The Wakening Fire [The Dawn of Ireland 2]

by Erin O'Quinn

  I lay back down and extended myself fully along the entire length of Liam’s warm body. As soon as our bodies touched, he murmured and drew me closer. “Oh, Cat. Love ye. Love your body.” He rubbed his downy mustache on my mouth until I opened it to him. And for a long time he sucked my tongue and moved against me as though he could make love all night long.

  I thought the beer was still speaking, and so I did not move away. Let him say what is on his mind, I thought, and I will try to answer. “Kiss me, Liam, I love you,” I said in his ear, and I sucked his earlobe and put my tongue in his ear. I wrapped my legs around him while he rocked back and forth, as though we were already joined.

  “Say it, say it.” His voice was husky with passion.

  “Suck my nipples, Liam.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love it when you suck me,” I whispered. I was sure he could not understand my words but I cared not. He moaned as though he knew what I was saying, and he brought one breast tenderly from hiding, licking and sucking, very slow. “Oh yes, slow, go slow,” I murmured, then I said it louder.

  He took the other breast from its lacy folds and held it, rubbing the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “Suck…now?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes, now. Suck me now.” I was almost crying from the fire that swept through my body whenever he touched my breasts, and so I told him about it.

  “Inside you,” he said, his voice hoarse. I arched my buttocks and helped him enter me.

  “Now, do it now, Liam,”

  “Say it.” He was straddling me, and he leaned back, not moving.

  “I want you now.”

  “Tell me.” He leaned his head low to me, his eyes full of lights and his mouth barely showing a teasing smile.

  I was thrashing against him, needing him to finish the love play. And so I said it, low at first. Then I was crying, feeling the pain-pleasure of his engorged groin, and I shouted it out, willfully wounding him as I dug my nails into his buttocks. He groaned as though releasing years of pent-up passion. Never had I felt him so hot and urgent as just then, and we reached an exuberant climax.

  We lay together for a long time, my legs wrapped around his hips, his groin still inside me. His eyes were very dark, and he brought his hands up and cupped my face. He looked at me very tenderly, then started to lick the tears from my cheeks. I knew that we had unrolled a fresh parchment tonight in our marriage. It was a new beginning, but one that would be difficult to put into words, even if we were capable of talking about it.

  “A chuisle mo chroí,” I said. “Ah koosh-la ma kree. You are my very heart beat.”

  He kissed me softly, his mouth salty with my tears. Putting his arms around me, he held me close until I slept.

  I woke early, as usual. I got out of bed slow and stealthy as a cat. The fire was still crackling, and the room was warm. Nevertheless I pulled the blanket up around Liam. He was lying in the same position as when we fell asleep, slightly curled like a young animal, his hair damp and clinging to his forehead and neck.

  I went to the fire pit and fed it again, and I put a cauldron of water on the grate. I tipped a candle into the flames and went around the teach lighting other candles until shadows were dancing on all the walls, moving to some unheard music. I was still wearing my underwear, now soiled, and I shrugged it off. I found a clean shift to wear and went back to the fire to prepare a special tea for Liam and me.

  I took the leather pouch of healing powder from its place next to the bed and sprinkled in a measured amount. Then I added another fair-sized portion of dried Marigold mint. I loved the tarragon-flavored infusion and hoped that the horsetail reed powder would not make it taste bitter. Dipping in my finger, I tasted it. It needed a certain tang—yes, an added winter savory leaf on top.

  Pouring the tea into two cups, I added the savory and carried them to the bed. I set them and my pouch on the little table next to the water basin. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I leaned over a bit and stroked Liam’s hair back from his face. “Wake up, love.”

  He groaned and turned over, his back to me, the blanket now halfway down his back. I reached over and ran my fingernail down his backbone, just lightly enough to feel annoying, like a crawling insect. “Wake up.”

  “Hrrmmph,” he said intelligently.

  “Time to heal, Liam, you slugabed. Drink your tea with me, and then we will heal your love wounds.”

