Free Warrior's Daughter by Holly Bennett Page A

remember the clatter of the chariot seemed so loud in that shadowy world. But then we emerged onto a long bare slope with a little rushing creek at its feet—and there, where the track turned aside to avoid the water, stood the king’s chariot. My mother and Berach kicked their horses forward, no doubt expecting nothing but a broken wheel or similar trouble, and without thinking, my driver followed.
    And there was Deirdriu. She lay sprawled at the foot of a great standing stone, her skull smashed, her silken hair clotted with blood and brains. Her lovely face gone. Conchobor and Eoghan were there. I heard their voices, angry and confused, but I never gave them a glance. My eyes were trapped, stuck like a fly in pine resin, on the terrible sight.
    Conchobor had been taking her to Eoghan’s dun, but Deirdriu had held to her vow. She killed herself, driving her head against the Old Ones’ stone as the chariot flew by.
    I had been chilled already, the wind nipping my fingers and nose as we traveled, but now I shivered and could not stop. But my mother came back to herself then, and back to me. She laid her hand over my eyes and drew me away, against her own chest. She wrapped her arms around me and chafed my hands, and then she pulled me onto her own red mare.
    “Come now, dove. We’ll go home,” she said, and the word sounded so sweet it filled me with longing.
    I will never forget how it looked when we finally emerged from the hummocky north country and looked down on the long slope of the Muirthemne plain. The autumn sun suddenly sailed free of the clouds to light up the patchwork fields, as if the earth were giving up a harvest of jewels. The wind carried just a hint of the sea—the smell of home—and it seemed all the troubles and horror and fear we had had were eased, and I could be a little girl again.

C HAPTER 9
D UN D EALGAN
    My father spent one month in the land of the Sidhe, and then one day he walked in our door as strong and full of life as ever before.
    Emer and I flung ourselves at him, and he laughed and held his arms wide so he could hold us both at once. All that day my mother could not stop looking at him, her eyes shining with the wonder of it. “Not even a scar,” she marveled, stroking her hand along his arm. “Not the tiniest mark.”
    At first it seemed like everything was back to normal. Only slowly did I notice the tension in the silences, the forced quality of the talk, the way my father would seek out solitude and my mother’s unhappiness when he did so.
    Then came a morning when my mother blazed around the house in a white fury, gathering her women all about her and arming each with a knife sharpened to a murderous edge. I could get no hint of what drove her—she snapped at Tullia to keep me at home and they all swept off toward the strand.
    I did think of defying Tullia—she was old, and at eight I could already outrun her—but my mother’s dark rage would not have brooked it. So I waited, in an agony of confusion and anxiety, and when at last I saw my parents making their way home together, and neither one visibly bloody, I hoped that our happiness at Dun Dealgan would finally be restored.
    But it was not. It was only some weeks later, after a visit from Cathbad, that the strange uneasiness in our family melted away.
    I did not understand what had actually happened until long after, when I pried the story from one of my mother’s women. My father had come home, but he could not forget the woman of the Sidhe who had healed him. And Fand loved him still as well. So they arranged to meet on Baile’s Strand, but my mother discovered their rendezvous and was overcome with jealousy.
    Yet when she arrived there and looked on Fand, her heart changed. She saw that Fand’s yearning for my father was as strong as her own, and the rage melted away into sorrow.
    She put down her bright knives, stood before the woman who loved her husband, and she said, “I will give him up to you.”
    But