Perhaps, Caith thought, then, they would not even dismount. Perhaps they would kill him and never give him a chance with the sword. He lay expecting the stroke, thinking, with some satisfaction, That for your plans, my prideful lord Nuallan. Now what will you do?
Then he wondered distractedly what had become of Firinne, or if she were with them now, and what side she took in the affair. But to look full circle about him would cost him pain, afford them sport and perhaps cost things to Firinne he could not, in his confused condition, reckon of.
“Bring him,” the rider above him said, with a sweeping gesture; and riders dismounted.
This was beyond his expectations. He closed the fingers of his right hand, expecting the hilt of his sword, but he could not feel it there. He moved his hand searching for it— and the flash of pain told him exactly where the arrow had hit.
Fool, he said to himself.
One of them set a foot on that wrist and trod down. In a progression of events suddenly grown too rapid for his wits to deal with, the men held him against the ground, and one laid hand on the shaft of the arrow, a touch that shot ice and fire through his bones and rendered him near senseless.
“Best not draw it,” one said. “Only break the shaft.”
Dubhain!
The arrow pressed sideways in the wound; pain shot to the roots of his teeth and the depths of his gut. A sharp crack, then, a jolt to the marrow of his bones. “Dubhain!” he thought he breathed, while the world went darker than it was. One of them laughed, and nothing of help came thundering in. A horse stamped and shifted, but it was a creature of flesh and blood, with the sound of bridle-rings.
They gathered him off his back, then, another grating of the broken stub in the wound; and held him on his knees while they ordered someone to get down from his horse.
Then they hauled him up onto legs that would not altogether bear his weight and aimed him at that horse’s side. They cuffed and struck him until half-fainting, he made shift to mount for himself.
They had to help him all the same, pushing from below; and when he had dragged himself into the saddle he sat swaying to the horse’s sidesteps as someone else climbed awkwardly up behind him and leaned and righted the saddle.
This hurt him. He bore it with a rolling of his head and a haziness of mind that made him think he might faint and fall again, arrow and all.
Arms came gently about him. “I’ll hold you,” the man said, a thin and subdued voice; and when the horse began to move and the swaying carried him back against the body behind him, Caith gave himself up completely to that support, reasoning with the shreds of memory and sense that yet survived, that he knew the voice, that it was Ceannann behind him and Ceannann’s arms that held him— the fool who had brought him to this, and he now the second fool, for this boy’s sake.
Is it enough, Dubhain? Once in dread, once in pain, once in bitter anguish— Was this what you Saw, and did none of the rest matter?
But where are you, Dubhain? Can you hear me at all?
To be among enemies, with the arrow moving in his flesh at every stride of the horse, an arrow which they only had to lay hands on to cause him unspeakable agony— this was not what he had bargained for with the Sidhe.
Dubhain!
* * *
Consciousness came and went in an endless haze. But it seemed to Caith at last that a black mass of stone crouched at the end of the cheerless loch, and that the steep mountains which walled the glen went on far beyond that place and wound and wove patterns against the night.
Draiocht and geas.
Caith beheld the keep through half-lidded eyes, in what he began at last to perceive a more and less of pain, in the troughs of which he could live and think and breathe, on the waves of which he could only exist. The laboring of his heart and the hoofbeats of the double-burdened horse seemed to observe the same cycle.
But where he was now in the world or what these men were, he began to forget. His world had shrunk to the mere rhythm of his breaths, and that outside was all too burdened by detail for a busy mind to deal with.
Draiocht and geas. Black sorcery and dire necessity.
He blinked again, or perhaps more than blinked— the mass of stone was much nearer, as if the horse beneath him had flown with a pooka’s speed, bearing him to hell and river-depth— or was it the darkness ahead that it had sought all along?
The hill and the keep ahead, beneath the stars and the mountain wall, had the shape of a beast, some old delver as flat and broad of body as a tortoise. Two guard towers at either end made its thick legs. The scope of outlying ringwalls made its mass. It might begin to move. It might rise up and walk.
That would be a remarkable thing. It might roam the land devouring fools and destroying as it went ... a stony thing, old and difficult to reason with....
Another blink and the beast crouched very near indeed. Desolation was about it.
A hall, Caith thought critically of its master, should have pasturages. It should have cottages and fields and such homely things as hayricks and fences and orchards about it. Here was nothing but the loch before it, dark water amid the barren steep mountains.
What kind of management was this, and what of the people in the glen? Were they all bandits, and the young couple in the cottage hitherto unmolested?
Draiocht.
Things changed rapidly now, and he tried to keep his eyes open and his mind at reasoning, however scattered his thoughts as they rode. He wandered in his wits a space, and then to his relief that green place beyond the sidh began to surround him, ever so much fairer than a hellish dark courtyard with all its clatter of horses and equipment, ever so much more hopeful than the agony he faced in dismounting.
In the greenwood, Nuallan might listen to him. Nuallan might have a reason for things, and an answer for him, however difficult. He called Nuallan’s name in his dream, and he decided he would walk farther, perhaps find the starry mere again, and not come back to the pain until he was resting.
