Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (24 page)

“Well,” Walter said, “better do as she bids, and turn yourself in.” At Dickon’s mutinous expression, he became again a disapproving clerical summit. “Ere they find you themselves, boy, and learn you what a true barbarian is.”

Dickon scowled. “They’d never find me.”

“They would if you keep pinching eggs from beside the kitchen door.”

Dickon’s jaw dropped as Walter turned and started down the stairs.
 

“
You
left the eggs?”

Walter seemed not to hear him. “You have a few days of liberty yet due you, as the master has just ridden off for town. See that you make yourself useful during it.”
 

Dickon started down the stairs after him. “How?”

“Collect more eggs.”

*

WITHIN THE HOUR, another round of emissaries had ridden out.
 

Aodh was out fast on their heels with his own contingent. Cormac and fifteen others rode at his side as the golden sun sent long rays over the tops of the walls, making the shadows retreat down in the baileys.
 

As they intended to win the town, and not conquer it, they bore few weapons and several heavy chests.

Ré stood on the wall just above the portcullis gate, in command of the castle in Aodh’s absence. As he passed under, Aodh stayed his horse.
 

“Station a guard at her door the entire time I am gone,” he ordered.

Ré nodded.

“Free the rest of her household. Not the guard, but her servants.”
 

Ré nodded again. Beside him, Cormac gave a grunt of approval, for this meant the maid with the bouncing breasts would be freed too.

As they passed under the gates, Aodh added over his shoulder, “And send her up a bath.”
 

*

KATARINA WATCHED him ride off. The horses seemed to wade through the low-lying mists down the valley, then they began climbing the far side. She watched until they were out of sight.
 

Aodh’s small hosting contained more soldiers than these hills had seen since Finn MacCumhail’s band of Fianna warriors, and that had been a thousand years ago, and a myth. But Aodh Mac Con’s uprising was far too real.

Queen Elizabeth would be enraged.

Chapter Twenty-One

“MY AODH?”

The majority of Queen Elizabeth’s councilors stared vapidly up at the rafter beams or whichever whitewashed stone was in their direct line of sight. A few others, absent rafters or stones, peered out the nearest window into a swiftly dying sunset as the queen reread the missive from Aodh Mac Con, who had, apparently, turned rebel.
 

How like an Irishman.

“
My
Aodh?”
 

The hollow shock in her voice created a shuffling of slippered feet as the men drew their averted gazes off the walls and windows and looked at each other in silent, furious query:
Where in God’s name was Burghley
? Only Cecil could manage the queen when she was bent, now that Dudley was dead.

Finally Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, ’tis a small enough thing, a trifling. So an Irishman has turned. It is what Irishmen
do
. They are savages, after all. ’Tis in the blood—”

“Trifling?”

Mildmay froze mid-word, his lips wrinkled around the effort of not saying what he’d been thinking of saying, and was now most definitely not going to say.

“A trifling that one of my most trusted councilors has forsworn me? That one of my best captains has commandeered a castle on my Irish frontiers and turned it into a rebel stronghold? A trifling that he has aban—”

The queen stopped short.
Abandoned me
almost rang in the air, but she did not say the words, and no one else ever would. They simply watched their steely queen as she set down Aodh Mac Con’s message and picked up the camellia flower he’d sent with it. A token of his affection. A reminder of times past. He’d always known how to touch her heart.

Ireland had been a simmering pot of rebellion for the past twenty years, embroiling everyone from the queen’s own cousin, the Earl of Ormond, up to the powerful Desmond earl and
his
brother, down to the man who’d replaced Desmond after he’d been imprisoned, fitzMaurice.
 

Ireland, quite simply, turned men to rebels.
 

These rebellions, as well as the threats and reprisals that accompanied them—including land confiscations—had unfortunately created even more fierce opposition amid the Irishry. Indeed, it had incited more uprisings in the south, and agitated a few pebbles loose in the unruly north too, mostly defanged Irish potentiates hoping to reignite their own aspirations.
 

The most noteworthy of these had been the Rardove clan.

The English barony was named for the region, and the legendary dyes that used to be, thousands of years ago, associated with it.
Ruadgh dubh
—“roo” and “dove,” the queen had obediently repeated the lyrical words Aodh had taught her—the Irish words for the colors red and black, the deep shades of the legendary Wishmé dyes that had once come out of that wild region.
 

The reappearance of such a long-forgotten, warlike tribe had been an unsettling blow.

Fortunately, in the end, the rebellions had been put down, and the overly ambitious Rardove aspirant had been beheaded, quite painfully, too, she’d been told—it had taken four blows. Cousin Butler had come to heel, the earl of Desmond had been imprisoned (until he was released to rebel again a few years later), and FitzMaurice had sailed to France to seek Catholic allies to begin another rebellion.

But Aodh…Aodh had come to her.

