Firebrand

by Gillian Philip

  ‘He isn’t,’ smiled Lilith, nodding at Sionnach. ‘He wasn’t asked for.’

  Sionnach had said nothing, but there was such shock and disbelief in his eyes he didn’t even struggle against the men who gripped his arms. Eili was howling her rage and terror, but Lilith turned and struck her brutally across the face to silence her. Then, as casually as if I was a full-mortal servant boy, she did the same to me.

  I was so shocked I stumbled, and one of her guards stepped forward and kicked me savagely in the belly. It knocked the breath out of me so that I couldn’t even move. I was still desperately sucking for air I couldn’t get when Lilith nodded once more to the guard with the drawn sword, and he stepped up to Sionnach. There was nothing on his face. Nothing at all, and I knew that Sionnach was lost.

  ‘Stop,’ said Kate NicNiven.

  The whole scene seemed to freeze. Some in the hall were too shocked to move, some too afraid; some were too plain curious, avid for blood and a thrill, and I never forgot that. Sionnach’s father’s men were surrounded, and though their blades were drawn, they were encircled and held at spearpoint by royal guards. Slowly, painfully, I sucked air into my lungs and the mist across my vision began to clear. Eili was on all fours beside me, and as she tried to scrabble to her feet I lunged and grabbed her into my arms, holding her hard and pressing my mind into hers, the way Conal used to do it for me. She had to be calm, had to. If Sionnach had a chance at all, this was it, and I didn’t want her to lose it for him. She fell still and silent, but she was as tense as a drawn bowstring in my arms.

  Kate laid a gentle hand on Lilith’s arm. ‘Lilith,’ she crooned. ‘There is no need for this.’

  Though I’d only just got my breath back, I found I was holding it.

  ‘I have been grievously insulted, Kate.’ My mother sounded sad and grave and dignified. How I hated her.

  Kate glanced at Eili. ‘Arrogant child,’ she said coldly. ‘But your brother does not deserve to die for your stupidity.’

  As I watched my lovely queen, I knew she didn’t care if Sionnach lived or died horribly. This was political. Her hall was in uproar and she needed to look just, and merciful, and stern, and generous. And most of all: in control.

  Eili was trembling in my arms. ‘That’s true, Kate. Punish me, it was my insult, my stupidity. Do as you like to me. Lilith can revenge herself on me. Not Sionnach.’

  ‘No!’ cried Sionnach.

  ~ No, I echoed in my head.

  ‘No,’ agreed Kate, lifting a hand. ‘No, Eili, that would be no punishment for you. You’re too tough and too brave and too stubborn. I’m afraid Lilith is right. He doesn’t deserve to die, but you need to be punished.’ From her belt she drew a long, jewel-handled knife. ‘This is the only way to do it.’

  Before any of us could draw breath she’d turned and swung the blade once, twice, at Sionnach’s face. Back, forth. Left, right. I saw blood spurt, saw his eyes widen, but he didn’t make a sound. He stayed absolutely silent as Kate opened his face with the blade, splitting his flesh into four new scarlet mouths, two on each cheek. He said not a word, and neither could I or Eili, as Kate destroyed his beautiful face for Lilith.

  Then Kate stepped up to Eili, who could only stare at her disfigured brother, at the torrent of blood streaming down his face and dripping from his jaw onto the flagstones. Kate lifted Eili’s hands, and wiped the bloody blade on them without leaving so much as a scratch. Then she polished the blade clean on Eili’s white shirt, and sheathed it, and turned to walk back to her place at the head of the hall, the smirking Lilith at her heels.

  10

  TEN

  ‘It was my fault.’ Eili was inconsolable.

  We clustered around Sionnach in an anteroom off the great hall, Eili and me and our furious men. We’d have been better to give him some air and some space, but we couldn’t bear to leave him. The healer summoned by his father’s lieutenant was struggling to seal the wounds, but they were deep and vicious, there was blood everywhere, and the point of the blade had gone through to the inside of his mouth. There was no way he’d be left unscarred. Kate had done my mother’s work well.

