Bloodstone

by Gillian Philip

  No, no. It was down to him. All of it. If he hardened his heart, Mila was lost.

  He needed perspective. He needed a lesson. ‘Get down,’ I said.

  He hesitated, thinking he’d heard me wrong. I half-turned and swung him bodily off the horse. He stumbled, speechless, giving me time to ride away without a backward glance. The roan picked up its pace a little, and in seconds he had faded into the dusk.

  Another couple of hundred yards, and I halted the horse. The others were ahead, but I couldn’t see them. I wondered, if I left him, how long it would take them to realise he was gone. And... whether they’d think it was worth turning back.

  The gloom closed in like a wet shroud. I looked back over my shoulder. He wasn’t visible, not even as a blur in the mist.

  Branndair sat down on the boggy ground and looked up at me, quizzical. I watched his troubled eyes, brushed his mind almost casually with my own.

  ~ It’s all right, you know.

  He made a small whimper in his throat, tilted his head. He was confused.

  So was I. I wondered when teaching the brat a lesson had morphed into the temptation to leave him here to his fate and the Lammyr.

  Shit. What was I thinking?

  I turned the horse abruptly and rode back into the mist and darkness, trying not to hurry, trying not to let myself believe I was too late. I’d left him minutes ago only. I couldn’t have lost him. Not yet.

  All the same, my heart turned over in my chest when I saw his forlorn shape, shivering worse than ever as he stumbled over the rough ground. A devil made me ride a wide circle, approach him from behind, so that when I spoke from above him, he yelped with terror.

  ‘Are you afraid now?’

  He came to a halt, shivering, breathing hard. Branndair slunk to his other side and watched him expectantly, while the roan swung its neck and grinned at him.

  ‘Yes,’ he spat.

  ‘Good,’ I muttered. ‘I’m glad you know how it feels. Now get back on.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll walk.’

  I took an angry breath. ‘Walk till you drop dead as far as I care, but you’re holding me up.’ Reaching down, I grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back onto the horse.

  ‘Aw. You’ve a heart of gold,’ he grunted. ‘You’re the one who kicked me off the horse.’

  Torn between laughing and hitting him, I bared my teeth. ‘He doesn’t like strangers. Except when he’s hungry.’

  ‘Ha ha.’ He glared at me. ‘What did I say, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a damn thing. Now can you keep it that way?’

  To be fair, he tried. The surly silence wasn’t sustainable, though, since he had to hug me tightly to get warmth into his bones. And I had to admit I’d nearly fallen off the horse with relief when I hadn’t lost him. And anyway, the curiosity was clearly killing him.

  ‘What’s this place?’

  ‘My home, my world,’ I snapped. ‘Which is why I wonder why you’re in it.’

  ‘And Finn.’

  ‘Nah, Finn belongs here.’ I nearly added So there! but I managed to restrain my inner five-year-old. ‘She belongs with us. You don’t.’

  ‘You’re telling me. Anyway, it was an accident. Finn saw the old bi— her grandma go in the loch, and she went in to try and get her out. I grabbed Finn cos I thought the silly cow was going to drown.’

  ‘How noble,’ I said, injecting a dash of sarcasm into the plain truth. ‘And then she sank, right? And you couldn’t let go. Just what happened to Laszlo.’

  He grunted again.

  I thought with a sigh that when Kate brought her full-mortals through, they were probably a little more articulate than this one. And she was always coaxing them through the Veil, for better and for worse. There was a time she’d gone in for poets, kings, knights-at-arms: lately it had been mercenaries with good pecs and a way with a sword. Fickle bitch.

  Even as I thought it, a memory of dream-lust rippled through my guts, and I shuddered.

  ‘Who?’ he said at last.

  Me and my big mouth. ‘Who who?’

  ‘Laszlo. Who’s he?’

  To buy time I combed the roan’s mane with my fingers, and it whickered affectionately. ‘Someone like you,’ was what I settled for at last. It was true in more ways than one. ‘That sodding Fairy Loch, it’s like Piccadilly Circus lately. No small thanks to Leonora. And now your little girlfriend’s at it and all.’

  ‘How’s it Finn’s fault?’ he snapped.

  ‘Because, Cuilean, you can’t get through the watergate without her.’

