The Irish Warrior (11 page)

“Rest, angel.” His soft, rough voice rumbled through her hair, onto her neck.

His lean, hard body was stretched against hers, heating every inch of her from neck to knees. One powerful arm was slung over her hip, the other stretched on the ground above their heads. She sighed deeply. This was beyond goodly, and more than enough to hold her pain in abeyance. Now, how had he accomplished that?

“Thank you,” she whispered just as sleep stole over her.

“Thank ye,” he murmured back. She snuggled in and his hand tightened on her hip. She fit right in.

When Senna awoke, Finian was already up, standing a few feet away, kicking more dirt atop what had been their firepit. Each time his foot moved forward, the rest of his body adjusted for the movement, muscular arms out slightly, the hair beside his face—that not trapped in its binding at the nape of his neck—swaying slightly. His chiseled face was dusky with beard growth. His gaze was intent on the pit.

She sat up. He looked over. His eyes dropped to her hand. “Yer fingers?”

She thought about them, then realized the fact that she needed to think about them with purpose was a good sign. “They do not throb so much, and there's no pock.”

He nodded appraisingly. “Aye, no swelling. Here's yer chance to wash.” He pointed to a small creek she hadn't noticed last night.

She looked at it without moving. There was absolutely no way she was going to undress in front of him.

“Now, lass. We leave as soon as we're done.” He pointed again.

“I do believe a good rest was all I required,” she said brightly. “Sleep,” she added when he looked confused. “Not a bath.”

His face cleared. One dark eyebrow slanted up. “I will not watch ye, Senna.” Was he amused? It certainly appeared to be a smile threatening to break free on his face.

“I simply do not think 'tis wise to dampen my hand,” she said coldly. “All your leech craft would have been for naught.”

A small smile did curve up a corner of his mouth at this, but he didn't say any more. He finished with the fire and started unbuckling his hauberk. Its flap fell down over the soft undertunic and he dragged the armor over his head.

“I don't want to hear any regrets later,” he said, his voice muffled.

She didn't reply. She was too busy staring in amazement: the Irishman was going to undress right in front of her! The armor came off, and he pulled up the bottom of his tunic. He was going to remove it. She couldn't rip her eyes away. Excitement flew around her belly like birds coming out of a nest, swirling and fluttering. He tugged up, revealing his flat stomach. Senna lurched back into speech.

“You shall hear no regrets,” she said sharply. “Although it seems quite likely that you knew of this stream last night when I wished to bathe, and did not mention it…”

Her words trailed off. There was simply nothing more to say on the subject, and the tunic had gone up and over Finian's head, dropping onto the ground beside him.

Tangled black hair fell down around his smooth, muscular shoulders as he rotated each one in turn, stretching his head the opposite way and groaning in appreciation, apparently unconcerned that she was watching him undress. Staring. She wrenched her gaze away.

He stepped over to the far side of the creek that ran in the gully, an easier access point than the side Senna stood on, and ducked his head under the water. He came out wet, and shook his head, sending water droplets spraying into the air. He pushed his hair off his forehead with a swift push of his palm, then looked at her.

“So tell me, lass, why are ye the one managing the books for yer father's business?”

She watched as he splashed more water over his face, then took one of the cakes of soap and clumped its misshapen lump in his palm. He spread it over his cheeks and jaws. Reaching into the belt lashed to his waist, he pulled out a blade.

“You shave!” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Aye.”

She watched in utter silence. When he was done, he plunged his head into the water a second time, threw his drenched hair back, and revealed his unbearded face for the first time.

Long dark hair slicked back, revealing the sharp, fine lines of his jaw and cheekbones. His mouth still held the grin that so beguiled, the one that made her heart thump, but now the full sensuousness of his lips was fully revealed, and it set her heart hammering as she recalled what he'd done to her with them.

Thick fingers entwined in his hair as he shoved the hair off his face, and before Senna's eyes flashed an image of them tugging through her own. The sculpted definition in his arms, bent above his head, exposed curves and lines that her eyes followed with greedy intensity. A dusting of dark hair covered his flat, ridged belly, which narrowed to trim waist and hips, then widened again to thick, corded thighs.

Her gaze devoured his body as if it were a meal, mindless of the fact that he was watching her watch him. Finishing, she lifted her gaze and encountered his wolfish grin.

“A woman who looks at a man like that, Senna, is a very tempting thing.”

God save her, the Irishman knew every turning in her wicked thoughts, every depraved notion and erotic wanting that had flickered through her mind. She blushed. He cocked an eyebrow. Her flush met her hairline. She ripped her gaze away.

