“Fool, is it, — ye damnable traitor! By dread, and by pain, is it? Damned wretch, you knew, you knew and you Saw this before we ever came to this valley! Dump me off your back— is it not enough? Is it not enough pain now? What in very hell d’ ye ask of me?”
He heard no answer. He staggered free of the bars and with a great breath, grasped his wounded arm by the wrist and hurled that shoulder against the stone wall.
The pain burst and blinded him; he heard Ceannann and Firinne cry out in dismay at his madness; but he stumbled a step away and flung himself at the wall with all the strength left in his legs.
“Dubhain!” he shouted, as the shock reeled through the marrow of his bones. He could not see, could not tell up from down, and an ankle turned. He fell, with another jolt of pain, onto his right hip, and sat there helpless as a child while the fog cleared from his eyes and the pain ebbed down to a measurable pain.
But pain had made itself heard. And the vault in its deepest shadow gave up a dusky, naked figure, all crouched and bowed.
“Dubhain,” Caith said in the voice left him.
Dubhain lifted his face and shook back his hair. The hell-light glowed bright in his eyes and dimmed again. For a moment it seemed not a boy who sat there, but a lump of darkness; a power of faery, as lethal and as quick as the beast.
Then: “Och, man,” said Dubhain, rising to his feet and looking about him, “what a merry place ye choose to lodge in. And in pain ye call’t on me, did ye, man?”
“Get us out of this place, damn you!” Caith doubled in his pain, fighting for mind and breath and control of his chattering teeth. He was on his knees, and the vault around him was fading into red haze. “The witch, the queen here ... herself knows your Name and one other, and she has waked things here you will not like to...”
A shadow rose up in his vision. For a dire moment, a single beat of his heart, he believed it was the beast itself; but it was Dubhain who gathered him up in his arms.
Then the cold and the pain seemed less, and what was human seemed less, in the ebbing away of the world. “Ye hae done well,” said Dubhain against his ear, a breath, and another, that let him get his own wind, and spread healing through him. “Ye great fool.”
“Call me fool, ye thrice-damned wight, call me fool— who got you past the wards! Ye know how oft I called? You know at what cost?”
“Och, aye, man, but did ye need to fall off like a child?”
Caith struggled out of his embrace, hurled himself up, wide-legged, reeling this way and that, indignation lending heat to his limbs and sending the red mist from his eyes. “It was your doing that brought me here! And if ye’d not run straight at them, ye bloody-minded fool, —”
Dubhain tilted his head back. “I, I, bloody-minded?”
“Get us out of this place! Or what are ye worth to anyone?”
Dubhain’s nostrils flared. “’T is iron, man; ’t is iron those wards are, and the pains of hell it takes to breach it, not for the summoner only!”
“Then why did you come here? There are bars, there are chains, there are locks. They do go with castles! What did you ever think to do here?”
Dubhain paced toward the water’s edge, then turned his naked back to that water and to the light. “Why, man,” he said cheerfully, hands spread, “I can ease your pain, is that nae help?”
Caith shook his head and sank slowly to his knees. “A plague on your humors and your jokes, Dubhain. Tell me what to do to get us free. These two have no guilt here.”
“Nae guilt at all? Why, what a wonder we have here— a guiltless man and a guiltless woman! And where is it writ that I should have the knowing and the doing, when ye call me into castles of iron and chains?”
“Then be damned to you! I should have left you in the loch!”
“Nay, nay, now,” said Dubhain, scratching his head and walking bare as any lunatic along the shore, apparently deep in thought. One way he walked, and the other way he walked, and a light like the moon began to reflect on the water within the vault, and on the puddles that formed in his footprints, as if they were filled with pale, soft light.
Wretch, Caith thought. It was never Dubhain’s tracks that pale light attended. Hellfire, yes, marsh-light and will o’ the wisps followed in Dubhain’s wake, but never that pure light, reflecting everywhere now, glistening on the damp stones, with no source visible. Brighter and brighter it grew, until there became a source for it, until a ghostly shape stood above the muddy ground.
Soil his feet? No, not the Daoine Sidhe. That was for mortals. That was for the likes of Caith mac Sliabhan, all blood from head to foot, filthy with mud and sweat, shaking like a leaf in the wind and holding to the bars to keep his feet. Ceannann had ducked his face away, as if the presence blinded him. From Firinne, Caith heard a soft, fearful sob. But he glared steadfastly, as from the footprints on the shore, bars of light went up to the roof of the vault, and silver vines sprouted from them and wove themselves into a shining barrier between them and the loch, up and around and into the stones of the vault.
And the brightness that was the Great Sidhe took on expression and lifted a hand, never yet touching the ground.
“Man,” said Nuallan, holding up a shining bit of silver between his fingers. “This is the key to every lock. Use it, take these two with you, and be gone from here as quickly as you can.”
