Read Online The Phantom Queen Awakes by Mark S. Deniz - Free Book Online Page B

and listen to Aoibheann whisper to Dallán
about the tales she had heard from the last bard who passed
through. About how the man had spoken of far lands where customs
were different, and where, when a man or woman became too old to
help the family any longer, they were led out into the wilderness
in winter and abandoned to die.
    Dallán had hushed his wife, but the damage was
done. Treasa was thrifty with the house’s resources, strict when it
came to directing the work that had to be done ― and there was
always so much of it, cleaning and cooking and spinning and
watching the children ― but she had not thought that Aoibheann
wanted to see her dead.
    Little wonder, then, that her thoughts were
elsewhere this morning as the cold curled round her shoulders,
sharp enough to cut tough meat. Spring it might be, and the ewes in
the fields with their lambs a full two months ago, but even the
flowers in the meadow nodded their heads low and shivered as if
they were chill.
    “Rare frosty day,” she said at last to the
crone bent down over the clear water on the other side of the
brook. The woman nodded and Treasa continued politely, hoping the
conversation would take her mind off last night’s shock. “Here’s a
prayer that the cold will keep the Northmen up in their own lands,
where they belong.”
    “‘ Twill warm before an hour has
passed,” the woman croaked, her sticklike fingers scrubbing
ceaselessly at a rusty stain on the length of an old, ill-mended
green skirt.
    “Good to hear,” Treasa murmured, squeezing the
water out of one of Dallán’s tunics. She peered at the woman,
belatedly realizing that the voice was not familiar. The hair under
the woman’s shawl was black as raven’s feathers, with threads of
white at the temples. “I don’t know you. Are you Fearchair’s kin,
from his house over the hill?”
    The woman was silent for a moment, wringing
the water from the skirt, and then shaking the garment out to peer
at it. It hung in wet folds, embroidered in black at the hem, and
Treasa dropped the tunic in her hands. The skirt the woman held was
identical to the one she wore, save for the vicious rent through
the fabric over the hips, and the red stain around the
tear.
    That...cannot be what I think it is...But I’d
know my own skirt anywhere. And that means she is...oh, Danu
protect me.
    “I am kin to all,” the woman finally said. She
tilted her head to listen and turned to look toward the east. “They
are coming.”
    “Coming...who?” The basket at her side tipped
over into the brook, and the clothes slowly floated downstream. The
woman reached into her own basket and lifted out another garment,
the swaddling clothes of a babe. There was a fresh stain of milk
and oats on one corner, a stain matching the one on the identical
wrapping that Treasa had gathered up this morning. Laoghaire spat
up his gruel this morning, his belly would not settle...is he going
to die? Am I? Seeing the washer at the ford is an
omen...
    A roar reached her ears from the beach to the
east, and Treasa paled. She had heard the harsh, guttural sounds of
the language of the Viking raiders only once before as a child. She
had run and hidden then, burying herself in a hole in the ground in
the forest, while the men of her father’s village fought the
Northmen and lost. She had been the only one to survive that raid,
and still heard their voices in her nightmares.
    She recognized it now.
    “You could run, away from the coast, away from
your home ― west, into the woods,” the woman across the stream said
to her flatly. “You could hide, as you did once, and they would not
find you. Your daughter-in-law would die. You would
survive.”
    Treasa closed her eyes as the warming wind
from the east swirled around her. “Aoibheann would die, yes. And so
would my son, and his children, and the others in the
village.”
    There was no answer, so she opened her eyes.
The woman and her basket were gone. Only the bloodied, rent