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Ré nodded again. Beside him, Cormac gave a grunt of approval, for this meant the maid with the bouncing breasts would be freed too.
As they passed under the gates, Aodh added over his shoulder, “And send her up a bath.”
*
KATARINA WATCHED him ride off. The horses seemed to wade through the low-lying mists down the valley, then they began climbing the far side. She watched until they were out of sight.
Aodh’s small hosting contained more soldiers than these hills had seen since Finn MacCumhail’s band of Fianna warriors, and that had been a thousand years ago, and a myth. But Aodh Mac Con’s uprising was far too real.
Queen Elizabeth would be enraged.
Chapter Twenty-One
“MY AODH?”
The majority of Queen Elizabeth’s councilors stared vapidly up at the rafter beams or whichever whitewashed stone was in their direct line of sight. A few others, absent rafters or stones, peered out the nearest window into a swiftly dying sunset as the queen reread the missive from Aodh Mac Con, who had, apparently, turned rebel.
How like an Irishman.
“My Aodh?”
The hollow shock in her voice created a shuffling of slippered feet as the men drew their averted gazes off the walls and windows and looked at each other in silent, furious query: Where in God’s name was Burghley? Only Cecil could manage the queen when she was bent, now that Dudley was dead.
Finally Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, ’tis a small enough thing, a trifling. So an Irishman has turned. It is what Irishmen do. They are savages, after all. ’Tis in the blood—”
“Trifling?”
Mildmay froze mid-word, his lips wrinkled around the effort of not saying what he’d been thinking of saying, and was now most definitely not going to say.
“A trifling that one of my most trusted councilors has forsworn me? That one of my best cap
tains has commandeered a castle on my Irish frontiers and turned it into a rebel stronghold? A trifling that he has aban—”
The queen stopped short. Abandoned me almost rang in the air, but she did not say the words, and no one else ever would. They simply watched their steely queen as she set down Aodh Mac Con’s message and picked up the camellia flower he’d sent with it. A token of his affection. A reminder of times past. He’d always known how to touch her heart.
Ireland had been a simmering pot of rebellion for the past twenty years, embroiling everyone from the queen’s own cousin, the Earl of Ormond, up to the powerful Desmond earl and his brother, down to the man who’d replaced Desmond after he’d been imprisoned, fitzMaurice.
Ireland, quite simply, turned men to rebels.
These rebellions, as well as the threats and reprisals that accompanied them—including land confiscations—had unfortunately created even more fierce opposition amid the Irishry. Indeed, it had incited more uprisings in the south, and agitated a few pebbles loose in the unruly north too, mostly defanged Irish potentiates hoping to reignite their own aspirations.
The most noteworthy of these had been the Rardove clan.
The English barony was named for the region, and the legendary dyes that used to be, thousands of years ago, associated with it. Ruadgh dubh—“roo” and “dove,” the queen had obediently repeated the lyrical words Aodh had taught her—the Irish words for the colors red and black, the deep shades of the legendary Wishmé dyes that had once come out of that wild region.
The reappearance of such a long-forgotten, warlike tribe had been an unsettling blow.
Fortunately, in the end, the rebellions had been put down, and the overly ambitious Rardove aspirant had been beheaded, quite painfully, too, she’d been told—it had taken four blows. Cousin Butler had come to heel, the earl of Desmond had been imprisoned (until he was released to rebel again a few years later), and FitzMaurice had sailed to France to seek Catholic allies to begin another rebellion.
But Aodh…Aodh had come to her.
He’d laid his sword at her feet and pledged himself, with a condition: he wanted his ancestral lands back.
Bold bantam chick. But bantam, nonetheless.
Against the will of her Privy Council, Elizabeth agreed to his proposition, in theory.
“Prove yourself to me,” she’d commanded, flattered and amused—and impressed—by the boldness of this dark-haired Irish boy about to become a man. Rebel man, or one of hers. Best to keep him close to hand, for he had a dauntless spirit.
