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her Connaught champion Ferdiad, friend and yet enemy of the
mighty hero Cuchulain."
    "Aye, and don’t forget Laeg, here." Triona
proudly patted her stallion’s glistening reddish-brown neck. "He’s as
stouthearted as they come. I knew his name should be Laeg the moment I first
rode him."
    "Cuchulain’s stalwart charioteer, courageous and
true. So you’ve named all your pets after Eire’s ancient heroes. You must know
your legends well."
    "As should any good Irishman."
    " Aye, and she can sing
them well, too, Lord! Triona has a lovely voice," added Aud, close behind
them.
    "Aud!" Triona twisted around and gave her
maid a quelling look, but the spare middle-aged woman simply nudged her spotted
pony into a faster walk until they were riding three abreast.
    Pleased to hear that Triona possessed at least one
maidenly virtue, Ronan asked, "A lovely voice you say?"
    "Oh, aye, Lord, as lilting as a lark,"
declared Aud, clearly eager to converse now that Triona had broken her silence.
So eager in fact, that she leaned closer to Ronan, her large brown eyes
animated and appearing even rounder in her small beak-nosed face. "Do you
have a harpist?"
    "Enough, Aud," Triona groused. She pulled up
on the reins and fell back in front of the four O’Byrne clansmen who trailed
them, the winding mountain path only wide enough for two horses. "I’m sure
the O’Byrne doesn’t want to hear all of this—"
    "Nonsense," Ronan interrupted, hoping to
discover if there were more worthy womanly qualities to his reluctant charge
than met the eye. "As your guardian, everything about you is of interest
to me. Allow the good woman to speak." He turned back to Aud. "Aye, I’ve
a harpist, one of the finest in Wicklow."
    "He’d have to be one of the finest to match my
sweeting’s fair music," Aud chatted on proudly, listing the ancient
legends that Triona could recite in song: the tale of the Red Branch Knights,
Deirdre of the Sorrows, the Children of Lir and so many more.
    "Jesu, Mary and Joseph,"
muttered Triona as she fell back even farther, embarrassed. Yet she should be
used to such talk by now, and she knew her irrepressible maid meant no harm.
Loyal to the bone, Aud had doted upon her since she was a wee babe. But Aud was
also a meddler, forever hoping that somewhere there was a man Triona might
accept . . .
    "Little chance of that," Triona breathed to
herself, watching as Conn playfully lunged in and out of the trees. She doubted
there was a man alive who’d take her just as she was
    "So Murchertach wasn’t the first man that Triona
spurned."
    "Oh no, Lord, there’ve been plenty of others."
    "Aud!" Wondering how the conversation had
jumped from the legends of Eire to such a personal topic, Triona realized with
growing irritation that she should have been listening to her maid more
carefully. "That’s enough talk about me!"
    "But the O’Byrne was merely asking—"
    "Too many questions!" Triona scowled at Ronan
as she kicked Laeg forward, forcing Aud to shift places with her, the startled
maid now riding behind. "If he must know anything else, then he can ask me
himself."
    "There is something," said Ronan, noting the
inborn grace in Triona’s gesture as she shoved an unruly shock of bright copper
hair from her face. "Why have you rejected every suitor?"
    "Didn’t like them."
    The truculent tilt of her chin told Ronan that the
subject was a touchy one but he persisted, puzzled by her answer. "Nothing
more than that?"
    "She shot two of them with her arrows!" Aud
interjected as if she couldn’t help herself. "Such fine-looking young men,
too, and of good family. One in the leg and the other—"
    "I grazed him in the shoulder," Triona
finished tightly.
    "You shot them?" Frowning to himself, Ronan
remembered with discomfort how close he had come to being skewered by one of
her arrows. "Did they overstep their bounds? Touch you? Insult you?"
    "No, just wouldn’t leave me in peace."
    "So you shot them."
    "I said grazed, O’Byrne. It wasn’t