The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (32 page)

And each time he looked into her face he would see his own life. From now until the day he died, glimpses of her would be stone picks hacking away at the remnants of the memories, until they, too, were nothing but rubble.

Rhys seized one of the bladders of mead off the table and headed past Dafydd toward the door. “Tell the bondsmen we’ve a hut to make.”

***

The afternoon sun sifted in through the doorway of Aileen’s new hut. Humming one of her brother’s harp–melodies, she worked through the small house, brushing a twig broom across the paving–stones. Beyond the walls, cows lowed on the hillside as they made their way back to be milked. She smiled, thinking she could distinguish her own cow’s lowing amid the herd.

Aileen paused in the doorway, half in the warmth of the July sunshine, half in the cool interior. The fresh thatch which hung over the door smelled of clover and sweet herbs she’d woven into it to keep away the fleas. Rich brown soil lay drying in the sun in the garden plot she’d only turned over this morning, and sprigs of precious herbs Father Adda had sent over to her fluttered nearby, waiting for their beds in the earth.

A fine hut, it was, overlooking a stretch of a cultivated field in the base of the valley, not far from the other huts which clung to the foot of the slope. Another woman tending her garden straightened and lifted a hand in greeting, and Aileen waved back while warmth spread through her heart.

She’d done right coming back here. When she’d woken up that afternoon on the cliffs of Inishmaan she felt as if she’d spent years asleep. It had all come to her so clearly. She had no place in her childhood home, not anymore. To stay in Inishmaan was to stay a child. To return to Wales was to face the consequences of her actions and to put the gift that rushed through her to good use again.

She would be a woman in her own right at last.

As for Rhys . . . She hugged the tip of the broom under her chin. He had never loved her, for all her imaginings. But she still loved him. She knew it the moment she’d set eyes upon him and felt the floor tilt beneath her feet. A faery had brought her to this place and to this man. She held no hope that this love she felt for him would ever fade, or that any other man could come into her life and move her heart as he did. She would have to take what joy she could and find some pleasure in the memory.

As if by thinking of him, she made him materialize, for there he rode, clear across the valley as if chased by demons. There was a body over the back of his steed. It didn’t take long for her to realize that Rhys was riding a straight line to her hut, and the boy behind him was little Owen, his head covered in blood.

She raced down the unpaved path and met them at the edge of the garden. “By the saints, what happened?”

“An accident at the castle.” Rhys swung down and caught Owen in his arms as the boy sagged off the saddle. “Hit by scaffolding.”

Aileen raced ahead to direct him to the pallet. There was only one in the hut now, but there would be a second, soon enough, when she got herself settled. No doubt many a night would be spent with someone ailing. She smoothed the hay with a blanket and rounded Rhys as he laid the boy down.

She fell to her knees at Owen’s side. The boy’s breath came shallow through cracked lips, and a pulse throbbed in his throat, but he did not wake to her gentle shaking. Blood matted his hair against his cheek. An ugly gash stretched just above his eye, and the skin around it swelled purple.

Rhys hovered behind her. He smelled of horse and leather, and his cloak brushed against her back with every pass of his pacing.

He asked, “Will he live?”

“You just set him before me.” She passed her fingers across the boy’s temple. “It’d help if you’d give him some room to breathe.”

He drew back and light flooded over the pallet.

She asked, “How long has he been unconscious?”

“Not long. He was alert when I put him on my horse. He slumped against me on the way over.” Rhys blocked out the light again. “Use your herbs, woman, make him come to.”

She seized her skirts and rose to her feet, finding him too close for comfort. He loomed over her and he smelled like man, all sweaty and strong and breathing hard from the long ride across the hills. She stumbled back, but her knees bumped against the edge of the pallet. His blue gaze flared over her. He made no effort to step away. The moment of awareness rang between them like the single string of a lyre plucked in silence.

She forced steel into her breathless voice. “How am I to help him if you won’t let me move about in my own house?”

He turned reluctantly to one side and then cast his gaze around the room. “This hut’s not fit for a cow.”

“It is fine enough for me.” She bustled to the waning fire, filling her lungs with the air that he’d stolen from them. “It’s no larger or smaller than any others built here.”

“You need more room,” he argued, waving his hand to the rafters hung with a few drying herbs, “for . . . things. Your plants. Whatever it is you use. What are you doing?”

“Setting a pot of water to boil.”

“See to the boy.”

“He’ll be needing some broth when he comes to, and a poultice for that wound after I see to the stitching—”

“Then do the stitching and I’ll set to that.”

He seized the heavy pot from her hands. He fiddled with the tripod until the pot hung over the weakening fire. She opened her bag and pulled out her precious silver needle. Three times, she tried to thread the thing while her gaze drifted to the hulk of a man hunkering by the fire. He stoked the flames and piled up the fuel until heat blossomed in the house, then grabbed a bucket. “I’ll get water.”

Banging the wooden–lathed bucket against his knees, he strode out of the house and headed to the trickle of a stream down the slope. Aileen took that moment to tug a fresh linen out of her bag and set to sewing the boy’s gash together before he came to. When she was done, she glanced over her shoulder but saw no one coming up the path. Rhys’s scorn of her powers still burned, mostly because she’d failed him in that. Well, she wasn’t going to furtively hide the fact that her healing worked on others, so she’d best get to it.

Later, Rhys strode in with the metal rings of the bucket clattering against his sword, cursing the distance and the ruts in the path that had made him splash mountain water all over his boots. After he poured the water into the cauldron, he fell into silence. She sensed his gaze upon her as she continued to pass her hands across Owen’s wound. The power now engulfed her, the drawing away of poisons, the mending of tissues, the slow easing of the swelling pressure, the current of light and warmth. The boy had taken a solid bump on his head, not enough to kill him, but enough to keep him abed till Lughnasa.

