“Enough! Enough for her to be alone when they came.”
And where were ye?Liadan wanted to ask.Off taking your own comfort with your friend. Leaving the hard task to me.
But she could not say that. Flanna was but a child. And it would only widen the rift between them.
So she bit back the words and said instead, “Ye will ha’ to forgive me. We have only each other left. Da, Mam, Conall, all gone.”
Flanna turned on her, face flushed and eyes awash with tears. Folk stared now, the women swiveling where they stood. “I do no’ have to forgive ye.”
“At least come home so we can talk together.”
Lasair’s mother, close by, stepped forward. “Flanna, my dear, mayhap ye should go wi’ your sister. Are there not enough wounds that we should no’ heal those we may?”
Flanna began to tremble. “Mistress MacDragh, If ye no longer want me with ye—”
“I did not say that.” Mistress MacDragh’s gaze met Liadan’s with regret and a measure of understanding. “To be sure, ye are welcome wi’ us. Perhaps in time—”
Liadan did not stay to hear her sister’s further reproaches, or to be pushed further away. Instead she turned and went home, a heaviness on her heart.
Maeve was at the hut and needed but one look at Liadan’s face before sitting her down beside the fire.
“Lass, what has happened?”
Liadan put her head in her hands.
“’Tis never Ardahl?”
“Nay. I ha’ not seen him.”
“Then what?”
“Forgive me. I canna speak of it.”
Silence fell between them, but it was an easy silence, one that let Liadan think and breathe. The hut quieted as Maeve prepared a meal, and some of the tension fled from Liadan’s body.
“Ardahl should be home from the practice field soon,” Maeve remarked softly, at length. “He will be hungry with the working. He always is.”
It struck Liadan that Maeve had, in a curious way, got her lost son back again. But only because their world had shifted so completely that nothing was as it had been.
“Mistress MacCormac”—Liadan lowered her hands from her face—“what has become o’ our lives?”
Maeve made a soft sound in her throat. “Life has been spun on its head, I do not doubt. The floor pulled out from beneath our feet, and the roof open to the sky.”
“I must admit, I canna see my way forward.”
“Nay. Mayhap not now. But ye will.”
“Every touchstone I had is gone.” Should she tell this woman Ardahl had become not so much a touchstone as the rock at the center of her life? That even the wordlovedid not describe what she felt for him?
Neither she nor Ardahl had pledged that one thing to each other,love.
“We ha’ lost much,” Maeve agreed. “But let me tell ye somewhat. I thought the worst day o’ my life had come when I lost Ardahl.” She paused in her work and looked at Liadan. “When he was given to ye and your Mam and taken from me. Now I am with him again. There is always hope. We have lost much, but not hope.”
“Aye, so. I did not ask—did Seona’s babe survive the ordeal?”
A beautiful smile spread across Maeve’s face. “She did. It was, as I said, a hard fight, but Seona has a bonny wee girl at the end.”
Sudden longing pierced Liadan’s heart. Would she ever have a child of her own? Ardahl’s child. It did not seem so.
