He hunkered down and stretched huge, bloody hands toward the fire. Eleanor stared, because he was like her father in a way, but seemed wholly lacking in any of Daniel Hope’s urbanity. The sword across her shoulders seemed to hum, and she understood that he was somehow the proper wielder of the bright weapon. She also knew that he was himself a sword, and she a scabbard. The idea of surrendering to whatever passions lay locked in the bloody chest was absolutely chilling. Her first impulse was to hand him the sword and run into the woods.
The serpent woman stirred a little by the fire. Eleanor
set her hands to knitting and stared at the flames. Baird had been right. She would have preferred the fair brother to the dark. But when she thought of him with the sword, his golden greatness shrank, and she knew that Baird could not wield the thing. So she shrugged about her doubts, swallowed her rage, and tried not to think of the great hands on her body. The stiff-necked pride that was a portion of the Darlington heritage from her mother rose in her throat like bitter bile, and she bit her lip in vexation. The acrid taste of Sal’s mouth on hers brought confused memories of love and instruction, and she banished the pride to look at the man again.
Eleanor saw that not all the blood on him was from whatever beast he had slain. There was a deep slash in the dark leather of his jerkin, and blood oozed from the cut in the flesh beneath. There were long scratches on his arms as well, and she had an empathetic surge of pain. She hated the cuts as she hated his silent endurance of them.
She cleared her throat. "If there is water, I... would clean your wounds for you... if you wish.”
The blue eyes seemed to bore into her mind. "No need,” he finally said. He had a deep voice, like the growl of the north wind in winter.
Eleanor was annoyed by this rejection. "Does he always hug his pain to him like something precious?” she asked his mother.
"Five minutes and I’m already mediating your first fight,” clucked the woman. "Of course he does. Didn’t Baird tell you he was morose?”
"Yes, but no one mentioned he was spoilt in the bargain,” Eleanor snapped. "But perhaps you’ve had other matters on your mind than teaching good manners and polite behavior.”
"Aren’t you a brave one, sweet serpent’s tooth,” the woman crooned. "Yes, you must be, or you wouldn’t be here at all. But a little foolhardy, too. Your argument is with him, not me.”
"Then keep out of it, Orphiana,” said the man. Doyle shifted his weight a little. "My mother would dice with the Devil, if she only had hands.” He fell silent again for a moment. "She enjoys games, too much, sometimes. Where’s Baird?”
"I sent him away. He was being very annoying,” Orphiana replied. "He tried to take what is yours, just like he always does. He’s the grabbiest, greediest child.” “You stopped him, I suppose. Why didn’t you let him have his way? I don’t want the wench, not with all those lines attached.”
Eleanor was piqued at first by this cold rejection. Then her sense of humor caught her, and she realized that Doyle was as unwilling to enter her adventure as she was to have it. The perversity of chaining the two of them, stubborn and reluctant, to one yoke seemed to her the epitome of Olympian meddling.
She laughed in spite of herself. "Believe me, the feeling is mutual.”
"I didn’t interfere. She’s quite able to look out for herself. Baird got his hands burnt for his presumption. She let him off lightly. That’s a fault in her. She forgives quite easily.”
"Bring him out,” Doyle said. "He’ll be a hornet’s nest if you don’t.”
"What? So he can try to slay you? You know he will. And you’ll mess up the patterns, and it will take me months to set them right again.” She turned her head to Eleanor. "Take my advice, child, and don’t have sons. Daughters are more biddable.”
Doyle seemed deep in thought. His head lowered into his massive shoulders until his chin almost rested on his chest. His hands clenched and flexed as if two forces warred in him.
Suddenly, he rose and stepped around the fire pit, yanking Eleanor to her feet and pulling her head back by the hair. He was cold where his body pressed against her, colder than the breath of Darkness from the Stone Wolf. She struggled against that cold, calling on Bridget’s fire, as she scratched his face and tried to free herself. The flame did not come as he covered her mouth with his.
