And indeed, he lit up with the joy of it, like a man transformed.
Before he left for the training field the next morning, he said, “Ye go off to Caomhán. I want our wee one hearing as much music as possible, mind.”
“I do not suppose he—or she—can do aught but hear it, when I play. Adair, my love… This makes ye happy?”
“Completely so.”
And who was she to quibble about homesickness when she’d raised the spirits of the man she loved?
*
A child. Onecreated between him and Bradana, begotten of their love. For Adair, it changed everything.
Would he not work ceaselessly for his child? Make a place here that might be handed down? Create security and a sense of belonging?
Then why did he keep thinking of Alba?
The place, or memories of it, had indeed begun to haunt him. Only, the memories did not seem like memories; they were too vital and too immediate. A kind of longing would come upon him in the midst of the day when he sweated on the training field. Or when he and Bradana, with Wen, walked together in this place he loved. Suddenly he would see a rough, dark mountain in place of the sweet and familiar stretch of hillside. He dreamed of Alba—almost believed he was there surrounded by her forests. And she whispered to him in the movement of the wind.
Most beguiling of all, he heard Alba in Bradana’s music, in the tunes she made for him and played in the still of the evening. Those had the power to carry him over the water to that place for which some deep and fundamental part of him yearned.
Was not Erin the land he loved?
Aye, but Alba had a claim on him.
Where and how had it happened? At what point during his sojourn there? When the stag led him out of the forest? When he and Bradana followed every sign granted to them, through the wild?
Or even earlier than that, the first time he’d gazed into Bradana’s eyes?
Whatever the moment, Alba called to him.
He could not admit to that call, especially now that Bradana had settled into life here. When she’d brought him the wondrous news she had. It had been she, after all, who insisted on leaving Alba. She believed they were safer here, and everyone they had left behind was safer for their absence.
How could he admit to her that he wanted to go back? But he did. With fervor that increased with each passing day, he did.
He said nothing of it, kept a cheerful demeanor with the boys he trained during the day, tried to be grateful for the small favors that came to him, and courteous toward his father and Baen.
At night, in his dreams, he roamed Alba’s forests and woke feeling he’d been pierced to the heart.
His old friends, those with whom he’d spent so much time in laughter and games before ever he left Erin, made a few forays into drawing him back among them. But he no longer felt comfortable there. For good or ill, he had changed.
He would be a father by spring. Nothing else mattered. Third son or no, he must make a place here, work as hard as he ever had to establish a standing for those who came after him.
On into the future.
Chapter Fifty-One
Bradana felt welland strong during the days of that summer, as if she’d been born to carry Adair’s child. None of the sickness that had beset her mother in her pregnancy, the weariness or distress. Indeed, as the bairn grew inside her, she seemed to gain in vigor, and Adair told her she shone with beauty.
She wondered often what had befallen her mother and remembered repeatedly her last glimpse of her mam, when everything had broken apart, and she and Adair fled. Had the child been born safely? Did she have a new half-brother or -sister? Had her mother perished?
The two of them had not always got on easily. Mother was a quarrelsome sort of woman, and Bradana herself was strong-willed. But she felt closer to the woman than ever, now.
After Mother had wed Kendrick and they had come south, it was just the two of them, at first. Those days now lingered in Bradana’s mind.
The truth was, she wanted to go home. With a deep and fervent urging, she wanted her child to be born in Alba, where she herself had been born.
But she could not say as much to Adair. He worked so very hard day after day to make a place for himself here. To make a place for them. And had she not been the one to insist they come here, to Erin? For the sake of her grandsire and Morag, and all the others.
