Firebrand

by Gillian Philip

  Well, my mother must have got over that problem. She had plenty of lovers, though what she wanted more than anything was to be Griogair’s bound lover and that was something she’d never get for all her wiles, because he’d bound himself to Leonora decades before Lilith came along. When it became clear I wasn’t going to advance her cause in any way, Lilith lost interest in me altogether.

  Which was fine by me. Being sent away from Kate NicNiven’s labyrinthine caverns was like breathing for the first time, and there was no-one I missed from her pale and haughty court. There had been even fewer children underground than there were above it, but anyway, I needed neither friends nor mother. At my father’s dun I was content to skulk in the shadows and watch; that way I could see how the fighters trained, how the children scrapped and competed, how the strange and complex hierarchies of dun life operated. There were daredevil games on horseback that I might have liked to join, and when the wild racing music played on moonlit nights I used to half-wish I could throw myself into the dance with the rest of them. But it was fine, I was fed and clothed and relatively safe, and I was learning a lot—not that anybody made me study, or even tried to make me work the fields or learn a practical skill. My education was self-inflicted and unconventional, but I knew that the lessons would come in useful for the rest of my life. The most useful of them was the one I learned first: I was responsible for myself. In life and death you’re on your own, and I knew that better than any of my peers.

  It seems stupid now that I looked forward so much to living with my father. I must have had some childish romantic picture in my head, me and him doing father-son things together, fighting and hunting and laughing and confiding.

  But it turned out he already had a son, a perfect one, so he didn’t need another.

  2

  TWO

  I was fishing that morning. This was what I liked best about living in my father’s dun: it was in the open air. I’d hated Kate’s underground caverns. They were beautiful, breathtaking, but lightless. You couldn’t see the sky.

  At my father’s dun there was sky to spare. The fortress rambled across a rocky headland, its stone walls falling sheer to the sea on its western side. It was as much a part of the land as the great grey rocks that jutted from the earth, mottled with yellow lichen, hacked and split by the weather of aeons. To the north and south were blue bays; inland was the machair, wild with flowers, and an expanse of moorland so huge it blurred to a haze at the horizon. I had no sooner seen it than I loved it and knew that I’d die here.

  The sooner the better, if you asked my new clann.

  I didn’t care what they thought of me. Now I could run free where and when I liked; I had no boundaries, no limits. I could swim and fish and snare rabbits; I could spend the whole day taming a wounded falcon while I ate what I found or caught. It was a loveless existence, but so what? I was eight years old and I was free for the first time in my life. Nobody knew or cared what I did or where I was. It was a kind of heaven and a kind of hell, but I fixed my mind on the heaven part and it was fine, it was a good enough life for a boy who wasn’t meant to be born.

  On the first day of my twelfth month in the dun, my life as a ghost ended.

  That summer day, the hours stretched ahead of me like a gift, sunlit and lazy. The lochan on the moor was still and steel-blue: not a good day for fishing, but I had nothing better to do with my time. Was there anything better? My ribs still hurt from my last beating, but my nose had stopped bleeding and I had the blood of my enemies on my own knuckles, their skin under my fingernails, and I’d cost one of them a tooth. My pride was intact and I knew it always would be. I was bruised and battered but the breeze was warm on my skin, the heather smelt of honey, and I was happy.

  I’d been teasing that trout for almost an hour. I didn’t use my mind. It’s hard and boring to enter the mind of a fish, and anyway, I liked the challenge. This was a cunning old one; plenty of people had tried and failed to catch him, and I wanted to be the one to get him. I had some vague notion of presenting him to my father, seeing Griogair’s eyes light up with pleasure and maybe a little respect.

  So there I was, on my stomach in the scratchy heather, letting my fingertips graze the still surface of the lochan, singing softly to my trout. He was sleepy and fat among the weeds, and the water so brown and cool that I longed to curl my fingers round his sleek body, but I knew I mustn’t rush it. When I let my forefinger trail a delicate line along his spine, and he didn’t stir, I knew I had him. Gripping him firmly, I tossed him out of the water with a yell of triumph.

