The Irish Warrior

by Kris Kennedy

  “Business,” she replied. “I came for business.”

  He’d been leaning forward, and his arm paused in its reach for a stick on the ground, muscles stilled in their silky slide beneath his skin. He continued reaching forward. “Ye mean money. Ye came for money.”

  “Why else would someone do such a thing as this?” she replied in a flat voice, carefully leeched of any emotion.

  “Why indeed.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said angrily. Angry she felt the need to explain herself. Angry that he did not approve.

  “I understand ’twas a piss-poor notion.”

  She gave a snort of derisive laughter. “You’ve no idea. My family is famed for piss-poor ideas. We ought to have a chamber pot on our coat of arms.”

  He sat back and uprooted a small plant near his hip with much more force than was necessary. Small clumps of dirt went flying. She listened to them land, tiny, swift, muted thumps falling on soft leaf fronds. A miniature army in sudden retreat.

  It was getting harder and harder to keep the emotion from her voice. She snatched an innocent stick off the ground and began peeling it, cutting into the soft flesh under the bark with vicious stabs of a fingernail.

  She felt Finian studying her face. “Had ye heard of Rardove, Senna? His violence?”

  She waved the stick through the air. “No. Not enough to know all…this.”

  All this indeed. How could anyone ever know what awaited her outside the door? It was a dangerous business, stepping out into the wide world, and she was sorely sorry she’d done so. Whether it was done to save the business, or her father, or her wretched, empty life, she was all sorrow now.

  But mostly, at the moment, she was sorry for the way Finian was looking at her, with something akin to disappointment in his eyes. She squared her shoulders in the steely gray light filtering down through the trees. “You do not understand.”

  An edge of his mouth lifted, but there was nothing amused in the grating voice he answered with. “Oh, I understand, Senna. My mam had the same choice to make.”

  “What choice?”

  “The one women always have to make.” He stared into the dying fire. “Her heart or the money.”

  Senna almost couldn’t see the earth below her anymore. Her eyes were filling up with shocking tears, fed by unfamiliar, impotent fury. What would he know about the choices a woman had to make, in the dark, when the papers were sitting there in the fading light, and no one spoke a word? When no one cared for the lifetime of moments before the decision, simply the consequences that followed behind?

  “How fortunate for your mother,” she snapped. The emotions would not be contained anymore. Sharp and fast, they shot out. “To have a choice. Many women do not enjoy such liberty. So tell me, when she married your father, was it for love or his money?”

  “She did not marry my Da,” he said in a cold, impossible voice.

  Senna went still.

  Finian shut his eyes. Why in God’s name had he revealed that? He gritted his teeth. It would only mean curiosity, then questions, and perhaps sympathy, and from this homeless waif—

  “I assume she had her reasons.”

  Her voice was cool, but soft. The dirt under his fingers was cool. Soft, too, like silt. Like her voice.

  What an unexpected reply. It barely stemmed his anger, though.

  “Aye,” he retorted, feeling his mouth twist derisively. “She had her reasons. And fine ones they were. A beautiful big castle, a fine English lord, coffers spilling coin and jewels.”

  He pushed abruptly to his feet, surprised to find his head was a bit spinny. Up too quick, in a prison too long. That was all. Soon he’d be right again.

  “And that’s enough of that,” he said firmly.

  She swallowed. He could see her slender throat work around it. “I assume she did what she felt she needed to do,” she said stiffly, as if he hadn’t spoken. “The…taking care of things. One takes care of things. One manages them.”

  “Is that so?” He stared at her. “Ye call it managing?”

  “I most certainly do.”

  A sad pride filled her voice, which under normal circumstances he would have heard. But just now he barely noticed it, because anger was foaming so high against his own shores.

  “Tell me, Senna,” he asked in a low, steel voice. “What do you think of yer masterful managing now, sitting here on the Irish marches?”

  She yanked her head up, a jerky movement. “An error.” Her lips barely moved. “A terrible mistake.”

