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And did.
Now, standing in the stillroom doorway, she breathed deeply through her nose. Pulled her pathetic self together as she scanned the empty room. Every trace of its recent occupant had been erased. Even the scent of Daigh destroyed beneath a new layer of soapy clean. All as if he’d never been. As if he’d only been a very involved and lifelike hallucination.
She tried swallowing past the lump in her throat. Breathing around the tightness in her chest. Rubbing her arms in an attempt to ward off the gooseflesh pebbling her skin. No hallucination—no matter how convincing—would leave her flushed with passion’s afterglow. His embrace had been real. His kiss had been very real.
It was only the snatched glimpses of herself as part of Daigh’s past that held the stuff of delirium. And those, in the reassuring light of day, she chalked up to the overflow of his tumultuous emotions seeping into her mind. Other empathy gone awry. Nothing more.
Trailing back up the passage, she pictured an empty ribbon of long days stretching before her. A lifetime of dawns and dusks where every day was like every other day. Safe. Quiet. Serene.
Devoid of meaning.
Sister Ainnir bent over Sister Moira, listening to her chest.
“How could you simply let him go?” Sabrina demanded.
The elderly priestess faced her with a wrinkled lowering of her brows. Straightened, ushering Sabrina before her back down the row of beds to her tiny office. Closing the door firmly behind her.
“We didn’t let him go. He absconded in the middle of the night,” she answered curtly once they were alone. “After ransacking Ard-siúr’s office. Making off with sacred valuables, and stealing a horse.”
Ard-siúr’s office? Sabrina’s chest collapsed on a swift exhalation. The night she found him there—had he lied to her? Had this been his purpose all along? “I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to believe it. The evidence is indisputable. The man was a common thief who played us all for fools. No doubt his intention all along was to gain freedom enough to move about unwatched. Once our guard was down, he opened the gates to his accomplices in crime.”
“He must not have known what he was doing. Or they forced him. Threatened him somehow.”
Sister Ainnir heaved a derisive snort. “And pigs can fly. No one could force that man to do anything he didn’t want to.”
“I heard there was blood in Ard-siúr’s office. Lots of it. How do you explain that?”
Sister Ainnir’s lips pursed, unmoved by Sabrina’s fervent defense. “A quarrel among thieves. We’ve seen already MacLir’s inexplicable ability to heal from wounds that would kill a normal human—even the most powerful of Other. That alone should have given us more pause than it did.”
“We couldn’t have misjudged him so horribly. Ard-siúr would have seen his intentions. Known him for what he was.”
Sabrina should have.
His tenderness with Sister Clea. The stolen kiss in the night. It couldn’t have been merely a con man’s sly conniving. The polished art of the deceiver. What of his grief? His pain? She’d sensed them both. But if she were being completely honest, she’d also felt an underlying rage that frightened her with its feral intensity.
Had those stolen glimpses hinted at something darker? A corrupt purpose he’d hidden even from the skilled scrying of the bandraoi? Had her childish fantasies blinded her to the warning signs?
“Argue as you will, Sabrina. Even if it’s as you say and Daigh MacLir is wholly innocent, his departure was past due. As sisters of High Danu, we walk a careful line. No hint of our order’s true nature must escape these walls. No suspicions must taint the careful construct we’ve made of our lives. Mr. MacLir threatened that. You know it as well as I. He was a danger, and he brought danger with him. It’s good he left. Now perhaps we can return to normal.” Her pointed stare included Sabrina’s return to normal in that statement.
It was clear she deemed the conversation at an end. Even before she’d finished speaking, she’d begun tidying away the remnants of her work. Returning bottles to their shelves. Checking supplies, marking her tally against an inventory.
“But what about—” Sabrina swallowed her words.
What about me? Her newly emerged, defiant self wanted to shout. Thought better of it.
Already Sister Ainnir watched her with increasing concern. Jane cast her fleeting, worried glances when she thought Sabrina wasn’t looking, and Sister Brigh searched for more reasons to postpone her elevation to priestess. If she exposed her foolish fascination with a man she’d known for scant days, revealed the inner tangle of captured memories and swamping emotions, or told anyone that Daigh’s disappearance pushed against her heart with an ancient and remembered ache, they’d call her mad. And rightly so. All she wanted would be jeopardized. Best to keep quiet. After all, Daigh had left. Slithered away in the night without even a good-bye to mark his leaving. Her life would go back to the way it was before Daigh MacLir had washed up upon their beach.
And that was a good thing.
What she wanted.
Wasn’t it?
“What about what?” Sister Ainnir’s canny eye focused on Sabrina’s forehead like a giant magnifying glass.
Had she been speaking? Sabrina scrambled to clutch the threads of lost conversation. “The . . . um . . . the still-room,” she blurted. “Does it need to be cleaned?” As if she hadn’t smelled the biting stench of lye already. Hadn’t seen for herself the sparse sterility of the tiny space.
