The Wakening Fire [The Dawn of Ireland 2]

by Erin O'Quinn

  He was suddenly angry again. “You are as bad as the bald ones, they who pretend to fear for my soul but who seek to probe my pain.”

  “Perhaps you do not know that I am a healer. Not just of physical pain. I once had a—my darling grandfather…oh, I once helped Leoninus begin to recover from mental anguish. Except that he left me before I could finish.”

  I did not want to reveal to Sweeney that my eyes were bright with unwept tears, and I turned my head toward the east window, the one looking toward Snaefell on the Isle of Man.

  When he spoke at last, the anger was gone from his voice. “No. I know nothing about you. You now know more about my life than I do of yours.”

  I told him in a few halting words about my beloved grandfather, King Leoninus of Faerie, how he was afflicted with severe mental anguish. He had lived to see eight generations of grandchildren, all of them except me now dead. He had lived through the sudden, tragic end of his darling wife, Caylith the Great, and he had suffered the loss of his second wife through some vile coward’s act of poisoning. And he had been plagued all his generations-long life with the evil of his twin brother Lupus.

  I told Sweeney about the comfort tea I had given to Grandfather each morning, and how it brought the glow of health back to his sallow cheeks, and how it had straightened his shoulders and taken the drag from his very footsteps. And then suddenly, he was gone on a journey to Snaefell, never to return.

  “…So I know not whether the infusion would have cured him, Mister Sweeney. Completely, or in part. I would have been grateful for even a bit of a cure.”

  “I will think about your words,” Sweeney said at last. “If someone could find my mother and speak with her and somehow find even a sand grain of truth, that would be the beginning of my healing. Now I need to rest. Excuse me.”

  With a practiced twist of his arms, Sweeney sent his cart spinning in the direction of the far wall. I saw a raised pallet, about the height of his cart, and I knew it was time to take my leave.

  Brother Galen heaved his bulk up to a standing position. “Me aching back,” he moaned. “Let me get your cloak, lass.”

  I spoke in a low tone, troubled suddenly with thoughts of Sweeney’s inner anguish. “Nay, a Shéamais, help Sweeney onto his cot. I will speak with you again soon.”

  I pulled my cloak over my head and tightened my ribbon, and then I managed to push the door open against the unwilling wind. I turned and gave the monk a half wave, and he returned it with a kind of salute. Then I bent my shoulders again into the wind and sought the school.

  I knew brother Jericho was behind one of the partitions. I listened as I walked, finally recognizing his mild voice, and I sank down onto a nearby bench to wait for him. In about ten minutes, he emerged from behind the screen, and he clasped hands with the one he had been speaking to. As he turned to leave, I cleared my throat a little, and he saw me.

  “Caylith! At the school two days out of two? What am I to think about your hidden ambitions?”

  “You would be wrong to think I would be either a teacher or a student.” I could not help smiling as Jericho stood waiting for a feasible explanation of my presence. “I beg a boon of thee.”

  “Normally, I would say, ‘Of course, Caylith.’ But I have learned to be wary of your requests. The last one I granted had me yoked to a giant redheaded, foulmouthed drunk for at least four days.”

  I laughed outright, thinking of poor Jericho forced into the company of Fergus MacCool, and all at my own behest. I needed to have Michael’s brother taken to the monastery at Emain Macha to begin penitence under Father Patrick himself. And I knew that Jericho would do it again in a heartbeat if I but asked.

  “Let us sit here for a few minutes, O brother, while I explain what I need.” I told him about my conversation just now with Sweeney and what he had said about finding his mother.

  “I need to get to Limavady quickly, and I need a translator she will speak to. I have learned that Mother Sweeney is a Christian, and so I know she will trust you from the beginning. Besides, you have already met her.”

  “That is true, Caylith. And I liked her. She was pathetically eager to help those poor women.”

  “We have two ways to get to Limavady. One by horseback. The other you may like even less. That would be by foot. Whichever way we get there, we need to do it quickly. I would be loath to think that our only clue to Sweeney’s past may be dying of old age as we stand here.

  “Or mayhap dying of some other cause,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Do you think she may be in some danger?”

