THE DAWN OF IRELAND Trilogy

THE DAWN OF IRELAND

The title I chose for my universe was not really a poetic choice, but one based on actual historic events. In ca. 432, a youngish priest was named Bishop and sent to heathen Hibernia by the Pontiff in Rome. Probably in his 40s, the man named Patricius soon became known as Patrick--in Irish Gaelic, Pádraig--and history literally began in a beautiful, isolated place named Ireland.

My imagination conjured up an 18-year-old woman named Caylith Vilton, who had run from the destruction of her villa in Britannia after it was torched by freebooter Picts. She had the foresight to find an Irish shipbuilder named Michael who was able to build a fleet of small, skin-clad boats called currachs. In those flimsy little boats, 300 immigrants arrived in what is today the harbor of Belfast and made their way to Armagh where Bishop Patrick had set up a growing monastery.

The three books that comprise THE DAWN OF IRELAND tell the story of Caylith and her eventual lover Liam, the sensuous clansman, son of the High King Leary MacNeill. Other characters enliven the series--conniving druds, cattle barons, a high king, and a brooding, mysterious man who follows her throughout all the novels.

What could an author possibly find in those rough-and-tumble days of cattle rustlers, wildass clansmen and Saxon mercenaries? How can a passionate young couple find love and fulfillment in the badlands of Old World Ireland?

STORM MAKER

Liam O'Neill meets beautiful, willful, naive Caylith--and a storm begins! In Storm Maker, the young couple fights their natural passionate nature trying to stay reasonably “pure” in the wake of a promise to Father Patrick, to stay chaste for the marriage bed. But as they try to start a life together, waiting for Patrick to join them in marriage, an implacable enemy plots their undoing.

G-rated excerpt:

Liam was so close to me now that, even in the dark, I saw the moonlight reflected back in his laughing eyes, and I saw the insolent smile playing around his mouth. He leaned into me, and I suddenly remembered all over again the sweet honey of his tongue and moving lips. I knew even before he started that I would answer his insistence, for we had been apart too long. 

I knew not when Michael left, but I was past caring. I knew only that Liam’s mouth had been created to join with my own, to probe and discover until we were breathless with the intensity of it. 

“A chuisle,” he murmured at last. A-koosh-la. It was as though a song had just been written for my ears alone.

And then I left him as I had the night he sang me his love song, running into the night, not looking back.

The ship was rolling and pitching. I could see the galley of rowers in the moonlight, straining against the wind and the relentless waves. I was trying to find a small harbor, a niche where I could curl up and sleep, but suddenly I lost my balance and fell—hard—on the slick deck.

Then Liam’s arms were around me, lifting me up and to the safety of the curving planks of the ship’s side. He set me gently against the smooth timbers and knelt next to me, his eyes asking a thousand questions. 

Even if we could speak each other’s language, what would I tell him? That I had missed him, but in a place so deep I did not discover it until a few minutes ago? That the very sight of him excited me so intensely that I could not control my fierce desire? That I ached for him, but for another man at the same time?

THE WAKENING FIRE

The Wakening Fire finds Liam and Caylith just beginning to discover the secrets of passion they have not yet revealed to each other. As those fires burn, other blazes threaten not just their lives but the future of Ireland itself. An old enemy resurfaces, and his own secrets will mean a major upheaval in the lives of all the characters. And Bishop Patrick has decided to light giant ritual fires in direct defiance of the high king himself, as he attempts to win men's hearts to the promise of the gospels.

G-rated excerpt:

He lay there looking up at the thatched ceiling for a while, silent and thoughtful. “I…told ye once, Cat. I never hold ye back. I love your freedom. But…not know such a small butterfly…hurt me so much.” 

The candlelight reflected back the tears that stood in his eyes. “Oh, oh, my darling husband. A chuisle mo chroí, a Liam, I am so sorry.” I rested my head on his chest. My shoulders began to heave with the sobs I tried to keep lodged in my stomach.

He reached out and embraced me, blanket and all, and drew me back down onto our bed. “Hush, hush,” he said, caressing my hair. “Ye did nothing wrong, Cat. Ye be guilty of loving too much. Even your enemies. Ah, Cat, I understand ye.”

I kissed his dear face, licking the saltiness from around his eyes and in his short, soft beard. I could feel his readiness even through the blanket. “Liam, make love to me. But slow. Silent. Even, oh, even in the dark tonight. All right?”

