Lord of Shadows (13 page)

It was clear she deemed the conversation at an end. Even before she’d finished speaking, she’d begun tidying away the remnants of her work. Returning bottles to their shelves. Checking supplies, marking her tally against an inventory.

“But what about—” Sabrina swallowed her words.

What about me?
Her newly emerged, defiant self wanted to shout. Thought better of it.

Already Sister Ainnir watched her with increasing concern. Jane cast her fleeting, worried glances when she thought Sabrina wasn’t looking, and Sister Brigh searched for more reasons to postpone her elevation to priestess. If she exposed her foolish fascination with a man she’d known for scant days, revealed the inner tangle of captured memories and swamping emotions, or told anyone that Daigh’s disappearance pushed against her heart with an ancient and remembered ache, they’d call her mad. And rightly so. All she wanted would be jeopardized. Best to keep quiet. After all, Daigh had left. Slithered away in the night without even a good-bye to mark his leaving. Her life would go back to the way it was before Daigh MacLir had washed up upon their beach.

And that was a good thing.

What she wanted.

Wasn’t it?

“What about what?” Sister Ainnir’s canny eye focused on Sabrina’s forehead like a giant magnifying glass.

Had she been speaking? Sabrina scrambled to clutch the threads of lost conversation. “The . . . um . . . the still-room,” she blurted. “Does it need to be cleaned?” As if she hadn’t smelled the biting stench of lye already. Hadn’t seen for herself the sparse sterility of the tiny space.

Sister Ainnir sighed. “It’s done already. You’re free until your duties this afternoon.”

She spoke this like a reward when it only meant Sabrina would have hours to roll events in her head. Tumble them into new shapes. Sort through every shared look and exchanged word that passed between her and Daigh for clues to his duplicity. End brooding over her complete and utter gullibility.

Perhaps if she wrote it all down in her journal. Seeing it on the page in black and white might help her to place Daigh and her naive infatuation in its proper place. Make her see it all for what it really was. A momentary diversion when she most needed one. Not the life-altering passion her overactive imagination had turned it into.

Suddenly she was glad of the escape. The hours to herself.

She hurried back up the aisle. Ignored Sister Clea’s pathetic call. “Where’s Paul? Where’s my brother? He said he’d come back. He promised.”

And what was a promise worth?

Sabrina had found over and over to her cost—absolutely nothing.

The hunt came so easy. Too easy for Daigh to ignore the obvious. He’d stalked his quarry before. Many times. And turned a skilled and deadly hand to it.

He traced Black Jacket to the village. And from there
toward Clonekilty. On to Bandon, where a frightened publican at the King’s Arms assured Daigh a man matching the thief’s description had stopped to rest and water his horse and snatch a bite to eat in the tavern’s tap before taking the road for Cork. No, he’d not spoken of his business in the city, but he’d a foreign look to him and an impatient air, so a betting man would say he’d been making for the harbor.

Daigh would take that bet. He tracked like a hound upon a blood trail.

Or like one of the
Domnuathi
stalking its next victim.

The truth fired his soul with torchlike intensity. Singed away hope. He’d been fooling himself since waking among the
bandraoi
. Let the calm of days measured in prayer and work lull him into believing he might be normal. A simple man suffering a simple tragedy that time and patience would heal.

Nothing simple or normal about him. And he needed neither time nor patience to heal. It was death that was denied him. Or should he say—dying again. He’d been sent to the grave once already.

But if he now understood what he was, he still didn’t know who he was. What dark power had summoned him back from the grave. How he’d ended half drowned upon a stretch of rocky shoreline. What strange presence infected his mind like a violent disease. Those questions remained along with the scattered bursts of so many others pummeling the insides of his skull.

Black Jacket knew the answers. Daigh just needed to run him to ground. Force him to give them up—at the point of a blade, if needs must.

Last night’s rain had become today’s drizzly mist, leaving him damp and miserable. The road slippery and
treacherous. Twice his horse had stumbled. And once he’d had to find a path around a wash where the road had completely vanished under a sea of mud and debris.

Urging the bay into a canter to the top of the rise, he searched the road below as it dipped into a shallow valley. A few carriages. A wagon and team. A farmer in a heavy coat and hat hiking the verge. The rest lost in a gray afternoon twilight.

