[Celtic Legends 01.0] Twice Upon a Time Read online

  His chest heaved. “It was your Sight which told you that.”

  “Oft I don’t know what it tells me until I speak the very words.” She shifted her eyes to the sword gripped in his hand. “I’ll temper that, though, for I’ve no wish for me or mine to feel the bite of your steel.”

  He glanced at the sword as if he did not remember how it had leapt into his hand. “I would never strike a woman.” He sheathed it. “Since your Sight told you I have no sons, your Sight can tell me why.”

  “You’ll have me do the work of the gods, then.”

  “Neither of my two wives—fat, healthy women, both—has ever borne me a child. Worse—neither has ever taken with child.” He glared beyond the treetops to the hidden horizon. “And though I’ve plowed every fertile womb from Ulster through Connacht, never once has a woman, high-born or low, come to me swelling with my babe.”

  “It’s common knowledge that if ye seed too thinly, the rain will wash it away, and you’ll never have a good harvest.”

  “It’s not for the trying that I fail.” He swung around, his sword clanking against the studs on his boots. “I’ve fosterlings a-plenty living in my ring-fort in Ulster, but none of them are my flesh and blood. A king needs sons, else he’s half a man, and there are whispers enough about the strangeness of my birth.”

  “There’s many a man conceived around the night fires of Samhain,” she argued, “who knows not his father’s name.”

  “You know of my birth.” His gaze was long and contemplative. “Were you of my tribe, woman, you’d have the Druid’s seat of honor by my right hand.”

  Brigid felt her loyalties shifting in ways that made her uncomfortable. “Conor of Ulster, I have told you nothing you don’t already know.”

  “Tell me when I will have a son.”

  “The visions can’t be had for the asking.” She jabbed the needle into the neck of her tunic and sloshed the herb-water onto the grass. “I’ve no control over them. My mother died long before she could teach me the full of the old ways. My visions come when they wish: an apple won’t fall until it’s ripe.”

  “I’ll kiss it out of you, then.” He crossed the distance that separated them in two long strides. He clutched her shoulders. The bowls in her hands clattered to the earth. “If the visions don’t come, then at least I’ll slake this burning in my blood since the moment I laid eyes upon you.”

  “No.”

  He stopped a breath away from her lips, his eyes aflame, her body pressed against his tunic. She smelled the honey mead upon his breath, the sweat and salt of his skin. Something inside flared as hot and molten as the smith’s ore in the fire pit, but she forced her legs to straighten, she forced their bodies apart.

  “You’ll not force me, Conor.”

  “You feel the slow burn, lass. I see it in your eyes.”

  “I’m a king’s daughter. Banished or not, no man will treat me like a common slave.”

  “There will be nothing common about this—”

  “You're acting like any man too long in war.”

  “Yield to me, woman. I’ll stoke that fire in your belly as I stroke the secrets between your legs—”

  “Those secrets are my secrets, to be given when I please.” She struggled away, stumbling. “I’ll have a proper wooing or I’ll have none of you at all.”

  She could not believe she had spoken the words, but now they hung on the air. This man was not the one for whom she was destined, yet something had prompted her to state such a thing. Perhaps the gods had sent this man—the only man she’d ever known who wasn’t afraid of her eyes—to ease her loneliness while she waited for her destined lover.

  “Aye, I’ll woo you, lass. After."

  He reached for her but caught nothing but a fistful of air. She swirled in the midst of the hot sun, feeling the glow of her hair around her. Their gazes clashed. She knew very well that she was defenseless. She knew that as her over-king he could command her to submit to him, and in her outcast position, she’d be a fool to refuse. She knew, too, that if he took her in his arms again, she would melt into his will.

  The words bubbled out of her. “Patience is the price, Conor.”

  “The price for what?”

  “For the healing.” She jerked her chin toward his wound, freshly bleeding red. “I’ve saved you a scar. You’re in my debt. My price is a wooing.”

  A muscle flexed in his cheek. “So that’s to be the way of it.”

  “Aye.”