“Tá go maith,” he said, and I barely heard him. He rose up a bit and seized the candle on the table and blew it out. I felt his body in the sudden darkness, a heat I felt more intensely now, with no flame to light his presence. 

It was almost as though we were back on the road somewhere leaving the Lough Neagh, in the shadow of a shadow of a moonless night, under a nameless tree. He was lying on his side, facing me. Then his tongue was in my ear, soft and slow, a timid animal, and he drew my fingers into his mouth and suckled them in the same way, unhurried and gentle.

CAPTIVE HEART

Finally, in Captive Heart, Caylith must face the history of her mother's past captivity by slave dealers, all the while being shackled by the unseemly love of her husband's own kinsman. Caylith and Liam are joined by friends trying to save a group of captive women, traveling to the desolate, lightning-racked north shores of what is now Donegal and to the rugged, remote Tory Island. Finally she confronts first the man who had enslaved the women, and then the man who has tried to bind her to his fevered heart.

G-rated excerpt:

Brigid and I rode home at a slow canter. I thought about today’s practice, how I had won not a match the whole day. The best I could do, as with Magpie, was to settle for a draw. I thought she knew that I was deliberately slowing the pace, and she rode quietly beside me, waiting for me to speak.

“Bree, I have made a huge mistake.” She was silent, but she looked at me with her wide, clear eyes, inviting me to continue. “A man’s heart reached out to me, but I was not free. Instead of slaying the monster, I allowed it in. This happened not once but twice. Two different men. Same mistake.”

“How did you let it in, Cay?”

“I found a beautiful woman for each of those men, thinking that would set me free. And set them free, too.”

“Yes, I see how that was a mistake, a chara. Those beautiful women were but a reflection of you. You still gave yourself to them.”

I thought about her words, and tears began to flow down my face. “I see it now,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Now they are bound not to one heart but two. And I am bound to three.”

She stopped her little white mare, who began to browse the roadside.... “Ah, Cay. The human heart is too complex to rein in, to teach tricks, to bind and set free at will.”

“What can I do, Bree? How can I undo all this hurt?

“As I said, it is not a matter of untying a knot, of letting the butterfly flutter free from your hand. It is something to be done slowly and carefully, so the hearts do not break. How you do that is what will define you as a real person. As an adult woman and as a wife.”

Adult. Wife. At last, after nineteen years of the imaginary fairy-princess life, I was being forced to see the vicious thorns under the soft-petalled rose. I thought I was teaching that lesson to others back when I was a willful sixteen-year-old playing warrior games. Now, somehow, I had to go back and undo the hurt I had caused. And if I did not do it right away, I stood to lose the one man in the world I loved beyond all others, the one whom I must never lose.

Lightning over the Fanad Peninsula, northern Ireland,
as experienced by the characters in CAPTIVE HEART

OQ Erin O’Quinn’s Gaelic blog:   http://bit.ly/Jgz6tU
Erin O’Quinn’s Manlove blog:  http://romancemanlove.wordpress.com/
Storm Maker:  http://amzn.to/O218y7
The Wakening Fire : http://amzn.to/N1Gc6C
Captive Heart:  http://amzn.to/Qm8b1X
Fire & Silk:  http://amzn.to/P6jZtn
Warrior, Ride Hard:  http://www.bookstrand.com/warrior-ride-hard

INTRODUCING ERIN O'QUINN

 

Today it's my pleasure to introduce a brand new Celtic genre writer, Erin O'Quinn.  I have had a chance to browse Erin's first book, Storm Maker, and I can only tell you this is an extraordinary first work.  Let Erin tell you some background, in her own words (and mine, of course!):

Q: What is your background, Erin?

A: I earned a Bachelor’s degree in English, then a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California. You might say that I’ve had a long and varied career--from university teacher to newspaper marketing guru, from car salesperson deep in the forests of Germany to hauling pallets of freight for a big-box store’s garden center. All of it has in some way prepared me for the life of a writer.

Q: Have you been a writer for many years?

A: Quite the contrary. In December of 2010 my husband and I bought an iMac. Only then did I start writing. And thirteen months later, I had written over a million words and ten books. I guess the muse wasn’t just on my shoulder--she had descended to my very gut, even to my soul, and she was beating the daylights out of me.

Q: How did you come to choose Ireland as the setting for your novels?

