Deirdre (37 page)

Alric held the troubled gaze Deirdre cast over her shoulder as she followed Abina and her brother until the heavy mist swallowed them all. He knew now beyond a doubt that he and his wife were one, for he ached as though part of him had been wrenched from his chest when she pulled away from his parting embrace. It was as though all that was good and righteous left with her.

The rest, this terrible blackness that filled the void, his enemies would have to deal with.

“Don’t let your taste for revenge keep you from your bride and birthright, Son.”

Abina’s parting caution surfaced and sank like a graze of oil upon a sea of emotion. He could taste the blood he would spill, not that of many but that of anyone who stood between him and the two serpents responsible for this. They’d bitten both him and his father soundly in the Achilles’ heel, seizing upon Alric’s love-smitten distraction and Lambert’s predilection for showing off to friends and kin.

The shadowy cover worked like a partner in his mission, making it easy to sneak up on the guards drinking outside the hall. A slash to one’s throat with a dagger and a blow to the other with his scramasax silenced them before they could sound an alarm. As a precaution, Alric donned one of their bright tunics. An enemy close enough to tell he was not one of them would not live long enough to share his knowledge.

Steeled as he was for battle, Alric was not prepared for the senseless carnage that met him inside the great hall. His stomach pitched at the sight of his guests lying in their makeshift beds on the rush-strewn floor, their blankets and clothes soaked in blood. Servants lay where they fell. Mostly men, he noticed, as he stepped over and around the bodies, had been slaughtered like swine, throats slashed from ear to ear.

It was no wonder the villains took so little precaution. The two guards left behind would have no trouble keeping this assembly in order. Keeping an ear open for anyone returning, he made his way to the head table, his nostrils filling with wood smoke tinged with meat drippings and the piquant bouquet of the imported ales and wines—the scents of warmth and hospitality now tainted with that of death.

Lambert was not among the dead … but Gunnar’s father was, as well as all of the king’s most trusted thanes, the Christian witans Alric had last seen Scanlan with …

He scoured the great room for any sign of the coarse, gray robe the priest wore, then approached the table where he’d shared a drink with his crew earlier. Perhaps like Alric and Deirdre, Scanlan had left before the massacre.

If only the
Wulfshead
’s crew had done the same, he thought as he closed the sightless eyes of his helmsman. This had to be the work of Ethlinda’s herbs. That Gunnar and Wimmer were not among the dead offered small comfort. Ironically, the drunkenness that threatened violence had protected rather than endangered Gunnar by forcing him and Wimmer to leave early A few others were missing, at least from the crew’s table. By God’s grace, they were sleeping in the bam with their steeds. Still, the roar of anguish building in Alric’s chest at those lost wedged like a battle mace in his throat, refusing quarter.

Alric stumbled away from the corpses of the men he’d drunk with, fought with, lived with, and laughed with.
God!
The silent scream rose from his chest, half protest, half plea—all pain. Blinded by it, Alric broke into a run toward the connecting corridor to the king’s lodge, his weapon clenched so hard in his fist that his fingers throbbed. Fate kept the passage clear ahead of him as he rushed the entrance past two
guards who lay slain where they’d stood.

Like a tormented bull, Alric charged into the large room. “Father!”

The queen crouching over the writhing form of King Lambert leaped away from the bed. The way the black silk of her gown billowed, she looked like a startled vulture. The round astonishment of her gaze strained against the pronounced slant of the paint she used to dramatize her eyes.

“What have you done, witch?” Alric snarled, his scramasax balanced before him as he approached his father’s bed.

“P … poisoned me,” Lambert moaned from the bed. “The witch has—” The man rolled on his side, retching to no avail, but the room reeked of his previous success.

“How come you to be about at this hour?” Fully recovered, Ethlinda asked the question as though he were a visitor—unexpected but strangely welcome.

“Kill her, Son … and kill her bastard. They plan to rule my kingdom as heroes for turning away their own army posing as the Welsh.”

“Don’t be absurd, Lambert,” Ethlinda taunted. “This boy is a child of God now, a champion of justice … and justice is exactly what I give you for the murder of my son’s father.”

“What?”
Alric couldn’t believe his ears. Ricbert wasn’t the legitimate heir?

