Chapter One
Inishmaan, the Aran Islands, Ireland
Aileen let her eyes drift closed. She skimmed her hand just above her mother’s left shoulder, a sensation like passing her fingertips through clotted cream.
“A right fine mess you’ve done of this, Ma.” Aileen dropped her hand. “You should have told me about this sooner.”
“It’s not so bad.” Her mother paused from cutting vegetables and rolled her arm through the stiffness. “It only started hurting this morning.”
“Next you’ll be telling me it wasn’t the seaweed–gathering that got you so tight. Ah”—Aileen arched a brow as her mother opened her mouth to protest—”don’t deny it. It’s no use, not to me.”
“Aileen, my firstborn.” Deirdre arched the same eyebrow that her daughter was arching at her. “Anyone would think you were the mother the way you boss me about. Mind you remember it was I who changed your linens as a babe—”
“Five–and–twenty years ago. No.” Aileen touched her mother’s hand as her mother reached for the knife again. “Leave that be for now. I’ll set my hands upon you. Then we’ll have nothing more to argue about.”
Aileen drifted her fingers closer to her mother’s shoulder. It felt as if she were compressing a bladder full of mead. When she touched the flesh, a ringing sounded in her head. In her mind’s eye she envisioned the threads of sinew drawn overlong and frayed, stretched far beyond their capabilities. It felt as if she strummed her fingers over her brother Niall’s lyre, and the strings gave loose beneath her hand.
Wasn’t it like her mother, proud Deirdre of Inishmaan, to get herself in such a mess? Her mother was well past her fortieth year, and still after every gale Ma heaped her seaweed–basket over the rim, then hefted the whole on her back to drag it up the limestone cliffs. Not a bit of sense in her, and she the mother of four sons and four able daughters, all healthy enough to do the work for her.
But Aileen knew there was no use in scolding. The words would fall silent upon her mother’s ears. And when Aileen’s mind wandered during a healing there was no room in her heart for a sour thought.
It’s a blessing that you have one daughter destined to remain in your house a spinster, Ma, else who would look after you when Da’s not about?
She began the gentle rubbing in earnest, falling into quiet concentration. A bee buzzed in through the open doorway of the hut. It circled the small room with its stone walls stained a mellow brown from years of peat fires, then wound its way upon its own path until it tumbled back into the sea air. The chill of the paving stones seeped through the calfskin of her slippers. The stinging scent of onion, the crisp sweetness of new–dug turnips, and the tartness of fresh greens wafted up from the table.
Her mind drifted away to a late Sunday afternoon. She’d long been in the habit of perching upon the rock–pile fence while all the islanders played games in the field just beyond. Often her cat would come and nestle beside her on the stones warmed by the day’s sun. She would stroke the creature while it purred and arched beneath her hand. Stroking, stroking, stroking, until something tingling collected on the palm of her hand, like the crackling of dry fur shed in autumn–time. She flicked it off into the air, before returning to the stroking until all felt smooth and silky–warm beneath her palm.
“Och, lass. . . .” Her mother sighed. “It’s done, the pain is all gone.”
Aileen blinked as the world rushed in upon her: The muted roar of the waves beyond the cliffs, the shouts and laughter of some children down the road, the sting of peat–smoke and the mist of water bubbling too hot. Her mother was gazing up at her, her hand lying upon Aileen’s own.
“You’ve a fine, fair gift.” Her mother patted her hand. “You’re likely to outshine the skill of your own father someday.”
“Listen to a mother’s pride talking.”
Aileen let her hands slip off her mother’s shoulder. If Aileen ever came to the point of outshining the great Conor of Inishmaan it would be because he’d never set his mind to healing with his hands. Sure, it came to her easily by virtue of her birth, but she was convinced it was something anyone could learn to do if they set their mind to it.
But no one ever set their mind to it. If they did, there would never be any trouble from it at all.
She swiped a tress of hair off the bridge of her nose then strode to the hearth where the cauldron threatened to bubble over. Poking at the fire, she shook off the last of the lethargy which fogged her mind after a healing. “No more gathering seaweed for you this week, Ma. It will take more than a pass of my hands to set that shoulder to right.”
“God gave me two shoulders. I’ll carry my burden on the other.”
Aileen clattered the poker into the basket by the wall and headed toward the door. “For the wife of a doctor, a body would think you’d be a far better patient.”
“Where are you going, child?”
“To fetch your other daughters.” Aileen whirled a cloak around her shoulders “They’re out prancing about in the sunshine with no more care than newborn calves. And here you are, with a sore shoulder and a stew to make before sunset—”
“Let them race about on such a rare sunny day and leave us free of their chatter.” Her mother waved to the vegetables on the table. “You and I have enough hands for this.”