Turning in the saddle, he looked back the way he’d come. To Glenlorgan. To Sabrina.

I’m back for you
. His promise to her. The words coming from some lost place within. A place where he saw her laughing. Loving. The two of them sharing a life. But she didn’t belong to him. It had been a mirage. A dream built upon his bones. A desire torn from a life that had ceased to exist centuries ago.

His hands clenched the slick reins.

Nothing solid but for the ache of their separation. That held a pain as real and recent as yesterday.

Sabrina lifted her head after long hours bent over her diary. Squinted against the fast fading light. Rolled her shoulders as she worked out the kinks. And read back the pages and pages filled with impressions, recollections, and conversations, hoping against hope her time with Daigh would make more sense than it had as she’d written it.

No such luck.

In fact her frantically scrawled notes sounded quite a lot like the ramblings of a particularly creative-minded bedlamite.

Memories of a past that didn’t belong to her. Daigh’s face swimming up through her mind as if it had always
been there. And a knowledge of things that shouldn’t be hers to know.

Dear heavens, if the
bandraoi
got hold of this they’d shackle her to her bed and hide all sharp objects.

She shoved the book under her pillow. Changed her mind. Stowed it under her mattress.

None too soon.

Jane wandered in, listless and pale-featured. Smudges hovered beneath her eyes, her body stooped as if she sought to protect herself from some invisible hurt.

“Are you unwell, Jane?”

Jane flinched in panic, before her gaze fell with relief on Sabrina. “Don’t ever sneak up on me like that. You nearly scared me to death.”

“I didn’t sneak. I was already here.”

She answered with a wan smile. “Were you?” Dipped her shoulder in a limp shrug. “I suppose I didn’t notice.”

Slouching into a chair before the dressing table, she tore off her kerchief. Even her beautiful red hair was dull and lifeless. Pulling the combs free with shaky fingers, she tangled one. Wrenched it loose with a muttered, “Blast.” Tears sliding down her cheeks. Shoulders quivering with dry sobs.

Sabrina threw herself from her bed. “What on earth? Here, let me, before you scalp yourself.” Took over from Jane, who merely sat like a life-size doll, allowing Sabrina to remove pins and combs. Brush the heavy fall of Jane’s hair, the rhythmic strokes easing her shoulders down from around her ears. Soothing her enough that she closed her eyes. Exhaled on a slow, deep breath.

Was this melancholia a result of the ambush in the woods? How had Sabrina not seen it before? Had she been
so wrapped up in her own problems she hadn’t noticed her best friend’s suffering? Hadn’t thought about how the violent attack might have affected her?

Sabrina frowned at her own self-centered fixation. What kind of a friend was she?

Jane attempted a smile. “I’m a mess.”

“Certainly not. A good brushing, a few pins, and you’ll be fine.”

Their eyes met, Jane’s red-rimmed and puffy. “Nice try, but you know exactly what I’m talking about. Every time I close my eyes I see that greasy, horrible face and feel that man’s breath on my neck. I go all nauseous and trembly, and I can’t sleep. Sister Ainnir gave me a sleeping draught, but it tastes so awful, I don’t like to take it.”

Sabrina smirked. “Sister Ainnir believes anything that doesn’t make you gag on its way down must not be effective. A simple infusion of pennyroyal mixed with honey would do more for you than any of her torture potions.”

Jane relaxed back in her chair. Already more color to her cheeks, but lingering guilt kept Sabrina babbling. “I wouldn’t have let them hurt you.”

Her declaration met by a skeptical raising of brows. “And how did you plan on stopping them? You were hardly in a better position.”

“Daigh then,” Sabrina announced proprietarily. “He wouldn’t have let those men harm us. He didn’t. He fought. And could have died. All for us.” She still didn’t quite believe Sister Ainnir’s accusations. There had to be an explanation for his departure. Though none she’d come up with so far made any sense.

Jane’s mouth twisted in a dry smile. “He really did turn you inside out, didn’t he?”

She gave a noncommittal shrug. Pulled a heavy section of hair up and back.

Jane dropped her gaze. Began toying with the pins on the table. “Did you kiss him?”

“Jane!”

A glimmer of a wicked spark. “Did you like it?”

Sabrina jammed a comb in place.