  That shut us both up, for different reasons. My whole brain had seized up. I couldn’t look at him, could only stare ahead in a sort of mild panic, desperate now to catch up with the others. That had been no casually-coined nickname. How had it happened?

  Luckily he didn’t notice that I was frozen with disbelief. The moon was rising higher, gigantic. The light made the darkness deeper, and when I glanced behind me again, I saw that Jed had shut his eyes tight, afraid to look too deeply into the moon shadows. It wasn’t those he should fear, I thought, and for a few seconds he was in mortal danger again.

  He was the unwitting protégé of a Lammyr. He was a complication, he was a bad omen, he was trouble. I had a very bad feeling about his presence here. And if he held on a little less tightly, if I kicked the roan into a sudden gallop, he’d fall.

  Not my fault the wee toerag couldn’t hang on...

  ‘Are we there yet?’ he asked, his eyes still tight shut.

  ‘No,’ I snapped, exasperated. ‘Can you loosen your grip a bit? It’s kind of hard to breathe.’

  He untangled his fingers, tried to sit back a little, but his entire body had seized up, from the motion of the horse and from sheer terror. ‘Can you not afford a saddle?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I wriggled looser, fighting myself as well as him. ‘But the horse wouldn’t like it any more than I would.’ At last I managed to tug one of his arms free.

  He opened one eye, looked around at the blackness, then down at the ground. Branndair was smiling up at him, so he flung his arms back round my waist and locked them tight.

  I growled. ‘I find this affection extremely touching.’

  ‘Just you wait till I get off this fecking horse. So are you really a faery? Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!’

  ‘Like I haven’t heard that one before.’ A snarl curled my mouth.

  He couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward to my ear. ‘I don’t believe in faeries.’

  I halted the horse abruptly, sighed, folded my fingers round his and yanked them off. When I turned to face him he was chewing his lip and watching me warily out of one eye.

  ‘Oops,’ he said.

  ‘S’okay, Lost Boy, I won’t eat you,’ I said. ‘Actually I thought that was pretty funny.’

  Looking away, he muttered, ‘It was worth a try.’

  I stifled a laugh. ‘Homicidal, but funny.’

  ‘Hello?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Am I the one with a sword on my back?’

  ‘No, you cretin, you’re the one with a semi-automatic pistol in your belt.’

  The satisfaction of springing that on him put a smile on my face and a bounce in the roan’s step. He still couldn’t keep things from me, and that knowledge made me feel a whole lot better. I confess it made him a little safer, too.

  ‘So,’ I said smugly. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Loch,’ he muttered. ‘The Fairy Loch. It was wrapped up in plastic. Under the reeds.’

  I thought that over for a few seconds. ‘It’s Laszlo’s. Has to be. What a stupid place to leave it.’

  ‘Not that stupid. I only put my hand on it by chance. We were fumbling around a bit.’

  A chill tickled my spine. ‘You should have left it.’

  Behind me he shrugged. ‘It’s empty anyway.’

  I didn’t dare ask why he thought that. He’d probably tried to shoot my horse when it ran off with Finn.

  I reached back and took the gun from his hands,
watery moonlight gleaming on the barrel like a silken skin. A beautiful boy-toy. Dropping the reins I loosed the magazine from the pistol grip and glanced inside. Then I held it over my shoulder so that he could see the gleam of live rounds in the moonlight.

  He swallowed. Said hoarsely, ‘It’s jammed then.’

  I snapped the magazine back into place, slid back the action, pressed the muzzle to my own temple and squeezed the trigger.

  A dry click.

  I heard him start to breathe again as I thumbed the switch on the side and dangled the useless weapon over my shoulder by its trigger guard. ‘Won’t work this side of the Veil. Must be why Laszlo left it in the loch. So it was handy when he went back.’

  ‘Won’t work...’

  ‘That’s right. Just as well, really, since some thickwit released the safety catch.’

  He almost dropped the pistol as he retrieved it from my finger.

  ‘If he doesn’t know you’re here already, he’ll know soon enough. You stealing that thing, it’s like an early warning system.’

  ‘Early warning.’

  ‘Yes, my little echo. You’ve dumped yourself in a pile of pig-manure, Cuilean.’

