The Irish Warrior

She nodded. “It became a joke, to call Father that instead. All the Scottish uncles and Mama did so. Father, with his dark locks. What happened to him?” she asked abruptly.

He sat back on his heels, still crouched before her. “Ah, lass. He died.”

She nodded. Of course he’d died. He’d lived a dangerous life, not of dissolution or excess, as she’d thought, but of intrigue and valiant causes, and heartbreak. He was committed to stopping Edward from subsuming his wife’s homeland by simply opening his royal mouth and swallowing. Her father had been committed and in love, even after Mama was dead.

“My parents loved each other,” she said dully. All this time, thinking her mother had abandoned them. Had not loved her father. What a shame.

“He wasn’t alone, Senna,” Finian said, and his quietly spoken words broke through the ether of her memories. “I was with him at the end.”

Of course Finian was with him. Of course he had stayed. “That is good to know,” she said, hearing the unfamiliar catch in her words.

“He spoke of ye, Senna. The last thing he said was about ye. Told me to keep ye safe. Protect ye above all else.”

She bit her lower lip. And what was she to do with that? It was probably sooth. Why would he want her hurt? He had loved her in his own way, she was certain. But what her parents had had, she now realized, encompassed only them.

After her mother’s death, that devotion had gripped her father like an eagle on a fish, with great, curving talons, piercing any attention that wished to wander from this one screaming fact: his wife had been killed.

Of course, she’d been more than wife. Or more than solely a wife. She’d been compatriot, inspiration, spy-lover. How could a child compete with that?

And the one left behind could, she supposed dully, spend the next decades of his life pretending to be something else, letting vengeance and intrigue hold sway, while small children fell off the edge of his particular map, nothing more than sea monsters, while his dead wife, his Jerusalem, was inked at the center of it all.

And how did the sea monsters then decide to care?

“Finian?” she said thickly.

He was still crouched before her, watching her face and waiting. His forearms leaned against the edge of the bench, his palms lightly grasping her hips. One thumb stroked slowly, probably without him even realizing.

“Thank you for not letting my father die alone.”

“Ye’re welcome, lass.”

And that released the tears. She leaned forward until her forehead touched his, trying to make the hard bones of him steady her spinning head. Dimly, she heard the door open, then a set of footsteps draw to a halt, but Finian did not move away. His touch helped, but it didn’t shut down the waterfall of emotions. And with the cascade of tears came images from her mother’s book. They flashed and tumbled through her mind.

As the fragments spun through her thoughts, rotating into position and sinking into her memory, she realized something wasn’t right. Or rather, wasn’t complete.

She pushed back from Finian. “Let me see that manual.”

He handed it over. She flipped through it, to the end. Then back a few pages, then slowly again, forward to the end.

“What is it?” Finian asked, a note of urgency in his voice tamped down but still audible. “What is wrong?”

She looked up. “This is missing pages.”

“How do ye know?”

She held it out. “See, here. ’Tis torn.”

He ran his thick thumb over the faint, worn edge of a softly torn page.

“How much would that matter?” the king asked from the doorway.

She got to her feet and walked over. She flipped to the end and held the manual open between them. “See these numbers? And this grouping of words and symbols? They are ingredients.”

The king looked at her, then Finian. “I thought you said you knew nothing of dyeing.”

She heard Finian get to his feet. She gave a small shrug. “’Tis true. I’ve no notion how I know such a thing. I simply…know.”

“’Tis in the blood, legend says.”