The Irish Warrior
Page 13
“Aye, Senna. We’re stealing a boat.”
He started down the hill, hunched low, until he was near the riverside, then ducked down into the tall reeds and rushes. No one was to be seen on this side of the water, but on the other, villagers went about their business. A few women were washing clothes in the stream. A child in bare feet ran from one hut to another, calling someone.
Senna followed glumly in Finian’s wake. They couched amid the grasses, something I find myself doing with great frequency of late, she thought sourly.
It was still risky to travel during daylight hours, but not nearly as risky as traveling by boat in the dark, and apparently, travel by boat they must.
They watched as the villagers on the small island moved through their daily paces, keeping Senna and Finian trapped in the rushes. She felt like a young child, playing hoop and hide with her brother Will. Just the two of them, running around like wild things, Mama gone, Father may as well have been.
What grand games they had played, not realizing how their voices echoed back to them across the empty meadows. For a while. But soon, Will was taken—sent, she corrected swiftly—to be fostered as a squire, trained as a knight, a privilege and expense she herself ensured once she took over the accounts at age fifteen. Will’s education had lacked for nothing.
The boats bobbed as a gust of wind whipped down the river. She swallowed. Will had probably even been taught to swim, she thought sourly.
She rooted around in her pack and came out with the flask. Uncorking it, she threw back a swallow. It burned the whole way down. Finian flicked a glance over.
“I can’t swim,” she said.
“That should help.” He looked back at the river and the bobbing, sickening boats.
She took another scorching swallow and aimed a glare at the side of his head. He had a very attractive side of his head. “Why ought I know how to swim? What good is that?”
“’Tis helpful when you want to cross a river.”
She took another sip of the whisky. “I do other things.”
“Aye,” he agreed, not looking over. “Make money. Drink firewater. Talk a great deal.”
She gave a wan smile. “I can use a weapon, too, should that interest you. It ought, if you intend to go on in that manner.”
He turned then and studied her, those blue eyes trailing over her face. Then he smiled his dangerous smile and settled back amid the high, swaying reeds. The low drone of flying things going about their business—butterflies, gnats, flies—settled over the heated earth.
“Is that so?” he said. “A weapon? Who taught ye that?”
“My brother, Will. He taught me many things. How to climb trees. Use a short bow. And a knife.” One of his dark eyebrows quirked. She nodded. “Oh, we were wild, for a time.”
Finian snapped a reed stem in half and chewed at the tip. “Good Lord,” he said mildly. “Ye were rough stuff. I’m surprised that’s not a crime.”
“Teaching a woman to use weapons?”
“No. Teaching ye to.”
He watched her with a teasing half smile, the long, lean length of him stretched out, resting back on an elbow, waiting patiently for the villagers to move out of sight, for her to tell her tale in a low murmur.
“How can you be so calm? When all this”—she waved her hand generally at the world—“is happening. Has happened. Will happen. How can you be so…at ease?”
He tipped the grass stem away from his lips and smiled full on. It was as if the sun just came out. “There are worse things I could be doing just now, Senna, than sitting here with ye. For the moment, I am at ease.”
Just as if the sun came out, indeed. She grew warmer. Everywhere. Lowering her eyes, she toyed with one of the tall, waving reeds, then snapped one off like he had done. She popped the tip in her mouth. She immediately took it out, grimacing. “I see why we put these on the floor.”
He nibbled on his stalk again, smiling. “Yer brother, Senna, and his criminal acts, teaching ye to use a bow and knife.”
“There’s been no damage done yet. I’m not terribly good with a bow.”
“Och. I’m sure if ye set yer mind to a matter, it’ll come out a good-looking thing in the end.”
They were speaking only in murmurs, hidden in a pocket of reeds and heat and his smile. There was something about the quality of how Finian lay stretched out on the earth, something about his breathing that said all his attention was on her. Although why she should care about that was utterly inconceivable.