  And as he stared longer into her beautiful, staring eyes, sense finally routed anger. He muttered a curse. “That was wrong of me, Senna—”

  “No. You’re right. Absolutely correct.” She gave a brittle, bright smile. Each of her words had a precise point, and her voice was hard like stone. He could climb all over it and never find a way in. “We both had mothers who left. How peculiar. And sad. And, as I observed about your mother, so it must be true of mine: they had their reasons. Your mother left for pennies. Mine for passion. Reasons, nevertheless. How old were you when yours left? I was five. My brother Will was but a year. My”—she gave a tight little laugh—“was he heavy. To me, at least. But we managed.”

  She looked over. Her eyes had turned into bright, staring gold stones. “Although, as you’ve pointed out, not so verily well.”

  “Senna,” he said slowly in a voice he hardly even recognized.

  “But then, one does what one can.”

  “Senna.”

  “Did your mother ever return? Mine did not.”

  “Senna.”

  “Did she, Finian?”

  He crouched down in front of her and pressed his fingers under her chin, turning her face up. Small tendrils of coiled curls shivered by her cheeks; she was shaking, very slightly. Her eyes were staring straight ahead, bright, shimmering.

  “Senna, heed me.”

  The shivering coil of amber stilled. Her hard gemstone eyes slid to his.

  “Did she, Finian?” she asked, but though her words were as brittle as before, he heard the plea inside them now: she very greatly wanted to hear a tale different from hers. “Did your mother ever come back?”

  Something heavy dropped off a cliff inside him. “Aye. She came back, and killed herself. I found her hanging from an oak tree.”

  Everything went still.

  “Oh, this accursed world,” she whispered. She wrapped an arm around his shoulders and he dropped to his knees before her, their heads bent close, pocketed by her outstretched arm and falling hair. For a while, they just breathed together.

  “She oughtn’t to have done that,” she whispered.

  “Nay.” He cupped the nape of her neck and, in the small pocket of space between them, felt their heat mingling together. “I’m told she’s paying for it now.”

  “Do not say such things. She is not.”

  “Ye think not?”

  She rested her forehead against his. “I have a heresy in my heart, Finian,” she confessed quietly. “I have met ever so many priests and abbots in my travels. Some have been gentle hearts, others with a brutality to depths I cannot fathom. At times, I was of the opinion they must worship different gods, because they have told me such different things.”

  He smiled faintly. Senna would have an opinion about dirt. “They all said the same to me,” he said. “Ye think some of them may be wrong?”

  “I think,” she replied slowly, “if there is a place in Heaven for each of them, how could there not be a place for each of us?”

  He scooped up her free hand as it dangled off her knee in the small pocket of space between them. “Ahh,” was all he could say, surprised to hear his voice had gone hoarse.

  Her free hand, the one he wasn’t holding, scuffed and dirty, rested on her knees. Her braid fell over her shoulder, trailing into the space between them like a rope lowered down the side of a castle.

  She was succoring him, and all he wanted was to rescue her. It was enough to
make you weep. He, who was filled with so many holes he didn’t know why his ship hadn’t sunk thus far, he wanted to rescue her. A woman who shone like the sun. He’d bared his deepest shame, the horror in his dreams, and all he could think was, How could your mother have left you behind?

  “You see?” she asked.

  “I see.” Lifting her delicate hand in his callused one, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles, then let her go.

  “Finian—”

  He got to his feet. “Ready, Senna?”

  She had her mouth open, as if to say something more, then she closed it and got to her feet. Wise woman. “I am ready.”

  “Just another hour or so.”

  He turned and began trekking a path into the woods. He heard her swing the pack over her shoulder and follow behind. They didn’t speak of missing mothers again. They didn’t need to.

  Chapter 28

  Battered, weary, and waterlogged from crossing yet another river—“Stream, whichever,” she’d snapped when Finian tried explaining the difference—Senna would have praised him as a god, if it were required, when he halted them after another two hours of hiking. She was literally stumbling from exhaustion.