His chill breath seemed to fill her lungs, and she tasted blood in his kiss. The Eleanor who had killed two beasts of Darkness, who had grown and changed, was swept aside like a tiny leaf in the wind. She could feel nothing, think nothing, but empty blackness. With an agonizing wrench, she let her body go. Let him have the shell, if that was his desire.
But the cold taste of his tongue and the press of his lips brought Sal’s kiss to her, and with it the endless play of green water and golden light. The endless instant of love she had shared with the goddess played in her like a bubbling spring. Eleanor felt her bones turn to cool water, bitter and quickening.
The hard hands slackened their grip, and Doyle pulled away his mouth. He held her shoulders and looked into her face for a long time. Then he drew her head to his chest and stroked her face with clumsy gestures. He trembled and made a groaning growl deep in his throat.
She could hear the thunder of his heart under her cheek, the labored moan of his breathing. Eleanor turned her face up and saw that his blue eyes were brimmed with tears. An icy crystal slid down his cheek and splashed on her nose. It tickled, and she gulped to keep from giggling.
"Just look what you’ve done to the pattern,” screamed Orphiana. "Have you no sense? Selfish beast. You could at least have dragged her outside before you—”
"Mother, be quiet,” he said. "I’ll help you set it right in a moment.” For once, the snake mother held her peace. "I am not accustomed to doing things I do not wish to do,” he told Eleanor.
"You didn’t want to... kiss me?”
He pulled a long face. "Was ever a man more misunderstood than I? Of course I wanted to kiss you, Lady Innocence. Curse all women! The world would be in less trouble if they had never been created.”
Doyle released her suddenly and bent down, examining the tiles on the floor. The interlaces where their feet had stood were a jumble of broken lines and colors. He traced one with a broad hand. A band of green seemed to thicken like a serpent undulating, and he grasped it and drew it down, manipulating another of blue at the same time. There was a hollow groan from somewhere underground. Eleanor felt a deep shaking under her feet, distant and thunderous. She moved carefully out of his way as he repaired the disrupted pattern.
"Why does everyone get to play with a full deck but me?” she asked, addressing her question to no one in particular.
"There, there, my wriggler”—Orphiana chuckled— "your fangs are showing. What fun is a game if you know the outcome? Don’t glare at me like that. You’re as stern as Doyle. What serious children you will make, solemn little prunes of virtue. Don’t you see any humor in Greenland nearly sinking in the power of your passion? Of course you don’t. Trust Bridget to send a dull stick. She’s almost as tedious as a Valkyrie herself.”
Eleanor understood the apparent passionlessness of her hostess, remembering how the very earth suffered under the tread of the Black Beast. Orphiana was tied to her task of nurturing the world, and Eleanor was sure that it wasn’t a pleasant job. The snake mother felt every grain of sand on the shore and every shoot of grass pushing its way from darkness into light. It was an occupation that bred cynicism, and Orphiana was no more resigned to it than Eleanor was truly resigned to the tasks Bridget had set her.
She closed her eyes to shut out the play of pattern around her, aware of a slight headache. Resisting an impulse to say "Tell me everything,” she attempted to form logical questions, knowing that if a little learning was a dangerous thing, ignorance could be deadly. Eleanor realized she had not had the time and leisure to examine the problem properly. At first, she had moved from a sense of duty, and later she had just run to keep away from
the bogies. Whatever the Darkness was, it clearly did not regard her with any great concern. She was just a nuisance, a gnat to be swatted at will.
The headache, she decided, was part hunger. She looked around for where she had set her pack. Eleanor was tired of bread and cheese and sour wine and would happily have traded the whole lot for a sight of the Golden Arches. She was weary of rain and cold, of damp clothes and soggy hose, of the sword across her shoulders and the constant ache it made in her back. If I’m not careful, I’ll have a proper fit of Irish doldrums.
Eleanor pushed her hunger and her fatigue aside and went back to her place by the fire. She picked up her knitting and stared at it, then rolled it up. Doyle rose from his work on the floor and came over to sit next to her.
After a long silence he asked, "Are you angry with me?”
