by Kris Kennedy
“How bad?” Katarina asked quietly.
Aodh reclined in his seat, a hand on Finn’s back. “Perhaps very. There are more rebellions.” He stroked Finn’s head. “The O’Neill is in open revolt.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Oh no.”
“Aye.”
She looked out into the hall for a moment, then asked flatly, “And are we expected to help put him down?”
Why did the English Crown insist on pushing at every ache with such vigor? Digging in, intending to root out pus, but instead, introducing more infection. Did they not know it was better to let some things lie?
Aodh shook his head. “Do not worry. I impressed upon the Lord Deputy how unwise it would be to ask Rardove to join a hosting against The O’Neill. It would only spur more rebellion.”
She swung her gaze to him. “So we are to…?”
“Hold the line. Our strength lies in being England’s wall, not its fist. Fitzwilliam seemed to agree.”
Relief and wonder made her laugh softly. “Only you, Aodh Mac Con, could convince the English to allow us to sit out a war.”
He shrugged. “I’ve no intention of fighting The O’Neill. I think Sir William saw that.” His reply spoke directly to her words, but his gaze was intent on an entirely different matter as it slid down the front of her gown with clear male purpose.
She sat back in her chair. “You told the Lord Deputy of Ireland you had no intention of fighting The O’Neill?”
“I did not have to tell him. I simply explained more rebellions would follow if Rardove were ordered to join a hosting against The O’Neill.”
She let the words sink in. “You meant we would rebel.”
“Perish the thought,” he said softly. “Lass, we tend the fires, we do not put them out.” He threw back the rest of his drink, lifted Finn off his lap, slid out, and set the boy back on the chair.
“Fight well,” he said to both his children, kissed their heads, kissed the baby, then turned to Katarina. “Come with me.”
Her body lit as if he’d lit a wick inside her.
They went to their rooms. Aodh was stripping off his clothes even as he kicked the door shut. “Take that off,” he ordered, tugging at her gown.
“Yes, well, I was going to,” she said breathlessly, pulling faster at the laces. He walked her back to the bed while he was still yanking off his tunic, and kicked her legs apart as she dropped onto the bed.
He was inside her in seconds, hot and fast, dragging cords of pleasure across her body. She was ready for him, pulsing with heat, slippery with desire, so he sank in deep, with a single thrust.
“Ah, Katy,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her neck. “I missed you. Come with me next time I go.”
“I will,” she whispered.
“You could have helped, with the Lord Deputy.”
“You do not appear to have needed help.”
He nudged her thigh up and to the side a little more, and thrust in again. “A beautiful woman always helps, especially when she is clever too. They never expect that.”
She lifted her hips to him. “You did not expect it.”
He stilled a moment, peering down at her. “What I did not expect was to get punched in the jaw.”
“Oh, yes, that was it. And to have your dagger stolen.”
He rolled his hips again. “I admit, that was a surprise. Particularly when you did it a second time.”
“I was angry.”
“I noticed.” He set a hand on her hip and held her firmly as he sank in with harder, more urgent thrusts.
Her breath came faster. She tipped her head back, pressing it into the mattress, and looked up into his eyes. “What will Elizabeth say?”
“Who?” His gaze was fixed between their legs, on their union.
She tipped his face up to look at her. “The Queen of England?”
His ice-blue eyes burned into hers. “Katy, there is always a way,” he said, ignoring her stated question, and answering the deeper one. The truer one. It was his way. “I swear to you.” He surged into her again, strumming her like an instrument, making her burn.
“I believe in you,” she whispered.
“I burn in you.”
Their mouths met, in a long, deep kiss of adoration.
This, this with Aodh, this was her home. Their lives, their union, their children. It was home.
She was finally home. In Aodh.
I hope you loved Aodh & Katy’s story in Claiming Her!
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Claiming Her part of the Renegades and Outlaws collection,
all new, loosely connected stories of scorching hot historical romance from Kris Kennedy.
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Check out Kris’s Author’s Notes for more about Claiming Her!
