“Three times no,” he said hoarsely, remembering more and more vividly the courtyard of the castle and the lanterns and the hands that had both healed and hurt. The woman was Firinne again, to the straight gaze of his eye. She cradled his head steadily against her bosom, stroked his cheek and waited for his compliance.
But three times was a magic number. It was a barrier against faery he had drawn about him by those three refusals.
And perhaps his head was the clearer by it, because he considered the space of a breath or two before challenging her further, and wondered if perhaps there had never been a Firinne at all. Firinne, if she were a wife to Ceannann, had not behaved with any wifely loyalty, that early morning in the cottage, and him a stranger, and her husband asleep, and the house in uneasiness with the recent s storm.
Perhaps if there was a changeling involved, the substitution had happened long ago, and the changeling might seem one thing to one man’s eyes, and have a completely different seeming to another man. Perhaps, he thought, that was the strange likeness of Firinne and Ceannann. Perhaps there had never been a lady of Dun Glas, or a harper, or any of the nonsense Ceannann had told him, and it was all, all Ceannann and Firinne themselves who warred with magic and arrows in the dark.
But everything he knew had been Ceannann’s story, none of Firinne’s.
And where had Ceannann gone and what had become of him who— he thought— had held him with some gentleness on the ride here, and defended Firinne with some measure of courage?
He thought he remembered that for the truth. He was confused about what he did remember, but that made him less, rather than more, trustful.
And perhaps at last the woman’s arm did grow weary or her patience had worn thin: she slipped her arm from beneath him and withdrew the cup.
She was slighter than Firinne. When he expected to see something different, he could see the signs of age about her mouth from moment to moment, tiny fracturings which drew down in anger.
And knowing that she had meant to deceive him and perhaps to do him greater ill than her men had done, there was no reason in all the world why he could not reach out even one-handed and make her his prisoner, and thereafter get himself free of this castle and all its riddles.
But as he chanced to look full into the lady’s eyes, he found himself incapable of doing violence against her, any more than he could have flung himself from Dubhain’s back in full flight.
(Yet that fall had indeed happened. And Dubhain was not here, when they could in no wise be parted.)
She sat there on his bedside a long while, silent and unmoving long enough for her to become a shadow in his vision. He became, in the way of his fevered wits, more keenly aware of the sunlight beyond the shadow she was— aware of the light picking out a haze of dust motes and becoming a veil over boxes and shelves and cupboards, all of the same woods, appointments such as a comfortable bedroom might hold. Only the dust was in motion, only the dust proved to him that the whole world had not ceased movement, and only the sunlight proved to him that the world was going about its ordinary business outside this room, and beyond the lady’s shadow.
Then, subtle and slow as the movement of the dust, he began to feel the stirrings of her magic. By such infinitesimal degrees the pain in his shoulder began again, so that it must have been growing for some few moments before it even drew his attention— pain most acute where the arrow had struck, as if the healing were slowly, inexorably unweaving itself.
All this while, the lady settled on the edge of his bed, silent, with the cup in her hand, with a meditative look on her face, and him knowing the comfort in that cup she offered, but not the price of it— except a man might guess, and fear what she was. She had no pity. She had no kindness. He understood that now. She was waiting for him to realize what was happening to him and then to take fright and beg the cup of her.
Of the Daoine Sidhe, aye, of lord Nuallan, he might beg a favor, but, then— the great Sidhe might give it, if it pleased lord Nuallan so to give, and give like a lord, he would, because it pleased him to do good sometimes, for its own sake.
But the lady who waited so patiently and so demurely for a sign of terror in him, while the pain grew and grew, while his skin seemed to part and moisture to run down beneath his arm and soak the mattress— in her— in her, he told himself, there was no spark of generosity, and be damned to her.
“There is the cup,” she reminded him quietly, at last, stroking his face when the pain had made him near mindless, and the fear of dying had traded places with a fear that he would live far too long. She offered the cup a fourth time.
