Shapeshifter

by Holly Bennett

  THE DARK MAN’S rage was like molten fire, burning everything in its path. He screamed at Sive like a warrior taken by the battle rage. She was terrified he would kill Oran. He swung his fist into the side of Oran’s head and dropped him like a stone. Then he set in to kicking him: stomach, back, face, anywhere. Sive closed her eyes against the anguish of it. How could she stand by while her friend suffered? She was so close to giving in, so close. But then the Dark Man stopped and turned from Oran as though he didn’t even exist and narrowed his eyes at the fantastic creature before him. He was calm again, summoning his power.

  “Change back to your woman’s head,” he commanded.

  But he could not command her head. He could not hold her deer eyes with his own green ones. Sive was already receding from his grasp. She had been a deer for so many years that, once changed, it did not take her long to distance herself from her own mind. She retreated into deerness, further and further away from the place where he could touch her.

  “We’ll see,” he said then. “We’ll see how long you will defy me.” And he put a rope around her neck and dragged her out into a drafty shed and shut her up.

  For days she was alone in the dark, starving, thirsting. She didn’t care. She was ready to die. And with each day her woman’s mind grew weaker, and the deer’s stronger, until by the time he dragged open the slatted door and let the sunlight flood over her, she hardly understood his words.

  On that day he bludgeoned Sive for long hours, with his magic, with his whip, and at the last with a branding iron. And when at last he understood that he could succeed only at making her bawl and writhe with pain, he snatched up his hot iron again and hurled it into the trees. And then he turned to Sive, very slowly, and she trembled for she was sure her death was at hand.

  But he would not let her die. He extended his one finger toward her. Drew up one leg like a stork and closed one eye. The position of the curse-hurler.

  “You wish to remain a deer,” he said. “I grant your wish. Become a deer, and remain a deer, and live as a brute beast to the end of your days. I wish both men and wolves joy of the hunt.”

  Sive Remembers

  So many feelings I have had about being a deer, since the day I first mastered the shapeshifter’s skill.

  At first I was in love with it, as delighted and glowing as though it were my first man. I loved the rush of triumph as my form streamed into another’s, the wonder of a world discovered through scent and sound and obscure, unnamed instincts. The sheer pleasure in my own speed and power.

  And then it became a prison. In the first years of my exile, I longed to escape, trapped in a life driven by hunger and fear and without the smallest comfort. I came to hate my rough pelt, my bony legs, the long outthrust snout that blocked all song or speech in my throat. There was nothing I wanted but to return to myself and to the light and warmth of my own kind.

  No more. He thinks he has punished me? He has given me refuge. I allowed Sive to sink beneath these layers of hair and sinew and muscle and vanish into their depths. I buried my sorrows and regrets and strangled hopes. I set my only aim to be survival, my only desire a full stomach. I forgot my own name.

  PART III

  OISIN

  TWENTY-ONE

  The boy is naked, curled against the cold dawn wind that sweeps across the mountain’s flat top. He shivers in his sleep, and his fingers grope against the ground as if searching for a lost blanket or companion. They close briefly around a tuft of wiry grass before tucking back in against his chest.

  He is only young, small but sturdy, with long golden hair. When he awakens in the first slanting light of the rising sun, he sits slowly, as one still in a dream. His eyes— beautiful eyes, clear as deep water and blue as the spring bluebell—are unfocused and confused. As he takes in his surroundings, his chin begins to tremble. He has no idea where he is.

  A sound, musical and savage, rises through the mist that hides the mountain’s feet. He knows that sound. Hounds, on the hunt.

  Oisin Remembers

  I may be one of the mighty men of the Fianna now, and Finn mac Cumhail’s son, but for all that I still have nightmares about the day I woke up on the great slouching mountain men call Ben Bulben. I thought the Dark Man had sent me to the desolate ends of the earth, a world empty of everything but cutting wind and seeping mist and a monstrous upheaval of rock. I was only six summers old and had never been out of my mother’s sight. No army or battle since has matched the terror of that morning.