  He floundered on the grey rock, looking stunned and a little betrayed. My delight faded as I stared down at his gasping, flopping body. Now he didn’t look so fine.

  I thought about my father again. This morning I’d seen him ride back from a dawn hunt with my half-brother, a sleek roebuck slung across their garron’s back. This half-brother had returned to the dun a month earlier, from secondment to another clann seventy miles to the north, but since his arrival he’d shown no interest in me. Well, the contempt was mutual.

  As they rode right past me the two of them were laughing together, easy companions, and you could see the pride burning in Griogair’s eyes when he looked at Conal, the love nearly choking him. I half-wished it would. Griogair had barely registered me there, but Conal’s gaze had slewed towards me, unreadable. He didn’t try to get into my mind—that’s how far I was beneath him—and I’d no intention of going near his, even if he’d let me. I didn’t want to read his scorn and superiority, his first-born arrogance. I did notice there was only one arrow missing from his quiver. He’d got that buck first shot, and it was a beauty.

  A fish? My father wasn’t going to care a damn for a fish.

  I picked up a stone to stun it, but once I’d hit its head I found I couldn’t stop. I went on smashing the stone into the pathetic creature long after I’d put it out of its misery. There was translucent flesh all over the rock, and bits of skin and shattered pale bone. Still I went on pounding, till I began to wonder how I’d ever stop.

  ‘Well, don’t take it out on the fish.’

  I leaped to my feet, the stone clutched in my fist and raised to strike.

  Conal was watching me from a rock outcrop, barely six feet away, his arms resting casually on his knees. Gods, how I hated him. He was everything I wasn’t. Grown-up, for a start: he had to be more than a hundred years older than me. He had his mother’s dark blond hair, cut short but unruly, and Griogair’s light grey eyes, dancing with laughter. He had everything of Griogair’s, not least his love and trust. And all I had was Griogair’s black hair, like the villain I knew I was destined to be. I decided then and there that I’d grow it long.

  Conal was wearing his sword on his back, his silver-embossed sword that Griogair had had made for him, and I wondered if he’d come here to kill me. I wondered if the prospect bothered me that much, and I decided that it did. My fingers tightened on the stone. I’d damn well hurt him first.

  ‘Go away,’ I snapped.

  He shrugged lightly. ‘But this isn’t your rock. And I like it here.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I snarled, raising my stone a little higher.

  Sighing, he turned himself round on the boulder so that his back was to me. ‘Better?’

  No. Worse. I went on glaring my hatred at him. The sword was a beautiful thing, and more than beautiful. I’d seen Conal wield it in practice, I’d seen how it sang in the air, light and fast as his thought, perfectly balanced on its tang, answering him like his own hand. My father, I knew suddenly, would never give me anything like that. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I would never be his son. Not really.

  ‘But you’re my brother,’ murmured Conal.

  ‘That means you get to lord it over me, does it?’

  ‘No.’ He glanced over his shoulder but didn’t quite look at me. ‘It means I’d like to know you. And it means that what I want…it isn’t the same as what Griogair wants.’

 
‘He wants me to go away.’

  That silenced him. He didn’t even bother to contradict me, because he knew it was true.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said at last.

  Hot tears spilled out of my eyes, and the humiliation made me loathe him even more. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Seth…’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ My words got all tangled up in my tears.

  ‘Isn’t that your name?’

  I sniffed violently. I wanted to hit him with the stone. I wanted to hit him like I’d hit the fish, till he didn’t exist any more. Then he’d know how it felt. My face was all tears and snot, like some infant, streaked with the dried blood from my nose.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  I stared at the back of his head.

  ‘Preferably not with the rock,’ he added, ‘but go ahead and hit me.’

  I don’t know why I dropped the stone. I could just have used it anyway, but I did drop it. Before I could think any harder I ran at him, and struck him hard on the side of his face. Then, like a coward, I ran away again and crouched, ready to bolt for my life.