Pronouncing Aodh’s name
It’s affected by dialect & has changed over time, but let’s keep things simple, and say it can be pronounced:
Ae, Aí, Eh, Ee, or Ay
Simple, right?
In my mind, I hear it as ‘ay’ with the faintest emphasis of a ‘d’ on the end, as you would say the beginning of ‘Aidan.’
In Irish Gaelic, Aodh means ‘fire,’ from the element ‘aed,’ i.e. fire. Many Irish kings have held the name over the centuries; it is a royal name.
The anglicized version is Hugh.
On Young Irishmen in England
During Queen Elizabeth’s reign
Aodh Mac Con Rardove is pure fiction, mores the pity, but there was a real life Irish clan chief, Hugh O’Neill (1550–1616), who would have been a contemporary of Aodh’s. I did not base Aodh on Hugh, indeed, when I started writing I did not even think of Hugh, although of course I knew him as one of the great Irish earls who fled during the infamous Flight of the Earls in 1607. But Hugh O’Neill had many of the same experiences as Aodh (or vice versa, I suppose), and if you’re interested in Irish history, I thought you might find this fascinating.
Brought up in England after his father was killed by warring factions in the ongoing battle for supremacy of the Irish O’Neill dynasty (derbfine), Hugh (aka: Aodh!) was Dublin’s choice to inherit the English-recognized O’Neill lordship and title Earl of Tyrone. To protect—and indoctrinate—him, Hugh was sent to England by the then-justiciar Sir Henry Sidney, and raised both in England and out on the Pale in Ireland by English families. He became known as ‘a little rascal horse boy.’
He was raised like other royal wards at the English Court, interacting with other young nobles, was taught the ‘new religion’ and generally indoctrinated into English ways. He was sent back to rule and inherit the title Earl of Tyrone when he was 17 years old.
The training seemed to have taken: he encouraged a court-like life in his Irish world, dressed his sons like English courtiers, trained them to speak English, and generally encouraged a refined life—an English life. As was true for many Irishmen, he served in the English army, and commanded a troop of cavalry in the Munster wars against Desmond (the ones Aodh’s father and grandfathers were killed/captured in.)
Unfortunately for Hugh, and in the end, England, within the Irish O’Neill sept, they had already picked their guy, and it wasn’t Hugh. It was Turlogh. They’d inaugurated Turlogh as The O'Neill, and as you know, there can only be one “the.” Many “a’s”, only one “the.”
Being the earl of Tyrone just didn’t compare to being a clan chief for Hugh. It was also surely difficult to see the Plantations happening, where transplanted English and Scottish settlers were taking up residence on Irish lands. And too, Hugh could see a future where they would begin to encroach on his lands. Indeed, rebellions were sparking up all over Ireland.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable. It was only a matter of time.
When Turlogh finally died (and only after much drama) in 1595, guess who took over?
The story gets sad after this, for Irish culture, which had been experiencing a renaissance under great Irish lords like The O’Neill, was all but extinguished after the Flight of the Earls.
For his part, O’Neill always meant to return, and was continually seeking allies to come back to Ireland and remount a defense against England, and regain his lands. Unfortunately, he died before those ambitions could be realized, and the English Plantations in the north continued unchecked.
Which is part of why I wanted Rardove to be what it was. A place where you can imagine Irish culture could go on, and would go on, no matter what external forces pressed upon it. A bulwark that would stand forever, a safe haven to cultivate and protect the spirit of Ireland, throughout the trials and tribulations in the centuries to come.
I hope you can imagine Aodh and his Katy being the ones who could start a lineage that would do just that.
Sea Travel by Katarina & Aodh’s men
This is a small point, but as I was writing, I realized that although Ré and Cormac and even Bran might be experienced seamen, there was no way they were going to get a large ship across the Irish Sea with a three man crew to rescue Aodh. Additionally, they then needed to be able to cruise into a small cove, Renegades Cove.
After much research on the matter (it’s amazing the amount of research that goes into a story element that’s barely alluded to), I realized they had to have traveled in a pinnace. Here’s a great picture of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DhowChase.jpg
Sturdy enough to undertake long open-water voyages and handy enough to use close to shore, it was used as a warship, a merchant ship and quite often as a tender, a small boat, to ferry goods and passengers to and from larger ships. It could be rowed or sailed, and could be manned by a small crew.