  I was winding him up again, but in my defence I’d say I was warning him, too. Guns didn’t work this side of the Veil, and just as well. Give the Sithe guns and we’d have been extinct four centuries ago.

  Of course Nils Laszlo must have liked having easy access to the gun on his return trips to the otherworld. And those weren’t infrequent. He had, after all, pillow-access to the woman who knew best when the time would or wouldn’t slip; and I suppose that sometimes he got nostalgic for death and destruction in his own world.

  Maybe Laszlo and I had more in common than I liked to think.

  I don’t exactly remember the first time our paths crossed, ten or more years ago. Some shit-hole of a war zone, I don’t doubt, where we both felt at home (though I liked to think it was in different ways). I’d certainly seen his work in half a dozen villages, arriving too late as peacekeepers always did. I’d had the choice of killing him once, and politics hadn’t let me, and I’d paid for politics in guilt when I found what he was capable of, which was basically anything.

  And of course he’d attracted the Lammyr Skinshanks; of course he had. And when Kate crossed over to find a new lover, a new distraction, a new game, of course he’d taken one look at her and followed her into her own world. That was perfectly understandable, especially if you weren’t fussy about the company you kept, or the governments you propped up, the throats you slit and the villages you burned.

  As for my facetious warnings to Jed: that was another thing Laszlo and I had in common. Prophecies. Nonsense that hung over your head like a dirty great boulder on a fishing line. The soothsayer who put her gnarled fingers round my life and twisted it may have been dead and gone, but her breed survived to poison new minds, new timelines.

  Splinter-heart, winter-heart, that’s what she called me. I was tired of listening to her tell me how my life would go: dead all these centuries, the old charlatan, and still dictating to me. Knowing who I’d love, and sometimes who I’d kill; knowing who’d watch me die. Knowing much more than me – though she never met me – because I couldn’t know what mattered and what was important; I didn’t know what to do for the best, not ever. She never told me the important bits, did she? Oh, how Kate NicNiven must have loved that moment in the dun: holding my dead mother in her arms as she passed on a lifetime’s useless information.

  Not that I believed a word of it anyway.

  The boy at my back was very quiet now. I stared into the darkness, listening to the eerie weeping sigh of the wind. I wondered if he knew what might be stalking us all in the smothering night, and suddenly the nape of my neck felt far colder than the bite of the wind.

  As if he read my thoughts, he asked, ‘What are you scared of? Laszlo?’

  ‘Mostly other things.’ I shrugged and sighed. ‘Lost Boy, I’m kind of bored with you now. And the others are ahead there. And if you fall off, I won’t be turning back for you.’ I hissed a word to the roan and it sprang forward. ‘So you better hang on.’

  It’s just as well he did. I think I meant it.

  Eili let her horse pace the clearing, searching the shadows though she must have known she was wasting her time. Lovesick, I decided. Her eyes were brilliant as a deer’s in the night and she was so tense, she looked as if she would spring away at the crack of a twig.

  ‘Damn it. He isn’t here.’

  I tilted an eyebrow. ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

  ‘Not the end of the world,’ said Torc cheerfully, though Eili visibly thought it was. ‘We’ll wait.’

  ‘No.’ Leonora was riding at Torc’s back. ‘We’ll move on. I’d like to be closer to the sea.’

  Eili stared at her. ‘We’ll wait for Cù Chaorach and Sionnach.’

  Oh, this was going to be good. I perked up.

  ‘No, no, no, Eili.’ Leonora tickled Faramach’s throat, and the raven crooned fondly. ‘No, we won’t. Cù Chaorach is taking his blessed time as ever, and I’ve got better things to do than hang around. You’re only his lieutenant, Eili. I’m giving you an order.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘And you haven’t the right to overrule it.’

  The wind had dropped. Nothing moved. Interested, I glanced from one to the other; Torc seemed more fascinated by the leaf litter on the ground.

  Recovering, her cheekbones darkening, Eili took a breath to argue, but I thought I should intervene, and reassert my closeness to Conal. ‘He won’t come here now. Fall back to the next rendezvous.’

  ‘Oh, brilliant,’ muttered Torc.

  ‘Good,’ said Leonora. ‘Let’s go. Cù Chaorach can look after himself, Eili.’