Apparently satisfied, he knelt back by the stream. “The accounts,” he said, prompting her to recall his question.

She half turned her head, trying to ignore the sight of the bunched muscles of his thighs as he crouched beside the stream, splashing water over the cake of soap in his large hand, then rubbing it over his wet arms and chest.

“I manage the accounts because I am quite good at it.”

“I didn't so much mean how ye came to it, Senna, as how yer father came to
not.
”

“Oh. Indeed. As I said, Sir Gerald gambled. Come a time, he would wager on anything. Horses, tourneys, raindrops, anything. Once he bet my mother's brother whether King Edward would choose Balliol or The Bruce to rule Scotland.”

Finian picked up his tunic and rubbed it over his damp hair. “And which did yer father choose?”

She gave a bitter smile. “One of the few times he was right, and the only time he was not pleased. Gambling became his passion, after my mother left.”

His gaze flicked over, but he didn't ask the question begging to be asked:
What do you mean, “after your mother left”?
Senna hurried on before he could. “Sir Gerald regularly raided the coffers. He has incurred debts to rather…unsavory men.”

“Your father has dealings with unsavory men?”

“My father has dealings with whomever will feed the beast. Noble thugs or dock workers, what matters that?” She flicked him a glance. “You are not afflicted by it, so you would not understand.”

“Unsavory, of what sort?”

“Of the manly sort, that comes to the house at night, sometimes in noble finery, sometimes plain as dirt.” She was distracted by his undressing and washing and his glistening, wet body and such, but beneath the glory of Finian, she realized she was speaking of things she hadn't for many years. “The sort who visits late at night, and you hear their angry voices, but all in whispers, as if they are sharing great, angry secrets. The sort that is gone the next morning, your father along with them. Unsavory, of that sort.”

He crumpled his tunic into a ball. “Ye call yer father Sir Gerald.”

“Oh,” she said, flustered and irritated. Why did he need to be perceptive as well? Could he not be lacking in
some
regard? “I'm used to referring to him thusly. Our contractors. Business, you know.”

“Well, I'm fair surprised to find such a spirited lady coming from his seed.”

“Me?” she shouted in laughter. “You must mean some other.”

“Och, ye're right, now. I'm talking about all the other fine ladies who stole me out of prison.”

Straightening, he stepped back across the stream and turned to reach down for his armor. The movement drew her eye. What she saw drained all the blood from her face.

“Mother of God,” she whispered, all of it an exhale.

His back was shredded. Long, deep lacerations whipped in a jagged orbit around his body, bisecting one another in a red fire and tortured map of brutality. Some were scarring, some spoke of more recent acquaintance with a leather strap. She rose slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed on the horror.

“Jésu, Finian.”

Gladiator muscles slid beneath his satiny skin as he turned to her. She could almost feel the razor-sharp whip snapping through the air, ripping open his flesh, tearing into the awesome strength beneath, like a knife cutting through a pear. Her trembling fingers passed a hairsbreadth above the ravaged flesh and she lifted her head to meet his steady gaze.

There are green flecks in his eyes.

“Ye suffered too,” he murmured, his eyes lingering on the fading bruises of her cheekbones.

“Oh, Finian,” she exhaled, feeling tears prick. Dropping to her knees, she dragged her pack over. “I've unguent,” she reported in a shaky voice, digging through the bag. In wild arcs everything came out, scattering on the ground around her: a brick of hard cheese, three small pouches, linen scraps, a rope, strips of leather.

She lifted her head, holding up a small container as high as she could, which reached to the middle of his chest. With an utterly unreadable look, he took it, and she scrambled to her feet. “Have they festered?”

He shook his head, resettling the damp hair across his shoulders. “They don't feel to have.”

“Well, I'll see about that,” she said in a clipped tone. The pricking of tears a moment ago was nothing, of course—simply understandable concern for the wounds of the man she needed healthy to ensure her survival. She put her hand on his arm to turn him around. “Stand fast.”

He allowed her to turn him, and she allowed herself to ignore the feel of his warm, wide shoulder beneath her hand. Clamping her tongue between her teeth, she began applying the thick lotion in slow, gentle movements that sent his muscles shuddering in response.

“Am I hurting you?”

“Aye,” he said gruffly.

She paused and peered over his shoulder at the profile of his square jaw. “Much?”

“Aye, that ye are.”

“Well,” she retorted, then said it again. “Well.”

