Maire Read online

  Maire hardly heard him as a woman emerged from the massive dwelling to join the men gathered about the tall warrior-priest. The crowd parted before the woman like water before the bow of a trim craft until she reached Rowan’s side. Too old to be the man’s wife, Maire guessed. This richly clothed woman was his mother or some other female relative, one who commanded his respect and affection. He answered her worried expression with a reassuring smile, his hand drawing her attention to the amulet he wore on his chest, which was bare now that he’d stripped off the robe in preparation for the combat. The amulet was an intricate design, a vision of gold symmetry enveloping strange lettering.

  “What manner of magic does he have in that, Brude?” Maire knew if anyone could fathom the power of the amulet or read its message, it was Gleannmara’s druid. Beyond his native tongue, he knew the secrets of ogham, the stick writing of those from far memory, and the languages of Greek and Latin.

  “It is a symbol of his god, nothing more. I’ve heard the Christian God espouses nothing but love for one’s enemy. It cannot be so harmful. Nothing will come of this day but good for all. I feel that even his God intends this.”

  With her death or his? Maire wondered as she stepped into the makeshift arena of packed soil, rid of grass and weed by the traffic of villa life. How could this be settled without the bloodshed Brude assured her would not happen? And how could anyone love his enemy? The spiritual world was one Maire left to the druids. Making what she could of this challenge was enough.

  Yet her puzzlement would not leave her. What would this man’s God have him do? Blow her a kiss before she took off his head?

  Maire watched warily as Emrys handed his weapons to a steward and approached her unarmed. Naught but a swath of cloth girded him now, freeing his powerful arms and legs for the fight.

  “Queen Maire, know before we start that I wish you no harm.”

  To her astonishment, he lifted her sword hand to his lips and brushed her knuckles, still wrapped tight about the hilt, with a kiss.

  “Nor I you,” she managed, heat washing over her at the onslaught of whistles and wolf calls, her own kinsmen’s among them. He surely made a mockery of her.

  “Tis a true shame you’ll lose that silver-tongued charm along with your head, Rowan ap Emrys.” She mimicked the Welsh p accent of their shared Gaelic tongue.

  “I promise I’ll do my best to keep both.” The man smiled as though he asked her to dance with him rather than do battle. His grin was like a cascade of pearls, white against a face lovingly bronzed by the sun, rather than tanned like old leather.

  Refusing to be thrown off balance by such calculated foreplay, Maire called over her shoulder to Brude as Rowan retreated to take up his arms.

  “Sing this swaggert a song, bard, that he’ll know the futility of his fight against the fearsome line of the Uí Niall. ’Twill sweeten the blow of his death for these good people.”

  Circling cautiously, sword ready, Maire hoped the gold amulet that rested in a smattering of dark hair against Rowan ap Emrys’s sweat-dampened chest was no more than adornment. It bore the symbol of a P superimposed over an X. This was flanked on either side by letters, the whole being encircled by a skillfully worked wreath.

  Adornment or nay, it served to distract her so that when the man launched his first attack, she narrowly fended it off. Spinning, she caught his returning blow, blades striking, sliding, and locking at the hilts.

  “It’s a Chi-Rho,” Rowan explained, his voice as tense as the muscles that held the weapons suspended between them. “A symbol of our faith in the God who will decide the outcome of this test.”

  Struggling to hold her own, Maire’s face was all but pressed against it now. She cowed down as if swaying beneath his strength and then shot up, pushing him away and dancing out of the range of his blade.

  “I will accept the favor of any god,” she conceded. “Yours included.”

  There was a gash above the amulet now, which Maire had managed with the dagger in her left hand as she shoved away from him. Her nostrils were white from breathing clouds of dislodged lime beaten from her shield, which now lay discarded at the edge of the crowd. There was no room for defensive armor in this fight. She needed deadly weapons in each hand against the considerable strength and skill of her opponent.

