A Storm of Passion

by TERRI BRISBIN

  Dara had not spoken of anyone else being here, so Moira called out to the man, who sat on a rock with his face turned toward the sun, much as she liked to do on such a day.

  “Sir?” she called as she walked closer. “I do not mean to disturb you. Dara did not…” She stopped then, as he lowered his head.

  With the distance still between them and his face yet turned away, Moira had the feeling she’d met him before. Mayhap another unfortunate victim of Diarmid’s cruelty taken in by Connor? She stopped and spoke again.

  “My name is…”

  “Moira.”

  Her body reacted before her mind did, for how could someone explain speaking to the dead except that her mind had fled? Her hands trembled, and her body shook as it recognized the voice.

  “Moira? Speak to me,” the man said.

  It could not be. It could not…be.

  She was running before she knew it, and she screamed out his name. “Connor! Connor!”

  He turned then, and she saw the face of the man she loved, the father of her bairn. She reached him and stopped directly before him, waiting for him to look at her. But when he did look in her direction, it was with eyes that were empty and unseeing.

  He was blind.

  The air around her felt heavy upon her, and her senses began to spin until she could feel herself falling. Grabbing his cloak, she tried to stay on her feet, but the shock of seeing him, seeing him alive, overwhelmed her and she lost the battle, sinking into a faint at his feet.

  The first thing she noticed was the sound of the ocean pounding against a nearby shore. Then she felt the strong arms around her, holding her tightly against an even stronger body.

  A body that breathed and a heart that beat.

  Moira opened her eyes and found herself on Connor’s lap and in his embrace. She reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand.

  “You are alive? How can that be?”

  If she was dreaming, she did not want to wake from it, for there were words that needed saying between them. In the moment when he died and she was overwhelmed by the truth of her father’s treachery, she’d hated him for revealing it to her. And that bitter moment had haunted her these last months when the depth of her love became so clear.

  “You were dead—I felt your chest. Your heart stopped beating.” And she cried. The tears came out in a torrent, and the questions also, flooded out in a stream as she tried to understand. “How did you live? How did you escape from Diarmid?”

  He reached up and put his finger to her lips, shushing her. His lips warmed her skin as he touched them to her forehead, and she fought the urge to simply lie back in his arms and forget the last time she’d seen him. Pushing against his chest, she leaned back and searched his face. She spoke his name softly now, still not believing that he was real and not imaginary.

  “Connor,” she whispered, clutching his shoulders and breathing in his scent. “They announced your death. They blamed it on me. If you lived, why did you not summon me to your side?”

  He took her face in his hands, drew her close, and kissed her until she stopped trying to talk. When he lifted his mouth from hers, he explained the plans he’d set in place in case his worst fear was realized.

  “I told you of my fears, Moira. I knew the power would end in my death and made arrangements to get you out safely,” he whispered, never pausing in kissing her face as he spoke. “I gave you my word that you would be safe and swore Breac to the task.” He leaned away then. “I could not risk telling you about it. Diarmid shows no mercy to those who defy him.”

  Moira trembled then, her body and soul remembering the cost of her own defiance against Diarmid’s plans. Connor held her closer.

  “I know how Breac got me away—he told me the whole of it when I woke miles and hours away from Mull. But tell me how you survived that vision. How is it that you still live?” she asked, letting the strength of his arms surround her. “How can it be?”

  “Breac returned once he had smuggled you out and got Diarmid’s permission to bury me here on my lands. As he was wrapping a tarp around me, I woke.” A sad smile touched his face. “I could not explain how I lived; I only knew that my sight was gone. My eyes,” he rubbed them then, “see nothing.”

  “Maybe in time?” she asked, thinking on how his sight would return after his visions. “Do they pain you?”

  Moira reached up to touch his eyes then, but stopped. They were open, but never focused on her. The green coloring was gone, replaced by a white, hazy layer that showed no sign of changing back to what it was.

  “Nay, no pain now. Only a piercing cold and darkness,” he said. “I did not send for you because I did not want to tie you to a blind man. Your life had been stolen away from you because of me, and I wanted you to have a chance at a new one without the burden of my care.”

  “You are alive, Connor—that is all I could ever have wanted. Alive! Power or not, sight or not, alive.” She shook her head at his words, but realized he could not see her gesture.

  “Do you remember the time after your heart stopped? How did you make it begin anew?” she asked, sliding from his embrace to stand before him. Laying her hand on his chest, she felt the strong pulsing of his heart, pushing blood through his veins and giving him life. “How is it that you live?”

  Connor smiled then and shook his head. “I know not, Moira. I only know that I felt the last beat and fell into the darkness and then later my heart beat again and I woke. I know not if it was part of the Fae gift or curse or something else.” He reached out his hand, and she guided it to her face. “I wonder if I was really dead or simply deeply unconscious.”

  “Nay,” she said, shaking her head. “I felt your chest. There was no breath there and no heart beating. I watched you die…”

  She could not help the way her own breathing hitched as she spoke of it. The terror and horror of witnessing it flowed once more through her. And the regrets with it.