  “Perhaps by her own hand. Who knows? If she was forced to testify against her beloved son, she may feel she has nothing left to live for.”

  “Then it is even more imperative that you take me to see her right away.”

  “I must agree with you. But it cannot be tomorrow. I need one day to shift my obligations. Let us agree to leave Friday, one hour after sunrise.”

  “Meet me at my teach, Jericho, and we will break fast together before we leave.”

  * * * *

  That night I lay touching Liam’s face as candlelight caught his high cheekbones and glanced off his mouth, seeming to make it move in subtle syllables. “Liam, darling, I must go to Limavady.”

  He took my hand in his large gruff fingers, separating my own fingers one by one and tasting the tips. “Cén fáth?” he murmured.

  “Two lives may hang in the balance. Sweeney’s. And his mother’s.”

  “Tell me,” he said, and his eyes bored into mine as I spoke.

  “I went to speak to a man I feared, and I left a man I pitied and almost respected.”

  I told him of Sweeney’s agitation, his frustrated whirling about of the invalid’s cart. I told him what Sweeney thought of me—my own deceptions to him, my taking of his land, my threat to have Talon and Claw tear him apart.

  I told him how Sweeney’s mother had taken him to Gaul to live with the monks, and how he had studied to become a scholar. How all his young life he sought answers about his father. Who was his father, really? Was his father really dead? If so, where did he die? Was he truly a son of Éire, or a native of the Pictish moors, or even Britannia?

  And yet his mother would not speak of him except to say he was a lord, one of high birth. He could elicit nothing more from her until it nearly drove him mad. When at last she admitted that he was not even from Éire, he ranted, as he said, days or months, drinking to oblivion, spending the family’s fortune, seeking his father somewhere in the depths of his own verging insanity. And still she was silent.

  “He would not speak of his pain, Liam. But I could see it in his eyes. It was the same pain I had seen in the eyes of my grandfather. It was a deep inner anguish, not a pain healed with a potion.”

  “What do ye think, a ghrá? What pain is it?”

  “I know not how much of it is because of his ruined legs. He would not speak of it. But I think part of it is the pain of love. Unanswered love. A thirst that cannot be quenched.”

  “What of his dead wife, Cat? And what of your mother?”

  “I think both women are tied somehow to his pain. He told me the same thing about my mother that Bree did. He said I need to ask her. There is a story waiting to be told, Liam, but no one is willing to speak it. As for his dead wife, he speaks of her almost with reverence. He does not sound like a wife killer. Or any kind of killer at all.”

  “Tell me why ye seek his mother.”

  “Mother Sweeney holds all the answers. For some reason, she has carried a dread secret with her for over forty years. Even as her son was bound and sentenced to drowning in the cold sea, she remained silent. Why, Liam? I fear she may die before her story is told. And Owen, too, may die soon, for the pain inside is killing him. I feel it.”

  “Then we go together. Tomorrow.”

  I tightened my fingers around his large hand, as if to restrain him. “No, we must wait one day, until Brother Jericho can go with us. Mother Sweeney will talk to the m
onk, Liam. He may absolve her of whatever sin she has carried all these years. She will talk to him and perhaps only to him. He can leave Friday in the morning.”

  “Ye…made plans before ye saw me, Cat.”

  I sat up and drew the blanket to my chin. “Yes. It was too important to wait. Life, Liam. And death.”

  He lay there looking up at the thatched ceiling for a while, silent and thoughtful. “I…told ye once, Cat. I never hold ye back. I love your freedom. But…not know such a small butterfly…hurt me so much.”

  The candlelight reflected back the tears that stood in his eyes. “Oh, oh, my darling husband. A chuisle mo chroí, a Liam, I am so sorry.” I rested my head on his chest. My shoulders began to heave with the sobs I tried to keep lodged in my stomach.

  He reached out and embraced me, blanket and all, and drew me back down onto our bed. “Hush, hush,” he said, caressing my hair. “Ye did nothing wrong, Cat. Ye be guilty of loving too much. Even your enemies. Ah, Cat, I understand ye.”

  I kissed his dear face, licking the saltiness from around his eyes and in his short, soft beard. I could feel his readiness even through the blanket. “Liam, make love to me. But slow. Silent. Even, oh, even in the dark tonight. All right?”

