Page 4 of For an Exile’s Heart (Ancient Songs #2)

B radana MacCaigh left her stepfather’s roundhouse and went out into the rainy afternoon. Behind her, Kendrick—said stepfather—still argued with her mam, their words becoming so wild and ferocious that Bradana could no longer stay to listen.

What they argued over this time, she could not say. Their relationship was a tempestuous one, and they quarreled over matters as small as what Mam served for dinner, to as big as whom Kendrick had arranged for Bradana to marry.

Not that she intended ever to go through with any marriage. She would be quite willing to die first.

She blundered out with such force that she nearly bumped into her stepbrother, Toren, on his way into the roundhouse.

They both paused, and Bradana rolled her eyes at him. “I would not venture in there, if I were ye.”

He grimaced. Of her two stepbrothers, Toren and Kerr, she liked Toren the better. Kerr had a prickly and devious mind. At least with Toren, one knew fairly well what to expect.

They were nearly of an age, Kendrick having had two small sons when he married Bradana’s mother, who had Bradana, no more than a toddler at the time. Both of them widowed.

Bradana could not remember a time when her mam and Kendrick had not argued. And made up so passionately that it had caused no end of embarrassment to their offspring.

Indeed, embarrassingly—and shockingly—Mam was now great with child. At her age.

“I am wet from head to foot,” Toren pointed out unnecessarily. So he was, his fair head drenched and even his hide boots sodden. “I need dry clothing.”

They all lived here in the great roundhouse that dominated the stretch of coast facing the Erin Sea.

“By the gods! Where ha’ ye been?”

“On the shore. And I ha’ news for Father. One o’ the lads there thought he saw sails coming in. ’Tis raining so hard, no one else can catch sight o’ them.”

Bradana’s heart fell. “No’ that awful drip o’ a cousin coming back?” Daerg MacMurtray was not, in truth, her blood cousin, but cousin to her two stepbrothers and nephew to Kendrick. He’d come to try to talk Kendrick out of his lands but had been woefully unequal to the task.

The first emissary Gawen MacMurtray had sent from Erin—his older son—Baen, had not been so bad. At least he’d had a bit of pride and backbone, and had not been ill-looking.

Not that Bradana ever noticed such about any man.

“I hope to all the gods not,” Toren growled.

“Who else could it be?”

Toren shrugged. “Might be fishers. Or invaders.” His mud-colored eyes met hers. “No need to think aught else. Now, let me by.”

“I am no’ holding ye.” She stepped aside.

He brushed past her and was gone. She could still hear the echoes of raised voices behind her. Her parents’ anger made her—well, angry in turn. Could they not strive to get hold of their emotions? Just as the rest of them had to do.

She looked out at the gray world. It did not merely rain. Water crashed down from the sky as if the sea itself had moved inland on the arms of low clouds.

How anyone could see a boat out there in such weather, she could not imagine. Surely the lad, whomever he was, had been mistaken. She did not want to go down over the rocks to the shingle on the shore to see. Already she was so wet, the chill reached her bones.

Early summer in Alba. One day sodden, the next so beautiful it made her heart ache.

She decided to go and visit her friend, Maeve. Maeve was used to Bradana turning up when she could not tolerate remaining at home. Often they would go off into the hills, a ready escape. Not on a day such as this.

But when Bradana reached Maeve’s hut, safe within the arms of the stone wall Kendrick had built around the outermost part of his settlement, she was not there. She had gone to care for an aged aunt who was unwell. Her mother invited Bradana in to sit by the fire, but she declined.

By the time she returned home, a stream of people came up from the shore, all hurrying toward the roundhouse. All as wet as she.

“What is it?” she asked an older man standing by.

“A new arrival. From Erin.”

By the gods, no.

She followed the runners inside to the great chamber where Kendrick held his meetings and received his people. The settlement had been a mere fingerhold when Kendrick founded it as one of a number of adventurers, mostly second sons, who had come from Erin to claim this place they called Dalriada. A Celtic settlement on the fringe of a new land.

According to Kendrick, he’d had to fight for every bit of it back then. In the years since, he’d come to some agreements with the wild tribes who’d lived here when he arrived. And of late, the settlement had grown, new children being born by the score who were neither of Erin or Alba, but something else.