  Moira kissed him again and let him feel the love within her flow to him. “And I should have believed you,” she whispered. “About my father and his…his…”

  “Hush now, my Moira,” he soothed.

  But the regrets still haunted her. Now she had the chance to set them straight. She stepped nearer and pulled his head down to her, kissing him.

  “I love you, Connor. I love you,” she whispered against his mouth. “I should have told you before Samhain. I was a coward and could not admit it to you. But, I do. I love you.”

  She would have said it again and again, but the sound of laughter surrounded them. Looking around, she saw no one. Then a glimmer of light appeared between them, and the fairy hill, expanding taller and wider, became an opening of some kind through which a man stepped out.

  “Connor,” she said, clutching his hand in hers. “There is a man…”

  “Not a man,” the stranger proclaimed boldly in a musical voice. If the tales told true, he was not mortal at all. Could he really be a Sith?

  Though she thought she might have already fainted, Moira tried to understand what or who she was seeing. He looked like a prince, with his regal bearing, beautiful robes, but it was his eyes that shocked her: they were the exact same green as Connor’s. His every movement and word caused the light around him to rival the sun’s; shimmering waves poured off him as he walked toward them.

  “Moira tell me,” Connor said, tugging on her hand.

  She’d already forgotten that he could not see what she was witness to. “He is…a Sith,” she finally forced the words out.

  His smile warmed her, and he stepped closer now until she could have touched him. She wrapped her hands around Connor’s arm now, holding him tightly, as the creature spoke.

  “I am Sith,” he said, “and would share what we are called with you, but it is incomprehensible to your human minds and tongues.” He reached out his hand toward her, and Moira shuddered.

  “Fear not, mortal. Our touch will not harm you.”

  And it did not, for it felt mu
ch the same as Connor’s had felt when he held her hand during his vision, the heat passing from him into her and…it was just the same.

  The Sith laughed then, and it moved the trees and grass and even the air around them with its power. “You have already been touched by our magic and lived, woman. He is part of us,” the Sith said, pointing at Connor.

  As if to make his point, he touched Connor’s cheek, and Connor’s skin glowed as it had during his visions. His face changed, and his eyes…his eyes glowed with power and sight as they took on their usual dark green color.

  “Moira,” Connor said. “My eyes…I can see once more!”

  Connor looked around the meadow and could see the greens of the grass and plants, the pinks and reds and yellows of the flowers bursting into bloom, the blues of the sea and sky, and the light of the sun and the Sith standing before them. But more importantly, he could look once more on the face of the woman he loved. The face of the woman…

  His gaze dropped lower, taking in her form, and his heart nearly stopped again, for she carried a child. His child, it had to be!

  “A bairn?” he asked in a whispered voice. “A bairn?”

  He shouted her name and took her in his arms and swung her until she screamed and laughed and cried all at once. It took several minutes before either of them could speak a word, for all he could do was hold her and place his hand over the place where his child grew within her body.

  Apparently the Sith felt ignored, for the clouds raced across the sky, covering the sun and making his glow the only thing lighting the day now. Connor turned them to face him.

  “So, Sith, is this just to remind me of how much you have taken from me? Will my sight go when you do? Will I spend the rest of my days in the darkness and never see the face of my child?”

  For years he’d lived with their gift and then with their curse, and through it all, he’d never lived his own life. If he had to be blind, he could accept that, but he would not have this Sith interfering with the rest of his life. “Or will you and your kind continue to twist my life for your amusement?”

  “Your sight is restored,” the Sith said quietly. “And the other as well.”

  Connor felt it then, the power, the visions moving deep inside him, waiting for him to call it forth. No longer servant to it, but master now. “Do you expect my gratitude then, Sith? I would rather face a life of blindness than be burdened by your gift.”

  His anger spilled out in his words, and he felt Moira tremble next to him. Wrapping his arm around her, he knew she would accept him blind or sighted, but he did not want some power that would forever control his life.

  “Take it back, Sith.”

  The Sith stared at him with those eyes that glowed, and then he laughed once more. Connor heard the laughter and remembered hearing it before…hearing it in this same meadow…on his seventh birthday when the first vision happened. “You were here?”

  “I cannot take back that which is part of you, Connor. You were not a changeling,” he said, staring at Moira as though he knew she’d carried those tales to him. “You are Sith, and you are mortal.”

  Connor felt the world under his feet shift as he grasped the truth of it. It explained so much, but prompted many questions.

  “My mother?” he asked. “Where is she?”

  The Sith’s face darkened then, as did the sky above them as though in fear of the Sith’s anger. “She betrayed me.”

  “Tell me my past, Sith,” Connor commanded. He needed to know how he came to be and what awaited him after the Sith was gone.

  “She did not catch me, woman,” the Sith said, looking at Moira, “I caught her. She was a daughter of this isle and spent many a summer’s day in this very place. I caught her, coming to her in the day and the night and giving her my love.”

  Connor noticed that the Sith now referred to himself as a separate being from the rest of his kind.

  “I took her to my lands,” he said, nodding at the fairy hill, “and we spent many months there together. I gave her everything,” he said fiercely, “but she was not happy and asked to return to her mortal world and the man she’d been betrothed to before I found her. She refused my love and found her way back here on that Samhain night twenty and eight years ago as you count time.”