  Slowly, a little stunned, he put his hand to his face. I knew I’d hurt him and if he pretended I hadn’t, I promised myself I’d hate him forever. But he shook his head slightly, wincing as he touched his cheekbone.

  ‘Strong,’ he murmured. ‘You’re strong.’

  ‘I hate you,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Can I turn round yet?’

  ‘No!’ I didn’t want him to see the fresh tears brimming in my eyes.

  ‘Did that make you feel better?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  ‘Good.’

  I could tell he meant it. He wasn’t trying to teach me some stupid moral lesson about the futility of violence. He actually just wanted me to feel better.

  ‘Your mother had my mother exiled,’ I spat, as much to remind myself as him.

  Shrugging very slightly, Conal half-turned. ‘Well,’ he said, a smile just creasing the corner of his mouth. ‘Your mother did try to poison my mother.’

  I slumped down into the heather and gnawed on my knuckle for a while. The silence between us was almost companionable. Almost. If I hadn’t been on the verge of tears I’d have been closer to contentment then than I’d ever been, just sitting there in his company. I had to keep reminding myself he was Griogair’s firstborn, the only one my father loved, the one who’d made me superfluous before I was even conceived. If he tried to tell me now he’d be my friend, I’d pick up the stone again and kill him.

  After a while he said, ‘Do you know Sionnach MacNeil?’

  I did, but I said nothing. He was a nice enough boy, about my age, one of the few human beings in the dun who’d acknowledged my existence, one of the few children who didn’t torment me. If I was the kind of child who ever needed a friend, I remember thinking he might do.

  ‘He knows where there’s a fox den, up in the pine-wood,’ Conal went on. ‘He’ll take you up there if you want.’

  ‘Who says?’ I snapped.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, because I could think of no other answer.

  ‘So can I turn round yet?’

  ‘All right.’ Quickly I rubbed my nose on my sleeve.

  So he turned and looked at me. I didn’t want him to smile at me, and he didn’t. Instead he reached out a hand to me, simple as that.

  Biting my lip hard, I looked at his hand. And then I took it, simple as that.

  Then Conal did smile. But by then I didn’t mind too much.

  * * *

  So after that, I had at least one friend in the dun. Sionnach liked the things I liked, and we spent most of every day together, and being Sionnach’s friend gave me a bit more status, since his father was Griogair’s second-in-command; Niall Mor MacIain was actually kinder to me than my own father. And Conal, while keeping a distance that was entirely my choice, slowly made me part of the clann; so slowly and gently, in fact, that neither I nor the clann noticed the moment when I stopped being Griogair’s unwanted mistake and became one of them.

  Now, when he rode into the dun with Griogair, from a hunt or a patrol or a diplomatic visit to Kate, Conal would say sharply ~ Athair! Father! That would be enough to make Griogair start, and look at me, and almost smile. It was all I ever got but it was more than I’d grown to expect. Conal would reach down a hand and pull me up onto his ferocious black horse—and sometimes Sionnach too—right in front of the whole clann. Then I’d just about burst with pride. I wasn’t Griogair’s son, not in any true sense, but look at me! Look at me, you dogs that used to sneer at me and kick me and ignore me: I’m Conal MacGregor’s brother!

  It was all I’d ever be, but by then, it was more than enough. So one night I went to bed still believing I hated him, because I’d planned always to hate him. And in the morning I woke up knowing that I loved him. If Griogair wouldn’t be my father, Conal would, and I would love him till the day I died. And he hadn’t even had to twist my mind.

  3

  THREE

  By the time I was eleven, I was in love in a different way. Gradually I’d made other friends, though not many: there was Feorag, a year younger than me and my partner in crimes that Sionnach refused even to contemplate; there was Orach, a quiet golden-haired girl who shot like a dream, and who tended to follow me around though she rarely spoke. I liked her company, and I enjoyed her devotion, and a year or two later, in the cool darkness of the sea-caves beyond the bay, we stripped each other of virginity.