She pushed an intrusive cattail out of her face.
“I’m surprised yer Da let it happen, though,” he said. “The weapons.”
She gave a bitter little smile. Why did they seem to touch upon the topic of her father so very much? She hadn’t spoken of him in years, save brief conversations with Will, where one or the other would report they hadn’t seen Sir Gerald in weeks. Months. Years.
“My father was gone a lot. I rarely saw him.”
His regard of her grew a little closer. “And what did yer Mam think, ye learning to use weapons?”
“My mother left. I believe I was five. I do not know my mother.”
He chewed his reed-tip in silence for a moment. “Do ye remember nothing of her?”
She shook her head vehemently, in direct opposition to the strength of the lie. “Not even what she smells like.”
Roses and green. Fresh, new green. And the yellow roses from out back, the ones she’d let overgrow with vines.
“Ah.” A dragonfly hovered silently by Finian’s shoulder, a quivering, iridescent arrow. Then it shot off. “Just ye and yer brother then, raising each other?”
“Just us. Until it was time for him to leave.”
She knew the wistfulness in her voice revealed as much of her as the words themselves. She looked over, loathe to find what she expected: scorn. Or worse, disinterest.
Instead, she found dark eyes considering her. The filtered sunlight made shadows of his serious regard. And when he nodded, slowly, gravely, she felt as though she’d been accepted.
And, with that, a breath of a new wanting brushed past her consciousness.
Finian’s eyes stayed on her, directly, a level, listening gaze, as if the things she spoke of were not shameful a’tall. Which they were. Highly shameful. The things her father had allowed to be done, the way he went through the world, a river of potential, a tepid pool of yield, after the gambling began. After Mama left.
And the shame of Mama, that could not be calculated if she used every abacus in France. Even as a child, Senna had felt it seeping out of those around her like frost heaves, icy remnants. Slippery and treacherous. Never look down.
And of course, all that was in Senna as well.
She tilted her chin up, a move she’d perfected years ago whenever shame threatened a coup. “I took over the business after…when I was fifteen. My father was never to home. Will works for coin. I do not know exactly what he does. He will not speak of it; something for various lords, I think. He hasn’t married yet. That cannot be good. He doesn’t look as if ’tis good. He looks rather…hard.”
“And what did yer hard brother say about ye coming to Ireland?”
“He doesn’t know.”
A companionable silence stretched out between them. Finian glanced at the river. Not a villager in sight. He rose to his knees and fingertips, then unraveled to his feet.
“Let’s go, lass.”
The sun burned hot on the top of Senna’s head and upper back as they hurried forward, crouching at the waist. Everything seemed bright and close to hand. The world smelled fresh, like warm, clean dirt and pine, hot flowers and river-stirred air. Ireland’s beauty was beyond her words, vivid and brilliant, like a drop of ink quivering on a manuscript.
The tall grasses closed behind them, rustling like eager, buzzing conspirators. Small puffs of breeze coasted down the river, which was such a shattering, smashing shade of blue it almost hurt her eyes. The thought of getting in a boat hurt h
er stomach.
She plodded forward, looking neither left nor right, resigned to the fate of sickening all over the indescribably beautiful land of Ireland. Or its waters.
Closing her eyes resignedly, she put her hands on the edge of a worn wooden boat and threw her leg over.
“Senna, no!” Finian hissed behind her.
She turned, startled, half in the boat, half out.
“Not that one.” He gestured once, rising slightly out of his crouch. “Come. This one.” He pointed to a smaller teardrop-shaped craft, tucked amid the cattails, hard to see.
She sighed and lifted her foot back out again. She did not, though, remove any of her weight from her hands, which rested on the lip of the boat. In fact, she was quite used to leaning on things, things that didn’t bob. Being incautiously unaware that her previous experience with one’s leaning tendencies and the movability, or immovability, of things upon which one leaned, did not apply in the present situation, she pressed down on the boat, which was, by nature, a bobbing thing. Her foot was in the air.
