Child of the Prophecy

by Juliet Marillier

  The sky had grown still darker, almost as if it were night. The sun was obscured, a mere rim of gold, its center quenched by some malign shadow. The strange light gave my words a power beyond the ordinary, and now all around the circle men muttered and whispered, and some cried out in fear, or called upon one god or another to save them. A few were already edging away from the crowd, and heading down to the boats.

  “The girl speaks no more than the truth.” My heart thudded as I heard the voice of the lady Oonagh. She threw back her dark cloak, and took one step forward so that she stood on the edge of the fiery circle, the flames licking at the hem of her gown, yet never catching it alight. It was as if she were impervious to its heat. She did not wear her old-woman image now, but the guise of a tall, lovely lady, white-skinned, auburn-haired, her voice sweet and strong as fresh-brewed mead. “Retreat is your only choice, poor foolish human warriors. It has all been for nothing, all these deaths, all these losses; quite pointless. The prophecy will never be fulfilled; it was no more than the ramblings of some ancient druid, age-addled and witless. There are no winners here save my own kind: I, the lady Oonagh, and my granddaughter Fainne, who shows herself now in her true colors, a sorceress even as powerful as myself!”

  She turned toward me, and as she spoke, I saw my uncle Sean staring at me, horrified; and Bran of Harrowfield, grim-faced, stepping into the circle of flames, heedless of the risk, only to be pulled back by Gull and Snake, one on each side. Nobody would cross this barrier, save one stronger in the craft than those who made it.

  “Now, Fainne!” My grandmother gave a gloating cackle of laughter. “Now do as we planned! Kill the boy; finish these upstarts and their Otherworld masters. End this farce about a prophecy here and now. Even now the fellow staggers with weakness; his fingers can no longer grip his weapon. Do as you promised me, and make an end of him!”

  There were shouts of outrage from the crowd; I heard Bran yell, “No!” and I sensed the rage and frustration of the men around us, Ulsterman and Briton alike. Yet none might step across the barrier, while it held; the balance was in my hands. I glanced up, and felt a deep pain, to see those men who had treated me with respect and friendship now staring at me as if I were a creature too foul to be contemplated. Gareth, Corentin, Gull and Snake, even my uncle Sean looked at me with shock and loathing. Perhaps it was no better than I deserved.

  Johnny had fallen to his knees; he held his hand pressed close to his side, the fingers stained with seeping blood. Edwin’s son lay prone on his back, eyes staring, breath harsh.

  “Quickly, girl!” the sorceress hissed. “Use the craft! Or use the sword, if you must. Do it! I must see him die by your hand.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandmother,” I said politely, my voice shaking like an autumn leaf. “I don’t think I can do that.”

  I watched her face change; I shuddered at the expression in her eyes. With such a look a sorceress might turn a hapless mortal to stone through sheer terror. Beyond my grandmother I could see Conor, still holding his arms outstretched, still maintaining the protective circle. Impervious to fire she might be, but the lady Oonagh could not move inside this charmed space, not yet; even now she struggled to break through, her brows knotted in fury. Perhaps a force stronger than any of us held her back.

  “What?” she screamed. The sky remained dark; now the wind rose again, a moaning, eerie wind that whipped her skirts about her. Strange shadows spread around her on the ground, and she seemed huge and menacing. Her eyes were slits in a chalk-white face, her lips blood-red, and her teeth like little sharp knives. To her left and to her right, the circle of flame began to waver and die down.

  “Hold fast, brother!” called Conor. His hands were shaking; behind me, I heard Finbar’s gasp of pain and fear. She was doing her utmost to break it, and she was strong. The druid and the seer, after all, were no more than mortal men. If only I were not so weak, if only I had but a fraction of my true power.

  “You think to thwart me, girl? You, a mere slip of a child, with a half-baked education and a featherbrain for a mother, you with your foolish notions of love and loyalty? Either you have a very short memory, or you think me exceptionally stupid.”

  And now she turned, facing outward, looking up the line of ditch and earthen wall to the place where the fortifications gave way to the sheer southern cliff face. Here small birds nested, and tiny plants clung. Here, there were no sheltered ledges wide enough for man or woman to rest on; no places of safety on the precipitous surface. Instead, the ground simply rose gently, and stopped, and there, far, far below, was the sea. Snake had posted his men all the way up the slope to prevent premature incursions into the ditch and over the earthen wall; he had deployed them right up to that sudden end. And who better to take the farthest place, the place deemed easiest to guard, where sloping ground gave way to nothingness, than a traveling man who had no business pretending to be a warrior anyway?

