toward the sun. He tilted her chin with one finger so he could slant his mouth against hers—kiss her more deeply—and then, moments later, he gripped that chin to pull her away before he, too, became lost in this dizzy rush of desire.

Inches from his face, she whispered, “Colin.”

His heart thumped at the sound.

As he turned on his heel, he wondered if anyone in the whole of his life had ever said his name with such sweetness.

Chapter Eight

I
n the English castle that evening, Arnaud—gleeful that the troupe had been invited to perform for such noble company—pulled her aside to tell her that the baron had demanded to hear ‘the foundling songstress.’

“Your fame has grown,” Arnaud told her, with avarice in his eye. “Sing well.”

So Maura took her place when her time came. English and Irish nobility sat hip to hip on the other side of the trestle table, the air taut with expectation. She wasn’t nervous, not about performing. She was too preoccupied thinking about that singular moment in the heather-scented shade of the candle maker’s shop, when Colin had touched her face, murmured sweet things against her hair, and—once again—left her alone and aching.

Now, in the dim firelight, by the strumming of Fingar’s harp, Maura let the music flow through her. She didn’t want to repeat the song she sang at the O’Dunns’. So she sang an old Irish song that Fingar had taught her that very afternoon, when Colin had abandoned her under the overhang amid peddlers and washerwomen and visitors through the gates.

My heart is like the sun
That crosses the sky above,
always bright and always true,
But his heart acts the moon,
That waxes full and wanes blue,
and every month becomes new.

She wanted to believe that Colin was just keeping to his promise to steer clear of the women in his own troupe. But a small voice inside her wondered if it were something more. Maybe she repelled him. Maybe he sensed that scent she emanated, some phantom odor that put people off.

She knew too well what it was like not to be wanted.

The sound of applause brought her senses back to the great hall. She curtsied and melted back into the shadowy chaos of the dark side of the room, where the troupe members jostled awaiting their turn. She headed toward the servant’s door intending to go into the courtyard and check on Nutmeg, to make sure the cats that swarmed the keep hadn’t found a way to knock her pet’s basket from where she’d hung it on a peg in the stables.

Then Colin burst through that door.

She didn’t know he was Colin, not at first. He was masked. He brushed by her unseeing, his cloak flapping against her as he passed. Only when she caught the scent of cinnamon and cardamom in his wake did her heart do a little skip-beat of recognition. He wore clothes she’d never seen before. Beneath his plaid cloak, run through with many colors, lay a knee-length saffron-colored tunic, edged with embroidery at the neck and hem.

She took a swift, shocked breath. She had seen such clothing before. The O’Mores of Leix, who held their Irish stronghold not far south of the convent of Killoughy, had a man among them—a
filidh,
a court poet who kept the clan’s history, and wrote great epics about their battles, their leaders, and sang them at festive occasions to the strumming of a harp. She’d seen that
filidh
once, traveling on a fine horse toward the monastery up the road. He and his like were allowed to wear a traditional robe of six colors, only one color less than the robes of Irish kings.

She covered her mouth, wondering what Colin was thinking. Clothing separated noble from common laborer, and there were enough Irish chieftains amidst this crowd to know the difference. At least he wore a mask, and not just to hide the bruises blooming from the afternoon’s fight with the blacksmith’s apprentice.

“Listen, my lords,” Colin said, as his voice sent sleeping birds fluttering, “to a tale I will tell, of a king of wretched fate, and the kind of man we all know too well.”

The room went still as the restless birds took perches among the rafters. Golden light brushed the forearms of men who had leaned forward to get a better look at Colin, as if they, too, were surprised to come upon an Irish bard.

Colin paced around the fire as he started the tale. His voice rose and fell as he wove the story to life. No one called for ale. The bones of the meat lay untouched upon the table. Through the stillness of her shock, Maura leaned forward to hear him better. A cold chill scurried up her spine and birthed gooseflesh all over her body. The nuns had warned her that the minstrels dabbled in a sort of sorcery. No Italian player could play the part of a
filidh
better than Colin was playing him, right now.