Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) by Lisa Ann Verge Page A

honor.” A muscle flexed in his cheek. “In my house, you will be my queen.”
    Her heart rose to her throat. His silver gray eyes burned with new intensity.
    “Brigid of the Clan Morna.” He clutched her wrists, where her hands lay flat against his chest “Be my wife.”
    In the sky above, sunlight burst forth from a tiny spot on the edge of the black moon and rushed like water around one half of the disk. Her soul soared high, high, as light as air beneath the wings of a sparrow. With the uttering of those commanding words, the loneliness which had always clung to her melted away, filling the void with joy and hope and sunshine.
    Conor’s wife. The Queen of Morna. No more would she live alone in these woods, dreaming of the impossible. She’d have a strong, mighty husband, she’d live among the people of Conor’s tribe—people who followed the old ways who surely would not fear her. She’d have children.
    Then another th ought came to her—a memory of her father’s tearstained face the day he was forced to banish her and her mother from the clan.
    In her joy, she dared to hope for yet another miracle.
    “Speak, woman.” Conor’s fingers tightened around her wrists. “Speak, or I’ll kiss the yes out of you.”
    She tugged her wrists from his grip and stepped back from him. “Tonight, in the sacred circle of oaks, by the light of the Lughnasa fires, I will become your wife.”
    “I won’t be waiting for fires, lass —”
    “I’m the daughter of a king, and I will be a queen,” she said, skittering back. “Will you have no ceremony to the joining, and all your people wondering about it?”
    “There’ll be enough ceremony,” he murmured, seizing her and pulling her flush against him, “after the bedding.”
    She stopped his kiss with her finger, and then lifted her lashes to meet the hunger in his eyes. “Before we marry in the old way, you must go back to Morna. It is the custom. You must ask for my father’s blessing upon this union.”
    “Your father is my subject.”
    “ I know the patience will choke you, mo rún .” But this is a chance I cannot forfeit, a chance for my father to take me back without shame. She traced his lower lip, and her fingertip trembled.
    “ Please do this one last thing for me.”
     
     

     
    Five
     
    The bellow of bagpipes shook the rafters of Conor’s newly built mead hall. Golden ale splattered on the reeds as drunken warriors stumbled up to dance. The red-faced pipers elbowed flat their bulging leather bags, their fingers flying over the crude pipe-holes, while all around them men jostled and drank and played dice on the paving stones, and sweaty bondswomen hipped their way through the crowd, bracing platters of roasted boar.
    Tonight, the king would take a queen.
    Behind the woven wooden screens which walled off the king’s living quarters from the rest of the hall, Conor sank his teeth into the champion’s portion of the boar and tore off a greasy shank of meat. Attendants hovered, fastening his leather belt studded with garnets and strapping on his gold arm-bands. A bondswoman teetered on a bench behind him, yanking a stag’s-horn comb through his wet hair. On the third snag, Conor released a roar which sent her scrambling to the ground.
    “Enough.” He tossed the haunch toward a platter, sending platter, haunch, and all skidding across the paving stones . “Out, all of you!”
    Aidan sprawled across the mountain of pelts on Conor’s pallet, brooding with a horn of ale braced on his belly. “What’s all this murdering noise about?”
    “My wife will think I’m a woman,” Conor said, jerking his hands through his damp hair, “with all this primping and preening.”
    “A wee bit of the marriage shakes, have you? Not a horn of ale ago you were grinning like a wolf and announcing your marriage to all who’d hear. Has the fairy magic worn off already?”
    Conor tugged at the laces at his throat. “You’d like that, I’m