  THE MOUNTAIN WAS a great looming ledge. Its head thrust up from the land, bare sides scored as though by a giant bear claw. The long tail sloped back more gently, though it was hardly the smooth grassland it appeared from a distance. Crisscrossed with deep ravines and unclimbable overhangs, Ben Bulben was tough-going from any point. Finn was, in fact, growing tired of hauling himself up and down its flanks.

  Yet there was something about this hulk of a mountain, and not just the wild boar that hid in its cracks and gullies, that called to him. Two days ago he had perplexed his men by hiking right to the summit and walking the length of Ben Bulben’s flat, wind-scoured top. Had it been lopped off by the Dagda’s war club in a fit of rage, as some believed? Finn had his doubts. He had met some of the Sidhe—killed one, for that matter—and seen their magic too. He didn’t think there were many with a swing that vast, magic club or no.

  Now Finn shook the clouds from his head and concentrated on the chase. Boar hunts his men understood; it was the nearest hunting came to military training, an exercise in discipline and trust as well as skill. When a big boar broke cover, you needed to count on the comrades at your side.

  Boar was Finn’s quarry of choice for personal reasons too. He had finally, reluctantly, after earnest counseling from Caoilte and Lughaid and other wise friends, stopped searching for Sive. How many times had he quartered the island? In how many places and ways, when he had at last concluded she was not to be found in his own land, had he tried to get into hers? Yet despite his wisdom, his learning, his far-seeing, despite his kinship with Lugh and his bag of power which had once been Manannan’s, he had not found a way.

  He had given up that hunt. But he would never again in his lifetime join a deer hunt without fear that it would be Sive that was found and killed before he could intervene. Foolish, that fear. His men knew well to spare all spotted does. If Sive were hunted to her death, it would not be by the Fianna.

  The hounds’ steady baying shattered into a frenzy of barking. They had something. Finn heard an excited shout from one of the men, hollered back and forced his legs to climb the steep slope faster.

  The dogs were in view, a ring of lunging, eager back ends on the far side of a shallow gorge. A deep bass growl rumbled beneath the chorus of barks. Only Finn’s two wolfhounds, his Bran and Sceolan, had such voices, growls that throbbed deep in your chest and carried beyond the racket of lesser dogs. He quickened his pace, picturing his beloved companions cornered and in danger.

  His men were converging now, and they covered the last distance together, scrambling and sliding into a seam sliced into the mountain’s side, shoving through the gorse-choked bottom and finally coming up, winded and sweat-streaked, behind the ring of hounds.

  It was a sight he never expected to see: Bran and Sceolan faced off against their own fellows. Hackles up, lips drawn back from their great teeth, growls swelling from their throats like thunder—this was no play-fight or squabble over a bone. This was deadly menace.

  It’s Sive. The thought was instant and inescapable. What else would they be protecting? Finn’s heart, already pounding with exertion, thudded into a painful, lurching gallop, and he began hauling dogs back by their collars, flinging them one after another back to the men.

  “Call them off!” he roared. “Tie them!”

  He heard Caoilte’s voice behind him, repeating the order and urging the men to action. Bless the man. More than anyone, he knew the pain Finn had lived with these long years.

  The do
gs’ clamor faded back, and the wolfhounds quieted, ears softening, tails gently waving.

  “What have you found?” Finn, with hardly spit in his mouth to speak, rasped the words out. He tried to see beyond the two dogs but could make out only a dark wall of rock.

  They sidled apart to make way for him as he stepped forward. He observed, as if watching another, that his legs were shaky with tension. His heart drummed in his ears and broke his vision into sharp, shattered glimpses.

  There was a recess in the cliff wall, a little scooped-out cavity in the rock. And yes, there was a figure inside its shadowed shelter. Finn lurched forward.

  Not Sive. He knew before he could really make out the features that it was not Sive. No grown woman was ever that small.