  They came to a small clearing, he stopped moving forward, and her knees slowly buckled. She looked up at him.

  “We’re done for the night, Senna.” His tone was gentle.

  She half smiled, rubbed her shoulders wearily, then threw her bag on the ground and slumped on top of it. She cried out briefly as her fingers took some of the impact, then was asleep before she could finish the cry.

  Finian watched her, curled around the satchel—a pack full of knobbly objects and sharp edges—like a nestling cat. Her knees were by her chin, her arms clutched around the bag, hair tugging free from the braid and spilling over her face until only the profile of a small, delicate chin could be seen.

  Turning on his heel, he walked to a small rise in the land and began his watch.

  The moon rose to its heights and a small wind blew by in gentle gusts, pulling the soft, wet scent of loamy earth and growing things behind. He ran his hand through his hair, drew a deep breath, and began a slow reconnoitering around the perimeter of the clearing. In the center of his sweeping circle, Senna slept.

  Nothing moved in the dark world. Years of practice made him move soundlessly through the sticks and leaves covering the ground. One circuit, two.

  An owl hooted.

  He froze.

  In the treetops to the west, the rapid beat of wings shuddered briefly, then a bird shot out of the dark greenery, squawking.

  Moving swiftly and soundlessly, he pushed his spine up against a tree trunk. Another small sound far to his left disturbed the night silence. His body was frozen but for his hand that swung to his sword hilt.

  Again it came. Shuffling, heavy hooves. Far away but far too close. The murmur of a voice speaking in hushed tones, racing through the night air. Creaking leather, jangling spurs.

  Soldiers.

  Bending low, he slid his sword free and crept back through the trees, moving from shadow to shadow, making no more noise than a bat winging overhead. When he reached Senna, he crouched down, mouth by her ear.

  “Up, lass. We’ve company.”

  Her eyes shot open. Her startled, bright eyes were inches from his.

  “Unwelcome guests. I’ve need of yer talents with a blade,” he whispered, rising and pointing to a far tree, indicating where to position herself.

  She scrambled to her feet, feeling in the sheath lashed around her waist, pulling out the knife. Her other hand briefly touched a second blade strapped to her leg, then she slunk across the shadowy glen to where he had pointed, bending low.

  The sound of hooves crunching on sticks suddenly stopped. Every muscle in Finian’s body rippled in readiness. He threw his head back, his mouth slightly parted, every sense alert to scent, sound, motion. At his side, his sword hung still. The dull silver plane of steel shone in the slatted moonlight.

  A nicker broke the tense silence, then a muffled snort. Two voices, speaking in thick, almost unintelligible English accents, prickled the hair along the back of his neck.

  Sweeping his sword up, he crept closer, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk like a slinking shadow. His blood welled thick and sluggish in his veins, an icy, solid feeling. Planting the heel of his hand on the gnarled bark of one tree, he edged his head around and squinted, trying to pierce the darkness.

  The night was too thick, the woods too dense. He couldn’t see anything. Behind, he heard the uneven whisper of Senna’s breathing.

  The soft clop of hooves began again, moving slowly away. An exchanged curse or word occasionally floated back to him. He let another moment pass. Then, to comfort Senna in her fear and ensure her continued silence, he turned to her, a finger at his lips.

  Astonishment dropped his hand to his side. Was this not the woman he’d awoken two minutes ago from a dead slumber, telling her their lives were about to be shortened? Nay, it could not be. She did not look in the least afraid.

  To the contrary, she radiated power and energy, and she was marvelous. Having nailed her lithe torso against the trunk of the tree, she peered around with one chestnut eye, her cheek pasted to the rough bark. Curving and tense, her body was finely tuned, her head thrown back. Masses of tangled dark curls slipped over her shoulder and along her arms. The blade hung deceptively still by her thigh, dripping from her fingertips.

