The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2)

by Lisa Ann Verge

  She blinked open her eyes and stared down at the sea crashing against the rocks. It was still as wild as she remembered, and the air above it just as salt–sweet, just as fresh. When the mist finally broke, she knew that purple shadows would emerge to the north—the outline of the mainland mountains. She knew, too, that the whitecaps floating on the water in the distance would run higher and harder to ultimately crash upon the shore below.

  Nothing and nobody could penetrate this island exile without everyone on the island knowing about it. That was why Ma and Da had chosen this as their home. That was why she had loved it, too. Inishmaan had always protected her from the cruelty of the outside world.

  Aileen shifted and tugged on the backs of her pampooties. She couldn’t seem to find a comfortable perch upon this ledge. Didn’t she once spend hours seated up here, watching the ebb and flow of the waves? Didn’t she love to huddle in this wet little nook until the birds settled around her? Now it just made her restless and uncomfortable. It made her mind drift to the things that lay beyond those waves, things she was determined not to dwell on, not yet, not until more time had passed and she had finally settled back into this life.

  It’s just the change that had her in such a flux, she told herself. So much had happened. Did she expect to come back and have everyone be just as young, everything be untouched, as if this were some small corner of Tír na nÓg? Babes had been born, people had married and others had died. Dairine had grown a full head taller and wanted nighttime stories full of frightening things, when once the tot would have had none of that. Aileen had spent six months living in a hall ten times the size of her own house, that was why the rafters of her birth home seemed to press down upon her. She’d never noticed before the smoke–darkened walls, or the work that needed to be done on the rock–pile fence. She’d lived too long in great open spaces. She was forced to stifle the urges of her heart to race wildly and blindly, in fear that she’d drop off the very edge of the world.

  She edged back to solid ground, her egg–basket heavy on her arm. Small feet pattered at her heels. She paused at the height to look around at the whole of the island: the row of beehive huts against the background of the glittering bay, the sweep of grass speckled with cows, the roll of the land down to the north island, and beyond, to the mainland lost in the mist. For reasons beyond her comprehension she found herself thinking of a winter ride on a horse through the mountains, a ride that went on for hours over hills and through passes, while the landscape shifted endlessly around her.

  What a contrary thing she was. She’d hated that place, the dead land, the forgotten faery–places, and the lifeless earth. She turned away from the cliffs and set her feet upon the path home.

  Ma sat on a stump just outside the door, a basket of sewing at her feet. “Just put those eggs in the pail of water, Aileen,” she said without lifting her head. “Then come out and sit with me.”

  Aileen bent her head under the thatch overhang and entered the cool interior. The peat fire crackled in the center hearth and curled sweet blue smoke up toward the smoke–hole. The room smelled of fresh–cut onion. She slipped the eggs into the water.

  When she emerged, she settled back against the doorjamb. She lifted one foot upon her knee to tug at the back of her pampooties.

  “You won’t be needing them for long, lass,” her mother said, lifting the calfskin in her lap. “I’m making you a new pair.”

  “There was no need to do that,” she protested. “These will soften enough with time and a few dips in the sea—”

  “They’ve been abandoned too long. Once the calfskin hardens that much, there’s no fitting into them again.” Ma shrugged her shoulders. “Besides, new shoes for a new life, that’s what you’ll need.”

  “It’s my old life I want back.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if we all could recapture that moment in our lives we loved the most?” Her mother pulled the twine through a hole she’d punched in the leather. “You’ve been gone too long and you’ve felt too many changes. I can see it in your eyes. You’re not the same girl who left this place. If you’re staying, it’s a new life you’ll have to make here. I thought you’d know that by now.”

  Aileen slipped the boot off her foot and massaged the arch. Leave it to Ma to place her finger on the heart of a problem. Every night Aileen sat in her old place at the dinner table, but she felt a hundred miles away.

  “Niall thinks you’ve a lianhaun–shee living upon you. You’re losing so much weight. And Cairenn thinks you were taken away by the faeries, the way you walk about in the gentle places all the morn and night, as if you’re yearning for Tír na nÓg.”

  “Wales was far from paradise.”

  “So you’ve told me.”

  Aileen held her foot tightly. She’d told Ma the whole story when she’d first arrived. It had come out of her disjointed, rushed, and anguished. Only Ma knew the full truth for Aileen could only bear to tell the story once. Ma had related the essentials to the rest of the family and had bid them not to question her about it. She knew that because everyone had been so careful around dinner time not to speak of her absence, tiptoeing easily around the subject while granting her curious, sidelong glances.

  Ma tsked and shook her head. “It must be a poor, wretched place, this Wales.”

  “Not a bit of life in it,” Aileen murmured. “So barren. But for that one place….”

  “The one he was building the castle upon.”

  “Aberygaun.”

  “A pity.” Ma shook her head over her sewing. “lt sounds like a place that needs a bit of a healing.”

  Aileen looked sharply at her, but her mother kept to her sewing. A land that needed healing, what kind of a place was that? What could she do about it, when she couldn’t even heal the man she loved with the hands that had failed her when she needed her powers most?

