The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) (24 page)

As they passed the ivy–covered rise of an old standing stone, Aileen realized that their worlds were not so different. Today she could almost sense the rustle of faery–life in the crystalline snow. A wind sifted its way through the tree–trunks, musical in its whispering, though no leaves remained upon the trees to rustle or hum. She closed her eyes. Was that faery music she heard upon the wind? She must be imagining things, surely. She’d been too long away from Inishmaan. Only once before had she sensed the
Sídh
at all, and then only for a moment during battle.

She blinked her eyes open. Rhys rode through the woods as if nothing had changed. It was her imagination, for if it were anything other than a trick of her heart, surely even Rhys could sense the vibrancy of the air around them. As she watched, he swatted something away from his ear.

She laughed aloud. No flies sang through this crisp winter air, no birds whistled down from these branches. He glanced over his shoulder at the sound of her voice and something in her expression made him rein in the horse.

“What are you doing stopping like that?” She dared to nudge her mare ahead of his horse. “Do you want the faery–folk to start pelting you?”

“Not you, now.”

Snow sifted down from a branch set shaking by some airless wind. It blew into his hood to melt upon his mask.

“Come.” She grinned at him as he brushed away the snow, then she kicked her mare forward. “There will be more mischief than that if we linger.”

Her horse’s hooves crunched on the narrow path. She bent low over her mare’s neck and dared to kick the horse into a faster gallop. Ahead, the trees thinned. Her horse shot out into the cleared land littered with tree–stumps.

And it was as if she’d slammed into a wall. Aileen jerked back and yanked so hard upon the reins that the mare whinnied and reared up on her hind legs. Shock and a tight grip kept her upon the saddle, but the mare struggled and shook the reins loose just as Rhys caught up to her and seized them from Aileen’s hands. He spoke softly to his mount as the mare stamped and pranced, and he struggled to get her settled.

Aileen clung to the horse’s back while her mind reeled. She sucked in air and tried to shake the throbbing in her forehead, for as sure as she was living and breathing she felt she’d slammed into stone. Around her lay nothing but oaks cut to the quick, their moist hearts exposed to the snow and sky.

And silence. Deathly silence. The dead silence of the most frozen of winters, the coldness of the grave.

“What are you doing?” Rhys nudged his horse closer. His black brows thundered over his eyes. “Aileen.”

The pall stole her voice from her. She twisted on her saddle to look back upon the forest, searching for the lost music, the sweet playfulness she’d sensed only moments ago beneath the boughs of the trees. Now a silent screaming sounded in her ears. It rose from the ground beneath her. It was like the screaming she sensed in her fingers when she placed them upon mutilated flesh, but this she sensed with more than her hands. She sensed it with every inch of flesh and bone and muscle, and the screaming seemed to come from all around her—from the open hearts of the trees, from the ground frozen over, and mostly, mostly, from the mound of the island in the midst of the river.

“Aileen.”

She heard his voice from a faraway place. She could see the island better now. The walls of the castle shot as high as a man’s shoulder, and they dug deep into the soft earth. She nudged the mare with her knees, but the horse only bucked, setting Rhys to cursing and holding firm to the reins. Such an island as this, Aileen thought, was far too round, far too evenly made for God’s hand.

Then she saw something that set cold teeth sinking into the back of her neck.

She seized the reins from Rhys and dug her heels into the mare’s flanks. She crushed a path through the snow to the banks of the river. In the mud lay a series of long stones, marked in black with the lines and crosses of an ancient language. They lay in pockets of melted snow, as if too hot for any ice to harden upon them. She nudged the mare along the banks of the stream, counting the standing stones which had been pulled out of the ground and laid aside for later building, shaking, shaking as she had last autumn as she’d stepped over the bloodied bodies of Rhys’s wounded men.

Suddenly Rhys loomed before her. Again he seized the reins from her trembling grip. “Off that horse, woman.”

He dismounted and seized her by the waist, then dragged her forcibly off the back of the mare. She clutched his arms and stared up into his face, searching those eyes for any hope of understanding, seeing only a thundering confusion, an angry concern.

“By Christ, woman, you’re as pale as ashes.”

Couldn’t he hear the screams? No man could be so deaf, so blind to the world around him. No man could commit such blasphemy.

“Speak to me.” His fingers dug into her arms. “What ails you?”

“You can’t . . .”

The words croaked out of her throat. She licked her lips, gasping for breath like a woman in labor.

“You can’t,” she continued, wincing at the shudders of pain rising up from the ground. She swallowed and glared at the black stones around them, at the scaffolding for the castle. “You can’t. . . .”

“I can’t what?”

“Rhys . . . you can’t build this castle.”

Chapter Fourteen

R
hys tightened his grip on her arms. Her lips pulsed blue. She stared at the island as if it were some river–dragon roaring into life.

He shook her. “Enough.”

Anger mounted in him along with something else, a fear he didn’t want to acknowledge. Moments ago she’d been laughing, sitting upon that mare swathed in fur, looking like a noblewoman and laughing like a peasant. Now a sheen of moisture frosted her skin and she was trembling. A chill washed through his blood. He’d seen old men and children die of sudden fevers. He’d lost his own mother to one in the midst of Lent, fifteen years ago.

