Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

"Och, you are dry! Donuil, have you no eyes at all for seeing to our guest? Here, Master Merlyn, let me bring you another." He took my cup and looked at Donuil, one eyebrow raised high. "I suppose yours is empty, too? Cardoc, another?" Cardoc shook his head in polite refusal, but Donuil proffered his cup sheepishly and Liam snatched it from him in mock surliness, smiling as he moved away to refill both. While he was doing so, his daughter Shelagh swept into the room, moving quickly and with confidence, her hand outstretched to greet me and the hem of her long garment brushing the floor, concealing any movement of her legs and giving the distinct impression that she glided rather than strode with long, sure steps.

"Master Merlyn, welcome to our house." She looked me straight in the eyes and made no attempt to apologize for not having been here to greet me when I arrived, and as I took her hand in greeting, her eyes were already scanning the rest of the room, taking a brief, keen inventory. Apparently satisfied, she looked back at me. "Has Cardoc been singing for you?"

"He has, and very well."

"Aye, he is our finest bard, in my opinion, although I keep that private, for the good of all." She flashed a smile at Cardoc and then her gaze moved on to Donuil, who was gazing into the fire again, but her next words were still for me. "I can see Prince Donuil is as talkative as he has been since he arrived. Father? Will you pour a cup for me? I'm parched from the heat of the kitchens. Be seated, Master Merlyn, and I will, too." She sat down immediately, in the seat her father had occupied, and he returned silently, holding a cup for her and one for me, after which he returned to collect his own and Donuil's before settling into the next chair on his daughter's right. I, too, sat down again, holding my cup aloft and smiling with admiration at this mercurial young woman.

There was no sign in her of the harassed and road-weary traveller I had met earlier in the day. The creature who sat easily beside me now, taking a deep draught of the brimming cup her father had poured for her, was wondrous to behold, with long, carefully tousled, burnished hair of a deep, rich brown, interspersed with lighter textures that caught the light in streaks and reflected the glimmer of flames from fire and candle. Artless in their abundant artifice, her tresses were luxuriant, waved, rather than curled, and held casually in place by several jewelled pins and one finger-wide band of polished amber that circled her high forehead a fingersbreadth above her eyebrows. Her eyebrows were remarkable: straight and full, they rose slightly upward at the sides, creating a dark band the entire width of her face, broken only by the space, again a single finger's width, between them. Beneath those startling brows, her eyes tugged at my consciousness, suggesting something I could not at first define, and therefore demanding my closer attention. They were the colour of hazel, neither brown nor green and yet a blend of both with overtones of grey, but it was the shape of them that had caught my attention, I decided moments later. They were straight, almost as though ruled across the bottom, making them starkly different from the eyes of others. Most young people's eyes are rounded, top and bottom. Only the advance of age mars their perfection, tugging and twisting inexorably downward with the years, until the eyes of older people become as individually different and wrinkled as their owners. Shelagh's eyes were straight across the lower lids, and only slightly curved upward across the top, yet they were huge, large and lambent and beautiful. She was speaking now to her father, turning her head slightly towards him and away from me, allowing me to look more closely at her, seeing her almost in profile, and only now did I recognize another artifice to match the skill with which she had arranged her hair: she had highlighted the shadow of her upper lids with some kind of cosmetic, very faint and only slightly darker than her natural skin colour. That hint, the merest suggestion of additional depth, lent her eyes the appearance of slanting slightly upward as they swept out from the narrow bridge of her nose, and lent emphasis also to her cheekbones, which were already full and high, smoothing the skin that covered them to polished planes. Her nose, narrow, clean-edged and perfectly proportioned to her face, was very slightly hooked; not aquiline in the sense of the great Roman beak of my own forebears, but a gentler, less aggressive yet unmistakably avian curve. A hawk, I thought, seeing that. This woman is a hawk! She is a kestrel, soft to the touch and beautiful, once trained, and a pleasurable, exciting companion, but intrinsically savage and untamable unless she herself has chosen to accept a master, after which her loyalty will be unswerving until death.

Surprised and slightly uncomfortable with these thoughts, I glanced away again, towards Donuil, only to find him gazing at the woman as raptly as I had been. There was an open vulnerability in his expression that I found even less comforting than my own thoughts, and so I returned my eyes to Shelagh, aware that I had absorbed no word of the conversation taking place between her and her father.

Now I heard her say, "They should be ready now. I'll go and start them moving so we can eat." She tossed back the remainder of her mead, tilting her head backward and gulping it like a man, then stood up, smiling widely at Donuil and me. "We will eat within the quarter hour, I promise you, but now I'm back to the kitchens." I watched her lips, wide and bright red and full, forming the words, and admired the perfectly shaped brightness of her strong teeth. Belatedly, remembering my manners, I began to rise to my feet but she was already gone, and I watched her move quickly and surely across the floor and disappear behind the screens that masked the far end of the house, where I could now hear the sounds of other people talking and moving Liam himself had twisted around in his seat to watch his daughter leave, and now he turned back to me, a small smile of bemusement on his lips.

"She's the wild one, and I love her more than is good for either of us, I fear, but there are times when I cannot help wondering what she is, and times when I wonder if she knows, herself." He saw my look of mystification and his smile grew a little broader. "Daughter or son, I mean. Oh, she's all female; the gods know, a blind man could see that, but she has some fearful male attributes about her from time to time. She refuses to be . . . what's the word I want? . . . constrained's as good as any, I suppose. She refuses to be constrained by her womanhood." He paused, his head cocked to one side, regarding me. "D'you understand what I mean by that, Master Merlyn?" I shook my head, not trusting myself to words. "Well, I'm not complaining, you understand, not really. She could not be a better daughter, and she lacks none of the affection or the warmth an old man looks for in his daughter. She looks after me as though I were an egg, too fragile to be entrusted to any but the gentlest care. And she's beloved, I truly believe, of all the other women in this place, helping them with their troubles and their children, and as you can see, she keeps a house for me that is unlike any other in this land, in terms of comfort and cleanliness." He finished off the contents of his cup before continuing. "But there's the other side of her. She prides herself on being a hunter and a warrior and, truth be told, she is one of the best and strongest fighters in the place. No other woman can match her with sword or spear or club, and precious few men would care to face her in earnest, either. And with a knife, she is almost a demon. She can throw a knife—any knife—and pierce a target, clean and centre, nine times out of ten . . ." This time his pause was long. "No other that I know—no one anyone else knows, either—can do that. But she's my daughter . . ." I heard a note of agonizing plaint in his voice, but before I could respond, another voice broke in.