The tip of his tongue moved over her closed mouth, prying gently so that her lips might open to his. Curious, Erin allowed the contact. His tongue moved into her mouth, delving deeper and deeper. Again, the sensation was pleasant. But it did not give her any indication of great rewards to come from such play. She moved her fingers from his shoulders to his chest, attempting to draw away. He held her tight, and suddenly panic descended upon her. Visions of rape, of the lady Moira in the hands of the Norsemen, flashed through her mind. She heard the screams in the air.…
Her protest rumbled deep within her throat and she brought her hand furiously against her suitor’s cheek. “You said a kiss, my lord of Connaught! Yet you abuse my consent when you are entrusted by my own father with my welfare!”
Anger was Fennen’s first reaction as he rubbed his cheek, but then he realized that he had pushed too far. It had been so easy to do when he held her in his arms. “I apologize, my lady,” he said with a humility he was far from feeling. One day he would not have to release her. He would calm her fears, and he would teach her all the beauty that there was to loving. In her kiss he could feel a smoldering sensuality, one she didn’t yet recognize herself. He could console himself with the knowledge that patience would award him his prize. One day he would have her forever, laughing, touching, bedazzling him, him alone, and he would love her.
“Oh, Fennen! I’m sorry too!” Erin murmured, again feeling the pangs of guilt. She had accepted him, she had wanted his touch, until … until she had thought of the Norwegians. But he was smiling at her again, and she returned his look mischievously, enjoying the power she had over this handsome and coveted Irish warrior and king.
“You must take me back to Mergwin, Fennen,” she said sweetly, “for then you must return to the envoy and see what fate the Vikings have met in battle. Oh, Fennen, Father believes that the Norwegians will be the losers—and a multitude of them will be slaughtered upon the field!”
Fennen nodded, holding her arm respectfully as he led her back to the cottage. “The Danes are strong in numbers and unity, and they promised us great riches!” He laughed.
Mergwin still stood before the cottage. “The day wanes quickly, King of Connaught,” he said pointedly.
Fennen ignored the scowling Druid. He turned to Erin. “Take care, my princess. I will see you soon.”
“Fare thee well, my lord Fennen,” Erin said prettily, dipping a low curtsy. Mergwin saw that she twisted her face demurely when he kissed her; he also saw the spark in her eyes beneath the lowered lashes.
Mergwin was hard put not to laugh. Think not that you hold the treasure of the young princess yet, my lord, he thought silently. I do believe the princess will have much to say in the matter.
Fennen mac Cormac dropped a finely embroidered scarf into the Druid’s hand—a present from the lady Maeve and Aed—and made a fine show of remounting his charger.
Erin waved as he disappeared through the path in the trees, then turned to Mergwin, her laughter coming to her lips. “What think you, Druid?” she demanded, the sparkle in her emerald eyes deep. “Is my lord Fennen not a bit like a puffer fish? As are all men?”
Mergwin lifted his brows and pursed his lips against his own laughter. “What is this, Erin? You mock the king of Connaught? I had thought at long last you brought me a betrothed.”
Erin shrugged, averting her eyes as she slipped past the Druid to enter the cottage. She sighed as he followed her. “No, Mergwin, I do not seek to mock Fennen. He is a good man, a good king of his province. I-I just don’t know, Mergwin. I believe it is me. I frustrate my father and my fair lady mother, I annoy my sisters. But I have no desire to marry.”
“Perhaps,” Mergwin suggested shrewdly, “you would enter a religious order as your sister Bede.”
“Oh, no!” Erin laughed, spinning around to smile at her old friend and mentor. “Bede is suited to her convent. I fear I am not so charitable as Bede, nor can I so blindly love her God—”
“Or purge the hatred in your heart,” Mergwin suggested in quiet interruption.
Erin shrugged and turned away once again, and strode to the earth-banked fire to warm her hands. “I saw a town razed, Mergwin. My cousin was torn and shattered, and sent to the monks to be tended. My aunt and uncle were food for buzzards, and they were not avenged. Do you wonder that a hatred remains to sustain me?”