  The sun, what there’d been of it that day, had reached its pinnacle at the start of the contest. Now it dove like a phoenix of fire in the shadowed sea behind the western hills to the clashing cadence of weapons. Darkness was all but upon them and still Maire had gained little more against her opponent than a few scratches. Rowan ap Emrys had scars on his body bigger than the wounds she’d inflicted, and her strength was wearing down. Time and again, the God of the amulet managed to turn her opponent’s flesh to air before her quickest thrust.

  Not that the forces conjured by Brude’s song had not done the same for her. Twice she’d felt the wind of Rowan’s sword as it narrowly missed her neck, once nicking the adorning gold of her protective collar. Her breastplate bore evidence of a steely slice that would have cut her in half had more than the tip of his weapon grazed her. Her agility and speed were all that saved her, allowing her to dodge his powerful blows better than block them. No, it was not Brude’s gods Maire doubted now, but herself. Her strength was fading like the sun.

  The druid might sing of her ancestors’ skill and courage till his voice gave out. Her clan might chant her name to the heavens in encouragement, but Maire knew her burning limbs were becoming dangerously slow. Her return blows weakened in succession. If she could get close enough to lock swords, just one more time, there was a chance she might slip the thin dagger from its hidden haven between her breasts and plunge it upward into his chest, where Rowan’s erratic expansion of breath and sinew tapered to a lightly furred valley. There, perspiration from the chase she gave ran in rivulets through the clinging dust stirred by their fierce dance of death.

  She could not be the only one who was tired, Maire thought in an effort to thwart despair. Their lively banter, which had entertained the onlookers as much as the fight itself, had now dwindled down to breathless exchanges between them. Many of which were unfinished. Her adversary’s dark hair curled wet about his neck and face—a face mottled with the blood rush of possible triumph.

  With a telling grimace, the Welshman came at her as she circled him seeking her chance for offense. Her arms afire with the effort to parry his sudden thrust, Maire spun about with the momentum of her sword to dance to the other side of the arena before he caught her on the back swing. Her legs were willing, despite the aching protest of her muscles, but something went wrong.

  The blade of Rowan’s sword struck her buttocks hard enough, had not it landed broadside, to cleave them to the bone. Maire went to her knees with the blow, the coarse dirt tearing at her flesh with stinging fingers. She caught herself with her left hand and rolled away, leaving the dagger she had wielded behind. She would need a hand free to loose the stinger anyway. Let him think she’d lost another weapon and was reduced to her sword alone.

  “Will you concede, Maire? Unlike your desire to take my head, I’ve no desire to take yours.”

  “Our queen has used but half her tricks,” Declan boasted behind her. “She toys with you, Welshman.”

  Her foster brother’s dying breath would be one of rebellion to its god. He refused to see the obvious as his still clansmen had. Only Brude continued to sing her on to glory, caught up in the poetry of the past. It was all he had to lean on in his advanced years, and all that was left for her in her last hour.

  By the gods who had set her mother on glory’s path, she had used all her well-tutored tactics… all but one. Maire gasped for air, her lungs screaming with the effort even as she did so. The last blow had inflicted as much a wound on her pride as her bruised buttocks.

  “Give it up, little queen. Surrender your sword and return with your tribe to your home.”

  “Never!” she managed through clenched teeth. The tas
te of surrender was too vile to consider.

  “I’ll not kill you, Maire.”

  “Then you’ll die yourself.”

  Raising her sword, she lunged at Rowan. His defensive parry felt as though it shattered the bones in her arm. But for a miracle of magic summoned by Brude’s poetry, she’d have lost the weapon altogether as she staggered past her opponent. The magic might last, but the flesh was failing.

  Maire could not help herself. She leaned on her weapon and tried to catch her wind at the far edge of the circle of onlookers. The yard was now aglow with the light of torches, which infected each ragged breath she took with the unsavory taste of pitch. As Rowan warily approached her, she wondered if she could even raise the blade. The cheers of his people drowned out the thunder of blood rushing past her ears, but the contrary quiet of her clansmen was louder.

