The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series) Read Online Free Page A

blue brightness of one eye that he’d squinted open. She forced a smile onto her lips. “I won’t.”
    She w aited until he closed his eyes. She waited until he turned his head into the crook of his arm. Still she waited, staring down at those broad shoulders, the thickness of one thigh hiked up outside his cloak, memorizing the color of his hair, the slope of his back, the smell of him, and the hundred thousand impressions of an unforgettable night.
    Then s he swiveled one heel on the grass. She headed through the fencing of trees as hot tears blinded her. When she’d walked far enough away, she yanked her skirts into her fists and began to run.
    At least, she thought, her eyes burning, the poor fatherless child he’d just put in her womb will have been conceived in joy.
     
     

     
    Two
     
    Garrick kneed his mount out of the forest and into the rolling lands of Birr. The tavern-keeper in the last town had told him that the castle stood just beyond these woods. Garrick paused to peer through the mist still clinging to the valley. All he saw were some bow-backed cattle lowing on the slope above.
    No hint of a castle.
    He frowned . The castle had probably disappeared into thin air, just like that woman from All Hallows’ Eve. He clenched the reins, breathing in the clean air, trying to accustom himself to the silence. He’d scented the magic in this place the minute he’d arrived from the stinking, narrow streets of Wexford to seek his fortune. Amid these mists, how easily a man could be lured into enchantment by a dark-haired beauty on a pagan evening.
    For two days he’d searched for her and no one had ever seen her nor knew her name. She’d sailed off to places unknown like the ships he used to watch in Wexford harbor when he was a boy, leaving him on the docks like some sailor’s forgotten wife. The pilgrim with whom Garrick had broken the fast had dubbed him bewitched. He said that Garrick would have no rest until he rid himself of the memory of her. As if he could forget night-black hair like Assyrian silk, skin the smoothness of country cream, and eyes as gray as mist. As if he could forget her husky, uncertain laughter or the heat of her body moving beneath him under the stars.
    H e would find her. If he had to seek the doors of the Otherworld, he’d find her, as surely as he would eventually find the Castle of Birr.
    Then he would claim both as his own.
    He kicked his mount up the hill on a trail no wider than a cow-path. The flaxen waves of a harvested wheat field came into view, then, in the distance, the blades of a mill. As he reached the height of the hillock, he saw another building. It was a tumbled-down square donjon of stone, planted by a river.
    Passing a few sheep nibbling at the stubble of a field, Garrick spied a young boy sleeping with his hood pulled over his eyes. He called out to him in Irish. The boy started and then, seeing horse and rider, he stumbled to his feet. The stripling’s clothes hung off his bones as he hurried closer.
    “That castle, up ahead,” Garrick asked. “Is it the castle of Birr?”
    “Yes, milord. And the village, too.”
    And a damn sorry sight, it was. The wooden roof was caved in and the stones of the walls looked as green as pond scum. Surely ten years or more had passed since a man had put his back to fixing the surrounding wall. Just outside that barrier, a clutch of huts sagged under dirty thatch.
    Garri ck resisted the urge to laugh. What a fine trick his great English lord of a father had played. In his father’s mind, a son who was nothing but a by-blow from a summer night’s dalliance with an Irish laundress deserved no better than a sorry place like this. But Garrick knew that being lord of the meanest castle was better than digging another man’s turnips. It sure as hell was better than sweating under the casks and bales and boxes on the docks of Wexford, or having his back striped by the snapping end of a cat-o-nine-tails on a merchant ship.