They both paused, and Bradana rolled her eyes at him. “I would not venture in there, if I were ye.”
He grimaced. Of her two stepbrothers, Toren and Kerr, she liked Toren the better. Kerr had a prickly and devious mind. At least with Toren, one knew fairly well what to expect.
They were nearly of an age, Kendrick having had two small sons when he married Bradana’s mother, who had Bradana, no more than a toddler at the time. Both of them widowed.
Bradana could not remember a time when her mam and Kendrick had not argued. And made up so passionately that it had caused no end of embarrassment to their offspring.
Indeed, embarrassingly—and shockingly—Mam was now great with child. At her age.
“I am wet from head to foot,” Toren pointed out unnecessarily. So he was, his fair head drenched and even his hide boots sodden. “I need dry clothing.”
They all lived here in the great roundhouse that dominated the stretch of coast facing the Erin Sea.
“By the gods! Where ha’ ye been?”
“On the shore. And I ha’ news for Father. One o’ the lads there thought he saw sails coming in. ’Tis raining so hard, no one else can catch sight o’ them.”
Bradana’s heart fell. “No’ that awful drip o’ a cousin coming back?” Daerg MacMurtray was not, in truth, her blood cousin, but cousin to her two stepbrothers and nephew to Kendrick. He’d come to try to talk Kendrick out of his lands but had been woefully unequal to the task.
The first emissary Gawen MacMurtray had sent from Erin—his older son—Baen, had not been so bad. At least he’d had a bit of pride and backbone, and had not been ill-looking.
Not that Bradana ever noticed such about any man.
“I hope to all the gods not,” Toren growled.
“Who else could it be?”
Toren shrugged. “Might be fishers. Or invaders.” His mud-colored eyes met hers. “No need to think aught else. Now, let me by.”
“I am no’ holding ye.” She stepped aside.
He brushed past her and was gone. She could still hear the echoes of raised voices behind her. Her parents’ anger made her—well, angry in turn. Could they not strive to get hold of their emotions? Just as the rest of them had to do.
She looked out at the gray world. It did not merely rain. Water crashed down from the sky as if the sea itself had moved inland on the arms of low clouds.
How anyone could see a boat out there in such weather, she could not imagine. Surely the lad, whomever he was, had been mistaken. She did not want to go down over the rocks to the shingle on the shore to see. Already she was so wet, the chill reached her bones.
Early summer in Alba. One day sodden, the next so beautiful it made her heart ache.
She decided to go and visit her friend, Maeve. Maeve was used to Bradana turning up when she could not tolerate remaining at home. Often they would go off into the hills, a ready escape. Not on a day such as this.
But when Bradana reached Maeve’s hut, safe within the arms of the stone wall Kendrick had built around the outermost part of his settlement, she was not there. She had gone to care for an aged aunt who was unwell. Her mother invited Bradana in to sit by the fire, but she declined.
By the time she returned home, a stream of people came up from the shore, all hurrying toward the roundhouse. All as wet as she.
“What is it?” she asked an older man standing by.
“A new arrival. From Erin.”
By the gods, no.
She followed the runners inside to the great chamber where Kendrick held his meetings and received his people. The settlement had been a mere fingerhold when Kendrick founded it as one of a number of adventurers, mostly second sons, who had come from Erin to claim this place they called Dalriada. A Celtic settlement on the fringe of a new land.
According to Kendrick, he’d had to fight for every bit of it back then. In the years since, he’d come to some agreements with the wild tribes who’d lived here when he arrived. And of late, the settlement had grown, new children being born by the score who were neither of Erin or Alba, but something else.
Bradana had herself been born in Alba, her father being one of those second sons who’d tried to settle farther north. He’d failed and died in the fight. Mam had called upon her fellow Erin chief, Kendrick, to help. He had brought her and Bradana here, and annexed her lands.
Bradana’s own inheritance, those lands should have been. But like everything else in the area, Kendrick had swallowed them up.