  ‘No.’ Sionnach’s voice was distorted and mumbling but it held only patience, and sympathy, and a terrible undercurrent of pain. ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘You did not do this to him,’ said one of our fighters angrily.

  ‘Hush,’ said the healer, wiping sweat from his forehead. He pressed another linen cloth to Sionnach’s cheek, and gestured for one of the fighters to hold it there. The healer had been working for most of the day and half a night, and he was getting next to nowhere with sealing the wounds. Sionnach had lost consciousness several times, and he’d lost a lot of blood before the healer staunched the flow, but he’d never cried out or cursed. He’d left that to Eili and me. He was his silent self, as if holding onto the part of him she couldn’t change.

  ‘Witch. Witch.’ Eili could barely contain her rage and grief and remorse.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I hissed, eyeing the strange healer, and afraid for her.

  ‘No! I swear, Seth…’

  ‘Stop.’ Niall’s lieutenant’s head snapped up. ‘Listen.’

  ‘What?’ said Eili irritably through her tears.

  There was a silence of unease about the place. The idle murmuring talk out in the forecourt had stopped. Booted feet shifted; spear shafts dragged on stone, swords creaked loose in scabbards. A horse, unnerved, scraped its hoof and gave a shrill whinny. I thought I could even hear the sigh of wind in the trees far, far beyond the cavern mouth.

  It was his mind we felt first: his cold enraged mind. You couldn’t help gritting your teeth when you felt it grate on your own. Then I heard them, we all heard them: the hoofbeats of a devil horse.

  ‘He’s come,’ I said. ‘He’s here.’

  * * *

  Thirteen hours after I’d called him, my brother rode his horse to a clattering, sweating halt in the forecourt. Conal didn’t look at me as he strode in, he didn’t look at anyone but Sionnach. Very gently, he took Sionnach’s face between his fingers and gazed at it. Releasing him, he stroked Sionnach’s hair. Then he turned and flung open the hall doors, and shoved past the stunned guards. His footsteps rang and echoed on stone as the great hall too fell silent, and he marched right up to Kate’s dais.

  ‘What have you done, Kate? Where was the need for that? Just to placate Lilith’s vanity?’

  ‘The twins have always been a little above themselves, Cù Chaorach.’ Kate smiled up at him affectionately. ‘Perhaps this was a necessary lesson. It will do them both good. Humility is a fine virtue.’

  ‘You had no right. They were hostages for me! If their father was alive he’d be at war with you.’

  A light dry laugh, a flutter of lashes. ‘He isn’t alive.’

  He was ice and steel. ‘But I am.’

  Languidly draping yourself across a chaise is fine for flirting with your courtiers or your captains; it’s fine for striking a pose so your people can admire you better. Kate had made a huge mistake staying there to receive Conal. He stood above her, and he looked a great deal stronger, and nobler, and more dignified. He looked a thousand times angrier. Not all the sympathy in the hall was with Kate, and not all the respect, either. Kate’s flirtatiousness looked suddenly foolish, and I wasn’t the only one who saw a tiny shiver go through her. Almost, for a second, there was fear in her eyes: a distinct focused fear, like a woman eyeing her own death and knowing it. You could have heard a feather fall to earth in that hall, and I’ve often played that scene over in my head and wondered if Conal could have put a stop to everything, then and there, if he’d demanded the kingship from her. But he’d given her his loyalty, and despite his growing distaste he hadn’t yet been driven to betrayal.

  The moment was gone, and Kate gathered herself.

  ‘Are you questioning me, Conal MacGregor?’

  My brother’s fury turned to bewilderment. ‘Since when has that been a crime among the Sithe?’ />
  There was a long silence, then, and all they did was look into each other’s eyes. I don’t know what passed between them; no-one did and I think no-one ever will, even now. But at the end of it Kate blinked, and rose to her feet.

  ‘Get out of my sight, Cù Chaorach.You may take the hostages back to your dun, but tell your lieutenant Righil he’s in command of it. As for you: let’s see if living with the full-mortals teaches you some self-control.’