"Angry? Of course not! I am getting quite accustomed to being nearly raped by every Tom, Dick, and Harry I meet. It’s so flattering to know I arouse lust in the heart of every fellow I come across. That’s every woman’s dream! No, that’s not quite true. There was a scarecrow of Darkness who wanted to cook me over a slow fire. And Sam was very courteous, but his wife was watching. The goddess only knows how he would have behaved without Sarah’s eye upon him. Why should I be angry?”
"Will you let me explain?”
"And spoil all the fun?” she snapped. "Can’t you realize I just adore blundering around with cryptic instructions? Go here, do this, go there, find that! It’s worse than a package tour of Greece—sixteen islands in thirteen days. Why should you tell me anything?” "Are you always this unreasonable?”
"No. Only when I’m hungry and tired and dirty and mad as hell!” Eleanor found that venting her frustration did not make her feel any better, and she tried to stop. Her skin itched with dried salt, and her hose were still damp, though the rest of her clothing was nearly dry. But the anger was a hard knot under her chest, a sickening lump of cold frustration.
"Why didn’t you say so?” he asked. Eleanor balled a fist and punched him on the arm as hard as she could. Doyle smiled at her maddeningly, took the hand, and kissed it. Shivers of some emotion she had no name for raced through her at his touch. "You’re a proper firebrand, macushla. Food, then.”
Doyle got up and crossed the chamber, vanishing into one of the pillars. He reappeared a moment later carrying a tray with two steaming bowls and wooden tankards on it. He set it on the floor between them and handed her a bowl. Eleanor ate the hot stew, mutton with carrots and onions, and felt the tension in her body begin to ease. The cups were filled with dark ale, and there was bread, a sturdy loaf of peasant bread, to mop up the last of the stew with. After three days on horseback and a chilly trip across the sea, it seemed ambrosial to her. She licked her fingers and watched him finish his food.
"Baird is quite irritated,” he said conversationally, "but that’s his normal state. I can’t help wishing you were his. I’d find the conflagration very amusing.”
"Well, I’m not, nor yours, either!” He reminded her forcibly of her father with his cool arrogance. She hated his confidence, his laughing sureness that he could dominate her. That was like Daniel Hope, too, and Eleanor found it more than a little frightening. The memory of his cold breath in her lungs returned, and she shifted her body uneasily.
"That’s true enough. What is it like, belonging to yourself?”
The question stunned her, for she could tell he was quite serious. She wondered what kind of mind lay beneath that black hair. His eyes told her nothing. Eleanor drank the last of her ale before she tried to answer. "Everyone belongs to themselves. It isn’t like anything. It just is.”
He shook his head and held his hand over her tankard. When he drew it away, it was filled again with ale. "No. Men don’t. First they belong to their mothers and later to their wives and daughters.”
"I... would say you had it the wrong way around,” she answered thoughtfully.
"That’s what you have been taught. It is a thing men have been trying to peddle for centuries. But a lie doesn’t become true by repetition. False is false. Every man knows in his heart that he is chattel. It gnaws at his vitals like worms. I don’t have any wish to leave my mother’s house and take on a new rider, but I haven’t any choice in the matter. I thought I did, but no, I do not.”
Eleanor was very disturbed by his words. Her last expectation in the world was to find a "liberated” male in thirteenth-century Hibernia. She herself found the stridency of the women’s movement disquieting, for she could not quite believe that being equal in a man’s world was a desirable thing. But this wasn’t her time or her place at all, and she did not know what to make of Doyle.
"I didn’t choose to come on this quest, either.”
"No one made you bring that sword to us, did they?” "No, no one made me.”
"Then you did choose.”
"I... suppose. It truly just never crossed my mind to say, 'Bridget, find another suck—ah, servant.’ You could say I have the habit of obedience.”
"And you never chafe under it?”
"Of course I do. Everyone does things they don’t wish to. All I want is...less mysterious directions. It’s like being ridden out of town on a rail—if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather not. Yes, I was terribly flattered. I never thought I’d be chosen to do anything important. I still wonder when I am going to wake up in my bed and find it was all a dream. Being a nobody is much simpler than being somebody.”
"Then you do this out of pride?” He frowned over his ale.