He’d laid his sword at her feet and pledged himself, with a condition: he wanted his ancestral lands back.
 

Bold bantam chick. But bantam, nonetheless.

Against the will of her Privy Council, Elizabeth agreed to his proposition, in theory.

“Prove yourself to me,” she’d commanded, flattered and amused—and impressed—by the boldness of this dark-haired Irish boy about to become a man. Rebel man, or one of hers. Best to keep him close to hand, for he had a dauntless spirit.

To the astonishment of the Council, he’d proved himself a hundred times over. Charming and capable of standing alone in unpopular opinions—he had none of the untrustworthy prettiness of so many others—Elizabeth had found herself desiring to keep him closer and closer to hand. Even at the expense of keeping her vague, theoretical promise.

She hadn’t thought it could matter so much. After all, it was only Ireland.
 

“I cannot lose you to Ireland, Aodh. Francis is weakening, Dudley is gone. Bertrand can go tend Ireland; I need you here. You are my man,”
she’d said with great affection.
 

He’d listened respectfully, as always, then leaned near and, taking liberties no man would dare, no man but he and Dudley, ran his finger down her forearm and said in that dangerously male lilt of his, “I am indeed your man, my lady, and have been for the better half of my life. I am not your puppet.”
 

Then he’d kissed her hand and left.

So. Aodh had shown her he was not her puppet.
 

Now, Elizabeth would show what she was not: a fool.

The Irish could not be allowed to simply
have
Ireland.
 

She snapped out of her stillness, crumpling the paper in her hand until it resembled the knot in her stomach. The men would never see that, though. They hadn’t the sight. They thought her indecisive, waffling, unwilling to commit. They knew nothing of the things she committed to, over and over, in the dark nights of her soul, the wretched ripping apart, dual courses torn asunder, striding the one path, leaving the other behind like a distant shoreline.
 

They never cared for what was left behind. Men so rarely did. The opportunity to try again always came to them.

She flung the crumbled paper atop the camellia and swept the room with a cool glance.
 

“Send for that fool, Bertrand,” she said curtly.
 

“Already done, Your Majesty,” Robert Beale, clerk to the Council, assured her. “He is en route.”

“To spending some goodly time in the Tower,” she snapped. “What was he doing up in York, for God’s sake? He will acquit himself on this excursion or I will see him shackled for a twelvemonth. Fool.” She cast her steely gaze around the room. “And so, the postern gate of Ireland once again becomes a matter for England. Did I not say it would? Did Leicester not know? Was two decades of war not sufficient to learn us our lesson?”

Silence met this array of questions. It seemed nothing would ever be sufficient for Ireland.

She got to her feet. The room erupted with a squeal of chairs. “Send an army to acquaint Aodh Mac Con with my displeasure.”

A loud chorus of voices resounded off the walls: dissension, cheers, Elizabeth had no idea. She was too deep in a swirl of memories. The faces of the men she’d relied upon, and then lost, swam up and receded. She’d lost Dudley, how many times?, but he’d always come back, until, finally, now, he would never come back again.
 

And now,
Aodh
?

Her chest felt hot and knotted. She turned toward the door she knew was there, but it was difficult to see, shimmering as it was behind unshed tears. But she never stopped moving toward it.
 

One could never stop. It was the only way.

Chapter Twenty-Two

AODH RETURNED from a triumphant visit to the town at twilight, four days later. Some of his men were on the walls, others hammering and sawing boards to strengthen the front gates, others training in the yard. He bypassed them all, calling for Ré, striding like a storm to his chambers.
 

For the past four days, all he’d been able to think of was Katarina. Pushing her out of his mind had proved impossible, in part because she was so well regarded in the town.
 

Folk were close to exultant that he’d graced the town with a personal visit, and close to crushed that Katarina had not. She was well liked, and more to the point, well respected. She sent the town food when times were lean, medicines when sickness came, and dealt fairly in all matters of court and taxes. So when Aodh showed up bearing gifts from Rardove, they simply assumed Katarina had joined this son of Ireland, and thereby legitimized his rebellion.
 

As Katarina turned, so did they.

Aodh did not see fit to correct their misperception, although he and Cormac did exchange a silent glance over the heads of the mayor and guild leaders at the feast dinner hosted in his honor.
 

“Aye, she was sore sorry she couldn’t accompany us,” Cormac had muttered, looking at Aodh. “Sore sorry, that’s for certain.”

The other reason Aodh could not set her from his mind was because every time he closed his eyes, he saw her. And every time he saw her, his body readied.
 

Sporting a partial erection for four days was painful in the extreme.

So when they returned home and the gates fell down behind them, he dispersed his men on tasks of food and sleep, passed by Katarina’s newly released servants and maids, one who was particularly flushed with curtseys and color when she saw Cormac looming behind him, then made for his chambers, Ré fast on his heels, reporting developments.