Veil of Time by Claire R. McDougall Read Free Book Online

are times when there is no point in putting in the effort, when you just have to step aside and wait for the pain to ebb. This is what Dunadd means to me. It was for this reason I came.
    I don’t tell him about my operation in January, because then I would have to go into the epilepsy. It’s not something I talk about. I take my pills and try to pretend I am not afflicted. My husband only rarely saw a seizure, my children never. It’s not the kind of thing you want the staff at Glasgow University to know about, so you drink the cocktails and stay away from fluorescent light, like a vampire. And now it’s just reflex to sit on it, and no point in baring my soul in any case, as I only have a few months before there will be no more dreams, because that part of my life is going to be fixed.



5
    T alorcan banged on the gates of the fort with the heel of his hand. “Open up now. I have Fergus Mac-Brighde at my right.”
    Echoes of the name rippled back up the hill, and it wasn’t long before a bolt shot back and the men walked through the gate. The torches had been lit up the craggy climb to the edge of the clearing where the royal houses stood, these and the granary, store, and bakehouses beyond. The smell of roasted deer meat from a spit outside the kitchen reminded Fergus that he had eaten little food since the oat bannocks and honey his host had sent with him for his journey. But for now, something more pressing than hunger insisted itself. He looked about for his daughter, Illa.
    He heard her before he saw her. “Father!”
    She came running with a shout into his arms. Fergus knelt to his daughter’s level, although there was barely any need these days.
    “You keep growing,” he said. He ran his hand through the girl’s rust hair and turned back to Talorcan. “She’ll be as tall as that giant Finn M’Coul before she’s done.”
    Looking down at his daughter’s smile, Fergus wondered why he ever looked for his wife among the dead, for surely she was still here among the living. Illa’s hair had grown long, gathered from the front and draped around to the nape of her neck. She looked up at her father with bright sky eyes, more his than her mother’s.
    She slipped her small cold hand into his and tugged him towards the house farthest up the hill below the summit. They could make out Fergus’s mother, Brighde, standing by the curtain at the door, erect, stately, her headdress pooling around her shoulders.
    She embraced her son. “Good to see you return safely.” She patted his chest in the way she had done since he was a boy. “You must be hungry.”
    To Talorcan she gave a simple nod.
    Illa waited patiently as her father set his bag down and went to warm himself by the fire at the far end of the house’s one room. The girl couldn’t help but hope that a journey of so many months might have won her aprize. But her grandmother ordered her out to the spit to bring meat for her father.
    Fergus watched her go. “Where’s Murdoch?”
    “He’s up by the fire,” said Brighde. “But stay here a little and talk with me. Tell me, how was the Briton?”
    Fergus laughed. “Fair, of course, or she would not have been thrust upon me. Bonny and generous, but too young to have anything of importance to say.”
    Brighde pulled her face tight. “You need a wife, not a war minister. Not a druid, not a bard—someone to give you children. Our line is only as good as its offspring.”
    Talorcan, who had been standing just inside the door, shifted his feet, making Brighde look up and sigh, for this Pictish man was a relative forced upon her. She had barely given Fergus’s marriage her blessing and now even less so, for her son could look favorably upon no one else. She knew that Saraid had been as much counselor to her husband as any good advisor, but Fergus was asking too much, and he would have to succumb to the choice of his brother the king if he didn’t act soon.
    Illa came back, her thin arms laden with dishes