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“I NEED YOUR HELP.”
“Ha.” Rowan’s single, bitter laugh was like a punch. Tadhg knew it was coming; best to get it over with. “Help, is it?”
“Aye,” he said quietly. They stood in the far end of the room, around yet another table, in another miniature hall of illicit booty.
“Now you’re needing help?” Rowan scoffed, his lazy sensuality twisted into anger. “Rose so high you couldn’t even see the rest of us, and now look at you.” He flung out a hand out with a derisive look that took in Tadhg from head to toe. “Dirty as a hog, trailing a woman too fine for the likes of ye, without your precious king, broken in almost every way, on the run.”
Tadhg leaned his spine against the wall, then his head. He closed his eyes, resting where he stood.
“Outlawed, if I heard the tale a’right.”
“That should please you,” he said, eyes still closed. “I am returned to the fold, as it were. Back to being one of you.”
Máel had remained silent but for his opening words in the other room. Tadhg couldn’t see his reaction now, either, but he could feel it, rippling across the room on a river-current of anger.
“Och, but you could never be one of us, could you, Tadhg? You were always too good for that.”
Still pressed to the wall, Tadhg, opened his eyes and stared at ceiling, then turned just his head toward Máel. “I need to find the earl of Huntington.”
Máel’s face shifted and Rowan gave another burst of hard laughter. “The earl, is it? Well, last I looked, he wasn’t frequenting the sewers the likes of us do.”
Tadhg pulled his head off the wall and stared down at the floor. “I never said a ‘sewer,’” he insisted quietly.
Rowan leaned forward. “You might as well have. We were never good enough except to help you live. Drag you off a battlefield, out of the sea. But anything more? Day to day living, that was never—”
Tadhg pushed off the wall. “You call this living?” He gestured at the room and all its costly goods and hangings.
Rowan sat back, grinning. “Aye, that I do. ’Tis a fine life. We have money for every need and any passing whim. We’ve women, the finest clothes, the most excellent drink.”
“And we never. Go. Hungry,” added a cold voice.
Tadhg turned to Máel’s darkly handsome face. “I never go hungry either.”
“Aye, but we never abandoned our people to ensure it.”
“You abandoned honor. You’re a criminal,” he said through gritted teeth. “All this is stolen.”
“Not stolen.” Arrogance and complacency filled his outlaw brother’s voice. “Occasionally people were stolen, then returned home after their families sent a token of their appreciation for the fact that we found them, safe and sound. The rest came by dint of hard work.”
He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. Dark mai
l shimmered dully on his arms; Máel was always armed and ready for battle. “And you look mighty hungry right now, tiarna bó,” he added softly.
Cow Lord.
Tadhg felt the sawed whip of old, deep anger. That had been their name for him, upon a time, the only one of their small band of exiles who was not a rightful lord. He’d been nothing beside these once-great men. And now…now he served a king, and they were still bandits.
All they could have been, and there were still…this.
He shoved the anger down deep. It would not serve here.
Still, he shook from the force of holding himself in check, of not leaping up and smashing Máel’s stubborn head into the hard, expensively tapestried wall behind him.
“Where is Fáelán?” he said tightly. “Where is my brother?”
“I am here.”
He jerked his around to see Fáelán standing in the doorway.