  I’ve loved a few women: loved them honestly and intensely and with all my heart. Many more I’ve loved with my body but only half my heart. Sithe life is too long for whole-hearted love. A heart can only break so many times. I’m not saying it fails entirely: just that it mends the wrong way. It warps. It’s stitched together loose and askew and it doesn’t work as it should.

  If I’d known that earlier, I’d have been more careful with it.

  Orach was my first love, my always-occasional love, the love and comfort of half my life. She was there when other loves left, when other loves died. She was there till another came along, as unexpected and stunning as a freshwater spring in frozen tundra.

  But that was my last love, and far too many centuries in my future. Back in my stupid youth, and Orach notwithstanding, my angry young heart belonged to Eili MacNeil.

  She was Sionnach’s twin, an imperious beautiful girl who treated me with cool kindness. She had brown eyes to drown in, and dark red hair that she cut roughly short with a dagger, and she was more of a tomboy even than the other young girls of the clann: all she lived for was swordplay, and archery, and horse races on the machair.

  And Conal.

  Eili followed my brother around like a puppy, and this was the degree of her obsession: the only reason she cut her hair short was to be like him. I didn’t take her crush seriously, though. In a way it made me happy, because being Conal’s brother, but the same age as Eili, seemed to me an irrefutable advantage. The more I saw of Eili the more I loved her, and it didn’t matter to me that she was devoted to Conal. After all, so was I: we had that in common. And I looked like Conal, despite my black hair; I even fought like him, because he was teaching me swordplay whenever he could. I knew that one day she would simply stop loving him and start loving me instead, and after all, we were pure-blooded Sithe. If we didn’t have all the time in the world, we had as much of it as anyone could want.

  How did it never occur to me that in long, long lives, age comes to mean nothing?

  But in childhood, Sionnach and Eili and I were the best of friends. Whatever other children came into our orbit, it always came down to the three of us. We fought and rode and played and hunted together, and dogged Conal’s footsteps when he was around the dun, and pestered the cooks and the stablehands and the smiths till they were half-demented with us. Generally, in other words, we were children.

  It was the swordsmith Raineach I’d gone to annoy, one autumn day just after I turned twel
ve. I liked the woman, surly as she was, and I admired the way she worked, and I was hoping that one day she’d make me the sword I wanted, so I sucked up to her relentlessly. She knew that was what I was doing, but she put up with it, because she liked me as much as I liked her. I think when Raineach was young she’d been an outcast too. We can always recognise one another. It’s something feral in the eyes.

  That day, as soon as I stepped from the bright morning chill into the dark wall of roaring heat that was her workshop, she raised her eyes from the half-made weapon hissing in the long water trough, gave me a nod, then jerked her head very slightly towards a corner. I thought she was palming me off on her two sons, both good company but younger than me. There was no sign of them. Instead Eili was there, intent on a small piece of silver that she was twisting with pliers. Pushing sweaty spikes of hair out of her eyes she licked her lips, fixated on the work. Raineach’s three-year-old stepdaughter stood watching every move of her hands, dark eyes wide and mouth open.

  Trying not to go straight to Eili’s side, I folded my arms and watched the smith beat the soldered steel, the razor hard strips to the softer core.

  ‘Another sword?’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Aye,’ said Raineach darkly. ‘Not for you, greenarse.’ She thrust it back into the furnace.

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘No, but who?’

  ‘Eorna.’

  ‘Why does Eorna need another sword?’ I said resentfully.

  With a sigh of exasperation, she whipped the annealed metal from the furnace, then wiped sweat off her face with her bare forearm. ‘Don’t you keep your cloddish ears open? You know fine Alasdair Kilrevin’s restless. Kate expects trouble from him, and she expects your father to put him back in his box. Happens every decade or so. Kilrevin gets bored if he can’t do some killing now and again. The bastard needs to let off steam.’