“Ricbert is the son of Elwid, the champion your father slew when he attacked my father’s burgh and offered peace by accepting my hand.” The queen glared at the weak, gasping man on the bed. “And I have waited nearly thirty years to see him avenged. How does it feel, Lambert, to know your enemy’s son will rule Galstead?”

Alric shook himself before Ethlinda’s evil aura trapped him like a helpless fly in a web of death. He started for her, one deliberate step at a time. There was no escaping his blade, unless she turned to smoke and vanished.

“If you die, Father, then die knowing you are avenged.”

“Alric!”

The flicker of brightness in Ethlinda’s onyx gaze alerted Alric of danger behind him ahead of his father’s gasp. Dropping low to a squat,
Alric heard the air slice over his head. The wind of the passing blade blew cool against his cheek. He sprang up, quick and hard, driving his scramasax into his assailant’s side, which was left unprotected by the momentum of the heavy long sword in his hands.

With a howl of agony Ricbert stumbled, legs twisted beneath him. Beyond them the sword of Gleannmara clattered to the stone floor. Ricbert stared at Alric with disbelief, and when his knees gave way, Alric instinctively tried to steady him. Ricbert’s weight rested on the hilt of Alric’s blade, which had entered just under the rib cage and upward, skewering all in its path.

“Mother!” The prince’s wail waned along with his strength as Alric wrestled him to the floor. “I’m slain.”

With no time to savor the moment, Alric withdrew his blade with a mighty pull. Ricbert screamed and curled on his side, no longer a threat, as Alric spun to face a very deadly one … the queen.

She was nowhere to be seen, as if she
had
turned to vapor and risen through the smoke hole in the roof over them.

His father lay clutching the hilt of the dagger she’d plunged into him. “Never felt … felt like he was mine.” Bile and blood trickled down the king’s thick beard. His breath was labored and pained.

Alric knelt by the royal bed. “I will track her down and give her the death she deserves.”

Lambert snorted, as if he saw humor in this most dire of circumstances. “I won.”

The blood that rose in his mouth choked him. Alric lifted him by his shoulders to a sitting position. Clearly Lambert was out of his senses.

“Don’t try to talk.” Alric wiped his father’s mouth tenderly, but the action felt awkward. To his recollection, the closest thing to affection Lambert had ever shown him was praise—a clap on the back at best. Life had forged a formidable wall of social and political taboo between them.

“Look at ’im …”

Struck by the pity he thought he heard in the king’s voice, Alric looked at where Ricbert wriggled toward the sword of Gleannmara.

“Not fit to carry a king’s sword,” Lambert disdained. He coughed, his grip tightening on Ethlinda’s dagger as though that alone held his spirit within his dying frame. Having seen more than one man spend his last breath with the removal of a fatal blade, Alric let the weapon stay where it was.

“He couldn’t swing it straight with both hands.”

Ricbert moaned, collapsing with the verbal stab the king thrust at him. Tears spilled as freely down his cheeks as the blood seeping through his fingers.

“You are my heir, Alric, always were … in my heart.”

Alric tightened his embrace, stumbling for a reply “That’s because of Mother.”

“Yes, derling, the best of us both.”

Derling? Alric tensed uneasily His father couldn’t be speaking to him. He’d never called anyone
derling
but Orlaith.

“I’ve done many—” Lambert coughed—“many wrong things, but our son …”

Alric followed the man’s gaze to the foot of the bed but saw no one.

“He was the key to my …
our
kingdom. Should have listened to you … should have—”

“Father—”

“Lemme finish.” Lambert rolled his eyes up at Alric, although the pupils were all but hidden beneath the sag of his eyelids. “Don’t be like me, Son. Love is … only kingdom worth living for.” A flash of alarm seized his features, and he tried to rise. “Your bride. Where is your bride? You have to save her. That witch will—”

“Deirdre is safe.”

“Then go to her, lad. Leave this cesspool on earth. Now!” Lambert’s breath became rapid with an infectious panic. Go! We’ve won. That witch brought your mother to me, but she’ll take Deirdre from you. Take up the sword and save your bride.”

Lambert’s arm was straight as an arrow now aimed at the door. He sat upright without the support of the pillows, as if he were about to chase Alric from the room.

