Blade of Fortriu

by Juliet Marillier

  “Deord is very strong and very quick,” Drustan said. “He walks a fine line. He knows I would indeed run mad without those short flights into freedom. He trusts me to return within, and I have never failed him, not in seven years. He understands what it is to be a prisoner. Without him, despair would have claimed me long since.”

  “I …” Ana made herself wait and regain her composure. “I don’t pretend to understand all of what you’ve just said, Drustan. It disturbs and perplexes me. Do you remember what happened on the day she died? Can you give me an account of that?”

  “I had come from my own home in the west to visit my brother. I was in the forest. I went out in the morning. There was a mist; it swirled cold around the trees, creeping into the lairs of wolf and badger, obscuring the paths of marten and hare. It was almost winter. She was screaming. She was running. She fell. I went away. When I came home from my journey, they had found her body.”

  Breathe slowly, Ana told herself. “This is the account you gave of yourself after you returned? Just this?”

  “It is what I remembered.”

  “What about before? Why was Erisa screaming? Alpin said you …” No, she could not say it.

  “My brother said I drove his wife to her death. Caused her to fall. That is his account.”

  “What is your account, Drustan? That’s what I want, and it seems difficult for you to put it in plain words.”

  “I suppose my brother’s tale to be true.”

  “What are you telling me? That you can’t actually remember what happened?” Impossible hope had awakened, alarmingly, somewhere inside her.

  “I was in the other place. What I remember is … different. When I am there, I do not see in the same way. I cannot explain in words that will make any sense to you, or to Alpin, or to any man or woman who asks me for an account. I cannot say with certainty what action I took before I heard Erisa’s screams, before I saw her fleeing through the woods. I do not remember hurting her. But there are other things I do not remember, from other journeys. They say I killed her. They say the old woman saw it, and was so distressed she fled away into the forest not long after. What Alpin told you is true.”

  Tears made hot paths on her cheeks. “Drustan,” she said, “how can you do that? How can you tell me with one breath that you want to … to touch me, to be close to me, and with the next breath say you are too dangerous to be let out? What do you expect me to do? How do you expect me to respond to that?”

  “I don’t know, Ana,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is another sign of my insanity that I tax you thus. Will you answer my question now? I hear the creak of the gate; Deord is coming in.”

  “Oh, gods, Drustan, how can you expect an answer to that, after … Very well, the answer is, if I were not betrothed to your brother, what you suggested would please me well enough, once I got used to the idea of it. But since I am to wed Alpin, I can in no way even imagine such a thing happening, let alone take the discussion of it any further. We must stop this. Farewell, Drustan.”

  “Farewell, my light.”

  Ana closed her eyes; it was too much. It was too hard. She wanted to go home to White Hill and for all this to be a bad dream. And yet … and yet, what she had told him was true. Murderer and madman as he was, she could never wish that she had not met Drustan, even if all of it were to end in sorrow. Until she had met him, she did not think she had been truly alive.

  “Good-bye, my dear,” Ana whispered, making sure it was so quiet that Drustan could not possibly hear, and then she got to her feet and went back to the bench. When Ludha came up the steps not long after, her mistress was busy sewing the little dogs on her betrothed’s fine new tunic, and if Ana’s eyes were looking rather red, her maid had nothing at all to say on the matter.

  9

  THE WEATHER WAS set fair; already, summer was here. The forest cloaked Alpin’s fortress in a soft garment of many greens, and the chieftain of Briar Wood announced over supper that in the morning his household would be going hunting.

  Faolan had been busy. The druid’s nonappearance had given him more time for investigation than he had anticipated, and he had gained the confidence of several members of Alpin’s household. He made sure the harp was difficult to mend, and escaped the requirement to sing by developing a lingering chesty cough, which was generally put down to his lengthy immersion in cold water at Breaking Ford. He spent a great deal of time listening, and still more thinking. The folk of Briar Wood were like hazelnuts: hard to crack, and not especially rewarding even then. Faolan could not remember a time when he had taken so long to extract so little useful information.

