Echo of Glory: An Irish Legends Novel

Table of Contents

Accident

Blank Stares

Determination

Rebellion

Explosion

Bean Sidhe

Bloody Ground

Wraiths

Sliver of Hope

Music

Longing

Terrible Beauty

Black Sky

Hostage

Justification

Ruins

The Bonnie Prince

Echoes

Admissions

Revisions

Illumination

Empty Fields

Damp Skin

Swords

Imagination

Absolution

Burial

Wisdom

Electricity

Thank You for Reading

Author’s Note

Praise for Destiny

Praise for Compulsion

Acknowledgments

About Martina Boone

Copyright

Accident

It takes two to make an accident.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

 Picture 1

The shout came from the excavation site, and it was nearly drowned out by the roar of the ocean rushing through the slim channel that separated Dursey from Oileán Beag, the much smaller island that hugged the coast of its larger sibling. Niall Sullivan shifted the heavy box of chemicals and microscopes in his arms and hurried across the narrow temporary bridge. Gemma, their anthropologist, was famous for her temper, but she rarely raised her voice. If she was shouting before the volunteers had even arrived, it didn’t bode well for the long, busy summer.

Oi, Kieran! I’m talking to you, you slacker! Gemma yelled. Are you planning to do any actual work today?

In the raw wind, the white nylon of the mobile lab tent on the other side flapped and billowed like the canvas of a sailing ship, as if the island on the southwestern tip of the Beara Peninsula were a vessel with her prow turned determinedly into the Atlantic surf, an English frigate sailing away after the massacre, a pirate ship returning from sacking the monastery, or a Viking slaver carrying Irish captives off to be sold in the Middle East. Each of those had brought misery to Dursey through the centuries, but Niall’s troubles since arriving on the island had been much more grounded in the present—and all of them centered on Kieran Stafford’s general bolloxology.

Niall couldn’t blame Gemma for her frustration. He’d have loved to have a go at Kieran himself, but he didn’t have that luxury. These days, he needed to be responsible. Settle matters with leadership instead of a good lead hook.

His steps were slowed by the uneven, tufted grass alongside the lab, and the tent still blocked his view when Gemma raised her voice again. Not that her words required much in the way of visualization. Kieran, Jaysus, come on! We need to get this done. Give James a hand picking up that sod instead of leaning on your spade. He’s already put in six times as much effort as you have.

Nothing new there, is it? Liam’s deep voice chimed in, the tone laced with resentment instead of his usual good-natured humor.

Will you two leave off? Kieran’s words were drawled out, his accent more Oxford than Irish like the others, despite having been mostly raised in Dublin, too. I’m entitled to catch my breath, and I’ve been hard at it all day.

Niall arrived at the front of the tent and scanned the area around the scarcely visible ruins of the Prince of Beare’s last refuge. Where the dig team had marked it off with twine and orange tape, Gemma stood at the front edge of the excavation grid along the buried rubble of the walls. In front of her, strewn with roots and rock, the sour earth gaped bare, the sod newly cut away.

There wasn’t much else to see. The foundations of the castle and fortress were mere bumps of history razed to the ground by the English at the time of the massacre and covered over by earth, grass, and clumps of furze and heather. Devoid of trees, the tiny island was an empty landscape, bare emerald green drifting toward the cliffs and white-capped sea. But to Niall, it was almost unbearably beautiful. Beneath the soil, anything and everything remained possible, answers and secrets still slumbering, waiting to be uncovered.

Gemma pushed the rim of her hat back from her face with a dirt-coated tattooed wrist. Her hair sprang forward in curls of deep red copper, and a galaxy of freckles shone beneath the gleam of sweat beading along her cheeks. A few feet away, Kieran—precisely as Gemma had said—leaned on his spade, talking to James, who, though forty pounds lighter and half a head shorter, merely shrugged his narrow shoulders, pushed his glasses up his nose, and continued lifting rectangles of sod from the stack by his feet and loading them into the wheelbarrow. Unlike the rest of the team, all of them caked with soil and sweat, Kieran still managed to look as though he’d recently stepped out of some glossy outdoor magazine advert aimed at the sort of readers who spared no expense.

