Normally, Agnes was not the sort of girl to cry. A fighter, she hated to have anyone discover what she considered a weakness in her. It was only with Breannan that she could break down and weep. Her tears were always real enough, he knew, the kind that convulsed the body with great sobs that could choke you half to death and wracked body and ( Read more... )

From Agnes’s performance on the day Breannan took her to see the corpses of her family’s murderers - some of the rocks she’d thrown at them had seriously bent the bars of their cages - he knew she was a fighter. Hell, he knew that from so many things about her, the way she’d gladly opted to work in the kitchen to earn her keep, her tenacious, ( Read more... )

And so the following Saturday, after making confession, Breannan and Agnes went down to the stables, which were located a little distance from the castle, on a natural terrace that had been scooped from the side of the plateau on which were located the castle and its grounds. It wasn’t so far that they couldn’t walk, and while it was cold, it was ( Read more... )

Day by day, the lessons proceeded apace. Brennan used two translations of the Bible done by Father Etienne Dupont, one in Gaelic, one in English, as textbooks for teaching Agnes how to read. First, he would read a passage to her, and then he would let her try the following passage, alternating from Gaelic to English and back again, to give Agnes ( Read more... )

And so Agnes learned to read, sitting next to Duncan at the big oaken table in his study.

But first, Duncan had her learn the alphabet. It was oddly difficult; Agnes wanted reasons for the shapes of the letters, becoming irritated when she found that the way a letter looked had little or nothing to do with the sound of it ( Read more... )

"Bláthín, she's barely more than a bairn!" Caítlín said angrily ( Read more... )

The next day, Bláthín was astonished to see Agnes up and around when she entered the kitchen at first daylight to begin preparing for the day's work of cooking and supervising the scullery-maids and other servants. A further prodigy: Agnes was properly dressed in a blouse and skirt that Bláthín had carefully folded and set on the stand by Agnes's ( Read more... )

She is very like a young hawk, thought Breannan. She fights for everything, I'll wager. Hmmm . . . I wonder if she'll eat some more. "Bláthín," he said, "I would like to try something. She is stick-thin and needs as much food as she can get down. Do you have more soup ( Read more... )

What a frail little bit of a thing, thought Bláthín, the cook. She and Caítlín, the seamstress, like Bláthín living in the Laird's castle itself, had been helping to tend the poor little girl-woman ever since Ian, the gamekeeper, and his assistant, Blár, had found her lying on the hard, rocky ground just outside the wall surrounding the castle one ( Read more... )

Well, not exactly dreams. More like memories from a life lived centuries ago by a girl who, at the age of 14, lost her entire family -- and gained a Laird and a people ( Read more... )