Sing Me Home (24 page)

She pulled away and licked her lips. He suppressed a groan at the sight of that little pink tongue.

She said, “You taste like me.”

“I like the way you taste.”

“I want to taste you.”

He tried to breathe. It suddenly became very difficult. She pressed a hand on his chest to push him onto his back. Then her soft hair trailed against his chest as she slid down the bed, until he felt her breath against his abdomen.

“The French way will work for you, too,” she murmured. “Won’t it?”

Chapter Nineteen

T
he Partry Mountains split the shores of Lough Mask from those of Lough Corrib with a ridge of hills that petered out, beyond the lakes, to grassy plains. In the late of summer, the light of the sun didn’t climb over the hills until midday. Here, in this elbow of mist and mud, Colin waited. His horse pawed the loosened grass, while his guards perched in the slopes all around, watching for the coming of the English.

A shout pierced the mid-morning gloom. It echoed beyond him, to the stone walls of the castle.
His
castle, now. Waiting in the pass that the castle guarded, Colin had a fuller sense of the strategic importance of the fortress than he’d had when he’d heard his father talk of it in his youth. By taking it, the MacEgans claimed all of the hills west of the lakes—and guarded those lands by guarding no more than this single mountain pass.

The shout came again. His horse flicked his ears. Colin tightened his grip on the reins. All around the clearing men rustled, settling into rock and crag and tree trunk. At the far end of the pass, something red flashed between the trees.

The first Englishmen emerged into the pass. He wore a jeweled swath of crimson, bright against the brown hills and muddy gray forest. Colin had expected one of Caddell’s trusted knights, armed and braced for treachery, not a man dressed in silks as bright as a minstrel’s. Then Colin heard Maura suck in a surprised breath.

There he was, William the Black himself, calmly riding straight for him.

Colin’s horse skittered. He forced himself to loosen his choke hold on the reins. His blood rushed hot, swelled in his head, and started a painful throbbing behind his eyes. Ten years he’d waited for vengeance, and here it was, appearing before him unprotected but for a few retainers. To kill Caddell now would be a breach of honor, of all accepted conventions of warfare, an act of incivility that would foment all the neighboring English lords into vengeance. But killing Caddell would be so very, very easy.

“It’s true what they say.” Lord William pulled his horse to a stop a few feet in front of him. “You look very much like your father.”

Colin didn’t respond. The war Colin’s father had raged had been one of quick raids, surprise skirmishes, and one desperate attempt to seize Caddell’s castle. Colin had never seen the Englishman as closely as he did now. Even lurking in the rafters that first night, Colin had noticed only a gray-haired lord, straight-backed, well-dressed, loud-voiced. Now, up close, he saw a man with a face carved in lines, his hair oiled but thin, his belly bulging against the crimson tunic.

But the Englishman’s eyes … his eyes held an intensity as they shifted focus to Maura, perched on a Connemara pony just behind Colin.

“You look well, my daughter,” Caddell said. “I trust you have been treated with the respect you deserve?”

“I’ve been treated,” she said, “almost as well as family.”

Colin wondered if the Englishman heard the hardness beneath the words.

“Fear not,” Caddell said. “Soon enough, you’ll be back in my castle safe with your siblings.”

Colin frowned.
So Caddell will keep to the falsehood
. The Englishman had something up his sleeve, though Colin couldn’t fathom what it might be.

“We have business, you and I.” Colin swept his leg over the saddle and jarred off the horse. “Let’s be done with it.”

“Ah, the fiery temperament of the young.” The fine leather of Caddell’s saddle creaked as the Englishman loosed himself from the mount. “I suppose I should expect no less from the son of Fergus MacEgan.”

Colin didn’t answer as he headed with his guard toward a small fire in the lee of the hill, where he and his enemy could speak in some semblance of privacy. He took his place and stood by the flames, ignoring the smoke stinging his eyes. The perfumed stench of the man reached Colin long before the Englishman’s riding boots squished in the mud.

Aedh stepped forward and handed Lord William a bladder of ale. The Englishman took a sip, then held it out to Colin. Colin’s first urge was to slap it away, but Aedh took the ale from the Englishman and handed it to Colin with a look in his eye that urged patience, that spoke of the virtue of courtesy, that reminded him of the danger of the situation, even as they stood in a valley ringed with MacEgans and their Flaherty allies.

So Colin took the silent advice, seized the bladder, and choked down the bitter ale.

“It speaks well of you,” Lord Caddell said, gesturing back toward Maura, “that my daughter has suffered no harm from this adventure—”

“No thanks to you.”

With a flick of an eyebrow, Lord William said, “I believe it is you who made her a hostage.”

“The girl was found by Lough Corrib by my own men. Had she been found by others, there’s no knowing what could have befallen her.” Colin eyeballed him. “You should hold closer that which you hold dear.”

“Do you have children, Colin MacEgan?”

He thought with a pang of last night’s conversation with Maura. He pushed the thought away and shook his head in the negative.

“Are you married, then?”

“When The MacEgan marries, you’ll hear of it.”

“I have six daughters, much like my uncle, the baron before me.” Shuffling closer to the fire, Lord William gathered his tunic and settled himself on a boulder set there just for that purpose. “Each of those daughters is more defiant than the next. Haughty rebelliousness seems to run on the distaff side of the Caddell family.”

The Englishman ran his hand over his head, dislodging the careful comb-tracks in his hair, looking, for a moment, exceedingly human.