  “Now,” breathed the lady Oonagh. “Now, oh now you will do as I bid you. For this you surely cannot endure!”

  Darragh’s attention had wandered from the job; he was looking up, watching a flock of terns as they flew overhead in neat formation, perhaps in search of springtime. As I stood there staring, my whole body frozen in terror, the sorceress sent the wind ahead of her up the rise, and men blundered aside, thrown to their knees by its force. The blast caught Darragh unawares, whipping his dark hair back, tearing his short cloak away, sending it spiraling up, up into the air. He staggered sideways, clutching for purchase, a rock, a bush, anything at all; but there was nothing he could hold onto, and the violent gale drove him steadily backward, backward up the slope, his feet staggering nearer and nearer to the point where the ground vanished, and the great space opened out above the sea. Now men were running toward him, the wind at their backs, but slow, too slow. Broad-shouldered Gareth, dark-haired Corentin, shouting, Hold on! We’re coming! It was clear they could not reach him in time.

  “Now!” screamed the lady Oonagh, her berry-dark eyes fixed on me, her snarling mouth as feral as a weasel’s. “Do it! Do it! Kill the child, or watch your little tinker perish! Do my bidding, curse you! Do it or watch him die!”

  Johnny was kneeling by me, his steady gray eyes looking up at me. I saw the recognition of death in them, but no fear. If ever there was one born to be child of the prophecy, it was this man, a model of courage and dignity. Without him the folk of Sevenwaters would be set adrift once more, their flame of purpose snatched away, their path once more in darkness. Without him, there would be no point to any of it; no point at all.

  “I can’t,” I whispered, and learned how it feels when your heart breaks.

  I knew a charm. I knew a little charm well-mastered before ever I ceased to be a child, and learned what love is. Stop. Drop. Now gently down. Once I knew this trick, I never broke the glass ball once. Today, I had no magic.

  There was no need to look. With eyes squeezed shut, with my two hands over my face, I saw it all. I saw the mad fury in the sorceress’s eyes, an unholy light of pure evil. I saw the wind pick Darragh up as if he were no heavier than an autumn leaf, I saw the cruel way the lady Oonagh held him poised a moment, right there on the edge, teasing me, taunting me, as if even now a cry, a word, a single gasp might bring him back again, if only I would utter it. And I saw how, at the very end, the traveling man turned his long, last descent to oblivion into a thing of wonder and beauty, a thing as lovely as the dying notes of a piper’s lament. For he did not fall, but twisted his body in air, and laid his arms by his sides, and dived head first, swift and straight as a swallow, down and down into the merciless clutch of the cold sea, down to the knife-edged rocks and the white surge of the waves.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Someone was screaming. Someone was wailing, a terrible sound of anguish that set the teeth on edge, a sound fit to shred the very spirit. It was a cry to make the strongest man tremble. My fists were tight in the sockets of my eyes; my jaw was clenched hard; my head vibrated with pain.
At last I had learned to do something I had always believed a sorcerer’s daughter could not do. I had learned how to weep. I wept as surely no girl had ever wept before, a river of tears, a gushing torrent of grief. I stood there and screamed my loss to the wind, and the lady Oonagh watched me with a little smile on her face. Beside me, Johnny stretched out a hand to the enemy who lay sprawled at his feet.

  “Come,” he said. “This is over. Both of us need a surgeon, and then we need to talk. Let me help you.” The Briton staggered to his feet; the two of them stood by me, supporting one another.

  “Not so fast.” She was not done yet; not so easily thwarted. “You think you have won, maybe; you think this task is beyond me, without your aid. Foolish girl. You’ve cast away the only one who ever cared a scrap about you, and for nothing. I will break this circle; I will break these human folk as I did once before, long ago. One by one I will take them, these sons of Sevenwaters, and then I will kill you both: I will kill the child of the prophecy, and you, my disobedient grandchild.”