  I backed swiftly away from the archway, horrified. I couldn’t believe I’d heard her say it, and yet where else could the confrontation have gone without an actual overthrow? I tried to make out the excited whispers and the muttering in the hall, to guess at what support he’d have if he resisted, but I couldn’t distinguish shock from glee, indignation from sympathy. I was too numb with dread.

  But Conal was smiling as he slammed the doors of the hall and walked over to join me.

  ‘Well, Seth, that’s me exiled. Across the Veil, no less.’

  ‘I’m coming with you, then,’ I said. It wasn’t bravado; there was simply no question of him going alone. I’d heard too many of Eorna’s terrible stories, I knew what the full-mortals thought of us and what they were capable of. It was probably fairy-stories, told to frighten children, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Of course I wouldn’t let him face them alone. Of course I was going with him.

  He grinned at me. ‘Of course you are.’

  So I did. And many times I’ve wondered how things would have gone, for worse and for better, if I hadn’t.

  PART TWO

  EXILE

  11

  ELEVEN

  ‘Time you learned to read, you wee barbarian.’ Conal dropped a heavy leather bag onto the rough table and grinned at me.

  I swore at him.

  ‘Your vocabulary needs work, no question.’

  I cursed again. ‘You think I’m not miserable enough?’

  He shrugged lightly. ‘You can always go home, Seth. You don’t have to stay.’

  I swore at him yet again, the way I always did, because that was a conversation we’d had a hundred times over the last grim months. Once again I thought longingly of the watergate in the damp green woods, the one we’d come through to reach this otherworld. It was so close, maybe a day’s fast ride away.

  I didn’t want to be here, but I wouldn’t leave Conal. The full-mortals were everything Eorna had warned me about: louse-ridden, disease-ridden, priest-ridden. I trusted every one of them as far as I could reach with the point of a short sword. They lived in squalor and darkness, and if they were rich they lived in finer squalor. Wash? You’d think they’d never heard of water, unless it was to brew crude alcohol that they never knew when to stop drinking. It seemed they couldn’t connect the filth they lived in with the filth and pain they frequently died in. No wonder they were fully mortal.

  Conal, of course, said it wasn’t their fault. Conal said it was the way they were built, the way their kind had developed, that they were vulnerable to disease and rot in a way we weren’t. He said short lives meant desperation and panic, and little time for study or memory or thought. He said their lives would lengthen in the end.

  My theory was different.

  Here’s what I thought: they couldn’t be inside another mind. They couldn’t know about pain or grief or death till it hit them personally, and even when it did they reckoned the pain and grief of others less than their own, and that’s why they’d never done anything about it. And maybe that’s why nature had given them so much less time. I thought my race vastly superior, and nature obviously agreed with me.

  Conal did not approve of my course of thought, but he refused to get into an argument.

  ‘Don’t go getting too proud, Seth,’ was how he usually left it. Or, ‘We’re all fully mortal on the point of a sword, Murlainn.’

  I was hardly likely to die of pride in my exile. From fine rooms in our own father’s dun we’d come to a hovel, earth-floored, turf-and-heather-thatched, walled with stone and mud and dung. Inside it was blackened, since the cold leaked in no matter what we did to plug the gaps around the door, but the smoke never, ever found an easy way out. We kept our black-house as clean as we could, but there were limits to our enthusiasm. Conal liked its position, a good two miles from the clustered homes and farms of the clachan, and half-hidden by rowan and birch trees. There was nothing I found to like. I hated that place.

  Now Conal tugged a few dusty volumes out of the leather bag and flipped one of them open. It smelt of dust and worm, and candle smoke, and knowledge.

  ‘I didn’t say I was that bored,’ I told him.

  ‘What else have you got to do this evening?’

  I backed away. ‘I could go and clean mouse shit out of the larder.’

  He laughed and grabbed my shoulder, shoving me into a chair beside him. ‘Gods, how did this end up being my job?’

  ‘I dunno. Lilith being so nurturing and all. Where did you get these?’ I nodded at the books.

  ‘The minister.’

  ‘The priest?’

  ‘I’ve told you, he’s not a priest, not any more. He’s a minister.’

