tearing open his flesh. Clamping down on his jaw, he scorned the agony, thinking only of what would happen to the spirits of his men if they heard him howling at Rardove’s feet. Battered back, stomach, ribs; he’d been beaten into a bloody mess twice already. Once more couldn’t matter much.
The assault was cut short on a shout from one of the baron’s men, who came slipping down the moss-covered steps to the prisons.
“Good, my lord,” panted the breathless courier. “Word has come. Senna de Valery arrives.”
“Ah, my…betrothed.” A pause. “Unshackle him.”
Finian spared a brief prayer of thanks to the woman who had saved him from this beating.
“How long until she arrives?” he heard the baron ask. The guards began unlocking the heavy iron cuffs from his wrists.
“Soon, my lord.”
“And?”
The simple but sinister question made Finian curl his lip in disgust. The soldiers jerked him around. A woman in Rardove’s care? She wouldn’t last a month.
“You will be disappointed in neither her face nor her form, my lord,” the messenger said.
“Yes, I’d heard she’s a pretty thing, if not so young. Twenty and five, if I recall.”
The soldier flicked a glance at Finian, then looked away. “She has a great number of heavy ledgers with her, should that matter.”
Rardove laughed. “It will not matter overly much, no. She will be…otherwise engaged.”
She will be like a lamb to slaughter, thought Finian.
The baron turned back. “We’ll have to continue our negotiations later, O’Melaghlin.”
Finian shrugged. “We’ve more to say?”
“I do not. You do. There is a great deal for you to reconsider. I will enjoy watching it.”
“I’ll reconsider the terms of my mercy if ye release my men.”
One graying, aristocratic brow inched up. “Mercy?”
Finian’s slow grin stretched from ear to ear. “I can make yer death a quick one or slow, Rardove. The choice is yers.”
The guards launched forward and flung him face-first to the ground. The weight of a heeled boot against his spine kept him pinioned as Rardove stepped over his legs and sighed.
“Would that these beatings worked,” he said in a plaintive voice, “for I do appreciate their simplicity. But there you have it: they do not. One wonders whether it is due to the stubbornness or the stupidity of your people. Ireland is a strange land.”
Finian shifted slightly, trying to ease away from the rock gouging into his thigh. The guard’s heel pressed down harder, and he stilled.
Rardove’s voice drifted in from his right. “And Senna de Valery knows nothing of it, coming as she does from England.”
Finian spared another brief thought for the woman. To the slaughter.
Scuffed leather boots paced an inch in front of his face then stopped, folding into thick leather wrinkles as the baron crouched beside him.
“I shall have to devise an educational welcome for her, don’t you agree, Lord Finian? Perhaps a few Irish rebels dangling from the end of a rope?” He put his mouth close by Finian’s ear. “I’ll save you for the last.”
Rage surged through him, red-hot and dangerous. He shoved his hips off the ground. The guard whose foot had been planted on his spine went somersaulting into the air. Finian swung around and kicked out with a boot, catching Rardove around his ankles. He went down hard. Finian leapt on top.
Four soldiers hauled him off and sent him flying through the air. He smashed into the wall, the back of his head hitting first. A knee in his stomach guaranteed he wouldn’t rise again anytime soon, and one to his groin made him never want to anyhow.
The soldiers dragged him back to his feet. He stood, fighting the swaying tug of unconsciousness, his boots planted wide. Summoning what ebbing strength he could, he lifted his head and shook away the blood dripping into his eyes.
“Christ,” Rardove snarled, his breath coming hard. “You’re all savages.” He jerked his head to the soldiers. “Make him pay for his insolence.”
They did, and later, as the light from torches carried by the retreating guards faded to nothing, Finian lay spread-eagled on the floor of his cell, barely breathing. But he was thinking hard.
The Englishry were a plague, an infestation of stark naughts, Rardove being the best example of their descent into hell. Finian would not ally with them were he offered the lordship of Tír na nÓg in return. He hadn’t wanted to come and even feign parley, but The O’Fáil wanted it done, and Finian could not refuse.
But now, even a feigned agreement with the worm would do nothing to save his