Heart's Blood

by Juliet Marillier

  Invisible hands clutched onto my skirt and my cloak. They gripped my bag, tugging backwards, almost toppling me. I opened my mouth to cry out a protest, then shut it again. Make a noise and I’d alert Rioghan or one of the others to my solitary departure. Box wedged under my arm, I managed to form the shape of a cross with my fingers.“Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison,” I muttered.

  There was a momentary slackening of the uncanny grip; then it tightened again. So much for the efficacy of a Christian prayer. I forced down a powerful urge to scream.

  A violent push. I fell.The writing box crashed to the path. Something was hauling on my bag again, trying to rip it from my back. “Stop it,” I whispered, struggling to draw air into my lungs. “Leave me alone . . .”

  “Leave her alone!”

  The voice was Gearróg’s, and it was Gearróg’s hands that lifted me to a sitting position, then retrieved the box and set it safely down by me. For a while, all I did was try to breathe. The insidious whispers had ceased; I sensed the two of us were alone.

  Gearróg squatted down beside me, his plain features creased with worry. From time to time he reached out to pat me awkwardly on the shoulder, but he seemed reluctant to do more.

  “Thank you,” I gasped eventually. “You saved me again. Gearróg, I’m going away. Will you walk to the foot of the hill with me? I need you to keep me safe.”

  “Me?”

  There was a lot in that little word: I hurt you. Aren’t you afraid of me? I failed at my job, and Anluan was angry. I betrayed your trust.

  “Please.”

  He helped me up, his big hands gentle. I gave him the bag to carry; I took the writing box.We walked down the path together.

  “Why would you go away, my lady?” Gearróg asked after a while. He held his voice to a murmur, and his tone was diffident.

  “He said I had to leave. Anluan.” Despite my best efforts, my voice shook. “He doesn’t want me.” It hurt to speak this bleak truth aloud.

  Gearróg kept walking, steady and quiet at my side.We had gone some distance before he spoke again. “That can’t be right,” he said.

  “It is right. He told me, just now.”

  A lengthier silence, full of things unspoken.

  “He’d be sending you away to keep you safe.”

  “No.Well, that’s probably part of it. But he meant forever.”

  “Then he’s less of a man than we all thought.” Gearróg’s tone was blunt. “Only a fool gives up his one treasure.”

  Tears stung my eyes. I could not let him go down this road. I must be strong. “Where did you go, Gearróg?” I asked. “Rioghan held a meeting. All the men of the host were there, or so it seemed. But Cathaír said he couldn’t find you.”

  He held his silence to him like a shield.We walked on.

  “You can’t fight the frenzy on your own,” I said after a time. “But perhaps all of you together will find the strength to hold firm against it. Rioghan has ideas about that; he’s clever where these things are concerned. I expect Cathaír and the others will have their own techniques for mastering it. Gearróg, I want you to go back up there and face them. I heard that Anluan spoke harsh words to you earlier. He was upset.Troubled.The fire awoke dark memories for him. I hope you will understand why he was angry with you, even though you had just saved my life.”

  “I did a bad thing.”

  “You hurt me by accident. I was simply in the way. That wasn’t you flailing around, it was something else using you. Promise me you’ll go back up and join the others, Gearróg.Anluan needs you.You have a special strength in you.You proved it by saving me even when the frenzy was on you.You’ve just proved it again by making those creatures go away. I can’t imagine how you did that.”

  “They haven’t gone far.” The words were dismissive, but warmth was creeping back into his voice. “My lady, you’re the one Lord Anluan needs most. And what about us? You changed everything. What’s going to happen if you go away? How can you not come back?”

  My eyes were brimming. I bowed my head; I did not want him to see how badly this was hurting me. “I said something terrible to Anluan. Something so cruel and hurtful that it shames me to think of it. Something so bad that he’s never going to want me back. And he . . .” There was no describing how I had felt when I had thought, for just an instant, that Anluan might strike me. Now, I recalled that when sudden anger seized him he would often clench his left hand into a fist in that way. I’d seen him use it to break the mirror. I’d never seen him hit anyone.

