The Shadow of the High King

by Frank Dorrian

  ‘You will never see my daughter again,’ Radha snarled between her teeth. ‘Never, murderer. Be gone from my town, before I have the men string you up to feed the crows.’ Her green eyes burned brighter, her face so furious she looked borderline insane. Harlin rested his hand upon the hilt of his sword in answer, never taking his eyes from hers. The clansmen guarding the stairway to her hall looked at one another, hands settling reluctantly upon their own blades. A steady roar was building about Harlin and Radha, the townsfolk eager for another spectacular fight.

  ‘It’s alright, mother.’

  Harlin and Radha both spun as Ceatha stepped from the crowd, setting those watching to ever greater buzzing and rumbling amongst themselves. She was still beautiful – tall, pale, freckled and fiery-haired as ever – though sorrowful, too. She was a woman whose beauty had the misfortune to shine ever more brightly in the depths of misery. Her green eyes peered warily at Harlin from beneath a hood of the same shade, the sight of him, no doubt, a jab to a wound not yet healed. She seemed outwardly fragile, like spun glass. Therein, Harlin knew, was the danger. Behind her façade of frailty waited the spider, sorting the threads of its web, laying its traps, its armoured hide tougher than steel plate.

  ‘I will speak with him,’ Ceatha said, moving to her mother’s side through a crescendo of muttered excitement. ‘Come, Harlin.’ She turned, gesturing away the two clansmen by the stairway’s arch when they made to escort her, and headed up the steps behind her, followed by Radha, after a moment’s more glowering at Harlin. He followed, the guarding clansmen’s helmed heads bowing in acknowledgement to him.

  ‘Kinsman,’ the one on the right said respectfully as he passed, moving to bar access to the stairway. The crowd soon became a distant humming, sighing ambience below, hundreds of heads watching the three figures ascend to where Radha’s hall waited above.

  A fire roared in the hall’s central hearth, Harlin, Radha and Ceatha sat about its spitting flames. The hall was empty, save for themselves and the young serving girls who were hurriedly set about arranging platters of cold food on short notice for them. Harlin was brought a cup of brown, watery ale, Radha unwilling to waste good drink upon him, while she and Ceatha sipped at cups of honey wine.

  The three of them sat in silence for a time about the fire, Harlin’s eyes moving from Radha to Ceatha and back again as he studied them. They sat stiffly across the flames from him, backs straight, faces stern but expressionless, neither moving nor speaking. Harlin allowed the silence to grow awkward, content to sit and sip and stare at the fire while the two women became agitated.

  ‘So,’ Ceatha said eventually, unable to meet his answering gaze. ‘You look…’ she struggled for words, ‘… different. You were not so pale when you left us.’

  Harlin laughed, looking at the back of his hand before the fire, fingers spread. It was true. ‘Hathad Camoraigh changes you,’ he said, shrugging, and muttered, ‘more than you could imagine.’ He clenched the hand to a fist. Radha narrowed her eyes at him.

  ‘What do you want, murderer, get to the point, I am beyond tired of you,’ she snapped.

  ‘Very well,’ he answered after a sip of piss-water ale. ‘You made me an offer some time ago, Ceatha, before I left for the island. One mutually beneficial.’

  Ceatha’s eyes widened ever so slightly for the tiniest sliver of a second, her mouth narrowing to a line. Radha glanced between the two of them suspiciously.

  ‘I’ve come here to take you up on it,’ Harlin finished plainly, draining his cup. He motioned for more from a serving girl, taking a cut of cold chicken offered to him on a wooden platter from another.

  ‘And what makes you think it still stands after what you did to us?’ Ceatha said confidently, though glancing furtively at her mother.

  ‘What scheming is this,’ Radha suddenly barked.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Harlin said around a mouthful of chicken. Radha gave him a black look. ‘Ceatha wants to restore the legacy of the High Kings.’

  Radha rounded on her daughter, looking her up and down as though seeking some outward taint of deceit upon her. ‘The High Kings?’ she said, turning back to Harlin, the anger in her voice barely restrained. ‘And how, might I ask, did she intend to do so?’ Ceatha’s face trembled visibly as she wrestled with anger. Harlin flashed her a crooked grin, her eyes gleamed hatefully.

  ‘Ceatha,’ he said, washing down good chicken with gods-awful ale, ‘planned to have me return to the island and find something for her.’ Ceatha said nothing, but her mouth drew as tight as a merchant’s purse string.

