“You dare say I have no cause?” Fionn’s fury burned like a lightning fire in the summer’s driest forest.
The old man’s walking stick came up with speed, and had Bryant not moved just so, it would have struck his head rather than his shoulder. He did not move completely out of the way, because he’d been taught by his father to always preserve the dignity of his elders.
“Papa . . .” Una’s soft, horrified tones interrupted, her eyes filled with fear as she insinuated herself between Bryant and Fionn. “You must not!”
Bryant laid a hand on the smaller curve of her feminine shoulder. “Let him speak his piece. If he does not, it will only continue to fester.”
Una spun on him, her expression still tinged with fear, but filled with a bigger portion of disbelief. “You do not think my father has spoken his piece? When does he not rail against the wolf, against what happened to him because of me?”
“Daughter . . . ’twas not you. My loss is at the hands of the evil Faol who hurt you so grievously.” The brokenness in the old warrior’s voice was hard to hear.
“And it is a Faol you need to rail against,” Bryant reiterated. “So, do your railing, old man.”
Like the blow to his shoulder, Bryant could take it easily.
“Old man? Whom do you call old?” Fionn demanded with genuine affront.
Bryant kept back his humor with effort, but he did it. “You claim to have cause to dye every wolf with the same bubbling vat of vitriol. So, let me hear it.”
“Your people took my daughter. They did unspeakable things to her. She has not been the same since we got her back. Her spirit is broken.”
Una stood there, her face suffused with color, her expression equal parts horrified embarrassment and remembered pain. But in her eyes?
In that beautiful hazel gaze, Bryant saw nothing but anger. Anger at the Faol? Anger at her father? Anger at Bryant? He did not know, but ’twas not the muted light of a broken spirit.
“She doesn’t look broken to me,” Donnach observed, agreeing with Bryant’s private thoughts.
Bryant let his smile through this time. “Nay, I would say she appears more a woman ready to break something. I’ve seen the look often enough on my own mother’s countenance to know it well.”
“I’m not . . . I wouldn’t . . .” Una couldn’t seem to get out a full thought and in a strangled tone at that.
“What is it, daughter?” Fionn asked with all the appearance of a man who had no thought to how furious his words had just made the woman before him.
“My private business is mine,” she finally said in a deadly tone, all signs of her timidity hidden beneath the heat of her offense.
“Aye, it is.” Fionn’s easy agreement surprised Bryant.
Una, for her part, did not look much appeased. “Then you should not have brought it up.”
“Aye, but the fool can already see what his brethren did to me with his own two eyes, and yet he denies it.”
“I deny no truth, but your words are wrong.” Bryant rarely gainsaid his elders. His parents had taught him better, but this he would not bear.
“These men who hurt you and the woman my wolf longs for, they are not my brethren any more than they are yours. All Chrechte are brethren in spirit, but in the end each man must stand alone before his maker to have his actions judged.”
“You are a fool.”
Bryant bristled at the blatant insult. “I am a warrior who would see the division between the Éan and the Faol at an end.”
“And then see the true end of the Éan. That is your plan, is it not?” The accusation in Fionn’s tone sparked doubt in his daughter’s gaze.
“No.” Bryant was so damn frustrated. “Speaking to you is the same as conversing with a rock.”
Una’s breath escaped with a shocking sound of amusement, her fear completely in abeyance for the first time that day.
When all three men turned their regard on her in question, she blushed and then shrugged. “It is only that my mother has often said the same.”
“Hmmph.”