  “Gearróg, the little girl will need friends once I’m gone,” I said. “She trusts you.”

  We were at the boundary. It still lacked some time until dawn, but I could see the shadowy outline of the settlement through the deceptive light, a huddle of dark shapes, the line of the makeshift defensive wall, the flickering points of torches set around the perimeter.Tomas and the others kept them burning all night, fearful of the host.

  “Promise me,” I said as the sky lightened towards the true rising of the sun. A bird gave a summons, an upward call of two notes: Come forth! Come forth!

  Gearróg held his silence.

  “I must go now,” I said.“I don’t want to see any of them from up there; I wouldn’t be able to bear it.Will you promise, Gearróg?”

  “Say you’ll come back. Later, when this is all over. Say you’ll come.”

  “I can’t. Not if he says no.” I must move on, I must run now, before the sun rose and they found me missing. I must flee before I lost the will for it.

  “You say, go up and face the others. But you’re running away.”

  I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders. “I have to go and find my sister. I have to face up to my own others, people who wronged me. And afterwards . . .”

  “You’ll come back to Whistling Tor?”

  Naked hope trembled in Gearróg’s voice. It shone in his eyes and transformed his features, forbidding a refusal.

  “If Anluan truly wanted me, if he needed me, nothing in the world would keep me away,” I said, and as the words left my lips I heard a great sigh, not from my companion, but from a dozen, fifty, a hundred ghostly voices out in the forest.The host was watching.The folk of the Tor knew I would not be there in the library tomorrow seeking out answers for them. They knew I would not be working through the grimoires in a quest to end their suffering. I had let them down. I had broken my promise.Yet I sensed that they understood; that the words I had just spoken were enough for now. “Be strong, Gearróg.Watch over him for me.” I looked out under the trees, unable to see the others, but acknowledging their presence. “Be strong. Help him.”

  “Farewell, my lady.You have my promise.” Gearróg placed a fist over his heart. He had halted right on the border of the hill, between the guardian trees.

  “Farewell, Gearróg.” I turned my back, and as the sky brightened I walked steadily downhill and away.

  As if to mock me, the day I left Whistling Tor the weather turned fair, with sunny skies and gentle breezes. It was enough to make me wonder if this was a different world, in which summer had followed its natural course through all the time of my stay in Anluan’s fortress, while mist, rain and bitter cold had clung steadfastly to the Tor.

  I held fast to the decision I had made as I packed to leave, that I would not give in to the helplessness that had befallen me after my father’s death. If I had learned anything over the strange summer at Whistling Tor, it was that I must not become the lost soul of last winter again. Never mind that the man I loved had sent me away forever. Never mind that I had been forced to break the deepest promise I had ever made, and abandon my friends in their time of greatest trial. If Anluan didn’t want me, he didn’t want me. It was as simple as that. I would grit my teeth, summon my courage and get on with what must be done.

  I did not go to Whiteshore. I did not even go to the settlement at the foot of Whistling Tor. I walked the other way, up to that crossroads where I’d been unceremoniously dumped on a day of mist and sha
dows. There was no point in waiting for a cart to happen by. I set my feet forwards, making lists of colors in my head to keep out thoughts of Anluan.

  It was so early in the morning, nobody was astir. Birds chorused in the woods by the cart track, and somewhere down under the elders I could hear the voices of frogs. Everything seemed swept clean, open to light, full of promise. It felt wrong. Part of me wanted to protest that such a lovely day ill fitted the catastrophe facing the folk of Whistling Tor. Another part of me whispered, You never belonged here, Caitrin. Forget these folk. Forget Anluan. If he loved you, he would never have done this.

  For half the morning I walked without seeing a soul. I grew thirsty and stopped to drink from a stream a little way off the track. I grew hungry. My precipitate departure had left me ill equipped to travel far without help. Memories of my flight to the west returned. I suppressed them, making myself move on. My feet were hurting; Emer’s boots were not such a perfect fit after all. The day grew warmer. I took off my shawl and stuffed it into my bag.