Aileen gave her mother a suspicious look. It was more than a sore shoulder that had her mother wanting company. Ma had had an eye upon her since she came in from the milking, and a nervous eye at that. Aileen knew that look—it made her flush. Wasn’t it a ridiculous thing for a woman of her age to be blushing as if Ma had caught her kissing Sean the son of the fisher again? There was no reason for this sudden embarrassed guilt. It had been a fine long time since any boy had wanted to curl with her into that cavern beyond the southern shore. Then, she’d been a girl of thirteen years and as flat–chested and boyishly hipped as all the others upon the island. But as the years passed and the other girls ripened, she’d remained as stringy and shapeless as a bean.
“It’s been four years,” Aileen said as she slipped the cloak off her shoulders. “Sean the fisher’s son is happily married to that girl from the mainland with the long blond hair. No chance of getting caught with his tongue in my mouth, Ma.”
“Four years, has it been that long? You all grow up before my eyes, like the rye in the fields. Now come, and set to those cabbages. Don’t be giving me that silver–eyed look of yours, daughter. Can’t a mother want a bit of peace and quiet and the company of her oldest child?”
Not when there’s work to do on the thatching, and a whole field of seaweed drying on the grass waiting to be spread over the northern field, and butter to be churned before the setting of the sun.
There was no knowing her mother’s mind, but Aileen had an inkling, considering the weather. A patch of brilliant sunlight stretched over the paving stones to lick the wooden trestles of the table. A sea breeze gusted in through the doorway, flattening her tunic against her shins. No ocean gale muddied the clouds, no morning mist breathed a haze between the island of Inishmaan and the mainland, no sea fog hung a veil across the sight of the salt–stained sails of foreign ships anchored in Galway Bay. Their island home lay naked and vulnerable and dangerously open to the curious. Her mother had never shaken off that fear of outsiders that she’d brought with her to Inishmaan as a bride. But Aileen knew that she and her family were safe here—safe where the good island people knew who and what they all were, and understood.
Then a shadow darkened the room.
“Aye, Ma,” she stuttered, startled at the silhouette looming in the doorway. “We’ve a visitor.”
Unexpected visitors were no surprise at the door to a doctor’s house, but as the man stepped in out of the light, Aileen froze. He was tall and draped in layers of cloth the likes of which she’d only seen upon the backs of the English invaders on the mainland. The cloth was bright in shimmering hues of yellow, like the primroses which clung to the rocks in the springtime.
“This,” he began in awkward Irish, “doctor’s house?”
She didn’t answer, not at once. He wasn’t a mainlander. Though the mainland Irish was a garbled dialect, she could understand it well enough, and this man spoke with an unfamiliar accent. An Englishman, perhaps, but they mostly kept to themselves. And such a finely dressed one as this would surely send a lackey to do his bidding. She knew there were several ships anchored in Galway Bay. No telling where they came from, or who sailed upon them. Any man who asked the mainlanders for a doctor would be told to come here, to the house of Conor of Inishmaan.
Her insides rumbled in unease. A gift and a curse, it was, Da’s skill as a doctor. It brought too much of the world to their door.
The stranger motioned east, in the direction of the path that led to the shore. “Need…doctor,” he said. “Man hurt. . . .”
A briny breeze gusted, skidding a few turnip peels across the table and upending a basket of wool set aside for spinning. Aileen glanced at her mother, expecting her to right the tumble of wool, but her mother stood still, her fingers curled around the cutting–knife, a crease of worry deep on her brow. Then Aileen realized that Ma stared at the stranger as transfixed as herself, without making a move to offer the man hospitality.
Aileen snagged a bladder of honey–mead off the wall and pinched the last oatcake into a bit of linen. “This is the doctor’s house.” She held the offerings out to him. Above the scent of the stew meat bubbling in the pot over the fire, she smelled him, some sweet perfume—exotic and odd on a man.
He glanced at the offerings and took the bladder of mead. He made a shrugging motion with his other sleeve. Aileen looked at his arm and realized that the sleeve hung loose below the level of his wrist.
An awkward moment passed while she stared at the nub where his hand should be. The man lowered the bladder of mead long enough to grant her a forgiving smile.
It was the kindness of that smile that got her. He looked honest enough, clear–eyed and open–faced, with enough humor to understand and accept her moment of awkward surprise. Aileen knew she’d never lose the tightening in her gut whenever she came upon an outsider—too much had happened to her to expect that. But she fancied that she had enough sense to gauge a man’s character by looking into his eyes. How much of a threat to two strong women was a one–handed man?
