Fire and Silk

By Erin O'Quinn

Flann O'Conall, the cranky bachelor son of a king in ancient Ireland, has always preferred harsh wilderness to the company of a woman. One rainy night, he reluctantly opens his rainproof blanket to the innocent yet disdainful and taunting Dona Mariana.

What happens under his cover? The clash and crash of his fire with her silk creates a whirlwind of conflict and intense emotion that changes both their lives.

Flann seems to have two clear choices: the lonely but secure life on his chosen mountain—his symbolic mistress—or the burr-in-his-britches torment of trying to understand the willful, passionate Mariana.

Explicit historical romance in the age of St. Patrick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin O'Quinn
• Release date: Mar 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463356319

Erin O'Quinn

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she's met.Erin has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also historical fantasy for all ages.

Book preview

Fire and Silk

Erin O’Quinn

Copyright © 2019 Erin O ’ Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN: 9780463356319

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover Design by Erin O’Quinn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author ’ s imagination or are used fictitiously; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Fire & Silk was originally published by another press. The contract has expired, and so I hereby re-write and reform it in new dimensions via my own New Dawn Press.

Dedication

Which is more profound—the love of one human being for another…or the love of humankind for the living miracle of the earth we inhabit? For me, both are deep and true and abiding.

This novel is my love song.

Fire & Silk

Introduction

Flann O'Conall, the cranky redheaded son of a king in ancient Ireland, has always preferred harsh wilderness to the company of a woman. One rainy night, he reluctantly opens his rainproof blanket to the innocent yet disdainful and taunting Mariana.

What happens under his cover? The clash and crash of his fire with her silk creates a whirlwind of conflict and intense emotion that changes both their lives.

Flann seems to have two clear choices: the lonely but secure life on his chosen mountain—his symbolic mistress—or the burr-in-his-britches torment of trying to understand the willful, passionate Mariana.

Most of the characters in this novel are historic, and the places are real. But the story is a fantasy born of myth and wish fulfillment

_______________________________________________

PART I

In the Manor of King Gulban

Chapter 1

The Coming Storm

Flann O’Conall dug his heels a little harder into the stallion’s side, impatient to reach the River Finn before dark. He could encamp there, where the spreading hawthorns along the bank would help shield him from rain overnight, and he would be only three hours’ ride from Ballyconall.

An hour of hard riding brought him to a ridge overlooking the river. In spite of his need to bed down soon, he took a long moment to gaze at the valley spread below, familiar as an old lover, her arms welcoming him home.

His eyes caressed the corrugated skin and boggy shallows of the Finn Valley. Miles of hawthorns seeking the river had just begun to lose their leaves, and from a distance, the deep red haws seemed a gaudy neckpiece on her wrinkled throat.

He had left this gleann when the aspens were coming into flower, well before the leaves. Now only scattered rattling leaves were left to the September winds. The sun-brown skin around his eyes crinkled as he thought of this ancient lady, how many times they had slept together since his boyhood twenty years ago. He had known many other lovers since then—the deep gorges of the Seven Sisters…the sighing cascades that sprang in secret places between the green-clad thighs of the Errigal…the urgent, bony knees all along the lightning-racked north coast of Tyrconnell. He knew them as only a lover could know them—deeply and fully. And when the passion was spent, he had left each one with a promise to return, and he had always kept his troth.

Every springtime, Flann would saddle the large dark stallion, tying his provisions behind the worn leather saddle. Then he would alternately ride and walk throughout his father’s rough kingdom—making friends, scourging enemies, discovering hidden valleys and secret grottoes. He made sure his father’s vast holdings of sheep were cared for—shorn in the spring, driven to the high bluffs in the summer, and protected through the long winter. Usually, he returned only when he felt the coming of the first snow. His knowledge grew every year, so that most of the huge kingdom was chiseled in every detail somewhere in the convoluted depths of his brain.

"All right, Storm, go! A Stoirme, tá go maith . Téigh !" Together they ran for the hawthorns. Flann dismounted close to the river and both of them drank deeply. He did not bother to tether the stallion. They knew each other well, and they separated only when Flann visited his father and was constrained by the rules of hospitality to seek Conall Gulban’s great stone house. Once there, Storm would sleep in a livestock byre, while he would be forced to lie on a linen-laden oak bed.

