Deirdre (27 page)

“I … I came to pray with Father Scanlan.”

Alric gave the priest a drilling look and then stepped forward, offering Deirdre his hand. “I did not give you permission to leave Abina’s lodge. She was frantic when she awakened to find you gone. Do you know what the penalty is for attempting to escape? Flogging at the least, hanging at the most.”

Taken aback at his blustering accusation, Deirdre drew away from him and rose to her feet unassisted. “I am not a slave; I am your betrothed. And I told you, I came to pray with Scanlan,
not
run away.”

“Father, do you mind?” Alric ordered Scanlan out with a jerk of his head.

“I mind.” Deirdre grabbed Scanlan’s sleeve as he started to comply “We are in God’s house, and I came to pray If you would speak to me, then you will wait outside—” She caught Scanlan’s warning look and added sweetly, “Please.”

She didn’t mean it. Alric knew she didn’t. But she had given him a way to salvage his pride. Instead of going outside to wait, he took a seat on the split-log bench near the door, arms folded against his chest. Tor followed him and sat at Alric’s quiet command.

He has no respect for the church or my prayers
, Deirdre thought, resuming her kneeling position.
Heavenly Father, what a mistake I have nearly made.

“Give us Thy Spirit. We fall on bended knee in the eye of the Father who created us, the Son who purchased us, and the Spirit who cleansed us …” Scanlan chanted. “Bless us with fullness in our need that our love for God is met with His affection for us, His smile upon us, His wisdom shared with us, and His grace surrounding us.”

“In shade and light,” Deirdre chimed in.
Heavenly Father, I so need Your Spirit.
“In day and night …”
Fill me
,
Father, that I might do what You will.
“All with Thy kindness, Lord, give us Thy Spirit.”
That I might meet anger with serenity and scowl with smile.
“Amen.”

There should have been more to the prayer, more specifics to ease Deirdre’s troubled mind, but with Alric listening, Scanlan resorted to a prayer that covered all her concerns. He rose beside her and walked
out of the enclosure. Behind her, she heard Alric rise. She smiled and imagined her anxiety draining away with each breath. Tor nudged her, impossible to ignore. With a little laugh, she grabbed his ears and scratched them.

“You have no more reverence than your master,” she scolded lightly With a sparkle of renewal in her heart, she turned and extended her hand to Alric. After he helped her up, she did the same to his ears, taking him by surprise, not only with her action, but her playful laugh. “I am sorry I frightened Abina,” she said, “but she was sleeping so peacefully and I hated to bother her.”

“Abina wasn’t the only one you frightened.”

It was Deirdre’s turn for shock. He was as earnest as she.

“It isn’t safe for you to wander about as you will in this den of wolves. You have made enemies in the queen and her followers. I would put nothing past my half brother on any account. I have my own men guard even my horse and dog when I am not about.”

Alric’s protectiveness made Deirdre wonder at his childhood—how horrible it must have been. “Someone would wish harm to your pets?”

“Jealousy and resentment have run rabid within these walls since my earliest recollection. It’s why my mother preferred the villa by the sea.”

Deirdre recalled her thoughts regarding Ethlinda’s and the Mercian envoy’s exchange of glances but could find no real grounds, save intuition, to share it. Nonetheless she intended to keep an eye on the queen, a decision that did not need Alric’s counsel.

“Then I shall go nowhere without you or Tor or—”

“I will be leaving in a few days, but Gunnar is to be at your disposal, and you are safe with my father. He is quite taken with you.”

“Where will you go? Won’t you need to help with the wedding plans?”

Alric looked around inside the chamber. “We have the church and your priest. As far as I am concerned, that is all we need. Father, on the other hand, would like to impress his neighbors and thanes with a bit more.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “He’s waited for me to take a bride for so long, I feel as though I should indulge him this much. The
only thing good about his waning health is that we will not have the betrothal period extended.”

“But he looks well,” Deirdre said.

“His headaches are becoming more severe and requiring more medication, according to Abina.”

“Why can’t I go back to the villa with you?” The moment Deirdre expressed her wish she regretted it. Her work was here with Scanlan, at least until he was accepted.

“I want to see the
Wulfshead
’s new mast installed and try her out for a few days at sea.”

