Chapter 29
The jangling of fairy bells, the tinkling of harp strings, and a crooning, sweet voice wove through the warp and weave of Clare’s faintly beating pulse. There was no pain and no pleasure, only being. She glided down from her perch, her wings in perfect harmony and alightedwith grace on the headboard of the bed. She pecked on the wood, denting it, and stared at the figure on the silk-covered pillow.
The gleaming skeleton queen smiled at her with a mouthful of perfect white teeth. Her red-brown hair was luxurious and full, with not a split end or frizz. Smooth, like a river of varnished redwood, flowing with the strong, delineated grain. Even the bones wereshiny and polished, not pitted with age or crumbling to dust.
But then, fairies didn’t age. They spent eternity in the Otherworld, forever young and beautiful. They had immortal spirits, and they drifted between the worlds at will or wisp.
An orchestral strain of strings detangled itself from among the plinking of harps and merged with the smooth hum of voices. The chanting rose,haunting and mesmerizing, reminding her of the nuns in meditation at the abbey.
Was she back in the twelfth century? Waiting for her High King? What was his name? It couldn’t be Bres, for he’d turned out to be a tyrant. No, there was no good man for Brigid. Her sons betrayed her, and her convent was destroyed.
The stories swirled around Clare’s mind. The nuns at the convent tendedthe sacred fires of Brigid nineteen out of twenty days, with the saint herself coming down every twenty days. They kept it going until the twelfth century when…
The music ground to a crashing halt of clashing cymbals. Bloodcurdling screams and howls of pain and anguish flooded her soul. Clare flew down a tunnel of thorns and clawed her way into the abbey.
Flames shot from betweenthe cracks in the wall. The deafening pounding of hoofbeats thundered over the cobblestones. Nuns tore from their rooms, running over the trampled green grass, screaming and half naked.
Raped.
A towering man on a dark-brown horse reared himself against the abbess’s hideout. Clare darted toward the man’s head, intent on pecking out his eyes. He swung his sword. Pain sliced throughone of her wings. A spray of blood blinded her. She grasped desperately and extended her talons, ripping and tearing.
“Feck you, bloody Morrigan!” the man’s deep-throated voice growled. With a heavy swat, he knocked Clare’s feathered body away, sending her spiraling to the ground.
“Caw, caw, caw.”
She crawled on her side, one eye up, and dragged herself with one wing. Thescene unfolded like a movie, and Clare couldn’t even close that one eye had she wanted to.
The traitor of Ireland, Dermot MacMurrough, dragged the abbess from her lair, raped her, and burned down the convent of Brigid. He would later ally himself with Richard “Strongbow” de Clare, giving one of his daughters to marriage to cement the alliance, and set the stage for the eventual Norman invasionand conquest of Ireland by the British under Cromwell.
Clare squawked with pain. Her bones froze and cracked, and her feathers withered. The sound of receding hoofbeats merged with the drumbeat of her inner pulse.
She was snapped back in place, like a paddleball at the end of a rubber band. Her body smacked down, and she groaned, rubbing her eyes.
Clare lifted her head fromthe downy pillow and blinked at the gossamer threads of the golden, crystalline netting. As the dark bedchamber came into focus, she turned her face and screamed.
The skull with its glossy hair and crown faced her. Its blank eye sockets gawped at her like an open cave door.
“Aww!” Clare yelped and scrambled away from the pile of bones. She jerked her head around and lifted her hands,staring at them.
Where had she been, and what happened to Biceps? What about the gunshot? Was she wounded?
She flung aside her bridal veil, patted her body, still clothed in the pearled and beaded wedding gown. No pain, and no blood.
Gingerly, she shifted her legs off the tall bed and dropped her feet to the ghostly white stone floor. Her feet were still encased in the sparklystilettos.
Whatever had happened, she was still a human, in one piece, and trapped in the bedchamber of an ancient queen. In two steps, she marched to the door and pulled on the crystal knob.
It didn’t budge.
She patted the walls for a light switch, but couldn’t locate one. Still, tiny pinpoints of light leaked in from above, and she had to conclude it was the moonlight seepingin. She was in an underground chamber underneath Griffin’s castle. She must have had another one of her living visions, this time, turning into a large raven. Or had that been real?
Clare tiptoed back to the bed and stared at the skeleton. She snuck her fingers toward the hair and touched it. It felt like real human hair, lustrous and fine. Emboldening herself, she touched the bones—smoothand hard. She wasn’t about to examine the dental work. Hadn’t she read in history that people had horrible teeth back in the day?
But this was the skeleton of the purported Brigid—a fairy who never aged.
Clare gasped and covered her face, recoiling from the frightening memories of the rape. The abbess was named Brigid. She was the keeper of Brigid’s eternal flame. The traitor hadextinguished it, and calamity had befallen Ireland.
Maybe there was a do-over. Maybe she was here to defeat the evil Dermot MacMurrough—her grandfather? He’d given his daughter, Aiofe, to Strongbow in marriage. If Clare was supposed to be a descendant of Strongbow…