Sunlight flashed on the blade of the six-inch knife Liam was using to hack away the last clinging roots from a square of sod, and then he swung himself out of his crouch. A gust of wind stirred the wheat-colored dreadlocks that hung midway down his back and made him look disconcertingly like a marauding Viking, but he lumbered over to where Gemma stood and made the tactical error of giving her his sweet, gentle smile and patting her on the shoulder.

Gemma swung to face him with her fists balled at her sides.

Niall stepped out from the shadow of the tent before the situation got any worse. Right, that’s about enough, all of you. Kieran, quit the foostering. Take over wheelbarrow duty and give James a rest.

We’re in the middle of a discussion. Kieran peered over James’ head.

A muscle ticked along Niall’s jaw. Discuss it later. The rest of this grid needs clearing before the sun goes down.

Kieran straightened slowly enough for insolence. The volunteers can finish in the morning. That’s why we have them coming.

Hardly. Niall shifted the heavy box in his arms. You know better than that.

I know I’ve more important things to do than manual labor. Kieran stabbed the spade into the grass and left it standing upright behind him as he stepped closer. Is this how you’re planning on running the dig? The staff catering to the hired help? To him? He jerked a thumb back at James. It’s absurd, this whole site order that he’s developed. At this rate, we’ll be checking half of Dursey before we get to the St. Michael’s property.

Which is what we all decided—four to one. I’ve no intention of overriding the vote. The odds of finding a burial site are slim, and it’s not wild geese we’re after, it’s evidence to corroborate what happened.

What happened according to Phillip O’Sullivan, which isn’t the official record.

"The official English record barely addresses the massacre at all. Niall swallowed down a sigh. Look, Kieran, you swore to me you were looking for the truth—whatever that turned out to be and whatever implications it would have for your father politically. I hired you on that basis. Now prove to me I wasn’t wrong."

Kieran shifted his feet and the wind blew his blond hair back from a high, smooth forehead. He had the red-cheeked coloring of the Irish side of his family, coupled with dark brown eyes that sometimes made his thoughts and moods hard to read. I didn’t realize you would discount all my ideas.

I’m not discounting them. Niall made an effort to soften the hard edge in his voice.

As good as. You’ve given them such a low priority that we’ll be lucky to start on the St. Michael’s land before the end of summer. At least let me take the ground-penetrating radar out myself when James isn’t using it.

The equipment’s not the point. We need to take the time to document systematically, and I need you here, helping with the volunteers, working toward the team priorities instead of haring off after your own agenda.

It’s a well-documented professional theory.

Exactly. One theory. Not the only theory. This is my dig, Kieran. My team, and my responsibility, and I won’t have you putting its success in jeopardy.

Kieran’s chin came up, and he fixed Niall with a glare. It seems to me you’re the one doing that. And wouldn’t it be a shame if you didn’t get approval to continue digging here next year?

It was a threat, possibly an empty one, but given that in a matter of weeks Kieran’s father could well become the next taoiseach, the next prime minister of Ireland, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. And Kieran’s smirk said he knew Niall couldn’t afford to take the risk.

Niall’s temper was saved by a gull screeching into a dive too close overhead, which gave him a moment to curb the desire to wipe the smug look from Kieran’s face. Seeing the shadow approaching, Kieran jumped back, and the gull flew past him with two feet to spare.

Niall was starting to have a genuine fondness for the island’s seagulls. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn they’d launched a personal vendetta against Kieran in the past week since the team’s arrival.

He tightened his grip on the box he held and managed to achieve a pleasant tone of voice. Pull your weight, Kieran. That’s all anyone’s asking of you. You’ve put us behind schedule as it is.

He turned and walked away.

Beyond the tent and the temporary bridge where the small island of Oileán Beag hugged the Dursey shoreline like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the sea curled white against the cliffs. The descending sun was edging down toward the island’s spine, the old signal tower on the hump silhouetted like a postcard against the western ocean. Already, the evening light was changing, and the last of the day-walkers were hurrying to queue up at the cable car station for the return trip to the mainland.