“Do not reject me. Take it. It is healing, it is surcease of all your pain, love. Your suffering is all your own doing.”
“No, it is not!” He had learned of Dubhain and Nuallan to suffer no lies in patience, and not to be put upon. He knew the wiles of the Sidhe and, in his agony, this accusation and blame-shifting sounded so very, damnably, cursedly like them, offering help with the one hand and taking a man’s soul with the other. “Three times and nine times no, and to hell with you, madam.”
“Have it as you will,” she declared; and abruptly took her weight from the bedside, which slight shift of the mattress sent agony through him. A wave of giddiness came over him as his life went flooding out, soaking his shirt and the bedclothes. He was dying, and because she was lurking in the world, he did not grasp at all after life or beg her for anything. He bent his fading sense instead to find that green place again, that river, that shore, for it was his dearest hope (and one he had never confessed to Dubhain) that Nuallan might, at his last breath, receive him.
But it was only desolation he found, a grey waste, a barren shore, and a dead, chill loch. A black horse was running in that wilderness, red of eye, trailing a mane and tail like smoke as it turned toward him.
“Dubhain!” he cried, holding out his arms in the faint and only hope that the Sidhe had sent Dubhain for him, and that the ride was not, after all, to hell, but to faery for good and for ever this time.
The pooka thundered down on him and reared up at the last instant, its hooves above his head. Then it diminished in the blink of an eye. Dubhain stood there, naked, his eyes glowing with that same bright hellfire.
“Have you come to carry me?” Caith asked. And with no little trepidation: “And where must you take me, Dubhain?”
“Why, t’ is yourself maun carry me,” Dubhain said, so unexpectedly he knew it was a dream of meaning, or perhaps he had truly come to this bleak place on the rim of faery, and his body was growing cold in the lady’s bed. Me, me, me, the hills gave back, with a peal like iron bells, so he could not forget it, even through the pain.
The cold wind roared and chill knifed at his wound; me, me, me, the hills still said, but Dubhain faded away.
Then the hills themselves did. Something wrenched at his very soul, while it clung tenaciously to his body, wrenched until he was spinning naked in the winds, above the retreating hills,and falling backward, and headfirst.
His shoulders landed, thump! against the mattress.
The lady took her hand from his shoulder, all besmirched with blood.
“...There, now,” she said. “’T will not bleed your life away.”
But the pain was no less. It settled at the seat of his joints and the roots of his teeth and the floor of his bowels and hurt with every beat of his heart.
“There remains,” the lady said, with his blood still on her fingers, “the cup. — You will not die, man. Never expect that mercy. Drink, or I will pour it out now. Will you have the pain or will you have the cup?”
She leaned above him, a smell of perfume turned sharp with fever and with blood. She took the cup from the bedside and offered it to him again. It was difficult to frame a word at all, so acute and all-consuming was the pain.
Fool, and: fool, said a voice, his own sanity, perhaps, retreating deep inside him: it hurts so, take it, take it while you can. Of what matter to you is another master or an
other mistress? Can two worse be than one? Take the cup, and let the lady and the bright Sidhe battle it out if they covet you so.
“No,” said the sullen voice that burst out of him, his damnable pride or the Sidhe’s own answer, he had no least idea.
Then slowly, in his stricken gaze, she tipped the cup and poured out the liquid that promised ease of pain. It was red like blood, it made a thick stream, and it spattered her skirts where it fell.
“You will greatly regret it,” she said. “You will pray me that I ask again, before I am done with you.”
He turned his face from her and her threats, reeled back, dizzied, against the blood-soaked bedclothes, and sought only to breathe between the tides of hurt.
There was silence a moment. Then she dropped the cup ringing on the stone floor. The ringing became a booming, a thunder of a great cauldron overset on the stones, a cauldron that rumbled and rocked to rest. Its depths were darkness and within that darkness were the old Images, the hammer and the hanging noose, in a throng of staring images, not Sidhe, but the blank-eyed gods of the grove and the torches...
