He smiled, a little sadly. “No. Not that I wouldn’t like you to. I don’t have your scáeli’s ability to convince, but if it goes wrong — well, you’re needed more than me. If the worst happened, Hairle’s old enough to be Harr.”
“No,” I protested.
“Be sensible,” he said. “Like it or not, your death would be a greater loss. Head of the scáeli’en council, advisor to the Teannasach — and you’re needed at your Ti’ach, too. For teaching, and more. You’re an important man, Sorley.”
What he was saying was not different than what I had told Gwenna when she had asked why Eluf had to die. “I’ll write a letter for you to take,” I said. “At least I can acknowledge my part in it, and my responsibility.”
He nodded. “I won’t leave for Pietarstorp too early. Go for a walk, one last look at the sea, and we’ll leave mid-morning. Hairle’s got further to ride, so I’ll send him off before you leave.”
“Better that way,” I said.
“There’s no chance, is there?”
“None. She’s only fourteen, Roghan, and regardless, she’s — ”
“Ésparias’s heir. A princess. She’ll have to marry someone important.”
“Likely, yes.” Were there plans for her? A conversation to be had.
He shrugged. “He’ll get over her.”
“Perhaps. I hope he does.”
“Because you didn’t?” my brother asked, his eyes still on the western sky. He put a hand on my shoulder. “You can come home, you know,” he said. “Bring Druisius. We’ll find a place for you, both of you.”
Tears pricked, hot behind my eyes. I put my hand on his. “I can’t,” I said. “My appointment as scáeli to the Ti’ach is for life, and Druise is an officer in the Ésparian army. And — ”
“And you will never leave him.”
“Not again, no.”
His hand tightened on mine, then let it go. “Gundarstorp is here, if you ever change your mind. Hairle will know my wishes.”
Chapter 57
13 years earlier
Dusk had fallen when I rode into the stableyard, drenched by the day’s rain, and cold. I was looking forward to a bed tonight: for the past days, I’d slept rough, or in barns. I hadn’t wanted the hospitality of the Eirënnen, hadn’t wanted to be toscaire or scáeli. I had too much to think about.
I dismounted, and a man I didn’t know came out from the stalls, peering up at me in the dim light. I’d hoped it might be Anndra. “Lord Sorley,” I told him, “with a letter for the Lady Dagney.”
“My lord.” He led my horse away. I had just picked up my saddlebags when a figure stepped out from the shadow.
“Sorley,” Druisius said. I dropped the bags.
“Druise? What are you doing here?” I stepped forward to embrace him, but he offered his arm, the soldier’s greeting. I felt a twinge of disappointment, but no surprise. “Tell me, Druise.”
“The Princip sent me. I will explain later. Come,” he said, with a shake of his head when I tried to ask again. Confused, I followed him along the familiar path, the rain and growing wind making talk difficult. At the steps into the hall he turned. “Give me your bags.” He opened the door, and I went in, rain dripping off my hair, blinking in the light.
I pushed my hair back. From beside the table where she stood speaking to Dagney, Lena turned. And froze, staring at me. I couldn't move, either. She said my name, barely a whisper. Her face showed me nothing.
I stood still, suddenly colder, waiting for her to turn away. With a tiny part of my mind I heard Druise’s receding footsteps on the flagstones of the hall. I straightened, preparing to accept judgement. “Lena?”
“How dare you come here?” she said. Dagney made a sound of protest.
“The Teannasach sent me,” I said, “with a letter for Dagney. I didn’t know — ”
“Sorley,” Cillian said from the annex door, as calmly as if I had only been gone for a week or two. “Mo duíne gràhadh. I have been waiting for you.” He held out his free hand.
“Cillian,” I said, not moving. “I — I’m wet. I can’t — I will give Dagney her letter, and there are things I must say. I was going to Wall’s End, to find you,” I managed. “And then I will go away again.”
“Why?” he asked, very quietly.
“I cannot stay. You will not want me to.”