The small craft sailed out into the river. The rope tugged it immediately and snapped it back to shore, but it had to bounce off Senna, who had fallen in the water with a hearty splash. One ankle still remained hooked over the lip of the boat.
She flailed as soundlessly as flailing in water can be done, trying to get her footing. Water lapped over her belly as she arched backward, her hands sinking into the soft, silky mud, one foot in the water, the other hooked over the edge of boat.
How she hated boats.
She tried to kick her leg high enough to free it. Her body having only so much bend, each kick up with her foot forced her head in the opposite direction which, in this case, was under the water. Her fingertips sunk deeper into mud. How long before the owner of this boat heard her racket and came to investigate?
“What do ye tink ye’re doin’ with me boat?”
Not long at all, apparently.
She tried to crane her neck around to see whom she’d perpetrated her highly embarrassing but not-yet-criminal behavior upon.
Finian’s legs walked into view. She tilted her face up to look at his, which appeared to be filled with disgust, if she was reading it properly. She was upside down, of course. Perhaps she was interpreting it wrongly.
He put an arm behind her back, which gave her the leverage to get her foot out. He helped her slosh to shore where she stood, dripping wet, a length of sea grass stuck to her neck. She peeled it off, looking at the sullen, yet-surprisingly-unsurprised, aged face regarding her.
“Me boat. Why’re ye climbing all over her?”
“I was only climbing there at the bow…the prow, the…edge,” she said chirpily. “She’s a bit wetter, but none the worse.”
Finian and the old man scowled at her. Then Finian turned to the old man.
“Grandfather,” he murmured, bending his head, and that was the last word she understood, because Finian lapsed into the most evocative, lyrical, deep-throated plumage of language she’d ever heard. Irish. It almost took her breath away. Finian surely did.
Watching his body, so powerful, restrain itself to bend into a pose of respect for an elderly man. Listening to him, whom she knew not at all, transform into some spellbinding creature before her eyes.
Wild, his language was. Wild, he was. Wild, she wanted to be.
Without warning, Finian was moving again, tossing a few heavy bundles onto the boat she’d almost capsized, speaking so she could understand again.
“We’ll take these to Cúil Dubh for ye, grandfather. And ye’ve my thanks.”
The old man stood impassively. He must have been sixty if he was a day, and more fit than men half his age. Compact, sinuous, and suspicious, he did not look happy, but he wasn’t arguing. Finian was moving swiftly, tossing another sack into the craft, muttering for Senna to get on board.
She hesitated. The old man was watching her with a canny regard. His eyes were bluer than the water, his eyebrows as wild grown as the grasses they’d crawled through, and his face was cragged enough for plants to take root. Old curmudgeon. She smiled. She’d once had a curmudgeon in her life, a laughing bear of a grandfather she hadn’t seen since her mother disappeared. Senna liked curmudgeons.
Slowly, the old curmudgeon smiled back.
“And we’re off, Senna,” Finian said lightly. But underneath, he sounded rushed. As if he was worried. As if, at any moment, this old man might turn and start shouting to others. Younger, armed others.
Without thinking, Senna scooped deep in a pouch tied around her neck and lodged between layers of her clothes, and dug out a few coins she’d taken from the trunk under Rardove’s table. She dropped them into the old man’s hand. A few pennies gone from her future, but they were owed.
“My thanks, grandfather,” she whispered, then held a finger to her lips, suggesting silence. She smiled at him over its tip.
His hand closed around the coin, probably sufficient to sustain him and his eight neighbors for a decade. His smile didn’t grow an inch, but slowly, one eyelid came down in the most extravagant, flirtatious wink Senna had ever been the recipient of. She blushed to her hairline and got in the boat.
They floated off, the old man watching them, until the tall grasses swallowed him up and the only thing to be seen was the blue bowl of sky and the long, outstretched wings of a dark, silent cormorant that flew overhead.
