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DEIRDRE, Fires of Gleannmara #3

By Linda Windsor

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Alric, still in his travel clothes after riding from his ship straight for his father’s home at the news of his mother’s waning condition, stood at Orlaith’s bedside. The fever that ravaged her body bled her face of color as it bled her body of strength.
“Alric.” Orlaith tried to raise her hand to him, but weakness would not allow it. “Your birthright lies beyond the sea, my son. God has shown it to me.”
“The sea treats me well enough. I’d have nothing I haven’t earned.” And he’d just earned another heavy laden ship bound for the Dalraidi Scots’ coast. It would be a week before his men squandered their share and reported back for another voyage.
Alric held his news and pressed her cold hand between his warm ones, massaging them as if to hold presumptuous death at bay. “Rest now. Save your strength.”
“God will give the strength I need to say what I must.”
Not wishing to upset her, Alric held back his response. Her Christian God had allowed her to be taken from the royal womb of her home in the north. Pampered and loved as she’d been, she was still King Lambert’s property and her son, a bastard prince.
“You are a prince, my son, and your true kingdom will be won by faith, rather than by the sword.”
“Ah, the kingdom of Heaven.”
Alric tried to suppress the bitterness with which he usually responded to what he saw as another sermon coming. For her sake, he hoped she would inherit that kingdom when her last breath was spent. As for him, he held no god in high esteem.
“But God also revealed to me your earthly kingdom.”
The light that shone in Orlaith’s eyes would have shamed the sun. Or was it fever? Still, the mention of an earthly kingdom reached up through his drowning ocean of anger and grief and pricked at Alric’s curiosity.
“Oh?”
“It’s colors are the royal blue of a sky lighted by the moon and its full consort of stars.” She licked her dry, cracked lips to no avail. Death was drawing breath and water from her body by the moment. “And the gold of your hair.”
He leaned closer, allowing her to finger his hair once more as she oft did. He could give her that, even if words of comfort eluded him. Anguish had cut them from his tongue and held them hostage, for his mother was the only truly good thing he knew in this life.
“And the symbol on the cloak I made for you. You will know it by that, my murnait,.”
Beloved. She hadn’t called him that since he was a weanling.
“Always your muirnait,” he assured her softly. It felt as if stones enough to build a wall round his father’s kingdom had been laid upon his chest. There was so much he wanted to thank her for, so much love he needed to declare, but never had he known the right words to do so. The one thing he believed in could not be measured. Nothing could hurt so much and not be real.
“And your earthly kingdom, son, will be won by love. I’ve seen her.”
“You’ve seen her?” This was something different from Orlaith’s Scripture-based prophesy, which was vague on the now and certain only after death.
“Her namesake is sorrow, yet she will bring you great joy. Her chatter will be like birdsong to your heart.”
Alric cleared his throat. “Have you a name?” Why he asked, he didn’t know. Certainly he didn’t believe these feverish mumblings.
Orlaith closed her eyes and took a deep, shaky breath. In a whisper, it escaped her lips. “God be with your, muirnait, until we meet again.” Her chest dropped, ever so slowly, as if death’s unseen hands pushed the last remnant of air from her body. His mother was gone and with her, the only real love he’d ever known.
Alric pressed her lifeless hand to his cheek. The blades of anguish and anger that held his tears at length, shredded the words he spoke into it “This I vow to your memory, maithar, that I will not repeat the crime my father committed against you. She who bears my son will be my lawful wife. I swear it.”
*****

Chapter One
The Irish merchant ship Mell shuddered beneath Deirdre’s feet, its leather riggings clapping overhead like gulls’ wings at the wind’s promise of freedom. It infected the young princess of Gleannmara with a wild longing to shed the trappings of her disciplined, albeit privileged, station, to fly before the wind–-at least in spirit.
But that was something she could not allow to happen. Deirdre gripped the rail. She’d no right to be intoxicated by the unbridled nature surrounding her, when her brother’s life was in peril. The princess of Gleannmara was on a mission on behalf of her ill father, a grievous task that pricked at her pride and her faith.
The shock of the new Northumbrian king’s invasion, the details of the carnage and pillaging of the Irish coast still curdled her stomach. Students at one university, her brother Cairell included, rallied to stop the Saxon dogs, but the aspiring young warriors were no match for the seasoned ones. Now the pride of fine Irish families were captives, bound for the slave markets in Rome, all save Cairell. The brigands held the young prince for ransom–a ransom she was to deliver.
“Sail ho!”
The shout from above drew her attention to an approaching vessel that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Now it was practically upon them, as if conjured from the belly of the sea itself. Its single sail strained toward them, full of the wind their own vessel seemingly lost with the collective gasp of surprise echoing round the deck.
Deirdre stood riveted in horror and disbelief, a word too loathsome to utter coming to mind.
Saxons!

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