  “I’m not a man to wait for a pleasure that can be had here and now.”

  “It would do you some good to keep that rod in your tunic. You may find the food is sweeter when you haven’t gorged upon it.”

  His jaw tightened as he willed patience. “Were tongues swords, you’d be the best swordfighter in Morna.”

  She tried to hide the hope in her breast. “What say you rí ruirech? Do you have the honor to pay the price?”

  “If that’s what it will take to have you, then you’ll get your wooing.”

  He swept up his cloak and whirled it over his shoulders, then scooped up his brooch lying in the grass. He pressed the warm metal into her hand. The garnets riveting the pin sparkled in the light.

  “My first gift to you.” He touched her cheek with one finger. “We’ll see, when this wooing is done, who is the more hungry for the other.”

  He strode out of the clearing, his cloak flapping. His whistling mocked her long after he disappeared from sight. She told herself that she would welcome him to her hut, but only to suck dry the last bit of his knowledge of the world. It’d been too long since she’d heard of what passed during the feis at Tara last year, or at the latest fair in Cruachan. She yearned to hear what new churches the priests had built, and of the intrigues of the high court. And so she’d stave off the loneliness for another passing of seasons

  She flipped the brooch into the air and caught it in her sure grip. Whistle while you can, Conor of Ulster. It’s sure I’ll be the last to whistle.

  Then, without a whisper of notice, a cloud passed over her eyes.

  Brigid blinked once, but the gray vapor persisted. The fog whirled like the smoke of peat fires, gathering and thickening until the blackened haze cut off the brilliance of the midsummer day. Brigid felt the brooch slip between her fingers. She was not afraid. She was familiar with the swift and unexpected blindness. She had had this vision every year since the onset of her moon-blood cycles. The revelation always plagued her with the coming of Lughnasa Day, the midsummer Celtic festival—the sacred night of the fires which she would celebrate at the next new moon.

  Tall, silvery forms shimmered through the fog, and then differentiated into a cluster of oak trees. The grove’s living warmth reached out and caressed her. Oaks were the king of trees, givers of shelter and warmth and worshiped above all others. Blue green light filtered through the vault of branches to cast an uncertain glow upon her skin. It was an uncanny twilight, like the kiss of night and day. High up in the star-studded skies, an unearthly moon-sun burned metallic and white hot.

  One of the trees swelled, and then birthed a shadow, which unfolded into the silhouette of a man. Brigid stretched out her arms and welcomed this creature of spirit and flesh, for she knew that she and he were a part of one whole, and that what was to occur within this ring was an old and sacred ceremony. He approached. The creature’s dark cloak shimmered with golden crescents, like the cloak of a powerful Druid. His large hands rasped on her bare skin—was it the furrowed texture of bark she felt? Was that his crescent-sprinkled cloak she felt brushing against her, falling to the earth beneath their feet, or was it the whisper-soft brush of shedding leaves? He caressed her nakedness, urging her to open herself to him and let him ease this growing ache in her body. And she knew that some greater fate lay in this mating, for she sensed around her the bated breath of men and gods, the stillness of the earth-sun and the wary watching of the Otherworldly moon, as if this coupling forged the last link in some mystic chain.
/>   Then the scene dissolved into mist and like every other time, she fought to stay within the circle. She wanted to look upon the face of her lover, to finally see the beloved features that always swirled in darkness. She struggled to probe through the veils that kept this last bit of knowledge from her . . . but inevitably the shadowy images receded, lost.

  The smoke obscuring her vision thinned and then dissipated altogether. She found herself standing in the sunshine in front of her sagging hut, staring at the honeysuckle that edged the moss that clung to the thatched roof.

  The brooch winked in the grass at her feet. She picked it up and turned it over and over in her hand.

  “You’ll be left the hungry one, Conor,” she whispered, the wisps of the vision still clinging to her. “My maidenhead is fated for a creature not of this world. Someone far greater than even you.”

  Chapter Three

  He would give the lass a wooing to rival the legendary wooing of Étaín.