She couldn’t become sick. She was the healer. There would be no one to heal her if she took ill, no one to seek the right herbs or tell Marged how to brew them. He’d have to send to Myddfai for a doctor, a delay that could stretch into days, days when death could steal her breath away while he stood over her and watched.

“Enough.”

She struggled to focus her wild gaze upon him. She curled his woolen cloak in her fists. “Can’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The screaming.”

Around them the day lay silent and cold but for a crack, now and again, of an icicle snapping and spearing into the snow. “I hear nothing but your raving.”

“Even the horses can sense it.” Her mare skittered. “Even your own palfrey.”

“They can smell your fear.”

“They can sense the pain.”

“Are you hurt?”

He probed her body for injury. She could have pulled something. She could have broken a finger in the reins when he’d pulled her horse to a sudden stop.

“Not me,” she said, “the earth. The world.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“There were standing stones on that island.”

“A dozen of them.” Covered with ivy and arranged in a circle outside a ring of oaks. He remembered the trouble he’d had finding men willing to pull them up from the earth, so many of his own full of mindless fears, so many of the Irish workers, too. “And a dolmen in the center. It took fifteen men to pull off the capstone.”

“You broke down a—”

“I broke it down and used the stones in the foundation of the castle. They are there now, mortared in.”

She recoiled from him and bumped into her mare. “What were you thinking, tearing such a thing down?”

“They were made of good rock. I put them to better use than standing forgotten under a coat of ivy.”

“Forgotten?!”

“Forgotten. Abandoned. The work of a people long dead and gone.”

“And their sacred place had no more sanctity?”

“Not for anyone living and breathing.” He yanked his hood off his head. “Come, Aileen. Aren’t you too practical to take to petty superstitions?”

“Then I’m not the first to tell you.”

“And not the last. Such nonsense spreads like disease.” He swung his arm toward the island in the midst of the river. “What do you see? A faery circle? Inhabited by little people who dance under the moon every night until dawn?”

“You scorn what you don’t understand.”

“I scorn the workings of idle minds.” He seized her shoulders and turned her to face the island. “Look at it.
Look!
It’s an island, a mound of dirt in the midst of a river. No more, no less.”

She jerked her shoulders out from under his grip. “Those people you spoke of—the ones who built such a thing—saw much more than that.”

“They saw just what I see.” Here was a sheltered valley. A river which ran in from the east and out to the west, navigable on both sides, a path into and out of the heart of North Wales. A perfect place for a castle strong enough to hold off the world. “A good meeting place. Easy to travel to. A sheltered island. Five years of work and you’d have me tear it down on a whim.”

“I want you to put back together what you’ve torn asunder,” she argued. “I want you to rip those sacred stones from the mortar and place them upright in their holes. I want you to remove the weight of those rocks from that island.”

“You want me to build a home for rats and rabbits and abandon the Prince of Wales’s commission.” He managed to tilt his lips up in a scornful smile. “Or would you have me build it for the faeries?”

“It’s a sacred place,” she whispered. “It’s full of magic.”

“Magic is for fools.” Magic was wild, unreasonable hope. For all the magic that the doctors and charlatans of England could muster, none had managed to cure him. “You have spent too much time listening to Marged’s stories.”

What had he expected? She was a woman sharing his bed, yes, and the first for years to do so willingly, but beneath that fine fur still beat a frightened peasant’s heart. She was more skilled at milking cows and fishing and sowing the earth, and more susceptible to a mother’s wild stories told by the hearth–fire. The true mystery of it all was why he cared. Inviting her here had been just another impetuous gesture, like playing a harp, like opening that chest of silks and furs. He was full of such foolishness these days. What would a woman know of the thrill of watching a building rising under his direction, faith, under the very palms of his hands? What would this woman know of the beauty of stone and mortar, of the power of creation?

The sounds of horses’ hooves cracked the silence between them. Dafydd and the bard headed across the field. Dafydd reached them first and pulled his horse to a halt, his brow creased in worry. “What’s wrong?”

“Dafydd. Dafydd.” She skirted a stone and raced to him, then clutched the harness of his horse. “You must hear it. You must.”

“Hear what?”

“The screaming,” Rhys interrupted, raising a brow.

Wind whistled over the plain, clattering ice crystals along the sheen of frozen snow. The river gurgled beneath a veneer of ice thinner and clearer than any glass made by man. Tudur Aled watched the scene with a wry smile curving his lips, the embroidery of his tunic bright against the winter snow.

Dafydd wrapped the reins around his handless wrist, and then leaned down to lay his hand on Aileen’s shoulder.

“Aileen, lass,”—Dafydd dug his fingers into the fur of her cloak—”this place has a way of playing tricks on a person’s mind.”

“You
do
hear it!”

“Aileen—”

“You do. I can see it in your eyes.” She jabbed a finger toward Rhys. “Tell him he mustn’t build this castle. Tell him he must put it all to rights.”

Dafydd said, “Sometimes, there are more important things than—”

“Don’t you say that,” she said, “you know better.”

Go ahead, brother. Tell me what you’ve told me every spring for the past five years, that the place is cursed and our efforts are futile. Tell me to put an end to it. Condemn me to sit in that mountain homestead and brood in exile for a lifetime. Such talk will only make me more determined to see this castle done, see it rise upon that island, sturdy and strong, with me in it as its master.