The Raven Queen

by Jules Watson

There, a harassed servant wiped sweat from her face and shaved flesh off a crackling pig. Smoke in her eyes, Maeve grabbed a bannock and retreated, colliding with someone behind her. “Lord Fraech,” she coughed, burying her mouth in the meat-filled bun.

  “Lady.” Fraech’s nostrils flared, as if he longed to charge in the other direction.

  A distant cousin, Fraech was twenty; tall and lithe rather than brawny like Innel. He was of the derbfine, the royal kin from which rulers were chosen, and she had heard he was being prodded toward the kingship by a father and uncle of ravening ambition. They must be rubbing their hands now that Eochaid was dead.

  Maeve chewed as Fraech flailed for something to say, giving her time to see him up close.

  His brown hair was tied in a simple horse-tail and he wore only one arm-ring. He was no puffed-up cock, then. His green eyes were steady, his face fine-boned and calm. His skin was unscarred, so it must be true that he was an exceptional fighter, his quietness at odds with a swift sword-arm, she had heard.

  “I am sorry … about your father,” he managed. “Lugh bless him on his journey.”

  “Thank you.” Maeve swallowed. “I am sure your father is dreadfully upset. I feel for him, I do.”

  Fraech clamped his lips together, but a small smile still escaped. “I will be sure to pass him your sympathies.”

  Self-control and wit. Ally? Enemy? She did not know. Maeve scanned the throng around her. “Oh, look,” she said. “I’ve been wondering where she was.” When a waft of smoke obscured them, Maeve slipped away, wiping meat-juice from her chin.

  Deep in thought, she was nearly bowled over at the fighting ring when a pair of wrestlers toppled across the ropes and fell, spattering her with sweat. A horn blew. “Out of bounds!” the druid shouted in the ring.

  Maeve was turning away when she spied an old chieftain watching the match. She hesitated, then realized she couldn’t wipe away the sensation of Innel’s eyes boring into her over their father’s body. All the stakes had been raised now.

  She ducked beneath a slew of fists in the crowd, the warriors all screaming and cursing. “Lord Donagh,” she murmured to the white-haired chief.

  “Lady.” Donagh did not glance at her, nursing a horn of ale.

  The bloodied winner was circling, waving his arms. The unconscious loser was being carted off, his arm bent at an angle and his face bone-white. The ranks of warriors parted.

  Maeve froze.

  Innel was there, protesting to the druid, his face scarlet. He jabbed a finger at the downed fighter—one of his own men—and then at the priest.

  Donagh hissed under his breath. “With the king gone, he thinks he cannot be touched. If I seek justice now, he will slaughter my people and blame it on Ulaid raiders.” His eyes creased with pain. “How could you curse me with this secret, this shame?”

  Maeve poked a fallen leaf on the grass with her toe, as if they weren’t speaking. “If not for me, you would never know that it was because of Innel that your daughter died. He killed her.”

  A shudder passed over Donagh. Across the grass, Maeve watched the tendons bulging in Innel’s neck and arms, and her skin crawled. Did he hold Donagh’s young daughter down like that as he forced his way into her?

  Maeve remembered how it felt, that weight.

  Some things only women could draw from other women. Following a trail of rumors, she had gleaned how Innel’s babe had begun to grow in the girl. Of itself, that was a blessing … but it would have betrayed Innel’s violence against a noble maid to the druids. He silenced her with threats against her family, and she resorted to a birch stick, and died of womb-fever.

  Maeve blinked the dead girl away, her belly turning. “If I can deliver you justice, you said you would support me if I needed you.” Two promises, and she had no idea how either would be fulfilled. Many seeds, though, had to be sown so that one might sprout.

  Just one to give her some kind of safe haven, somewhere.

  “I value my honor,” Donagh sniffed, wiping his sleeve across his nose.

  “So do I.” Maeve made herself hold his eyes. Donagh commanded many warriors and was allied to many chiefs.

  A bellow claimed their attention. Innel’s ale-soaked cubs were brawling with the winner’s friends, fists and kicks flying. As the druids called for order, Innel ripped out one of the posts and clouted the victor over the head.

