Veil of Time Read Online Free Page B

their land. Inside theneck of his tunic he found the godstone on the string of acorns that the druidess had given him before he departed. It had protected him on his long journey; he hoped it had enough strength left to keep him safe along this last uninhabited stretch.
    The call of an owl muted the subtler sounds; wings fluttered suddenly to his left. A good portent, Sula would say. He had not meant to be away this long, too long since the day he left his daughter in the arms of her grandmother. Already, in his absence, the celebrations for her eighth year had come and gone. Two years since the plague had taken her mother, and now there was talk among the Britons of another round of the pestilence coming up from the Sassenachs in the south. If it spread this far north, he would take his daughter to the people who lived away from Dunadd, in the houses on the lochs, until the danger had passed. Illa was all he had left of Saraid, and he meant to hold on to her.
    Fergus leaned forward into the smell of his horse, ran the coarse strands of her mane between his fingers. Horses were like the druids in a sense, hearing and seeing more than they should. Only a little while now and he would be home—not the home he had shared with Saraid, for he had closed that door two years ago after the body had been burned. He slept now on his mother’s floor, just as the king himself sometimes did, though he had a wife and children and other women enough.
    Like stone and like sand, these two brothers, their father had said. He had been dead since before either Murdoch or Fergus was old enough to take a wife. Ainbcellaig was his name, though the boys went by the name MacBrighde, since their royal line came down through their mother, Brighde. Murdoch was dark and brown-eyed like his father and the line of Scots that had sailed over from Erin two hundred years before he was born. But the mother had Pictish in her line and had passed blue eyes down to the second son, a point of scorn for the proud king, who wanted nothing to do with the Picts who made up half his kingdom.
    “Pale-eyed Pict!” from Murdoch was enough to rouse his brother’s anger and have them rolling in the dirt.
    Still, Fergus had taken his wife from the Picts, and his daughter—rust in hair and light of eyes, long-legged like her mother—was more Pict than Scot, a stark contrast to the dark-eyed pale-skinned children Murdoch spawned. For the Scots came down from Scotta, a dark princess who had sailed across seas to Erin from a land far off to the east. It was she who had brought the sacred stone that those Scots had in turn brought from Erin to this land two hundred years ago. Gaels, the Picts called those sailors from Erin. Strangers.
    Fergus’s horse jolted to a stop just before a branch that hung low in the dark. The mare reared, and it was all Fergus could do to catch her reins and slip off herback. His foot came down hard on the soft moss, making him cry out louder than he should in this place on this night. He pulled his dirk from its halter under his arm.
    Fergus waited and listened. “Sssh.”
    Even the dead from his own people shouldn’t know his whereabouts tonight, in case they tried to haul him back with them. He had sunk his blade into the chest of a Northumbrian, cut the heart still quivering from a dying Sassenach, but he had no defense against the dead; nothing else could make his own heart quiver. While his fingers fumbled again for the godstone against his neck, the horse broke free and bolted.
    All Fergus could do was run, not across the open fields, but weaving between the scrubby hazels, and now he didn’t know if it was the trees or the dead ripping at his hair, blood from the scratches running down his cheek, down his shins, and him panting now, not from the running but from the tight grip on his throat, and surely the ghouls would suck this last drop of life from him. If only he could reach the houses, but his ankle shot pain up the length of his