Caith walked unsteadily from the bars, reached with a grimy hand for the silver key in Nuallan’s immaculate fingers. The metal burned like ice, it sweated in his fingers as if it were melting as ice would melt, and the pain of it stung him half to tears, when he had suffered so much else for no reason.
But complain against the Sidhe? Nuallan might abandon him here for another lesson, more bitter than the last ... and leave him the guilt for two innocents besides.
He dared not look the Sidhe in the eye, lest Nuallan suspect his rebel thoughts. He only brought the key to the lock that held Firinne prisoner. It seared his fingers when he put the faery silver into the iron, and his hands shook with the pain, but the hasp gave, and the lock opened.
“Come out,” he said to Firinne, opening the bars. His hand was hurting so he could hardly hold the key, but he took it to Ceannann’s cell, and opened that lock, too, biting his lip and shaking so he could scarcely, with one hand steadying the other, find the keyhole in the lock.
But once that lock was open the key melted and vanished, and he was left looking at the burns on his trembling fingers, red and deep amid the bloodstains and the mud. It hurt. Oh, gods, it did hurt, and Ceannann seized his hand and cast an accusing glance at Nuallan.
But Caith closed his fingers hard on his before the youth could say a word. “He will leave us,” he warned the boy on what breath he could muster. “Don’t accuse him. He could not have touched the iron himself.”
“Go,” Nuallan said, as if he were dismissing the household servants. “And as you love your lives, be away from this place. The sun is setting.”
“Lord,” Dubhain began, in objection; and flung up his arm against the light of the Sidhe’s sudden, angry regard. For a moment it was the dark shape Dubhain had, with the wild mane and the red eyes; then a hunched and naked boy, head bowed to the ground. That much Caith saw, himself blinded and shielding his eyes from that light.
But as quickly as a dream, it was the red sunset about them, and they were on the open, reedy shore of the loch— Firinne and Ceannann in close embrace beside a naked, kneeling boy . . and a hurt and bloodied man, for whom, after all else, the burned fingers were only an afterthought, a trivial cruelty to make the eyes water and the heart ache with the desire to do murder on the Sidhe and the lady together.
But that was the unredeemed Caith, his father’s son, the hasty, foolish man. The wiser one blinked his streaming eyes at the ebbing daylight outside the gates of the lady’s castle, and asked himself was their freedom now yet another dream within a dream, and himself lying fevered on a roadside, or in the lady’s bed, or in the vault, waiting for
the beast?
Every part of him hurt, that much he knew for certain, and he dreaded at any moment to see the gates opening and the lady’s men-at-arms rushing out to take them back.
“Let’s be away,” he said, and turned to gather up Dubhain. But Dubhain was standing now and staring at the castle in horror plain to see. Dubhain was afraid, and when he caught at Dubhain’s arm to make him move, Dubhain flinched out of his reach and gave a furious shake of his head.
“He is trapped,” Dubhain said frantically. “He is trapped, man! And by your grace she knows his name!”
Nuallan? No. He had seen the clear Sidhe light, he had seen the silver bars and the vines, he had just seen Nuallan standing in clear possession of the field.
“How can he be trapped, wight? He has the castle, he has the key to their locks—”
”And is prisoner within what he holds.” Dubhain’s arms were locked about his naked ribs as if he were freezing. “A shell of his own inside the lady’s magic, he is. A nuisance, a burr, a gall, but nae more than that to her—” Dubhain’s teeth were chattering, his breath hissing with cold, when Dubhain had habitually skipped barefoot on ground that would numb mortal feet, and gone in a thin shirt whatever the season. “That is a wicked, wicked creature, man.”
Nuallan, trapped in the lady’s prison? He could not imagine ... the creature of light, who had sent the silver vines, who had twined them all through the stone vault and barred out the creature of the loch— that was not defeat.
Was it?
And what could the lady do to a Sidhe in her prison— who, Lugh save him, was the only one of the Great Sidhe who might, if only for his own occasional convenience, care about Caith mac Sliabhan?
“What shall we do?” Ceannann asked faintly. “She must not have him. Worse, far worse, than her having us.”
“We must go to our father,” Firinne said.
“Go to your father,” Caith echoed Firinne. Every word he was hearing on this shore seemed full of portent, and echoed off the sunset sky, saying: This is why. This is the Sidhe’s reason for putting us in this mad place.
But none of it fitted together, absent the truth from Firinne and Ceannann.
“And where and who might this father be, woman who is no wife? The father of you both, is he?”
“Come with us,” Ceannann said, already a step and two on his way with Firinne.
No other direction offered itself. Caith caught at Dubhain’s elbow to wake him and draw him away from this fatal place— shook at him again as Dubhain cast a look back at the castle and faltered in his going.