A: My husband is a fanatic reader of historical fantasy. He wondered aloud to me one day why he had never read any accounts of Ireland at the time of St. Patrick. It seems that everyone loves St. Paddy, and almost everyone fancies himself or herself to have Irish clans in their family somewhere. So the subject matter should be a rich mine for an author. But I found that he was right--hardly anyone has ever written fiction about Ireland in the 5th century AD. So I could fill a niche that no one else had yet attempted to fill.

Q: Your characters seem to have a deep and varied background--from the central heroine Caylith to her best friend, her mother, her Gaelic clansman lover, his own family, the high king of Ireland, even St. Patrick himself. How did all these characters begin to live in your imagination?

A: The main characters, outside of the Irish ones, were born as characters in a young adult fantasy series called The Twilight of Magic. So when someone begins to read STORM MAKER, he or she is reading about a character who already has at least three novels worth of back story!

Q: You say “at least three.” Is there another novel lurking back there somewhere?

A: For last year’s NANOWRIMO, I wrote a 50,000 word novel or novelette called MARRIE APPLESPROUT’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, about Caylith and her aged great aunt from Lindum, Britannia (modern Lincoln). In that book she is fifteen, and she is quite a spoiled, self-absorbed brat. By the time of STORM MAKER, she has grown up a bit, although she is still pretty naive!

Q: Where do you find your inspiration for your plots and characters?

A: I hope that this doesn’t sound crazy—they are all in my head, clamoring to be let out. All my books are character-driven. The plots are ones that the characters force on me, whether I want to go there or not.

Q: What other novels may we expect after STORM MAKER?

A: I feel like a child who has glutted on all the candy in the bag, and who must now pay the consequences. I turned in several novels all at once, and all of them were accepted. So I have a novel coming out every four weeks from now through the end of August. The next two novels complete The Dawn of Ireland Trilogy--THE WAKENING FIRE and CAPTIVE HEART. After those, I turn to one of the characters from CAPTIVE HEART, another interesting redhead--but this time a male named Flann O’Conall, and I introduce his love interest, a virginal young woman named Mariana, in a tempestuous book titled FIRE & SILK. Following that are two “ManLove” novels in The Steel Warrior series. These characters are from some of the earliest books, but no one (especially the reader) has an inkling that they may be attracted to other men, much less to each other. Life happens.

Q: Would you say that your historical romances pass the test of being suitable for a general audience?

A: No. Siren has placed the first four in the category of “steamy,” and the ManLove novels are even more explicit.

Q: Would you say, then, that your historical romances are heavy on the romance and light on the history?

A: That’s a good question. Readers of course expect romance, and I give it to them. Caylith has just begun to feel the stirrings of womanhood, and Liam is a lusty young suitor. But I have to warn readers that there is also history, and folklore, and religion, and Gaelic expressions, and a host of other areas that I explore in every one of my books. St. Patrick himself is a character who appears in some of the novels; and many of Liam’s kinsmen are actual historical characters, including his own father, the High King Leary.

Q: Which other characters are based on actual historical figures?

A: Liam’s father Leary had seven brothers, all uncles of Liam, and some of them are important characters in later novels. The character Murdoch Mac Owen, the poet- scholar Dubthach, Liam’s oldest brother Torin--all these, and more, were real figures in the history of Ireland and become crucial characters in the later novels. The reader will even meet the O’Cahan clan later--this was the clan who were the ancestors of the man sung about in the famous Irish song “Danny Boy.”

Q: Give the readers an idea of the story of STORM MAKER.

A: It is a novel of the clash of opposites--of passion and chastity . . . evil doing and forgiveness . . . storm and calm. Caylith has brought a group of immigrants to Éire following the charismatic Father Patrick. She is not especially religious, but he is a friend whom she had met earlier, in Britannia; and she has pledged to him that she will not commit the sin of fornication. Much of the novel centers on that lightly given promise and the difficulty of actually carrying it through, as Caylith and Liam discover how difficult it is to hold back their impetuous passion until marriage.

There is another maelstrom brewing outside of the storm of young passion. Caylith has already gained an implacable enemy in the form of the brooding cripple Owen Sweeney, who manages to have Liam captured and held for the return of all his rich cattle lands. So part of the novel is devoted to Caylith’s rescue of Liam, and Liam’s slow conversion to Christianity and to the forgiveness of his enemy.

Q: Why do you write from the first-person point of view--through the eyes of the heroine?