Mergwin sat at his table and began to grind a mixture of roots before him. “Your father could not avenge Clonntairth, Erin. The kings of Ireland were scattered and fighting among themselves. The Norsemen were very powerful then, as they will be again. Aed’s first loyalty must be the protection of Tara and the Brehon laws. He could not leave the high seat of government unprotected and open to attack. And think on this, girl: Aed could easily spend his life in the pursuit of vengeance. His brother was lost to an attack by Danes; his father was murdered by a fellow Irish king. Tell me, Erin, where should your father start, with the total collapse of what little centralized order there is?”
Erin was an intelligent girl; he knew she fully understood his arguments. Yet Mergwin was well aware that all the reasoning in the world could not ease the pain that haunted her spirit.
“So what do I do, Mergwin?” she demanded. “Marry Fennen mac Cormac and become a docile wife and keep turning my head as my country is ravaged?”
You will not marry the son of Cormac, Mergwin thought with certainty, but he didn’t say so. He returned his attention to his roots. “You could do worse.”
“Ahh … you think I could do better!”
He should warn her; he should tell her there was an aura of darkness around the king who would have her. The darkness meant tragedy or pain—but for whom? The young king, or the princess he coveted?
Mergwin didn’t answer and Erin exploded. “I cannot marry and bear children and watch daily as my men go about their business until the longboats or the horses come and my province too is destroyed!”
Mergwin looked up, staring hard into the vehement emerald eyes that met his. “The longboats will come no matter what you do. They will come in your children’s time and in their children’s time—”
“And we just sit like sacrificial lambs!” Erin exclaimed furiously. “And the great provincial kings like my lord Fennen will cry Irish while siding with the slaughterers—”
“It will not be all slaughter,” Mergwin intoned emotionlessly. “Nor, in the end, shall the invader triumph.”
Erin drew in her breath sharply. On the table sat a fine doeskin bag. Within it were Mergwin’s runes—exceptionally fine pieces, stones with beautifully carved glyphs. She grasped the bag and rattled it beneath Mergwin’s nose. “Tell me my fortune, give me an oracle. Cast the runes for me, Mergwin,” she pleaded.
“No!” Mergwin protested sharply.
Erin knelt at his feet, but the gesture was far from humble. She lifted her chin proudly and met his eyes with her implacable green stare. “Then I shall tell you, Mergwin. Last night at the banquet my father’s new poet told the story of Maelsechlainn’s daughter—how she and fifteen other maidens tricked the Norwegian Turgeis. She slew him, Mergwin—a woman rid the Irish of the pagan Turgeis! And when the Vikings took Clonntairth, I saw a woman warrior. She fought alongside her men. That, my dear Druid, is exactly what I intend to do. Perhaps the invaders will ravage our countryside for the decades to come, but I will do something about it, Mergwin. I may die, but the invader will die alongside me! That is a fortune I can live with, Druid!”
“Fool girl!” Mergwin rose to his feet, his eyes blazing, his robes shaking with his fervor. “Enough will die! Would you break the heart of your father? Leave your mother wallowing in tears?”
“Men die in battle. And I am more proven than most! My brothers grow more and more irate because I can best them—”
“Stop!” Mergwin raised his hands, his sleeves floating behind him. He glared at her a moment longer as the silence stretched between them. Then he whirled like a gigantic bird to stare at the
fire, then again to stare at her. “I will read the runes for you, girl, and you will see that such dreams are but foolish imagination.”
She laughed softly. He saw the affection and manipulation in her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Mergwin!” she exclaimed. She lifted her hands and grinned. Though she was hard, bright, and determined, Mergwin smiled in return for she was also very much a lady. She spoke against marriage, but there was a brilliance to her eyes and an understated sensuality to her well-formed body that spoke of great underlying passion. When she loved, Mergwin thought, she will do so with all the fervor she now fed to her dreams of vengeance.
“I hope,” he muttered, “that the runes show you respectably married, mother of a score of children, dutifully following the will of father and husband.”
Moments later they sat across from one another at the table. Darkness had come fast to the copse within the trees, the only light coming from the fire and the one precious candle. Mergwin laid a linen cloth over the table, then cast the stones upon it, glyphs downward. “You will touch three,” he ordered Erin.
She did so decisively. Mergwin turned over the first stone. Thurisaz. The Gateway stone. Erin should be standing still, viewing the world about her carefully, not impetuously rushing about.
