The Irish Warrior

“This way, Senna,” he called out softly, turning back the way they’d come.

Stones crunched as she spun. “Back that way? Why?”

“I’ve a mad notion to throw them off our scent.” He rubbed his palm across the back of his neck. “We’ve a long way to go, lass, and I haven’t the time to explain myself

to ye.”

She stepped up beside him with an impatient stride. “Then we walk. Can you not walk and talk at the same time?”

He looked down coolly. “Not so well as you.”

As they hiked quickly back up the creek side, he gave a brief synopsis of their next few days. “We have two rivers to cross—”

“A river?” She sounded deeply shocked.

“Two.”

“Two rivers?” she clarified, as if his meaning had somehow been unclear.

“Then a town, and—”

“Friendly?”

“Hostile.”

“Hostile?”

“Then leagues of open land before we reach safety.”

She walked silently and seemed to be figuring, determining which was the most important thing to focus on just now. “You mean Dublin,” she finally said. “We’re making for Dublin.”

He grunted. No, he did not mean Dublin.

He meant Hutton’s Leap. That was the most important thing right now: getting to the town of Hutton’s Leap before Rardove figured out what the Irish were up to, and went there himself.

The mission had been two pronged from the start. Finian’s task was to probe Rardove’s cunning, as well as take on the hazardous job of providing a distraction while another Irish warrior was sent to Hutton’s Leap to retrieve the dangerous, coveted dye manual that contained the secret of the Wishmés.

Finian now knew that warrior’s head was being sent to The O’Fáil in a box.

No time for grief or rage. Just focus on the mission. Someone had to retrieve that dye manual before it fell into the wrong hands. Rardove’s hands.

Finian was the only one who knew the mission had failed. Therefore it had just become his mission.

Senna, of course, did not know this, as she had no idea they were actually on a mission.

“Is that…is that one of the rivers?” she asked, her words tentative.

A slim, pale finger pointed at the sparse tree cover that separated this tributary from the main rushing river, perhaps forty paces off, as the slip of land they were on slowly narrowed until it became but a diving board into the raging river.

“Aye. That one.”

“And how wide is this riv—what was that?”

A low howl rose up through the dark air, like the nighttime was haunting itself. Another howl came, filling the darkness with its mournful sound. She looked at Finian, her eyes wide and frightened.

“A wolf,” he explained gently.

“We haven’t many of them in England anymore,” she whispered back.