They went inside, and there she found hushed reverence.
“The Cromwellians set fire to the place,” Boyle told her. “You can see from the ruins outside the monastery that the quarters and such fell. But the church stood, and still does. The baptismal area there, they say, is a thousand years old.”
“It’s comforting, isn’t it, to know the things we build can survive. It’s beautiful. The stained glass, the stone.”
The way her footsteps echoed in the quiet only added to the atmosphere.
“You know a lot about it,” she commented. “Did you study up?”
“Didn’t have to. I had an uncle worked here on some of the repairs and improvements.”
“So my blood built it, and yours helped keep it. That’s another connection.”
“True enough. And I’ve had two cousins and a couple of mates married here, so I’ve been around and about it a few times.”
“It’s a good place for a wedding. The continuity, the care, the respect. And the romance—tales of kings and priest hunters, Cromwellians and James Bond.”
He laughed at that, but she only smiled. She felt something here. A kinship, a recognition, and now a kind of knowing.
She’d come here before, she realized, or her blood had come.
To sit, perhaps, in that quiet reverence.
“Candles and flowers, light and scent. And music. Women in pretty dresses and handsome men.” She wandered again, painting it in her mind. “A fretful baby being soothed, a shuffle of feet. Joy, anticipation, and love making a promise. Yes, it’s a good place for a wedding.”
She wanted it for hers, this place of age and contrast and endurance.
She went back to him, took his hand again. “Promises made here would matter, and they’d hold, if the ones making them believed it.”
Back outside she wandered the ruins, brushing her fingers over old stone, moved through the cemetery where the long dead rested.
She took pictures to mark the day and, though he grumbled about it, persuaded Boyle to pose with her as she took a self-portrait with her cell phone.
“I’ll send it to my Nan,” she told him. “She’ll get a kick out of seeing...”
“What is it?”
“I... The light. Do you see it?” She held out the phone to him.
On the screen they posed with her head tipped to his shoulder. She smiled, easy, and Boyle more soberly.
And light, white as candle wax, surrounded them.
“The angle maybe. A flash from the sun.”
“You know it’s not.”
“It’s not, no,” he admitted.
“It’s this place,” she murmured. “Founded by my blood, kept by yours—that’s part of it. It’s a good place, a strong place. A safe one. I think they came here, the three. And others that came from them. Now me. I feel... welcome here. It’s a good light, Boyle. It’s good magick.”
She took his hand, studying the back of it where dark magick had spilled blood.
“Connor said it was clean,” he reminded her.
“Yeah. Light banishes shadows. Meara was right about that.” Still holding his hand, she looked into his eyes. “But like promises made, the light has to believe it.”
“And do you?”
