He longed to capture it. But life on this particular turn of the wheel did not look to be so kindly or straightforward.
He took himself off for a walk away from the clamor and down to the sea. A glorious morning it was, with the long combers clawing at the shore and the sky out over the islands reaching for eternity.
Much about the settlement had changed since he’d last known it—and he did not speak of his visit here as a harper’s young apprentice. The keep was larger and better fortified. The huts and cottages had more than doubled in number and now stretched away north to where once there had been a Norse encampment. More cottages and farm plots dotted the higher ground where once had been naught but heather and bracken, and a tracery of drystone walls marked the land like jeweled necklets. But the bones of the place—ah, those could not change.
The coast trail still wended away southward—now, indeed, more a road than the rough path it used to be. He followed it, his feet feeling for the familiarity of the ground, past a few more cottages until the land climbed and became wild again.
When he reached the headland he stood and gazed out, his eyes filling with beauty. Och, his heart had ached for this place almost as much as for her. He doubted he could get his fill of looking.
The wind felt stronger up here. It blew his hair and swirled his cloak back from his sides. It blew away the years. Almost, so it came to him, he might stand so in any time. Any life.
He could not but wonder again—what was the meaning of it? Why did it come about that he remembered it all, to the last detail, but she did not?
He was a man who dealt with words, wove them to entertain, please, and beguile. But if the stories he brought her had failed him, he did not know any other ones that might convince her.
Life after life had been hard in the past, had separated, then joined, and ultimately separated them again. It had taken him near thirty years to find her now. Would it be only to lose her once more?
He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting away all that beauty, and saw her face instead. Her face as she looked now.
The wide, pale eyes. The broad forehead where he longed to plant a kiss. The strength of the chin, the proud nose. The ashen hair. How could she fail to know how lovely she was?
He could not walk away from this. He could not, without herremembering.
Know me,he said to her, to the earth and the sky, and opened his eyes again.
The world wavered before his eyes. He saw not the scene he expected but another, in Ireland.
A wide swath of green turf with a river twining through it, silver beneath a serene sky. A familiar place, well known and well loved, and yet—and yet he carried anxiety in his heart.
And he felt—och, had he the words for it? Aching in his bones. Stiffness in his limbs. The burdens of old age.
He looked down at himself. He wore a kilt of plain gray wool, his limbs well wrapped beneath in leggings made of hide. A tunic and cloak, and a belt from which hung a stout long-knife and a leather pouch, into which he thrust a scarred hand. He drew out a fistful of herbs—bright green—he had collected in the hills.
Enough to save her?
He blinked and the scene vanished, replaced by what should be there. MacMurtray’s land, the stretch of shore and the islands. Eternity beyond.
Aye, there were meetings and partings. He needed for the wheel of life to stop turning a wee while.
Long enough for her to know him.
*
In the kitchens,situated in the bowels of the keep, all was confusion. Following breakfast, Katrin found herself trapped there, trying to calm Cook, who was shaken by the advent of the Gallowglass, thinking she would eventually be required to cook for all of them.
Katrin did her best to reassure the woman, for her agitation was contagious and she had all her staff in a dither, the girls and lads who worked for her growing clumsy and dropping things.
“How,” the woman wailed to Katrin, “am I to manage if I need toprovide for so many—so many great soldiers?”
“I tell ye, ye will no’ have to,” Katrin reassured her even as she wrapped the hand of wee Philip the spit boy, who had burned it only moments before, in clean linen. “The Gallowglass will feed themsel’s. I ha’ already arranged for their leader, Master O’Hanlon, to have the supplies they need.”
O’Hanlon. She’d regarded him far differently since their training session. How soon would he be willing to work with her again?
Her whole body hurt after last night’s session, a constant reminder whenever she moved. And Master Finlay was not the only one who had remarked on the grazing to her hand, where she’d accidentally received a bashing.
Master Finlay. Something—something profound lay in his green eyes. When he looked at her…
But nay. That was pure fancy. She barely knew the man. It merely seemed she did, when she listened to his music. Because of all those tales and the intimacies they contained.
