Pride of Lions Read Free Page A

contrived to keep her son away from his sire so she could demand Brian's attention for herself. But when at last the Ard Ri divorced Gormlaith under Brehon Law and sent her from Kincora, he had kept Donough with him.
    The youngster had taken this as a sign of special affection, and began imagining himself someday supplanting Murrough as Brian's favorite, the son being groomed to succeed his father.
    But now Murrough, who had spent his life trying to step out of Brian's shadow and be his own man, was with the Ard Ri at Dublin, while Donough was being held at arm's length. To keep him safe.
    He ground his teeth in the darkness.
    With no one watching, Donough did not have to keep up the fa@cade of maturity he assumed by daylight. He could be what he was, a sixteen-year-old boy ... well, to be honest, sixteen in two months ... in unfamiliar country in the middle of the night, assailed by the fears that worry most youngsters at some time.
    What would I do, he asked himself, if anything happened to my father?
    The mere idea made his stomach churn.
    Without Brian behind him, Donough was nothing more than Gormlaith's son; the son of the Princess of Leinster, the most hated woman in Ireland.
    Surely, he thought, concentrating with desperate intensity, God will not let anyone harm the Ard Ri!
    He pictured his father as he had last seen him at Kincora--tall, regal, looking far younger than his years.
    But old nevertheless. Brian had been old for all of Donough's lifetime.
    The boy recalled his father's voice, that deep, slow voice which dropped each word as if it were a jewel, compelling people to listen. Donough had strained his throat trying to force his own voice into a lower register, and when someone eventually commented that he was beginning to sound like the Ard Ri he had glowed like a beeswax candle.
    He knew he looked somewhat like Brian. In his mother's many mirrors he had studied his face, searching out similarities. He had the same broad brow and long, straight nose. To his regret he had also inherited his mother's curving mouth, but as soon as he could grow the drooping moustache of a warrior he would hide that flaw.
    Unfortunately he lacked Brian's famous red-gold mane, for his own hair was an auburn so dark it looked almost black unless he stood in the sunlight. But at least he was tall. Someday he might be as tall as the Lion of Ireland.
    Someday ...
    He tensed abruptly. He thought he heard a woman cry out--but what woman would be in these mountains at night when wolves might be hunting?
    Perhaps it was a wolf he heard. He dropped a cautious hand to his sword hilt.
    The sound came again, raising the hackles on his neck. That was no wolf. Now Donough was certain it was a female voice, one with an unnameable quality at once familiar and frightening.
    The wail drifted on the wind. And all at once, he knew.
    "Ban shee!" he hissed in horror.
    "Whassay?" mumbled a warrior lying near him on the ground, wrapped in a voluminous shaggy cloak.
    Donough stood transfixed as the sound rose in volume, shrilling upward into an inhuman ululation as much a part of Ireland as her fields and forests.
    "Mother of God!" gasped the warrior on the ground, trying to scramble out of the enveloping folds of his cloak so he could get to his feet. "What was that?"
    "The guardian spirit of the Dal Cais,"
    Donough told him with sudden, absolute certainty. His blood and bones identified the sound. "She who lives on Crag Liath, the Grey Crag above Kincora. But she's not there now. She's somewhere on this side of the country, and she's keening for the Dalcassian dead!"
    "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph protect us!"
    cried the warrior, fervently signing the Cross on his breast.
    The others were waking in spite of their weariness, the very mention of the ban shee enough to cut through the fog of sleep. Their priests claimed that the ban shees--fairies, Little People, supernatural relicts of a vanished race--were but myths and legends preying on superstitious minds.