Duana had helped him focus himself in those first few terror-stricken days, until he could exert some control over the Weaving, and the Sight came with less punishing intensity and frequency. Now, as the weeks had passed, and Duana had guided him, it only came when it was called. Though it was difficult to maintain, even weak at times, as he bent it to his will, the cripple-king had been right to call the Sight a weapon, and Harlin meant to sharpen it until it could shear through bone.
They reached Duana’s room and Harlin set about kindling wood on the ashes of the previous night’s fire. Flames growing, he stood, thinking to fetch meat to spit, when Duana’s tattooed hands slinked about him from behind. ‘Are you hungry?’ Harlin asked, her nimble fingers unfastening the brooch of his cloak.
‘Very,’ she answered, tossing the cloak aside, hands slipping under his shirt to trace his scars, breasts pressing into his back.
‘Will meat and rootbread do?’
‘Just meat,’ said Duana, and spun Harlin around to face her. She dropped to her knees, amethyst eyes staring up at him slatternly, and unlaced his pants, yanking them down to his knees.
The fire had died again by the time Duana’s body tensed and she cried out her pleasure atop Harlin. She heaved a delighted sigh, panting, her face dripping sweat an inch away from his. Harlin’s bottom lip bled where she had bitten it at the height of her climax. She kissed it, breathing heavy, sensually, as her tongue teased across the cut. She was fond of the taste of blood.
Duana broke off the kiss, her own lips bloodstained, and looked down at him. Her eyes, dark and mottled where they should have been white, were almost black against the faint glow of her violet irises. ‘I might almost miss this when you leave,’ she said dryly.
‘At least one of us will,’ Harlin answered, sucking his bleeding lip. Duana slapped him across the face for that. She climbed off of him with a small groan and lay beside him quietly.
They dozed together for a while, side by side. Harlin would wake momentarily as Duana shifted sleepily, feeling her form curl around his affectionately. The Weaving was awake in him as they slept. It was a restless thing in his repose, ever moving, ever changing, and sleep brought strange dreams from it, violent and cryptic. Images of Caermark aflame, its towns and cities crumbling, glimpses of people, places, gone in an instant before the eye could focus on them, all bloodstained and desolate. A snowfield, a forest on its border, the faces of a thousand dead men peering from between its skeletal, blackened trees. A red-haired woman, her face obscured by her hair, cradling an infant boy, and a crowned shadow that rose above them, stretching across a land reft and ruined by its coming.
Duana shook him awake at some point in the morning, banishing visions of fire. ‘Up, little wolf,’ she whispered, ‘there is somewhere we need to go.’
‘Must we?’ Harlin muttered wearily, trying to bury himself deeper in the furs around him. Winter was cruel even in the depths of Morbha.
‘Yes.’ Duana pinched him sharply on the back of his arm, casting sleep from him. ‘You will thank me for it, someday.’
Harlin rose reluctantly and dressed sleepily, wincing at the cold air. He winced again at Duana’s snickering comments about how cold air humbled men. She had him pack food and arm and armour himself before they left her chamber, leading him back into Morbha’s cold halls with spear in hand and deathly mask in place. They wound the halls together on the long walk to the outside, emerging into the eternally grey morning that hung over the island, the shrieks of winged beasts fading into the east. They made their way down the sloping paths along the mountainside, down into the foothills of the Sisters where the bog-stink was strong and cloying. A few dead men rose from the waters to stare at them from afar and ponder at their being, but Duana bid them sleep again with a wave of her hand and they soon slipped back beneath the mire with a rustling of morbid reeds and gurgling of rank waters.
Duana led him westwards through the day, through sparse, winter-stripped woodland and wild, briar-tangled moor. She had him take her in the half-night, on the slopes of gentle hills where ruined towers stood watch over them. The creatures of Hathad Camoraigh played an ambience with their harsh calls and disharmony, a savage rhapsody to their frenzied coupling.
‘There,’ Duana said as they crested a rise in the land on the morning of the fifth day of their journey. She pointed to a silhouetted shape, a quarter-mile away, looming above a screen of tall, spindly trees, their branches like the groping claws of dead men. It was an ancient keep of some kind, fashioned from stout grey stones, meant more for practicality than beauty. A squat curtain wall ringed it, circling the great mound of earth it sat upon. It was broken in places, eaten away by time and apathy.
