Chapter One
Armagh, Erin, the first century AD
Ardahl MacCormac struggledup 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’dknown 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.
