Read The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series) for Free Online Page A

open to silence. The scent of boiled herbs and the pungency of dried reeds assaulted her. But the ashes of a fire lay cold in the hearth. Maeve leaned against the trestle table. Where could she be? It was far too late in the season for Glenna to be herb-gathering, and Maeve had passed Glenna’s cow chewing grass, its udder already emptied.
    Wasn’t it just like Glenna to flutter off when Maeve needed her most?
    Sh e whirled out of the hut and planted herself on the stump just outside the door. In her youth she used to sit by Glenna’s feet while the older woman twisted her fingers around the spinning as she twisted her tongue around a tale. Here, Maeve had grown to womanhood learning the old Irish stories and the history of her people. Here, she’d been taught her life’s duty.
    Now sitting in this clearing where she’d spent so many years of her childhood, she willed herself to be calm. She had journeyed halfway to the sea, to another village’s Samhain fires, just to choose a lover. She had been so careful. In the nights since, she had even come to imagine that they’d been chosen to be together, drawn by some Otherworldly force.
    If so, it had been an evil force. The mischievous creatures of the Otherworld now laughed at her, piling curse upon curse.
    Maeve pulled her cloak tight around her. She stood up and wiped away the tears she hadn’t known she’d shed. This half-blooded Englishman must leave Birr, like every other full-blooded Englishmen before him. The curse was specific and clear.
    She heade d home more slowly than she had fled, hating the fates that would force her to drive off the man who haunted her dreams.
     

     
    Three
     
    Garrick stumbled out of the castle into the cold slap of morning. He yanked his cloak closed against the chill. Pale pink clouds fingered the eastern horizon, driving back the deep blue of night. The air rang with an inhuman caterwauling which had torn him from an uncomfortable sleep.
    He rounded the castle seeking the source of the noise. He saw a milkmaid shriek across the yard and vault herself through the open door of the kitchens. He planted his fists on his hips and turned to the source of her terror. Cows. There were a dozen of them, trailing in an uneven line out from the hay barn. He’d never known cattle could make such an annoying wail. Then again, he’d never known cattle.
    He trudged across the yard. One of the cows turned its head and rolled an eye at him. He slowed his pace. Th e closest he’d ever gotten to a cow was a tepid pail of milk his mother bartered for with the red-faced farmer who drove it into Wexford every morning. Stupid-looking beasts. Bigger than any he’d seen driven through the town of his youth. It was the bulls one had to beware of . . . wasn’t it?
    Garrick edged around the portal into the musky shadows of the barn. He skidded through something wet, then stubbed his foot on a milk pail and sent it cartwheeling. Milk splattered across the ground.
    At least he thought it was milk. He crouched down. The familiar smell of it wafted up, musky and warm. He trailed a finger through the fluid and then frowned at the liquid clinging to his fingertips.
    “It’s green today.”
    Garrick looked up at the sound of her voice. She swept in, her black hair a cloud against the spill of the morning light. Four servants skittered around her banging pails against their knees. They bobbed at the sight of him and then rushed to crouch down beside a cow.
    “Aye, as green as the hills,” Maeve mused, staring at the milk se eping into the dirt floor. “At least it isn’t blood-red. That gave us quite a scare last time. We thought the cows might have been taken by a bloody flux.”
    The green clung to his hands like tar. He knew milk wasn’t supposed to be green. But his groping, sleep-fogged senses were focused on something more visceral: the bright-cheeked woman standing over him, clear-eyed, clear-skinned, and radiating energy. The woman he’d not seen