Princess of Shadows (Hearts in the Highlands #2)

Prologue

Long ago…

She slept, pale as a river pearl, hair black as a raven’s wing, lips drained of warmth. Leaning down, he kissed her and drew back. His heart broke to see her eyelids flutter without awareness.

“Liadan.” He whispered her name, smoothed a hand over her hair. “My wife, listen. It is I, your husband, Aedan mac Brudei. I am here.” Her breathing seemed to quicken.

How little it took to keep her alive. Breathing thin, heartbeat faint but steady.

Each day, when he fed her broth and water, she swallowed even as she slept.

Day and night, he sat with her, his heart, his life, the mother of his infant son, for such long hours that his men came to draw him away, but he came back soon as he could.

Twilight to dawn to sunset and on, he stayed with her, his grief easing a little in the strange serenity of her presence.

Aedan rubbed weary fingers over his eyes, listening to the crackle of the fire in the low stone hearth. The hour was late, but sleep came hard. He took Liadan’s hand and stroked his fingers thoughtfully over the pink scratches covering her forearms.

A wild rose briar had surrounded her that day of battle weeks earlier.

He had carried her from that bed of thorns and blossoms and cared for her.

Yet still she slept, though her wounds were healing.

If her body could renew and breath still flowed through her, life existed in her, and so hope existed in him.

She was gaunt now, a fragile shadow of the vibrant girl he had wed last year, with his child in her belly and a blush upon her cheek. Now he could count the bones in her hand, could set his thumb in the valley along her forearm.

He kissed her fingers and set her hand down on the blanket. Pushing back his long dark hair, he closed his eyes in anguish.

Druid priests and healers had spoken spells over her, used every potion, salve, and charm to save her.

Aedan, a warrior prince of the Dal Riata and trained by Druids, had murmured incantations over her and tipped one infusion after another between her lips.

In the dark of the moon, he had swept his hands over her in magical patterns.

He had even recited the Christian prayers that some said; perhaps that would stir her soul to wake.

But Liadan slept on.

He thought of the magic they had created together—nights of sultry, tender love, days of comfort, laughter, friendship.

He yearned for her touch, longed for her wild, bright spirit.

Even now, exhausted and despairing, his body stirred to remember the way she had been and the dream of what she could be again.

Liadan was part of him, blood, heart, bone, and being. There was torture in sitting here helpless while she drifted further away. He was a warrior, a Druid, a man of strength and secrets. Yet he could not save the woman he loved.

With one finger, he drew a spiral of protection on her brow and murmured once again the charm to guide a lost soul back to its forsaken body.

Journeying upward, come again down

Journeying outward, come again in

No peril shall find thee on hill or in heather

Come again homeward, safe to me.

A frown rippled over her brow as if she heard, as if she struggled to live. Aedan leaned forward. He knew how to tap the life force in a being, like drawing water from a well. He would never give up drawing upon her spirit. She would come back to him. She had to.

“Liadan, hear my voice in the mist,” he whispered. “Come to me, my heart.”

The others had implored him to set Liadan under the stars for a peaceful death. They said his grief bound her to the earth like an iron chain. Let her go, they told him. She will find you again in another realm, and you will be together once more.

But he loved her now, here. She was a lark to his brooding hawk. Liadan would live, he vowed, if he had to reach into the Otherworld himself and pull her soul back with his own hands.

One method remained untried, though Druidic law forbade it. Yet any risk seemed small to him. The enduring magic of the written word, the tool of the Christian priests, was his final resort. A ribbon of words could burn power into a spell like a flame on a wick.

He had been educated by a priest, if not converted, and so he could write spells in ink in his native Gaelic. Those words could act like a hook; sent into eternity, the writings could call back Liadan’s soul from its unmoored wandering.

Rising, he went to a wooden chest to find a piece of parchment. The vellum sheet was filled with neatly inked words, but there was space yet in the margins. It would do.

Aedan mac Brudei took a pot of lampblack ink and the feathery quill stored with it and carried them back to Liadan’s bedside. He began to write.

Come again homeward, safe to me….