The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (25 page)

Aileen said, “Take me away from this place.”

She spoke the words to Dafydd. Rhys’s nostrils flared as Aileen’s silver eyes searched his brother’s face. Never once did she look at
him
like that, so full of trust and understanding. Never once did she lower herself to plead for anything. Dafydd’s hand lay so casually upon her shoulder—the shoulder of
his
woman.

“Take her back to the homestead.” Rhys snapped the crop upon his thigh. “I’ll show Tudur Aled the castle.”

He climbed back on his horse and led the way, not looking back. Dafydd had a softness for the Irish witch.

He’d been waiting for this last brother’s betrayal.

***

“Take care of the water!”

Marged heaved a bucketful of dirty water out of the door of the kitchens, and then gasped as Aileen stepped back out of its path.

“Saints be blessed! Oh, Aileen, lass, it’s you!” Marged clutched her chest. “When did you get back? I thought I’d splattered water upon the spirits of the dead last buried and doomed myself to be haunted for the rest of my life. What are you doing standing in the twilight like a ghost, with your cloak flapping open like that and the air frozen enough to crack in your lungs?”

Aileen stared at the figure standing in the doorway. The warmth of the kitchens spilled out into the darkness. She had stood here with her feet in the frozen mud watching Marged bustle here and there, seeing the servants one by one pass her and head toward the mead–hall where the men were taking their evening meal. She had stood here breathing in the smell of poached fish, wanting with all her heart to press forward and be a part of that warmth. But her mind held her feet frozen to the ground.

“Aileen, my lady?” Marged clattered the pail to the floor and scurried out, her hands buried in her apron. “Is the master back from the castle, then? I thought I’d heard horses, but I wasn’t sure they—by God, Aileen, you look as if you’ve seen. . . .” Marged curled her fingers around Aileen’s wrist. “You just came from Aberygaun, didn’t you?”

Marged spoke the name in a hushed voice of reverence.

“Come, lass, come into the kitchens. You’ve a look upon you that sends a chill to my heart, it does. Faith, your hands are like ice. What were you thinking standing in the cold like that?”

Aileen stumbled after her. She blinked against the stinging smoke and found her way to a stool by the hearth–fire. She sank into it as a tired babe would sink into a mother’s arms, then listened to the lullaby of the kitchens: Water bubbling in a pot slung over the fire, burning logs crackling. She breathed in the fragrance of warm bread, onions, and roast drippings.

Marged thrust something warm between her fingers. “Drink that, and quickly now. We’ll warm you from the inside out. Did the master even warn you before you rode off to that place? No, he wouldn’t, would he? He wouldn’t see any need to, but I’d expect better of Dafydd. You didn’t do anything to anger the
Y Tylwyth Teg,
did you? They’re fair enough to those who treat them well, but it’s sure they take revenge on people who ill–treat them. There was once a shepherd who wandered into that valley one day and set free a strange little man who’d got his clothes caught under a boulder. . . .”

Aileen winced as she wiggled her pained toes. She hadn’t realized how cold she was. Funny, she’d felt no chill when riding to the castle behind Rhys earlier in the day, thinking of the moments in the bedchamber that morning. She hadn’t felt the cold of the brisk February day until she’d galloped out into that cleared forest land and felt death all around her. Only now, in this warm and sacred sanctuary, did she begin to thaw.

“. . . And later, two old men thanked him and gave him a walking stick, and don’t you know, from that time onward, every sheep in his flock bore two ewe lambs, until he lost the stick and his luck vanished with it. . .”

Aileen sucked on the rim of the cup. She filled her belly with fresh buttermilk, still warm from the churn. She stared into the flames flickering under the iron pot. Now and again a blue flame would flare up and then die, like the ghost of Rhys’s eyes.

Magic is for fools.

He didn’t believe. She’d known that since the beginning. She’d known he was a man whose senses had been deadened to the mysteries of the world. Yet this morning he’d walked on that riverbank amid the corpses of mangled trees, blind, deaf, and dumb to the agony screaming up from beneath the snow. Had she come upon him destroying a cathedral to build a tavern upon holy ground, she’d not have been more shocked. Holy ground was holy ground, and that mound was not the place for man’s mortar.

“. . . Years ago I remembered a woman telling me about a white cow that wandered from that valley and no one knew who was the owner,” Marged said as she spooned broth into a bowl. “The farmer that found her took her into the herd just like all the others, though, she was a faery cow and didn’t they all know it. When the cow grew old and the farmer set to have her slaughtered, didn’t the cow just up and leave, and take every calf she’d ever had with her? And then there was that young girl who disappeared by the lake. . . .”

Marged absently thrust a bowl of soup at her. Aileen clunked her cup down by her feet and took it.

“. . . Oh, I could tell you a dozen stories of that place, Aileen—dozens and dozens, good and bad. But since the master set his mind to building a castle upon that island, there’s been nothing but bad luck. Nothing, I tell you.” She clattered the ladle back into the pot and gestured to a small clay tumbler by the hearth. “Every night I put out a bit of milk for the wee folk, and not once in all these years have I woke to find it emptied. Now what kind of house is it that the faeries won’t enter when given a little hospitality, will you be telling me that?”

What chilled her to the bones was the audacity of it. He’d torn up a ring of standing stones and destroyed a dolmen without a blink of his eye. It was like striking a stone cross with a sword in a church. Surely the very stone would bleed, surely screams would rise to the heavens and sting the ears of God.