  She didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so she determined to change the subject. “What of the Widdy Peggeen, Ma? I’ve been meaning to visit her. I’ve not heard a word about her since I’ve been back.”

  “Och, no one told you. Poor old Peggeen passed over last winter. Died as peaceful as a lamb, your father said, not one word of complaint out of her, she just slipped away.”

  A butterfly flitted by, white and pure. It hovered for a moment before it flittered off toward the primroses nodding on the rock–pile fence. Marged had once told her that butterflies were the souls of people sent off to eternal peace. A stab of something like homesickness pierced her heart.

  Dafydd would call it hiraeth.

  By God, when would she stop feeling like this, torn between a home she couldn’t recognize anymore and a place that had never really been her home?

  “You know,” her mother said, “I’ve been thinking about that place you told me about, the one where he was building a castle. It brought to mind an old tale a friend once told to me so many years ago it’s a wonder I even remember it.”

  “Come now, Ma. There isn’t a thing that passes by you without you remembering it.”

  “We’re talking twenty–odd years passed.” She poked another hole in the calfskin. “Before Conor and I came to Inishmaan. I was so torn between my home in Champagne and trying to get used to this wild place. But I was with your father, and in truth he was my home, not a bit of land.”

  Aileen flexed her dirty toes. Where is my home, Ma? Is it with a contrary Welsh prince in a tortured faery–place? Or can it be here, the land of my childhood?

  “As for the story …. It was told to me by a man I haven’t seen since, a funny little Irishman who used to entertain me while your father glowered at me across a fire, in the time before he saw sense and decided to make me his wife.” For a moment her mother grinned and looked like a young girl. “I started thinking about it last night and now I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  “Give me that other strip of calfskin.” Aileen planted her feet back onto the ground and reached into the sewing basket for an awl. “If you’re
going to be telling me a story, the least I can do is set to my own slippers.”

  “Seems there was this young man,” her mother began, holding out the calfskin while her gaze roved over the wind–blown meadow stretched out before them, “an ambitious man, whose father held a good plot of land of his own and herds and herds of cows. As the young man grew his father taught him how to pasture the beasts in the low fields in the winter and the high ones in the summer. But in order to pass from one pasturage to the other, they had to make a long wide journey around some wild land. The son questioned his Da about it, wondering why they couldn’t cut right through, but his father said he’d been told long ago by a faery–woman that his family would only be prosperous if they left that bit of land alone.”

  Aileen settled back against the door post, lifting her work to her face to set the holes along the edge of the calfskin. This was what she’d come home for, to listen to her mother’s stories while the sun made its way across the horizon.

  “This boy, being a curious sort, always wondered what lay along that land, and as the years passed he drove the cows closer and closer to it, peering at the mound in its midst and the river that curled along its edge, thinking it would be a fine place to build a house, with so much water nearby and such a commanding view of all about, and so conveniently located halfway between the summer and winter pasturage. He began to think his father a fool and the old faery–woman neighbor a jealous woman who wanted to deny his family the rich green pasturage that would make their cows fatter and the milk from them richer. But when the boy made mention of it, his father stood firm. ‘That’s faery–land,’ his father told him. ‘Don’t you be thinking of using it or it’ll bring nothing but grief.’”

  Aileen thought about Marged who liked to tell stories of the white faery–cow and the Lady of the Lake while she peeled turnips.

  “Well, it’s not a surprise to say that when the boy’s father passed over to the other world, and the boy took over his land and his cows, it did not take long for the boy to forget his father’s warning and look upon that faery–mound with all kinds of ideas. In the end, he determined to build a house there and pasture his cattle on the rich green fields by the river.”

  Aileen paused in the midst of threading some twine through a needle as she began to see similarities. She stared pointedly at her mother, who continued her sewing.

  “He set to clearing it and he began to get an ache on his back which he figured was from all the hard work clearing brush and weeds from the height. It didn’t stop him, nay, no more than the bees that swarmed there though there were few flowers on the height and nearby lay a whole field of blooming purple heather.

  “No one in the neighborhood would lend a hand and help him, for they all knew better. They even pointed out that his cow’s milk this year grew thin and watery. But this only made the boy more determined, so he set out to hire some tinkers to help with the building. They never stayed long and always set off complaining about noise and lights in the midst of night and some such things, which the man thought was nonsense and an excuse for laziness. So in the end the young man determined to roll his rocks up the hill to build his house by himself, even though he found after each day’s work that he could barely straighten up and his shirts were beginning to fit him oddly, on account of all the muscle he was making, so he thought.

  “One day, as he went into town to buy himself a new spade—his old one broke in the hard ground of the hill—he noticed that people along the road were staring at him, and whispering to each other, and pointing.”

  Aileen lay the sewing upon her lap while her mother tilted her head against the door post, staring across the fields, lost in the story.

  “‘What’s that upon your back?’ the blacksmith asked as the young man hobbled toward him. ‘It’s naught but a lot of hard work,’ the boy growled, trying to straighten up. ‘I bend over my anvil all day,’ the blacksmith argued, ‘and you don’t see me with a lump on my back.’ And with that the young man hobbled over to a helmet the blacksmith had been polishing for the local baron and peered into it. And by God, did he cry out fit to split the hairs on a woman’s head! For sure as he stood living and breathing, a lump swelled on his back just below his shoulder, hunching him over as did the one on the village idiot, who had been like that since birth.