  Ana was unhappy, edgy, nervous; he saw it in her face and, under Alpin’s keen eye and stated intention to punish any man who so much as looked at her too hard, was powerless to help her. At the supper table, watching her without being seen to do so, Faolan deduced that she was asking Alpin if she could be excused from the day’s hunting. She was saying, perhaps, that blood sports had never been her first choice of outdoor pastimes; explaining that other tasks would keep her at home. Bitterness welled in Faolan as he watched Alpin roar with laughter, set a heavy hand on his bride-to-be’s delicate shoulder, and shake his head; he was telling her she must come, she’d enjoy it, and besides, what better opportunity to view the extent of her new husband’s domain?

  “Take care, friend,” Gerdic advised from the bench by Faolan. “You’re sticking the knife into that cheese as if it’s about to attack you. Watch your fingers, fellows, our bard’s not in his best mood tonight.”

  “Only got one mood,” someone else commented. “Surly. Typical Gael.”

  Faolan made no reply and the talk turned to other matters, notably the proposed hunting expedition. There’d be game for the pot; Gerdic and the other kitchen men could expect a long day. The men-at-arms, seated farther up the board, were exchanging theories on what might be tracked so early in the season. Not deer, for certain, but the dogs might take a boar or two, and with the help of hawks, there might be capercaillie or other game birds to be flushed out, though they’d likely not have much meat on them at this time of year.

  Faolan made a show of cutting cheese, tearing bread, slicing an onion. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Alpin’s arm crept around Ana’s narrow waist then slid up so his hand could brush the lower curve of her breast through the fine dove-gray wool of her tunic. A little spot of red appeared in each of her cheeks.

  “Hunting, eh?” Gerdic said meditatively. “Not an occupation for bards, I imagine.”

  “Oh, he’ll expect me to go.” Faolan’s tone was as grim as his mood. “You wait, he’ll give it a little longer then call me up to grovel, and he’ll let me know he’s kindly including me in the expedition and that he’ll expect a song about it when we get home.”

  “Shh,” hissed Gerdic. “Don’t let him hear you speaking like that, or any of his warriors.”

  “He won’t hear me. And you won’t repeat it.”

  Gerdic glanced at him nervously. “Not when you glower like that, I certainly won’t. But watch yourself.”

  “I do.”

  “What if he does that, what you said? You got the harp ready?”

  “As ready as it’ll ever be,” said Faolan sourly. “I just need to stay out of the way of boar spears tomorrow, and to use this cheese knife cautiously tonight, and I may have sufficient fingers left to play a tune or two about our chieftain’s exploits on the track of the biggest boar in the north. The voice, now that’s another matter.”

  “Put in a good chorus.” Gerdic advised, his expression serious. “Make it one of those tunes that are easy to remember, the kind that keeps on going in your head, you know? That way, we can all join in and give you a bit of help.”

  Faolan came as close to a smile as he ever did. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

  IT WAS ALL part of the well-practiced game, of course. Faolan performed his missions with no help from anyone; it was far simp
ler that way. He preferred to rely on nobody but himself. It minimized the risks. If it suited his purpose to humor Gerdic, who occasionally let slip morsels of information not available elsewhere, he would summon a friendly demeanor. Since it was necessary to be a bard tonight, he would be one. Ana could never have imagined the ordeal she was confronting him with when she told her expedient lie out in the forest. He would rather stand naked and unarmed before a circle of Alpin’s fiercest warriors than set his hands to that harp and make music in a crowded hall. It would be like hanging his heart from a meat hook. It would require every scrap of his considerable control to survive the experience with his mask intact. It was not Ana’s fault. How could she know such exposure must excoriate his very spirit? He’d done his best, at White Hill, to be a creature of cold detachment, an efficient tool, a man whose only alliance was with whichever master offered the heaviest bag of silver. He had come to believe in that carefully cultivated persona himself, over the years. The mask had kept him safe; safe from his memories. The harp would bring them flooding back.

  Ah well, that was for tonight. Today was the hunt, and an opportunity that must be seized. He was outside the wall, and he had a horse, his own this time, and the nature of hunting was such that he might slip away unseen if he played it right. There was one quarter he had not yet investigated, and today provided an opportunity to do so. He could not pack up and head off home to White Hill without being completely sure of Alpin’s loyalty to Bridei. A mark on parchment, a sworn promise, these were without value when the man who made them had no concept of honor.