Now, still free under a darkening sky, he removed the saddle and curried Storm while the stallion grazed on rich heath grass. He built a fire and sent a brief smoke signal to his cenél … I am home…and then, taking his woven netting from the pile of supplies lying near the saddle, he sought the river again. Within minutes, the iridescent flashes of a trout struggled in his net, and he wrapped it quickly in grasses. He pushed the bundle deep into the fire and waited, his knees drawn up, until he could smell the familiar aroma of tender brown trout.

While he ate, Flann thought about the last few weeks, the time he had spent with a recently discovered kinsman, Liam O’Neill, and his quite-pregnant wife Caitlín. Liam was at least ten years his junior, a son of high king Leary, Flann’s uncle. The woman was nineteen, perhaps a few years younger than her husband. She was a self-styled warrior queen with hair as red and eyes as green as Flann’s own—a hellion to be sure, tamed for the moment only by her advanced pregnancy.

Flann shook his head even now in amused disbelief. They and their company of about thirty had been seeking Tory Island, the unknowable, desolate Tory, and he had been their eager guide. They had discovered that the island was being used as a hiding place for slave traders, and that more than a dozen women were in their brutal embrace.

Somehow the rescuers had done it, in spite of the roiling Sea of Éire, the lightning storms, the rock pinnacles that guarded the island. Flann himself had not led the charge, but he had borne a once-shackled woman down to the sea in his arms, and he was glad he had gone. Part of the triumph, apart from the joy of freeing the captives, was discovering a part of Tyrconnell that he could not have guessed—the once-unknowable Tory, home to thousands of cliff-nesting birds and untouched wildflowers. Always before, he had shunned the place, knowing that only experienced men in currachs could navigate the harsh and unpredictable currents that lashed Tory or could work the skin-clad boats around the jagged rocks that rimmed its coast.

He had stood on the heights of the cliffs, his head thrown back, letting the unending wind buffet his strong frame as thousands of crakes’ wings beat around him. This was freedom, he had thought—a place where only the rocks and wildlife would remain for hundreds of years after he left. Ironically, the island had held women with rope marks burned into their skin. But after the rescuers left, it would again be a haven of the free, not a prison for the shackled and oppressed.

Once the women had been rescued, Flann reluctantly left his cousin and his companions to return to Derry, while he himself turned toward the western ocean to his father’s báile . This year, for the first time, something was calling him back early to his father’s holdings, spread around the lovely deep bay where the River Eask drained into the sea. He had parted from his kinsmen at the southernmost end of the great Lake Swilly, only five days’ ride from the bally, and he had suddenly yearned to return to his closest family—his father Conall Gulban, his father’s sister Aran, and her two children.

Squatting by the fire, his belly full, Flann wondered for the thousandth time why he preferred the sky to a beamed ceiling, the hard ground to a pelt-lined bed. If he must be surrounded by walls, he thought, let it be the walls of granite heaving from the Sea of Éire. If he must converse, let it be with the soaring gulls. Let him laugh in defiance at the antics of Splanc Thintrí, the lightning thrower, and his constant companion, Béal Mor —Big Mouth, the incessant wind.

Then why was he returning early? Shaking his head, he settled into his easy crouch and let the fire breathe close to his skin.

The rain had not yet come, but Flann knew it would. He could read the sky the way a druid or an ollamh could read the symbols etched deep into the cairns that seeded Tyrconnell. The old stones only sometimes revealed their secrets, but for Flann, the mutable sky always told him what to expect. Tonight, he knew, the rains would come, probably in under an hour. They would sweep out of the northern sea and bring a more gentle touch of the storms that bruised the north coast almost every day and night.

Flann stood then, shaking off his moody thoughts. He walked again to his supplies and drew out a large tarred cloth, his only shield against the weather, and a smaller cloth coated with pine pitch. He tucked the smaller one around his meager bundle of possessions. The larger one he spread on the ground where the fire crackled, built as close as he had dared to a full-canopied hawthorn. Before he sat, he drew his bone whistle from a pouch on his belt and blew the dried spittle from the finger holes and from the end where he put his mouth.

Flann settled onto part of the heavy, weatherproofed cloth. When the rains came, he would simply roll himself up and ignore the slashing rain, while Storm would roll his eyes and toss his head in aggravation but never run away in fright. The stallion had been through the worst of the spectacular lightning storms that regularly pounded the north coast. He would not flee from this one, for his very name told his intrepid spirit.

Flann ran his fingers over the holes in the little bone instrument and put his mouth to the opening. The sound that rose through the still-thick leaves overhead was mellow and pensive, a song he sang to the sky and the earth, to the evergreen junipers and bare branches of aspen and larch, to the berry-seeking birds that roused in the canopy overhead.