He stood quietly under the painful repair work. When finished, she stepped back and looked with a critical eye at her handiwork. “I think I've got them all,” she muttered, angling her head to the side to see if the light had tricked her and she'd missed one.
No,
she decided, straightening,
I've got them all.

His dark eyes were waiting for her.

“I've another debt to pay, mistress.”

His gaze dropped to the unguent still coating her fingertips. A stride of his muscle-corded legs brought him close enough to catch her hand in his.

Her lips parted around a hot rush of breath. Almost thoughtfully, he placed the pad of his thumb on her lower lip, curling it down, his rough, clean skin on the fleshy inner side. Hot coils unwound through her body.

“How shall I repay it? What do ye want, Senna?”

“All I want,” she whispered, “is to go home.”

Home, where there were no wolves baying or soldiers hunting. Where the biggest river to be crossed was the murmuring brook between home and the stables, and the hardest bed she ever had to sleep in was the one she'd made herself by booking passage with the more expensive shipping merchant for last autumn's Flanders drop.

Home, where the sun slipped away each evening through leaded glass windows, spilling dull green light across the ledgers at her copyist's desk.

Where months passed with only the servants to talk to, until she had to let them all go too, when the debts grew too large.

Home, where silence reigned and even the ‘lucrative sheep' were simply bright white specks on the sodden brown landscape of her heart.

His hand was warm curled around hers. “Is that truly all ye want, then? To go home?”

No,
her heart cried.
No, no, no.

“Aye,” she said dully.

He dropped her hand, and she barely remembered how to lift it again. They shouldered their packs and silently slipped under the cover of trees as twilight spread, leaving neither sound nor trace of their passing.

“Praise God. A boat.”

Senna had the exact opposite reaction. “Oh, dear Lord. A boat.”

It was the third noontide after their escape from Rardove, and they were crouched above a river. On a small isle in the center of the rushing currents was a small village. Perhaps five little tear-shaped boats bobbed at the edge of their side of the river.

“A boat will make travel much faster. And easier.”

“We're stealing a boat,” she clarified flatly. As if thievery was the reason for her protest.

“Aye, Senna. We're stealing a boat.”

He started down the hill, hunched low, until he was near the riverside, then ducked down into the tall reeds and rushes. No one was to be seen on this side of the water, but on the other, villagers went about their business. A few women were washing clothes in the stream. A child in bare feet ran from one hut to another, calling someone.

Senna followed glumly in Finian's wake. They couched amid the grasses,
something I find myself doing with great frequency of late,
she thought sourly.

It was still risky to travel during daylight hours, but not nearly as risky as traveling by boat in the dark, and apparently, travel by boat they must.

They watched as the villagers on the small island moved through their daily paces, keeping Senna and Finian trapped in the rushes. She felt like a young child, playing hoop and hide with her brother Will. Just the two of them, running around like wild things, Mama gone, Father may as well have been.

What grand games they had played, not realizing how their voices echoed back to them across the empty meadows. For a while. But soon, Will was taken—sent, she corrected swiftly—to be fostered as a squire, trained as a knight, a privilege and expense she herself ensured once she took over the accounts at age fifteen. Will's education had lacked for nothing.

The boats bobbed as a gust of wind whipped down the river. She swallowed.
Will had probably even been taught to swim,
she thought sourly.

She rooted around in her pack and came out with the flask. Uncorking it, she threw back a swallow. It burned the whole way down. Finian flicked a glance over.

“I can't swim,” she said.

“That should help.” He looked back at the river and the bobbing, sickening boats.

She took another scorching swallow and aimed a glare at the side of his head. He had a very attractive side of his head. “Why ought I know how to swim? What good is that?”

“'Tis helpful when you want to cross a river.”

She took another sip of the whisky. “I do other things.”

“Aye,” he agreed, not looking over. “Make money. Drink firewater. Talk a great deal.”

She gave a wan smile. “I can use a weapon, too, should that interest you. It ought, if you intend to go on in that manner.”

He turned then and studied her, those blue eyes trailing over her face. Then he smiled his dangerous smile and settled back amid the high, swaying reeds. The low drone of flying things going about their business—butterflies, gnats, flies—settled over the heated earth.

“Is that so?” he said. “A weapon? Who taught ye that?”

“My brother, Will. He taught me many things. How to climb trees. Use a short bow. And a knife.” One of his dark eyebrows quirked. She nodded. “Oh, we were wild, for a time.”

Finian snapped a reed stem in half and chewed at the tip. “Good Lord,” he said mildly. “Ye were rough stuff. I'm surprised that's not a crime.”

“Teaching a woman to use weapons?”