“Ow!” Jane jerked upright. Shot Sabrina a dirty look. “Fine, if you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. But don’t stab me for asking.”

She loosened the skein of hair. Adjusted the offending comb. “Sorry.”

A companionable silence fell over the room. Afternoon light slanted long and golden over the bare wood floor. Up the whitewashed walls. Over three sets of plain white coverlets.

Sabrina caught herself comparing the simple unadorned chamber to her sumptuous, peacock-bright bedchamber at Belfoyle. She’d not seen it since . . . well since that last horrendous autumn. Hadn’t been home to walk the park or scramble down the cliff path to the narrow stretch of beach. Hadn’t stolen fruit from the orangery or curled up in her favorite chair by the drawing room fire.

Would it look the same seen through adult eyes? Would the rooms seem smaller? The grandeur seem less grand? Would she feel like she were coming home, or would it be a stranger who strode the corridors as if seeing it all for the first time? Would the ghosts of her past rise up to walk with her? And what sort of ghosts would they be?

Father with his hot and cold moods?

The patient but distracted hand of Mother upon her shoulder?

Or would it be Brendan who visited her in the tangled corridors and quiet rooms? Explaining away his abandonment and the horrible accusations. Reasoning past her suspicions. Telling her it would be all right. That it wasn’t the way it sounded. That the
Amhas-draoi
had it wrong.

He was innocent.

What a fool she was. Twice now she’d been deceived by a man she’d stupidly trusted. Who’d been as false as his word.

Apparently she had quite a talent for seeing a good in someone that just wasn’t there.

She shuddered off her daydreams of her lost home by the sea.

She wasn’t going back to Belfoyle. Aidan’s pleas notwithstanding, she remained committed to the
bandraoi
. Even if that life seemed empty after the upheaval of the last days.

And as for Daigh’s betrayal? She’d recover. Thoughts of him would fade in time. Her infatuation naught but cause for future teasing.

“Sabrina? Did you mean what you said the other night? I mean about Daigh MacLir?”

Jane asked this now? Sabrina peered closely at her reflection in the glass. There must be a message tattooed on her forehead.
Moonstruck. Approach with caution.
Or had every priestess suddenly grown adept at reading minds?

She did her best to look breezily vague. “You’ll have to be more specific. Which night? And more important, what did I say?”

Jane continued arranging and rearranging the tiny pile of unused hairpins as if afraid to look Sabrina in the eye. “About feeling as if you and Daigh had known each other before? Seeing things?”

Good heavens, talk about sounding like a blathering idiot. She put the finishing touches on the carefully reconstructed chignon. Tried to keep up the appearance of detached disinterest. “It does sound ridiculous when you say it out loud like that, doesn’t it?”

Jane flashed her a sympathetic smile. “At first hearing, perhaps. But do you still believe it?”

The memory of the parting in the woods. The gnawing ache of a past separation pressing even now upon her heart. Daigh’s fierce certainty they knew each other. His claim he’d come back for her. But back from where? And why for her?

She bought time. Stood back, admiring her handiwork. Touching up here. A stray wisp there. Not bad. If she failed at High
Danu
priestess she could always get a position as lady’s maid.

“You’re avoiding me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’ve rearranged that same curl three times already. If you don’t want to—”

“I don’t really know what I believe anymore,” Sabrina answered in a rush. “But Sister Ainnir is right. The order—and I—need to forget he was ever here. His arrival brought nothing but trouble.”

She leaned across Jane’s shoulder. Took up the kerchief. Draped it over the dark red brilliance of her hair. Pinned it neatly in place. Sighed. All that hard work, and no one would see it.

“I watched him watching you, Sabrina.” Jane craned her neck around, her smile wistful and envious and dreamy all at the same time. But—for now, at least—not haunted. “And you watched him just as avidly. Good luck forgetting that.”

Sabrina studied her reflection. Narrow, pinched face. Dark circles. Pursed line of her mouth.

And she worried over Jane? Physician, heal thyself.

A sharp rap on the door, and they turned together to face Sister Brigh’s wrinkled scowl. But not her usual world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket glare. This held a gleam of suppressed excitement. A hint of victory. Not a good sign. Any victory of Sister Brigh’s usually meant torment for some unsuspecting novice.