  I heard my uncle Sean shout, “No!” and start forward, to be beaten back by the very flames that protected us; I saw my grandmother raise her hands, and send a ripple of green light along the line of the fiery circle, a ripple which touched Finbar first, and sent him crumpling to his knees, wheezing with pain. Conor was ready for it, and held fast, but his face was gray, and his eyes less than calm.

  “Quick, Fainne!” he said. “We cannot maintain this much longer. Help us!”

  But I could not. The craft was returning slowly, my fingers tingled, my blood ran swift, I could feel it flowing into me now like a deep anger that built and built, inexorable, unstoppable. But still I stood there frozen by my grief, paralyzed by my loss, and beside me were the sons of Sevenwaters and of Northwoods, both like to bleed to death where they stood if I could not help them soon.

  “Which shall be first?” hissed the lady Oonagh, baring her teeth like a hunting cat, and she sent another wave through the circle, deep red, the color of heart’s blood. Finbar cried out, and she laughed. I could see what looked like smoke rising from the soft feathers of his wing; his face was drained of color, ashen and terrified. The next time, surely he would be unable to hold against her. She raised her arms high, a fierce smile on her face, and as she did so the sky began to brighten once more, the sun to emerge from its strange obscurity, and a great bird flew across the circle, diving so close to the eyes of the sorceress that she flinched away; passing by to alight on the shoulder of a dark-cloaked figure who had appeared among the onlookers, as abruptly as if by magic. The sorceress lifted her hands again, and she seemed to draw sparks downward from the air into her fingers. Her body was clothed with glittering brightness. She seemed far taller than any mortal woman might be.

  “You,” she shrieked, “you who defied me once, you who endured what no man should endure, this time I will finish you!”

  She swept her arms downward and pointed them straight at Finbar, who knelt there gasping with pain, his eyes still clear and true as he fought to maintain the protective fire.

  “This time!” she hissed, and the strange flame seemed to flow from her fingertips and out across the circle. The dark-cloaked figure pushed back his hood and raised his hands, holding them out at his sides, palms up, in an echo of Conor’s posture. The line of sparks from the sorceress’s fingers fizzed and died.

  “I think not, Mother,” said Ciarán, standing quiet with the raven on his shoulder. His gaze was level, his face pale but calm. If he had been sick before, sick to death, he seemed well enough now. She had lied to me. She had manipulated me, and I had believed her. How many more of her threats were merely that, merely poisonous falsehoods she used to frighten me into compliance?

  “You!” she spat furiously. “How dare you meddle in this, you misguided weakling with your headful of druid notions! No wonder your daughter failed the test in the end! You ruined her, you and that useless little wife of yours, your precious Niamh with her soft ways and her empty head. Just as well I got rid of her, or I’d never have made anything of the girl. But Fainne didn’t live up to my expectations. Lost her grip, just when it mattered.”

  My father took a step forward, very slowly. He, it seemed, could cross this circle with no difficulty at all.

  “What did you say?” he asked softly.

  “Girl’s no good. Like her mother.” There was a change in the lady Oonagh’s voice, an edge, as if she were surprised, or frightened. Above us the sun was emerging fast now; the day grew ever brighter.

  “Not that. You said, you got rid of Niamh. What does that mean, Mother?”

  “A little accident, no more. A little slip on a ledge. A slight push in the back, and down to oblivion. She was no good for you, Ciarán. You could have been a great man; a man of power and influence. She was spoiling you and weakening the girl. She had to go.”

  My father’s face blazed with fury. There was such danger in that look, even a sorceress might quail before it. As for me, her words made me tremble with horror. I knew her well, yet I could hardly believe the depths of her ill-doing. It was she who had snatched away their happiness in the end, not Sean, not Conor, not a cruel husband or uncaring family, but the sorceress herself; Ciarán’s own mother. My father’s eyes were like dark ice. His voice was deathly calm.

  “So it comes to this,” he said, regarding his mother across the circle. “A test of wills; a test of strength. But first…”

  He glanced at Johnny where he stood by me with Edwin’s son leaning on his shoulder. I could hear both young men’s labored breathing; it was hard to say which of them was more ghastly pale. “Go forth from the circle,” Ciarán told them quietly. “Go forth under my protection.” I felt rather than saw the effect of the charm he was using, a guardian cloak, invisible, unshakable, which wrapped itself around both young warriors. He would not hold this enchantment on them for long, but while he maintained it, this was a screen no weapon could penetrate, neither arrow nor spear nor sorceress’s curse. Clothed in this spell, they could cross the fiery barrier unscathed. Johnny hesitated, feeling the magic, no doubt, but slow to comprehend its meaning through the clouds of exhaustion and injury.

