Free Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) by Lisa Ann Verge Page B

the clearing, clutching the pup to her chest. “You can never win.”
    “Do you think I became the rí ruirech of Morna by leaving the field of battle?”
    “This is no mortal foe you face.”
    “If it is the gods I must battle, then so be it.” He grasped a handful of her hair and watched it shimmer through his fingers. “I’ll be here when he comes for you. One-on-one combat will determine the winner. And you will be my prize.”
     

     
    Four
     
    The cow lowed as Brigid dragged her hand down the beast’s udder. A thin stream of milk steamed into a bowl. The cow stamped her back hooves, circled her snout in the air, and flicked her ears. Her eyes loomed white.
    “Easy, now,” Brigid murmured, petting the cow’s side as she aimed the last of the milk into the froth. “We’re nearly done.”
    The wooden bowl scraped against the ground as Brigid sli pped it from beneath the cow. Hitching the rim to her waist, she stood up with the bowl at her hip. Wind burrowed under her hair and tinkled the golden balls woven into her plaits, and then the wind gusted again, stronger, as if to set the balls pealing anew.
    She smiled and struck the cow on the rump. The beast bolted down the hill.
    “You’ll find sweet summer grass on the banks of the lough,” Brigid murmured, “but on a day like this, you won’t be able to shake the fairy wind from your nostrils.”
    She headed up t he winding path, the milk eddying in the bowl as if invisible fingers toyed with the foam. The breeze leached from the very womb of the earth and billowed around her knees. Mists curled up from the sod, wound about the furrowed bark of the trees, then dripped like mother’s milk to the turf. High in the oaks, the leaves rustled as if a thousand birds nested deep in the verdure.
    Brigid kept her eyes to the path while the Sight writhed within her like a caged thing. She caught snatches of acrid scents and lost them before she could find the source. Strange, unearthly images glimmered on the path before her, and then dissolved into fog. The dawn had long ceded to the brighter grays of morning, yet the Sídh still roamed thick. This was why she loved Lughnasa—and Beltane, Samhain, and Imbolc. On such days, the walls between the worlds thinned, the veils separating human from inhuman mingled and parted. Brigid sensed the closeness of the Otherworld like the heat of a kiln’s stones.
    A finger of sunlight broke through the haze and buttered the stones of the path. The fairy wind ebbed. Brigid felt the first prickle of certainty the Sight had granted her all morn.
    Conor would visit today. Again.
    The very air she br eathed sizzled through her and set her skin tingling. She stopped in mid-stride as a heat swelled like the tide. Conor once spoke of enchantment, and she began to believe it was true. For she now welcomed her brother’s murderer and her father’s nemesis to her home. She trembled each night with hot and cold, like a woman beset with the ague. She waited each day for the sound of his footfall on the path .. . and found herself beset with a young girl’s dreams.
    She hitched her skirts over her free arm and set her mind back to the path. It was foolish to want what couldn’t be. It was dangerous to tease destiny, for her fate still lay with the fairy-lover of her dreams. Even if Conor somehow bent fate to his bidding and won her as his prize, it was folly to yearn for what he offered her. Though she was highborn, no Ulster over-king would take an outcast to wife, a woman with one cow to her name, when beautiful daughters of rich men preened and pranced for him in Morna. Aye, Conor wanted her—desire raged like a flooded river in his eyes—but she feared it was the piquancy of the chase that lured him here each day. She was another tribe to conquer, another herd of cattle to steal, a woman promised to a formidable opponent, and thus a woman wanted all the more.
    For despite all his bold threats to battle her lover from the Sídh ,