  Odd, how she’d been prepared for death when she stepped on this foreign soil. They’d have sung about her glorious passing in battle around fires long after she was no more than dust in Gleannmara’s hills. Now her plans were reduced to this! If she failed her people, they would go back empty-handed, back to Morlach’s harsh dominion. She’d hoped at least to fill their coffers with plunder enough to replenish the pastures with cattle. Instead, the bards would preserve this disgrace for eternity. She’d sullied her mother’s memory, disappointed her clan.

  “Was the mighty Maeve downhearted? Tho’ she be too weary to raise her head to see the brutal attack of her enemy, she fell back beyond the sweep of his weapon and met his body with a deadly thrust of her sword. All around, her minions roared…”

  Maire’s battered thoughts became one with the familiar words of Brude’s song. It took her away to a hall filled with boisterous warriors reveling in her mother’s triumphs. Pride nearly bursting from her chest, she was again the young girl watching from the balcony reserved for the women, picturing herself in Maeve’s place, fighting valiantly to the finish. Then it would be her they hoisted on their shoulders and drank to, not her mother.

  “There must be a way to settle this without separating your head from that comely body.”

  Emrys’s voice shattered Maire’s short retreat, bringing her back to the grim presence. Although he offered words of reconciliation, his raised sword belied them. Exhausted and nearly blind from the smoking pitch of the torches, Maire fell back as her glorified mother had once done, escaping the deadly whistling path of his weapon. Summoning all her strength, she thrust her blade upward as the man charged over her and felt the engagement of flesh. Twist as he might, he could not avoid the hungry bite of her steel.

  A scraping of metal collapsing against metal registered as his full weight dropped upon her. Stunned by the breath-robbing assault, Maire struggled to gather her senses beneath the felled man. Something was wrong. She felt the warm flow of his wound seeping beneath the armor at her waist as only blood can crawl, yet her sword lay sandwiched between them, instead of protruding from his back. Somehow its blade had been deflected. There was no room to move, much less use the weapon, pinned as she was by his weight.

  Was she to die and leave her people to Morlach’s dominion after they’d rallied so bravely to her side? Stubbornly, Maire blinked away the acetic glaze spawned by her dismay to meet the gaze of her soon-to-be murderer. At any moment, she’d feel the death crush of his fingers about her neck, and, Maeve help her, she had no strength left to resist.

  “I’ll surrender my sword, little queen, if you give up the notion of taking my head as trophy.”

  What? There was not enough breath left for Maire to ask for confirmation of what her ears reported. Surely, he’d not offered his sword to her in surrender when victory was firmly in his grasp! What means of cruel trickery was this?

  “I’ll go myself as your hostage to prove my word true. My sword will be yours as long as you fight for what is right under my God’s eye.” His breath was hot against her ear, as ragged as her own. Gradually she felt his body relax over hers, further betraying his weariness.

  Maire’s eyes widened as Brude’s earlier words came back to her: “There will be no bloodshed.” The druid had indicated this contest would be the answer to all her problems. It would seem the gods were giving the day to her despite her failure.

  “You’ll swear loyalty to Gleannmara?” she whispered, still in disbelief. His sword would be an asset to the tuath, especially if she were to battle Morlach for it, which she’d do or die trying.

  “And to its queen, so long as she asks me to do nothing against my God’s will.”

  If his God hated evil, He would see Morlach put in his place, Maire reasoned, as a strange calm enveloped her. She would need the help of all the gods she could muster.

  “And so Maeve took the prince of her hostages to marry as her choice, rather than accept that of the men of Erin for her…”

  That man had been Maire’s father, Rhian, and the union was a happy one from what she recalled from her short childhood. He’d been at Maeve’s side to avenge her death before falling himself. It was all commemorated in beautiful song, their union of love in life and death. It was the kind of ballad that made a red-blooded Celt’s heart sing tender beneath his formidable armor of muscle and fierce spirit. Even now, wild roses grew amid the hawthorn about their place of rest, forever entwined.

  “As my husband?” The question slipped out even as Maire considered the bizarre possibility. This man had already demonstrated himself to be honorable, if in a somewhat fey manner.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it before? If she married another, Morlach would have no grounds to press her further in the king’s eye. Pursuit of her land would be nothing short of outright aggression and in direct opposition to the king’s promise of protection to Maire’s mother.

