The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

stilled to listen and the angels smiled.”
    As they climbed the hill, the sea began to sing as backdrop, or so it seemed, to his story.
    “Many’s the morning her song would carry over the hills, and the joy of it rivaled the sun,” he continued, and tugged her along the path. As they walked on, the breeze turned to wind and danced merrily over sea and rock.
    “Now the sound of it, the pure joy of it, caught the ear and the envy of a witch.”
    “There’s always a catch,” Jude commented and made him chuckle.
    “Sure and there’s a catch if the story’s a good one. Now this witch had a black heart and the powers she had she abused. She soured the morning milk and caused the nets of the fisherfolk to come up empty. Though she could use her arts to disguise her vile face into beauty, when she opened her mouth to sing, a frog’s croaking was more musical. She hated the maid for her gift of song, and so cast a spell on her and rendered her mute.”
    “But there was a cure—involving a handsome prince?”
    “Oh, there was a cure, for evil should always be confounded by good.”
    Jude smiled because she believed it. Despite all logic, she believed in the happy-ever-after. And such things seemed more than merely possible here, in this world of cliffs and wild grass, of sea with red fishing trawlers streaming over deep blue, of firm hands clasped warm over hers.
    They seemed inevitable.
    “The maid was doomed to silence, unable to share the joy in her heart through her songs, as the witch trapped itinside a silver box and locked it with a silver key. Inside the box, the voice wept as it sang.”
    “Why are Irish stories always so sad?”
    “Are they?” He looked sincerely surprised. “It’s not sad so much as . . . poignant. Poetry doesn’t most usually spring from joy, does it, but from sorrows.”
    “I suppose you’re right.” She brushed absently at her hair as the wind tugged tendrils free. “What happened next?”
    “Well, I’ll tell you. For five years the maid walked these hills and the fields, and the cliffs as we walk them now. She listened to the song of the birds, the music of the wind in the grass, the drumbeat of the sea. And these she stored inside her, while the witch hoarded the joy and passion and purity of the maid’s voice inside the silver box, so only she could hear it.”
    As they reached the top of the hill with the shadow of the old cathedral, the sturdy spear of the round tower, Aidan turned to Jude, whisked her hair back from her face with his fingers. “What happened next?” he asked her.
    “What?”
    “Tell me what happened next.”
    “But it’s your story.”
    He reached down to where little white flowers struggled to bloom in the cracks of tumbled rocks. Picking one, he slid it into her hair. “Tell me, Jude Frances, what you’d like to happen next.”
    She started to reach up for the flower, but he caught her hand, lifted a brow. After a moment’s thought, she shrugged. “Well, one day a handsome young man rode over the hills. His great white horse was weary, and his armor dull and battered. He was lost and injured from battle, and a long way from home.”
    She could see it, closing her eyes. The woods andshadows, the wounded warrior longing for home.
    “As he moved into the forests, the mists swirled in so he could hear nothing but the labored breathing of his own heart. With each beat counted, he understood he came closer to the last.
    “Then he saw her, coming toward him through the mists like a woman wading through a silver river. Because he was ill and in need, the maid took him in and tended his wounds in silence, nursed him through his fevers. Though she was unable to speak to comfort him, her gentleness was enough. So they fell in love without words, and her heart almost burst from the need to tell him, to sing out her joy and her devotion. And without hesitation, without regret, she agreed to go with him to his home far away and leave behind her own, her friends and family and that part of herself locked tight in a silver box.”
    Because she could see it, feel it, even as she spoke, Jude shook her head, moved through the tilted gravestones to lean back against the round tower. The bay swept out below, a spectacular blue where the red boats bobbed, but she was caught in the story.
    “What happens next?” she asked Aidan.
    “She mounted the horse with him,” he continued, picking up the threads she’d left for him as if they’d been his