My Voice for My Heart

Chapter 1: One week earlier

I stood in the field, on top of the highest hill there was, watching for the dust that would be kicked up by the horses hooves and signal to me that the boys were on their way home. The boys had been gone from me for three long years. Three years of apprenticeships so they could learn their vocations with experts and return to my father's keep, ready to contribute the way nine sons of nine lords should.

But they were my playmates, and I didn't want them to contribute, I wanted them with me.

I had spent three friendless years without them; each forest hollow and flower-filled meadow was full of memories, and every celebration or event paled in comparison to what it could have been, had they been with me.

I was exceptionally lonely.

I sighed, thinking about the last three years. At first, I had been relieved that Bhaltair was going to stay behind, and be an apprentice to my father, but he had changed. Whenever I had seen him, I had been more than invisible. It felt worse than any ignoring my father had even done, because he had been my friend. My first, dearest, most depended upon friend. And now, he shadowed my father, learning how to be a benevolent lord and keeper. growing closer and closer to Father until he most certainly didn't have time for me. I knew that he was no longer the boy who had held my hand while we crossed fast-moving streams or taught me how to ride a horse with my legs on either side of the saddle, but I thought he would have remained my friend. What he was now was a leader, ready to follow in my father's footsteps and take over when my father died.

I was my father's only child, and Bhaltair was the son of my father's most trusted ally. Since I was a girl, there was no way that my father would let me take over his keep, guard his boundaries, or govern his people. My father dismissed me from his thoughts in as long as it took for his eyes to land on me and then move elsewhere.

He didn't want me around. He didn't want to teach me. He just wanted me gone. The times his eyes had landed on me for more than a second, they had narrowed into a glare, becoming ice cold.

I had remembered a time before the boys had left; when I was eleven and they were twelve, except for Bhaltair and Iasan, who were the oldest of us all, and fifteen, and Aodhan found me one afternoon, crying into the neck of one of the horses. His eyes had sparked, burning me with their fire.

"What happened?" he asked me.

"Father hates me," I said into the horse.

Aodhan had taken my shoulders, turning me into his arms and wrapping them around me, "He doesn't hate you," he told me.

"Yes he does, Aodhan!" I argued, stamping my foot and earning an indulgent smile, "You don't see how he looks at me. It's like..." I thought about it, clenching and unclenching my fists, "It's as if he wishes I was never born!"

Aodhan's smile left his face immediately, making me suspect that I said something that might be true.

He kissed the top of my head and ruffled my hair, "It doesn't matter what he thinks, Princess," he told me, "I couldn't be happier you were born."

"Even if you did look like a red-faced squalling old man!" Finn interrupted.

Finn stood in a beam of sunlight against the door of the stall. He had probably stood there on purpose, knowing that the light would hit his blonde hair in such a way that it would make him look like an angel with a halo.

"Oy!" I heard Rab kicking aside the hay as he walked toward us, "she didn't look like an old man, she looked just like that weird monkey-thing that came with the travelers. You remember, the thing that wore a hat and took it off to say 'hello'."