  I looked up at my cousin. “Best go,” I managed, my voice coming out cracked and hoarse, for I still could not keep the tears from flowing. “Go, seek help, make a truce. All must leave this place by nightfall. There is a wave coming, and a mist; none can be safe here.” Words, again, which seemed to come from outside me; words which made a curious sense.

  Johnny stared at me. “But—” he said faintly.

  “Ssh,” I said. “All will be well. Go, ask Gull to staunch that wound. Mend matters with these men. That is your part; to lead. There is no further need for you here.”

  “Fainne—”

  “Go on, Johnny. Trust me. I am family.” I saw the sorceress’s head snap around toward me as I spoke these words. Her eyes narrowed sharply. At the moment her attention was diverted the circle of flames died down a little, and the two warriors stumbled through, cloaked by my father’s protective spell, and collapsed into the arms of waiting healers. Bran of Harrowfield and Edwin of Northwoods each went to his son; they conveyed the wounded men away to a place of safety. Still the forces of Inis Eala kept a tight control of the crowd; the warriors were growing ever more restless and fearful. They had come here expecting an honest battle, not some eldritch display of magic tricks that turned the very day to night before their eyes. My father lifted his arms again and the fire sprang up anew. The sorceress gave a little smile; her pointed teeth glowed red in the flames. She took one step, two steps inside the circle. It had not taken her so very long to find a way through.

  Ciarán stood calm and steady with the flames at his back. On his shoulder Fiacha crouched still as a carven effigy. Behind my father the fire still burned fiercely. Conor stood still and silent, outstretched arms holding the circle unbroken, and on the opposite side Finbar played his part, crouched on the earth with visage ghost-white an
d eyes darkened with pain. Mother and son faced each other not six paces from where I knelt, my head still reeling from the knowledge that my mother had been murdered, and a terrible lie told all these years, a lie which had filled my father’s days with guilt and shame. All this time he had believed his love was not enough for Niamh; all this long time he had believed she chose to leave him. Beneath this new grief my heart still ached with emptiness, with the loss which could never be made right, not if I lived thrice the span of mortal woman. Maybe my mouth no longer howled my pain, but inside me the song of grief wailed like the banshee’s cry, keening, screaming, sharp and savage as a shard of ice twisting deep in the vitals. And all the while I felt the magic flowing back into me, stronger and still stronger, powerful and true, yet I could not move; I slumped on the ground, held fast by shock and misery.

  Beyond the flames the great throng of warriors had fallen silent, but for occasional mutterings and whisperings; prayers, maybe. This was far beyond the experience of ordinary man, be he hardened warrior or Christian priest or merely fisherman or shepherd called to arms in service of his chieftain. Terror blanched their faces; fascination held them watching as this strange game played itself out before their eyes.

  “So,” the lady Oonagh said, and it seemed to me as she faced her son she drew up dark power from deep within her; she grew taller, and grander, and her mulberry eyes glowed with malevolence in the smooth pallor of her terrible, fair face. “So, you think to do battle with me; you, my weakling son, corrupted by druids, tainted by family, crippled by love. Have you forgotten who gave you birth, you apology for a sorcerer, that you manifest yourself now at the last in some futile attempt to save these fools and their pathetic scrap of rock? Or do you seek merely to protect your daughter, who has proven no apter a tool for my purposes than you yourself were? Look at her crouching there, a shivering, pathetic wreck! Some sorceress she is! Cared more for her common little tinker than for the great task I set her, got it all mixed up in the end, let it all go. Now she’s got nothing left, no power, no influence, no lover, no family, for they will cast her out now they know what she’s done. Maiming children, killing druids, spying, watching, insinuating herself among them with the will to destroy in her heart. There’ll be no going back for your precious student, Ciarán. You should have seen your sweet little girl in Eamonn’s arms. That would have opened your eyes well and truly. Oh, yes, she did inherit one or two skills from her mother. Niamh was good under the blankets, wasn’t she? Why else would you have wanted such a featherhead?”