The Faery Bride (The Celtic Legends Series Book 2) by Lisa Ann Verge Read Free Book Online

water grows cold.” Aileen stood up in the wide–mouthed half–cask and squeezed her hair. Water sluiced down her body and cooled in the autumn drafts sifting in between the ill–mudded walls. “You and the others can get in, now. You all worked so hard filling it up.”
    “Oh, the bath was for you alone. Faith, look at you.” Marged thrust a linen at her and looked unabashedly up and down Aileen’s figure. “Like the leanest of the master’s hounds, all bones and muscle, true, but a woman nonetheless.”
    Heat rushed over Aileen. For all the baths she, her sisters, and her mother shared, never had she stood naked before an outsider. She seized the linen from the woman’s hands only to pause as she felt the fine weave, as soft as butter.
    “This is not for drying.” The words came out with a chatter of her teeth. “Would you get me a fitting piece of cloth? I’m near frozen to death here.”
    “Aren’t you a strange one. Dry yourself, now.” The woman swept the linen around her. “It wouldn’t do for a healer to be catching the ague the moment she steps foot in Wales. I’ll get another linen for your hair, now, just a moment.”
    Aileen wrapped herself in the linen and stepped out of the cask as Marged bustled about, blathering on without taking a breath and rifling through the things she had carried in. Aileen rubbed the fine weave against her skin, thinking all the while what a waste it was to dirty such exquisite linen drying a body that hadn’t been properly washed in all the weeks of the sea voyage. Wasn’t that the way of the wealthy and the powerful, to put all the hard work of some expert spinner and squinty–eyed weaver to waste like this?
    She pressed the soft linen against her face. She wasn’t so weak from a few days’ diet of bread and water not to know something was up and about. Life wasn’t always easy on Inishmaan, and there had been more than one season in her lifetime when she’d felt the pang of hunger. Rhys had much to learn if he thought by sending her a bite of food, a bath, fine linens, and someone who spoke a civilized tongue, that she would then do sorcery for his whims.
    She had a suspicion she knew what those whims were.
    “Here’s another.” Marged snapped out another linen. “Faith, you are a tall one, I’d have to clamber on a cask to get to your hair. You’ll have to do this yourself, unless you’re of a mind to squat in the rushes.”
    “Five–and–twenty years I’ve done well enough without a servant.” She twisted her hair into the cloth and cast her gaze around the room, searching amid the scatter of silks for her wheat–colored tunic. “Will you tell me where my clothes are?”
    “They’re in the washing, of course. My lord brought you something else to wear. Now let me see if I can put my hands upon it, fine stuff, it is.” Marged walked like a cat in a hurry. “A waste it was lying in that chest for so many years. It’s good it’ll see some use. Here it is.”
    Aileen stared at the fine stuff in Marged’s hands, cloth that smelled vaguely of heather. “You’re mocking me.”
    “Now why would I be doing that? Fine clothes, these are, though a bit musty, I’ll admit, for they’ve been in a chest in the master’s room for more years than I care to count, but they should fit you fine enough.”
    “Would you be wearing them?”
    “Faith, I’m too old to be wearing such things. Besides, such richness is not for the likes of me.”
    “Nor me, either. If this is your lord’s idea of kindness, I’m of no mind to accept it.”
    Balancing one linen atop her head and gripping the other over a breast, she tiptoed through the rushes, plopped down on a sack, and curled her legs beneath her.
    So now it’s come to silks, she thought. What would Rhys ap Gruffydd want, seeing her dressed in silks like some fine lady?
    “Are you refusing our hospitality, lass?”
    She avoided Marged’s eye and arranged the edges of the linen around her legs.