Sing Me Home (14 page)

The knowledge tingled a new awareness along her spine.

And then she looked back at him, and he was smiling at her, a soft strange smile, and her heart stumbled. She could smell him—clean and cold as if he’d bathed in the sea. She noticed the water dripping from his
culans,
the dampness of his hair against his neck and the water stain on the front of the horsehair shirt.

He reached out to tug one of her curls. “Tell me, Maura. What would a fine lass like you want with a penniless vagabond like me?”

Now there was a question she couldn’t answer. Truth be told, she hadn’t thought it all through. Her mind and heart had turned to Colin with as much impulsiveness as when she’d set out of Killeigh with the idea of finding her long-lost mother, with no more guidance than a scratched old ring. But while she searched those eyes of blue, she knew instinctively what she wanted. She felt it clear through to her bones. She wanted to dance with Colin again. She wanted to taste his kiss again. She wanted to journey to the land they’d visited last night—and go farther—without guilt and without regret.

He raised his eyebrows as if he heard her thoughts. “Is it marriage that you’re after, then?”

The back of her throat dried up and a new ache was born in her chest. Why should she be surprised he’d know such a thing, when she’d hardly grasped it herself? It wasn’t as if she’d fought in his embrace last night. Like every other maiden, she found herself looking upon his battered nose and his strong shoulders and dreaming of things she had no business dreaming of, wanting things she had no right to want.

“I want what any woman wants,” she whispered, wishing the fair would swallow her up. “I want to be an honest woman.”

“You want a name,” he said. “A name for a nameless foundling.”

“No.”

He raised his brows at her.

“I wasn’t dropped from the sky onto the convent steps.” Her throat was impossibly tight. These past weeks she’d done nothing but pinch farthings into thieves’ hands to get nothing but lies in return, and grow ever more ashamed of her former foolishness. “I have a name,” she persisted, “I just haven’t found it yet.”

He upped her chin in the palm of his hand. “And yet you stand before me willing to take a name you don’t even know.”

She knew that Colin wasn’t all that he seemed, that there lay some hurt within him, a powerful guilt or shame that made him put himself in the way of blacksmiths’ fists, that made him hungry for quick pleasures that never satisfied and thus must always be fed, a guilt or shame that made him mock high ranking men while hiding behind a mask and push the troupe hither and yon for reasons he did not disclose.

She still wanted his kiss.

Here I go again,
she thought.
Here I go, playing the wayward woman in the shadow of the church, succumbing to glamour.
But the thought passed like a breeze. Nothing mattered under the power of Colin’s touch, now that she understood the joy that could come of it.

“It’s the man I want,” she heard herself say. “Not necessarily the name.”

Colin’s expression shifted. Suddenly, he said, “Leave with me, Maura.”

She startled. “Leave?”

“Right now,” he said. “Right this moment.”

“But Arnaud—”

“—has run this troupe for decades, he can do well enough without us.”

He eased her back against the limestone of the cloth maker’s hut and then caught her mouth with his own. Water dripped from his hair and trailed between her breasts.

A sharp, sweet ache speared through her. His kiss was never enough, never enough, never enough.

Then, suddenly, they were racing through the crowd, through alleys where the sun beamed a streak of golden light between the thatched roofs. They danced across the center gutter, rounded a peddler’s stubborn donkey, and dodged a stray dog tearing at a captured hen near the poulterer’s shop. Her heart slammed against her ribs as he tugged her in his wake, his grip tight on her hand. The devil’s mask banged against his back, smiling and mocking her. She swept up her skirts to free her feet from their tangle, but she stumbled still, and fell straight into Colin’s waiting arms.

He laughed as he caught her—a strange, wild laugh that should have given her pause, because it brought to her mind a flash of a memory of him grinning through bloodied teeth as he faced a fighter—and maybe she would have paused if he hadn’t at that moment twisted her back into the shadows to make her senseless with more kisses.

She didn’t know how long they’d been kissing when a voice cut through the bustle of the fair.

“Colin?”

Colin ignored the deep, questioning voice, not even pausing to raise his face from her throat.

The voice again. “Brother?”

At that word, Maura blinked her eyes open. She saw, beyond Colin’s head, a beggar stepping out of the crowd. He wore a patched tunic and gripped a walking stick. A silvery scar trailed across his cheek, then disappeared under a headdress of rags that covered one eye. Tall but thin, the beggar stood with his mouth gaping, an alms bowl hanging from his neck.

“Brother,” the man repeated, raising a hand against the sun. “Brother, turn and look at me.”

Colin raised his head from her throat, fixing his unseeing gaze on something on the limestone wall behind her.

“Murtough.” Colin’s jaw went tight. “Then it was you that I saw begging back there at the church steps.”

“Ten years.” The beggar ventured a trembling smile beneath the rags—a madman’s twitching grin. “It’s a long time to make us all wait.”

Colin’s attention shifted to her face, his bright blue gaze becoming as brittle as the colored glass she’d seen in the cathedral at Athlone.

The beggar said, “You’re the only one left of us, Colin.”

“I know.”

Colin turned to face the beggar. Maura, breathless, came to realize that a hush had fallen along the street. The place had gone so quiet that she could hear the wind rustling in the thatch above her head. Though most of the English people flowing through the street couldn’t possibly understand the Irish language, many stopped at the sight of the beggar, holding out a trembling hand to the minstrel playing the wild man, as if what was happening before them was nothing but a play.