“No. Teaching ye to.”

He watched her with a teasing half smile, the long, lean length of him stretched out, resting back on an elbow, waiting patiently for the villagers to move out of sight, for her to tell her tale in a low murmur.

“How can you be so calm? When all this”—she waved her hand generally at the world—“is happening. Has happened. Will happen. How can you be so…at ease?”

He tipped the grass stem away from his lips and smiled full on. It was as if the sun just came out. “There are worse things I could be doing just now, Senna, than sitting here with ye. For the moment, I am at ease.”

Just as if the sun came out, indeed. She grew warmer. Everywhere. Lowering her eyes, she toyed with one of the tall, waving reeds, then snapped one off like he had done. She popped the tip in her mouth. She immediately took it out, grimacing. “I see why we put these on the floor.”

He nibbled on his stalk again, smiling. “Yer brother, Senna, and his criminal acts, teaching ye to use a bow and knife.”

“There's been no damage done yet. I'm not terribly good with a bow.”

“Och. I'm sure if ye set yer mind to a matter, it'll come out a good-looking thing in the end.”

They were speaking only in murmurs, hidden in a pocket of reeds and heat and his smile. There was something about the quality of how Finian lay stretched out on the earth, something about his breathing that said all his attention was on her. Although why she should care about that was utterly inconceivable.

She pushed an intrusive cattail out of her face.

“I'm surprised yer Da let it happen, though,” he said. “The weapons.”

She gave a bitter little smile. Why did they seem to touch upon the topic of her father so very much? She hadn't spoken of him in years, save brief conversations with Will, where one or the other would report they hadn't seen Sir Gerald in weeks. Months. Years.

“My father was gone a lot. I rarely saw him.”

His regard of her grew a little closer. “And what did yer Mam think, ye learning to use weapons?”

“My mother left. I believe I was five. I do not know my mother.”

He chewed his reed-tip in silence for a moment. “Do ye remember nothing of her?”

She shook her head vehemently, in direct opposition to the strength of the lie. “Not even what she smells like.”

Roses and green. Fresh, new green. And the yellow roses from out back, the ones she'd let overgrow with vines.

“Ah.” A dragonfly hovered silently by Finian's shoulder, a quivering, iridescent arrow. Then it shot off. “Just ye and yer brother then, raising each other?”

“Just us. Until it was time for him to leave.”

She knew the wistfulness in her voice revealed as much of her as the words themselves. She looked over, loathe to find what she expected: scorn. Or worse, disinterest.

Instead, she found dark eyes considering her. The filtered sunlight made shadows of his serious regard. And when he nodded, slowly, gravely, she felt as though she'd been accepted.

And, with that, a breath of a new wanting brushed past her consciousness.

Finian's eyes stayed on her, directly, a level, listening gaze, as if the things she spoke of were not shameful a'tall. Which they were. Highly shameful. The things her father had allowed to be done, the way he went through the world, a river of potential, a tepid pool of yield, after the gambling began. After Mama left.

And the shame of Mama, that could not be calculated if she used every abacus in France. Even as a child, Senna had felt it seeping out of those around her like frost heaves, icy remnants. Slippery and treacherous. Never look down.

And of course, all that was in Senna as well.

She tilted her chin up, a move she'd perfected years ago whenever shame threatened a coup. “I took over the business after…when I was fifteen. My father was never to home. Will works for coin. I do not know exactly what he does. He will not speak of it; something for various lords, I think. He hasn't married yet. That cannot be good. He doesn't look as if 'tis good. He looks rather…hard.”

“And what did yer hard brother say about ye coming to Ireland?”

“He doesn't know.”

A companionable silence stretched out between them. Finian glanced at the river. Not a villager in sight. He rose to his knees and fingertips, then unraveled to his feet.

“Let's go, lass.”

The sun burned hot on the top of Senna's head and upper back as they hurried forward, crouching at the waist. Everything seemed bright and close to hand. The world smelled fresh, like warm, clean dirt and pine, hot flowers and river-stirred air. Ireland's beauty was beyond her words, vivid and brilliant, like a drop of ink quivering on a manuscript.

The tall grasses closed behind them, rustling like eager, buzzing conspirators. Small puffs of breeze coasted down the river, which was such a shattering, smashing shade of blue it almost hurt her eyes. The thought of getting in a boat hurt her stomach.

She plodded forward, looking neither left nor right, resigned to the fate of sickening all over the indescribably beautiful land of Ireland. Or its waters.

Closing her eyes resignedly, she put her hands on the edge of a worn wooden boat and threw her leg over.

