The Irish Warrior

“Senna, this ye can’t avoid simply because ye do not wish it to be.”

She shook her head again, but Finian touched her chin and stopped the movement. He held out the book.

“Look.”

Chapter 49

She took the book.

It looked just like the drawings on the sheaves she’d received from an unknown Scottish uncle on her fifteenth birthday, on the occasion of her betrothal.

And then, of course, she’d seen the book itself once, too, in her father’s hand, as he hurried down the stairs one night to join the arguing men.

She turned the pages slowly, recognizing her mother’s familiar hand in both the letters and the sketchings. She turned the pages slowly, then faster and faster. A shiver skimmed over her. The pictures were highly erotic. The formulas, the measurements and alignments, were remarkable. The computations vaguely terrifying.

She forced herself to look up. “What is this?” It was a flat query, like her heart felt right now. Stomped on and flattened.

“That is the secret of the Wishmés. They are weapons. They explode.”

“Oh, dear God.” Slowly realizations settled down on her, like rings on a tree, aging her. “No. My mother did not make weapons.”

Finian was relentless though, pushing past her denial. “She did. She rediscovered the ancient formulas and then she wrote them down. And she did this, too.”

He handed her a child’s tunic. Her fingers slid over it, touching what she could hardly see. It shimmered and almost flickered in his hand. Her heart was hammering in her chest and she had no idea why. “What is that?”

“Perfect camouflage.”

“God save us,” she whispered, touching it. “How?”

“With a certain dye. In a certain weave. On a certain wool.”

Her fingers started shaking. “On my wool.”

“Aye. Yours. Yer mother started the strain, did she not?”

She shook her head and found she couldn’t stop. She just kept shaking it, back and forth. “No. She would not do that. My mother would not make weapons—”

“The explosions the Wishmés produce can bring down a castle, Senna. And that?” He gestured to the fabric. “With that, ye could get inside any castle. Anytime, anywhere. Anyone.”

She stared at the tunic, then briefly touched the edge. “It looks like a child’s tunic,” she said dully.

Finian crouched in front of her and rested his fingertips on the top of her knee, a light, steady touch. “I thought the same. ’Twas for a little girl.” He closed his fingers around her hand. “Would keep her safe as anything.”

“Oh,” she whispered with a watery laugh. “I suspect her coming home might have done that better.” She swallowed and shifted on the small bench. “And Sir Gera—my father?”

“I knew

him as Red.”

She looked at him bleakly. “So did we.”

The rushes under her feet were crunchy. The weight of Finian’s hand on her knee was warm and comforting. “Red is the name he used to call my mother. Mama’s red hair,” she said, and like that, she was swept up by a vivid memory of her parents, so that every sense was awakened.

They’d been swimming in the pond at twilight, when Senna, four years old, was supposed to be abed. Father sitting on the bank, leaning back on his palms, murmuring something. Her mother smiling and lazily making her way over to him, one pale, graceful arm stretched out in the green water, her long red hair streaming out behind. The world had smelled like roses and moss that night as Senna tiptoed out the back gate, and the white moon rose through the willow tree.

She took a deep breath and let the memory go. It floated away. She was back in a strange room, a hard bench beneath her, Finian’s watchful, guarding gaze on her.

He prompted her gently. “Ye said he used to call yer mother Red.”