  “Sacrilege!” Donagh gasped. “His father lies dead ten paces away!”

  Maeve bared her teeth. “That’s my brother.”

  Dagger-hilts cracked skulls; noses shattered and more blood spattered the shadowed turf. Fraech appeared, plowing in to drag his warriors off. He plucked the victor up and hauled his men away, scowling and filthy. Innel was left grinning among his pack of fighters.

  Maeve glanced around. A few old chieftains had been drawn from the ale kegs by the unseemly brawl. Their fingers glittered with gaudy rings, but as they lifted their cups, their mouths were grim behind them.

  Here was the moment. The lords were on this side of the crowd, Innel on the other. Maeve moistened her tongue, heart hammering.

  She knew only that her brother could not become king. If he did, she would not outlive the royal feast.

  CHAPTER 4

  “So it begins.” Maeve’s voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “Can such hot blood rule a kingdom? My father did not think so.”

  No one could dispute what her father thought now.

  “Lord Cormac,” Maeve addressed one of the lords by the wrestling ring. “You suffered when Connacht cubs raided Mumu without my father’s say. The Mumu sought revenge, burning your people’s steadings, we heard.” She did not point out that the cubs were her brother’s men, seeking cattle to bribe his supporters for the kingship. Everyone knew that.

  Maeve ignored the hiss that came from somewhere at the back. No one spoke. The lords all looked away with brows and mouths drawn, before quickly dispersing. Donagh had already slipped away.

  Maeve’s knees went shaky and she crossed her arms to hold herself. She felt a prickling on the back of her neck but would not look toward Innel. Instead, she pretended to be watching some girls practicing their dancing in the next field. Gradually, her brother’s braying grew fainter.

  They had gone.

  In the brief silence that fell, a youthful voice piped up. “Lady Maeve!”

  Maeve plastered a bright smile on her face and swung about. Shadows were now stretching long fingers across the bronze grass. The brown and gold trees were fading into a mist that was curling up from the nearby stream.

  A knot of young warriors had reclaimed the ring, throwing aside the broken stakes. They prodded the speaker, who stepped forward. “Will you join the last horse race before dark?”

  Maeve walked toward them, sway-hipped. “Now, Lassar, I have been outracing you for moons. Do you really want to be beaten just before supper?”

  The youths guffawed, strong teeth gleaming in the twilight.

  “But I’ve been feeding up my stallion,” a bold one drawled, waving at his groin. “If you sat his saddle, you’d be surprised at his brawn.”

  “I heard he bolts the start, Ruari, and spends himself too soon.” Maeve grinned, a hand draped at her waist. “Not a good bet for a woman.”

  They all laughed, jostling closer as she brushed back her scented curls. To the young and fiery fighters, she had summoned the mask of a goddess of the woods: wild, untamed, and almost unreachable, riding out on their hunts and joining in their sword sparring. Around them, she left her hair unbound whenever she could stand the inconvenience. Married women wore theirs coiled, maids in long plaits. She was in-between now—and the only place hair ever tumbled about a woman’s shoulders was in the bed-furs.

  “What about the spear-feats?” another suggested.

  “It is too dark,” his friends argued.

  Exhaustion was creeping over Maeve. She unclasped a bracelet. “I’ll come see you race in a moment. The first home wins this.” She lifted th
e ring so the sunset fired the bronze. “And I’ll sit by the winner for the Samhain tales.” They gawped at the promise in her smile. “Hurry up!”

  Grinning and shoving each other, the youths raced to their horses.

  Darkness had almost swamped the field now. People were drifting away from the games toward the flaring bonfires on the meadows and the trill of pipes. A drum began to beat. As the last of the boys leaped the ropes, Maeve saw a single man left, stretched out against a post that held up one of the leather awnings.

  Garvan tucked his arms behind his dark head. “You must be bloody exhausted.”

  Maeve threw herself to the ground. “Can still outrace you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Garvan’s eyes glinted. “Those boys can’t decide whether to fight you or bed you—or both at once. Your sword skills impress them.”

  Maeve tensed. “I learned much in the years I was away.”