"I don’t know. I haven’t given it much thought. Sure, why not? Everything comes from pride, doesn’t it? Or fear. Will you please tell me about the sword?”
"Yes, I will. Back at the beginning, before time was thought of, when the gods were still squalling brats, my mother had a lover. I do not know what sort of man... or being he was, but he was a craftsman, a smith. He was the father of all smiths, first of his craft. He-phestus is but a dim shadow of what he was, and Vulcan a buffoon. Being a male, he desired to release himself from my mother’s... tutelage. In pride and imitation of himself, he made that sword and three others. I believe it was the first thing ever made in reflection of the male, so, of course, it was a weapon. He used it to cut off Orphiana’s head—used each of those swords in turn to slay her. And each time she made a sheath for the blades, from her sloughing skin, as she herself was a sheath—as women are. And much of the power of the blade was... absorbed by the scabbard. The sword is a very weak thing, separate from its sheath.”
"Weak!” Eleanor remembered the terrible shock her first handling had given her and how difficult the two subsequent uses had been. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to know the full capacity of the weapon. "I’ll take your word for it. How did Bridget get it?”
"The tale goes, she diced it away from Llyr. She is fire, and so is the sword. She got Llyr drunk and gamed with him. He was too hotheaded to handle it—like Baird.”
Eleanor had great difficulty imagining the dignified figure at the priory on her knees, shaking a set of bones and muttering for Little Joe, like some back-alley crap-shooter. "And the sheath?”
"Was in Orphiana’s care. For a time, Bridget had both, but she and Mother had a falling out.”
"Noisy, pushy wench,” hissed Orphiana. "No manners, no courtesy. She needs to be beaten with a stick.” "I... assume,” Eleanor began, as the old woman stopped speaking, "that if the sword and sheath are brought together, the wielder is very... powerful.” Doyle laughed, his deep rumble bouncing off the walls. "Yes, he is. There’s a madness in it.”
"And I’m supposed to hand it over to you? Why don’t you just take it?”
"I tried. Have you forgotten?”
"Was that what you were doing? I must have a dirtier mind than I thought. So much for lust. I take it you’ll be master of the world, once you get your hands on it.” "Yes, unless I am contained.”
Eleanor shied away from the meaning of his words violently. "And you don’t
want to be... restrained.” "Slaves rarely like changing masters.”
"All this superior-inferior nonsense is stupid! It’s sickening. Why don’t you think better of yourself! I don’t want... a mouse!” Eleanor did not understand her feelings. She tried to force her emotions into a semblance of order, but they squirmed into knots of conflicting ideas. Equality and dominance seemed to have started a war inside her, with a lifetime of being "Daddy’s girl” battling both the notion of sexual equality and the idea of holding dominion over this great, dark man. For a second she wished she could just hand him the sword, and with it the responsibility to finish Bridget’s tasks. Let the Devil take the hindmost.
The realization that she hadn’t really accepted this quest was like Sal’s hard hands holding her head down in the well. Eleanor came face-to-face with her great fear of failure and her anger at having the job thrust upon her. She did not curse the gods or the war in Heaven; she cursed her own blind pride and obedience.
She didn’t want the responsibilities. Eleanor looked herself squarely in her inner eye and admitted she had avoided actual responsibility, rather successfully, all her life. She’d even managed not to choose a career, letting Daniel guide her instead. And then he had died that slow, painful death, and she had known betrayal. Her father had not loved her enough to continue living. She mistrusted love now and felt almost relieved that Doyle did not appear to possess a single romantic bone in his large, scarred body. He didn’t want her, just the sword. It seemed to confirm her sense of lovelessness.
Then Sal’s white face rose in her mind, and the mem-ory of their shared emotions, and she realized the problem lay within her. Eleanor hated the idea of a marriage of convenience. It fairly sickened her. She wanted to be able to care about the man who took her body, not out of any reverence for virginity but simply from self-respect. To lie with a man toward some mutual end beyond passion or begetting was disgusting. She was unsure of where those emotions were within her, or even if she possessed them, for the love she carried for the Lady of the Willows seemed remote from this great, dark man.
Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01] Page 13