The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) by Lisa Ann Verge Page B

swiveled in the mud and set her foot back on the path to the kitchens. “And it explains better than anything else why you stay loyal to him when your other brothers have rebelled. But will it get me home any faster by knowing it?”
    “No. I suppose not.”
    Aye, and it was home where she wanted to be at this moment, instead of in a world where good–hearted, intelligent children grew up into raging, senseless men. Aileen thought of Ma and her sore shoulder, hefting a basket overflowing with seaweed upon her back. She thought of the pile of wool tumbling in the corner of the house, waiting for long winter’s night spinning by the fire. She thought of briny fogs swirling outside the house fragrant with a peat fire, with stew bubbling in the cauldron. She thought of the soft white sea mists pillowing around the island, cutting it off from the rest of the world, from the eyes of outsiders, from warriors and their bloody battles and all the ugliness and pain of this world.
    The homesickness cut through her sharper than the cold mountain drizzle, so sharp and so sudden that she stumbled in the mud. She shot out an arm to clutch a handful of Dafydd’s fur–lined mantle to right herself. She blinked her eyes open to a slate–gray sky, to a horizon lost in the clouds. Thinking of spring with its green shoots and bright sunshine was like thinking of a leaf buffeted farther and farther away by the wind.
    The dogs took advantage of the ebb in Aileen’s pace to leap up and nip the coarsely woven fibers wrapped around the meat.
    “Does the sun never shine in this wretched place?” She hitched Marged’s tunic up out of the mud. “It’s enough to make a woman mad.”
    “Hiraeth.”
    “Is that a curse in your wretched Welsh?”
    “Hiraeth,” he repeated. Dafydd reached over and relieved her of the burden of the package so she could hold up her skirts. “There’s no translation for it in Irish. It means longing. A yearning for your birthplace.”
    She met his eye for one moment too long. Too perceptive, this one. Far too perceptive. The kitchens lay just ahead, a woman’s place, and so she lengthened her stride toward sanctuary.
    He persisted. “It can be a sort of sickness, hiraeth, enough to drive someone mad. I pray you never know the depths of it.”
    “It’s sure I wouldn’t have known it at all if it weren’t for a certain Welshman. And you.”
    “If you look hard enough you’ll see that every man, woman and child here is infected with hiraeth. And has been, since this thing happened to Rhys.”
    The kitchen blasted a strip of light over the muddy paving–stones, and it was here Aileen swiveled and held out her arms for the package. But Dafydd paused with it slung upon his shoulder and stared off to some point beyond the wooden palisades.
    “Five years ago I first noticed it,” he said. “A sharper chill to the winters, a staleness in the air. It’s as if the spirit of the place withdrew and left us all here. Instead of being banished from Eden, Eden has been banished from us.”
    She felt a strange quiver. So it wasn’t her imaginings then, the odd silence of the woods and valleys, the deathly stillness of Arthur’s grave.
    “Rhys would flay me with the sharp side of his tongue if he heard this talk. He has no use for anything he can’t taste, touch, see, hear, or smell.” His half–smile faded. “There are men who’d mark me for a fool for saying this, but I’ve believed that if Rhys heals—then so will we all.”
    Her skirts sifted out of her arms to swish around her legs. The sounds of the kitchen roared behind her—the bubbling of cauldrons and the chatter of women, the crackle of fires and the squeal of turning spits. She knew she should rise up and ask him with scorn in her voice what he was talking about, but she also knew it would all be in vain.
    Dafydd had heard the footsteps in the woods. He’d seen the enemy cower. And he’d understood what he’d seen on that riverbank.
    “You