Colin pushed that aside. “There is the matter of ransom.”

“Yes. Ransom.” Caddell tipped his head. “Indulge my curiosity for a moment. That was you behind the bear mask, that first night with the minstrel troupe?”

So it was true, his presence had not gone unnoticed. “Your sight hasn’t faded with age.”

“Your clansmen all have jaws as hard as the Connemara hills. Why didn’t you kill me then?”

Colin couldn’t stifle his surprise. He tried to read the Englishman’s gaze as he would read a blacksmith sizing him up for a fight, but Colin was becoming increasingly aware that this wasn’t the same kind of battle. He wished Brendan was here. His cousin would know what to say to an enemy, how much ransom to ask for, how to handle the golden moment when William the Black stood before them, unprotected.

But Brendan had finally died last night, leaving this world with an exhalation that had sounded very much like relief.

Colin said, “If you knew that was me behind the bear mask, why didn’t you seize me and have me hanged?”

“Perhaps for the same reason you didn’t kill me that night as your father no doubt bade you so many years ago.”

“You talk in riddles.” Colin didn’t like this strange, indulgent communality. He reached for the ale and brought the conversation back to the topic at hand. “There’s the matter of ransom.”

“Mmm. How much is a daughter worth these days?” Lord William rubbed his hands together as if he felt the morning’s chill. “It has been years since I’ve had to think of such things. Fifty head of cattle? Sixty? With a couple of bulls as well?”

Colin stiffened. Maura was worth all the cattle in Ireland, but apparently not to this Englishman.

“And after this ransom we settle, what shall you do next?” Lord William squinted across the clearing. “Shall you steal more of my vassals’ cattle? Burn the harvest? Attack another castle? Win the Caddell lands back to the MacEgans, hill by hill, field by field?”

“I’ll win it back the way you took it—with the blood of Irishmen, with the blood of Englishmen.”

“How very difficult.” The Englishman stretched his open hands over the fire. “And so very wasteful, too.”

“You’ve never had any compunction over spilling blood.”

“Grant me some small amount of consideration, MacEgan. Your father, friends, and brothers died in the heat of a battle that I did not start.”

The words held a glimmer of truth but Colin mentally deflected it. “And Murtough?” Colin trailed a finger across his left eye. “Was that cruelty just the heat of battle, as well?”

“I blinded your brother to stop the fighting. I reasoned that, without a head, the clan MacEgan would be subdued—and peaceful—and that is what I wanted more than anything.”

“My brother feels no peace toward you—”

“I could have blinded him in two eyes. I could have killed him outright—it would have been fair. You know this. For ten years, there has been a sort of peace in these lands. An Irish peace, of course, full of cattle reiving and thievery, but an all-but-bloodless peace nonetheless.” Caddell gestured to Colin. “Now here you are, riling the clan up again. Fergis had too damn many sons, and all the people of these parts pay the price—English and Irish.”

Colin remembered the bloodstained banks of that pond east of here. “Killing didn’t hurt your conscience ten years ago.”

“Ten years ago I was ten years younger,” the Englishman said. “Even then, I’d long lost the stomach for the kind of war your father took grim pleasure in.”

Colin clamped his hand over the hilt of his sword. “You speak ill of the dead.”

“It’s a difficult thing to avoid since most of the men I’ve known, most of the men I loved and hated, are long since in the grave
because
of this war. Please,” he said, throwing a pale hand up in surrender. “The very sight of you, standing there with fury in your eyes, as I’ve seen your father so many times, is enough to weary me.”

And what kind of target was a weary old Englishman? Colin reluctantly dropped his hand from the hilt of his sword. “I didn’t summon you here to chatter about the past. Talk of ransom, and let’s be done with it.”

“Sir Maurice will be the one providing the ransom. He, too, is weary of the demands of our situation.” The Englishman squinted toward the hazy outline of the castle atop the hill. “You may have noticed that the Fahy castle was not well guarded. Sir Maurice has grown lax in his twilight years.”

Colin’s gaze drifted to the English knights in the clearing beyond, to the bushy-browed one among them, his oiled beard gleaming.

“Maurice has buried his children, and his wife,” the Englishman continued. “He has no direct heirs, only distant cousins who can easily be put off. I have offered him a place in my household, and he has agreed to surrender his lands to me now—something he’d have to do at the time of his death nonetheless.”

“You think me born stupid.” Colin tilted his head toward the castle. “You offer me for ransom something that I already possess.”

“You possess it by force, and thus it can be taken away by force. But I’m offering it to you as an end to our war. What remains to be seen is if you can stomach being my vassal for the price of a few coppers a year.”

His throat tightened. “You’d have me bend my knee?”

“Your father was vassal to my uncle, once. Life was peaceful then. Think of that if you can’t bear the thought of bending your neck.”

“My father would have fallen on his own sword before bowing to you—”

“Your father paid homage to many a man when it suited him. Before I came to defend my birthright, he’d bent his knee to The O’Conor.”

Colin clenched his fists. William knew too much of Fergus, more, Colin sensed, than he did himself. More than Brendan had been able to impart before his weakness overcame him. In his mind’s eye, Colin sensed the rage of Fergus’s ghost. But Fergus was dead. And so were many of his aspirations—lofty, impossible ones that they were. Across this fire sat the man who could bring peace to a world that had not known it for too many years. And he himself, the man who had been the spark for the whole conflagration, was the only one who could now throw sand upon the flames.