“I do.” She lifted her free hand to his face, rose on her toes to brush her lips to his.
She believed it. Deep down in her belly she carried faith and resolve. And her heart came to accept what she understood as she’d walked with him along the paths and tidy gardens that opened for spring, among the spirits and the legends, into the promise kept by one of hers.
She loved. At last. Loved as she’d always hoped. He was her once in a lifetime. And with him she had to learn patience, and hold only to that faith as well. The faith that he would love as she loved.
She put on her best smile. “What’s next?”
“Well there’s the Ross Abbey. Actually, it’s a friary. Ross Errilly. It’s not far, and you’d probably like to poke about in it.”
“Bring it on.”
She glanced around as they walked to the truck, and knew she’d come back. Maybe to walk the Stations or just stand in the breeze and look out at the fields.
She’d come back, as her blood had come.
But now, as he drove away, she looked forward.
She saw it from the road, the foreboding mass of it, its peaks and tower and rambling walls. Under the thick sky it looked like something out of an old movie where creatures who shuffled in the dark hid and plotted.
She couldn’t wait to get a closer look.
The truck bumped down a skinny track with pretty little houses on one side, laced with gardens with blooms testing the chill. The other side of the track spread with fields loaded with cows and sheep.
Ahead, beyond the tidy and pastoral, loomed the ruins.
“I didn’t study up,” he told her. “But I know it’s old, of course—not as old as the abbey, but old for all that.”
She walked toward it, heard the whistle of the wind through the peaks and jut of stone, and the flapping of wings from birds, the lowing of cattle.
The central tower speared up above the roofless walls.
She stepped inside a doorway, and now her feet crunched on gravel.
Vaults for the dead, or stones for them fixed flat into the ground.
“I think the Brits kicked out the monks, as they were wont, then, astheywere wont, the Cromwellians did the rest and sacked the place. Pillaged and burned.”
“It’s massive.” She stepped through an arch, looking up at the tower and the black birds that circled it.
The air felt heavy—rain to come, she decided. Wind blew through the arched windows, whistled down the narrow curve of stone steps.
“This must’ve been the kitchen.” She didn’t like the way her voice echoed, but moved closer to look down in what seemed to be some sort of dry well. “Stand over there.” She gestured to the ox-roasting fireplace.
He shuffled his feet, gave her a pained look. “I’m not much for pictures.”
“Indulge me. It’s a big fireplace. You’re a big guy.”
She snapped her pictures. “They’d butcher their own meat, grow their own vegetables, mill flour. Keep fish in the well there. The Franciscans.” She wandered out, even at her height ducking under archways, to an open area.
A line of archways, gravestones, grass. “The cloister. Quiet thoughts, robes, and folded hands. They looked so pious, but some had humor, others ambition. Envy, greed, lust, even here.”
“Iona.”
But she moved on, stopped at the base of steps where a Christ figure had been carved in the arch. “Symbols are important. The Christians followed the pagans there, carving and painting their one God as the old ones carved and painted the many. Neither understand that the one is part of the many, the many part of the one.”
Wind fluttered through her hair as she stepped out on a narrow balustrade. Boyle took her arm in a firm grip.
“I died here, or my blood did. It feels the same. Breaking the journey home, too old, too ill to continue on. Some would burn the witch, such is the time, but her power’s gone quiet, and they take her in. She wears the symbol, but they don’t know what it means. The copper horse.”