  In Laigin, the moment he got a child on her, Ros Ruadh had shoved Maeve aside like one of his hounds. By the time her shock and illness ebbed, he was hoarding the babe as his own treasure, his women nursing her. Bereft, Maeve had wandered, drawn again and again to the warriors with their fiery eyes and sharp blades. They radiated life, when the only thing that was ever hers had been taken.

  Maeve’s throat ached, and distractedly she rubbed it, turning her face to the cold dusk. In Mumu, when she was older, she sought out the warriors not just for her bed, but to teach her to fight. That was when she found she could expend sorrow in sword-blows and sweat.

  No one knew it all, though.

  “Your efforts are leaving you too weary for some things.” Garvan scratched the black fuzz along his jawbone. “Why have you not come to me for so long?”

  Maeve looked at the stars kindling over their heads. Because her favors were a currency now, and if her father used them, she must, too. Every lord must think he still had a chance to become her royal mate and sire a child of Eochaid’s blood. It was a scrap of power she would hold onto.

  “Stop griping.” She poked a buckle on his belt. Garvan had been her guard on every foray this past sun-season, and many gifts had flowed his way. His battered face had never attracted many women, but his new array of bronzes did. “Girls are throwing themselves at you now like salmon up a stream. I bet you’ll land a wealthy wife come Beltaine.”

  “She wouldn’t be as understanding as you, spitfire.”

  “Probably not. She catches you wriggling another, and you’ll get a tail in the face.” She chuckled, dangerously light-headed as what she had just done hit her.

  Garvan did not smile, picking at the damp grass. “I could marry you. You’d be safe then.”

  Maeve cleared her throat, her face burning. She touched his hand, the knuckles swollen from sword-fights. “You do me great honor, but what men value in me I must use for myself now. And Innel is already suspicious of you.”

  Garvan pulled at one scarred earlobe. “Don’t you think I can handle him?”

  She grinned. “You can’t handle me.”

  His only answer was a snort.

  Maeve let all the masks fall away, flopping on the turf and knuckling her eyes.

  Garvan uncorked a goatskin and handed it to her. “Just be careful. Innel heard what you said to the lords.”

  “All the more reason to get them on my side.” Maeve gulped mead and handed the skin back. But to do … what?

  Garvan’s eyes were suddenly uncertain. He ran a hand through his black hair, making it stick up in a crest. “Just what are you getting me into, spitfire?”

  Gods, to have one person who did not look at her like that. She sprang straight, pulling her knees up. “Don’t be like all the others,” she burst out, knotting her hands about her legs. Then she caught herself and put a hand on Garvan’s arm, the muscle ridged and hard. She breathed out, her smile crooked. “Treachery has been inflicted on me so many times, my friend. I would only ever bring a man down through his own weakness, I swear.”

  I will never be my father.

  Garvan searched her face, and eventually his shoulders lowered. He reached out and pinched her chin.

  The girl summoned Ruán awake once more without words.

  Her particular scent drew him from sleep first: smoke-tanned hides and pungent herbs. When his sight cleared, her eyes were hovering over him, the irises shimmering through all the hues of moss and wood.

  Girl, woman … his sense of her shifted like the watery light of the lake.

  Her features were delicate, her chin pointed and neck long, framed by dark hair braided with shells and feathers. She was the only one of his rescuers to appear in daylight at the little shelter he slept in, a dome of reeds that seemed to have grown from the marsh itself. Only at night, lost in wanderings of the mind, did he glimpse the eyes of others shining around the fire.

  The druids spoke of little, ancient hunters who lived in Erin before the tall lords came with their iron swords. There were rumors of their remnants clinging on in hidden places. Earth people. Tree people. It seemed impossible they could be so cut off from the tribes that they did not share a language, but they never spoke to him, or answered him. He only heard them singing—a burbling melody that always sent him back into slumber.

  This day, the girl’s eyes were more penetrating than usual. Belying her delicate appearance, she flashed a feral grin and poked him in the chest. That made him sit up.

  She leaped up, twirling a foot to kick the furs off his legs. At the edge of camp she looked back, cocking her head with a challenge in her bright eyes. It was unmistakable. Get up, and come along.