God, I am getting old, when the earth speaks louder to me than its people.

And then, reflected in the light of the fire, he saw the tall figure of a woman.

He slowly lowered the bone whistle and stared. The woman was dressed in some kind of dark, voluminous gown—not the léine and gúna of native women, not the protective britches of one moving through the underbrush…but some kind of silken wrap. Her skirts flared around her, iridescent in the firelight. Her dark hair shifted in tangles, and it framed a pale oval face filled entirely, it seemed to him, with fierce eyes that challenged his right to be here.

She took a few steps toward him as he sat, and he saw that she was limping.

" Volo vobis vesperum ," she said through her teeth. Clearly, she was loath to speak at all but was obeying some ludicrous social obligation to wish him a good evening.

He remembered the Latin clearly from his youth, when the young monk Ezekiel had taught him his letters after his father’s conversion to Christianity. But something about her imperious attitude, her upturned chin, kept his voice silent. Instead, he rose slowly to his feet and regarded her.

" Go maith? she asked, resorting to Gaelige. Well? Help me, instead of gawking like a peasant!

Hearing the word tuathánach —peasant—Flann sat back down and lifted the whistle again to his lips. He looked out into the night, careful to ignore the interloper who obviously needed his help but knew not how to ask.

His answer was blown into a small piece of hollow bone, and it was a continuation of his tribute to the hawthorn trees and to the dark limb-raked sky.

~o~

She had been walking for hours, it seemed, her dainty leather shoes torn and split, now in her hands instead of on her feet. Even in September, the sun had permeated the heavy silks, causing her skin underneath to sweat and then itch. She drew her hair back from her face, for the wind kept blowing it into her mouth and across her eyes.

Where is Father? Why has he not sent his men to find me?

The high honorable Dona Mariana de la Castra de Oro tripped again and caught herself before sprawling on the moor grass. ¡ Mierda ! I will have those men whipped before the mast of the merchantman Angelica for letting me get lost!

They had docked this morning on the fair coast of Hibernia, away from the cliffs and close to the place her father said he always moored his merchant ship, and they had loaded their precious goods on the backs of twenty sullen crewmen. Papa, she knew, had been coming here for years, for he always had a ready market from the primitive tribal king named Gulban or Benbulban, or some such. She could never fathom his willingness to sail to this barbaric land, to sell his precious goods to a savage.

But, Papa, what fascinates you so about that wild place? Surely not the cliffs you talk about, that keep you from landing close to civilization. Not the constant rain that you swear about or the cold, dark sea.

Ah, child, he would always answer, his hand on her dark curls. " Quizás …it is the lure of the sirens of old."

Sirens, Papa? Do you not honor the memory of my mother?

"You will someday understand, hija . Until then, you will see me as always, in two months, when my voyage is complete."

But this year, she had talked to her father more like a woman and less like an innocent child.

I am ready, Papa, she had told him three months ago, June first, her twentieth feast day. She had been learning all the requisite talents of a noble lady—the music, the dance, the fine stitchery, the manners, and all the trappings of the idle life. She had a mild tutor who gave her lessons in Latin, geometry, rhetoric, and more besides. And after her lessons, with her father’s nervous blessing, she had for years been studying the art of the warrior with his former armsman Rodolfo.

The four walls of any room made her skin begin to fester and her soles begin to itch. Even the fenced-in byre where she practiced her sword seemed too confining, and she often dreamed of escape. But Rodolfo, wise to her yearnings, told her matter-of-factly that if she left, he would leave also—forever. This time, on her twentieth feast day, a deep burning began to drive her actions. And finally, with her father’s reluctant blessing, she was away from home for the first time.

At this moment, she told herself, I would give my father’s kingdom for one steel espada . Then I would smite the insolent whelps who allowed me to wander from the others and lose myself among the thickets and bogs of this miserable place!

The truth was that as soon as Mariana’s feet touched the soil of Hibernia, she ran away at the first opportunity, knowing her father had already left in the vanguard, trusting her safety to his dim-witted crew. She was following a deep burning she did not understand, and it had kept her well ahead of the attendant sailors whose land legs faltered in the high sheep grass.

In spite of her erudite learning and her weapons training, Mariana realized, she knew nothing about survival itself. Which way should she walk? How could she find water? What would she do if a wolf or—or whatever lurked here—if a feral creature attacked?

Her father had greeted her decision to sail on the Angelica with incredulity and had at first refused. No, no, Mariana. It is not the kind of place for a genteel young lady. No, no. But she had been more than stubborn—she had been implacable in her will, and she had whined and complained, until at last he had relented.

