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This is the first chapter of the first book of Lara and the Silver Mare. There are four books in the set, it will be published Spring 2005.
LARA AND THE SILVER MARE
Book One
Lara and the Gray Mare The girl who comes to stand beside me in the early mornings brings me handful of barley--and her soft voice. I am so glad to be away from shouting men and the barbed scents of anger and blood.
“Larach!” Fallon cried out in the dusk before the sunrise. “Lara O’Marchach!” Her voice was loud enough to wake a rock. Of course, I did not answer her. I am no fool. And I was on my way to see if the gray mare had foaled. So I skittered to the side, silent as night-breeze, and I hid in the black shadows beneath the old oak that stands beside the gates.
Fallon is my aunt, now 14 years old and not yet married.She is five years older than I am, and she scares me.Her voice is as shrill as iron on stone, hard put. I can tell you true that I have been afraid of Fallon all my life because she has always been mean to me. She was mean to my brothers, too, when they were little. Do I need more reasons to dread her? You may add this to the count, then: Until I was old enough to outwit her, she often stole my supper and lied about it. She still takes more than her share sometimes.
At sunset, just as the new day is beginning, Fallon likes to stand out where she can see the distant shine of the sea, her hands on her hips. She’d pick a fight with nightfall if she could. She is, after all, my father’s little sister. They share the same temper. My mother says Father is a calmer man now at twenty-nine than he was at sixteen when they married. He is both loved and feared by all our relatives, all the people in our tuath. And by me. My grandfather was only feared, the old ones say, so I suppose we O’Marchachs are improving with time.
“Lara?”
Ah. Fallon had made her voice gentler, but I was not taken in by that. I ducked farther back into the slanting branches of the oak. Fallon knew where to look for me this early. I always went to talk to the gray mare. She was entirely healed now. It had taken a long time. The gray was a beauty, taller and more graceful than any horse I had ever seen. My father had found her grazing free on his last journey, wearing a bridle with a broken throat latch and dragging one rein, a wound on her foreleg. There was a burn-mark on her jaw, a strange design that could not have been an accident. What tuath marked their horses with fire-scars?
Some battle had freed the gray from her owner, my father guessed. He had brought her limping home, and I had nursed her every day, bringing lichen and cress to stanch the wound until it healed. That was when my visits to the gray mare began. I could not take time from my work, so I slept less, creeping out of the house to go stand beside her in the dark, talking quietly so she would know that she was not alone. It raised her spirits, I could tell. She began eating better and she healed.
My father had never thanked me for nursing her back to soundness. But he had been happy to hear she was in foal. When I realized it, I had been dizzy with joy.Girls are not allowed horses. But since I had saved the mare, had cared for her so well, I hoped my father would consider giving the foal to me. When he came home from whatever battle he was fighting now, I intended to try to talk him into it.
“Lara!”
Fallon’s shout shattered my thoughts and I held still as a rabbit beside a wolf-path as she passed before me and opened the gates to go into the rath. She called my name three more times inside, then came out again. I could hear the mares shifting uneasily as they stood inside the great circle of the earthen walls, startled by the intrusion. I recognized the high, gentle neigh of the gray mare. If Fallon didn’t give up, I would have to go to my day’s work without seeing the mare. I let out a long breath as Fallon came back past me and headed for our cottage. I knew why she was angry, and there was nothing I could do about it. I pressed my back against the outer earthen wall and tried to decide what to do.
I wanted so much to go see the gray mare, but I was afraid Fallon would come back and find me there, inside the rath. The walls of the rath are simply this: monstrous big heaps of earth, shaped like giant rings, one inside the other, both broken for two cart’s width at one place, to let people pass in and out. That’s where the gates are.
We keep the mares inside the earthen walls at night. During the day, boys herd them out to graze. They won’t let me help. I am not a boy.My father says it is a rare thing, for a rath to have two earthen walls. Usually there is only one. He has traveled near to Dublin and back and has seen only one other like ours. Perhaps the ones who built it so long ago had better harvests than others did. Maybe they had the strength to keep digging and dirt-piling for years.
Inside the huge earthen walls, the ground is open except for four little round byres that my father says were once houses. Now the stock uses them for shelter in the rain. I shivered and pulled my woolen brat closer around my shoulders and tugged the thick cloth down to cover my arms. The brown wool was softened with wear. We were finally past the last cold days of Gam. I could not wait to see the sun after all the dreary days of people and animals wet and trembling with cold.