“That is for me to judge, is it not?” His dark eyes studied me. He was still so thin, and I thought his hair greyer. “Not just now, though. Shall we sit, and share wine?”
“A very good idea,” Dagney said. “Sorley, my dear, welcome.”
“I will not drink wine with him,” Lena said. “I am going to our rooms, Cillian. I suppose he’ll have to stay the night, but I want him gone in the morning.”
“But I do not,” Cillian said evenly. She stared at him, her shoulders high. “Stay, käresta, please?”
“If I stay,” she said, “I will not be quiet. Is that what you want?”
“Say what you need to, Lena,” I said. “I deserve it.”
She took a deep breath, and let it out, a long exhale of frustration. “Not now,” she said. “I will not spoil everyone’s relief at knowing you are safe.”
“Thank you,” Dagney said. “Druisius, will you pour wine for us all?”
“No,” Cillian said. “I will. I always do.” He limped to the table where a jug stood, along with cups. Propping his cane against a chair, he poured the wine, handing the first cup to Dagney. The next he gave to me.
“It’s yours,” Lena said, as I offered it to her.
“No,” I said. “Always you, first, Lena.” She grimaced, but she took the cup. Druise was given his. Cillian held mine out; this time, our fingertips brushed as I took it, his familiar gesture of affection. My heart caught.
“My lord Sorley,” he said. “We have missed you. Welcome back.”
We drank, still standing. “Dagney,” I said, my confused mind remembering. “Your letter.” I found my bags and handed it to her. Inside it was another note, which she gave to Cillian. She glanced at the content of hers: whatever was in Ruar’s letter pleased her. But she folded it again, and made no mention of what it said.
“Tell me,” I said, the first shock subsiding a little. “How are you here? Why?”
“Sit down,” Cillian said. We took chairs around the long table, Cillian sitting at the head. “We are here for my safety, among other reasons,” he began. “I am a target, it appears.”
“Someone tried to kill him,” Lena said bluntly.
“What?”
“I was riding with Druisius, the usual route east along the Wall,” Cillian said, calmly. “The man — presumably — was on the Linrathan side of the Wall. Druise saw movement just in time, and slapped my horse.”
“Druise,” I said, turning to him. “Thank the gods.”
“My job,” he said, shrugging.
“Who?”
“It is unclear,” Cillian said. “Druise stayed with me to ensure I wasn’t unseated, rather than pursue the archer.”
“A good thing he did,” Lena said flatly. “Trying to stay on a galloping horse wrenched Cillian’s back. Badly.”
“I am better now,” Cillian said. “More importantly, Randall was found stabbed to death the next morning. Stabbed and robbed, but that may not have been the motive.”
“He was Linrathan too,” I said.
“One possibility,” Cillian said, “and a likely one, as this happened only a few days after Daoíre and Ruar had met with the Governor.”
“Resentment about the perception that the treaties favoured Linrathe,” I said. “And you the negotiator.” The simmering anger finally acted upon?
“Yes. Although I was careful not to be involved with their meetings with Livius, I did, of course, meet with them privately. There are few secrets at Wall’s End.”
“Someone knows who killed Randall, and tried to kill you, yes?” Druise said. “But maybe not about the treaty.”
“
What then?” I asked.
“Maybe Randall knew too many of someone’s secrets. Whose translator was he for many weeks? And who hates Cillian?”
I stared. “Decanius?”
“Another possibility,” Cillian said. “There is no proof.”
“But for Cillian’s safety,” Lena said, “we have been sent away. Once he could stand to travel, heavily drugged. We came here in a cart, a few hours a day.”
“Drugged?” I asked.
“Cannabium and willow-bark, nothing more,” Druise said.
“There is no poppy here, nor will there be,” Cillian added. “Do not worry.”
“Do not worry?” Lena snapped. “You were ill half the winter, and worrying about Sorley did not speed your recovery. Have you forgotten the anguish, and because of that the cravings, and the sleepless nights? The melancholy? I have cursed your name more than once this winter, Sorley, and you deserved it.”