Which was another problem to lay at Kieran’s feet.

If they hadn’t been so far behind—and if the tensions hadn’t been running so high—Niall would have taken the day to drive to Dublin and bring his twin sister and her son down himself. Siobhan should have been here long since, but even with the spotty mobile coverage on the island, he’d received no message since a garbled call from Adam that morning—and no response to the calls he had made himself. After setting the box of assorted microscopes, testing sieves, and solutions down on the corner of a table, he gave in to the increasingly insistent worry, dug his mobile from his pocket, and tried again.

His sister didn’t answer, and he could only leave another message. Hiya, Siobhan. It’s nearly eight o’clock. Where are you, love? The cable car’s due for its last run in half an hour, and I hate to think of you and Adam stranded for the night. The weather won’t be fit for a boat crossing from the mainland with the wind picking up. Phone me, would you? Let me know you’re safe, at any rate, and if you won’t be arriving straight off, I’ll ring round to one of the nearby B&Bs. Just ring me back and tell me where you are.

Guilt swamped him along with a potent cocktail of fear and fury as he hung up and crossed to where the flap of the tent was tied back against a post. Kieran or no Kieran, he should have gone to get Siobhan. He should have made the time. Deep down, he’d known that even when she had sworn she’d be fine driving down on her own. She had already postponed her arrival twice by then and put off coming until the last minute. But she’d always had a gift for making him feel like he was worrying over nothing.

Until long after it was clear he wasn’t.

Now all he could do was wait and regret—and try not to take it out on Kieran any more than the man deserved.

What he really needed was to replace Kieran altogether, although that would be a complicated prospect. It would be nearly impossible to find anyone else with a fraction of Kieran’s familiarity with the historical material or archival research now that summer had begun. Anyone worth their salt was already committed elsewhere.

Then, too, he couldn’t discount Kieran’s threats.

The latest political shift had been only a cloud on the horizon when Niall had hired him, and the rumors of Kieran’s father maneuvering toward becoming taoiseach had seemed like a distant—worst-case—possibility. But Callum Stafford’d had plenty of influence even then without being the actual head of government. And since the last of the approvals for the dig had been promised but not yet finalized, the advantage of having a bit of political influence on their side had crossed Niall’s mind, he couldn’t deny that. How much he had allowed the possibility to cloud his better judgment, he couldn’t honestly say. Already at that first interview, there’d been a whiff of something in Kieran that suggested he was a bit of a chancer. Even more than the complicated tangle of his family motives and connections, that attitude had made Niall hesitate. He had convinced himself Kieran deserved a chance.

He should have listened to his doubts.

That was the problem, he thought as he emerged through the flapped opening of the tent and stood blinking against the light. When it came to the Dursey Island excavation, he kept letting emotion influence his own decisions. He’d spent his whole life thinking about this place, spent too many hours listening to his father’s bitter stories, whenever his father had been in a mood to rail at injustice or wax poetic. Those moments were the memories of his da that remained the clearest for Niall, his father sitting in the old rocking chair beneath the window of the flat above the family’s grocery in a part of Dublin far removed from the posh neighborhood where Kieran had been raised. With his powerful hands wrapped around a bottle of whiskey and his eyes alive with centuries-old injustice, the way Da could bring the brutality of what the English had done in Ireland—and to their own clan—to life had reduced Siobhan to tears, but Niall had walked away with questions about Dursey Island and the fate of the O’Sullivan Beares that demanded answers.

Those questions had been the saving of him. Years later, when he and Siobhan had been carted off to foster care and separated, Niall had been heading down an ugly road. Malcolm and Valerie O’Rourke had taken him in, and they’d nurtured those questions of his and taught him the value of hard work and self-respect. He’d fought for it every step of the way, but he’d eventually gone on to earn his doctorate in archaeology.

