Maire by Linda Windsor Read Free Book Online

buttocks.
    “Give it up, little queen. Surrender your sword and return with your tribe to your home.”
    “Never!” she managed through clenched teeth. The taste of surrender was too vile to consider.
    “I’ll not kill you, Maire.”
    “Then you’ll die yourself.”
    Raising her sword, she lunged at Rowan. His defensive parry felt as though it shattered the bones in her arm. But for a miracle of magic summoned by Brude’s poetry, she’d have lost the weapon altogether as she staggered past her opponent. The magic might last, but the flesh was failing.
    Maire could not help herself. She leaned on her weapon and tried to catch her wind at the far edge of the circle of onlookers. The yard was now aglow with the light of torches, which infected each ragged breath she took with the unsavory taste of pitch. As Rowan warily approached her, she wondered if she could even raise the blade. The cheers of his people drowned out the thunder of blood rushing past her ears, but the contrary quiet of her clansmen was louder.
    Odd, how she’d been prepared for death when she stepped on this foreign soil. They’d have sung about her glorious passing in battle around fires long after she was no more than dust in Gleannmara’s hills. Now her plans were reduced to this! If she failed her people, they would go back empty-handed, back to Morlach’s harsh dominion. She’d hoped at least to fill their coffers with plunder enough to replenish the pastures with cattle. Instead, the bards would preserve this disgrace for eternity. She’d sullied her mother’s memory, disappointed her clan.
    “Was the mighty Maeve downhearted? Tho’ she be too weary to raise her head to see the brutal attack of her enemy, she fell back beyond the sweep of his weapon and met his body with a deadly thrust of her sword. All around, her minions roared…”
    Maire’s battered thoughts became one with the familiar words of Brude’s song. It took her away to a hall filled with boisterous warriors reveling in her mother’s triumphs. Pride nearly bursting from her chest, she was again the young girl watching from the balcony reserved for the women, picturing herself in Maeve’s place, fighting valiantly to the finish. Then it would be her they hoisted on their shoulders and drank to, not her mother.
    “There must be a way to settle this without separating your head from that comely body.”
    Emrys’s voice shattered Maire’s short retreat, bringing her back to the grim presence. Although he offered words of reconciliation, his raised sword belied them. Exhausted and nearly blind from the smoking pitch of the torches, Maire fell back as her glorified mother had once done, escaping the deadly whistling path of his weapon. Summoning all her strength, she thrust her blade upward as the man charged over her and felt the engagement of flesh. Twist as he might, he could not avoid the hungry bite of her steel.
    A scraping of metal collapsing against metal registered as his full weight dropped upon her. Stunned by the breath-robbing assault, Maire struggled to gather her senses beneath the felled man. Something was wrong. She felt the warm flow of his wound seeping beneath the armor at her waist as only blood can crawl, yet her sword lay sandwiched between them, instead of protruding from his back. Somehow its blade had been deflected. There was no room to move, much less use the weapon, pinned as she was by his weight.
    Was she to die and leave her people to Morlach’s dominion after they’d rallied so bravely to her side? Stubbornly, Maire blinked away the acetic glaze spawned by her dismay to meet the gaze of her soon-to-be murderer. At any moment, she’d feel the death crush of his fingers about her neck, and, Maeve help her, she had no strength left to resist.
    “I’ll surrender my sword, little queen, if you give up the notion of taking my head as trophy.”
    What? There was not enough breath left for Maire to ask for confirmation of what her ears