He did not gladly give up land.
Kendrick and Mam, as Bradana discovered when she stepped into the great chamber, had ceased their arguing. Mam remained standing, her arms wrapped around the bulk of the child she carried.
Mam, a beautiful woman, was tall and slender, with dark red hair. She had a face Kendrick often said belonged to a goddess. Unfortunately, she had a temper to match.
Bradana had inherited little enough of her beauty, taking strongly after her father by all accounts—he she could not remember. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, with an unfortunately strong nose. Not that she cared whether she could attract any man. Better by far if she did not.
She sometimes wished she could take her harp—for a facility with that instrument was one of the few talents she possessed—and disappear into the wilds of the land. Become a shanachie, a bard, trudging from dun to dun with no roots at all.
As if there could be anything more absurd than a female bard.
She tiptoed in, listening to the news the runners had brought.
A boat had indeed landed on the shore. From what the runners related, that boat was a familiar one, having departed there only days ago.
Bradana moaned inwardly. Had that sad and overly earnest fellow, Daerg, returned so soon?
Kendrick grumbled and rose from his chair. “Is it Daerg come back upon us?” he asked, nearly echoing Bradana’s thoughts.
“Nay, Chief Kendrick.” The runner, a young man named Cullen, shook his head. “Another young man it is, with two attendants. Them, I recognized. The young man is on his way up here now.”
“Eh?”
“Chief Kendrick, the new arrival says his name is Adair MacMurtray. He says he is brother to the one we just saw off.”
“Eh?” Kendrick barked it this time.
“Brother to Master Daerg.”
A terrible, if brief, silence fell.
Kendrick swore low and bitterly. “By all the gods! What will it take to dissuade my Erin relations?”
Bradana’s mother stepped forward. “Gawen MacMurtray has no right to anything we hold here, does he?” When Kendrick did not answer, she added, “Ye said he has no claim.”
“I will walk out and meet this lad. See if I can send him straight awa’ again.”
“But”—Mam hesitated—“there is such a thing as hospitality.”
“Any hospitality we owe was worn out by the last two visitors. By Lugh’s spear, they are a tiresome lot.”
He marched out. Bradana should not have followed. Indeed, her every instinct bade her clear out of the hall and off in another direction, any direction besides the shore.
Well, perhaps not every instinct, for when Kendrick and the runners left, she did follow.
Curiosity, only.
It still rained hard, making the afternoon noisy with the raindrops striking the ground. From the dun, located above the shore, she could look and see the boat—aye, an all-too-familiar craft with the gray sea heaving beyond.
She had never been to Erin, though she understood it did not lie afar off—not much farther than the islands that clustered like protective arms around the shore, like gray-green beasts sleeping in the deep water.
She was, aye, daughter of a man from Erin yet felt no connection to it, being all a part of this place of high hills and bottomless lochs. Alba was in every breath she drew. In the music she loved and played. In the blood that rushed through her.
This settlement, clinging to the rough stones at the edge of a great, mostly unknown land, might be naught to what their new visitor knew back home. Who could say?
She could see him now through the rain. See a party of three, two of the men trailing the first. Kendrick reached the place where the path led down to the sea and paused. Any folk out and about—few enough in such weather—also paused in their tasks to stare.
The visitor looked tall, slender, and ordinary enough as viewed through the rain. He wore a gray cloak, leggings, and boots, and she could see not much else through the blur of raindrops except a mane of brown hair.