Siobhan’d had no such luck. Niall owed her for that, and seeing her hurtling into darkness herself—yet again—he’d offered her an admin post on the dig in the hope of providing her the sort of second chance the O’Rourkes had given him. A chance to pull her life together, for Adam’s sake, if nothing else.

With a sigh, Niall stopped halfway between where Liam was working and where Gemma had picked up her own spade to slice sod way from a new section of the grid. James bumped the empty wheelbarrow back along the uneven grass while Kieran jogged along beside him, still nagging, still trying to wear him down.

Niall shook his head. At himself as much as Kieran.

Will you all gather around a minute? he asked.

Liam came over, his movements loose and his large frame relaxed in a way that Niall had long since learned could be deceptive. What’s up, skip?

The cable car is about to stop running, so we have to make alternate arrangements, Niall began.

Gemma stopped at Liam’s side. Still no word from your sister?

Nothing, Niall said, which is part of what I need to tell you. At this rate, I’ll either be on the phone half the night bribing Pete to turn the cable car back on and bring them over, or I’ll be needing to get them settled at the house come morning. That means we’ll have to take turns meeting the volunteers ourselves as they arrive and bringing them here to the dig site for the orientations.

Head cocked to the side, Liam studied him, and for all that he gave the appearance of looking like he had more brawn than brain, he’d always been perceptive. I wouldn’t worry yet, boss. You know how boys are at Adam’s age. Probably took his time saying his goodbyes to twenty of his closest mates before leaving Dublin, then demanded feeding every half hour on the road. I was a proper nightmare to travel with at fourteen.

You still are, so. Gemma grinned, raising her face to Liam’s.

Niall ran a hand across the back of his neck and glanced up at the gulls circling overhead. The point is, he said, eyeing James and Kieran as they wandered over, whatever happens, Siobhan won’t be here to help, which will make it doubly important for the rest of us to work as a team. One team, no squabbling, no letting our differences show. The volunteers are paying their own way to be here, and it’s critical we remember that. We’re the ones depending on them, so we owe them a good experience.

Gemma and Liam glared at Kieran, but if Kieran felt Niall’s words were directed at him in any way, he gave no sign.

What it comes to, Niall continued, is that not one among us is indispensable. We can’t afford to let our egos, tempers, or own opinions show in front of the volunteers, and I will—I promise you—replace anyone who treats a volunteer or another member of the staff with anything less than complete respect. Is that fair?

Yeah, boss, Gemma said.

Understood, Liam and James said together.

Kieran buried his hands deep in his pockets and didn’t answer.

For Niall, that was the final straw.

They should have been a solid staff. On paper, they still were. He’d worked with James and Liam before, and Gemma, their anthropologist, was among the best at reading bones. Liam had not only the training but the instinct to piece together fragments of battleground evidence, and James’ skill at finding potential excavation areas was nearly supernatural. Niall had witnessed that himself once when James had veered two hundred yards off a plotted track to a patch of ground most archaeologists would never have noticed without technology or research to point them there—and James had been right. The site had turned out to be a previously unsuspected Bronze Age burial.

With Kieran’s knowledge of the sources, Niall had hoped to identify and finish preliminary instrumental explorations of all the potential excavation sites on Dursey Island before the excavation season ended. That would give him the winter to look for additional funding for the following year, and he couldn’t let Kieran derail that.

Before he could weigh how to address Kieran’s attitude and decide what more needed saying in front of the others and what could wait to be said in private later, his phone rang in his pocket. He turned aside and answered without looking at the screen.

Finally, he said. Where are you, Siobhan? Tell me you’re phoning from the cable car.

The voice on the other end of the line wasn’t his twin’s, though. Dr. Sullivan? Niall Sullivan? This is Sergeant Mahoney from the Dublin Garda.

The wind off the ocean raised chills along Niall’s neck. Yes?

I’m calling about your sister Siobhan. She is your sister, do I have that right? The sergeant’s voice was professionally gentle, the right blend of compassion and dispassion that allowed someone to deliver bad news on a daily basis.

