Chapter One
Armagh, Erin, the first century AD
A rdahl MacCormac struggled up from the green turf of the training field and stared at the blood on his hands. Quick and clever hands they were, well used to holding a sword or a dirk. Skilled at fashioning a curragh or carving trinkets out of wood to please the children of the clan. Now stained red, slick with the life’s blood of his best friend.
Around him, the field teemed with other warriors working. At the far edge of the field, Chief Fearghal’s war advisor, Dornach, directed half a score of lads tossing spears at wicker men. Across the way, a group at practice with the chariots made a rattling din.
Ardahl looked from his hands to the figure at his feet. Yellow haired, limp, slumped forward with a spreading stain across his tunic.
This could not be. It could not, it could not. By all the holy gods—
Someone shouted at him. With his pulse pounding violently in his ears, Ardahl barely noticed. Such shouting, common here on the practice field, did not penetrate his horror or break the paralysis that gripped him like a hard pair of hands.
“Conall?”
If he called to his friend, Conall would most assuredly get to his feet, give Ardahl that crooked grin of his, the one he’d known from their earliest days together. Prove this was a prank of some sort, the kind Conall loved to play. That the whole of this encounter had been but a prank from beginning to end. A poor sort of jest to be sure, for only moments ago Conall had seemed to be angry with him. So very angry.
He had changed lately, no denying that, had become harsh and all too ready to kindle, quick to pick a quarrel as he had just moments ago while they sparred with one another. Here, where they were supposed to be practicing together to face not one another, but their tribe’s enemies.
“Ardahl!” Someone bellowed his name repeatedly, coming closer and still closer. “What has happened?”
The way such things often seemed to occur among men who trained together, warriors were flocking in. They had a sense for trouble. Disaster, betrayal. Death .
Ardahl turned uncomprehending eyes on the first of those to reach him.
Cathair. It would be him .
If Ardahl had an enemy here in Armagh, this land he so loved, it would be this man. A few years Ardahl’s elder, Cathair considered himself foremost among the young warriors and carried his arrogance just as naturally as his mane of white-blond hair. As assistant to Dornach, he tended to make a habit of denigrating Ardahl’s deeds and making him seem lesser, presumably so he could himself feel greater.
Now Cathair’s broad face held an expression such as Ardahl had never seen. He looked from Conall, hunched over on the ground, to Ardahl and back again rapidly. “What is this? What has happened?” He stopped so fast in the turf beside Ardahl that his deerskin-clad feet skidded, and he blinked at the blood on Ardahl’s hands. “What?”
Ardahl found himself unable to answer. He did not know what had happened.
Cathair bent down and touched Conall gently, turning him onto his back. Everyone favored Conall, even men who would admit to liking no one else. It would be nearly impossible to dislike him, with his cheerful nature and love of nonsense. Even though lately something had been eating at him like a sickness, culminating in—
This .
“I do not know what happened.” Ardahl forced the words through a dry throat. Others were hurrying up now, looks of concern and then disbelief on their faces. They made a circle around the three of them—Ardahl, Cathair, and Conall there on the ground. The warriors stared as if they could not believe their eyes.
Nor, it seemed, could Cathair. He raked Ardahl with a pale blue stare before going down beside Conall in the grass.
“What’s happened?”
What happened? What happened? What—
The query echoed all around. Ardahl, finding himself at the center of a ring of onlookers, also dropped to his knees beside his friend.
“Conall,” he croaked. “Conall, get up. ’Tis not funny, this.”
Cathair’s big hands moved, reached out and touched Conall’s head almost tenderly before searching out the pulse at his neck. When Conall’s fair hair flopped back, revealing a quiet face, Ardahl was certain he was alive. Playing yet at some horrible game.
But the blood. So much blood. And the dagger embedded in Conall’s chest.
For an instant the world blurred around Ardahl, and even though he knelt, he went dizzy. A grim silence now settled around him. These men, warriors all, had seen grievous wounds before.
Perhaps not so grievous as this.
Cathair’s fingers fluttered from Conall’s neck to hover above the hilt of the dagger, which he did not touch. He raised his face and stared into Ardahl’s eyes.
“He is dead.”
“Nay.” Ardahl huffed the word. “It cannot be.”
But the warriors standing around them had heard. A shiver of a whisper did go up then, like a cold wind in the barley.
Cathair, ignoring them, fixed Ardahl with a stern look, the sort he gave his companions when they proved careless on the practice field, or uncertain before a battle.
“How could it be otherwise, wi’ all that blood? Ardahl, is this your dagger in his chest?”
“His. He drew it on me. He began a quarrel—”
“He drew upon you? His closest friend?”
“Aye.”
Conall had many friends, and, aye, Ardahl held that honored place of the dearest. That much, no one could deny.
“I do not believe it.” Ardahl stared again at the blood on his hands. Conall’s blood? Another whisper rippled through the air around him, sounding like an echo of the word.
Believe.
Believe.
Believe .
