Page 51 of For an Exile’s Heart (Ancient Songs #2)

S omething worried Adair, eating at him like an illness. That much, Bradana could not deny. What it was, he refused to say.

Though he had fought her on leaving Alba, she had expected him to settle once he returned to Erin, this land he loved right down to his bones. And she could see why he loved it so. It was a bonny place of soft rains and hazy distances, the kind to lend peace to a man’s heart.

Adair’s heart did not harbor peace. She could feel that when he came home from the field. When they spoke together. When they walked with Wen and even when they made love, a time they were so surely joined, his every thought nearly became her own.

Still, he held what troubled him from her.

His brother, Daerg, had gone off back to Alba at his father’s bidding. Was it that which ate at Adair? He felt much guilt about the way things had gone when he was there. He felt guilt over abandoning Grandfather and for stealing her, as his elder brother, Baen, put it.

Did he regret bringing her back here to Erin with him?

She did not think so when he kissed her. Could not believe it when he was inside her. Yet doubt haunted her even as trouble flitted in his eyes.

She came to like Baen less and less. She’d had little to do with the man when he came to Alba. He’d been naught but an interloper there, of whom everyone wanted shed.

Now he appeared to be amassing a measure of power and making his opinions known—to be expected in a future chief. He did not hold back from sneering at Adair. And just what he thought of her, Bradana could only guess.

She had taken to cutting the man dead when they met. But she did not want to make things worse for Adair by showing her antagonism. They would eventually have to live under Baen’s rule, and if she showed how she disliked him, he could make it very difficult indeed for them.

And their children.

Even after she became certain she carried Adair’s child, she did not tell him. She could not say why, save that he already had enough crowding his head, and she did not know how he would take the news.

He would be glad, surely? Even if his father looked upon the child as just another interloper?

Either way, her child would be born here in a strange land, his or her mother an exile. The very thought made her heart hurt, though she could not tell Adair that, either.

So she gave him what comfort she could. A quiet place to rest when he came home. Long walks with her and Wen. And she played for him on her harp, which seemed to provide him the greatest ease of all.

He would lie upon their bed with his eyes closed while she wove her songs, some of them ancient and some tunes from her own head and heart. He told her that when he listened so to her tunes, he felt as if he could fly. As if, like a bird, he soared out over the ocean and away.

He never said to where he flew, just that her music set him free.

“We are so tied to this earth,” he mused once into her hair, after she’d ceased playing and come to lie in his arms. “Tied to those who came before us and those who will come after. Your music, alanna , has a magic which takes me beyond all that.” And he would drop kisses into the palms of her hands, at both corners of her mouth, her cheeks and forehead. She would dissolve in love for him and vow in her heart that nay, spending her life here in Erin was not too high a price to pay for being with him.

Then came the night he whispered, after she ceased playing, “Perhaps—so I pray to all the gods—our children may inherit your talent. Only imagine if a whole line o’ them became bards or shanachies, down into the future.”

Bradana shifted in his arms. “Ye would like that?”

“Och, aye, far better bards than warriors. For what does a warrior deal, save death? A shanachie weaves enchantment.”

“We may find out sooner than ye think. By the next turn o’ the holy wheel into spring, I am thinking.”

“What?” He went very still, and her heart faltered. Aye, perhaps he desired children at some time in the future, but not now.

“I am carrying your child.”

“Are ye certain?”

“I am.” Were he not so distracted by whatever bothered him, he would have noticed she’d missed her monthly more than once.

“Bradana, by the gods!” He kissed her, and in his kiss she felt what he did not say, his love for her and the child they had created between them. He framed her face between his hands and gazed into her eyes. “Are ye well with this?”

“So far, I am well.”

“Why did ye not tell me?”

“Because ye ha’ had enough troubling your mind. Adair, please tell me what bothers ye. There is something.”

“Naught that matters now. This is the best of news.”

And indeed, he lit up with the joy of it, like a man transformed.

Before he left for the training field the next morning, he said, “Ye go off to Caomhán. I want our wee one hearing as much music as possible, mind.”

“I do not suppose he—or she—can do aught but hear it, when I play. Adair, my love… This makes ye happy?”

“Completely so.”

And who was she to quibble about homesickness when she’d raised the spirits of the man she loved?

*

A child. One created between him and Bradana, begotten of their love. For Adair, it changed everything.

Would he not work ceaselessly for his child? Make a place here that might be handed down? Create security and a sense of belonging?

Then why did he keep thinking of Alba?

The place, or memories of it, had indeed begun to haunt him. Only, the memories did not seem like memories; they were too vital and too immediate. A kind of longing would come upon him in the midst of the day when he sweated on the training field. Or when he and Bradana, with Wen, walked together in this place he loved. Suddenly he would see a rough, dark mountain in place of the sweet and familiar stretch of hillside. He dreamed of Alba—almost believed he was there surrounded by her forests. And she whispered to him in the movement of the wind.

Most beguiling of all, he heard Alba in Bradana’s music, in the tunes she made for him and played in the still of the evening. Those had the power to carry him over the water to that place for which some deep and fundamental part of him yearned.

Was not Erin the land he loved?

Aye, but Alba had a claim on him.

Where and how had it happened? At what point during his sojourn there? When the stag led him out of the forest? When he and Bradana followed every sign granted to them, through the wild?

Or even earlier than that, the first time he’d gazed into Bradana’s eyes?

Whatever the moment, Alba called to him.

He could not admit to that call, especially now that Bradana had settled into life here. When she’d brought him the wondrous news she had. It had been she, after all, who insisted on leaving Alba. She believed they were safer here, and everyone they had left behind was safer for their absence.

How could he admit to her that he wanted to go back? But he did. With fervor that increased with each passing day, he did.

He said nothing of it, kept a cheerful demeanor with the boys he trained during the day, tried to be grateful for the small favors that came to him, and courteous toward his father and Baen.

At night, in his dreams, he roamed Alba’s forests and woke feeling he’d been pierced to the heart.

His old friends, those with whom he’d spent so much time in laughter and games before ever he left Erin, made a few forays into drawing him back among them. But he no longer felt comfortable there. For good or ill, he had changed.

He would be a father by spring. Nothing else mattered. Third son or no, he must make a place here, work as hard as he ever had to establish a standing for those who came after him.

On into the future.