The Irish Warrior

“My business cannot manage without me,” she warned.

“Then I suppose ye oughtn’t have come to Eire.”

He thought if she could have stabbed him in the heart just then, she might have. “I came for business,” she explained icily.

“Ye came for money.”

She sputtered, which he suspected was more due to an overwhelming excess of responses, rather than a lack.

He kept his eyes shut and tried to sleep. Tried to recapture the half-resting state of repose that marked his nights and substituted for sleep.

He’d been up for regular reconnaissance throughout the day, and Senna had been awake, too. He knew, because every time he’d risen, her gaze followed him, although her body never moved, rigid as a post kicked to the ground, arms clamped to her sides. She ought to be tired. But just now, she may as well have been pounding on his chest with her fists, for all that her energy had abated.

He finally sighed. “Ye’re like a spring wind, Senna. Ye never stop pushing. We’re not going to go tripping down the king’s highway to Dublin. Ye’re mad to think so.”

“No. I’m mad to have ever believed you.”

“I never said I’d take ye to Dublin.”

“But I asked you to!”

“Och, well, ye ought to have found another guide, then. One more well suited to being ordered about.”

She drew back. “I do not order about.”

He watched as she ripped her gaze away and stared across the small clearing, her hands twisting around each other with great, unrelenting pressure. The edges of her palms turned white from it. She suddenly sat forward, her spine rigidly straight.

“I shall go to Dublin,” she announced imperiously. “At once.”

“Is that so?”

“’Tis.”

“Ye’ll be going alone, then.”

She swallowed but did not shift her gaze away from the no-doubt fascinating profile of a tree trunk. “How much will it cost?”

He gave a short bark of laughter. “What?”

“How much money do you want?”

He sat up slowly. “To take ye to Dublin?”

She gave a clipped nod, still staring away from him. But he stared at her very hard. The back of her hair was starting to glow from the dipping orange sunrays.

“Whatever ye’ve got, Senna, it would not be enough to make me go to Dublin.” He threw himself down again, coiled anger pushing through him. “English,” he muttered. “And their coin.”

She sighed in a resigned way. He felt hope.

“So be it, Finian,” she said in a reasonable, therefore highly suspect, voice. “I understand your reasons for not taking me. I accept them.”

He examined her more closely. She looked exhausted, like she’d been…escaping from a violent, enraged baron. Her eyes looked wide awake and alert, though. Quite alert. A bit too alert. Hectic, in fact.

“What are ye saying?”

“You cannot take me to Dublin, and I cannot traipse about the Irish countryside. I mu

st get home.”