“You’ve finally come,” the beggar said, making the sign of the cross. “Finally, you’ll take your place as the true MacEgan.”

Chapter Eleven

“
S
hould I lower my head in obeisance when I see you now, King Colin?”

Colin stiffened at the sound of her voice, strained from the swift climb up the hillside just outside of Kilcolgan. He’d retreated to this high point not just to get away from her questions, but also so he could eyeball the stretch of countryside below, particularly the ribbon of road that led to the town of Shrule where his brother Murtough insisted they all travel—into the very land for which he would soon be spilling blood.

“So you want to pay obeisance?” he asked, forcing his voice light. “I admit, it’d be a fine sight to see you on your knees before me.”

He saw a spark in those eyes, but she didn’t bite back. Her clothing rustled as she settled herself upon the ground, an arm’s length away from where he sat, close enough that he knew she intended to stay awhile.

“So this is your lost kingdom then,” she said, waving a hand over the scene. “All these little English towns?”

He supposed she deserved an explanation. She’d been patient enough in the square, after he’d embraced his brother and then gathered the minstrels to bustle them out of town. They could no longer stay and risk the chance that someone had heard Murtough, in his reckless excitement, shout the MacEgan name.

“These were MacEgan lands once.” He gestured to the north. “Three days from here, between Lough Corrib and Lough Mask, lies Fahy, once the castle keep of the MacEgans.”

“Colin, the English have settled here so thickly even the wind has forgotten the sound of the Irish.”

He agreed, in part. In the genealogy it was said that the MacEgans had controlled all the lands bordered by Lough Mask and Lough Corrib to the west, to the rounded Slieve Aughty Mountains to the south, to the river Suck to the east, to the wild tribes of Clan Morris and the O’Conors to the north—more land than he could now see, though the June air shone with clarity. But in his grandfather’s father’s time, the English had attacked and seized these lands and raised the cluster of English towns that now controlled them. For three generations the MacEgans lived peacefully as subtenants of the English baron, a mockery of vassalage since they rarely paid tribute or gave homage. For generations, the MacEgans had lived side by side with the English and didn’t care a wit. To the Irish of the land, the MacEgans were still the chieftains.

But that was a big bite of a tale to swallow, even for this cloistered young woman who believed in the stuff of impossible dreams.

“All this time,” she said, grasping her knees, “you’ve been calling yourself King Colin, making a big jape of it all, and now I’m to believe that you’ve been mocking me with the truth?”

“Murtough has told you the whole tale, I’m sure.” At the base of the slope a fire flickered as daylight began to dim. From the height, Colin could see his brother’s walking stick gleaming as Murtough gesticulated with it, a bladder of ale swinging in his other hand.

“Your brother has told a tale, yes, but he may as well be reciting stories of Cú Chulainn or the Fenian men.”

“The old tales are the only riches any of the MacEgans have left.”

“So I’m to believe that the man I’ve seen juggling the breasts of sinful women—the man I’ve seen brawling with blacksmiths—is the mighty MacEgan?”

He flinched. Even Maura could see into his craven heart and know it not to be the stuff of legend.

“Your brother did tell me one thing that struck me as true,” she said, fixing him with that sharp hazel gaze. “He told me about a boy, a sixth son, who was sent off to a monastery at Emain Macha to learn to be the clan’s poet. A boy who came back in his fifteenth year with a bard’s skill.”

It had been Christmastide, he remembered it well. He’d had a head swirling with legends, eager to show off his skill on the harp, eager to show his father how fine a
filidh
he would be for the clan.

“Strange thing about this boy,” Maura continued. “He told a tale that year, a tale so moving that no MacEgan present has ever forgotten it.”

He’d worked for weeks on the composition of that poem, keeping pure to the ancient language of the poets—keeping it in perfect rhyme. The content had been just as rigid, just as ancient. It was a proud poem of bloodlines that stretched past to the kingship of all Connacht, a poem about the bright victories of the MacEgan ancestors, of the continuing honor of the clan’s birthright, of the clan’s God-given destiny.

Because he knew, above all things, that a
filidh
must stroke a patron’s feathers by vaunting their bloodlines.

“Colin.”

“Aye, that damn poem. I was showing off for my father, no more.”

“Murtough said it had an effect.”

“The English baron had just died,” he said, “leaving only daughters as heirs. So the question of who would control the lands that had once been MacEgan’s hung in the air. A change in power is always a dangerous time. And there I was, launching into that poem in a room full of young warriors—”

“You couldn’t have known what would happen, Colin.”

“Aye, I did know. It doesn’t take much to set MacEgan blood stirring.” He cocked a brow at her. “You know that well enough.”

She jerked to her feet, turning her face away from him. “That story you told at Tuam, the one that got you in so much trouble with O’Kelly.” She paced upon the bare stone, her leather shoes scraping across the rough surface. “That was your father’s story, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“If Murtough speaks true,” she said, “then the war your clan fought is over and lost.”

Aye, lost. Lost, lost, lost. According to Murtough, what was left of the MacEgans clung to a precarious existence in the Partry Mountains, west of Shrule, forced to live as best as they could under the leadership of his ailing—if not already dead—cousin, Brendan. There, if Murtough spoke true, they warmed themselves by the fires of old stories and whispered Colin’s name, waiting for his return.