Ricbert’s still outstretched hand lay no more than a finger’s curl
from the jeweled hilt of the Gleannmara sword—a finger’s curl and a lifetime. Alric knelt and picked it up. A bolt of energy surged up his arm. The black sea of anguish that tossed in his brain calmed, and Abina’s warning bobbed to the surface again, echoing as though she stood right at his ear and repeated it.

“Don’t let your taste for revenge keep you from your bride and birthright, Son.”

Wonderstruck, Alric turned back to the bed in time to see Lambert snatch Ethlinda’s twisted blade from his chest and smile. Alric had never seen such joy, certainly not on his father’s face. His eyes all but glowed, like stars catching the light of a full moon on a cloudless night. As though lowered by angels, Lambert, still smiling, eased back on the pillows, his last breath a long, contented sigh.

It spoke volumes, not to Alric’s ear, but to his heart. His father was with his beloved.

Now it was time for Alric to join his.

T
he fog blanketing Galstead proper had tinged the night with gray, where the scattered lamps and torches glowed as though looking through from another world. It swallowed sound like a thick carpet as Deirdre and her party made their way through the pitch-black tunnel down a seemingly bottomless incline in the globe of light from Abina’s lamp.

As long as it took, it should have put them out at Chesreton’s gate, Deirdre thought, when at long last they emerged at the bottom. At least the eerie mist wasn’t as smothering as before. The air they inhaled now held the promise of light. Restless, Cairell took up the watch, while Tor eyed him from the leash Abina clutched tightly in her arthritic hand. Deirdre helped the nurse to a seat on a flat rock as the old woman called upon heaven for angels to surround and deliver Alric safely away, if it be God’s will.

Deirdre could not consider the possibility that it was not. She turned away from the nurse with her own plea.
Father, You have brought us together. It can’t possibly be Your will that we part now. Surely You’d not use our hearts so unconscionably. Surely …

“You really love him.”

Realizing that she’d voiced her protest, Deirdre met her brother’s gaze. “With all my heart, Cairell. God has taught me … taught Alric
and
me,” she amended, “so much that we might make a good match in heaven’s eye, I will cherish Alric to my dying day.”

Cairell scoffed. “He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“Nay he’s a wolf in Christ’s light.” She would not let her brother’s words ruffle her.

“He’s a pirate, a thief—”

“He’s a warrior protecting his father’s shores—” the old nurse spoke up—“by seizing ships bound for Scotia Minor with arms and supplies to be used against his country And not the least different from the
Dalraidi vessels that ply the Northumbria coast with the same purpose.”

Cairell was clearly taken aback. “She speaks Irish?”

“I
am
of the Dalraidi,” Abina informed him, head high. “Captured along with my mistress, Princess Orlaith of the same.”

“Alric’s
mother
.” Deirdre smiled at her brother’s shock.

“My Alric was educated by the finest teachers the Irish have to offer and certainly learned better manners than you, young man … speaking before me in a language you presumed me to be ignorant of.”

The corners of Cairell’s mouth struggled between humor and consternation. “My apologies, milady.”

With a righteous sniff, Abina returned to her prayers.

“But it still doesn’t change the fact that he chose to fight with our enemies.” Obviously Cairell was still unconvinced of Alric’s worthiness.

“He fought with honor for what he believed in, just like you and your friends, Cairell.”

“With all due respect, miladies, neither of you have seen the handiwork of Northumbrian
honor.”
Cairell thumped his chest with his fist, taking his simmering rage upon himself. “I, and my less fortunate friends, have.”

His firsthand account of Ecfrith’s attack on Ireland’s coastal monasteries was enough to blanch Gleannmara’s green hills. Worse still was the plight of slaves taken. “Mostly children, Deirdre.” Cairell could not stem his disgust. “I and those who survived were taken because one of the children inadvertently called me Prince Cairell to warn me of an attacker at my back. Even so, there were four of us trying to form a fighting circle, and the devils never did figure which of us was the prince.”

“What was the name of this brigand who took you?” All Deirdre had was the letter from a Frisian trader, who’d demanded the church deliver the ransom.

Cairell shrugged. “’Twas a group. They spoke so fast, I couldn’t understand most of their babble.”