Morrighan - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,16

take him away from me. “Past the mountains there are animals, Jafir. There are—”

“Shh,” he said, his finger resting on my lips. His hand spread out to gently cradle my face. “Morrighan, the girl of ponds, and books, and knowing.” He stared at me like I was the air he breathed, the sun that warmed his back, and the stars that lit his way—a gaze that said, I need you. Or maybe those were all the things I wanted him to see in my eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he finally said. “We won’t leave for a long while. More supplies need to be gathered for such a journey, and with so many mouths to feed, it is hard to save up. And some in the clan oppose the journey. Maybe it will never happen. Maybe there will be a way for us to go on as we always have.”

I clung to those words, wanting them to be true.

There has to be a way, Jafir. A way for us.

We rode through the glades and the gorges, setting snares, stalking fowl, and waded at the edges of ponds, wriggling corms loose with our toes. We laughed and squabbled and kissed and touched, for the exploring never ended. There were always new ways to see and know each other. Finally, with six rock doves and a bag of corms hanging from the back of his saddle, he told me there was another piece of his world that he wanted me to see.

* * *

“It’s magnificent,” I said. Strangely and bizarrely magnificent.

We stood on the edge a shallow lake, the water lapping at our bare feet. Jafir stood behind me, his arms circling around my waist, his chin brushing my temple.

“I knew you would like it,” he said. “There must be a story there.”

I couldn’t imagine exactly what that would be, but it had to be a story of randomness and chance, of luck and destiny.

On a knoll in the middle of the lake was a door, surely part of something greater at one time, but the rest long swept away. A home, a family, lives that mattered to someone. Gone. Somehow the door alone had survived, still hanging in its frame, an unlikely sentinel of another time. It swung in the breeze as if saying, Remember. Remember me.

The wood of the door was bleached as white as the dried grass of summer. But the part that left me most in awe was a tiny window no bigger than my hand in the upper half of the door. It was made of red and green colored glass pieced together like a cluster of ripe berries.

“Why did that survive?” I asked.

I felt Jafir gently shake his head. And then the afternoon sun dipped lower and the rays skipped through the panes just as Jafir promised they would, casting us both in jeweled light.

I felt the magic of it, the beauty of a moment that would soon be gone, and I wanted it to last forever. I turned and looked at the prism of light coloring Jafir’s hair, the ridge of his lip, my hands on his shoulders, and I kissed him, thinking that perhaps one kind of magic might make another last forever.

Chapter Fourteen

Jafir

Liam was dead.

Fergus had killed him.

When I arrived back at camp, Fergus was strapping the body to the back of Liam’s horse to dump elsewhere. There were only careful whispers among a few. Even Steffan held his tongue.

Reeve pulled me aside and told me what had happened.

A baby had been squalling all afternoon, and Liam was on edge, telling the mother to shut the child up. By the time Fergus rode into camp, Liam was primed and searching for a fight. He laid into Fergus again, and they argued, but this time Liam wouldn’t let it go. He wanted the northern kin to leave and the clan to stay put. If not, he was leaving with his share of the grain. Fergus warned him if he touched one bag of the supplies, he would kill him, saying the food was for the whole clan, not just one. Liam ignored him and hoisted a bag onto his shoulder, carrying it toward his horse.

“Fergus was true to his word. He had to be. Liam betrayed the clan. He had to die,” Reeve whispered, not saying exactly how Fergus had killed him.

The northern kin looked on the spectacle with both fear and respect. Laurida hung back in the shadows, her gaze fixed on Fergus, the lines at