  ‘Liar,’ Radha snarled, ‘my daughter would do no such thing, she knows as much as any the horrors of our homeland.’

  ‘I assure you, I speak true,’ Harlin said, ‘only, you never intended for me to go alone, did you Ceatha?’ Her hand twisted tightly in the skirts upon her lap, shaking, knuckles bone white. ‘You meant for us to conquer the island together, and find something most have forgotten exists. Save for the privileged few – the Sí Druí.’

  ‘Did you come here just to slander my daughter before me,’ Radha shouted, springing to her feet and throwing her cup at the wall behind him, ‘was killing my son not enough for you, galloglách? Ceatha would do no such thing, we have no need of a king to rule us, and there is nothing left for our people but death on that island.’ She gave him a crooked sneer, looking him up and down. ‘What a shame it didn’t see fit to rid us of you.’

  ‘There is more than death that roams Hathad Camoraigh,’ Harlin said quietly as he regarded Radha, brushing drops of honey wine from his cloaked shoulder. ‘Far more. You both know that already, though, much as you might try to deny it. Your aim, Ceatha, was to recover the crown of the High Kings, and name me Túthal’s heir.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough of your shit, Harlin!’ Ceatha shot to her feet beside her mother, furiously throwing her own cup into the blazing hearth in a cloud of sparks. ‘How dare you – how dare you! Not only do you take my brother from me, but you come into my home to stir hate between me and my mother? We are all that’s left to each other after what you did to us, you wee galloglách shite! How dare you! I’ll have the men string you up and gut you for this. No –’ she shook her head dangerously ‘– I’ll have them tie you down and beat your face till your own mother wouldn’t recognise you, just like you did to Bradan.’

  Harlin placed his empty mug beside the bench and stood slowly. The serving girls scurrying about the hall quickly made themselves scarce, retreating into far corners away from the escalating confrontation, seeking shadows or chores to busy themselves with.

  ‘I know how you mourn for Bradan,’ said Harlin, ‘I understand that pain. I mourn each day for those I’ve lost myself. Though, it does surprise me that you were willing to let me kill him, Ceatha. For all the love you bared him, your own ambition still sat upon its pedestal above all else.’

  Ceatha went to leap over the hearth for him with a snarl, eyes wild and teeth bared. Radha caught her arm and held her back firmly. ‘Stay yourself, child!’ she scolded through her own grit teeth. ‘Do not let him provoke you so!’ Ceatha wrenched her arm from her mother’s grasp and stalked back to their bench, where she sat with her head in her hands, sobbing gently. Radha frowned at her, and looked back at Harlin, her eyes narrowed to slits.

  ‘You have a cruel tongue, boy,’ she reproached, ‘and a crueller imagination. Why would my daughter sacrifice her own brother to try and make a High King of a silver-ring galloglách? What possible reason can your sick mind dredge from its cesspits for that?’

  ‘I was to be your daughter’s puppet,’ Harlin uttered, ‘a warrior king, a slave in a crown to inspire your people, whilst she pulled strings from my shadow to make me dance. I refused her, but her scheming knows no restraint. It was a gamble on her part. She did not think I would kill Bradan, but then, she did not foresee that I could overcome your Weaving when you would, no doubt, intervene to save him. When she saw Bradan dead beneath me, she realised just how grave he
r mistake had been, and I journeyed to Hathad Camoraigh alone.’

  ‘Liar!’ Ceatha shrieked at him, her tear-streaked face drawn hatefully, annihilating any trace of beauty. Radha scowled darkly at him in the silence that followed.

  ‘Let us see what truth there is in you, Harlin,’ she uttered calmly.

  Radha’s eyes burnt with green flames, and Harlin smiled as her Weaving reached for him, its claws prickling at his temples. It tried to pry open his mind, expose what lay within, the sensation like fingernails scraping fruitlessly against stone walls. He focussed himself upon her, reached out and called – his own Weaving awoke, rising from some unseen pit within him, uncoiling itself as it came. Like wrestling hands crushing and folding limbs and digits into agonising, perverse angles, he battered down the walls her Weaving threw up desperately against him as he forced it back upon her. She gasped as he tore into her mind, and screamed as he filled it with images of Bradan’s death as he had seen it, with the feeling of her son’s facial bones caving and breaking beneath his bleeding fists, the sound of snapping sinews and his gurgling, final breaths. He let voices assail her, uttering and whispering perfidious words never spoken aloud, except in the most secluded depths of their forebear’s heart. In less than a moment, Radha lay crumpled on the floor, a writhing, shrieking mess.

