Chapter Fifteen

Colin urged his mount up yet another slope in the foothills of the Partry Mountains. Rain splattered from the trees, soaking his six-colored cloak, now glued to his horse’s flanks. He backhanded a rivulet off his chin and urged his mount around the crackle of gorse that choked the old trail.

Something hissed by his cheek and then thunked into an oak nearby. To his right, the shaft of an arrow quivered.

A voice sifted from the sky. “Who comes into MacEgan lands?”

He recognized the lilt of the Connemara dialect as easily as he’d once recognized musical scales by the ringing of pitched chimes.

“I am Colin.” He sensed more than one pair of eyes upon him, more than one bow drawn against him. “Son of Fergus MacEgan.”

Colin’s tongue rolled around the surname as it would roll around a bone found within the meat of a fish. It had been ten years since he’d called himself by it, and longer than that since he’d considered himself worthy of it.

A man dropped out of a tree and landed flat-footed upon the trail. Beneath a tunic of deerskin, knotted sinew held the warrior’s hose to his legs. The warrior strode closer, assessing him with narrowed eyes. Colin didn’t recognize Aedh the blacksmith, not at first. All that remained of the once burly vassal was a tunic that caved in around his belly and cheeks that had sunk deep into his skull. But the drooping mustache was the same, as russet as autumn leaves.

“Unless Fergus himself has risen from the grave,” Aedh said, lowering his bow, “then it’s Colin for sure.”

Men dropped from the trees like ripe apples in September, men in ragged dress with wood-handled knives strapped to their waists. He saw among them familiar, older faces—scarred, the skin tight to the bone, all with eyes full of a strange brightness.

Aedh said, “Your brother Murtough returned yesterday and told us he’d found you alive in Kilcolgan.”

“I sent him ahead.”

“Brendan, your cousin, holds the rod of the clan now.”

Colin tried to hide his surprise. He’d been led to believe, by the Connacht exile he’d stumbled across in London, that Brendan was all but dead.

That was months ago.

“Aye, Brendan lives still.” The blacksmith curled his fist into the bridle of Colin’s horse. “I’ll lead you to him.”

Colin tugged on the reins. “I know the way.”

“Not anymore you don’t. We’ve more than one trap set for the likes of the English along this path, should they dare to show their faces here. We move from mountain to mountain with the change in seasons, and watch the paths well.”

Like rabbits beneath the sight of a fox.

Colin allowed Aedh to lead him down a tight path, wide enough for only one horse at a time. They hugged the edge of the woods, keeping quick in the shadows, though nothing disturbed this rain-drenched world but the leap of a roe deer. They sifted their way through the narrow pass that led up to the old MacEgan stronghold, but rather than head toward it, they took a sharp turn to the east, up a rocky ledge, through a pasture speckled with bow-backed cattle, to a clearing beneath a blue haze of smoke.

The makeshift homestead consisted of no more than a shallow trench surrounding a cluster of wattle buildings. As they came closer, Colin noticed men clattering dice against a stump. Women bickered over an open fire and half-naked children chased a stray dog around a tree. Colin heard the ripple of his name across the land, a strange murmuring—cullin, cullin, cullin, cullin.

He was used to drawing attention whenever entering a settlement. But during his time as a minstrel, it was laughter and joy and applause that had greeted him, not this quivering expectancy. Not the sight of women clasping their hands against their chests, or children reaching out to brush their fingertips across the hem of his cloak. Not the sight of warriors rising from their duties, their faces blanching as if he were a ghost.

In their gaze he saw the look they had given to his father Fergus all those years ago, when Fergus bright in his new-forged chain mail, Fergus with the bloodlust of righteousness in his eye, had set out to take back for the MacEgans what had been seized from them.

He wanted to shout for them to stop.

Men stood sentinel at the door of the mead hall. The door swung open as Colin approached. Brendan MacEgan stumbled out on the arm of another warrior, his king’s cloak of many colors wrapped around chain mail. At the sight of his cousin, Colin bit down on the urge to hiss his breath through his teeth. Brendan was Fergus’s brother’s oldest son, older than Colin by less than fifteen years. Colin remembered him as a man quick of thought, strong of opinion, and unstoppable in battle. Now his cousin stood in the doorway little more than hardened flesh upon bones. Only his black eyes showed life, fierce beneath half-drooping lids.

“Colin.” Brendan spoke the name in a gravelly voice. “We thought you dead.”

“Aye.” Seizing the horse’s mane, Colin swung himself off the beast’s back and stood before his cousin. “But you sent me off so that I might live.”

A silence settled over the clearing, a tense, watchful silence, and Colin knew the source of it. More than one cousin or brother or uncle had killed his own kin for the sake of seizing power. Looking at this proud but wasted warrior, Colin suddenly understood why Aedh had spoken of Brendan’s recovery with such weariness. These men anticipated a change of leadership—hoped for it—for as Colin stood in their midst, they did not grip their sword hilts to protect the man they now called The MacEgan.

Brendan shuffled a foot. Grasping the shoulder of his guardsman, he started to bend a knee. Colin stepped forward and seized him before his cousin could sully his hose upon the wet ground.

“No.”

Brendan raised his hooded gaze. Beyond the etching of weariness, Colin could see how the wheels of his cousin’s sharp mind turned. Suddenly the past ten years hung on Colin like irons. It was Brendan who had stayed behind with the clan when Colin had been hustled onto the boat out of Galway Bay. It was Brendan who hid in these hills what was left of the MacEgans, and their cattle, and their women. It was Brendan who had kept these clansmen alive for ten hard years while he danced under the sun and drank in alehouses and made love to the women of Gascony.

Brendan had earned the title of The MacEgan.

Colin had not.

“The MacEgan,” Colin said loudly, “does not bow to his heir.”

And with a rush Colin remembered when he had come charging back from Emain Macha with a harp of horsehair and thongs, his head roiling with poems. He’d played a song of war to the elders. He’d been like a torch to dry tinder, starting a conflagration that would swallow everything—everything but this ragged band of clansmen clinging to life in the barren slopes of a place not even the English bothered to conquer.

Now he felt a hot rush of emotion as he turned to meet the eyes of those watching him, seeing how dirty his people were, how worn, how thin. The years under the eye of William Caddell had taken their toll: His people had forgotten who they were. They’d lost their pride.

That much, a bard could change.

“There will be time enough to choose a new king,” Colin said, “when William Caddell is dead.”

Colin swung Fingar’s harp off his back. With the old poem singing in his ears, he set his fingers to the strings.