The Irish Warrior

One almost invisible eyebrow arched up, forming a ladder of small, upside-down crescent moon shapes across the steward’s high, smooth forehead. Then he looked over her shoulder and nodded at someone or something in the shadows behind her.

A huge mastiff, Senna imagined glumly, growling and slathering, waiting for the newest arrival to step wrongly and be thrown to him for dinner. That shouldn’t take long.

A stone stairway disappeared into the gloomy distance behind Pentony’s angular figure. Through the gray miasma of smoke and stale air hovering in the hall, the maid was returning, her slim shoulders pushing through the fog. In truth, the castle was a blurry echo of energy, reverberating in dim, cold pulses.

She shook off a shiver and turned back. “Where will I be meeting with Lord Rardove?” she asked briskly. “I have the account books here.” She indicated a small chest by her feet, which the soldier had carried in.

“Lord Rardove asked that you be shown directly to the mollusk fields.”

She drew back. “To the what?” She’d heard exactly what he said.

“The mollusk fields. The beaches.”

“I know nothing about mollusks. Or their beaches.” Which wasn’t precisely true. Or true at all.

He regarded her somberly. “They’re where the mollusks live.”

“Why ought I visit them?”

Her high-pitched, startled responses finally gave the wraith-steward pause. “We were under the impression you knew something of dyeing, my lady.”

She clutched her fingers to her collar. Another opening closed off. “I am here to discuss a joint venture in wool. I know nothing of dyeing,” she assured him, in what she hoped were firm tones. Convincing tones.

“And yet, your mother—”

“I am nothing like my mother,” she said sharply. “I know nothing of dyers or dye making.” My, she was telling a lot of lies of a sudden.

Pentony’s figure, already freed from excess movement, stilled further. “I will inform my lord of that.”

“Please do,” Senna replied in her haughtiest tone, perfected in dozens—nay, hundreds—of meetings with merchants and shippers and abbots of fair-towns. In general, it was intended to subdue anyone thinking bargaining with a woman meant easy terms. In this case, it hid belly-chilling fear.

Although why made no sense. She’d made no mention of being a dyer. Heaven forbid. Hard to believe anyone even knew that remote history.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with her. This was a business arrangement about wool. It had nothing to do with smelly little shellfish that, if crushed and mixed just so, by a true craftswoman, could create the most astonishing, wondrous shade of indigo—

Nothing whatsoever to do with her.

“Tell Mary”—Pentony’s gaze indicated the trembling maidservant—“or myself of any needs you have.”

With another slight bow, he turned to leave.

“And Lord Rardove…?” she couldn’t help asking, hating the quiver in her voice.

Angular ashen eyes glanced back to her, containing the expected chill. It was the faint glimmer of a genuine smile that surprised her.

“You will no doubt be joyful to hear he is to return soon.”

The enigmatic Pentony left, cricking his neck to pass under the low archway, and Senna let the maid hurry her out a far door. She barely paid attention, instead enjoying a few moments of pointless rumination about Rardove’s apparent proclivities for torture and very thin attendants, and what that might mean for her.

And the unsettling knowledge that someone thought she knew something of dye making.

They reached a small building.

She had her life’s mission, and it was not about getting her skin discolored. It was not about coming in after days spent in a dye hut, sniffing out the trail of some new concoction that would create green the shade of ice, or a new red the hue of hot blood, with hair wild, huge smiles, and hugs and—

Nothing whatsoever to do with her. That was her mother’s mad passion. Not hers. Senna had no passions. She had a business.

“The dye hut, my lady,” the maid said, and swung a door open.