Bradana had herself been born in Alba, her father being one of those second sons who’d tried to settle farther north. He’d failed and died in the fight. Mam had called upon her fellow Erin chief, Kendrick, to help. He had brought her and Bradana here, and annexed her lands.

Bradana’s own inheritance, those lands should have been. But like everything else in the area, Kendrick had swallowed them up.

He did not gladly give up land.

Kendrick and Mam, as Bradana discovered when she stepped into the great chamber, had ceased their arguing. Mam remained standing, her arms wrapped around the bulk of the child she carried.

Mam, a beautiful woman, was tall and slender, with dark red hair. She had a face Kendrick often said belonged to a goddess. Unfortunately, she had a temper to match.

Bradana had inherited little enough of her beauty, taking strongly after her father by all accounts—he she could not remember. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, with an unfortunately strong nose. Not that she cared whether she could attract any man. Better by far if she did not.

She sometimes wished she could take her harp—for a facility with that instrument was one of the few talents she possessed—and disappear into the wilds of the land. Become a shanachie, a bard, trudging from dun to dun with no roots at all.

As if there could be anything more absurd than a female bard.

She tiptoed in, listening to the news the runners had brought.

A boat had indeed landed on the shore. From what the runners related, that boat was a familiar one, having departed there only days ago.

Bradana moaned inwardly. Had that sad and overly earnest fellow, Daerg, returned so soon?

Kendrick grumbled and rose from his chair. “Is it Daerg come back upon us?” he asked, nearly echoing Bradana’s thoughts.

“Nay, Chief Kendrick.” The runner, a young man named Cullen, shook his head. “Another young man it is, with two attendants. Them, I recognized. The young man is on his way up here now.”

“Eh?”

“Chief Kendrick, the new arrival says his name is Adair MacMurtray. He says he is brother to the one we just saw off.”

“Eh?” Kendrick barked it this time.

“Brother to Master Daerg.”

A terrible, if brief, silence fell.

Kendrick swore low and bitterly. “By all the gods! What will it take to dissuade my Erin relations?”

Bradana’s mother stepped forward. “Gawen MacMurtray has no right to anything we hold here, does he?” When Kendrick did not answer, she added, “Ye said he has no claim.”

“I will walk out and meet this lad. See if I can send him straight awa’ again.”

“But”—Mam hesitated—“there is such a thing as hospitality.”

“Any hospitality we owe was worn out by the last two visitors. By Lugh’s spear, they are a tiresome lot.”

He marched out. Bradana should not have followed. Indeed, her every instinct bade her clear out of the hall and off in another direction, any direction besides the shore.

Well, perhaps not every instinct, for when Kendrick and the runners left, she did follow.

Curiosity, only.

It still rained hard, making the afternoon noisy with the raindrops striking the ground. From the dun, located above the shore, she could look and see the boat—aye, an all-too-familiar craft with the gray sea heaving beyond.

She had never been to Erin, though she understood it did not lie afar off—not much farther than the islands that clustered like protective arms around the shore, like gray-green beasts sleeping in the deep water.

She was, aye, daughter of a man from Erin yet felt no connection to it, being all a part of this place of high hills and bottomless lochs. Alba was in every breath she drew. In the music she loved and played. In the blood that rushed through her.

This settlement, clinging to the rough stones at the edge of a great, mostly unknown land, might be naught to what their new visitor knew back home. Who could say?

She could see him now through the rain. See a party of three, two of the men trailing the first. Kendrick reached the place where the path led down to the sea and paused. Any folk out and about—few enough in such weather—also paused in their tasks to stare.

The visitor looked tall, slender, and ordinary enough as viewed through the rain. He wore a gray cloak, leggings, and boots, and she could see not much else through the blur of raindrops except a mane of brown hair.

Ordinary enough, aye, only—

At the sight of him, a hum started up in Bradana’s blood. One such as she’d never experienced, unless she could call it akin to what she felt when she was alone up in the hills. When the wind spoke to her, and the ground stirred beneath her feet, and an eagle rose with a rush of power. A feeling of being caught in the grip something much greater than herself.

She must be going mad. For he was but another accursed cousin from Erin. Not even her blood relation.

Yet the world, the very world, seemed to pause and draw a breath. The raindrops froze in the air and glittered, glittered before all resumed crashing down.

The young man approached and Kendrick stepped forward reluctantly to greet him.