Very well. But do not—not, you understand?—do not cry to me if you lose your combs or your dainty slippers or if you find yourself with a rash from the waves or the sun. You must be a high-born woman and bear it with grace.

She had been burning to go, to follow perhaps the same far-off call as her father. But of course, Papa, she had told him carelessly. Did that mean she could not now complain that she was lost? Head down, Mariana kept walking, sure that she was bearing to the south and west, somewhat in the direction her father and his men had gone. And after a while, she had begun to stride in great Z -like paths, impatient when she noticed a recurring pile of rocks or formation of trees.

And now it was almost dark. She kept walking until she saw trees. And trees, she knew, grew near water. The sky itself was ominously gray, as though it threatened to open at any moment and spew an indifferent rain that would soak her along with the willing earth.

For the first time, Mariana discarded her attitude of scorn and anger and began to feel the smallest tremors of fear. How would she eat? Where could she sleep? If it rained, how would she protect herself from the cold and wetness? She looked up at the tall unfamiliar trees, their leaves just beginning to turn brown and expose bright red berries that studded the branches.

She saw the shadows lengthen until she knew that darkness would fall any moment. She dropped to the ground under one of the strange trees, her heavy silks billowing around her, and at last she succumbed to the solace of tears. She did not know how long she sat there, her shoulders shaking and her chest aching with the self-pity that was choking in her throat. But suddenly, she became aware of two important facts. First, it was quite dark. And second, a forest satyr was playing his shepherd’s pipe nearby, a funereal dirge, preparatory to her slow, inglorious demise.

Astonished, she rose, her useless slippers stranded in the rough grass. She edged her way through the darkness toward the music, and in a few minutes she saw the flicker of a fire—or perhaps the malevolent eyes of the creature who was beckoning her.

Mariana bit her lip and summoned whatever warrior spirit she still possessed. When she saw that, indeed, a fire was crackling at the edge of a dark tree, she walked almost into it in her eagerness to find succor. She squared her shoulders and assumed a defiant expression in case she was challenged for the right to the warmth of that mysterious fire. She saw a figure huddled near the flames, and from that figure came the haunting music that had beckoned her.

She could see in the wayward light that the musician was no satyr, for he had legs instead of hooves crossed in front of him like a child. He would be tall, she thought, judging from the size of his shoulders. Mariana drew in a deep breath and stepped close to the fire, challenging the man-beast for part of its comfort.

Let him know I mean him no harm, she thought. " Volo vobis vesperum ," she told him, wishing him a good evening. There! Any cultivated person would know that I, too, am a woman of culture who would not stoop to violence.

The man was clearly thunderstruck, for he lowered his rude instrument and stared at her. A long moment passed while she assessed his probable birth and extent of Latin vocabulary. He looked clean enough, although his beard could use a sharp knife and his unruly hair—of no determinate color—looked altogether slept in. She saw right away that he was some kind of itinerant, or even a low criminal who sought the night for his nefarious deeds.

His silence grated on her. Surely he can see, even in this dim light, that I am a lady! And if he is a criminal, he will find a fingernail in his eye.

He stood then. A tall, broad-shouldered man in some kind of travel cloak. She thought he wore barbarians’ breeches under the cloak, and she could see thigh-high leather boots.

" Go maith ? She groped for the right words in his crude language. So, if you are more than a peasant, you will help me." She thought those were the right words, an appeal to the man’s sense of honor. Her knowledge of the Gaelic tongue had been learned from the rogues who surrounded her armsman in the taverns of Galicia, taught to her secondhand from the Gothic-born Rodolfo. She loved the blurred syllables and sensuous sound of the barbaric tongue and had learned it without telling her father.

And then to her astonishment, he sat down again and turned his head to the darkness. She heard again the haunting tone of the mysterious instrument. I have found a fool, she raged, or a deaf mute. Of all the damnable luck, I have found an addled itinerant who can offer me only a fire.

Mariana stood tall, trying to seem nonplussed by the stranger’s cold attitude. She reasoned that if she could sit here before the fire, in the morning, her father’s people would surely find her.

She moved closer to the warmth, and then a fine rain began to fall. In a matter of thirty seconds, the wind changed it to a cold, slashing wetness that pierced her exposed skin like needles. She gasped to her deaf companion, Oh, help me! Cover me! Do something!

