May Secret Agent #ALT-3

TITLE: Daughters of Brigit
GENRE: Young Adult Fantasy

The town square was empty when Owen returned for his mother’s body. She was still hanging from the gallows, a black mass against the dark night. He’d heard people describe loss as a hollowed out feeling but all he felt was waves of white-hot anger ever since she was taken away three days ago. He clenched his fists and pushed the feelings into a corner of his heart so that he could focus on cutting her down. Pulling a knife from his belt, he ascended the wooden stepstool. He held his mother’s body close to release the tension on the rope, and then he sawed through until she fell into his arms.

Unprepared for the momentum of their two bodies, he stumbled from the stool. Owen had thought of his mother as petite; he hadn’t realized how heavy she would be in death. He struggled to regain his footing finally laying her down with care. With the burlap sack covering her head and dressed in the simple muslin shift of prisoners, she could be any townswoman. Not his mother, wife to a Clansman. The thought of his father filled Owen with rage and as he cut the twine closing the burlap sack against his mother’s neck, it felt like a rebuke to his father. Proof of what Father had allowed. Owen pulled off the sack and his mother’s dark hair tumbled out over his hands. It was the same hair, unchanged by death, and it allowed Owen a moment’s denial.