The Shadows (Fianna Trilogy Book 1) by Megan Chance

Author:Megan Chance [Chance, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyscape
Published: 2014-06-02T23:00:00+00:00

“Well?” Mama asked.

I tried to smile as I handed it to her.

Aidan said, “There’s this too,” and thrust the package at me.

I knew the moment I took it that it was a book. I opened the paper. The cover was smooth and unblemished—the book was brand-new, the pages uncut. I opened it to the flyleaf, where Patrick had written:

It was a book of poems by an Irish poet, J. J. Callanan. I said to my brother, “Hand me your knife.”

He pushed aside the lily tickling his nose and gave me the knife. I turned the folded, uncut pages to where Patrick had indicated, and then I cut the folds to reveal a translation of an Irish poem called “The Lament of O’Gnive”: “How dimm’d is the glory that circled the Gael. / And fall’n the high people of green Innisfail / The sword of the Saxon is red with their gore / And the mighty of nations is mighty no more!”

Another poet who spoke of oppression in Ireland. “Do you want to know me?” Patrick had said, and now I wondered: was this all there was to him? Only Ireland?

“What makes you so sure he knows you?”

“No jewelry, eh?” Aidan said disapprovingly.

“That would hardly be appropriate,” Mama said. “But I hoped for a proposal. Oh, what he must have thought yesterday . . . What is that book he sent you, Grace?”

“Poems,” I said. “An Irish poet.”

“More gloomy talk of rebellion,” Aidan said. He peered at me around the flowers in his arms, and I was surprised to see compassion in his eyes before he shoved the bouquet at our mother. “You’d best put these in water, Mama, before they wilt. I suppose we’ll have to smell the things for the next week. They’re making me sneeze already.”

Patrick had told me this would be something special, and I supposed it was special that he wanted to share his passion with me. But I’d wanted something more. Even Aidan understood my wish for romance. “What makes you so sure he knows you?”

I pushed Derry’s words away. Patrick did know me. “Perhaps I could be your Diarmid,” he’d said. Patrick understood that I’d felt we were moving too fast. But things could not be delayed much longer. My family could not afford the luxury of waiting.

My mother was tight-lipped the rest of the day, more wan and distracted than usual. She did her best with a birthday supper. Soup with decent bread and a dessert of applesauce and cream. But she ate almost none of it, and her hand went to her head often, as if she were in pain, which was something I could understand. I felt the start of my own headache. “You’d best push him along if you can, Grace.”

“Why?” Aidan asked, taking a spoonful of applesauce—the only thing he’d eaten. “I promise you he’ll ask her to chain him soon enough. There’s no point in rushing it.”

I kicked him under the table.

“Oww,” he cried out. “What’d you do that for?”

My mother sighed.

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