  Finn squatted down and peered in at the seated figure in wonder. A child looked back at him, a naked, crosslegged child with long blond hair and eyes that…oh, those eyes! As blue as his own, they were not Finn’s eyes, nor the eyes of any son of the Gael he had ever met. They shone like jewels and shimmered with the secret depths of a sun-kissed lake.

  Finn’s head swam with questions, but he settled on one: “How did you get here, lad?”

  The boy—he could not be more than six or seven summers old—searched Finn’s face without replying, and Finn began to wonder if he was simple or could not speak. Then the corners of his mouth twitched into a shy smile, and Finn’s hot skin puckered up in sudden gooseflesh. He knew that smile, had seen it the very first night he and Sive had met, and he had kissed its lovely corners more times than he could count. Then at last the child spoke.

  “Find Finn.”

  The boy had the high, fluty voice of a child still, but Finn could hear the music in it. Tears started into his eyes as he opened his arms wide.

  “You’ve found him, lad. I’m Finn. You’re safe now. You’re with your father, and you’re safe.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  For six years Oisin had lived in near silence, with only the sounds of the woods and his mother’s voice. Apart from the occasional, dreaded appearance of the Dark Man, he had never seen another person.

  Now he was plunged into the life of the Fianna, surrounded by loud, rough, boisterous men, many of whom had women to match. It’s not that he was treated unkindly; rather the opposite. He was their darling, with every man vying to teach him a skill, impart a wise lesson or make him laugh, and the women cosseting and petting him whenever they could pry him away from the men.

  It was exciting and terrifying at once, and in those first months there were times when he felt he might be crushed by it all. Then he would run away and hide, and the longing that came over him for his mother and their quiet little world squeezed his heart so painfully that he didn’t see how he could go on. He wasn’t brave enough or strong enough. Sometimes he wished he could become a deer himself and spend his life alone in the forest.

  But Finn—his father—helped him. If he found Oisin huddled behind a storehouse or crying in the woods, he would lift him up and just hold him without talking. Sometimes Finn would take Oisin into his own chamber, build up the fire and leave him with Bran and Sceolan. Oisin would press himself into the flanks of one or the other, and the quiet, steady presence of the great gray dogs, nearly the size of a deer themselves, comforted him in a place talking could not touch.

  Finn saved the talking for the times when his son was not overwhelmed by his new home. He wanted to know all Oisin could tell him about how they had lived and what had happened to his mother, though the telling made Finn groan and beat his chest in helpless anger and sorrow, and reduced Oisin to tears. Yet it was a comfort, too, to know there was another in the world who cared about his mother’s fate.

  Oisin had never slept in a bed, never seen a sword, never eaten meat (there was no deer meat for months at Almhuin, on Finn’s orders). But he learned quickly, and by Samhain he had lost his shyness and dogged the footsteps of the Fianna as if he had been born among them.

  It was a fine, brisk autumn day when the anger came over him. A day for a young boy to roam the countryside and be glad for the life rushing through him, it was, and Oisin had been doing just that. With Bran and Sceolan at his side, there was little harm could come to him, and Finn was happy to see him venture out on his own.

  But something swept over him—perhaps guilt at his own happiness, or a sudden glimpse of what life could have been had his mother stayed safe within the walls— and before he knew it he was scrambling up through Finn’s wooded hill, bursting through the gates with fire in his eyes and his small chest heaving with rage.

  Finn was enjoying the weather too, propped against the wall of his house with his legs in the sun and his head in the shade of the thatch, “chewing his cud” as he called it after a hefty midday meal. Oisin rushed over, drew back his foot and kicked his father under the ribs with all his strength, then fell upon him with a flurry of fists.

  Later he would realize he was lucky that Finn, startled out of sleep, hadn’t thrown him across the yard or stuck him with his hunting knife. Instead the great man had lumbered to his feet, shucking him off like a stable fly, and held him at bay by the shoulders.

  “Hold, lad, hold!” Finn peered at the red-faced, tearstained fury of a boy, arms still windmilling the air between them. “What’s this all about?”