She drew her hands away. She could have been at the healing for a minute or an hour, she never could tell. The light in her hut had dimmed, but it only took her a moment to realize that something cast a shadow over her. Rhys stood close again.

He said, “He’ll live.”

She slipped by Rhys to tend to the pot of boiling water. “It was a hard knock he took, but he’s a strong young man. I’ll know better by evening.”

Rhys frowned down at the boy, who now rested peacefully. “He’s a foolish boy.”

“You said it was an accident.”

“An accident meant for my head—not his.” Rhys turned away and sank a shoulder against the doorjamb. “He saw the scaffolding give. He ran clear across the island to push me out of the way.”

Aileen twisted the wooden spoon in her hand.
Aye, loyalty is a hard thing for you to understand, isn’t it?

“What was he doing at the castle?” she asked. “I thought his duties were at the homestead.”

“He got it in his head to take up a trade rather than tend to hounds.” Rhys shrugged. “So I took him to meet the master–mason, thinking he could always use a pair of eager hands.”

“It was a brave thing he did, not a foolish one. Of the two of you, your head is the harder, though.”

“You’ve much to learn, woman, about how to speak to your lord and master.”

“We had no master upon my island. And I’ve never taken much to all that bowing and scraping. I’ve no doubt that wood was for your head. Mayhap to knock some sense into you.”

“It isn’t the first time there’s been danger upon that site.”

“Nay, and it won’t be the last, until you come to your senses and tear the whole thing down.”

“I’ll find the culprit first. The Englishman in our midst. Or the Welsh traitor.”

“I won’t wish you luck if you’re thinking of getting rid of the faeries.”

He was in such a mood this day, distracted by the wounding of the boy, all in a flux about something. There was no need for him to be hovering about. No doubt there were a hundred thousand things for the lord of the land to be doing right now, with a castle half–built and a household to run and enemies raiding cattle on the borders. She’d seen little of him this past month while she’d slept next to Marged waiting for the hut to be built.

Yet now he lingered.

“My mother told me a story,” she said, before he could scoff. “It got me to thinking about you and that castle in a way I’d not thought of it before.”

She swept a horn of mead off a peg and paced to the door to thrust the thing at him. He raised a brow at it. “Is the price of this mead a bunch of faery–stories?”

“Will you be insulting me by refusing my hospitality?”

He uncorked the flagon and eyed her over the rim as he took a deep and healthy swig. She returned to the center fire, pinching dried herbs into the water and then cutting up a pile of wild onions she’d collected on the hill. She told him the story as her Ma had told it to her, keeping her gaze on her work until she’d come to the end . . . only to look up and see him scowling, the empty flagon hanging from his hand.

“So, break down the castle and I’ll be cured, is that it?”

She tossed the wild onions into the pot of water. The water slopped over the rim and sizzled upon the flames. Why had she expected him to take her advice to heart? Why had she expected anything but scorn?

She said, “I don’t know why I bother with you.”

“It’s a question I’ve asked myself. Is your mother English, by the by?”

“Half–French and half–Irish. And she knows nothing of you and little of men’s wars. It’s a tale she heard a long time ago.”

“From a faery, no doubt.”

“He was a strange little man who used to work for my father. He had an odd sort of name. Otto or Oscar or Octavius or something.”

Rhys looked at her with wild eyes. With two strides and a snap of his cloak, he was gone, leaving nothing but the potent perfume of man, leather, and steel.

***

Dafydd urged his horse toward his brother as Rhys emerged from the edge of the woods.

“The boy Owen,” Dafydd asked, “how is he?”

“She says he’ll survive.”

Rhys scanned the castle walls. Scaffolding caged every stretch of stone. He watched the Irishmen and the Welshmen mixing mortar and transporting stones and hammering together fresh–cut wood for the scaffolding. He breathed in the scents of earth, of hay heating in the summer sun, of split oak.

How many years had he planned the construction of this castle? The number was lost on him now. He’d spent enough time warring in Southern Wales to have a chance to envy the English castles built there. There was strength, there was beauty, there was something solid and immortal—something impenetrable, a bulwark against a world full of enemies. With those castles, the English had conquered the south of Wales and had kept it. If the north of Wales was ever going to hold out against them it must build such castles of its own. So here was his, commissioned by Llywelyn, the Prince of Wales. Here was the stone and mortar of what he’d once dreamt of as a boy.

“We’ve rebuilt the scaffolding.” Dafydd eyed him strangely. “And we’ve checked the other wood for rot or looseness—”

“What of the north tower?”

Dafydd shrugged. “The master–mason thinks we can shore up the base with mortar, and thus stop the tilting.”

Damned silver–eyed wench. Glowing like some ethereal thing every time she laid her hands upon a wounded man. Looking like an angel hovering over the dead, bringing color back into a wounded man’s face with nothing but the brush of her fingers and something else. Some abiding, rock–strong faith in things unseen.

The words tore from Rhys’s throat. “Knock it down.”

“Rhys?”

“Knock the damned tower down. To the bones, Dafydd. Right to the foundation and get rid of that, too.”

And why not, Rhys thought. As it was, the tower would blow over with the first winter gale. Maybe if he knocked it down, he’d root out that wretched trickster—Octavius—that midsummer night’s visitor who Rhys was beginning to think stood at the root of all this trouble. Then he could start the construction over from the base and watch every moment of work. If nothing else, he’d have before the coming winter a tower that would rage up out of the ground straight and tall.

Proof to hold up to that red–haired wench that magic was a thing for the ignorant . . . and hope was dead.

Chapter Twenty