  The Weaving ebbed as it was recalled, the final cruel images fading away, though it did nothing to silence Radha’s wailing. Harlin paced around the hearth, past cowering, pale-faced serving girls hiding in the shadows of table and bench, to where Ceatha knelt, cradling her weeping mother. Radha shoved her away with a desolate yell, crying, ‘Don’t touch me, you deceitful bitch! Get away from me!’ Her sobbing filled the hall again, as Ceatha turned away, face buried in her palms.

  ‘The truth in me cuts deep, does it not, Radha?’ Harlin said, amused as he stood over her.

  ‘What are you?’ Radha shook, looking up at him with tear-reddened eyes. ‘How can a man control the Weaving?’

  ‘I am the end of Caermark,’ he answered, ‘I am the High King of Luah Fáil.’

  ‘You are king of nothing!’ Radha spat on his boot. Harlin kicked her sharply in the stomach, wiping the spittle off on her dress as she doubled over choking.

  ‘I did not come here to bargain with you, Radha,’ said Harlin, ‘nor to beg your favour. I came here to rule.’ He summoned the Weaving again, and forced those same images upon her as before, until she lay convulsing silently, her eyes rolling back into her skull.

  ‘Please, stop,’ Ceatha beseeched from somewhere to Harlin’s side. ‘Please just leave her be, you’ve caused enough misery already.’ Radha clawed at her face as if pulling something from it when Harlin released her, wailing her anguish.

  ‘Misery?’ Harlin said drolly. ‘You think you know misery, Weaver?’ He took a step towards her, she flinched and scurried back from him with a yelp into a corner. Her Weaving flared out like a shimmering wall of air, buffeted against his own and rebounded with a boom that shook the hall’s rafters, scattering furniture, dust and cutlery in a wide arc across the floor. Harlin grunted as it hit him, stepping back beneath the weight of the blow. He paced toward her, boots scuffing over floorboards as Ceatha’s face fell, realisation dawning. ‘No,’ she whispered, head shaking violently. ‘No!’

  He grabbed her by the face and pressed her back against the wall. Fresh tears welled in her eyes as he drew her face close to his. She struggled against him, lip trembling.

  ‘It is always interesting,’ Harlin mused, regarding her, ‘when you delve into the hearts of others.’ Her eyes widened fearfully, and he saw in their reflection how his own burned like twin blue flames, his Weaving unleashed again.

  He tore at the barriers she threw up against him, his Weaving’s claws carving rents through them, gouging channels in her mind even as Ceatha’s own thrashed and fought back viciously against him. She was powerful, far more powerful than Radha, and her Weaving was aggressive, honed for destruction and violence. Its defiance felt like pushing a hand through a web made of knives, or scraping a palm through broken glass, a hundred sharp edges cutting deeper with every inch gained.

  ‘Do not fight me,’ he said, the blades of her Weaving biting harder still. ‘You are strong, Ceatha, but it will not avail you, and I will break you if I must.’

  She screamed, her last resistance bending, crumbling and collapsing beneath the crushing force Harlin threw against it, the winding corridors of her schemer’s mind laid bare before him.

  I learned much in Hathad Camoraigh, he whispered, too much. He drew out the truth within her, the truth he had gleaned with the Sight over the long days he had spent watching her – the folly of the Soraí Fai, her desperate plea with the Dhaine Sidhe, her secrets and designs, her callous expenditure of Bradan.

  He forced his own truth upon her then, or his own twisting of it – some things he kept within himself. Visions thrashed her mind’s eye, the royal banners of Caermark flying over Bráodhaír as it burned, the dark bellies of King Aenwald’s slave ships, the fighting pits and his family’s final moments. The cup he had held in the Cloister of the Evermore, filled with its thick liquid, the earth’s blood – gods’ blood – how he had drank deeply of it and the knowledge it held. And finally, the crown of the High Kings, as it sat in his hands in the tomb beneath their ancient hall, its edges picked out by red torchlight.

  I see like the High Kings of old, Harlin spoke through the Weaving, and even you, Ceatha, as powerful as you are, cannot hide from me.

  He released her, and she slid down the wall in a crumpled heap, staring up at him, watery-eyed and vacant. ‘I will never be your puppet, Ceatha,’ he said, ‘but I will be your king.’