Came the sharp grit of dust between sole and stone, and the rustle of heavy skirts passing his bed. He blinked at the dust-motes dancing their vital, timeless motion in mortal sunlight. Only the smell of roses lingered as the steps gritted away, away, away above his head. He heard the door open, but not—
— not shut. That, through all the haze of misery, came clear to him.
He tilted his head back despite the pain, saw the cup and not the cauldron lying on the stones, saw not the lords of the dead, but cabinets, and the door left open wide, wide as the window that let in the healing sun.
He clenched his teeth and struggled to raise himself from the blood-soaked mattress. If he could once get on his feet, he thought, his head would be clearer. If he could once get his body to move, he could overcome the pain.
Better the window, he decided. If he could get out it unseen, if he could get to the roofs and over the walls of this place— or, if nothing was in reach, it had to be the hall, there to find some weapon against the lady’s magic, dark magic, stone magic, the cauldron of the death-god, and the hammer of the slayer. He had found it in the vines. He had thought it powerless, but it ruled here. Old magic. Draiocht from the stone time. That was what this woman served.
Against the cauldron and the hammer he had the Sidhe magic, that had not utterly deserted him. And there was mortal iron, which at the moment, he trusted more— Macha, if he could find him a sword, his own sword ... or anyone’s at all ... and get him out of this place....
The sweat broke out on his skin as he swung his feet off the bed, and felt his shoes there— foolish, that small delay might be, but he had no idea where he was going, or over what, through the window and over the roof slates, perhaps, thereafter, onto sharp, stony ground— it was no help to cripple himself.
The cup stayed a cup and the wine made a puddle on the floor in front of him. The dust danced in the wind from the open door. Well enough. He drew on the ragged stockings, one-handed and sweating. He arranged his shoes and slipped his feet into them, everything in good order.
But when he straightened to stand up, his head spun, and he caught at the bedstead. He pulled himself up, fighting the weakness and the descent into dark— took a step, tried to fix his sight on the sunlight and the dust, but the whirling dance confused him, and his weakened knees at the second step forgot which way to bend. He went down with his arm on the edge of the bed, knocking a small table against the wall with a scrape and clatter like doom.
The hall outside rang with alarm and running footsteps. The hell with the door, then, he said to himself, and, bracing his other arm against the mattress, tried to turn for the window and get a knee under him, as armed men spilled into the room. In his ears the death-cauldron was booming again, and he looked around at the men, slack-jawed, in hopes of them doing for him what he could not manage at the moment, and lifting him to his feet.
There were four of them that he could see, armed in metal and leather, and their cloaks were grey. Bandits, he would have judged such a scowling lot of faces outside a lady’s bower; but servants of her magic, they might be, servants of the cauldron, of the ringing hammer, the stone magic, the flint way ... Ye fools, he thought to say to them, to warn them he served other, younger powers. Fools, he should tell them, the old gods have gone below. The Sidhe have their gates locked, the silver, unaccustomed gates ... locked against them.
But he owed them not even that much warning, reckoning the bloodiness they served.
Pain shot through his arm with their laying hands on him, but he had measured that before it came, as he had marked the dagger that came within his reach as they drew him up. He had but to reach out for it and return it beneath its owner’s jaw— but the man fell on him, then, leaving it stuck fast in bone as the man’s weight carried him backward against the bed. Life’s blood flooded onto his hand and chest as he slid down, as if there was not enough of his own about. He slid off the mattress edge and, with all the strength he had left, twisted over and flung himself up to gain the door, balance deserting him.
He was already falling before one of them fell atop him. He struck the stone floor with one man’s weight on his back; with others hauling at his arms, and thereafter he could make only small, miserable movements of his limbs, sick with pain, as they lifted him up by the sound arm and the wounded one.