Malcolm O’Rourke, when he’d taken Niall in as a teenager, had been an inspector in the garda, and the tone was one Niall had come to recognize. Dread slipped inside him like cold fog melting into his skin.

Is Siobhan safe? What’s happened? he asked. And Adam—

I’m afraid there’s been an accident. The emergency crew did everything possible, but your sister died before she reached the hospital.

A gannet, soaring above the cliff, tucked its black-tipped wings and dove, a white blur disappearing beyond the rocks. Niall’s heart plummeted with it, and he stood, locked in the moment as though his feet and his heart had turned to stone.

Dr. Sullivan, are you there? the sergeant asked.

Niall cleared his throat, but he couldn’t form coherent thoughts, much less words. I—yes. Sorry, he managed finally. What about Adam? Was he in the car with her?

He’s bruised a bit, and his arm’s broken, but he’s strong. He’ll be fine. Physically, at least. Can you come and get him? We’ll also need a formal identification. We phoned the boy’s father, but he’s . . .

Useless. Right. Niall closed his eyes and let the world spin around him. Of course. I’ll leave now—but I’m down on Dursey Island. County Cork. It’ll be late before I get there.

I’ll stay here with the lad myself until you get here. The sergeant started to provide instructions to the hospital, but Niall, still staggeringly numb and disconnected, remembered he had to run to the station—literally run—if he hoped to catch the cable car off the island. He offered the sergeant a brief explanation and promised to phone back once he’d reached the mainland. Then he explained briefly to Gemma and the others.

Don’t give us a thought. You worry about Adam, Gemma said. And yourself.

Niall didn’t dare let himself think of Siobhan, not yet, though grief was already settling inside him like a hole, insatiable and dark. Kicking his feet into a sprint, he raced across the temporary bridge, and hopped into the rusting Toyota SUV they’d managed to negotiate the use of on the island. He drove full speed along the overgrown track, back toward the smallest of the three holiday cottages he’d rented for the staff in the abandoned village of Ballynacallagh.

Brian Sheehan, the farmer who’d recently fixed up the rental cottages—and purchased a good amount of the rest of Dursey Island—was walking his cows in from the pasture as Niall raced past. What’s the rush? Brian called, pushing a scratched pair of sunglasses up into his shaggy white hair. You unbury someone’s ghost already?

Niall waved without answering, snatched up his wallet and the keys to his own car from the table in the kitchen, then drove the truck at an unhealthy speed to the cable car station. A rapid-fire explanation to the waiting tourists got him to the front of the queue, and while the lone six-seat metal crate made its slow traverse above the churning water of Dursey Sound, he stared at the bottle of holy water and the tattered copy of Psalm 91 that hung beside the phone box on the wall. He wasn’t a religious man. He’d studied the aftermath of too many atrocities committed in the name of religion to allow for that, but for the first time since childhood he breathed a prayer.

Twice on the way to Dublin he was pulled for speeding, once on the outskirts of Cork and again on the M8 north of Cashel. Still, he felt as though he didn’t draw a full breath again until he stepped into the waiting area at the hospital and Adam, spotting him as he ran through the door, rocketed uncharacteristically into his arms.

Uncle Niall!

Niall folded him in and held him close. Hallo, mate. Steady on. We’ll be all right.

Boys were fragile at fourteen, try as hard as they might not to let it show. Too well, Niall remembered what it had been like at that age to be ripped away from Siobhan and everything he’d ever known.

It struck him forcibly that Adam no longer had a mother. From one instant to the next, he’d been left with no one. Not a soul in the world, apart from Niall and a father so feckless Siobhan had long since named Niall as Adam’s guardian. The weight of that responsibility settled on Niall’s shoulders, and he didn’t know if he was strong enough to bear it.

These past few weeks, he’d been afraid Siobhan was dancing herself toward a cliff. He’d tried to persuade her to go back to rehab, spoken to her sponsor, offered her the job on Dursey where he could be there for her. Clearly, none of that had been enough. If it had been, she would have been here with him now, her smile wide and bright, an invitation to trouble. As contagious as ever.

He should have known there was a problem