Fallon did not call my name again for such a long time that I dared hope, even though I know her too well, that she might have given up. A moment passed, then two. The silence was lovely, lovely and the morning sky was passing from deep gray to lighter gray. But I was not fooled. I knew she was trying to trick me into coming out if I was hiding. So I did not. I looked up at the gray sky instead. The day before had been sunny and fine and I hoped it would be another cloudless day. I had not pondered long on the graying sky before I heard tiptoe footsteps on the path.
I knelt down, then stayed perfectly still. Fallon passed—I could see her easily now in the dawn dusk. She went on around the rath, following the curve of the outer earth-wall until she struck off toward the stream. Then she began shouting again. I could hear her all the way down to the cows, then the direction of her voice changed and I knew she was headed back again. She had probably gone just far enough to see that there were no candles lit in the dairy byre, that I was not starting my day’s work early.
Bebinn, Gerroc, and I were always up before most the others because we had to milk. It didn’t take that long this time of year. The few cows that had been bred late enough to have winter calves were drying up, giving less and less milk every day. And they were so tame we didn’t even have to put spancels on their front legs to hold them still. Work of all kinds is lightened by Bebinn and Gerroc. We are like sisters we are so close in age.
“LARA!” The shout made me shudder.
Fallon was on her way back up the hill. I knew exactly why she was so angry with me. It was this simple: She had, after five days, decided to comb her knotted hair. Magnus had not meant to ruin Fallon’s carved-antler comb, but he had. He was my littlest cousin; he was Gerroc’s youngest brother. Magnus had played with the comb five days past without asking and he had dropped it where one of the dogs could snatch it up and run. By the time he had gotten it back, the comb was cracked.Any dog will chew bone, of course. It is their instinct and their right. How was the hound to know that this bit of antler had been carefully sawed and that the row of slender close-set teeth would be so fragile?
Unfortunately, this was no ordinary comb. It had belonged to my grandmother—Fallon’s and my father’s mother. It had been given to Fallon on my grandmother’s death, when Fallon had been barely old enough to use it without help.I knew she cherished it. I knew she prized that comb more than she cared for whoever had caused the damage, plain and simple. Magnus knew it, too.
It was I, coming back from evening milking, who found Magnus crying behind the offal heap near the grain fields. The new-hatched spring flies were buzzing around the rotting manure and the piles of last year’ cornstalks. The ruined comb was tight in his little hands. I could not think what else to do so we washed it carefully and put it back in Fallon’s wooden box. I hoped she might think she had cracked it herself without knowing. Small chance—I should have known better. Fallon was always eager to lay blame for any mishap upon someone else. And she had clearly assumed the blame was mine.
Ah. Well. Better me than poor little Magnus. She was in a fine temper. Little Magnus hardly needed her to drag him about by his ear, thumping his thin back. Not that I would enjoy it, mind you, but I had stood it before from her before, many times, and it wasn’t so awful as it sounds. I was bigger now and she couldn’t hold onto me very long.Little Magnus walked with a limp. He had wandered into the cattle herd when he could barely toddle and a cow had stepped on him. The hurt leg had healed crooked and his gait was changed forever. Even so, he was sunny and he worked hard and he sang like a bird. I liked him very much. Everyone did. Except Fallon.
Listening to her footsteps come closer, I was hard pressed to think of anyone she did like. I was entirely unable to think of anyone who liked her. Even my father—who was her very own brother—could only stand her for a while before he found some excuse to take his leave. He said Fallon was like their father in that way—easy to anger, always ready for a fight. He had also said it was a shame she wasn’t a boy, that she would have taken to sword and bow and battle like birds to the air. One thing was clear; she had never taken to spinning thread or weaving, grinding grain, making bread or any of the work girls and women had to do day in and day out. Half the time, she had her leine hitched up like a boy, the sleeves rolled up to bare her forearms. She likes to work without the long hem shortening her stride.
This is shameful, but it is true: I prayed every evening to the old ones and the saints that some man would be stupid enough to marry Fallon and take her away from us one day. I knew one thing standing there in the graying light of dawn: It wouldn’t be this day. She was very close again, bellowing my name, following the curve of the rath walls back around to the gates. I stiffened. It was time to make a decision or I would be stuck here so long that Bebinn and Gerroc would come looking for me. Some days, I would have just stepped out into the gray morning light and let Fallon find me, just to have it done and over with.This morning, for whatever reason of fate, fortune and divine guidance, I did not. Instead, when she was still just far enough away not to see me in the shadows of the oak branches, I hitched my leine up around my waist and scrambled up the massive outer earthen wall.