“I know,” I said. “I did. I do. I am not staying, Lena.”
She put her wine down abruptly, turning away. Her shoulders heaved. Cillian put a hand on her back. “Yes you are,” she said through the tears. “You must.” She scrubbed at her eyes before she looked up. “Remember what I said.” She gave me a hard stare. “Not about not forgiving you. About bindings.”
You brought him back from death. I believe you are bound to him by that, and he to you. She’d spoken the words on a morning at the end of summer. I hadn’t forgotten. What she’d said had been unexpected, but with a deep ring of truth, of inevitability, like so much that had happened in the previous hours. I couldn’t find anything to say.
“He thinks,” Cillian said, “he has done something I will not forgive. Or is it still I who have made it impossible for you to stay?”
“No,” I said. “Not you. I — I see things differently now, Cillian.”
“Take Sorley to your library,” Dagney said. “This is between you and him, Cillian, not for all of us to hear.”
“Everything is for the four of us,” Cillian said.
“Not everything,” Druise said. “Not this. Lena agrees, I think.”
“Yes,” she said, sniffing a little. “Druise is right. This is private.”
Cillian pushed himself to his feet. “Come, Sorley,” he said. I followed him to the annex door. His library? But of course, his small bedroom would not be big enough for him and Lena. There would be larger rooms somewhere, maybe even several together, as a nursery was needed, too. Dagney must have prevailed with the new Comiádh, whoever that was, to allow him to keep his old room for his books.
But the door he opened was one down from his bedroom. Shelves lined the walls, and a table piled with papers stood near the middle of the room. A xache game, partially completed, sat on a sideboard beside a flagon of wine and two cups. In the interior wall was a door, the mortar around the stones indicating it was new. Cillian followed my eyes.
“What was once my bedroom is now my treatment room,” he said, without inflection. “Apulo sleeps on its far side, just as at Wall’s End. Now, my lord Sorley, sit, and tell me why you feel you cannot stay.” He hadn’t touched me, hadn’t offered an embrace again.
“I do not deserve your trust,” I said. I didn’t sit.
“I doubt that.”
I ploughed ahead. “There are two things I must tell you, and they are not trivial. But I don’t know how to begin, because I don’t know which transgression is worse. One involves my trust in you, and one your trust in me. Where should I start?”
“I know how I lost your trust,” he said immediately. “The other is likely erroneous.”
I shook my head. “It’s not. But there is more to the first than — than the obvious.” I took a breath. “Even before Liam died, I thought — not voluntarily, Cillian, but once the idea appeared, I couldn’t ignore it — that you had manipulated me, used my feelings for you to convince me to sign away Sorham.” I forced myself to meet his eyes, expecting anger. It wasn’t there.
“Can I fault you for that?” he said. “You know what I did as a toscaire for many years, and you know what I would have done in Casil to secure the treaty. You made a logical conclusion, and one I should have seen you might reach. But did you, in the light of day, believe your thoughts?”
“I would like to say I didn’t. But I was not myself, for some time.” I told him of the beating, seeing him wince in pain at my description, and the days of near-delirium and the angry, circling thoughts that followed. “Then I did believe it could be true. Perhaps because I deserved it to be,” I added, seeing for the first time the connection between my duplicities.
“Because you believe you broke my trust? Should I not be the judge of that?” He reached out, touching my arm to stop my pacing. “But finish this first confession. What do you think now? Did I coerce you to give up Sorham?”
“What do you think I think?” I said crossly. “No.”
“No. I will swear to that, if you like.”
I shook my head. “It isn’t needed. I know you didn’t. But when I found out what you had done, the negotiations with Varsland — I was horrified. Appalled. You betrayed Linrathe.”
“I cannot deny that,” he said. “Nor will I make excuses. I hated what I had done, and hated myself for doing it. I knew what the outcome might be, the Marai influencing Linrathe’s choice of leader. But I could not allow you to be cast out of your family as a result of my actions. The first I thought I might mitigate, somehow. What could I have done, if the second had occurred?”