  A rumbling, squeaking sound and the thump of hooves sent me down under the bushes to the side, wary of carters traveling alone. A pair of stocky horses came into view, pulling a well-kept cart laden with bundles. A man and a woman sat on the bench seat; she had a child on her knee.

  I stepped out and waved a hand. A little later I was perched on a sack of grain in the back, on my way eastward. I imagined the mist-clad slopes of the Tor behind me, slowly diminishing until they could no longer be distinguished from the ordinary landscape of fields and woodland. As the cart moved further and further to the east, I did not once look back.

  It made a difference having funds. I spent two nights in a village inn, with my own chamber and a lock on the door. I got directions and arranged lifts. I read a letter for a local trader in return for a place on a conveyance that was going all the way to Stony Ford, a settlement about three days’ travel north of Market Cross. Father and I had executed commissions for the chieftain there, and I was fairly sure Shea and his fellow musicians would be known in that house.

  My fellow passengers on this somewhat larger and grander cart must have thought me dour and uncommunicative. They could not know the whirl of thoughts that filled my mind every moment of the day, those I fought to banish and those I tried to concentrate on, in particular how to track down Maraid and Shea without going too near Market Cross. If Stony Ford did not provide any clues I must try other places Shea had mentioned when telling us of his traveling life, but those were few and far between. I thought I could recall a town called Hideaway or Holdaway, where the band had regularly played to entertain people at a big weekly market. Lean enough pickings, Shea had said with good humor, but if they stayed on for the evening’s dancing there would generally be a few extra coins tossed their way.

  Failing that, I could look for Shea’s family. That would mean a far longer journey, as they lived somewhere well to the northeast, close to Norman-ruled territories. His father’s name I had forgotten, but he had been a master harp maker before his hands were afflicted by tremors, and such craftsmen would be few in any part of the land. I had a good chance of finding him eventually. Eventually. How long would it take?

  As the cart rolled steadily on and my fellow passengers chatted about the weather or how long it might be until the next stop, I pictured Anluan, Magnus, Rioghan and the rest of them in pitched battle against Lord Stephen’s army. I imagined the spectral voice filling the ears of the host with poison and sending them into howling, tortured disarray. I thought of Anluan cut down, wounded, dying, while I went from village to village asking about a band of musicians who might or might not have passed by some time earlier. I saw the Latin words of the counterspell clean on a parchment page, useless without me there to translate them. Often I came close to tears, and it was necessary to remind myself that if Anluan had really loved me, he would not have sent me away forever.That worked for a little, until my mind began to tell me that perhaps Anluan had banished me because he thought there was no chance of defeating Stephen de Courcy, and that he and Magnus and Olcan were all going to die, leaving the host leaderless and adrift. Once this perfectly logical idea had come to me, I couldn’t shake it off. It made me cold all through. I sat on the cart’s padded seat with my shawl hugged around me and my gaze set straight ahead, seeing nothing but Anluan’s pale face, his bright hair, his lovely crooked features. Over and over I thought of the unforgivable words I had said to him, and of how he had looked when he heard them.

  The journey to Stony Ford took several days. We stopped one night in a hostelry that was a cut above the others. Two of my fellow travelers, Brendan, a physician, and his wife, Fidelma, had shown me particular kindness on the way.They and I sat down to supper to find the other folk at the inn table in spirited discussion about the Normans.

  “They say there’s been a treaty signed,” said an old man nursing a mug of ale between knotted fingers.

  “If you can call it that,” said another man, grim-faced. “More or less gives away all the lands of the east, and a lot besides, to this King Henry. May the Uí Conchubhair break out in a rash of blisters, every one of them from the high king downwards. That man’s handed our birthright to a bunch of gray-shirted foreigners, as ready to burn a good Irish town to ashes as they are to listen to their own folk.”

  “You’d want to watch your mouth,” a third man said, voice lowered.

  “War’s not over.”This from an ancient in the corner, who had seemed fast asleep.