Or farther on than that. He had always believed it a risk to his life, to go beyond the mere. He could not say why he thought so, but it was time to try, now. His life was ebbing out of him, and it seemed far better to be here forever than there for the rest of the night.
Still, still, as he wandered, nothing seemed right. It was only featureless meadow, at first, and he could not find the mere or the green woods at all. Then he did see the edge of the woods, and went toward it, and entered under its shade, thinking he must have arrived on the wrong side. But as he looked about, the woods he now wandered looked far wilder than the faery he had known. He looked for familiar places, and found none.
But abruptly there was a silver gate in that woods, and beyond its shining bars he could see the faery he knew, the woods, the meadow, the stream that ran with stars.
He had never known there was a gate. He had never come at faery from this vantage before. He tried the gate and found it locked against him.
Worse, the sky was growing darker: the moon in faery was fast setting, and he was locked outside its bounds, shut out in a dreadful woods the rules of which he did not know.
Someone was speaking, cursing someone or something. He felt a standing horse shift wearily under him, a jolt that brought the world back in all its grimness and pain. The rider behind him was still holding him in the saddle. The racket of chain rattling through the works of the iron gate sounded like doom, and after what he had seen in the realm of faery, he feared now he was outcast from all hope, that it was not even Ceannann who clasped him about the ribs, but some dire thing well-content, for now, to have this little joke on its prey.
The chain clanked taut. The second gate groaned open on its hinges, and a ratchet thumped, taking up chain for a door no attack would find easy. There were pavings, beyond the momentary eclipse of the arch, a starlit stone courtyard beyond the horse’s ears, and the animal climbed the cobbled track with a jolt that threw him back against the man that held him. The pain stole his senses for
a moment.
A wall loomed overhead. They passed beneath the threat of the portcullis, and onto a steep, winding, walled ascent, where the pain now lodged in his shoulder found a new summit.
Then he felt that he was falling— being dragged off the horse by creatures he could not recognize. He tried to defend himself and jolted his wound— after which came another darkness, in which he was aware of sound, and movement, and the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobbles.
Beyond that came the swearing of a groom, and other such ordinary sounds as attended a stable-yard. Hell, he decided, had its own mundanity, its solidity, its harried, ill-tempered horse-grooms and bored men-at-arms. He could understand this place.
Some time passed. He had not been aware for a moment, then opened his eyes, and was lying on his back on cold stone, with a light in his face and a woman leaning above him.
It was so strange a sight he struggled to maintain it and to comprehend the vision, whether it was faery or hell or yet some third thing. Lantern light gleamed above the woman’s shoulders like a pair of small suns or the eyes of a misshapen beast. A shadow glistening with gilt embroidery, this dark-haired woman leaned above him, and laid a cool finger on his brow.
“Draw the arrow,” she said, at which he tried to protest that he had had enough of pain and wished simply to die, if die he could, without that further cruelty; but several men came and held him fast.
While they held him, the woman kept her finger in the center of his brow, and a touch of ice and balm went spreading outward from that spot. They moved his arm and it did not much hurt; they cut the shirt then and began to cut the arrow free, which he thought must have gone somewhere about the bone— once came a jolting strange feeling as something grated, but the woman was there, her hand was there, and the pain in his shoulder was only enough to advise him what they were doing. Most clearly he could feel the pull and the working of the arrow, and he looked desperately at the woman as his only source of comfort.
But something changed behind her, and when he looked— he saw the god, the pillar with fixed eyes, the god in the vines and the sheep-fences, Him of the Wheel.
He saw smoke rising in the courtyard, and a dance of shadows writhing across mortared stone.
Then living bodies moved between him and the shadows, and the pain became acute. He heard a thunder in the earth or in his ears.
The barb of the arrow came out, and it seemed the very earth gave way beneath him, so vertiginous the relief, so immediate the panic he felt as the woman took her hand away and the pain hit him anew. It was one red wash across his senses, blurring lights and movements into giddy trails across the night.
The woman’s hand rested again on the wound, and after a little, the agony ebbed to something bearable. “There,” she said gently; and warmth followed, not painful and not quite without pain either, but far, far more ease of body than he had had a moment ago.
“There.” Her hand brushed his brow.
“Beware of her!” a woman’s voice cried, and there followed the sharp sound of a blow, and a man’s curse and other, harder blows.
Trouble surged about him— Ceannann’s foolishness, he thought, recalling that Ceannann’s foolishness had had no little to do with bringing him into his plight. He was angry with Ceannann, and had no sympathy left, while he drifted in that touch and that cessation of an otherwise excruciating pain.
But— Firinne? Had that been Firinne’s voice?
“Who is he?” the woman asked out of the darkness of his sky.
“A wanderer,” said a woman’s voice.
Firinne? He strained to look that way, and did, into the eye-hurting light and impenetrable shadow between the lanterns. He caught a pale gleam just within the edge of the light, indeed, Firinne’s loose hair, and Firinne’s troubled face.
For her, he did feel concern. He tried to lift his head and speak to her, but the sight hazed for him into another whirling cycle of fire and his head fell back against the unforgiving stone.
“A traveler,” said Ceannann’s voice. “He has nothing to do with us. Moragacht, let him go.”