  Conor descended upon Brigid after a mid-morning squall while the raindrops still dripped from their cradle in the leaves. He unfurled at her feet two cloaks worthy of a king’s daughter. One was saffron, and it lay on the damp grass like a carpet of blooming gorse. The second was a heavier, striped cloak, dyed bluish-purple from the dog-whelk shells from the west. Over her shoulders he draped a length of white linen, and then wound about her arm the finest woven gold braid that could be had in all of Erin.

  “I would have you dress,” he told her, “as befits a woman of your birth.”

  As the days passed he showered her with carved hair combs made of bone, jewel-encrusted beads to fasten to the fiery plaits of her hair, enameled rings, a girdle of links hung with tiny, clustered bells, ankle-rings of swirling silver, and other such things he imagined a woman would crave. Yet she never wore the riches, even when he visited. And each time he handed her another gift, she’d turn it over in her hands, comment on the fine workmanship or an unusual design, and then put it aside, as if it were no more than an empty horn of mead. Then she’d ask him if he’d like some heather honey and barley cakes.

  Once, he clutched her by the waist and drew her slim warmth against him. “My hunger’s not for food,” he growled, burying his face in the rainwater silk of her hair.

  “Have you forgotten your price already?”

  “Have I not been patient enough?” He nudged the jeweled cup crushed between them, frustrating his efforts to draw her closer. “Doesn’t a man deserve more thanks for the gifts I bring?”

  A heavy weight clanked against his chest and then thudded to the grass. “Take your metalwork, then. Do you think I can be bought like a hosteller’s wife?”

  And so he whirled away and raged back to the ring-fort to plow his war chariot like a madman across the fields, the reins of his foam-flecked horses as taut as a harp’s strings. He tested the flex of his spears until they snapped beneath his grip, and then nicked two blades into jagged edges fighting. At night in the smoky mead hall, Conor swilled enough hazel mead to drown two men, then barked at bards for tales only to cut them off, or summoned his harper for music only to bellow like a hound when the lyre twanged not to his liking. Slaves and Ulster warriors alike trod wide circles around him, and whispered behind their hands the suspicions they dared not to say aloud.

  But Aidan dared. After a mad morning race, he slid down his horse’s heaving side with a thwump of his cloak and approached his king. Conor hunkered on the hurdle of one of the animal pens, sharpening his sword with a whetting stone.

  Conor spoke without raising his head. “You’re as slow as an old woman, foster-brother.”

  “Aye, but my horse is alive after the race, which is more than I can say for that beast of yours.” Aidan glanced over to the sweat-soaked stallion, its proud head bent in exhaustion as two Briton slaves lathered its steaming coat. “You won’t bring the lass around by killing your own horses—”

  “They’re my horses to kill.”

  “Will you look at yourself? Half mad with—”

  “It’s a sparring I want.” Conor leapt off the hurdle and landed flat-footed and ready. “Fight me for the champion’s portion of the stag I felled yesterday.”

  Aidan crossed his arms. “I won’t fight you.”

  “Growing old, are you?”

  “I won’t fight a man who snorts and paws the earth like a bull with the smell of a cow in his nostrils.”

  Conor grew like an angry god. He pulled his blade and held the tip at Aidan’s throat. Aidan knocked it away and ignored the sting as the blade nicked his palm.

  “Every man down to the meanest slave knows she’s stolen your manhood.” He faced Conor, eye to eye. “You’re bewitched.”

  “There’s no magic in this.”

  “All the worse, then.” Aidan stanched the wound by curling his hand into a fist. “You won’t shake free of it by destroying another war chariot or killing your horses or killing me.”

  Conor glared, the fury banked in his eyes. His hand clenched the hilt of his blade. There was no getting away from it, this angry, endless rush of thwarted passion. He’d never before felt the like. Many a time he’d been tempted to ask his Druid if he were bewitched, but he wanted no man laughing into his beard over his failure to bring this woman to his pallet.

  Aidan said, “Go back to her, Conor.”

  “She wants none of me.”

  “There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t give the last tooth out of her jaw to have the Champion of the O’Neill in her bed.”