  He rolled back over and sat up. “Mo ghrá,” he managed to mumble.

  “Here. This will make it better.”

  Whether he understood me or not, he obediently drank the tea, looking more and more alive as he drained the cup. “Better. Feel…better,” he said at last.

  I, too, felt better. I would not tell Liam, but his lovemaking last night had made me ache inside from the size and insistence of his groin. But guiltily, I loved the simultaneous pleasure it gave me and would never give it up. Instead I sipped the healing infusion and felt a warm glow spread from my throat into my stomach and deeper still.

  “Now roll over,” I ordered him.

  He looked at me with the light in his eye that heralded a tease. “Like a dog?” he asked.

  “Yes, like a wolfhound.”

  He obediently rolled onto his stomach, and I inspected the marks I had left on his skin. I saw several bruises and welts, and a few long scratches. Pouch in hand, I straddled him, aroused immediately by the sight of his moving buttocks. “Hold still.” I leaned down and very gently licked all the wounds and then I tipped the powder lightly on each one.

  By now Liam had arched his buttocks high, wordlessly asking for something more. Now it was my turn to tease him. Stroking him very lightly, I said, “Say it.”

  He moaned.

  “Say it, Liam,” and I cupped his buttocks, spreading them very slightly.

  I distinctly heard, “Devil woman, póg mé.”

  “No.” I leaned far forward over his back and put my tongue in his ear, exactly the same as he had done to me last night. “Tell me, tell me what you want.”

  Twisting his head, he murmured something into my mouth, and I caught fire, sliding down his back and seizing his arched butt. My mouth enveloped his testicles from behind, and I sucked again and again as I penetrated his opening with my finger, while Liam was almost shouting his pleasure. At last I put my tongue inside him and thrust it in and out. “In me arse, in me arse. Never, never stop,” he cried.

  At last he turned and lay me down, spreading my legs with his knees, and the moment of entry was as though for the very first time. We told each other all our passion until the fire took over and consumed us.

  Afterward, I lay looking up at him as he raised up on his elbows. “Conas tá tú, a chroí?”

  “I am…whole. I am healed. Devil woman.”

  I laughed and rolled from under him and out of bed, ready to wash and cook breakfast.

  Chapter 5:

  Swords and Shillelaghs

  Mama and Glaedwine lived on our holdings, a bit farther downriver near the houses we had erected for Michael and Ryan. She had insisted on many windows, and the teach was studded with shuttered openings so that she could look out over the river or across the fields to the groves of aspen and elm that grew thickly over the property. I did not remember Mama being so drawn to windows while I was growing up in our large villa in Britannia. But I saw a clear connection between her open-aired home and the dank, windowless slave quarters where Sweeney had recently held her and four others for several months.

  I would not soon forget the image of Mama standing outside the crude, unlimed building, using me to stand upright, smoothing my hair over and over. And then, unable or unwilling to walk on her own, collapsing like a pile of rags. And Glaedwine, the huge Saxon mercenary, picking her up, his arms like tree trunks, tenderly carrying her to safety.

  Brigid and I tethered our horses near the door, both of us enjoying the still, crisp air. Yesterday’s billowing winds had played themselves out in the thousands of bare tree-branc
h lyres, so that now only a faint whisper reminded me that clustered stands of hazel could hold a lovely tune. The sky, too, had been swept to a clean brilliance. It was absolutely cloudless, and the morning sun had a field of play all to itself and a few soaring birds.

  Mama came to the door in a long, Roman-style tunic belted with a velvet cord. I noticed that she never seemed to be comfortable in the long-sleeved léines worn by the women of Éire, although she did favor the lovely gúnas that women customarily wore over their tunics.

  “Darling,” she said, and she embraced me warmly. “And beautiful Brigid—welcome to my home.” We went inside, treading on woven wool rugs that lay here and there on the highly polished floors. I saw that she had hung several tapestries on the walls since I had been there last, and I asked her about them.