“You go to plunder again,” she accused him.

“I patrol the coast, looking for ships carrying supplies to my enemy.”

“The Dalraidi.”

“The same,” he admitted. “Now, will you join me for breakfast?”

“I shall come here every day” Deirdre warned him. Faith, the idea of remaining in Galstead without Alric raised the hair on her arms.

“I’ll make certain Gunnar brings you. Meanwhile, the women will help prepare whatever it is the women prepare. You’ll like Helewis.”

“Ricbert’s wife?” At Alric’s nod, Deirdre grimaced. “At least I have something in common with her. Neither of us likes the queen.”

“Neither of you likes Ricbert either.”

At Deirdre’s startled look, Alric laughed. “Come along, milady ’tis a long story I will share on our ride this afternoon.”

“Ride?” Deirdre blinked as she stepped out into the bright sunlight. “But I have no horse.”

Alric crooked his arm and brushed Tor aside. “You do now, muirnait,” he told her, folding his hand over hers as she placed it on his forearm. “And it’s fit for a princess.”

I
’ve never seen anything like it,” Ricbert said, watching as Alric rode away from the town enclosure with his bride to be. The horses were the best that could be had, the wolfhound trotting along beside them of the finest stock, and the woman a lovely, fiery princess rather than the meek, little cow Ricbert had wed. But it was the sword hanging from Alric’s waist that the elder prince coveted most.

“I have to have that sword.”

“You will, Son. The weapon of a king shall belong to a king.”

Ricbert turned to Ethlinda, who’d denied him nothing since birth. “He will not sell it.”

“Dead men have no claims, save the right to rot.”

A rush of excitement whetted his waning humor. He’d waited a lifetime for the rule of Galstead, and now that it was within sight, it consumed him day and night. “What if he isn’t here?”

“As long as she is here, he’ll return.”

“How can you be sure?”

“He cannot take his eyes off her. No one can, for that matter.”

Ricbert arched his brow at the cryptic turn of speech. He wondered if the fair-haired lass had any idea of how dangerous an enemy she’d made. His mother, like her mother before her, was a high priestess of the earth mother.

“But after the wedding, she’ll move to the villa.”

He preferred the luxury of the seaside estate to Lambert’s austere fortress, but his father had set it aside for his whore and her whelp. Had Ethlinda and Ricbert taken up residence there, his coffers would be running over with treasures like his half brother’s. Ricbert would have built a fleet of ships and milked the seas like a fatted cow. Instead, he inherited a land of ungrateful peasants. Collecting the king’s portion from them was like squeezing blood from a stone.

The peasants continued to devise ways to cheat their protectors of
the luxuries due them, and what did his father do? He fined the salters, gave the leader a few token flogs, and totally ignored Ricbert’s suggestion that they hang the men as an example, as well as fine their kin. But nay, Lambert would jump off the cliff protecting Galstead’s back if his illegitimate son advised it. If Ricbert never ruled Galstead, just to run a blade through Alric’s beating heart would be enough to appease a lifetime of hatred he felt toward his younger sibling.

His muttering drew Ethlinda from her own thoughts. “Don’t concern yourself so, derling. Your half brother is the least of our problems.”

“Our problems?” Ricbert watched as his mother ran a painted fingernail along the flawlessly chiseled taper of her chin. She was so beautiful—in a cold, brutal way that made his flesh crawl and his blood boil. No maid he’d ever seen excited or frightened him so, certainly not his simpering Helewis. The only satisfaction he received from his marriage was denying Alric’s best friend what he so desperately coveted. Were Ethlinda not his mother—

“That Irish princess and her priest,” she said, “
they
are our problem.”

“We can kill the priest. I’ll do it myself.” With pleasure. “The female as well,” he added, with an intoxicating tingle of anticipation.

Curse Alric for claiming her first. Taming her would have provided more thrill than he’d had since capturing that little Welsh firebrand a year ago. Ethlinda’s laugh defied the pitch of the smallest of harp strings. Ricbert fancied it stemmed, like her knowledge of magic, from elfin blood infused into the line in a generation long forgotten.