  The Sith turned from them then and nodded at the place before them, and Connor could see it as it happened. He thought only he saw it until he felt Moira clutch as his hand and watch as he did.

  A young woman appeared, pushing her way out of the fairy hill. She was huge with child and stumbled out of the ground, holding her belly and moaning against the pain of her impending birthing. She kept looking behind her to see if anyone followed, and then she began to run toward the path.

  But she did not make it, falling to the ground as her pains struck. When she looked over her shoulder before gaining her feet once more, the Sith stood there on the fairy hill.

  “Do not leave,” he said. “I gave you my love.” Connor did not think the Sith were capable of such mortal emotions, but he could see and hear both the love and the pain as the Sith spoke.

  “Come back with me now.” He held out his hand to her, but she turned away, trying to run.

  “I cannot live with you. I do not love you,” she said, gasping for breath as another pain struck. She howled in pain but still turned away. “Let me go!” she screamed.

  The Sith’s rage and pain exploded then: flashes of light and waves of heat pierced the night’s sky as he lashed out at the woman who’d betrayed him.

  “They are mine,” he said, pointing at her huge belly. “They are gifted.” Something flashed from his hand to the woman’s belly, and she screamed in pain. “But cursed for your betrayal, for when they use their Sith powers, their mortal lives will suffer. Their powers will grow, and their mortal bodies will suffer. When their powers peak and end, they will wither and die.”

  “No!” she screamed. “Please! Do not make my bairns carry the punishment for my sins against you,” she cried out, pulling herself up onto her knees and reaching out her hand to him. “Spare them, I beg you!”

  The Sith approached her and crouched down in front of her then, placing his hand on her belly for only a moment. Connor could not describe the look on the creature’s face as he felt the bairns inside her womb.

  “They will be taken from you, for you are not worthy to raise them. They will not know of their powers or the source of it, and you cannot tell them or the Sith will strike you all down,” he commanded.

  She began to crawl away as though to escape his sentence, when he shook his head at her and waved his hand. Four others appeared around her, holding her and keeping her from running.

  “Unless they find true love, given and spoken by one called their enemy, their Sith nature will destroy their human one, and they will live in our world forever. If they find that true love given and spoken, before their powers end, their mortal nature will control their Sith side.”

  Connor did not move as they heard the words declaring his fate. The scene sped up, as Moira held on to him, and they watched the woman give birth to three bairns, all boys, and as each was born, one of the other Sith took the babe and disappeared. When the birth was done, the last Sith faded away, leaving only the woman and this Sith alone.

  The Sith shook his head at her. “You will not find what you seek with him. You will suffer this loss and more by refusing what I offered you. Only one of the three can help you find the happiness you seek.”

  “No,” the woman keened out. “No more!”

  “I do not curse you, Aigneis,” he said softly now. “I only see what the failure of your mortal heart will cause for you.”

  Moira felt her own tears flow as she watched the Sith walk to the fairy hill and fade into it. The vision of that Samhain night faded, too, until it was the present day and the sun shone overhead. She wiped her face and turned to Connor as the words made sense.

  I had children, but they were taken from me.

  �
��Agnes,” Moira whispered to Connor. “She is your mother.”

  The Sith’s eyes glowed then as he turned to face them once more. “That was your past, born of betrayal, half Sith, half mortal. I did not give your sight back to you, Connor,” he said, nodding at her now, “Moira did.” The Sith’s gaze softened then as he smiled.

  “’Twas a piece of your heart and soul left behind in him that saved his mortal life that day, but your love, given then but spoken today, that freed him from the curse laid on him in anger.”

  Just as on that day long past, the Sith glimmered across the meadow to stand near the fairy hill. “Wait,” she called out to him. “What will happen now?”

  The Sith laughed then, and all the clouds that had gathered in the sky blew out to sea in an instant. Did he even know his powers here in the mortal world?

  “Your lives will be as they should be, Moira,” he said. Looking at Connor, he smiled. “Your Sith powers now bow to your mortal will, Son. Use them as you desire, and they will serve you well.”

  Connor took a few steps toward him and called out a name, one she did not understand and could not repeat if held to the sword. But the Sith understood it, and it bound him to Connor for that moment. Only a Sith’s name spoken by one fully mortal had the power to bind him completely to their will.

  “And my brothers? What of them?”

  “They followed their own paths, Connor. While you were facing your test, they faced their own.”

  “You know them? You know if they lived or died?” he called out, for the Sith began to fade until only the slightest glimmer remained in the air over the fairy hill.

  “I know them,” a voice said, as it spread all around them. “As you may, in time.”

  A moment later Moira knew they were alone, and she turned to Connor and saw that his eyes still glowed, but now with love for her. He lifted her head and touched his mouth to hers. She opened to him as she wanted to, as she needed to, now and for the rest of their lives.

  “You had the true power, Moira. You saved me,” he whispered against her mouth. Lifting his head, he smiled. “Come, we have much to plan and much more to celebrate.”