Chapter Eleven

“Should 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.

Maura said, “You’ve got four brothers dead, another blinded in one eye, and the MacEgans pushed to the edge of the world. Did you think, by coming here, you could set that all to rights?”

Colin’s smile dimmed. A bird swept low over them, screeching in warning. “I am the only son who isn’t dead or maimed—”

“And thus smart enough to know better than to fight lost causes.”

“How rich it is that you talk of lost causes, with that ring of yours, and your wild hopes of finding your family.”

“I don’t have to spill blood for what I seek.” She clutched the hand that bore the ring. “But who do you plan to kill? Your brother spat on the names of a long list of men. Are you to kill the O’Shaughnessy’s and the O’Heynes? Or are you going straight to the English baron who controls these lands—Lord William Caddell?”

William Caddell.

Colin’s nostrils flared. He remembered the wash of Galway Bay upon the shore. He remembered the sight of the tattered army around him, the remnants of his defeated clan. He remembered standing there, barely twenty years of age, thinking of the three brothers who had died in the wars, the father hastily buried by the side of that pond, the fourth brother lying upon a makeshift litter in the purple of twilight upon the coast of Connemara, his face soon to be a death mask—thinking of all the waste, all the battle, all the grief. He remembered, too, the sound of horses coming from the woods behind him, the sound of swords scraping unsheathed as his warriors prepared to die. But the horsemen who crashed upon their hiding place were his own men, carrying Murtough—blinded in one eye by the sword of William Caddell—blinded yet spitting a hundred thousand curses upon William the Black, just as Colin’s father had done, not two days before, as he died beside that lake.

And all the men had turned to him with vengeance in their eyes, as if a twenty-year-old poet could be the warrior MacEgan.

“Colin,” she whispered, drawing him back to the height of the hill, the June breeze that didn’t smell of blood. “If everything Murtough is babbling is true, then there must be a price on your head.”

“Wasn’t it you who said the devil would stretch the rope to the ground, if I ever found myself hanging?”

“Don’t use my words against me.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “What are you going to do if you get yourself caught?”

“Die. It’s how the legends usually end anyway. And the wars.”

She gripped his sleeve. She shifted so she was on her knees before him. “You can’t do this, Colin. Not you,” she whispered, tugging at the wool of his tunic, “not the man with the enchanted heart.”

Something moved inside him as he looked down at her lovely, fair face with its winged brows and the freckles on her temples—a strange sliding of heart and mind, a dangerous sense of doubt and reckless hope. He wondered, in the days to come, whether he would ever see such gentleness in anyone’s eyes again.

“You wanted to escape before Murtough found you,” she whispered, in that husky songstress’s voice. “There’s a whole world out there, free of the past, free of what cannot be changed. Let’s run away, like we planned.”

For one moment, he traced her jaw with his thumb and let himself imagine traveling with her through rolling green hills, sleeping among the cows and waking with them lowing on the warm hillside. He imagined the bubble of a kettle over a fire, while they slept upon a pallet of fresh hay. He imagined picking the straw from her hair every night after kissing her cheeks pink. He imagined waking up to the first rays of the sun with her warmth curled in his arms, with nothing but their bodies and a thin blanket holding back the chill. He imagined swimming in a hundred different rivers, building a new home every night by the side of the road. He imagined shedding his name, disappearing into the world, drowning in this woman’s arms.

In some ways, he’d lived that life already—at least a darker, meaner shadow of it. But for all that he pretended he enjoyed the oblivion found in ale and willing women’s arms, his obligations had eaten away at him. He could not ignore the family that called to him anymore, and still call himself a man.

He caught the edge of her lip with his thumb. “Go back to the camp, Maura.”

“Colin—”

“I must do what I promised my father. I intend to put an arrow through William Caddell’s heart.”