  Her reply had been simple. “GoldenFinch.” Finch was the wife of Jay Feather, one of my closest friends. She was a master weaver, and her talents had been passed on to her eight or so beautiful daughters. Her darling daughter Magpie, also very dear to me, had fashioned most of my clothes, except for the few Brigid had given me.

  “Mama, our tastes are very much alike. I will also have rugs and tapestries all around me in our new brugh.”

  “I wonder why, Caylith,” she said drily. “Perhaps because you grew up crawling on rugs and climbing up tapestries.”

  I hugged her, laughing. “Here, Mama. I prepared cakes of pan bread for you and Glaed, with thanks for the butter and cheese and eggs you gave us.”

  She accepted them and then turned to Brigid, holding out her arms for the warm mantle. “Brigid, sit here where it is comfortable and tell me what you have been doing here in Derry.”

  I handed her my own brat, and she hung each of them on hooks near the door. Brigid and I lolled back on large, high-backed benches covered with animal pelts. As I leaned back, I looked around. Glaedwine’s influence was unmistakable. Not just the benches, but almost everything in Mama’s home was oversized. The bed was almost a duplicate of Liam’s and mine, for they had both been fashioned by the same master woodworker, our dear friend Luke Smith. The tables were sturdy and tall, and the soft “couches,” a recent invention, were larger than most.

  “Ah, Claudia, thank you for asking. I have been lending my few small talents to the new school. My Latin is not the best. But it is not the worst, either.” I fancied that she looked pointedly at me, and I laughed without embarrassment.

  Mama laughed, too. “We did our best, Bree, but Caylith would be a warrior, like her father. We never found a priest or other teacher who could hold her indoors for more than half an hour.”

  “Wrong, wrong, Mama. What about Brindl?”

  “Yes, Brindl was a good teacher for you. She could run over your noun declensions while the two of you were playing with bows and arrows in a hiding hole somewhere.”

  Even now, years later, I flushed with the sudden knowledge that Mama knew some of my childish secrets. “Brindl is coming with us this morning to train with Gristle,” I offered, changing the subject.

  “I wondered at your, ah, manly costume, dear. Will you be toting around those cudgels I saw behind your saddles?”

  Mama had seen us riding up. I wondered how much she really did see and decide to accept without comment.

  “Claudia, I think Caylith is right.” Bree came to my defense. “There may come a time when I shall need to ward off some threat. It would not hurt for me to learn a thing or two.” Brigid herself was dressed in a pair of Michael’s leather breeches that she had quickly torn apart and resewed to fit her slight frame. I thought she looked very smart indeed. Apparently, Mama thought that we both were decidedly unfeminine.

  “How did you learn Latin so well?” Mama asked my friend. “Not to mention our language?”

  “After my mother died, Father took me to Britannia for a change of air. This was when I was around ten years old. We ended up staying there for almost ten years while Father studied points of law in the Londinium Biblio-kathedra. My teachers were high bishops and the like. My parchments were gleaned from the treasure troves of antiquity. I suppose you could say that I had a continental education.”

  “Very Roman,” said Mama approvingly.

  “Yes,” Brigid said, laughing softly. “I miss the baths most of all.”

  I wished she had not brought up that subject, for Mama was as much an admirer of Roman baths as I imagined the most hedonistic Roman emperor. “Perhaps someday,” she said wistfully, “someone may devise a way to make a small—very small—caldarium for me. The icy river itself is my frigidarium.”

  Brigid looked meaningfully at me and I subtly shook my head. Please do not discuss the baths that Michael is making for me, please, please. I knew that Mama would not rest until she had the same built for her and Glaedwine. And “very small” would never do. Until Michael was through with my own holdings, I did not want him to be diverted by Mama’s list of demands.

  I rose. “We need to stop by and gather Brindl into the fold,” I told Mama. “Thank you again for the provisions.”

  “Anything for my daughter,” she said pointedly, and she raised her smooth cheek for me to kiss.