Harlin had never seen it before, nor heard tales of it, he’d never thought the clans were inclined, or capable, of the building something so fortified. True, it was little more than a hillfort compared to most fortifications in Caermark, but still, it seemed so out of place with what he knew about his own people that he found it more unsettling than the blighted land around him.
‘What is this place?’ Harlin asked as they approached the steep slope of its foundations, watching her rip climbing plants and clinging vines from something buried beneath them, set into the ancient stones. Harlin looked up at the walls towering above them, casting their shadow deeply. The collapsed roof of the keep could just be seen over the top of broken battlements. It looked more like a grand, stone hall than a keep now Harlin was closer, distinctly of clan make.
‘You will see,’ Duana said vaguely as he stared in wonder, sparing him a quick glance. Her tearing revealed a large, dilapidated stone archway, carved once with intricate, flowing vine work like the halls of Morbha, but now weathered and pockmarked so badly that only traces remained. It was crooked, its foundations sunken so that it leaned sideways, though it still stood some ten feet tall and half as wide. A heavy stone panel was set in it, sealing off whatever was inside. It was carved with faded images of Cu Náith and Luw battling hordes of ancient demons the clans called the Balorí. Above them, Ancu’s face leered balefully, blank and fearsome as ever. Harlin wondered briefly then, if the Balorí were another twisted mockery of the Dhaine Sidhe, seeing the way Duana’s mouth twisted as she regarded the carving.
‘A tomb?’ Harlin pondered, tracing a hand over Ancu’s face, brow knotting beneath his helm with its identical faceguard. Duana simply nodded, and placed a hand upon the carving. With a deafening crack, the stone panel split and exploded inwards, splinters and jagged hunks of it thundering and pinging into the darkness beyond. She threw back her hood and took off her mask to admire her handiwork.
‘Subtle,’ Harlin said, peering inside through dust clouds. Narrow steps of carved stone led down into a black abyss.
‘I can be,’ said Duana, smiling and taking his hand. ‘Come. There is something here you must see.’
‘I’ve seen enough cadavers in my time, Duana,’ Harlin sighed as she led him into the passageway.
‘This one will inspire you more than most, I think,’ she said briskly.
Duana tore a torch free of its rusted bracket and lit it with her Weaving before darkness swallowed them. Harlin could still see no end to the stairs even with its light. They stepped carefully.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Harlin, ducking under a hanging root and manoeuvring past piled rubble. ‘The clans burn their dead, even their greatest. It is what is done. Why would they build such a thing as this?’
‘For those who eclipsed all others,’ Duana answered sharply, and said no more.
They came to the foot of the steps after several minutes of silence. The stairway opened up suddenly into a wide hollow beyond another carven archway, and the torchlight showed only the faint outlines of nearby objects, oblong and waist-high.
Duana told Harlin to stay where he was, and moved carefully through the chamber, lighting torches hung in brackets on stone pillars materialising from darkness at her approach. A murk still hung over the chamber agai
nst the light of nine spitting torches, as though the very air was reluctant to accept it. Duana waited farther down the long chamber, some forty paces from where Harlin stood, in a pool of wavering light, beckoning him to join her.
Eight sarcophagi lined the chamber. Two rows of four, Harlin counted as he passed, each one carved with the image of their interned corpse. They were all men, and warriors. Their braids were clearly carved to show their rings and heritage, and they were depicted lying upon their shields, swords clasped upon their chest in both hands as they rested. Where the dim torchlight caught upon the walls, he saw more cracked and faded carvings of Cu Náith and Luw fighting Balorí, some depicted crowned men fighting at their sides, wielding sword, shield and spear. At the far end, beyond where Duana waited and barely picked out by torchlight, an enormous carving of Ancu’s face stared out towards the stairway opposite, taking up most of the wall. Black scorch marks in its empty eyes showed they had once held illuminating fire. Harlin shivered, remembering how Ancu’s eyes had burned like cold, frozen stars when he had dreamed of it.
