Free Son of the Shadows by Juliet Marillier Page A

true; and I wondered again if my father had been wrong about Eamonn. I tried to see myself as a man might, but it was pretty difficult: too short, Page 28

    too thin, too pale, too quiet. You could say all these things about me. I was, however, not discontented with the face and body I had inherited from my mother. I was happy with what Niamh disparagingly called my small, domestic round. I had no wish for adventures. A farmer would suit me just fine.
    "What are you smiling at?" My sister glared across the room at me. The candle made her shadow huge and menacing on the wall behind her as she sat up, dashing the tears from her eyes. Swollen with weeping as it was, her face was still dazzling in its beauty.
    "Nothing much."
    "How can you smile, Liadan? You don't care at all, do you? How can you imagine I would ever tell you anything? Once you know, Sean knows, and then they all know."
    "That's not fair. Some things I keep from Sean, and him from me."
    "Oh yes?"
    I did not reply, and Niamh lay down again, her face to the wall. When she spoke, it was in a different tone of voice, wobbly and tearful.
    "Liadan?"
    "Mmm?"
    "I'm sorry."
    "For what?"
    "Sorry I said that. Sorry I said you were plain. I didn't mean it."
    I sighed. "It's all right." She had a habit of coming out with hurtful words when she was upset and taking it all back later. Niamh was like an autumn day, all surprises, rain and shine, shadow and brightness. Even when her words were cruel, it was hard to be angry with her for she meant no harm by them. "I'm not looking for a husband anyway," I told her, "so it hardly matters."
    She gave a sniff and drew the blanket over her head, and that was as far as we got.
    The season drew on toward Beltaine, and the work of the farm continued, and Niamh retreated deeper
    Into herself. There were heated words exchanged behind closed doors. The household was quite unlike its usual serf. When at length Eamonn did return, he received the warmest of welcomes, for I think we were all glad of anything to ease the building tension among us. The tale he had to tell was indeed as strange as the rumors had suggested.
    We heard it the night of his arrival as we sat in the hall after supper. Despite the season, it was cold, and
    Aisling and I had helped Janis prepare mulled wine. Ours was a safe household, where all were trusted;
    and so Eamonn told his story openly, for he knew the depth of interest in what had befallen himself and
    Seamus and their fighting force. Of the thirty from Liam's garrison, but twenty-seven had returned.
    Eamonn's own losses had been far greater, as had Seamus Redbeard's. There were women weeping in three households. Nonetheless, Eamonn had returned victorious, though not quite in the way he would have wished. I watched him tell his tale, using a gesture here and there to illustrate a point, a strand of brown hair falling across his brow from time to time, to be pushed back with an automatic sweep of the hand. I thought his face bore more lines than it once had; he carried a heavy responsibility for a man so young. It was no wonder some thought him humorless.
    "You know already," he said, "that we lost more good men than we could well afford on this venture. I
    can assure you that their lives were not lightly thrown away. We deal here with an enemy of quite a different nature from those known to us: the Britons, the Norsemen, the hostile chieftains of Page 29

    our own land.
    Of the one and twenty warriors that perished in my service, not two were slain by the same method."
    There was a murmur around the room.
    "You'll have heard the tales," Eamonn went on. "It may be they spread the tales themselves to increase the fear. But these rumors are founded in fact, as we discovered for ourselves when at last we encountered this enemy." He went on to tell of a northern neighbor with whom a long-running dispute had flared into action, of cattle raided, of retaliatory strikes.
    "He knew the strength of my forces. He would