  When we were well on the path to Brindl’s house, Brigid laughed gaily. “Your mother is a treasure. How fortunate you were as a child to have such a Romanophile as a mother! Can you imagine how you would have turned out if she had merely let you loose?”

  “The very same, Bree! I would have been dirty, no doubt, but every bit a cheeky boy in every way but the obvious, the same as now.”

  “Yes, you are still a cheeky boy,” she admitted. “But because of your mother, you are also a cultivated and beautiful young lady. I think Liam would never have met you otherwise.”

  I shrugged. Who knows what Fortuna would have given me if I had never swum in a hot pool or learned to conjugate a Latin verb?

  Brindl and Thom’s teach was nestled under a copse of rowan and birch trees upriver from us, close to Luke’s house. It was almost exactly like Liam’s and mine, except for a noticeable lack of garden and grazing land. Instead, the grounds resembled a large training field. Upright stakes some hundred feet apart reminded me that my friends were also experts at the game of hurling. Brindl had been proclaimed champion camán player of all Éire by the high king himself at the Fair of Tara over a year ago.

  Thom and she had married some three or so months before Liam and I, and she had largely disappeared since the wedding. Thom was as withdrawn and shy as Brindl was gregarious and active. But right now he was working all day on the bally defensive trench with Liam, and so I had a chance to reestablish my very old friendship with Brindl.

  True to her warrior nature, Brindl was outdoors, running through offensive and defensive moves with her wooden spatha, her practice version of the famous three-foot, blunt-nosed Roman sword. She, too, was dressed in triús made of wool, flared at the hips and gathered in at the waist with a stout leather belt.

  Brigid and I dismounted, and Brindl stood still, waiting for us to approach. Her hair, brown shattered by golden sundrops, hung flawlessly straight to her shoulders as though she were sitting on a plush couch and not standing among the tall clump grasses. Her eyes, brindle like her hair, were wide and calm.

  I stood hesitantly on the edge of the training field, feeling suddenly like an interloper. Brindl gazed at me for a long moment, and then her eyes refocused. She suddenly threw her sword to the ground and ran into my arms. “Cay, Cay, darling, how are you?” She hugged me so strongly that I grunted.

  “Fine, dear Brindie. I think you have met Brigid?”

  Brindl walked close to Brigid and took both her hands. “We met the day of your wedding. I am very happy to see you again, Brigid.” She turned her head to address both of us. “I am sorry that Thom and I have not been around much to visit. Give us a while, please.”

  “I understand, dear one. Um, Brindl, have you been practicing deep breathing? It seemed like you saw us, and yet you saw us not.”

  “You gu
essed it, old friend. I was concentrating very hard on my most formidable opponent.”

  “And that would be—?”

  “Myself,” she said simply. She looked closely at our clothing. “Have you both come to practice with me?”

  “I thought we could all three ride to Gristle’s training grounds this morning, Brindie.”

  “Oh! I think I would like that very much. Does he know we are coming?”

  “No. But if he is not there, or if he cannot train today, we can still use his facilities.”

  Soon we were all three on the way to Gristle’s unique three-level house. He had built it himself with a small work crew, using the lay of the land as the basis for its shape and height. One advantage to using the ruggedness of the hills and ravines was that no one else wanted to lay claim to the acreage, which was breath catching in its beauty. I thought that if a tree had stood where Gristle wanted his teach, that tree would have stayed and the house would have been built around it.

  The house was surrounded by several small practice areas, some rectangular and some circular, where he instructed a small number of students according to his whim, not for any monetary gain. I had been his student—or he had been my armsman—from the time I arrived in Faerie more than two years ago, when I was just sixteen.

  Once the right hand of Traherne, Lord of Wales, Gristle had sworn his fealty to me when they feared that my mother had been killed by forces I could never conquer on my own. It had taken me some time to fully appreciate Gristle—not because he had changed, but because I finally started to mature. His training techniques were harsh. True to his name, the man was tough and hard to swallow. But he was totally dedicated to me in the classical manner of sworn vassals, and he was the best tactician and weapons man the Roman world had seen in generations.