  “Tá go maith,” he said, and I barely heard him. He rose up a bit and seized the candle on the table and blew it out. I felt his body in the sudden darkness, a heat I felt more intensely now, with no flame to light his presence.

  It was almost as though we were back on the road somewhere leaving the Lough Neagh, in the shadow of a shadow of a moonless night, under a nameless tree. He was lying on his side, facing me. Then his tongue was in my ear, soft and slow, a timid animal, and he drew my fingers into his mouth and suckled them in the same way, unhurried and gentle.

  Not being able to see him, I could not anticipate where he would touch me, and I shivered when I felt his thumb and forefinger take my nipple. As his fingers pulled lightly, his tongue entered my mouth, nuzzling and grazing. I pressed my body hard against his in a sudden demand for more, and I felt my breath becoming labored.

  I felt his hot tongue slow against my throat, and then lower and lower until his mouth found the blanket, still drawn around my breasts. Both his hands took the top of the blanket and drew it down very slowly, almost inch by inch, and my ragged breathing made my breasts jump and fall. When his mouth finally found a nipple, I gasped as though taken in ambush.

  And then he was sucking my moving breasts, licking and sucking my fugitive nipples, in the rhythm I so craved that it made me frantic. I held him around his waist and helped guide him inside me. His hardness and his heat both combined to take my breath completely. As soon as he penetrated me, I reared up and put my legs around his hips, thrashing and pulsing, while he pushed his groin in, then out with his hands on my butt.

  Only at the end, only when I could feel his tremors of pleasure, did I cry out, my groin on fire. Then he did, too, a great moan of passion and then relief.

  My legs were still wrapped around him, and my arms, too. “Liam, Liam, I love you.” My lips moved in his ear, and my tears unaccountably came again.

  Liam rolled over a bit, keeping himself inside me. “We…love in the cold. And dark. Under the trees. Hardly wait.”

  I laughed softly. “And I can hardly wait. Codladh sámh. Sleep well.”

  Chapter 17:

  The Road to Limavady

  Liam and Michael had agreed that it would be a two-day trip from Derry to Sweeney’s old homestead. In my mind, the area was still Ballysweeney, for that is where he and his mother had lived for the past twenty years and where I had first crossed swords with him, in a sense. It was more like crossing sharp minds, I thought, as NimbleFoot deftly took on ditches and gullies on the road to Limavady.

  I thought about the man for whose sake I was traveling. From the moment I had met Owen Sweeney, my very insides had lurched with fear. There was something unspeakably menacing about his hard, dark eyes and his knife-slash mouth. The very fact that he spoke my language impeccably had made my skin shrivel along the back of my neck.

  His bulging muscles and rope-like sinews moved with a language of their own, a language of almost careless warning, as though silently telling me that I would be his next victim. As I rode, I thought about ignorance, how it can warp the mind and numb the senses with unreasoning fear.

  Now that I knew a bit more about the man, my fear had receded, replaced by a sense of acute haste. Looking back, I could see every act of Sweeney’s in the light of his increasing mental collapse.

  He seemed to have set himself up to be captured from the very beginning. He lived in a clay house with no guards. He surrounded himself with stupid drovers—or at least, men with no initiative or imagination, people who could be taken in by the flimsiest of ruses. The second time, he had halted in his northward flight in the shallows of the Bay of Trawbreaga, and he had returned to an obvious ambush, to the formidable Caylith and her Saxon army hidden in his own escape tunnel.

  I wondered now why he had chosen to take Liam at all. The retribution for harming the son of a high king would be swift and terrible. Is that what he wants, a swift and terrible death? I had even started to believe that he meant Liam no harm. Perhaps my husband was merely a way to seize sudden attention and sure punishment. The fact that Liam had been grievously wounded was an accident of the abduction process, not an act directed by Sweeney himself. I thought that the baron had told his minions to seize and drug Liam. I found it improbable that he had told them to cudgel him senseless. That was the act of frightened and cowardly men.

  My thoughts were shattered by Brigid’s lilting voice. “Cay, how will we bring back Mother Sweeney?”