  Ruán clambered up, his limbs surging with a vitality that had become more intense with every passing day. Reveling in that rush, he bounded after the girl, down the slope.

  The camp sat on a knoll of hazel and alder trees. Below was a sea of reeds, their bronze stalks gleaming, and beyond, the glitter of the lake. Behind the knoll, channels of water almost cut this spit of land into an island.

  Ruán broke out of the shade and collided with sunlight. He could see it. He put his arms out and turned. It had been an endless sun-season. As he swung around, the warmth on his bare chest melted away the sense of his body, and he became pure light as well. The mud squelched between his toes. Moist air curled over his cheekbone.

  He had always questioned, and craved answers—and had nearly died of that. Now he would question nothing, know nothing but the green haze of trees and the silver sky.

  Ruán spun to a halt. The girl dangled a dripping bag of mussels before him.

  But before he could reach for them, she danced away and, turning for the shore, raced off through the shoulder-high reeds. He plowed after her, leaping over channels of water that cut the reed-beds, the marsh-grasses tangling in his spread hands.

  He came upon her at a hearth she had built on the lake beach. Fire-things were spread before her: flint, iron-stone, tinder. She pointed at his hand and gestured with her chin to the hearth.

  Ruán sank to a squat. “I can do it, you know. You would not believe it to look at me, but I was a druid once.” With a wry smile, he looked down at himself, poking a hole in his threadbare trews. His ruddy hair was tangled with leaf-litter, and they had given him a tunic of deerskin, crudely sewn. No, no one would believe him. And, fool, you haven’t made a fire for years.

  He was always given the honor-seat beside the hearths of great halls. Lord Mulach’s hall …

  Ruán’s smile died.

  Startling him, the girl patted his cheek. She grabbed his hands and guided them to the fire-kit like he was a child. Ruán snorted under his breath, but gave in. She had saved his life. He would do anything for her.

  Fingers tangled together, they shredded pieces of dried mushroom into tinder and struck the stone with the flint. When the spark caught, the girl wafted the smoke over him, sucking it in with an exaggerated flare of her nostrils.

  Ruán chuckled. “Yes, I can smell it.” He blew on the flame, piled on grass and shards of w
ood. As he wrapped the mussels in leaves, the girl hopped up and walked to the shore.

  Ruán tucked the mussels in the fire. The maiden was standing thigh-deep in the glittering lake, her hands hovering. Something about the spread of her palms made the hair stand up on Ruán’s neck. She’d never done this before.

  Without a sound, she sank beneath the lake. Ruán waited, but there were no ripples. His heart thumped loud in that silence. A gust of wind sent bright wavelets to shore, and with them Ruán caught a snatch of her song, faint and fleeting.

  Come … come …

  Without realizing, Ruán was on his feet, ankle-deep in water.

  Come … come …

  Ruán’s body became untethered from his mind, swaying with a life of its own. At that moment the girl rose grasping a bream, the gleaming fish already limp in her hands. Dazed, Ruán looked between the girl and her catch. It struck him forcefully how the fish appeared empty rather than dead. The enlivening force in it had simply … gone.

  The girl turned, her glance glinting with approval. She came ashore and left the fish, taking Ruán’s wrists and spreading his palms over the water. Baffled, Ruán shut his eyes.

  Ideas flowered within him. A great rush of life had filled him whenever he drank their nectar, and it surged through him now. He could also sense that charge in other living things—as a blind man he had always known when someone was near, even if they were silent.

  The girl was singing. The vibrations of her voice tickled his skin. Then they were inside him. Ruán released his breath. The sun was dissolving his body, his awareness, and merging it with the watery light all around him.

  Ruán’s palms prickled. He felt … bright-glowing-warm-darting things below. Fish.

  Come … His thoughts seemed to flow out on that rippling light.

  A fish swam into his hands. Beyond the glide of the scales, Ruán’s fingers tingled as if the creature was made of sparks. He saw and felt a bright burst—the flame of life in the fish and his own flaring together. Ruán laughed with a joy that blanked out all questions. Incredible.