The Irish Warrior

“I was only climbing there at the bow…the prow, the…edge,” she said chirpily. “She’s a bit wetter, but none the worse.”

Finian and the old man scowled at her. Then Finian turned to the old man.

“Grandfather,” he murmured, bending his head, and that was the last word she understood, because Finian lapsed into the most evocative, lyrical, deep-throated plumage of language she’d ever heard. Irish. It almost took her breath away. Finian surely did.

Watching his body, so powerful, restrain itself to bend into a pose of respect for an elderly man. Listening to him, whom she knew not at all, transform into some spellbinding creature before her eyes.

Wild, his language was. Wild, he was. Wild, she wanted to be.

Without warning, Finian was moving again, tossing a few heavy bundles onto the boat she’d almost capsized, speaking so she could understand again.

“We’ll take these to Cúil Dubh for ye, grandfather. And ye’ve my thanks.”

The old man stood impassively. He must have been sixty if he was a day, and more fit than men half his age. Compact, sinuous, and suspicious, he did not look happy, but he wasn’t arguing. Finian was moving swiftly, tossing another sack into the craft, muttering for Senna to get on board.

She hesitated. The old man was watching her with a canny regard. His eyes were bluer than the water, his eyebrows as wild grown as the grasses they’d crawled through, and his face was cragged enough for plants to take root. Old curmudgeon. She smiled. She’d once had a curmudgeon in her life, a laughing bear of a grandfather she hadn’t seen since her mother disappeared. Senna liked curmudgeons.

Slowly, the old curmudgeon smiled back.

“And we’re off, Senna,” Finian said lightly. But underneath, he sounded rushed. As if he was worried. As if, at any moment, this old man might turn and start shouting to others. Younger, armed others.

Without thinking, Senna scooped deep in a pouch tied around her neck and lodged between layers of her clothes, and dug out a few coins she’d taken from the trunk under Rardove’s table. She dropped them into the old man’s hand. A few pennies gone from her future, but they were owed.

“My thanks, grandfather,” she whispered, then held a finger to her lips, suggesting silence. She smiled at him over its tip.

His hand closed around the coin, probably sufficient to sustain him and his eight neighbors for a decade. His smile didn’t grow an inch, but slowly, one eyelid came down in the most extravagant, flirtatious wink Senna had ever been the recipient of. She blushed to her hairline and got in the boat.

They floated off, the old man watching them, until the tall grasses swallowed him up and the only thing to be seen was the blue bowl of sky and the long, outstretched wings of a dark, silent cormorant that flew overhead.

Chapter 21

“Ye gave him coin?”

At Finian’s sharp tone, she looked down from the bird and nodded.

He snorted. “Ye bribed him. That’s something ye English like to do.”

She smiled loftily. “And something you Irish like to do is assume you understand the meaning of things. ’Twasn’t a bribe. And if you cannot see that, then I am at a loss for words.”

He snorted again. “That’ll be a rare day in hell.”

“You snort a lot,” she pointed out.

He stared at her. “Lie down.”

“Pardon?”

“An Irishman in an Irish curaigh floating down an Irish river with a sack of skins is unremarkable. Ye, remarkable. Lie down.”

“How am I remarkable?” she asked, already lowering herself.

He just looked at her.

She did insist on disrobing somewhat, rather than lying in wet leather, to be baked like a cod in the sun. He grumbled but she was resolute, and in the end, he relented.

A brief, disagreeable delay ensued, wherein she hitched and yanked at various wet clothes, disrobing down to a thin linen shift. Then she lay down in the bottom of the boat.

The sacks of skins were not down here with her, she realized irritably, although they would have made perfect bedding. But they were perched on one of the benches, sunning themselves. Finian’s sword and bow were down here with her, of course, out of sight but within easy reach. They were also poking her.