“It’s simple, really,” drawled the voice from the shadows. “Submit, or men start dying. The choice is yours.”
Finian O’Melaghlin, Irish noble, warrior, and chief councilor to the great O’Fáil king, finished his grim smile. Everything was going as planned. Or rather, as expected.
From the moment The O’Fáil sent Finian to accept Lord Rardove’s long-standing but ultimately treacherous invitation to meet, Finian had been separated from his men, plied first with food, then with prison. Rardove was proving predictable. And dangerous.
Finian had argued against the meeting, but his king insisted. The Irish suspected Rardove was up to something. Something dangerous. Something related to the legendary Wishmé dyes.
Unfortunately, Rardove suspected the Irish were up to something as well.
Pain shuddered through Finian’s body from the savage beatings he’d already suffered, but that meant nothing. All that mattered was finding out what Rardove knew and preventing him from finding out any more. For that, he and his men had committed to die if needed.
“Somehow, Rardove”—he angled a glance over his shoulder—“I don’t feel I can trust ye.”
The guards holding his arms eyed him warily. Shackled around the wrists, cast in a prison with a blade at his throat and a guard on both arms, he was scaring them half to death. He could see it in their anxious eyes, smell it in the stench of fear rising from their pores. He growled once, to warn them and amuse himself.
Iron chains bit into his wrists as one of the soldiers twisted his arm up and into his spine. Lord Rardove, baron of a small but strategically important fief on the Irish marches, stepped out of the shadows and made a slow circuit around the entangled foursome.
“Stop scaring my men, O’Melaghlin,” he said, and deposited a disgusted glance on a soldier who’d backed up a pace at the feral growl. “Join with me and you’ll be a rich man.”
Finian laughed hoarsely. “Rich, is it? I’d have something different in mind than to be fettered in chains and thrown in a prison.”
Rardove gave an exaggerated sigh. “You did not begin in chains, did you? We began in my chambers, with wine and meat. Now look at us.”
Finian glanced around the small cell, where the stone walls wept rancid water from abovestairs and old blood from previous guests. “I agree. We’ve deteriorated.”
A wan smile crossed the baron’s face. “You will find me a most accommodating master.”
“Master?” Finian spit the word from his mouth. Tall, ruddy-faced, blond, Rardove was the English ideal of noble handsomeness. Finian wanted to kick his teeth in.
“A hundred marks to you personally if you secure The O’Fáil’s goodwill in this matter.”
“Rardove,” he said wearily, “ye’ve been here for twenty years, and the land is dying under ye. The crops don’t yield, your people die of ague, your cattle from murrain. Yer overlord can’t stand ye, and neither can I. Why on God’s good earth would I align with ye?”
The careful mask of calm covering the baron’s visage cracked slightly. “Your king sent you here to parley, did he not?”
‘Get inside the bulwark of Rardove Castle,’ was actually what his king sent him here to do. Step one, accomplished.
“Parley?” Finian retorted. “Is that what ye call this?”
“I call this a necessary measure.”
“My question is simple, Rardove, and has not changed since I knocked on yer door: what would ye get out of such an alliance?”
Step two: Ascertain what Rardove knew, how much he knew. And above all, stop him from learning any more.
The baron waved his hand through the air, a vague gesture. “Reduced threat of war on my borderlands. An end to an old feud.” His voice slowed. “Perhaps, say, access to some of your Irish documents.”
And with that, Finian had his answer: Rardove knew everything.
It was what he’d feared all along. Why would one of the most powerful lords in northern Ireland—powerful enough to seize these lands without his king’s permission twenty years ago, then powerful enough to acquire the typically unforgiving Edward’s royal dispensation afterward—now be begging for an alliance with the very people he’d conquered?
“Ye know about the dyes,” Finian said slowly.
The mollusks, the Wishmés, had been forgotten for centuries, but their legends stretched back to the Romans. In a time when majesty was instilled primarily on the point of a sword, the indigo shade was allowed only for royalty, but it could make a man with the recipe richer than a king. Much richer. And more powerful. Disguise and rumor were half the game, and