“. . . It’s as if the faeries have turned a dark eye onto us all. I can’t remember the last time I heard of a young man falling in love with a lovely girl he saw combing her hair in the reflection of a lake, or an old man gifting some luck in return for a kindness. Except for one time, of course, the night we learned about you.” Marged rifled through the debris on the table, searching for a spoon. “But even that was a strange visit, and I won’t be the one saying whether it was for the good or—”

“Marged.” Aileen straightened as Marged’s words penetrated the fog of her distraction. “Did you say something about the night you learned about me?”

“Aye, that’s what I was talking about. I haven’t heard tell of a single encounter with the faeries for years and years now, with the exception of last Midsummer’s Night.” Marged plucked a spoon hiding amid some dirty bowls and wiped it clean on her apron. “Didn’t you know lass?”

“Know what?”

Marged handed her the spoon. “As surely as I stand before you now, it was a faery who told us about you.”

Chapter Fifteen

A
ileen had been at it for hours. She pinched the strand of wool and rubbed a lump smooth. She stretched the scratchy hair across the back of her hand then twisted the length upon the wooden spindle. The winter wind swept down through the smoke–hole and battered the wood–fire at her feet. She watched the flames flicker lower and lower, until nothing but a glowing mass of embers singed her slippered toes. She waited for him, because now she knew why she’d been dragged into his world.

Now she knew the task the faeries had given her as a price for her gift.

Suddenly he was there, still muddy from the ride back from the castle. His blue gaze fell upon her face as he tossed his cloak back to reveal the body which could do such things to her. A weakness invaded her limbs. She fought it off. She was as much a slave to her own needs as any woman but she had work to do this night.

He said, “You look better. There’s blood in your cheeks.” He tugged at the ties of his cloak. “Has it yet reached your head?”

She bit down on an angry retort. He thought she was daft, and no wonder, with the way she’d behaved at the castle.

“Have you lost your tongue, woman?”

“You must be weary from the journey.” She speared the spindle in the basket of wool by her feet. “Sit, and I shall serve you.”

He froze with a bladder of mead halfway to his mouth. As she brushed by him she sensed his wariness. She peeled the linen off the tray and the pungent scent of pepper sauce rose from the poached fish.

She said, “I’ll ask you to forgive my behavior today.” Calm logic, aye, that’s a thing he would understand. She had enough brothers to know something of the way a man’s mind worked. “I should have leashed my tongue in the presence of a guest.”

He stood still as stone in half–shadow, the bladder gripped in his hand, the laces of his boots trailing upon the floor, those blue eyes burning holes into her back as she made her way around the fire to the bench.

He said in a low, dangerous voice, “You sound like a pickpocket who is very sorry she was caught.”

Her hair slid over her face as she slipped the tray upon the table. “I am what I was when you stole me away—a simple peasant girl.”

“The woman who offered her body to me on New Year’s Day was not a woman to flinch at shadows.”

“Aberygaun is no shadow. In my world, such a place is as sacred as a church.”

“You are not in your world anymore.” His voice rumbled low, in a way she’d long become familiar with. “You are in
mine
.”

“Our worlds are not so different.”

“Oh, they are, Irish. I don’t understand yours, and you cannot enter mine.” He stepped toward her, curled his hand around her waist and dragged her against his chest. “Only in this bedroom do they meet—”

“There’s a bit of arrogance.” She elbowed out of his grip, then skittered away to sit on the far end of the bench. She seized the spindle to have something to occupy her nervous hands. “You don’t have a world of your own, separate from all others.”

“My world isn’t peopled with little mischievous creatures that live in flowers, or dragons who breathe fire.”

“Your own people would disagree with you.” She tugged up threads of wool with shaking hands. “Haven’t I heard stories about Arthur’s Grave and Aberygaun and that lake up in the heights whose name I can’t wrap my tongue around. Marged has told me—”

“Is Marged the goddess of this world of yours?”

She didn’t answer right away. His overtunic sailed through the air and crumpled in a ball near her feet.

She pinched the wool into a strand of thread between her fingers, wishing she could mold this man’s mind as easily. “Every home I’ve entered in this kingdom has a bowl of milk set by the fire for the faeries, and a tale or two about the woods nearby or a sacred yew tree or a curve of river. This Wales of yours is peopled by the
Y Tylwyth Teg.
Your disbelief won’t make it otherwise.”

He slapped the bladder back on the table. “I’m tired of this argument. You’ve grown no wiser these past hours.”

Oh, no, Rhys, there’s where you are wrong. In these past hours I’ve grown as wise as Solomon.

“It’s a poor man who believes only the evidence of his senses.” She crushed the spindle into her lap. “If you were deaf, would you insist there was no such thing as music?”

“I would feel the vibrations of the harp–strings.” He snapped open a buckle of his chain–mail tunic. “That’s a deaf man’s music.”

“What of this stuff around us?” She whirled the spindle in the air as his chain–mail shirt clanked to the floor. “This stuff that fills our lungs with each breath? Can you see it? Can you smell it?” She rolled her fingers into her palm. “Can you hold it in your hand?”

“The wind blows it against my skin. I can feel it when it’s hot, when it’s cold.”

“And what of a thought? A dream,” she added, pressing her temple. “Can you see, smell, or touch that?”

“I’ve had lessons in philosophy, Aileen, more than you.” He yanked the collar of his shirt wide. “My castle was once a dream, but now it is real—more real than any of your faery–creatures.”