Chapter 21
“Ye gave him coin?”
At Finian’s sharp tone, she looked down from the bird and nodded.
He snorted. “Ye bribed him. That’s something ye English like to do.”
She smiled loftily. “And something you Irish like to do is assume you understand the meaning of things. ’Twasn’t a bribe. And if you cannot see that, then I am at a loss for words.”
He snorted again. “That’ll be a rare day in hell.”
“You snort a lot,” she pointed out.
He stared at her. “Lie down.”
“Pardon?”
“An Irishman in an Irish curaigh floating down an Irish river with a sack of skins is unremarkable. Ye, remarkable. Lie down.”
“How am I remarkable?” she asked, already lowering herself.
He just looked at her.
She did insist on disrobing somewhat, rather than lying in wet leather, to be baked like a cod in the sun. He grumbled but she was resolute, and in the end, he relented.
A brief, disagreeable delay ensued, wherein she hitched and yanked at various wet clothes, disrobing down to a thin linen shift. Then she lay down in the bottom of the boat.
The sacks of skins were not down here with her, she realized irritably, although they would have made perfect bedding. But they were perched on one of the benches, sunning themselves. Finian’s sword and bow were down here with her, of course, out of sight but within easy reach. They were also poking her.
She shuffled around, trying to fit into the small cramped hull of the boat, which really was not where she wished to be, not even for a moment. She was squished, her arms tight up against her sides. It smelled. It was mucky. It was wet. Wet, as if a small pond held a secret life down in the basin of the curmudgeon’s curaigh, or whatever Finian had called it.
“Finian.”
“Mmm?” He didn’t look down. His powerful arms kept up a powerful paddling. She could almost feel the river skiffing away not an inch below her body.
“I think there’s fish down here.”
“Aye. This river has many fish.”
“No. I mean this boat. Swimming around me. Little tiny fish.”
His lips twitched.
“If you laugh, I’m getting up,” she warned.
“Hush.” His voice went low, his lips hardly moved. Senna barely had time to feel a tingle of concern before she heard the shouts of men at the shoreline. The rush of panic came flying for her. Englishmen. Soldiers.
They’d been found.
“Heave to, Irishman,” one of the soldiers called.
“That looks like O’Mallery’s nubbin’ boat,” one of them said.
“That’s so,” agreed Finian easily. “He let me use it.”
“Not bloody likely,” muttered the shorter one. The two stared at each other a moment, then the taller one snapped his fingers.
“O’Mallery don’t let his wife use his pecker,” he growled. “Come over here, boy.”
Senna could almost feel Finian rise up in the boat, like a huge wave uncoiling itself close to shore. She grabbed his boot. His steely gaze snapped down. With her free hand and an open palm, she mimed going softly down. Sit down, calm down.
“For me,” she whispered.
He fired his gaze up again. “There’s only two of them,” he said, not moving his lips.
“Now there’s only two,” she whispered. “You said you enjoy traveling with me. I enjoy traveling with you. Let it go.”
“I’ve let a lot of things go,” he said in a calm voice. That worried her. He was still squinting toward the shoreline, locked, she supposed, in mortal eye combat with one of the English soldiers.
“I’ll make it up to you,” she whispered urgently.
The faintest trace of a smile lifted his lips.
“Boy, git over here.”
It was the whisky that made her do it. She was fairly certain of that. The hot, uninhibiting flush the drink had sent coursing through her limbs simply floated into her brain and melted her wits.
She took a deep breath, gave her tunic a harsh tug so it tore further, exposing an immodest curve of her breasts and the valley between. Then she sat up. Unraveled, really. Or so she hoped.
Finian’s jaw dropped, but not so far as the English boys’ did on the shore.
“Jay-sus!” one of them shouted, jumping back as if she were one of the fey.
She smiled as lustily as she could and draped her arms over Finian’s thighs, her face close to his groin, implying she’d only just lifted her mouth away.