So, now you can picture Katy and the boys traveling over the Irish Sea to rescue Aodh!
Prisms
Elizabethans knew of prisms as novelties. Isaac Newton and his work on refraction and the essence of light was decades in the future, but I admit to a bit of rebelliousness when I’m told, “This is the way it was—the only way it was,” and “People did not know/use this word/say X before such-and-such a date.”
Newtown experimented, and validated, and, perhaps most importantly, published. But he surely wasn’t the first to think, or to wonder, to suspect, or even to experiment. Especially among inquisitive and curious people, maybe even people who worked around prisms and light and water, and might depend on them for their livelihood. Like seamen and captains. Like Aodh.
Originally, in fact, I pictured Aodh giving Katarina a gift of Icelandic spar (Viking sunspot) used by seamen in the Elizabethan era (and before) to help navigate, but as the spar does not refract light in the same way as a prism, I had to leave that one behind.
Still, refraction as a concept was theorized about in the 13th century, by Englishman Roger Bacon (1220-1292), and even further back, it was studied experimentally Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (964-1014). Known as “Ahazen” in the West, he was a Muslim physicist and philosopher in Iraq & Egypt, who studied and wrote seminal works on the nature of light and optics. It was he who first introduced the law of refraction, and he used this knowledge to make lens shapes that focused light with no geometric aberrations. Pretty cool, huh? He is reputed to have written over 90 books, including his seminal work, the Book of Optics.
I think a thoughtful, curious, questing person like Aodh might have done a little experimenting on his own. And then, shared it with his woman, to help light her fire, so she could burn for him.
On Katarina’s investment flop, Gilbert Humphrey
This name was a total play on the real-life, contemporary ‘adventurer’ Sir Humphrey Gilbert, solider, mariner, adventurer in Ireland and the New World, and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh.
Unfortunately, his ‘adventuring’ in Ireland was quite viciously done. On one campaign, he put everyone to the sword, even women and children, then cut off their heads and staked them along the pathway to his tent. Because the Irish were the savages, right?
Gilbert’s maritime adventures led him as far as the New World, and he died on one return journey; stubbornness did him in, as it likely had in other endeavors, too. This time, it saw to his end. He died on board his beloved ship Squirrel, slowly sinking, reading a book on the stern as he went down with his ship. It is believed he was reading Utopia by Sir Thomas More. A hard-fought, hard-won, dynamic, incredible, and sometimes deplorable, life.
References to dyes and the history of Rardove
My second book, The Irish Warrior, was set in 1297 at Rardove. The story of the dyes and the madness of a 13th century baron—and the vengeful Irishman and merchant widow—are told in that story.
Anachronisms
Glacier-From mid-1700’s in English, but derived from the French word glacier, which is 16th c, so I went with it, as Aodh knows French.
Hellcat – Was not documented in use until 1605. “Wildcat” was, but that felt even more anachronistic to me! So I decided, seriously, 15 years?? I’m sure someone thought it about someone else long before another someone else wrote it down.
Mark – as in “You’re wasting your fight on the wrong mark, my lady.” Someone pointed out that ‘mark’ as a victim was not in use at this time. I would counter by saying it was not documented, a very different thing. That said, its use here was as a ‘target’ for Katarina’s anger, and that use was very much was documented, by 1350.
I used a few other words or phrases that were not documented as being in use at the time of the story—for instance, ‘en route’ (!?!)—but I tend to err on the side of atmosphere and plausibility. Hopefully you felt immersed, even when people were ‘en route’ to places.
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RENEGADES & OUTLAWS Collection
The King’s Outlaw (2016)
(originally part of the Captured by a Celtic Warrior anthology)
Claiming Her (2016)
OTHER MEDIEVALS
Defiant (re-release 2016)
Deception (coming 2017) Sign up for the newsletter to get alerts
The Irish Warrior (2010)
The Conqueror (2009)
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Bella Love
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
> Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Epilogue
Author’s Notes
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