A: From the beginning, back when she was fifteen years old, Caylith began to tell her own story. And from the beginning, she was a rather self-centered and naive person. So it became more and more fun for me to put her through her first kiss, and then make her go beyond that, to sensual craving, and finally to her marriage bed. I wanted to know how it felt through the eyes and senses of a young girl beginning to mature into a woman. By the way, the novels after the Liam/Caylith trilogy are not written from this very specialized point of view.

Q: Where did you learn the necessary background for your historical novels?

A: Mostly two places:  the internet and actual, page-turning books.  I have probably bought more than twenty books on every subject from Roman Britain to Gaelic Grammar, and I have read probably fifty more in libraries and bookstores. Yipes!

Q: Are the places in your books just made up to fit your plot?

A: To the contrary--most of them are places that existed 1500 years ago in Ireland. There were no such things as “cities” in Éire back then, only settlements and a few monasteries. But places like Tara, Derry, Limavady, Tyrconnell, the huge lake called the Neagh, the river and lake called the Foyle--all are authentic. I do make up a few places, usually the name of a character preceded by the word “bally”--Ballysweeney, Ballyconall--as people in Ireland do to this day.

Q: Many of your books take place in what is today Northern Ireland.  Aren’t you afraid that people may think you have a hidden political agenda? Or even a religious bias?

A: Wow, I hope not. I am the most un-political person I know. . .  and not much of a church-goer either! People have to remember that the action takes place 1500 years ago. Back then the politics were all about clan vs. clan, provincial king vs. king, cattle barons vs. cattle rustlers. The religion was 99% druidic influenced, almost a nature-based theology; and the “gods” were bigger-than-life warriors with bad-hair days.

* * * *

EXCERPT:

Later that day, walking to our seven-lake haven where we had left our horses, Liam and Ryan and I found ourselves walking close to Sweeney’s crude chariot.
Liam said something to his cousin, who turned to me. “Caylith, think ye the bindings are tight enough to cut a man and sorely wound him?”
I knew what Liam wanted, but I held back. “He bragged to me of the fools who made his ropes too loose, how stupid the people were who tied him into the currach.”
“And yet he is surrounded by stalwart warriors, not herders of sheep.”
I stopped in my tracks and talked to Liam through his cousin. “Liam, I take your meaning. Here—hold my pouch of healing powder. Go to your merciless captor. Do whatever you feel is right.”
He silently took the pouch, and I signaled for the attendant Keepers to stop the horses. Our entire party stopped then, while Liam approached his sworn enemy.
He walked to the wheeled cart and stood looking down on our trussed-up prisoner. The disheveled Sweeney slowly raised his head and glared at Liam, then spat at him. Liam did not even look at the spittle running down the leg of his breeches. He knelt and began to untie the ropes holding him to the invalid’s chair.
Sweeney’s arms and hands were . . .  bleeding where the harsh tarred ropes had bit into his flesh. I quietly drew the dried headband from my belt and squeezed water onto it from my wineskin and passed it to Ryan. He stepped up to Liam and handed him the soaked cloth.
Liam began to wash Sweeney’s wounds, slowly and carefully. Then he drew forth the pouch and poured healing powder where the wounds were deepest. All the time he was ministering to Sweeney, the brute jeered and taunted him. “You lumpkin—you addle-pated fool. I want not your gentle care. I would rather you keep grinding me under the wheels of my mobile throne. If I had a knife, you would be repaid in stab wounds. Leave me alone.”
Sweeney did not know that Liam understood not a word of his tirade—though I knew he was smarting from the ferocity of Sweeney’s rantings. When he had applied enough powder, he tied Sweeney back into his chair, avoiding the places where the wounds were still fresh. I saw that the brute was well fastened to his own chair, but he was no longer in pain. Indeed, the rope cuts and burns had begun to disappear completely.
Liam signaled for the horses to move again, and he walked back to me. He handed me first the pouch, then the soiled cloth, and I saw that his face bore a radiant smile. I stood on tiptoe and brought my lips to his. I kissed him as though for the first time, sweetly, searchingly, trying to understand this half-wild young man. 

Buy link: http://www.bookstrand.com/storm-maker

CONTEST

If you would like to be entered into a drawing for a free Advanced Review Copy of STORM MAKER, just leave a comment and your email address.  A drawing will be held one week from today and the winner announced on the blog and notified!