  “She has spurned my gifts.”

  “Then you’ve yet to find what it is she wants.” Aidan sucked on his hand then frowned down upon it. “Be off with you now, before the bards start singing songs about their poor, witch-befuddled king, and paint you with such shame that you can no longer show your face in all of Erin.”

  So Conor mounted another horse and took the narrow path bowered by oaks and yew to the pebble-strewn stream. He followed its gurgling path deep into the woods. He dismounted when the path grew too narrow for the horse. He left the beast near a sweep of sweet summer grass, and then shouldered his way through the verdure to the clearing, glowing just beyond a thick oak.

  He saw her standing outside the door of her hut. Her hair shone like polished brass upon the saffron wool of her cloak. Her tunic, bound with the brooch of his clan, caught flecks of sunlight. A faint tinkling filled the clearing as he approached and he knew she wore the girdle with a hundred tiny bells. Her long, white neck arched like that of a swan as she drew him into the swirling iridescence of her eyes.

  “I’ve been expecting you, Conor.”

  He took in the sight of her like a man starved. She spread her arms, exposing more of her white tunic beneath the yellow glow of her cloak. “It’s been many a season since I’ve felt such fine stuff against my skin.”

  His gaze fell to her breasts, small and high. Through the fine linen he saw the pucker of her nipples, and he found himself wondering what it would be like to draw one tip into his mouth, to feel it harden against his tongue.

  “Why?” The word rushed to his lips, harsher than he intended. “Why are you wearing all this now?”

  “Because you came back.”

  Conor shook his head. There was no knowing a woman’s mind. Only when he came empty-handed to her door did she accept all he had given her. He was in no state to puzzle it out. It was enough that she finally accepted the gifts and did not tear him to shreds with her tongue. And it made his head soft, to see her draped in cloth he’d given her with his own hands, even if he wanted nothing more than to rip everything off her body.

  He said, “They say you’ve bewitched me.”

  A corner of her lips twitched. “I’ve worked no charm. I don’t know the way of it, though the people of Morna would have you think otherwise.”

  “Tell me why am I here, then, when every bondswoman in Morna has offered me room on her pallet to flush my mind of you.”

  Her cheeks stained an angry pink. “My Sight
doesn’t teach me the strange ways of men. Don’t blame me if you find no pleasure in a whore’s arms.”

  He wanted to seize her shoulders and squeezed them hard. Instead, he asked, “What do you want of me, woman?”

  Her eyes flew to his face, and in one brief moment, like the clearing of mist to reveal the whipped surface of a storm-lashed lake, he saw a flash of a powerful emotion he could quite name. Just as quickly it was gone, masked in murky shadow.

  Tilting her chin, she gestured toward the hut, where in a pool of sunlight lay a crude yew board bristling with pegs. “I want no more of you than this: Play me a game of fidchell.”

  “Fidchell?”

  “It’s an old battle game. Any Ulsterman served his first food on the tip of a sword must know the way of it.”

  “I know it well enough.”

  “Good.” She turned with a flap of her cloak. “It’s been many a moon since my brother and I played. My palms have been itching for someone to challenge.”

  So fidchell they played as they sat on the sun-warmed grass with thrushes warbling in the bushes and bees buzzing swirls in the air. As he stretched on his side, one arm draped over his raised knee, three days of unceasing activity began to take its toll. A heavy languor settled over him, dulling the throb of his bruises. He wondered if she had crushed some herb in the new beer she offered him.

  He cared not. He let the lassitude wash over him.

  Between games, she placed before him a meal of new whortleberries with sweet clustering cream. As the juice of the berries ran down his chin, he found himself speaking of things he only shared with Aidan. It was to prod her Sight, he told himself, as he spoke of his priestess mother, of his search for a father with his own face among the men of Ulster, his determination to earn a kingdom by sword, since his lineage was unknown to him and thus he could not claim a kingship by blood. She sat still and silent, listening as intently as a child hearing her first bard’s tale in the shadows of the mead hall.