Waking Up by Arianna Hart

Prologue
    Ireland, approximately 1000 AD
    “But you have to marry me, Declan. I’m carrying your child,” Fiona wailed, clinging to his arm as warriors assembled in the courtyard.
    “I’ve told you before, I can’t marry you. My chief needs me.” Declan looked at her with distaste. Her once beautiful hair was matted and probably filled with lice. Her eyes looked wild and rolled around, never meeting his gaze. He instinctively made a sign of protection. When he’d met her, she’d been training to be a priestess. She knew the rites to commune with the gods. Perhaps she’d been god-touched and it had addled her brains.
    “I love you! I sacrificed to Anann for this baby. You have to marry me.” Spit flew from her lips and she yanked on his arm. “’Tis only you I love!”
    A shiver of dread danced down his back. Anann was the goddess of fertility, but she was also Morrigan, goddess of death.
    “I don’t love you. I enjoyed you but that’s over.” He shook her off more forcefully than necessary and Fiona went sprawling in the mud. Declan stormed off to gather his belongings and catch up with the warriors who were moving out ahead of him. He had no time and no use for women when there was a battle on the horizon.
     
    Hours later, the cold seeped into his bones as he tried to find a comfortable position on the ground. The watch had been set and he was free for some time yet. He should get some sleep while he could. The fighting would be fierce tomorrow and he needed all the advantages he could get. He couldn’t help feeling the gods wouldn’t be on their side. Fiona’s crazed eyes haunted him every time he relaxed.
    “Bah, nonsense.” The feeling was nothing more than bad mutton in his gut. He threw off his blanket and stalked over to the trees. He’d walk off the indigestion and the uneasiness at the same time.
    The campfires flickered as he made his way around sleeping warriors. Suddenly, the air grew still and he couldn’t move another step. The fire in front of him blazed taller than three men and heat scorched his face, yet he stood frozen to the spot.
    “Declan, son of Donal, you have refused my gift.” The words sounded as if they came from three separate voices. The volume echoed through his skull until he thought his head would explode. “What have you to say on your behalf?”
    Sweat dripped off his face and down his back. He could make out a figure in the fire but it wavered and changed in the flames. At first it appeared as a young woman, then as one with child, lastly as a crone bent with age. His knees shook but he couldn’t move.
    “I have not been offered a gift, so how could I refuse it?”
    “Fiona sacrificed much to be blessed with a child and you denied her the rights of marriage. By refusing her, you refused my gift.”
    Bone-deep terror turned his bowels to water and he struggled to talk his way out of what would surely be a painful death. “I am a warrior. I travel with my chief to battle on the morn. I can’t marry her when I could die at any time.”
    “Is that so?” The triple voices bounced around his head and the flames grew higher and hotter. “Dying on the morn shall be the least of your worries, my irresponsible warrior. You refused one gift. You will not have the opportunity to deny this one.”
    White light blinded him, but he thought he saw an arm or arms reaching from the flames toward him. Blazing heat seared a spot above his heart and fire coursed through his body, boiling his blood until he thought he’d be cooked from the inside out.
    “By refusing the gift of love and new life from one of my daughters, you shall now be cursed to search for love for eternity. You will be denied the blessing of death until you fall in love and that love is reciprocated and a child is conceived.”
    An explosion of heat and light lifted him off his feet and threw him against a tree.
    When he could focus again, the camp looked normal and the fire was down to glowing embers. No