  The taut lines of muscles in her arm were defined by the filtered moonlight. Broken fingers did not seem in any way a hindrance. Her eyes glittered as she met his startled gaze, and she flashed him a bold, intrepid smile.

  “We are alive yet,” she whispered with an exultant look.

  Partner. He had a partner. Sweet Jésu, when last had he such a thing?

  Never. Never, and always sought it.

  He forced his gaze back to the woods. The sound of the soldiers was farther away and continued to grow more distant. Motioning for Senna to stay where she was, he crept after them.

  Half a mile of stealthy hunting assured him they were indeed headed away, and would trouble them no more. He turned back. Upon reached the clearing, he saw Senna had done as he bid, waiting motionless by the tree.

  “They are gone,” he whispered.

  Her body was trembling with repressed excitement. He could scarcely fathom it. This was a dangerous world, and she was a small woman in its merciless midst. The crown of her head barely topped his shoulder, although the fuzz of untended hair added a good half inch, and he could nearly wrap his fingers twice around her slender wrist. With a twist, he could snap it. She was defenseless, really.

  With weapons or without, she was no match for a soldier, no match for him. And she could have been killed a moment ago.

  But she was smiling, God save him, with an untamed, fearless grin that smashed through the base of an untended wall of his heart and entered in.

  He kept expecting Senna to be a simple matter: a smart, sensuous woman with some surprising, engaging traits. But that all lay in the dust of the past. In the damp, impressionable here and now, she was coming together as a human being in such startling and unexpected ways he was quite helpless before it.

  He couldn’t think of a single thing to say. The moon was setting.

  “Were they searching for us?” she whispered.

  He shook his head. “No way to know. I doubt it. That is a rarely used path between two towns.”

  “Is it safe to stay here?”

  “I don’t want to chance it. Can ye walk some more?”

  She nodded. No semblance of a braid anymore, she was a sea of wild red-brown curls he could dive into. “All night, if we must. But, the moon has set,” she pointed out. “It will be ever dark.”

  “I can see us through. Yer hand?” he asked, gesturing.

  She looked at it as if surprised, then grinned. “I do not feel a thing.”

  They were very quiet as they shouldered their packs and started off. They h
iked until the sun rose, when russet light fell like rain through the emerald tree branches. Scented with pine needles and forest resin, the triangulated rays of gold and dusty red drifted between the branches, humming faint light.

  They passed through this furred illumination, their bodies alternately light and shadow, chilled to the bone and alive. It would be another glorious day.

  They stopped twice—once to rest for a deep, hard sleep at midday, and one other time for a quick scrub in a stream.

  But mostly they walked. And talked, although not of the nights before. Finian told her about his extended foster family and his love of music, and she might have mentioned something about a few be-knighted daydreams of her youth.

  And he watched her. Endlessly.

  Every time she bent her body, he followed the curve. When she laughed, he watched her mouth stretch up into that bewitching grin. When she looked up to ask him a question, he was already watching her with a slow regard that brought a blush to her cheeks.

  At which point he would jerk his gaze away. The feeling was indescribable, akin to being stoked by fires that had been long banked. Something like coming home.

  When evening finally turned honest eyes unreadable, she brought up their brush with the soldiers.

  “Have you ever felt that way before, so alive when you are so close to dying?” Her voice was so low it barely disturbed the air. She could have been talking to herself.

  He nodded silently, a bit alarmed by the feelings coursing through him. It brought life to her blood, did it? That pleased him. He knew the feeling well: the waterfalling sensation, the tumbling exhilaration of facing death alongside the inner certainty, ‘This moment is mine.’

  There were few enough people who had such a response, with hearts who liked to live near the edge of unseen cliffs and fling themselves over the side, knowing they could fly.

  Maybe pleased wasn’t the right word.

  He’d stood within inches of her body when it had come alive, when he’d told her their lives might be about to be shortened. Peered into her eyes when they’d sparked with fire. He’d known exactly how excitement pounded through her body, made her shimmer like a warrior-sprite. It left him breathless.