  Whatever he called himself, the priest was bearable. He was tall and thin, ascetic and often severe, but kind enough. And he had a pragmatism that appealed to me, since his religion seemed adaptable to his troubled times: even the full-mortals couldn’t decide what their god wanted of them. Priests who called themselves ministers were driving out priests who called themselves priests, and the priests who called themselves priests were either caving in (like this one) or running away. They were fighting over things I couldn’t understand, except that the new priests were keener on sexual continence and a lot less keen on dancing and drinking. As far as I was concerned the whole crowd of them could go to their hell in a handcart, where doubtless there’d be no dancing to bother anyone.

  At least this one hadn’t grown fat on the tithes of his flock, and I found his grey hair fascinating, when there was clearly so much life left in him. And when he remembered to notice Conal, he liked him. Anyone who liked my brother was fine with me, and the man never made the mistake of trying to evangelise me. If I came home to find him sharing a drink and his malleable philosophy with Conal, he would nod to me, and smile in his solemn way, but that was all. I would nod back, and occasionally smile, and get on with something useful. He thought I was brain-addled, but that didn’t bother me.

  ‘Did you tell him you were teaching me to read?’

  ‘No.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘I don’t tell anyone anything about you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. What does that say?’ I jabbed a finger at the curled hide cover of one volume, at embossed hieroglyphics I couldn’t interpret yet.

  This time it was Conal’s expression that darkened.

  ‘Demonologie,’ he said, his voice cold. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he was angry at me. ‘That’s a book you should read, not one you’d want to. Same with this one: Malleus Maleficarum. Let’s not start with those.’

  ‘Fine.’ I shrugged.

  He gave a huffing laugh, as if trying to cheer himself up, and pulled forward a third book. ‘Come on, then. You’ll be glad you did.’

  And I was. In the end I was grateful he taught me to read and write. It’s come in more useful than I’d have liked to admit when I was fourteen and already knew everything about everything. Disappointingly for me, Conal couldn’t leave it there. He tried to teach me politics, and philosophy; he tried to teach me about the modern world, and how the full-mortals had made it, and how and why the Sithe did things so differently.

  So he had to teach me ancient history too: how the foremothers had been smart enough to see how things were going between us and the full-mortals; how they’d made the Sgath, the Veil, back when our race was strong and had magic, because we couldn’t live in the same world as the full-mortals any more. How we were just too different from them. How we stayed more and more in our own dimension, till t
hey didn’t even know us any more.

  And how, sometimes, some of us couldn’t resist going back.

  That I didn’t understand. To go into exile when you had a choice in the matter? It was the kind of thing the Lammyr were said to do. The Sithe had cut off that sickly twisted branch of our family tree, so the Lammyr chose instead to wreak havoc on the full-mortals (and find their protégés among them). Constantly, doggedly, the Lammyr slipped between the worlds, till guards had to be placed on the watergates to stop them; and still they slipped through.

  It did nothing for our reputation. They’re warped, the Lammyr. A piece is missing. It’s the way they’re built: they don’t love life, only death and pain. Who knows why the gods thought of them? Maybe they didn’t give them much thought at all. Perhaps they just happened, when the gods were looking the other way.

  I had never seen one, and never wanted to. Even Conal hadn’t, because Griogair and the other dun captains had driven them away long before he was born. But we heard stories, and shuddered, and were glad they were gone. They’d never returned: I don’t think they feared Griogair’s blade or any other, but he’d spoiled their fun and they must have found a more promising playground in the lawlessness and poverty of the otherworld.

  Oh, the poverty. Since my first exile I’ve seen many things, I’ve seen them all over the world. I’ve seen degradation and hunger that was worse, but it’s never shocked me to the bones the way that first experience did. The Sithe worked hard, and we fought hard, but we lived and loved and played hard too. The full-mortals were born with nothing but their dignity, and they died with less. Out of pity there were some I’d have helped from the world, but Conal wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t allowed, he said. They had different traditions, different rules. Their lives did not belong to them, but to their god and his priests.

  Winter was more merciful than the priests: it killed off many of the old and sick, though it had a tendency to take the very young as well. Those dark months were hard, so hard. I experienced cold like I’d never known before, cold with no respite; and I knew real hunger for the first time in my life.