‘That one,’ Duana said as he reached her, pointing to one that lay on his left at the end of the two rows. Looking past her at the expanse of empty floor between them and Ancu’s carving, it seemed as though the chamber had been meant to house more of these sarcophagi, originally, but had never been needed. Harlin looked down at the stone face. It was newer and less worn than the others, slowly eroding into obscurity, less rotted and eaten by time’s unending appetite. It was a kindly face, peaceful, majestic and utterly lifelike. Impressive craftsmanship. The braids resting on stone shoulders showed rings etched with a staring eye.
‘Help me with this, little wolf,’ Duana said, hanging her torch in a bracket. She moved to the side of the sarcophagus, planting her feet and gripping the stone lid. Harlin moved to help her. Grinding fearsomely in the still gloom, the lid slid back gradually, falling away and landing with a solid thud, casting dust into the air as it shattered into a hundred pieces.
Harlin regarded the exposed corpse, waving away churning dust from the broken lid. All that remained of the occupant was their hoary skeleton, its flesh withered by time into nothing. The antiquated bones were covered with mouldering rags of something once, no doubt, illustrious, and gripped a sword made purely of rust in the same manner as the lid carving. But what caught Harlin’s eye was the tarnished crown set upon its head.
‘It can’t be,’ Harlin breathed, eyes widening as they took in the sight. ‘This… this is –’
‘Túthal,’ Duana finished for him, ‘the last High King of Luah Fáil.’
‘But how? How can his bones have come to rest here? The legends say –’
‘The legends are lies,’ Duana snapped, ‘like most Sea Child tales, they were bent to serve a purpose. They used songs of his death to paint the end of an era as a tragedy instead of justice served. Túthal was murdered though, yes, you can even see where the swords shattered his ribs.’ She showed Harlin the distinct, gaping wound on the side of the skeleton’s ribcage where something had cleaved through it, and others, broken where blades had punched through into the vitals. ‘It was an old clan of your people that betrayed him. Just like your songs say.’
‘And Túthal’s vengeance?’
‘Never happened,’ Duana laughed, ‘as you can see, he’s here, dead as dead could ever be.’ She rapped her knuckles smartly on Túthal’s dusty, hollow skull. Harlin frowned.
‘So if the clans’ tales are lies, then what is the truth?’
‘Túthal was the last of the High Kings,’ Duana answered, ‘the arse-end of an inbred line of weaklings, a slow-witted, corpulent waste of meat, even for a Sea Child. His reign saw rebellion and discontent as your chieftains remembered they’d once been kings unto themselves, and he did little to put an end to it. A chieftain and his chosen warriors came one day, to renew their oaths of fealty to him, they said, in the throne room above us, in the Hall of Kings. Instead, they put their blades through his heart, killed his men and then fled. Túthal had no heir, being soft in the cock and stupid, and they left the clans loyal to him leaderless and vulnerable. It wasn’t long before they forgot what bound them to each other, marked out their borders and started fighting like all the others, all their old hatreds taking hold again. I still remember the day Túthal died. I found it quite funny when our Great Father told us about it. No one deserved it more than he and his kin.’
Harlin regarded her sceptically. The High Kings had been ended at least three hundred years ago. Duana, he thought, was relatively young, though maybe older than himself. He’d never thought to ask her age. She couldn’t have seen more than twenty-five summers in her life. Thirty, maybe, at a push, but her body was as firm and youthful as her face. She had to be lying.
‘How old are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Duana said, shrugging. ‘Older than Túthal, though. Much older. I remember when they crowned the first High King, Morlú, and how they ruined the land we’d given them with their fighting. I was young, then, a little girl still learning the spear. I thought the Sea Children more stupid than dangerous, like most of us did. I didn’t learn to fear them until Morlú came and killed my mother and my father and drove us into the Tiar Valley. That was a long time ago, now.’
‘How,’ said Harlin, ‘how have you lived so long?’
