The Heroines Read Online Free PDF Page A

expert in Irish lit. I’d read only a couple of stories in Dubliners, and at twelve I hadn’t really understood them. If I had thought for a minute that Deirdre was a Heroine, I might have skimmed Mother’s books days ago. We’d missed the obvious cues because her name didn’t ring any bells. “How much ransom are you going to ask for?”
    “There’s no fear for you! A ransom!” Then he laughed that big, phony, lowbrow novel chortle. A girl couldn’t help being offended. “I wouldn’t ask for more than a mewling calf!”
    “My grandfather’s got some money left!”
    “I’m not interested in you, you—you are a mere irritation, a fly I could swat, a maggot”—he dug his heel into the ground—“I could squash. I am a man of honor, not a kidnapper. I only need you to help me reach my wife!”
    “Deirdre’s your wife?” I gave him a good, adolescent scowl. “She’s only sixteen. You’re old enough to be her dad!”
    “Bound to me, she is. I spared her life. My men would have torn her from the womb of Fedlimid’s wife and killed her at birth! It was I who said, ‘Such beauty will not be destroyed!’”
    “She was cursed at birth?”
    “In the womb! She howled from the hollow of her mother. ‘A weird uproar at the waist!’ as Fedlimid said. Cathbad foretold that a woman with twisted yellow tresses and green-irised eyes of beauty would be born. High queens would ache with envy at the sight of her pure perfect body. And he said, ‘Much damage, Derdriu, will follow your high fame and fair visage. Ulster in your time tormented.’ My men wanted her killed, but I offered my protection, hid her high in the mountains, to spare the hard men of Ulster from carnage. But she defied me! Running off with the son of Uisliu. Harsh deeds were done in Erin on her account!”
    I wondered what he meant by harsh deeds, but I was too afraid to ask. “So you want to rescue her from…?”
    “From herself!” He lunged and pointed the sword in the air. “And to rescue Ulster itself!”
    “Why won’t she come back to you on her own?”
    He ignored my question and lifted the sword higher into the trees. “I could give her golden goblets, cups, and drinking horns, houses paneled with red yew, copper screens with golden birds, apples of gold. I could protect her with javelins and shields and swords, three times thirty warriors—”
    “Why wouldn’t she want all that?”
    “This Deirdre is a stubborn child. Sure she doesn’t know what’s good for her.”
    I didn’t like the sound of that. Sure, Conor was mighty robust, but he seemed a little too cocksure of what was his. My mother had warned me to beware of men who referred to women as children. She was a “libber,” as they said back then, a feminist who, despite her own passivity, believed in equality between men and women. I had assimilated those ideas through her breast milk, but I had enough common sense not to try to enlighten Conor. Pretending to go along with him was my only hope to escape him.
    “She is stubborn,” I said. “She’s always yammering on about true love and some guy that got murdered.”
    “Noisiu was doomed the moment she grabbed his ears!”
    I let that cryptic allusion fly. “Why do you need me?”
    He lifted his chin and sniffed the air. His wide nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed like a cat’s. “There is a druidical spell on that field. Somebody has conjured a shield.”
    “Really?” That could be why he still wore his period clothes. “You think I can get you through the prairie?”
    “With your ginger hair, I thought a shape-shifter you might be. But since you couldn’t take flight to escape me, I saw that you had no power. But you must do something to lure Deirdre back into these woods.”
    Imagine me, luring a Heroine into the forbidden woods. Over Mother’s dead body! “Deirdre won’t listen to me.”
    “You must make her.” The horse wandered farther into the trees, and Conor stepped over a fallen trunk