Page 53 of For an Exile’s Heart (Ancient Songs #2)

T hat voyage seemed like a dream, one that ended as a nightmare. The little boat ferrying everything for which Bradana cared sailed with mystical ease over a smooth sea between the sleeping dragon islands. When they approached her grandfather’s settlement, Alba lay swathed in a bank of mist, her dark land banked like a fire. A place of magic and imaginings.

Not till they passed through that mist to the shore did the truth become apparent. For the mist cloaked even the din of the battle taking place.

She stared in horror, and Adair abandoned his oars to lean over the gunwale of the little boat. Even Wen picked up his head to stare. Bradana felt the blood drain from her head so rapidly, she went dizzy.

Nay. Nay!

Most of the settlement appeared to be aflame. Indeed, the smoke from the fires mingled with the mist to obscure the horrors before their eyes. Even a few of the boats on the shore burned.

Men fought everywhere. In the settlement itself, near to the hall. On the heights. On the shore.

One thought broke through Bradana’s dismay as she took in the terrible scene, her mind flailing. Their departure from this land she loved had spared her grandsire nothing.

Och, by all the blessed gods, where was he? That valiant old man who had been so ill when she left. Did he live or die?

“Mican?” she breathed, and reached to touch Adair, seeking to ground herself. “Are they his men?”

“Aye.” Adair did not move, frozen in his dismay, his eyes narrowed upon the throes of battle high and low.

Bradana knew this man now. She knew his heart. He would plunge into this fight.

But for the moment they hung there in their wee boat like the inhabitants of a far dream, no one upon the shore noticing them, though they floated in clear sight.

Wen gave a whine that seemed to break Adair’s paralysis. He seized the oars tight.

“We cannot land here. ’Twill be certain death.”

He began to pull on the oars. Bradana hung over the side, unable to look away from the settlement as they scuttled past. Her mind would not work right. She half expected Adair to turn them around and row back to Erin.

He did not.

Instead he took them farther up the coast, where he beached the little boat on the stones of the shingle. He and Wen both leaped out, and he dragged the boat ashore.

“Adair—”

They could hear the clamor of it now that their feet had met Alban soil, the terrible screech and cry of attacker and defender.

And suddenly, suddenly Bradana knew what her lover was going to do. She knew that all of their tale, from the moment they’d met to this very instant, had led to the action he would now take.

She seized hold of him and stared into his face. That beloved face she knew so well. Every freckle. Every smile and frown. The eyes that could brim with laughter.

Stark and cool now.

“Ye will stay here, Bradana. Hear me? Stay here where ye be safe till it all goes quiet.”

Till the battle ends , he meant.

“I am coming wi’ ye.”

“Nay.”

“Adair, I am always wi’ ye! Where’er.”

He seized both her arms and shook her gently. “Think o’ the child. Ye must think o’ the child.”

“But—”

“Once it falls quiet, ye must creep close. See whose men are in charge. Right? If they are Mican’s men”—his gaze turned still colder—“I want ye to put back out to sea. Can ye do that? D’ye think ye can make it back to Erin, or down the coast to your stepfather’s holding?”

Because he would be dead. That was what he told her. He went to fight, and he would not quit till he was either victorious or had spent his life.

“I canna lose ye.”

“You are strong, Bradana. Live for our child. I will live on in him.” He kissed her. One kiss, fierce and bright as the flash of light on a war shield. “Ye will stay here. Promise me.”

She wept now, the tears running down. “Aye,” she said, for she could deny him nothing.

He turned to Wen. “Stay wi’ her. Guard.”

And then he ran with all his might, his sword already in his hand. Straight back down the shore into the dark horror that was, in truth, no dream.

Wen whined. Bradana could feel how he wanted to follow this man he loved. That she loved.

They stood, the hound quivering and the woman weeping till Adair disappeared around a curve of the headland.

Then Bradana looked around herself. Naught but the tiny boat, still holding their possessions. The misted land and the gray sea.

The soft voice of Alba beneath it all.

Alba whispered to her in the shush and draw of the waves. In the breath from the land. In her own heartbeat.

Too much to ask her to remain here while life and death raged just out of sight.

But she must think of the child. Adair’s child.

She pressed both hands to her belly, and for an instant prescience poured into her. As if it came from the land itself, from the sea and sky.

If Adair did not survive this battle, his child must live. It was important. The very future depended upon it.

But och, she could not stand here without knowing. Everything inside her longed to find a weapon of her own, to join that battle she could hear, but not see. To fight at her lover’s side. To fight for him.

He wanted her to live for him, instead.

With her hound at her side, she climbed up the rough headland that fronted the shingle and through the gorse and bracken, to see.

*

Adair ran into the smoke, the heat, and the horror of the battle. It felt as if he ran somehow back through time to the past, to other battles when strength took hold inside him and he knew no fear.

He could taste the fear now, though. The uncertainty. He remained connected to Bradana and could feel her there behind him. Naught else about the situation was known—who was winning, who losing. Whether he would be required to die.

If he did, at least he would be leaving a part of himself behind.

It was all a man could do.

He had no shield, and the fight swiftly closed around him. Dead lay everywhere on the shore and in the settlement. Some of them wore Mican’s tartan. Far more, it seemed, Rohracht’s colors.

He met his first two opponents before his feet left the shingle. They came in tandem down the rocky slope that led to the settlement. Mican’s men. The fighting here on this stretch of shore was fierce, as if it had tumbled down from the dun.

Adair felt his mind and his emotions flow into a single channel. Kill or be killed.

He felled Mican’s warriors one, two, without conscious thought. He turned and pelted up the slope toward the dun.

Not a great distance. The settlement was not a large one. It might as well have been half the length of Dalriada, for he had to battle for every step. Here the fighting grew fierce indeed, and the smoke mingled with the mist. Alba breathing fire. Just ahead, he saw men he knew—members of Rohracht’s forces with whom he’d grown friendly before he left. No sign of Rohracht.

How could the old man survive this?

At the door of the hall, half of which, though seared by flame yet stood, raged the thickest of the fighting.

There, so Adair knew on a deep and primal level, he needed to be.

He fought his way to it, his sword shedding blood, flesh, and bone, an extension of his arm. His mind directed it without conscious thought. He did not see Rohracht’s men, what remained of them, falling in behind him as if he were the head of the spear.

But he heard their cries—of surprise those must be, at seeing him there. A roar came from up ahead, and peering through smoke that stung his eyes, he saw one man fighting amid a knot of others for admittance to the hall itself.

Mican.

With a single thought for the woman he loved, Adair dove in.