The Maiden of Ireland. Susan Wiggs
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heaths. On the morrow would come the feast of the planting, and Seamus MacBride had decreed it a high holiday. But what sort of holiday would it be without food?
She found her father in the kitchen, a vast stone room connected to the great hall by a narrow passageway.
“More sage, Janet,” he said, peering over the cook’s shoulder into a bubbling iron pot. “Don’t skimp, now. It’s a feast to be sure we’re having tomorrow.”
“Daida.” Caitlin rubbed her palms on her apron. “Daida, I must speak to you.”
He looked up. Vague shadows darkened his eyes, his mind off on another of his mysterious quests. Then he smiled, giving her a glimpse of the handsome lion he had been in his youth. A lion with the heart of a spring lamb.
“Caitlin.” He spoke her name suddenly, as if he’d just remembered it. “Ah, ’tis a grand day, and praise the saints.”
“Yes, Daida.” Although Curran’s warning hovered like a bird of prey over her thoughts, she forced herself to smile and nod toward the door. “If you please, Daida.”
They stepped outside to the kitchen garden. The tops of Janet’s turnips and potatoes reached desperately for the weak rays of the spring sun. The sight of the sparse planting depressed Caitlin, so she looked out across the craggy landscape, the rise of mountains skirted by stubbled fields and misty bogs coursing down toward the sea. The late afternoon sun gilded the landscape in a rich mantle.
Seamus’s gaze absorbed the view. “Devil so lovely a day as ever you’ve seen, eh, Caitlin? Isn’t it grand, the broadax of heaven cleaving the clouds, and the great skies pouring pure gold into your lap?”
Why was it, she wondered sadly, that the splendor of the land moved her father to poetry, while the privation of his people affected him not at all? “Daida, about tomorrow—”
“Ah, it’ll be fine, will it not, colleen? And isn’t it we Irish that are brewed from God’s own still?”
She rested her hand on his arm. The muscles lay flaccid, the flesh of a man who shunned hard work as a monk shuns women.
“Tom Gandy says you’ve invited everyone in the district.”
“Tom Gandy’s a half-pint busybody, and a sorcerer at that.”
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“Of course. Your mother—St. Brigid the holy woman keep her soul—always planned the grandest of feasts. Now that she’s gone, ’twould be a sad and cruel thing for us to do less.”
“Daida, since the English burned our fishing fleet, we can barely feed our own folk. How can we—”
“Ach, musha, you worry too much. We be under the sacred wing of providence. We’ll feast on fresh meat, see if we don’t.”
Suspicion stung her. “What do you mean?”
He spread his arms in a grandiloquent gesture. “I’ve had Kermit slaughter that young bullock.”
Caitlin pressed her fists to her belly to keep her temper in check. “Oh, Daida, no! We needed that bullock for Magheen’s dowry. Logan won’t have her back without it.”
Seamus dropped his hands to his sides. “But won’t it be grand, the sweet taste of it and all our neighbors and kin toasting the MacBride. Think of it, Cait—”
“That’s just it, Daida,” Caitlin cut in. She had been raised from the cradle to honor her sire, but she had learned on her own to speak her mind. “You never think.”
She stalked off toward the stables. It was wicked to speak so to her father but she couldn’t help herself, any more than she could quell the impulse to run free along the storm-swept shores.
In the dim fieldstone stable, the black stallion waited in anticipation, muscles gleaming, nostrils flaring. Sunlight bathed his hide in gold as if he had been singled out by the gods to ascend to the heavens on wings of mist.
Caitlin walked between the stalls past the large strong-limbed ponies. For generations untold, Connemara horses had borne heroes to victory. But the stallion was different.
His velvet lips blew a greeting to her.
He had no name. He was as wild and free as the kestrels that combed the clouds over the mountains.
Black he was, the color of midnight, the shade of eternity, as beautifully formed as nature could manage.
“There, a stor,” Caitlin crooned, slipping a soft braided bridle over his ears. She used neither bit nor saddle. When she mounted him they became one mind, one soul, one will. Her bare legs against his bare hide formed a pagan bond of two spirits which, though as different as human and beast, melded into unity. The black needed no more than a touch of her heel to urge him out of the stable and across the rock-strewn fields.
The smells of the sea and of dulse weed enveloped her; the scent of greening fields should have reassured her, but didn’t. The Roundheads could, at any moment, swoop down and destroy the tender plants and subject Clonmuir to a starving winter.
Caitlin rode west, into the shattering colors of the sunset, toward the surging iron-gray sea. She let her hair fly loose, free as the mane of the black, free as the mist in a windstorm.
Her troubles lay behind her, an enemy she had left in her dust. Her swift rides renewed her spirit, made her feel capable of confronting and besting any problem that arose. So Seamus had wasted the bullock. She had faced troubles before. Despite the danger, she knew where she could get another.
The black’s gallop gave her the sensation of flying: a lifting glide that made the air sing past her ears. She abandoned thought and surrendered to the pulse of hooves, the rush of wind through her hair, the tang of salt on her lips.
They reached the coast where cliffs reared above the battering sea. Riding the wind, the black sailed over a ravine, then tucked his forelegs in a daring descent that made Caitlin laugh out loud.
On the damp sandy beach, she gave him his head. He arched his neck and leapt with breath-stealing abandon. He crashed through the surf, a black bolt of living thunder, full of the rhythm and mystery of Connemara’s wild, god-hewn coast.
The English claimed the coast from the shore to three miles deep. Caitlin scoffed at the notion. This land belonged to forces no human could claim.
The sun had sunk lower when the black slowed to a walk. Deep bronze rays winked like coins upon the water.
Caitlin dropped to the sand, the chill surf surging around her ankles. She patted the stallion’s flank. “Off you go,” she said. “Come back when I whistle.”
His tail high, the horse trotted down the strand. Tears stung her eyes at the sheer beauty of him. He was as full of magic as the distant lands of Araby, as handsome and noble as the man who had given him to Caitlin, the man who claimed her heart.
Alonso Rubio.
Come back to me, Alonso, she thought. I need you now.
“Sure there is a way, you know,” said a sprightly voice, “to summon your true love.”
Caitlin spun around, her gaze darting in search of the speaker. A chuckle, as light as the land breezes, drew her to a spill of rocks that circled a tangled, forgotten garden. Once this had been a place of retreat for the lord and lady of Clonmuir, a place of welcome for travelers from the sea. But time and neglect had toppled the rotunda where her parents had once sat and gazed out at the endless horizon.
“Tom Gandy,” she said. “Blast you, Tom, where are you?” Tidal pools were reclaiming the garden, and she stepped around these, lifting the hem of her kirtle. Crab-infested seaweed draped the stone blocks, and gorse bushes grew in the cracks.
A brown cap with a curling feather bobbed behind a large boulder. A grinning, leather-skinned face appeared, followed by a thick, squat body.
Glaring, she said,