  The oddity of Alpin’s family arrangements intrigued Faolan and stirred his suspicions. Two brothers, two estates: one brother accused of a heinous crime and locked up for life under decidedly bizarre conditions. The other brother thus in control of both landholdings, including one with a strategic anchorage. That had to be cause for doubts, and Alpin’s behavior did little to allay them. Since nobody in the household was prepared to discuss Drustan, Faolan must go straight to the source.

  Then there was Deord. A Breakstone man; like himself, one of the very few survivors of the dark cesspit that was the Hollow. If a man got out of that place, as Faolan himself had done, surely the last occupation he would choose was prison guard. He considered it as he rode down a steep incline under tall firs, following the strung-out line of Alpin’s hunting party. Seven years, they said the fellow had been here. Seven years of dark memories; seven years of evil dreams. Why hadn’t Deord settled down somewhere, found a comfortable woman and raised a family? Why wasn’t he plying a trade in a safe settlement as far away from the touch of the Uí Néill as he could get? Going back under lock and key was the action of a madman. Well, Deord was guarding a madman, if what folk said was true. Maybe they were good company for each other.

  The forest was playing tricks today. The tales Faolan had heard suggested presences beyond the human, beyond the animal: creatures of bone and darkness, long-fanged monsters with reaching arms, crones bearing little bags of perilous charms, fell warriors armed with deadly, invisible weapons. Then there were the trees themselves, the tortuous pathways and the eldritch mists. To hear folk talk, one would think the very stones had legs and eyes and a capacity for mischief. Faolan discounted such tales, for he knew the propensity of men’s fears to build on themselves, making a mighty monster out of a creak in the dark, a furious demon from a darting shadow. In his own opinion, the ill deeds of men were a great deal more alarming than the phantoms that could be concocted from a bad dream and too much mead. Nonetheless, these pathways were tricky. At more and more frequent intervals the hunting party halted in a clearing or on the banks of a stream and held a consultation as to which fork to take, which path to follow.

  Ana rode at the front with Alpin; Faolan himself was far down the line with the last riders of the party, mostly household servants leading packhorses, whose task would be to carry today’s kill home in triumph. Faolan rode quietly, making himself as unobtrusive as possible and memorizing each turn, each branching of the way as they went. With luck, it would scarcely be noticed if he disappeared for a while; once the hounds scented boar, the last thing on anyone’s mind would be how many men were currently in the party and exactly where they were. He hoped they would not ride too far before his opportunity came. His own quarry was not out here in the forest, but back at Briar Wood. He intended to find Deord and extract a few truths from him. Their kind had a bond, forged through adversity and through survival. They were bound to aid one another whether it suited them or not. If the guard would not talk, maybe Drustan would.

  When the party halted again he caught a glimpse of Ana, mounted on her horse, waiting quietly while Alpin explained something to his men. The hunting dogs milled around the horses’ legs, turning their heads at every rustle in the bracken; they were long-legged, shaggy creatures, taller at the shoulder than the White Hill hounds, with an implacable look about the eyes and jaw that suggested a boar might be easy prey for them. Ana was looking pale and tired.

  As they moved on, Faolan gradually allowed one, then another rider to pass him until he was behind the packhorses. Before long the hounds erupted in a baying cacophony of noise and Alpin’s chief huntsman released them. The dogs vanished into the forest, each one a battering ram of sheer muscular power. The riders set off in pursuit. The ways were narrow and overgrown; within the space of a few breaths the party was spread out so far one could see no more than one or two other riders, and the dogs were well ahead, driving their quarry to a point where it must turn and face them in its last desperate stand.

  The men with the packhorses found a small clearing and settled to wait it out. While they were unloading their gear and tethering the creatures to graze, Faolan slipped away under the trees, his mount obedient to his touch. He made quietly back the way he had come. So far, so good. He’d no desire at all to be in on the kill. He had seen enough violent deaths in his career, had indeed inflicted many of them with his own hands: the battle of a wild boar against that rapacious pack held no appeal whatever. He’d his own hunt to execute today, and it needed to be quick, for he must rejoin this party as invisibly as he’d left it and then obtain the account of its successes, for the fashioning of a song.