  ‘You met them,’ she trembled, heedless, ‘the Bodah Duhn, the Dhaine Sidhe. Why… why did they let you live?’

  Harlin turned away without answering, and paced back around the hearth to where his pack lay. ‘I have something you will want to see,’ he said. Unlacing it, he produced a misshapen bundle of oiled cloth. From within its folds, he removed the crown of the High Kings.

  ‘It can’t be,’ Radha hissed from where she still lay upon the floor clutching her stomach.

  Harlin admired the crown in his hands, its long arches catching the light of the fire. A beautiful thing, its metal something caught between silver and gold in colour. He traced a thumb over the eye patterned on its circlet, its recesses black with tarnish from lying atop a dead man’s skull for centuries.

  ‘How?’ Ceatha uttered quietly, eyes fixed upon it, recognition writ upon her face.

  ‘The how does not matter, only that I have it,’ he answered, tossing it to her over the fire. She caught it clumsily, staring with open awe.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she muttered to herself, running a hand tenderly along the crown’s circlet.

  ‘Then start,’ Harlin said loudly, making her jump, ‘for this is where the future begins.’ The two women looked at him warily, emotions warring on their faces. ‘The clans will be made great again,’ Harlin continued, ‘you will be made great again, Ceatha.’ A selfish, hungry look passed across her face for a moment.

  ‘What do you mean murderer, what is this all for?’ Radha asked, voice pained.

  ‘There is a man I am going to kill,’ he replied, ‘but I will need the clanfolk with me if I am to do it.’

  ‘Who,’ the High Weaver demanded.

  ‘King Aenwald of Caermark.’

  Ceatha and Radha shared a dismayed look. ‘We cannot do this,’ Radha said, head shaking furiously. ‘We have never had the strength to fight a kingdom such as theirs, and we learned the foolishness of striking back at them in the Tiar Valley. If we begin a new war with the Marchers it will be the end of us all.’

  ‘We do not need to fight an entire kingdom,’ Harlin retorted, ‘only cut its throat. The clanfolk are raiders and warriors, not soldiers – we fight from the shadows, not in formations and lines. If we face the Marchers in the open, we will be crushed. But the Sight gives me
knowledge, and I will wield it against Aenwald like the High Kings did against the Dhaine Sidhe. He can be defeated, will be defeated, if we act quickly. Summon what clan chiefs and Weavers remain here tomorrow, let them know of my impending coronation, and I shall tell them how we will exact our justice from Caermark.’

  Radha laughed mirthlessly, slumping back against the wall. ‘Coronation… do you think they’ll listen to what you have to say, murderer? Do you think they’ll be ruled by the like of you? A silver-ring galloglách more Marcher than Clansman? You won’t survive the night, boy, you’ll be crossing the Muil Márda again in a hundred pieces.’

  ‘You talk as though I’m giving them a choice, Radha,’ answered Harlin. He turned away, shouldering his pack and making for the door, leaving her and Ceatha to ponder the crown.

  Outside the crowd had dispersed, and the sun was setting. The two clansmen still stood beyond the archway at the bottom step with arms crossed, acknowledging him with quiet nods again as they moved aside to let him pass into the darkening street beyond. With a cry, something large, heavily-muscled and smelling of sweat barrelled into him from his left and threw meaty arms round his shoulders, the impact scattering stars across his vision.

  ‘Harlin!’ a familiar voice came roared in his ear. ‘Harlin, you selfish arsehole! You had me worried sick!’

  Harlin was spun about by his shoulders, and found himself looking into to Anselm’s beaming face. His old friend was still bald, still foul-mouthed, still huge and still full of his usual fiery bluster. Except he had grown a beard, Harlin noted. It was thick, wiry and jet black. It looked absurd, he was so used to Anselm being completely hairless, yet it suited him, too.

  ‘Anselm,’ Harlin said, forcing a smile and laying his hands upon the man’s shoulders. ‘It is good to see you well, but… strange to see you so hairy.’

  ‘And you, you helmet-shiner!’ Anselm laughed, his warm eyes scanning Harlin’s form up and down. ‘I feared the worst, if I’m true, once winter came and you’d still not returned. The men said you were dead for certain. I didn’t believe the rumours flying around this afternoon saying you were in town, but here you are, proving me wrong. By Vathnir’s steel-clad cock, Harlin, am I glad to see you!’