“You may have her as well …
after
the wedding,” she stipulated. “But for now, this new development suits us perfectly. What better excuse to invite my brothers than to a
family
affair.” She pulled her dark, rouged lips into a pout. “My husband has made a grave error in not accepting the Mercian’s offer of protection. He is not the warrior he used to be, and his main force is on the northern border. While he gawks at Alric’s bride and frets about dying in his winter season, his enemies ally against him.”

“From without and within.” Ricbert savored the fantasy of taking Lambert’s kingdom from him by force, thus making the pie all the sweeter.

Ethlinda lifted his chin, peering into his eyes with a delicious wickedness. “You will not be so foolish, will you, my sweet?”

“Friends and enemies are of little consequence, aside from their use to me.”

“Come, derling.” The queen opened her arms to him.

As Ricbert stepped into his mother’s embrace, his heart rate quickened. If she only knew how she tormented him. Ethlinda hugged him and, drawing back that she might see his face, ran her long nails through his dark curls.

“You are your father’s son.” Admiration turned to venom as she added,
“Not
his Northumbrian murderer’s.”

Since his sixteenth year, Ricbert had known the truth. It was a Mercian thane who’d fathered him, a man who died by Lambert’s sword just before the marriage contract sealed the peace between their kingdoms. It had been with revenge on her mind that Ethlinda came to Lambert’s court and bed.

What would Lambert say if he knew the son and heir she delivered was not his?

What a cunning beauty she must have been then, for even now Ricbert’s breath grew short at the perfection in his embrace. That his feelings were forbidden only fanned his want. He ought to hate her for this torture, for it had anything but a motherly effect upon him.

Ricbert drew away and crossed him arms. “So when, Mother.
When
?”

Stepping up behind him, she spread her long, jeweled fingers on his shoulders.

“Patience, derling, makes the victory all the sweeter.” She massaged the tension there, but her ethereal titter of laughter worked against her purpose with a sweet torture. “I have waited for this revenge for thirty long years. You can surely endure a few more weeks.”

Ninga was a beautiful dappled gray with a dark mane and tail. While not as solid of build as Alric’s Dustan, the mare’s sleek lines were more suited to the racecourse than the battlefield. Deirdre proved as much.
racing the two to a nose-to-nose finish on the return from their ride. For just a few wild moments, they’d been free of the concerns that both kept them apart and united them with the same tether.

Deirdre constantly reminded herself that this heady suit of Alric’s was born of greed and nothing more. She was a gamble to him. If he won with her, he would keep her. If not, she would be divorced, discarded like used clothing. For that reason alone, she had to keep him to his promise regarding a conjugal relationship.

“Have you given any thought as to how you might find my brother?” she asked, loosening the reins so that Ninga might drink in the shallow stream.

“I have made some inquiries. Things like this take time, but Hinderk gave me his word that he would try to find out where the prince was sent. I’ve made it worth his while.”

“You did?” She could not hide the fact that she was pleasantly surprised.

“Did I not give my word?”

“Of course, but I thought … well, I didn’t think you would act upon it until we were officially wed.”

“If I am to make my word good in this case, prompt action is called for. Although …”

Her heart dipped. “Although what?”

“Hinderk thought all the captives were sold. Not one admitted he was of royal lineage. So if your brother is being held for ransom, it’s without knowledge of Ecfrith and his thanes.”

“Can you trust Hinderk to tell you the truth?”

“Ecfrith values the support of my fleet more than a prince’s ransom.” The dryness of his comment told her she’d once again pricked at his pride.

“Well, I thank you for trying. It means a lot to me.”

“Having a king for a brother-in-law cannot hurt a man.”

Having such an attitude surely hurt a woman
, Deirdre thought. Scanlan was so right. Alric didn’t want her but whatever influence or power he could derive from the match. That was all that whetted his appetite for marriage.

“What say we let the horses graze for a while and walk along the streambed? Tis a perfect day to spend with a beautiful lady.”

Deirdre raised her hand to her temple. “I fear the sun has been overmuch for me, milord. Would it be untoward to ask that we return so I might sleep off this pain in my head?”

“You’re ill? Why didn’t you say something?” To her surprise, his scowl was not one of anger but of concern. “By all means, milady let’s return at once.” He leaned across the short space between them and cupped her chin, a perfectly rakish grin tipping his lips. “Although I have a perfectly sound remedy to restore your humor.”