  Once he was far enough from Alpin’s hunters he began to hum under his breath, the beginnings of one of those tunes that kept going through a man’s head. Gerdic was right; these folk would be best pleased with something simple, and this musician would be far safer with such a ditty to deliver, a trifling thing devoid of high emotions or grand themes. But the song that dogged him, insinuating its own form into the tune he hummed, was the ballad he had sung when he carried Alpin’s bride across a ford: the tale of a man bewitched by a fairy woman, a man who could never be the same again.

  DEORD WAS WEARY. When Drustan had a bad night there was no sleep for either of them. This had been one of the worst, his charge raging up and down the enclosure in darkness, beating at the iron gate, punching tight fists into the stone walls until his hands were raw and bleeding, crouching with arms over his head, leaping up to hang from the grilled roof of their cage as if he would breach the barrier by sheer force of will. Later Drustan had torn a blanket into strips and begun knotting them together with grim purpose, and Deord had been sorely tempted to put the shackles on him to keep him from self-harm. But he had not. Maybe the bad nights were the product of a disordered mind, but it was incarceration that provoked them; to bind Drustan while he was in this mood would be particularly cruel. The madman’s prison at Briar Wood was spacious and comfortable by Deord’s standards. Any man who had endured the hellhole of Breakstone Hollow must see Alpin’s provision for his brother as generous and fair. But Drustan was no ordinary man, and this confinement was, for him, every bit as hideous a torture as those dank, malodorous cells in the secret prison of the Uí Néill chieftains had been to Deord himself. Denying Drustan the sun, the sky, the freedom of the wildwood was as bad as the beatings, the strippings, the humiliation and debas
ement Deord had endured at the hands of his Gaelic captors.

  A man never forgot such experiences. They had taken away the light, so that he lost track of day and night completely. They had kept him awake, endlessly, with torches and noises and sudden deluges of chill water. They had strung him up by the hands; by the feet. They had done other things, which he had put away in a deep part of his memory with impenetrable barriers around it. If one were strong enough to survive, to escape, one could not then afford to be eaten up by bitterness. There were few enough of them who wore the Breakstone mark out into the world again. One lesson he retained, and that was how easily evil could rise in any man if he gained too much power over another. He had seen it in the guards at the Hollow; how they started as ordinary, well-intentioned individuals and how quickly they changed. After a while Deord had stopped making the effort to befriend new prisoners; he had ceased trying to help them survive. Watching his comrades fall apart, one by one, had begun to weaken his own resolve. In the end his mind had had room for only one thing, a fierce and selfish will for survival. He forgot the past; he did not think of a future beyond the single thought, the talisman: escape. He made himself blind to the present, which was full of blood and screams and quiet despair. In the end a chance had come his way and he had seized it. He knew that if he had squandered his flagging energy on helping the others, neither he nor they would have lived to see freedom. He did not allow himself any regrets.

  So, Drustan: poor, beautiful, benighted Drustan shouting and punching and weeping through the night, Drustan who could not be left alone for more than the briefest time in case he made an end of things … What was to be done for Drustan? All the compassion Deord had suppressed as a captive, he let flow through him now he was a prison guard. He knew what his charge had done, a heinous, unforgivable deed. He knew Drustan’s wildness, his difference, as perhaps nobody else did. Deord had learned to be strong in body and mind; he had learned a truly fearsome self-control. He used his strength, now, to give his prisoner what freedoms could be managed. He broke Alpin’s rules, but carefully, so no harsher punishment would descend on this unhappy prisoner who, for all his malady, was a man of rare talents, great charm, and considerable intellect. He wondered if Alpin had ever considered, in the last seven years, consulting Drustan on issues of trade, alliances, war, or the management of the two sizable estates the elder brother now controlled. He thought not. Alpin had decided his brother’s frenzies meant an addled mind, a degree of idiocy despite the soft-spoken manner and generally rational speech. He had become blind to Drustan’s humanity.