The cauldron boomed again, a deep, hollow sound: the womb of death, the vessel of rebirth, the instrument of the old gods’ power. The stone walls and the cupboards spun giddily about. The stone gods stared at him, with cold, blank eyes. The pain came and went in flashes that blinded him to the light as they half-carried him for the hall— but he was aware of the doorway, and tried to resist there, bracing his foot.
They dragged him past it. He saw a projection of stone halfway down the hall, braced his foot and his knee and tried resistance there, but he could not hold it.
Beyond that was dark and flashes of light, whirling comets of torches and the eyes of staring gods.
Then the banging of a doorway, a spiraling descent down stone steps, in a dizzy confusion of sun from window-slits and the echoing thunder and darkness between. Shouts echoed from below and above as they went down and down, amid the clatter of metal-guarded boots and the rattle of scale and mail.
An open space gaped suddenly on the right, a blur of dim light, in which, astonishingly vivid, a vaulted ceiling arching down to earth and water, closed off with bars.
Down a last flight of steps they haled him, to a vast, muddy-floored space beneath that barrel vault. Water lapped in pewter daylight beyond that grating and half filled the width of the vault itself, where it made a muddy bank.
Here they hurled him onto wet, dark earth, and one cursed him bitterly and kicked him twice in the groin before he could double to protect himself.
“Stop!” someone cried, and the next blow did not come.
In bewilderment, in the booming of the cauldron and the trailing flare of grey sunlight, he turned his face from the wet earth, trying to determine whether this intervenor had help for him, or some other claim on him.
Firinne’s pale face shone through black iron bars.
And in her presence he did try: he hurled himself for his feet in his guards’ distraction and snatched at a dagger in a man’s belt. Blows rained on the back of his head and his shoulders, but he kept his hold on the hilt while the man wrestled with him to prevent his drawing it.
Then an arm slipped around his neck and hauled at him, that weight and another one bearing him down, the third man suddenly pulling and not pushing. He came down on that man, facing the grating again, in doubt of his sanity— for it was not Firinne imprisoned behind the bars, but Ceannann. And the booming and thunder drowned all sound in his ears.
Things after that went very slowly. He saw Ceannann flinch and avert his eyes from the beating the guards gave him, but he watched Ceannann, wondering why he
was there watching. Eventually, weary of kicking him on the ground, the guards dragged him up to hit him. He floated through the air sidelong, it taking a long time until he hit the muddy ground, which came all too hard and sudden, and jolted his wound beyond all enduring.
“Dubhain!” he murmured through the blood, thinking the guards gone, and rubbed at the film blurring his sight. “Nuallan, lord, —”
Once in dread, once in pain, once in bitter anguish.
“Dubhain!” he cried. “Lord Nuallan!”
“Names are useful,” a guard said, dragging him up halfway by the hair. He blinked at that film-darkened sight, dismayed at his own foolishness, and the guard, for his part, grinned at him before he flung him down like a soiled rag and kicked him in the wounded shoulder.
They could have killed him, then. He could no longer prevent any blow they chose to give him, and a few more blows did fall, desultory, none so devastating as that one, before they exhausted their energies or their imagination and went away up the stairs.
A door thundered shut. A bolt shot and echoed through the vault. He wondered dazedly whether it would hurt worse to turn his cheek from the disgusting mud, or to go on lying there, and whether that sogginess he felt under him was water or his own blood.
Water lapped. Water dripped. The least sound echoed in this place, but the booming and the thundering had ceased.
“Is he dead?” a high voice said clearly, and the scuff of a foot resounded on stone.
No, he thought. He could not possibly be so fortunate as to be dead. The lady had promised him that.
“I see him breathing,” a lower voice said. Ceannann’s, he thought. “Better he were dead.”
For a time he could not move. Perhaps the lady’s men would come back for more amusement, or perhaps let him lie. If he lay long enough he supposed he might get breath enough to fight them again, but his wounds were all new and, by his experience, had a day or so to go before they hurt their worst.
At which time, if no better happened, he would still be here, for whatever disposition they chose to make of him.
Faery Moon Page 16