The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

to keep it. ’Tis the Irish who absorbed the Vikings, the Normans, and so on, not the other way around.”
    There was pride there that she understood and respected. “The fact remains that these people came to this island, that they mated with the women here, passed down their seed, and brought with them their superstitions and beliefs. Ireland absorbed them, too.”
    “Which came first, the tale or the teller? Is that part of your study then?”
    He was quick, she thought. A sharp mind and a clever tongue. “You can’t study one without studying the other. Who tells and why, as much as what’s told.”
    “All right, I’ll tell you a story that was told to me by my grandda, and to him by his father, and his by his for as far back as any knows, for there have been Gallaghers on this coast and in these hills for longer than time remembers.”
    “The story came down paternally?” Jude interrupted and was met with that quirked brow. “Very often stories come down the generations through the mother.”
    “True enough, but the bards and harpists of Ireland were traditionally male, and it’s said one was a Gallagher who wandered to this place singing his stories for coin and ale, that he saw some of what I’ll tell you with his own eyes, heard the rest from the lips of Carrick, prince of the faeries, and from that told the story himself to all who cared to listen.”
    He paused, noting the amused interest in Jude’s eyes. Then began. “There was a maid known as Gwen. She was of humble birth but a lady in her heart and in her manner. She had hair as pale as winter sunlight, and eyes as green as moss. Her beauty was known throughout the land, and though she carried herself with pride, for she had a slim and pleasing form, she was a modest maid who, as her blessed mother had died in the birthing of her, kept the tidy cottage for her aging father. She did as she was bid and what was expected and was never heard to complain. Though she was seen, from time to time, walking on the cliffs of an evening and staring out over the sea as if she wished to grow wings and fly.”
    As he spoke, a silent stream of sunlight shimmeredthrough the rain, through the window, to lie quietly on the table between them.
    “I can’t say what was in her heart,” Aidan continued. “Perhaps this is something she didn’t know herself. But she kept the cottage, cared for her father, and walked the cliffs alone. One day, when she was taking flowers to the grave of her mother, for she was buried near the well of Saint Declan, she met a man—what she thought was a man. He was tall and straight, with dark hair waving to his shoulders and eyes as blue as the bluebells she carried in her arms. By her name he called her, and his voice was like music in her head and set her heart to dancing. And in a flash like a lightning strike, they fell in love over her dear mother’s grave with the breeze sighing through the tall grass like faeries whispering.”
    “Love at first sight,” Jude commented. “It’s a device often used in fables.”
    “Don’t you believe that heart recognizes heart?”
    An odd and poetic way to put it, she thought, and was glad she’d have the question recorded. “I believe in attraction at first sight. Love takes more.”
    “You’ve had the Irish all but drummed out of you,” he said with a shake of his head.
    “Not so much I don’t appreciate the romance of a good story.” She sent him a smile, a hint of dimples. “What happened next?”
    “Well, however heart recognized heart, it was not the simple matter of a maid and a man taking hands and joining lives, for he was Carrick, the faerie prince who lived in the silver palace under the hill where her cottage sat. She feared a spell, and she doubted both his heart and her own. And more her heart yearned, more she doubted, for she’d been taught to beware of the faeries and the rafts where they gathered.”
    His voice, rising and falling like music on the words, lulled Jude into propping her elbows on the table, resting her chin on her fists.
    “Even so one night, when the moon was ripe and full, Carrick lured Gwen from the cottage and onto his great winged horse to fly with her over the land and the sea and show her the wonders he would give her if only she would pledge to him. His heart was hers and all he had he would give her.
    “And it happened that her father, wakeful with aches in his bones, saw his young Gwen swirl out of the sky on the white