  “Oh,” I said. I was stricken with a sense of misgiving. “Bree, I have given it no thought. She is old and perhaps even quite ill. She has no way to know that her son is safe, so she may be ready to collapse or even die. What do you think?”

  “Thank you for asking, my friend. I think we need to—that is, Michael needs to—build a contraption of some kind to carry her. He is the genius who designed the longship Brigid, so I am sure he can fashion a way to carry her.”

  “Will you ask him, Bree?”

  She smiled and urged her mare forward to talk with her husband. It was really quite foresighted of me, I thought, to ask Michael and Brigid to come with us on this trip. Or, if I was being honest with myself, I realized it was a happy accident that Bree was the first person I talked to when I left my house yesterday on the way to our first Triús meeting.

  As soon as she had opened her door, I rushed to hug her. “Oh, Bree, you were so right about Sweeney! I have been very selfish and stupid. I had consigned him to the executioner’s axe without even a second thought!”

  “Hardly the axe, Cay,” she had responded drily. “He is now under Father Patrick’s guidance and protection. Come, let us ride, and tell me what has happened.”

  When I had calmed down enough to talk rationally, I told Brigid about my encounter with Sweeney—how he had repudiated me for my merciless judgment, how he had somehow relented enough to recount his boyhood history. I told her about Mother Sweeney, how she had held back the secret of his birth even in the face of her son’s disintegration before her eyes.

  She had asked me about Sweeney’s reputed murder of his wife and his brazen slave holding. “Bree, he told me, as you yourself did, that I need to ask Mama about her servitude to him. As for his wife, I am no longer so sure he is capable of killing the mother of his own children. I was in her very room. Looking back, I realize now that he had not altered it since the day she died. Is that the action of a demented murderer?”

  As we rode yesterday to Brindl’s house for our Triús meeting, Bree and I talked about going to see Mother Sweeney.

  “…Tá go maith, my dear Bree, I must find out the truth. Brother Jericho may be the only one on this earth who may bring her to a confession. Being a devout Christian woman, she must be full of remorse and guilt about keeping her so
n’s secret, and about giving false witness, causing the death sentence to her beloved son.”

  “I agree, dear friend. She has a compelling story to tell. You must go to her, and you must bring her back. But how will you take care of her by yourself? You will have the monk, and Liam. But you will need help bathing her and caring for her on the wilderness road back to Derry. I say you will need none other than myself, Brigid O’Kelly MacCool.”

  “But Bree, what about Michael? What about your Latin lessons?”

  “Michael will of course want to help. And my lessons—hah! Who better to teach my students than Sweeney himself? He is a scholar’s scholar, one who knows enough to be an ollamh. I know he will agree to teach in my absence.”

  It was settled then. Barring Michael’s refusal, he and Brigid would ride with us to Limavady. I welcomed their company for another reason. They were both interesting, outstanding people who I loved conversing with, and our trip would be an excellent opportunity to do just that. Besides, Michael and Liam dearly loved each other, as Bree and I also were close, and all of us would welcome the comradeship.

  Brigid rode back and joined me. Her white mare Ailbhe—I pronounced it Alva—flirted and whinnied with NimbleFoot, and I realized she must be in her cycle of accepting a stallion. My pony was more than a bit interested in her charms, and for the first time ever since I started riding him, I had to force his attention back to the path ahead.

  “I thought mares did not accept a mate in the cold weather,” I told Bree.

  “On the contrary, Cay, I think it warms them up. Then the colt may be born in the spring, when the weather is perfect.” She was grinning as she spoke, and I could only guess that she was teasing me.

  “Michael told me he will try to invent an invalid’s conveyance, one suitable for horse riding. He will construct it when we arrive at the bally. Ah, Caylith, I think I will take Alva to the rear, away from her ardent suitor. We will speak more at suppertime—or I will change horses!”

  We both laughed at NimbleFoot’s own nimble attempts to mount Alva in spite of a rider and in spite of his beloved’s great height advantage. I hoped that Macha, now being ridden by Brother Jericho, was not also feeling her seasonal urge. I spurred NimbleFoot and caught up with Liam, riding ahead with Michael.