Lord Of The Isle. Elizabeth Mayne

The specter’s tartan molded around his torso, detailing his size and exposing brawny, hard-hewn banded arms. Lightning flashed off his upraised sword. War plaits streamed from his temples, as if to flee from the fierce visage under his helm.

      Morgana lifted her head from the mud and spat in James Kelly’s face. She let free a high, wild laugh of triumph.

      “You are dead, James Kelly!” she shouted, believing in the magic of the witchcraft handed down to her from generations of ancestors more powerful than she. “Look to the river, cur! See you the revenge of the Fitzgeralds!”

      “God and Saint George,” whispered a soldier.

      “J-J-Jesus Mariah! It’s Shane O’Neill! The ghost that haunts the bridge!” Orson bawled.

      Her attackers released their grip at once.

      Kelly scrambled off her on all fours, crawling and clawing at the ground for the sword belt that he’d cast beyond Morgana’s reach to torment and break her. He shouted frantic curses and babbled frenetic orders. His cowardly soldiers bolted, howling as they ran for horses. “Jesus save us! It’s the ghost of Shane O’Neill!”

      Shane O’Neill, indeed! Delighted, Morgana pushed herself up from the mud, snatching Gerait Og’s blade back into her hands. She brought it to her lips and kissed the amber jewel embedded in the hilt, then staggered painfully onto her feet.

      A wild notion made her kick James Kelly viciously in his pimpled arse. He slipped and sprawled facedown in the mud, his belly covering his sword. That made her choke with glee. She tried to find the strength to kick him in his ugly dangling cods. Much as she wanted to deliver that last indignity before he died, she hadn’t the strength to do it. Her weakened energy went into fueling her mad, ecstatic laughter.

      Morgana sobered the instant her gaze returned to the warrior. Burning eyes were fixed on her, not Kelly. Her gown hung loose from her shoulders, rent from throat to hem.

      Her brain locked on to a truth. Her grandfather’s supernatural powers summoned only demons. Years of strict convent teachings had drummed that fact into Morgana’s head. This bloodthirsty, berserk Irish war god running circles around her with lust in his terrible eyes wasn’t coming for Kelly. He was coming for her.

      The conundrum of those thoughts brought more mad laughter surging from her lips. All demons, spirits, powers and dominions demanded a high price for their aid. A supreme irony struck her. What could she possibly offer her war god for a sacrifice? Her virginity? Hardly. She was a widowed woman.

      At that ludicrous thought, Morgana laughed. She was truly a witch, as all in Dublin called her—Morgan le Fay! Tears squeezed from her eyes as she threw her arms wide and spun in a slow dance, chanting, “Kill them, kill them! Slay them all for me and I am yours!”

      A soldier screamed, “Shane O’Neill!” as the warrior’s sword cleaved his head from his body. Morgana stopped dancing. Could her vision-god be the ghost of the murdered Shane O’Neill?

      And why not? She laughed again. Shane O’Neill had died on the bridge at Benburg. How very Irish of him to haunt the very spot where he’d died!

      Her humor left her then.

      Another warrior—a giant of the ilk of the legendary Finn mac Cool—appeared. The giant’s hair gleamed curiously white. Adorned with Pictish blue war paint, he bore no other trace of humanity.

      Lightning bolts flashed from their gleaming swords. Mud churned up from the hooves of their charging war-horses.

      The Abhainn Mor erupted. Warrior after warrior spewed forth from the bridge.

      Each was more ferocious than the last. Heads sprouted helms and horns. Targes grew spikes. All bore swords and dangerous dirks on their belts, while brandishing halberds, pikes, lochaber axes, tridents or wicked spiked maces.

      James Kelly staggered to his feet, hitching his breeches to his waist to cover himself. His sword hung limp in his hand. He turned tail, and spying Morgana, ran behind her to hide himself while he fastened his breeches.

      Morgana dragged her ruined gown onto her shoulders and clutched its pieces closed over her breasts. Past that, she had lost all ability to move or breathe. Every muscle in her body was locked rigid. Rape at the hands of the English was the least of her worries now.

      Her dabblings in her grandfather’s witchcraft had come full circle. As the good nuns at Saint Mary de Hogges’s Abbey had predicted, the devils had come for Morgana’s wicked, unrepentant soul. She lacked the ability to dredge up the words of confession or the sense to list her many varied and too-often-repeated wicked sins.

      “Sweet Saint Brigit, save me!” she whispered.

      For the first time in Morgana’s tumultuous life, the sights before her overwhelmed her mind. She fainted dead away at James Kelly’s feet.

       Chapter Three

      No redcoat escaped Hugh O’Neill’s retribution. In short order, five curs fell under the stroke of Hugh’s sword. Only Kelly remained alive, his heart still beating, as Hugh dismounted from Boru and tossed the war-horse’s reins to his young nephew, Owen Roe.

      “What farce be this, O’Neill?” Kelly demanded. He hid his fear behind a mask of sarcasm—that of a bureaucrat accustomed to wielding threats against lesser men than he. “Think you this some London stage, and you a hero of some play, wherein you ravish the maiden yourself?”

      Hugh’s cold smile sent Kelly staggering backward. He came up short, pinned to the point of Kermit Blackbeard’s sword.

      “Your sarcasm ill suits you, Kelly,” Hugh crooned. He handed Loghran his sword to clean the blood from it. James Kelly and Hugh O’Neill went way back, fifteen long years, to Hugh’s first days at the court of Elizabeth Regina. Kelly had been the bully of the queen’s court then, just as he was the bully of Ireland now.

      The soldiers were dead, but not the traitor. Hugh stepped around the broken body of the woman, drew back his fist and let it fly into James Kelly’s face, dropping him like a stone at the feet of Shamus Fitz and Donald the Fair.

      “Truss him and tie a rope around his neck. If he doesn’t wake up, I’ll drag him by his throat to the stone of O’Neill.”

      Hugh turned his back to the traitorous Kelly as he stripped off his gauntlets. He flicked a cold glance to the kerns milling all over the vale, examining the soldiers Hugh had dispatched. Before a one of them had so much as lifted a finger, Hugh had lopped off three heads and gutted a fourth.

      Stoic Loghran O’Toole’s only participation in the melée had been to make certain Kelly remained Hugh’s prisoner.

      A deep silence settled over the kerns as young Hugh O’Neill turned to face them.

      “Macmurrough!” Hugh shouted. “Present yourself!”

      At one time, Art Macmurrough had been a general under Shane the Proud, in command of a division of five hundred foot soldiers. He commanded no one now. Bereft of the heart of their leadership, the army of O’Neills had not marched anywhere since Shane’s death. The old soldier came forward reluctantly.

      “So your admiration for fine horseflesh exceeds your attention to duty, does it, Art?” Hugh asked in a controlled voice, though the angry edge was there. Every living soul near Benburg bridge heard it.

      “My lord,” Macmurrough answered in a voice as aged by the years as Loghran’s, “’twas a fine mare. I couldn’t let it drown in the river. Not a horse like that.”

      “So you gave my position away, then, for a piece of horseflesh? Good thinking, man. What if this had been the justiciar, Lord Grey’s, vanguard, bringing siege to Dungannon’s abbey? Did you turn your back on Shane as you just turned your back on me? Did you leave Shane vulnerable? Here at this bridge? Send