No one let him go. He had no recognition of Moragacht. He lost interest in the conversation and drifted. He tried to go back to that dream he had been having, however grim and dangerous. He had his wits better in order, now, and he might find a way through the silver gate.
But now he could not find the gate at all. All his sight was of a dead forest and a black stream, which poisoned the trees that grew above it.
Chapter Four
Someone moved, with a soft rustling of drapery. That stealthy sound wanted quick attention, and Caith waked among soft cushions, with a dazed, distant memory of hurt.
Daylight slanted dustily into a stone-walled room from a window partially shuttered. A mass of gold and dusk and lavender whispered to his bedside, a richly clad woman who settled on the very edge of his mattress and offered him a jeweled cup.
Do I know this woman? Caith asked himself, bewildered, wondering how he had arrived in this room and this bed ... as if he had fallen back into some foreign, strange existence that he ought somehow to remember if he thought hard enough.
She brought the cup toward his lips and he lifted his head to take the drink. His mouth was dry as dust and his throat was sore, another legacy of a night which seemed to have nothing to do with this place or this moment.
But as the cold rim touched his lips, he suffered a second, frightening doubt, recalling how a drink taken or a morsel of food eaten under a roof might bind a man in hospitality to a house and obligation to a power forever.
So with weak and unhappy resolution, he sank back and refused her offering.
She drew back the cup with a little frown. Then he did not understand why he had not known her— for the woman was none other than Firinne. And he remembered how, at daybreak in the cottage, Firinne had leaned close to him and offered him a cup; and he remembered how he had felt immediately, strangely aroused, as he was now, retaining only a dim thought of present danger and far less concern for an hour from now.
“There is no harm,” she said. Scents of rose and rue laced richly through the warmth and the dusty dryness of the chamber. He heard the beating of his own heart, saw the press of her breasts against her gown, and was enveloped in the whisper of damask and the sweet smell of her as she leaned close to slip her arm beneath his neck. Her lips brushed his brow, his cheek, and his mouth. Her fingers wound into the hair at his nape, and a second time she touched the cool rim of the cup to his lips.
But he had not grown up in blind trust of things as they seemed; and, as a man, he had had shaken what little he thought he knew. He had mistaken her at first. Or now. She leaned over him, her eyes were as sea-glass, her lips full and soft. The wine in the cup moistened his lips, urging his acceptance.
He was not, now, in possession of his wits, and knew it, but he would not slide further down that slope of trust.. A second time he turned his face away and a second time she withdrew the cup.
She let his head down, slipped her arm free, and a gentle hand brushed the hair from his brow and trailed down his neck. “There,” she said, “am I your enemy? Was I ever your enemy? — I had thought not.”
“What manner of place is this?” His own voice fell strange and muffled on his ears, or it was the light-headedness. He reached and felt tentatively of his shoulder. There was only a profound numbness, as if that entire quarter of his body had died to pain or sensation. On its evidence, he could not prove there had ever been an arrow, or a pooka-ride, or such overwhelming pain. Bright sun slanted through the window-slit, through the lazy drifting dust— so he had slept here some little while, however much of the night had remained when the men had hauled him into the courtyard.
But had there ever been such men, if there had been no arrow?
And Firinne, a prisoner in that dark journey, wore her long hair now in elegant braids and rich ribbons and jewels, and had on a damask robe with gilt embroidery that a queen might
envy. How did he reconcile that with memory?
And where was the pain and the threat and the force of this place, that he had experienced last night?
“A far place from your hill,” he murmured, “from your goats and your sheep, goodwife.”
“Hush, enough silliness. I have things to do and you must drink.” Again she slipped her arm beneath him. A third time the cup came to his lips, chill and sweating and smelling of the wine inside. Her bosom was close to him. Her slender arm held him against that soft, perfumed warmth. “For me, sweet, drink. Drink, then lie with me. Be not so stubborn, love.”
Stubborn, or prideful, once lost and knowing himself foolish: for these very faults thegreat Sidhe damned him, too. But he took nothing in faery or on earth on another’s terms, not even so sweet and kind terms as these.
A third time and at the last moment, he turned his face aside, so that some of the wine spilled and ran over his cheek and his jaw and trickled down to pool in the hollow of his throat.
Probably it had run down and stained the sheets, too. Most probably she was angry with him now. For a moment he held his eyes averted, wondering why he must be so contrary a fool to everyone he met, and thinking then that it was most remarkable strength in her slight arm, to hold his head so long against her bosom. Perhaps it was the carrying of water and the spinning of wool that had made a crofter wife so steady and so strong of arm, but he was uneasy and looked back to know what did have him in its embrace.
From the tail of his eye, the woman was not Firinne. The woman holding him was dark of hair, burning of eye and hard of mouth. He felt a moment of acute panic, wondering what had befallen him, wondering how he could know what was the truth at all, and felt the elfshot stone lying against his shoulder, where its cord had disposed it.
But, he reasoned with himself, if she were truly any dark power she would have taken the elfshot from him first.
If a dark Sidhe in fact had the power to take it.
“Drink,”she said. “It would be the better for you.”
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