‘We all do,’ answered Duana, ‘we are the Dhaine Sidhe. The earth’s blood is our blood. The earth does not wither after a handful of years, and neither do we.’ She looked at him sharply, smiling wickedly. ‘Does it trouble you, knowing you’ve laid with someone older than your grandmother, little wolf? You’ve seemed to enjoy it, so far. I should be offended, I’m quite young compared to some, after all. Maybe you’d like to go back to fucking Land Child coin-scraping waifs who think they know their way around a man?’ She was against him suddenly, a hand trailing down his worn leather breastplate. ‘That is, if you prefer soft little girls over time and experience.’ She felt for him beneath his mail skirt.
‘Stop it,’ Harlin snarled, pushing her hand away. She stepped back, giggling girlishly, the sound belying the age she claimed. Her eyes were almost black in the shadows, their soft glow absent for the moment.
‘So why bring me here, Duana,’ Harlin asked, sitting back on the edge of Túthal’s stone cot. ‘Was it for another of your history lessons, another reminder of the lies of my people and the hardships of yours?’
Her eyes glowed softly, their light catching upon her smooth cheeks. ‘They are not your people,’ Duana said, a hint of venom in her tone, ‘we are your people. You drank deep of the earth’s blood, the blood of gods, forsook your former life to accept the one we offered. The blood remade you, reformed you, washed away their stain and their filth and awoke the Bond sleeping within you. You are Dhaine Sidhe now, Harlin, and we stay true to our own.’
She moved from the shadows, stood between his legs and draped her arms about his mailed neck. ‘I brought you here to show you how to take your vengeance.’
‘How,’ Harlin demanded immediately.
‘You are a strong man,’ Duana said, fingertips following the faceguard of his helm, ‘you are gifted with the sword, and you grow stronger with the Earthbond each day. But you still cannot face Aenwald alone. He is a king, surrounded by thousands of fighting men. Even you, my little wolf, would struggle to find your way past so many spears.’
‘So what must I do then?’ Harlin sighed, letting his hands settle upon her hips beneath the thick cloak she wore, the ever-swirling shadows on its outer surface dancing as it shifted. She was right, of course, it was something there was no getting around. Aenwald was too well-protected for Harlin to ever hope to reach by force alone.
‘The red-haired spider,’ Duana uttered coldly, ‘she spoke to you before you came here, of her scheming and conniving, did she not? Of how she wanted to see the High Kings return and make her people great once again?’
‘She did,’ Harlin agreed coldly, letting his hands fall from
her hips, and shifting uncomfortably. Duana knew far too much of his goings on prior to his coming to the island. It made him paranoid, knowing she could glean so much, so easily, through her use of the Sight. It was as though he was constantly stripped bare before her, his every secret written upon his flesh for her to peruse and poke at her pleasure. She enjoyed it, too, he could tell.
‘Give her the king she wants.’ Duana’s words dragged his attention back to her.
‘What?’
‘You need the clans and their warriors behind you, Harlin,’ she said, ‘you cannot fight Aenwald alone. Take Túthal’s crown, give rise to her schemes, and use them to crush the man who wronged you.’
Duana moved to his side, stooping and reaching down towards Túthal’s dry bones. With a dull, gritty sound, she wrenched the crown from his dead, grey skull, and held it before her. She tilted it this way and that, pondering it, the tarnished metal’s edges glimmering red with torchlight. It was an elegant yet brutal thing, wrought of some pale metal, its circlet worked with the distinctive weaving vine patterns the Dhaine Sidhe favoured so highly. They seemed to form something shaped like an eye at the front of it, above which a large, sharp point rose, curving back gently, almost like a blade. Three others, shorter and less prominent, jutted upwards from the circlet at the sides and back. He had seen it before, he realised then, in those fevered nightmares conjured up from Ceatha’s Weaving in Tásúil, the crown held aloft at the end of a vicious battle that brought a nation to its knees.
Slowly, holding the crown almost reverently, ceremonially, Duana stood before Harlin again, and presented it to him. ‘Take it,’ she said, ‘use it well.’
Harlin stood and took the crown from her, staring at it for a moment, dumbfounded, before shaking his head. ‘I cannot,’ he said, ‘I am no king, Duana, and certainly no High King of Luah Fáil. I am just a warrior – I kill men, I do not lead them.’
The Shadow of the High King Page 59