“So you chose to protect me,” I said. “A vow to replace the one you had broken.”
He leaned back, regarding me. “You read my diaries,” he said quietly.
“Yes. I am ashamed that I did. You see why you cannot trust me.” I managed, just, to keep my voice steady.
“But you were free to read them.”
I didn’t understand. “How can you say that?”
His lips twitched. “Because I told you to.”
“What?”
He smiled, quirking an eyebrow. His amusement irritated me, suddenly. Too much had happened, too quickly. “If it is truth you seek, remember the xache game,” he murmured.
Almost the last thing he’d said to me before I had ridden north. In a flash of understanding, I realized he’d been referring to his childhood game, stored in the chest above his diaries. Irritation flared into anger, deep and hot. The anguish, and the sleepless nights, and the melancholy, Lena had said. Hadn’t I suffered all those too?
“Why didn’t you just say, rather than make me decipher your cryptic words? I hated myself for what I’d done.” I snapped. “You arrogant bastard.”
He closed his eyes. I pushed away the impulse to apologize.
“Both are undeniable,” he said after a minute, “although I failed you not from arrogance this time, but because I needed to deny myself the ease of simply asking you to read what I had written at the time. But in punishing myself I punished you too, and for that I am sorry, mo duíne gràhadh.”
“Can’t you ever take the easier path?” I growled. “You and your accursed inclination to self-sacrifice, Cillian. I don’t care if you over-water your wine, or eat too little, but when your self-denial hurts others, you have gone too far, regardless of what your god Catilius says.”
“Do not lay this at Catilius’s hearth,” he said. “The fault is mine, and mine only. You are not wrong.”
“Not wrong?” I said. “I am fucking well right, and you know it.”
We stared at each other for a heartbeat, and another. “I see my vow is no longer needed,” he said.
“What? Oh, gods, Cillian, you are annoying.” I grabbed the other chair, turning it, and sat down. “No, it isn’t. I am past needing protection. And you are avoiding answering. Are you going to admit I am right?”
“Completely.”
“Say it. No circumlocution.”
“You are right. My tendency — no, my habit — of negating my own desires, of not choosing the easier pa
th has served me well, even in this last year. But I have overlooked its effect, in some cases, on those I love.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Will you forgive me?”
“It was I who was to beg forgiveness.”
“Unnecessarily.” He reached out, touching my fingers with his for a second. The silver bracelet glinted on his wrist. “Sorley, I want you to stay. But in fairness you must know your alternative, or one of them: Ruar would like you to succeed Bhradaín as scáeli to Dun Ceànnar.”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“I persuaded him not to. I thought perhaps I had a prior claim. Was I wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything, Cillian. I didn’t expect you to be here. I came to give Dagney a letter. I’m wet and cold and I wish there were baths.”
“There will be, soon. Druisius and Apulo are building them. But the existing bathhouse still has its tubs, and I will wager that Apulo has anticipated the need.”
“Druise,” I said. Another confusion. “He chose to come?”
“Assigned as bodyguard to me and Ésparias’s heir,” Cillian said. “But do you really think he would have let Gwenna out of his sight?”
I smiled, wearily. “Not for a moment.” As I stood my eyes fell on the xache game. Cillian followed my gaze.
“The pieces stand as you and I left them,” he said. “It is your move, I believe.”
The bath was ready, and afterwards I declined dinner. Exhaustion suffused me. I couldn’t face Cillian again, or anyone. Apulo led me to a bedroom.
“What do you need?” he asked. “Soup, maybe?”
“Soup,” I agreed, and a little later he brought me soup and fuisce. I drank half the soup, and all the fuisce, and then I slept.
Chapter 58
Hunger woke me halfway through the morning. I dressed and found my way to the kitchen and Isa, who gave me a hug in greeting. “Lord Sorley,” she said. “Is it breakfast you want?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “Isa, I am not Lord Sorley to you.”
“You must be,” she said, handing me a cup of tea. “You are a scáeli now.”
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