Without a word he turned the second stone. Hegalez. The stone of great disaster and upheaval, a stone of the gods. Something coming of destiny, something man could not control, like a massive wave of the ocean … like the endless tide of the invaders.
Still silent, Mergwin turned the third stone. The rune was blank.
Erin, watching the old Druid’s eyes becoming narrow and clouded, felt a nervousness creeping through her and edgily prompted him. “Mergwin! Tell me! Tell me what it is that you see!”
He did not wish to speak of what he saw. The blank rune was the unknowable. To the Vikings, it was Odin’s rune. It could be death; it could be a beginning, a rebirth. Following Hegalez, the stone marked vast and dangerous obstacles looming before her. She must accept the change that was coming. If she did so, her life could be long and, in time, he believed she would find happiness. But the pathway before that happiness seemed laden with danger.
He closed his eyes in deep concentration, his fingers caressing the coolness of the stones and absorbing their symbols. He saw her clothed in mail as she had threatened and sensed the agony of the punishment that would come to her because of her armor. The punishment was caused by a man, but the man was not Fennen mac Cormac. He was a golden man. Light shone around him. He was powerful; he was dangerous. Yet his aura was not of evil, but of determined strength. The runes seemed to whisper that he was of the land and that the pathways of his life were irrevocably interwoven with those of Erin mac Aed.
Within his mind, Mergwin heard the howling of a wolf. A standard bearing the animal was raised high … a Viking standard. Mergwin began to shake. It was not the usual reading of the runes; he had touched upon a destiny that was of the earth, eternally consequential to the land of Eire.
“Mergwin!” Erin demanded.
His eyes snapped open. “Hush, Erin of Aed!” he snapped with wide, fever-eyed irritation. “I see exactly what should be seen for the daughter of Aed. You will grow old, you will bear many children. Your sons will people the land.”
“You lie to me, Druid!” Erin accused reproachfully.
Mergwin rose from the table, his robes flowing about him. He left the runes as they were with feigned disinterest. “I do not lie, daughter of Aed. And I am a tired and hungry old man who would have my supper and my bed.” Irritably he returned to the table and dropped the stones back into their doeskin bag.
Erin hesitated a moment and then smiled. Mergwin did sound like a crotchety old man, but she loved him dearly. She stood and straightened her robe and followed him to the fire. She reached on tiptoe to massage his shoulders as she often did for her father. “Tired old man, eh?” she demanded with a light tinkle of laughter. “You will not be old, Mergwin, when you have outlived all the trees of the forest! But come, this stew you have simmered all day smells delicious! We shall eat and I will tell you all the gossip that floats about Tara and then you shall tell me more legends of the old days and we shall sleep!”
Erin lifted the cover from the pot and carefully ladled out two portions. “Oh, there is fine wine from the province of Alsace in my saddlebags! I bought it myself when the peddler brought silks to Mother. We shall get a little tipsy as we talk, Mergwin!”
Mergwin brought his wooden bowl of stew to the table and glanced wearily at his beautiful charge. “I will not be so tipsy, Erin, as for you to manage to bring to my lips words I do not intend to say.”
Her eyes went very dark for a moment. She was still and straight and proud as she lifted her chin to him. “I have no plan to connive you, Druid,” she said, her tone steady and dignified.
She set her food upon the table across from him and moved to the door so that she might go to the horse shed and retrieve the wine. She hesitated, then turned back to him, her words soft but vehement. “You see, Druid, I care not what your stones say. I shall forge my own destiny.”
CHAPTER
3
With his hands upon his hips, he stood beside the gnarled ash, and in the twilight of the day he created a stunning silhouette. His mantle of red, emblazoned with the wolf’s head, blew about his magnificent body, his tendrils of sun-blond hair swept back across his forehead.
His eyes held a cast of indigo as he beheld Carlingford Lough below him. The Danish camps could be seen across the banks. Thousands were gathered there that night for the battle that would begin at dawn.
Olaf shook a chill from his body. The Danish raiders were talented and clever men. The very chain mail that he and some of the Irish chieftains wore was the result of the Danes’ ingenuity, and that cunning would be what he would be fighting come morning. There was so much more there than most men, Norse or Dane, realized. He, a prince of Norway, sought more than battle and plunder. Even as a child, sitting through the frigid nights at the feet of the storytellers, he had dreamed of Eire. As a younger son, he would not inherit his father’s kingship. His destiny was his own to make. He thought of his uncle Turgeis, who had once held most of this emerald isle beneath his thumb. From the banks of the Liffey, to Dubhlain, Turgeis had stretched out his conquering hand. Olaf felt he even knew his uncle’s weakness. Turgeis had been determined to create a pagan empire—but the Irish were a people not willing to give up their own god.