“My father is off tending the cows in Connemara.” She slipped the crumbled oatcake onto the trestle table. “He won’t be back until nightfall. You say that there’s a man hurt?”
The man nodded over the neck of the bladder. He swung it toward the path to the shore. “Man hurt…bad.”
“Then you’ll have to make do with the doctor’s daughter.”
Aileen reached for her cloak as her mother made an anxious, breathy sound. Aileen mentally told her mother to be calm as she hefted a battered bag full of herbs and linens onto the table. Aileen always took her father’s charges when her father was out. And this stranger hadn’t specifically asked for her, as some of the mainlanders did with a hush in their voice and a shuffle in their gait as if Aileen would turn them into frogs with the strike of a single glance. There was a good chance this stranger had heard Da’s name only, and not the whispered tales of Aileen the Red.
“What’s he going to think of us, Ma?” She spoke to her mother in the thick Inishmaan dialect, so the stranger could not understand. “You didn’t even offer him honey–mead.”
“He’s an outsider.”
“It was you who taught me never to deny hospitality to any man who comes to this door.” Aileen rifled through the bag and counted the linens. “He’s not the first outsider I’ve set to heal, nor will he be the last.”
The man slipped the bladder upon the table and wandered out the door to wait. Aileen lifted a small linen of herbs and sniffed it before she nodded and tucked it back into the bag.
“You’ll be careful, Aileen?” Her mother leaned over and righted the basket of wool. “Your gift…it’s fine, but powerful, child, so powerful.”
“Don’t worry.” It had been a good ten years since Aileen had discovered her faery gift, long enough for her to learn how to hide it well. Long enough to know that if she allowed herself to live always in a state of terror among outsiders, she’d only make herself crazed. “I’m not like the Widdy Peggeen, Ma, foolish enough to dance naked in the surf every sunrise.”
“Och, don’t I know it. I’m full of foolishness today. Your Da has been away on Connemara for too long. Still, you’ll be forty summers, lass, before I’ll stop worrying about you. That’s the burden and the joy of being a mother. You’ll know it someday.”
“Still hunting for grandchildren?” Aileen tugged another bladder of mead off the wall so her mother would not see her face. “Look to your other daughters. I won’t have a man bossing me about and telling me what to do. I’ll live my own life, thank you very much.”
“Life does not always take the path we’ve chosen—”
“You’re sounding as maudlin as old Seamus in his cups.” She tucked the bladder into her bag. “Why should my life be any different? I want it to be so. It shall be so.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if the world turned upon a girl’s whim. What a simple place the world would be then.” Her mother glanced out the door to the expanse of the island, and beyond to the sea, lost for a moment in the horizon beyond the stranger’s shoulders. “But there are greater powers, Aileen, with wills of their own, and there’s no telling how they’ll weave the path of your life.”
That froze Aileen in her own tracks. Ma’s faery–gift was the Sight. It showed in the swirling green gaze her mother always hid from outsiders. It had always been an uncertain magic, its secrets not revealed for the asking. Now Aileen wondered if Ma had had a vision. But when Ma turned her swirling green eyes upon her, her mother did it with the softest of smiles.
“Don’t go listening to me, I’m all about today. Go.” She kissed her daughter’s cheek and nudged her toward the portal. “There’s someone down there in need of your healing.”
“I’ll be back in time to help you with the spinning.”
Aileen shrugged off her mother’s odd mood and set off to follow the stranger’s sure and long–legged pace. It was thatching–time upon the island. Long ropes of braided hay stretched golden across the fields. Below the sheer cliffs, Galway Bay licked the rock with tongues of froth, siphoning up thinning whorls of sea mist. It was indeed a fair, fine day, she thought, looking about her at the rare sight of the sharp horizon, and at the low bed of mist clinging to the shore. She’d long convinced herself that the Heaven in the clouds the priest spoke of must be very like Inishmaan on the morning after a gale.
Aileen filled her lungs with the clean salt–spray as she descended the cliff. On one part of the path, she caught sight of a crescent mark dug into the mud. The faeries had been here this day, she thought, playing ball amid the rocks. When she returned home later, she’d tell Dairine about this. She’d wind a fine yarn of a story around it to get her wild youngest sister to settle before going to bed.
The coarse sand sank beneath her pampooties as they finally reached the shore. Through the shifting sheets of mist, she caught sight of a single boat dragged up close to the cliff face. A man paced beside it.