  “Aye, as hostage and husband,” she decided, seeing this also as a way to ensure the payment of tribute by joining their tuatha. Not that Emrys looked capable of producing a decent fighting force.

  Rowan’s surprised laugh shook her from her ingenious burst of thought.

  “By all that’s holy, you ask too much! Why would I take to wife such a painted vixen with sword as sharp as her tongue?”

  Again he mocked her. Humiliation boiled in Maire’s blood, fortifying her waning strength. She snaked her fingers between their bodies and around the hilt of her secret weapon. In his sudden swell of confidence, the man had relaxed his guard. All she had to do was keep him that way until the blade was free.

  “You’ve admitted yourself that I’m comely enough and—” Maire moistened her lips and silently cursed at the battle grit clinging to them. Coquettishness was not her strength, but she’d seen other women use that ploy to snag the attention of a strapping warrior. No matter how she longed to, even she knew that now was not the time to spit. She swallowed the grime as best she could. “I cannot say in truth that I do not find your person worthy of this queen.”

  Though she had briefly admired the Welshman’s fine physique when he’d stripped off his clerical robe for the fight, she couldn’t bring herself to return his earlier compliment. The wrap of cloth about his hips was not unlike what her male kinsmen wore outside of battle, although his was shorter to allow greater mobility. Thankfully, it was more modest combat attire than the Scotti preferred. It annoyed Maire that the mere thought of a more intimate glimpse of her opponent deepened the battle flush of her cheeks with embarrassment.

  Regardless of what she thought of him as a man, Maire now had his full attention. She wriggled beneath him, a provocative smile curling on her lips. From the corner of her eye she saw Eochan block Declan, whose fist was tight about the hilt of his sword. If her brother broke the terms of the contest, shame alone would emerge the victor.

  The long, thin blade of her stinger came loose and her oppressor was none the wiser. What he mistook as an intended embrace became, with a practiced flash of metal in the torchlight, her triumph.

  “We marry in name only, of course.” More color claimed her face. If more was to come of th
e marriage, as it had in her mother’s… well, that remained to be seen.

  She pressed the razor-sharp blade against Rowan’s skin, where a vein swelled with the flow of his life spirit. His wince was barely perceptible, but it told he’d felt a taste of the stinger’s deadly potential.

  “May I ask why this sudden proposal?” He grated the words out, careful not to strain against the knife in his evident battle between hostility and bewilderment.

  The crowd closed in no more than a body’s length from them in hopes of hearing the negotiations whispered for each other’s ears only.

  “I need a husband to be rid of a troublesome suitor. You need your head.”

  Rowan clearly didn’t care for either rationale. Had there been real steel to his cutting gaze, her eyes would be gouged out by now.

  “Then I don’t see where I have much choice.”

  “I’d have your word in your god’s name,” Maire added, somewhat offended by his decidedly reluctant concession. After all, it was he who’d admitted aloud she was comely.

  “You have my word in the name of God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, that I will take you as my wife.”

  Maire shook her head. “That I will take you as my husband,” she corrected, gaining satisfaction at his deepening scowl. Here was a man unaccustomed to a woman’s dominion. He’d get used to it, being married to a queen.

  “However you wish to put it, milady.”

  “Then give me your sword… carefully.” She kept the stinger pressed against him as he reached over her head to retrieve the weapon he’d dropped to break his fall. “Place it in my other hand.”

  Her fingers closed about the hilt of Rowan’s sword. It was still warm from his grasp. A surge of nearly lost triumph welled in her chest as if to explode like heaven’s own thunder. Praise her mother’s gods, she’d won!

  “You may get off me now, sir.”

  “Aye, for now.”

  Maire allowed the taunt to glance off harmlessly, unanswered. It was her moment. It was Gleannmara’s day. The bards would sing of this in centuries to come, after all. She was just gone eighteen. She’d beaten a seasoned warrior in battle. She won Gleannmara a tribute fit for a king. Further, she found the answer to Morlach’s threat and secured the tribute with the same blow, taking Rowan ap Emrys as husband and hostage. Brude had been right all along.