Chapter 2

The Cover of Night

A slight shift in wind told Flann that the rain would begin in a matter of minutes. He eyed the corner of the tarred cloth as he continued to play his bone whistle—more to confound and anger the woman than to extend the improvised melody. When he felt the first fine spray of rain on his face, he seized the corner of waterproof cloth nearest him and, in one sweeping motion, wrapped it around himself. Then he lay waiting for the real rain to fall.

He saw by the dancing fingers of fire that the woman was defenseless against the cold night—not a shawl, not a cloak or brat or any kind of wrap that might have kept her warm or dry. And yet she merely stepped closer to the fire, as though defying the heavens. Except for her last commanding words, she had apparently decided to stand there, soaked to the very bone, even after the rain had drowned his fire, cursing him and his peasant attitude.

Good! Tá go maith. Let her feel the cold arms of night and the loveless kiss of an autumn thunderstorm. He wrapped the cover tighter and pulled it over his head just as the rain began in earnest. From under the cloth, he clearly heard her anguished cry. "Oh, help me! ¡ Ayúdame! Do something!"

Flann felt himself grinning in spite of his resolve to ignore her. He lifted the cloth and opened it wide like an eagle’s wing, inviting her inside.

The woman, to her credit, did not hesitate coyly, drawing back from touching the body of a stranger. She dived for him and the protective covering, and as soon as he felt her all along the length of his body, he closed the cloth around both of them, one winglike arm drawing her against him. They lay cocooned while he breathed evenly and she gasped in a kind of throaty cough. Shush, shush , he crooned to her in his mind. After a while her spasms of cold ceased, and she was silent.

They were lying face-to-face, close as lovers. In the darkness, he could not see her face, but he felt her uneven breath on his cheeks and mouth. And then, unbidden, his body betrayed the fact that he had not been near a woman in several months.

Oh! she exclaimed, and in spite of the tightness of the cloth around them, she tried to turn away from his adamantine groin.

Deeply amused, Flann spoke for the first time. " Volo vobis vesperum. Good evening to ye, O great lady. As ye can see, there is scant room to roll about like a cork in a barrel. Lie still."

You…you are a cad and a scoundrel! Touch me not!

Flann lapsed again into silence, still grinning, his urgent bod pressing into her silken dress—not by design but by necessity of their unusual encounter. Completely encased by the tarred cloth, he could feel the insistent rain pummeling them, almost laughing at them, daring them to change position. And so he merely lay stretched out, one arm around her shoulders, enjoying this last night under the vast sky of his beloved Éire.

They lay immobile for half an hour, by his reckoning. He could feel that her shivering had ceased completely, and he knew that the warmth of his body was saving her from an agony of wet and cold. Her breath on his face was regular and easy, as though she had fallen asleep. And so he shifted slightly, trying to ease the pressure on his groin by moving away from her.

" Nolo tangere ! she spat. Touch me not!"

Ye’re a scourge an’ a nag an’ not in the least desirable to me. D’ye understand? D’ye know nothing of the ways of a man?

I know enough, she whispered defiantly. I know I would rather die than be ravished by a—a low criminal.

Ye’ll deem yourself fortunate to be touched by any man at all, your highness. For while your body is not repugnant, your attitude is. I have a mind to let ye loose to the wind an’ the rain. Believe me, I would sleep more soundly by meself.

She began to struggle under the cover, and Flann held her even closer, suddenly reluctant to let her go. When she moved her head, her lips touched his, and he seized them, biting down on her mouth, sucking it in sudden gnawing hunger. His tongue moved on her lips, seeking an opening, and she moved her head back and forth like a restive mare. His hand went from her shoulders to the back of her head and held it while he forced his tongue into the softness of her mouth. There! There! He probed with his tongue and moved his fierce bod against her silken skirt until he felt a sharp release. And then he lifted his hand and turned his face away.

Afterward, he slept, heedless of her grating curses.

He awoke one hour before dawn, as he always did. The rain had stopped sometime during the night, but the chill had remained, forcing him to lie longer than usual, bidding him gather the mental strength to face the still-dark morning. It took a full minute for him to remember that he was not alone.

The woman had rolled away during the night, dragging part of the protective cover from his shoulders. Perhaps she had left him purposely, silently reviling him for his vulgar lapse of manners. More likely, he thought, she was a restless sleeper who, like himself, was unused to a sleeping partner.

He slid from beneath the rough cloth and threw his portion over her in a studied motion of carelessness. Once in the protective cover of trees, he relieved himself. He noted sourly that the crotch of his leather bríste would take a while to dry.

Tá go maith. I shall wear soggy britches in penance for me base