  “He went to the doctor, of course, but what do doctors know of such things? The doctor made him pay dearly and gave him unguents and the like, but nothing got rid of the terrible swelling, nothing at all. And the young man began to despair, for he’d set his heart upon Bonnie Mary of the next town, and he’d been building the strong stone house all for her. Now she’d have nothing to do with him, for all his riches.”

  The calfskin slipped out of Aileen’s hands, tumbled over her lap, and settled into a pool on the flagstones. It came to her as plain as day. Sitting up straight, she searched her memory for what little she knew of Rhys’s castle—when it had begun, when Rhys first noticed the affliction upon his shoulder, how it stopped every winter when snow and cold weather caused the construction of the castle to cease.

  Her mother continued. “It wasn’t long before that faery woman came to see the young man, out of the goodness of her own heart, mind you, for the man had done nothing but scorn her to all the people of the land. She was still old, but she had a quick mind for all her slow steps, and took the boy to task.”

  “And what did she tell him, Ma?” Aileen stood up and paced across the stones of the path. “Did she tell him that he mustn’t build upon the mound? That he must tear down all he had done and put it to rights?”

  A gentle smile softened her mother’s features. “The faeries had put a curse upon him for building with mortar and stone upon their sacred place. ‘Twas the only way, the faery woman told him, to set all to rights.”

  Aileen hugged her middle. “I suppose the young man does as he’s told and loses his hump and marries Bonnie Mary to raise a passel of children and he never goes near the faery mound again.”

  Her mother pushed her hair off her shoulder. “You know, lass, it’s the strangest thing, but I don’t remember the end of the story at all.”

  ***

  Aileen tore down the path, the wind blowing her hair wild and her mind spinning. Ignoring her mother’s call, she set off for the wild part of the island where only the barest of grass poked from the stone. When she got there she had no place left to go, no place but down to a ribbon of shore washed with surf strong enough to scour rock from the cliff.

  There she paced, rubbing her arms against the wind, watching the glitter of Galway Bay and the boats bobbing upon it, seeing only Rhys’s face as he sat upon his steed and pointed down the hill toward the skeleton of his castle, the child of his dreams.

  She had told him it was sacrilege. He’d scoffed at her warnings. Would it have made any difference if she told him that by tearing down his dream, he could once again be whole—as handsome and unmarred as he’d been before the wretched thing had climbed from his shoulder to his face? He’d scoff. He’d call it the talk of superstition and paganism. He wouldn’t believe, not Rhys the unbeliever. He wouldn’t heed her, the woman who had cheated him out of a healing.

  She buried her head in her knees. She sensed the Sídh around her, trilling their soft music, agitated, uneasy. She knew the pain of their cousins in Wales. She’d stood upon that tortured ground and heard the screams. She’d felt the vibrations in every stretch of skin and bone. She had tried to save them, not even knowing that with the healing of one would come the healing of the other.

  You belong there.

  No. She shook her head between her knees as the words drifted to her on Otherworldly music. What was she to do? Go and live among the Welsh, make her living as a healer, always under the shadow of Rhys’s castle, seeing him only from afar on feast–days, remembering the nights they spent in his bed? Away from her family, away from the only people who truly knew who and what she was, and made no bones about it?

  She
lifted her head and peered out to the western horizon, to the faintest stretch of masts and flutter of sail at the bay’s inner end. Dafydd’s ship was still there, awaiting repairs.

  I can’t go back.

  She didn’t have the strength to do this.

  The Sídh eased their swarming. They settled down around her like thistledown riding off a breeze. Aileen took a shaky breath and whispered for forgiveness, over and over. A heavy languor swept through her. She lay down upon the rock, curling her knees tight into her chest. She was so tired, so very, very, tired. She was weary to the marrow of her bones.

  The sea breeze turned oddly gentle. She listened to it rustle through the scrubby grass, and then heard hollow music rising from the secret caverns that riddled this end of the island. The suck and ebb of the sea. The hush of sand sifting through stone. Ma wouldn’t miss her for hours, she thought. In the few days she’d been back, she’d noticed that there were hands enough to do the work. She wasn’t needed. What difference would it make if she lay here for a while and bathed in the uncertain sunshine? Perhaps here she could finally sleep a dreamless sleep.

  Strange, she thought, as she drifted into slumber. She heard no cawing or screeching, nothing but the rumble of the waves… . The breeze rushed so gently over her it was as if birds brushed the tips of their wings over her skin, as if invisible hands trailed her hair off her face.

  Strange …

  Chapter Nineteen

  With every slap of his horse’s hooves in the mud, Rhys cursed the north tower. What had possessed him to start construction on the marshy puddle of the northern edge of the island, instead of the solid rock of the southern end? And why was it that he’d never noticed how soft the ground was when he’d first walked the site? The earth caved deeper with every load of stone.