  “Ruaridh Uí Conchubhair’s not the only leader we’ve got, though he may see himself that way,” said a brawny man at the far end of the table. “We’ll keep on fighting till the last of us lies on the sward with his blood soaking into the breast of the earth. Uí Conchubhair’s gone weak in his old age, if you ask me. He was something of a leader, once, a man almost worthy to be called high king. He’s fallen far.”

  “No king lasts forever.” Brendan spoke quietly. “As for Henry of England, I know of this agreement, and you’re right—under the terms of it the high king keeps sovereignty here in Connacht, and in other places where the Normans haven’t yet set their mark. But the fact is, Henry can’t keep effective reins on his own lords—they’ve got used to taking what they want, by force if necessary, from us and from each other. They’ll still be jostling for territorial advantage, treaty or no treaty.”

  “They’ve proven themselves no respecters of boundaries,” said Fidelma.

  I cleared my throat, regretting deeply that I had not taken much interest in such matters when I lived in Market Cross. I had always believed that Connacht, at least, was safe from invasion.That was what everyone said. So far west, with much of the land too barren for farming, it had not seemed a place the English would want. King Henry’s treaty sounded quite true to that theory.

  “Has any of you heard of an English lord called Stephen de Courcy?” I asked.“He—I heard that he threatened to take an Irish chieftain’s holding, quite some way to the west of here. I was told there’s a tie of kinship by marriage between Lord Stephen’s family and that of the high king. That means Ruaridh Uí Conchubhair won’t step in to help this chieftain.”

  All eyes turned to me.

  “Never heard of the fellow you mention,” said the old man. “But it happens. Place up north, can’t remember the name, they rode in and cut down the chieftain’s men-at-arms; a rout, it was. Put their heads up on pikes afterwards, Northmen-style, as a warning to other leaders not to stand up for what was rightfully theirs. Burned the settlement; killed women and children as if they were less than human.That’s what they think, of course. That we’re no better than dumb beasts of the field. It sickens me.”

  “You believe something like that could happen right on the coast of Connacht?” I felt a lead weight in my belly. “It makes a mockery of Ruaridh’s title. A high king should protect his own, surely.”

  “Ruaridh’s always done what was expedient,” someone said, lowering his voice and glancing around the r
oom. “That’s why he’s lasted so long. His sons are better men.”

  There was a short silence, during which nobody met anyone else’s eyes.Then Brendan said, “I believe I’ve heard the name de Courcy before. I can’t remember in what connection. He’s a youngish man, I think, and ambitious. My brother would know more. He’s very well informed on such matters; his line of work demands it.Why do you ask, Caitrin?”

  “My father always said the far west would hold out against the Norman advance. But it seems this treaty is a sham, if our own high king can step back and allow someone like Stephen de Courcy to take territory from one of his own chieftains. It’s wrong that we have no protectors, no leaders of our own who can stand up for us.”

  A weightier silence this time.

  “Do you have kinsfolk in the far west, Caitrin?” asked Fidelma, concern written all over her kindly features. “Perhaps in the territory of this threatened chieftain?”

  “Just friends.” I offered no more. Start to discuss Anluan’s situation in any detail and I would lose my hard-won self-control.

  “Give it time,” said the man who had mentioned the high king’s sons. “Connacht will stand, that’s my opinion. There will be new leaders, men with stiffer spines and bolder hearts. Men I’d take up arms for myself, if the call came.”

  “You?” queried someone with a chuckle.“That leg of yours can’t even walk straight behind a plough, let alone charge into battle against a line of mounted gray shirts. But maybe you fancy a quick and bloody death.”

  “I suppose a man with a damaged leg can still use a bow,” I said with somewhat more emphasis than I had intended. “Or throw stones. Or perform a hundred other essential tasks.” I looked the would-be warrior in the eye. “I commend your courage,” I said.

  Now everyone was staring at me, not as if they believed my speech odd, but as if they were interested in why I had made it; as if they wanted to hear my story. But I could not tell it. I picked up my ale and took a mouthful, eyes downcast, cheeks burning.