Her steps faltered. A big man, this, bigger than the one who had fetched her from home. The sea wind slapped his cloak as if he felt no cold and the pale mists swirled around him as if he were an Otherworldly visitor stepping out from between the veils. The man ceased his pacing and stormed toward them with all the force of a charging bull. It was then that she saw the mask, a leather mask tanned night–black, slashing across his face from forehead to jaw, making him look all the more inhuman.
Her throat closed in an uncertain fear.
Her guide gave way to the man, who stopped several paces before her. Eyes the color of blue winter ice scoured her from the shadows of the mask. She stilled the urge to reach up and tuck a sprig of her red hair back into the braid which hung down her back. It would do no good. Her hair never stayed in its bounds, even in the calmest of weather. Still he glared, a harsh, lingering look that made her feel as if he burned the clothes from her body and found her lacking.
Aye, so she was no beauty, and aye, she didn’t look like much of a doctor. She was well used to not being accepted for what she really was. She tilted her chin and returned the look in kind.
As for him—he was a warrior. She’d recognized the sure gait and the arrogant cast of his broad shoulders before she’d even noticed the beaten bronze scabbard of the sword hanging from his belt. The mask, too, spoke of a warrior’s vanity. She’d seen his kind paint themselves up with blue woad and fancy themselves with chain mail and embroidery before they went off to do their killing. A battle he’d waged, no doubt, and killed enough innocents to satisfy his blood–lust for the morning. Now he brought a wounded man here, one of his own, hoping to patch him together so he could fight another useless fight on another bloody day.
She wondered why she was mustering so much hate for a man who had not yet said a single word.
Then he said, “You are Aileen the Red.”
It was a statement, not a question, and he spoke the Irish as purely as any mainlander. Aye, those rumblings of distrust had been right. So he knew her name, and by the look in his eye, he knew the story behind it.
A shiver shook her spine, but she stifled the chill. She jerked her chin toward the one–handed man. “He asked for a doctor. My father couldn’t be here. You’ll have to settle for me.”
“You are the great healer.” His lips curled. “You, a bit of a girl.”
“It’s clear enough you are not the wounded man.”
“You wouldn’t have the strength or the stomach to pluck a bird for dinner—”
“But it’s not dinner I’m making here, is it?” She peered around him and saw no one else. She set her gaze upon the boat pulled up on the shore, thinking the wounded man must be inside. “I’ll see to your man well enough. It’s either me or no one.”
Then I’ll see you off this island. We don’t welcome killers on Inishmaan. She brushed by him, and it was like brushing by a ridge of limestone. She stilled the urge to massage her own bruised shoulder. She would do her healing, masking the true nature of it as she always did, and then she would return to the warmth of her mother’s house, and curse this man and his ilk for their arrogance and their scorn.
The boat was cocked away from her so she could not see the inside until she seized the rim and peered over. Her pack slid off her shoulder, snagging the collar of her tunic. She clutched it to her arm until her knuckles turned white. In the belly of the boat there was nothing but coils of hemp.
She swiveled her heel into the muck. Her one–handed guide was staring at his master with an odd look in his eye. He muttered something in a garbled tongue—a strange language, like Irish but spoken as if through a mouthful of rocks. The warrior ignored him and kept his gaze fixed upon her. His hands curled into fists at his sides.
Fear froze her to the sand. A thousand stories flooded her mind of pirates who seized women from the shores of Connemara, women who were never seen again. She’d heard the tales a hundred thousand times in her youth. As she grew she scoffed at them as stories meant to keep young ones abed. Even as terror gripped her, she scolded herself for her foolishness. What would a pirate want with her? She was thin and awkwardly tall, her plain face, her hair a tern’s nest. Perhaps that was why this warrior stood so silent before her, brooding and fierce, eyeing her figure and wondering if he could find a price in some exotic port for such a shapeless, freckled, bone of a woman.
What a joke it would be upon Aileen the Red, she thought, to be cast back by the pirates in disdain like a rabbit too thin to be worth the work of slaughtering.
Pride rose in her, and she welcomed it to stem the fear. “The tide is coming. Are you to lead me to your wounded, or are we to stand here until this sand is beneath the sea?”
The guide said something again, but the warrior shook his head once. Then he came to her, his boots sure in the sand, his black hair rising above his shoulders by the force of the breeze and floating around a face that could have been carved from the stone of the island.
The rim of the boat dug into her thighs. Such eyes as his had never known the meaning of pity.
He reached behind her to heft up a roll of hemp.
“It’s you or no one, Aileen the Red. So be it.” The first coil of rope scraped her neck. “Say goodbye to Inishmaan.”
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