“Senna, no!” Finian hissed behind her.

She turned, startled, half in the boat, half out.

“Not that one.” He gestured once, rising slightly out of his crouch. “Come. This one.” He pointed to a smaller teardrop-shaped craft, tucked amid the cattails, hard to see.

She sighed and lifted her foot back out again. She did not, though, remove any of her weight from her hands, which rested on the lip of the boat. In fact, she was quite used to leaning on things, things that didn't bob. Being incautiously unaware that her previous experience with one's leaning tendencies and the movability, or immovability, of things upon which one leaned, did not apply in the present situation, she pressed down on the boat, which was, by nature, a bobbing thing. Her foot was in the air.

The small craft sailed out into the river. The rope tugged it immediately and snapped it back to shore, but it had to bounce off Senna, who had fallen in the water with a hearty splash. One ankle still remained hooked over the lip of the boat.

She flailed as soundlessly as flailing in water can be done, trying to get her footing. Water lapped over her belly as she arched backward, her hands sinking into the soft, silky mud, one foot in the water, the other hooked over the edge of boat.

How she hated boats.

She tried to kick her leg high enough to free it. Her body having only so much bend, each kick up with her foot forced her head in the opposite direction which, in this case, was under the water. Her fingertips sunk deeper into mud. How long before the owner of this boat heard her racket and came to investigate?

“What do ye tink ye're doin' with me boat?”

Not long at all, apparently.

She tried to crane her neck around to see whom she'd perpetrated her highly embarrassing but not-yet-criminal behavior upon.

Finian's legs walked into view. She tilted her face up to look at his, which appeared to be filled with disgust, if she was reading it properly. She
was
upside down, of course. Perhaps she was interpreting it wrongly.

He put an arm behind her back, which gave her the leverage to get her foot out. He helped her slosh to shore where she stood, dripping wet, a length of sea grass stuck to her neck. She peeled it off, looking at the sullen, yet-surprisingly-unsurprised, aged face regarding her.

“Me boat. Why're ye climbing all over her?”

“I was only climbing there at the bow…the prow, the…edge,” she said chirpily. “She's a bit wetter, but none the worse.”

Finian and the old man scowled at her. Then Finian turned to the old man.

“Grandfather,” he murmured, bending his head, and that was the last word she understood, because Finian lapsed into the most evocative, lyrical, deep-throated plumage of language she'd ever heard. Irish. It almost took her breath away. Finian surely did.

Watching his body, so powerful, restrain itself to bend into a pose of respect for an elderly man. Listening to him, whom she knew not at all, transform into some spellbinding creature before her eyes.

Wild, his language was. Wild, he was. Wild, she wanted to be.

Without warning, Finian was moving again, tossing a few heavy bundles onto the boat she'd almost capsized, speaking so she could understand again.

“We'll take these to
Cúil Dubh
for ye, grandfather. And ye've my thanks.”

The old man stood impassively. He must have been sixty if he was a day, and more fit than men half his age. Compact, sinuous, and suspicious, he did not look happy, but he wasn't arguing. Finian was moving swiftly, tossing another sack into the craft, muttering for Senna to get on board.

She hesitated. The old man was watching her with a canny regard. His eyes were bluer than the water, his eyebrows as wild grown as the grasses they'd crawled through, and his face was cragged enough for plants to take root. Old curmudgeon. She smiled. She'd once had a curmudgeon in her life, a laughing bear of a grandfather she hadn't seen since her mother disappeared. Senna liked curmudgeons.

Slowly, the old curmudgeon smiled back.

“And we're off, Senna,” Finian said lightly. But underneath, he sounded rushed. As if he was worried. As if, at any moment, this old man might turn and start shouting to others. Younger, armed others.

Without thinking, Senna scooped deep in a pouch tied around her neck and lodged between layers of her clothes, and dug out a few coins she'd taken from the trunk under Rardove's table. She dropped them into the old man's hand. A few pennies gone from her future, but they were owed.

“My thanks, grandfather,” she whispered, then held a finger to her lips, suggesting silence. She smiled at him over its tip.

His hand closed around the coin, probably sufficient to sustain him and his eight neighbors for a decade. His smile didn't grow an inch, but slowly, one eyelid came down in the most extravagant, flirtatious wink Senna had ever been the recipient of. She blushed to her hairline and got in the boat.

They floated off, the old man watching them, until the tall grasses swallowed him up and the only thing to be seen was the blue bowl of sky and the long, outstretched wings of a dark, silent cormorant that flew overhead.