  ‘Huh. In that case we’ll split up. That patrol’s still about. Torc, take Leonora. She can confuse them.’

  ‘Gladly,’ said Leonora. ‘You only have to ask.’

  I loved female politics. Torc’s choice, of course, didn’t come into it. He grinned at me.

  Eili growled, but ‘Be careful’ was all she said. Flirtatiously Leonora squeezed Torc’s torso, and they and the horse melted into the trees like ghosts.

  ‘Seth, take the lead.’ Eili turned to Finn, holding a vicious knife by its sheathed blade. ‘Can you throw this?’

  Finn shrugged. ‘I could throw it. But it wouldn’t hit anything.’

  ‘Oh, what has your mother been playing at? Take it. Anybody follows us, make like you know what to do with it. Okay?’

  ‘Um...’ Finn slid the blade a little out from its sheath and examined her reflection in it.

  ‘Be better if we could just take you two back to the watergate,’ Eili grumbled.

  ‘Not while Laszlo’s between us and it,’ I said.

  A tremor went through the boy; I felt it. I half-turned, not quite looking at him. ‘You’re scared, Cuilean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Eili had chosen her route for the dark denseness of the rhododendrons that had overrun the shallow rock-strewn gully, which was fine so long as we were trying to stay out of sight. But I didn’t like the tight closeness of them, and the way the straggling branches tangled and clung to fissures in the rock. They’d be impenetrable on horseback, and the confused shapes were humanoid enough in the dark to make the skin crawl, even with my eyesight.

  The roan’s muscles bunched under me, and its head came up, nostrils flaring wide and lips peeling back. At its high snarl, I whipped my sword off my back. Rhododendrons were not the problem.

  A brief thunder of hooves, and Eili’s horse came up alongside mine. Both her swords were naked in her hands; she’d left her reins lying loose. I gave Finn one backward glance to see she’d already slid her knife out of its sheath. I wasn’t sure what I saw in her pale eyes. Not all fear, anyway.

  Ahead shapes were dappled in leaf-patterned starlight: three horses, one rider.

  No. Two riders, but one of them was off his horse and on the groun
d. As he rose awkwardly to his feet I saw him clearly, and he wasn’t alone. His arm was wrapped round the neck of another man, limp in his grip.

  ‘Cuthag,’ I murmured.

  He stood up straighter, arm still locked round the neck of his victim.

  ‘That’s no fighter,’ said Eili at last.

  Teeth flashed in a grin. ‘A waste of time, is what he was.’ Cuthag hitched his captive a little higher, slid a blood-streaked blade out from beneath the man’s breastbone, and let him collapse lifeless to the ground. There were deep vicious cuts on the corpse’s neck and his staring face, and on his bound arms. But those cuts hadn’t killed him; it was the final blade in his breast that had done that. Cuthag’s favourite methods didn’t have much sophistication, and they probably weren’t even efficient, but gods, he enjoyed them.

  Something chilled my blood as he smiled up at me.

  I wondered if Finn or the boy knew at that point how close they were to death. I willed the girl not to drop the knife: she’d be dead in a heartbeat if she did. But eyeing her, I realised there wasn’t a chance of it. It fitted her hand, which wasn’t trembling any more. She looked like she might even have known how to use it, in another life. Another world.

  ‘Bad timing on your part, Eili.’ The killer sighed. ‘I was only asking him if he’d seen you around. You could have saved the poor man a lot of pain.’

  I barked a laugh. ‘Still a fighter’s fighter, aren’t you, Cuthag? Why’d you tie his wrists? Scared he might scratch your pretty face?’

  ‘He was a bit of a wriggler.’ Cuthag grinned.

  ‘He was a farmer.’ Rage brimmed in Eili’s voice.

  ‘He was a very stubborn farmer. I knew he must have seen you.’

  ‘Well, there we are. What are we going to do now?’ I glanced from Cuthag to the man behind him on horseback, who was pointing a sword at us. ‘Where’s the rest of your gang? Where’s your captain? Hey!’ My grin broadened. ‘Did they leave you two to dig the latrines?’

  The rider growled, and Cuthag’s smile tightened. ‘They’re just killing Eili’s brother. They’ll be along in a minute.’