Image 1 of 3
Image 2 of 3
Image 3 of 3
Want to sample before you buy? Read on:
He is old now, grey and weathered like the rocks of Connacht round him. He has become ragged as the rolling hills. Yet still he commands a room with his presence; still his subjects heed him, for all their Queen is in the twilight of his years. He has sat upon his throne for decades, carried many children in his belly, and served his people well, though the weight of age and seas of spilled blood hang heavy on his shoulders.
He welcomes death; waits for its hand with patience won through long campaigns and longer years. But the world has other ideas.
#
His would-be death comes for him on a trip to Lough Ree. One of the few indulgences he affords himself, the weight of the crown ample and not safely long ignored – to bathe there in preferred pool on Inis Cloithreann. Too public, too known, was his chosen respite, so it proves; but how was he to know that Furbaide, still in fury at the death of the man’s mother, had mapped and measured distance between pool and shore, and lay in wait for him there, sling in hand?
He had bare but laid himself down into water’s keeping before something sang on the air. Something small and rigid. Its arc sure and true.
The strike of it against his skull almost dreamlike as it rocks his head, and he slumps sideward, before the waters take him.
There’s time, as he slips beneath the surface, to think, Was that cheese…? before all goes dark.
#
But the dark is not his end. He sinks down, down, down far deeper than that pool has ever been. Tumbling through water like air, like cloud, away from the light above, to greener light below; bright and pale, glowing strange.
He breaches gasping for air, head pounding like a rung bell, as he grasps for shore. His leathery fingers find pillars of rock and wood instead, his grip still strong but the outcroppings slippery. Everything around him lit golden-hued, warm as high summer sun. Even the water warmed by that light, though from where it comes, he cannot say.
He coughs up a pool’s worth of that liquid from his lungs, old bones aching with the force of it. Then blinks to see something at the edge of his vision, making a fierce shadow against such brightness: In the near distance rides a woman terrifying tall, in hunting garb fashioned from leaf and bark and bone. She sits astride a towering deer, its antlers their own canopy resting bare like winter wood.
“Welcome,” says the huntswoman, the corner of her mouth curved up in a smile as she watches him collapse into the mud and fronds at water’s edge.