I would conquer and then learn to coexist, Olaf thought. He cared not which god he worshipped. In his mind he saw a great new race, created of the raw strength and architectural talents of the Viking—and of the great social laws and learning of the Irish, which held them together against all force.
He sighed. Foolish thoughts for a warrior with a feeling of doom. He was conqueror of nothing at the moment. He was but a warrior-prince, as many other generals who would lead the Norse into battle come the dawn. Yes, tonight his thoughts were foolish. He had taken many towns; he had given riches to himself and to his men. But Eire was still a battlefield, and he shrewdly felt that no terror by the sea would ever fully quell the Irish. Coexistence …
The Norseman who becomes Irish is the man who will survive, he thought with, a strange poignancy. He shrugged, impatient with his own thoughts. He was the son of a king—minus a kingdom, and he craved to be a king.
There was a touch upon his shoulder. He did not spring about or reach for his sword. He knew the touch. He placed his hand over the hand that lay on his mantle, slowly drawing her around until she faced him. His sweet Grenilde. So tall a woman, she could almost meet his eyes. So courageous that she blazoned into battle like a man. So uniquely beautiful that she held his heart and soul.
Now she raised a golden brow at him and taunted, “Would you not come to bed, my Wolf? I would hate to see you falling off your horse due to lack of sleep come the morn.”
He laughed and drew her tight as he teased, “Do you ask that I
sleep, my lady barbarian? Or have you other thoughts in mind?”
Her laughter in return was like a bubbling brook. It amazed him still how many things she could be. He had found her leading another group of Vikings in a raid that coincided with one of his own. When the village was taken they had faced one another. Squared off, they had stared into one another’s eyes, and their swords had fallen to their sides with their laughter. Ever since, they had ridden together, lovers and adventurers alike. She had known other men, she was not of royal blood, yet while others married princesses and kept them in spoils at home, he had made her his hearth-wife, finding that other women paled in comparison to her beauty and spirit.
She had taken away his desire to rape the innocents he discovered in his plunder. A screaming woman held no lure for him, not when this creature of the gods came to him to please him, to cry her pleasure at his touch. He could not keep his men from demanding the women who were a part of their spoils, but in his raids he had demanded certain rules—and because of them, they now had warm, living bodies to do their bidding. Several of his warriors had held dear to their Irish maidens, making of them wives rather than slaves.
He touched his lips tenderly to Grenilde’s. Her mouth opened sweetly to him, then as their tongues began a silken duel, the desire in him rose. He broke from her, seeing that he had pressed the soft flesh of her partially exposed breasts so hard against his mail that he had left marks. “Come,” he murmured, “to bed.”
In the seclusion of their tent she set to removing his mantle, mail, girdle, then tunic and rough leather leggings. Her pleasure with her task was evident and stirred his blood even further. The throbbing within him rose unbearably.
When he stood naked before her she stepped back as she had countless times before, her eyes caressing his warrior’s body. Her tongue touched her lower lip and her breathing became raspy. She stepped forward, her lips touching upon a battle scar that cut across his bronzed and golden-haired chest. She ran her tongue over his nipples, which stood upon wire-taut muscle. Then she was roughly grabbed, her makeshift tunic torn asunder. Olaf held her for a moment against the beating of his heart, then he dragged her down, unable to bear a moment’s more hesitation. He glared down at her a moment, his eyes hungrily appreciating the blue veins that lay beneath the milk white of her breasts, her hardened nipples that rose with their own desire to be cherished and touched. He met her eyes again, then stared at her mouth, fascinated. Her lips were parted, her tongue wetting them against the rapid force of her breath. Their mouths met thirstily again, and the fever that ensued sent them both seeking the other’s body with hands and lips and teeth. In his ardor he devoured her flesh from head to toe, the whirling that pounded in his head becoming more and more thunderous as he found her woman’s places and elicited strangled cries from her lips, pleas that he make her whole.