A second later, I was tumbling down into the deep fosse that lay between the outer wall and the inner one. I landed on my feet, then pitched sideways, hitting hard on my back.I lay there for a long moment, staring up into the sky. This place between the earthen walls, dug deep to free enough dirt to build them—this was a faerie place, everyone knew. It was dangerous to trespass where they lived.I got up, my legs a little shaky. Then I gathered a handful of the back of my leine, pulling the cloth around my body, trying to see how badly I had dirtied it. It was my newest one, not yet outgrown. It was still loose and came nearly to my ankles, the sleeves still long enough to cover my whole arm to the fingertips. In the dim light, I could only feel the damp and the grit.
At least I had not torn it. My mother might not even notice the new stains if I wrung it out in the creek, then slid it back over my head wet and wore it long enough to dry it. My woolen brat, pulled close around my shoulders for warmth, was only a little muddied. I had landed more where I sit, than anywhere else. And my mother was no fool. She had dyed the wool of my brat a light dunny-brown, to match the brown linen of my leine—and the both of them to match the dirt. I pulled my leine straight and shrugged my brat higher around my shoulders, then looked around. It was very odd to stand in this gigantic trough between the two circular walls. We’d had pounding rains ten or twelve days before. The water had been running though the fosse then, fast enough to hear the trickling as it sifted into the base of the walls and drained away.
“Lara!” Fallon’s shout was hoarse with fury. I flinched, even knowing that she could not see me through the high earthen wall, that she would never suspect I would brave faeries to escape her. Everyone knew stories about children disappearing in the fosse, borne off by faerie folk, lost forever. The stories might be accurate, but this was the truth: I was by far more frightened of Fallon than any faerie that morning.
“Lara! Where are you?” I began to walk, silently following the inner curve of the rath, moving away from her. I slid my hand along the earthen wall, grass and moss tickling my fingers. The men of the tuath had spent part of last summer repairing the outside wall, digging out loose places and repacking the soil where the rain had weakened it. For a while the patches had been easy to see. Now, after a season of rain, green had covered them.
Green.
I realized that I could see colors and knew the sun was close to rising. Fallon would need only to see me at a distance to know I had not answered her call. That would bring her to a frothing rage, I was sure. I could hear her, still, talking to the empty oak branches. “Lara, I know you are up in that tree,” she growled. “Come you down. Now.” Shivery and scared, I began to run, hoping she would not hear my footfalls, that she would stand talking to the empty branches long enough for me to climb over the earthworks on the opposite side. If I made it all the way around the huge circle, then over the top and on to the woods I could hide again. Then I would simply wait. Bebinn and Gerroc would soon come to the dairy. The other women would be about their work within an hour. If I could hide that long, Fallon would be stopped at least for the day. She had never set upon me where anyone else could see.
I thought it was because my father, after all, was our ri’, the lord and king of our tuath. He was Fallon’s brother, true enough, but I was his daughter and one of my brothers, someday, would take my father’s place. Fergal and Trian were fostered out now, living close to the sea with another tuath, learning trades. But they would come home once they were grown. She would not dare bully them then. Nor me.
As I ran, flying along on both hope and fear, I was beginning to smile, to believe I would escape, when my toes struck a hard edge, cool and straight—unlike rock or grass or tree wood. I stumbled to an ungraceful halt, thinking it might be some sliver of bone—or with astounding luck, a comb. My mother had found hers and it was a grand one, made from elk antler with a design of carved knots on it. Excited, hoping that the saints or the faerie folk had pitied my thudding heart and had given me a fine comb to replace Fallon’s cracked one, I dug at the soil. When I had it free, I wiped the object on my woolen brat. It was not a comb. I took in a quick breath. It was a perfect oval of gold, and within it was fastened a horse-shape beaten from the same pure metal. The little gold horse was galloping, its mane and tail streaming out behind it. There was a sharpened wire folded back, hinged to the gold circle. I stared at it, smiling at my luck.
How long had it lain here? Perhaps it had belonged to an ancient queen. The little brooch was meant to be worn on a smooth linen leine or a fancy silk dress. It was a dainty ornament meant for a real nobleman’s daughter, not for me. My father ruled our tuath—not dozens of tuatha, not a castle or an army of many clans. We owned nothing made of gold. “Lara?” Fallon was not closer, but she was shouting at the oak branches now; it was light enough for her to suspect that I was not in them.
Fallon would take the golden brooch from me between one heartbeat and the next if ever she saw it. I traced the oval with my fingertip, then touched it to my lips to feel the coldness of the metal. Shivering, I pinned the brooch inside the shoulder of my woolen brat, next to my body, and clambered over the earthen wall on the far side of the keep. Then I ran for the woods.
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