“Get up. Ardahl, get up.” Suddenly Cathair was on his feet, and Ardahl climbed to meet him, nose to nose. For aye, they were nearly of a height, even if Ardahl did not have Cathair’s girth. Pale blue eyes gazed fiercely into Ardahl’s hazel ones.
“Conall would not draw a weapon on ye. You be closest to him o’ all the men. Tell me what truly happened. I will have to call the chief. The druids.”
Ardahl went hot and cold in turns. He saw no mercy in that stare. A quick look about, as he turned in a circle with his bloodied hands hanging at his sides, showed him none anywhere.
Dornach, their war chief, came bulling up, clearly summoned from the far side of the field. He took in the scene, almost stumbling over his own feet when he saw Conall, now stretched on his back upon the ground.
“What has happened?” Swiftly he turned on Cathair. “Cathair?”
“Conall lies there dead. ’Twas no’ me, but Conall’s best friend who took him down.”
Dornach, a stout and hardened man of middle years with black hair and dark eyes, swayed where he stood. As had Cathair, he bent to touch Conall at the throat before sweeping Ardahl with a look that took in his reddened hands. “I do no’ believe it.”
Nor do I .
“Ardahl,” pronounced Cathair with ponderous scorn, “claims Conall drew the weapon on him.”
“Nay!” Dornach said before bending and touching Conall once more, as if hoping he was mistaken.
“He did, Master Dornach,” Ardahl ground out. “He’s lately been changed. Quarrelsome and angry—”
A high-pitched, keening sound pierced the air. Someone came running, pushing at the barrier of gathered warriors. Her terrible cry preceded her like that of a gull wheeling above the water.
Dornach stepped away. Horror clawed its way up from Ardahl’s belly when he saw Conall’s mother, Beath. Face white as bone, eyes burning blue, she threw herself upon the figure in the grass.
“Nay. Nay! My son, my son, my son!”
The world once more spun around Ardahl. Light and darkness flickered before his eyes. He saw faces, those in the gathered crowd and Beatha MacAert’s, as she lifted it to him, all grief. All pain.
“By all that is holy, I have lost my only son.”
*
Chief Fearghal soon came at a run, his druids following at a more dignified pace in a group of three, their expressions grave. Ardahl had by then gone numb with disbelief and dismay. Had it not been for the blood on his hands and the faint breath of a breeze on his cheek, he would have thought it a dream. Some dark imagining come in the night.
They took him to the chief’s hall, Dornach walking behind him as if he were a prisoner and thence to the chief’s private rooms beyond, where his lady wife stared like all the others before fleeing. Leaving the six of them, the chief, Ardahl, Dornach, and the three priests, alone.
“Tell us what happened.”
The same question over again. Different expressions. The chief’s had turned hard as flint. Dornach’s blank as stone. The three holy men appeared to be reserving judgment, but Ardahl saw no leniency in their eyes.
“I do not know what happened.”
“How can that be? You were there, were ye not?”
Ardahl searched his mind, which contained a jumble of thoughts and images. He shook his head. Even now he had no clear understanding of how Conall came to be dead at his feet.
Dead!
Chief Fearghal looked at Dornach. “What did ye see?”
“Very little. The men were at practice. I was on the far side of the field instructing the younger lads. All seemed well. Then there was a flurry. Cathair cried out—”
“Cathair?” Chief Fearghal interrupted. “He was there?”
“’Tis my understanding he was close by.”
“May I please wipe my hands?” Was that Ardahl’s own voice, sounding faint and far away? “They are covered in blood.”
“That blood is the proof o’ your crime,” said one of the holy men, speaking for the first time. “It stays where it is.”
Ardahl’s stomach heaved over in a slow roll. They believed he had done this terrible thing. To Conall, of all men.
Believe .
“Send for Cathair,” Chief Fearghal snapped. “We will hear what he saw.”
Cathair, who detested Ardahl. Cathair, who would not mind seeing him out of the way, that he might be first among the warriors.
“I did no’ mean to hurt Conall,” he said quickly, knowing he had best say something before Cathair arrived. “I would never harm him. He is my best—”
Was. Was .
The pain of it hit Ardahl then like a crashing wave. He swayed where he stood.
“Stand,” Chief Fearghal ordered him. “Ye will at least ha’ the courage, the decency, for that. Ye will keep to your feet until the truth o’ this is found and a punishment determined.”
Punishment. Was it not enough that Conall must be gone from the world? He who had brought at least half the sunlight to it. The first person Ardahl went to with a trouble or a joke to be shared. The one he stood beside in battle. A touchstone of his life.
But Conall had been different lately. Less confiding. Angry more often. Ardahl had thought it the pressures of training, which had increased. They would face many battles this summer against Chief Fearghal’s rivals to the west. A man like Conall, who refused to show fear, who dared not do so in the chief’s hall for dread of losing face, often demonstrated it in other ways. Not till the knife was in Conall’s hands had Ardahl looked into his eyes and seen the threatening intent.
“Stand there,” Fearghal said, the very voice of command, “and speak your truth.”