  “Why didn’t you save her?” Oisin shrieked. “Why didn’t you find her? She came to you for protection, you told me so, and you let him steal her!”

  Finn’s ruddy face darkened almost to purple and he abruptly let Oisin go, turning away with his own great hands fisted into clubs. Oisin’s rage drained out of him as quickly as it had come, and he looked with sudden fear at his father. He had gone too far, insulting the man who had saved his life and called him son. He looked up at the angry tower of Finn’s rigid body and back down at the fists clenched at his sides. It was too late for apology. Finn’s punishment would fall on him at any moment.

  But Finn did not raise his fists, or even his voice, to him. When he spoke, his voice was husky and cracked, and Oisin realized with shock that it was tears, not anger, that his father was choking back.

  “Do you not think I tried, lad? Do you not think I would spend my life, and gladly, for even the least glimmering hope of saving her?”

  Oisin could not speak. He was confused, shamed by his own actions. Of course he knew Finn had tried to find Sive. Nearly everyone at Almhuin had told him so at one time or another. But he had failed. You could not blame a man for trying and failing, but he did. If his father had not failed, his mother would be with him now.

  Finn turned back to face his son and sagged wearily against the wall. The blue eyes that looked at Oisin were naked—sorrow and anger and shame unguarded.

  “Every spring and cave, every mound and standing stone, anywhere there has ever been the least rumor of a passage to Tir na nOg, I went there. I went to Tara and spent long nights on the Mound of Hostages, thinking if I was taken captive I would at least be through the veil. I got an audience with the High King’s Chief Druid and followed every scrap of advice he could give me.”

  Finn ran a hand slowly down his face, like a man who has stood vigil through the night. He looked about that tired too, thought Oisin. His father shook his head.

  “The way is closed to me, son. I don’t know how the Dark Man did it, but he has barred my road. I cannot get in.”

  “But I can,” blurted Oisin. He was surprised at his own words. He did not know where they came from, but he was sure they were true.

  Finn gazed at him thoughtfully and then smiled.

  “You may be right, lad. You are more of that land than this, after all.”

  “Then what do I do?” Oisin was strung taught with urgency and crippled with sudden doubt. What could he do? He remembered struggling against the invisible door the Dark Man had used to close him into the cave. He had been useless, too weak to pose any threat at all. His thin shoulders slumped.

  “You wait patiently, my son.” The Finn Ois
in knew was back, a man bursting with life and confidence. “You wait, and you hold on to your hope, and you train. I myself will teach you, and all the Fianna, and whatever other teachers you need we will find for you. And when you are a grown man and armed with all the skill and strength and knowledge you can master…then, then you will go to your mother’s land and conquer the Dark Man and free her.”

  BY HIS SEVENTH year with Finn, Oisin had already mastered many of the feats of the Fianna. He could outrun the lot of them through the forest without snapping a twig, for he had the speed and grace of his mother’s people. In time he would have Finn’s strength and height as well, but for now he still had a boy’s thin arms and narrow chest.

  Not that he was about to admit it. “I am ready now,” he insisted. The Fianna were sailing to Alba, and Oisin was determined to join them. “I can fight. Let me come and prove it.”

  “No, lad. Pass me the oil, so.” Finn poured oil into a clay dish, dipped in his fingers, and began carefully oiling every inch of exposed leather on his war-harness. “You can oil my boots, if you are so eager to help.”

  Oisin’s face darkened with anger. His father had dismissed his case without a second’s thought, as if he were nothing but a baby. But a baby’s tantrum would get him nowhere, so he mastered his temper, stuck out his chest and tried again.

  “But why? I am well-trained, by the best, as you said. And I am nearly as tall as you!”

  “And half as big around,” retorted Finn. With a sigh, he put down his harness and met Oisin’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, lad. It’s not a joking matter, and your big heart does you credit. And you are right—there is little left to teach you, at least, not until you get your strength. But you must wait for it. If you rush off to battle now, you will be killed. You have it in you to be one of the great heroes of the Fianna, only you must stay alive until you have the might to match your skill.”