“We can do nothing as we are,” he told Dubhain, “but get ourselves off the witch’s doorstep.” Breath came hard for him, even yet. It was surely only the witch’s preoccupation with Nuallan that let them slip her notice thus far, but they could not dally. He could not walk far or fast, and Dubhain’s strength was all the hope they had. “Don’t think of him,” he warned Dubhain, with a tight hand on his arm. “Don’t look back, ye fool. Don’t be dragging your feet.”
“Nay,” Dubhain said, teeth chattering, and seemed to come to his senses at last, walking more lively, keeping up with them, if limping somewhat. “Och, what hae ye done with my clothes and my belongings? Where did ye lose them, ye clumsy man?”
They were going toward that place, along the track beside the loch. He had seen it in his dream and seen it that night, and he had no doubt at all that they had to go to where Dubhain and he had parted company— that, he thought, must surely be the farthest boundary of the lady’s power.
But it was a long, a terrible walk distant down the loch shore, under the grim witness of the keep.
“Yonder,” he said, already out of breath. “Where you fell. We’ll get them back.” Firinne had never blanched at Dubhain’s nakedness, desperate as they all were— certainly there was no way Dubhain could help his condition, but in a saner mind, and for the sake of Firinne’s modesty, Caith stripped off his own bloody shirt while they walked and passed it to Dubhain. “Wrap that about you.”
“’T is filthy!” Dubhain objected, a flaring of his usual contrariness, as the keep fell further and further behind them. But with no more ado than that, Dubhain wrapped the shirt about himself for a kilt, tied the sleeves together, and strode along at their desperate pace, as short of breath as they all were.
The lady’s power, Caith saw in Dubhain’s weakness, in the power of the stone gods. Dubhain was fighting hard for his freedom to leave now, as Dubhain had not been able to cross the boundary to enter the castle until someone inside had invited him in. No: more than invited— until someone, wicked enough to lure a dark one, had Called Dubhain across the lady’s powerful wards, called him with all the force of geas and Need that their damned bond to each other could muster.
They, he and Dubhain, stuck together like felons bound by a common chain, and, like the simple, rustic wards of the cottage, the great wards of the lady’s keep had suffered damage in Dubhain’s entry?
Suffered so that Nuallan had gotten himself in, and suffered so that somehow Nuallan had flung them outside...
But they not suffered enough that the lady could not suddenly draw the nets of her magic tight— a large fish, was a Sidhe lord; and very small the likes of themselves, to slip away while the lady was startled, for so long as the lady was startled, or busy with the silvery vines that, if they kept on as they had been going, were working and prying at the stones of her keep.
Necessity, Dubhain had said, back in the woods where the beast had hunted through the night and the storm; and he had stumbled into it, no mere whim of Dubhain’s that had brought him to that cottage, to that keep, to this shore. He could damn Nuallan for what he suffered, but even while his mind churned that resentment over, he had to hear Dubhain’s protestations: Nuallan was not where Nuallan wished to be, either, and that was a frightening thought.
Nuallan had freed them and then not been able to free himself? Self-sacrifice was not the Great Sidhe’s habit.
Draiocht and geas. Black sorcery and dire Necessity. Once in dread and once in pain—
Find their father, Firinne said? Well, so fell the last shred of Ceannann’s story. Sibs, they were. And ask why this had aught whatsoever to do with them. They were all of them, and perhaps separately, arrows shot from some power’s bow, but ask whose. Aye, that was the question.
And ask why, when they walked by necessity at the very brink of the loch, where they had greatly to fear the beast, there was now no more than a troubling of the waters near the shore, only a roiling of mud up from the bottom, as if some great fish had come into the shallows and dived deep and suddenly. Perhaps Nuallan was not so helpless as Dubhain feared.
Or perhaps the power that held sway here was diverted, busy at other pleasures.
Then— the same way they had been at one moment in the vault beneath the castle, and been on the loch shore outside the gates, the particular patch of shore they were walking ... was not the same patch of shore.
And when in astonishment Caith turned to look behind him, they were miles farther down the curve of the loch.
The others were looking back, too.
And the castle was a scant dot in the distance.
“He hae flung us out, man,” Dubhain whispered. “Or someone hae flung us out of her domain t’ be quit of us the while. ‘Och, the fool, the fool, she hae got him!”
Chapter Five
A patch of reedy bank at a scant walk back in the direction of the castle, a place where the road ran perilously close against the loch. In the mortal sense there were a dozen like it, and in the fading twilight every place along this cursed shore looked as unsavory as the rest of it, but Caith himself had no doubt it was the place where they had fallen. Dubhain at a certain step paused— flared his nostrils with a deep breath as if he were about to dive deep, tossed his head, then waded into the reed-choked water, searching for something.
“Have a care,” Ceannann said, and Caith thought of the ripples they had seen
farther down the shore.
As for why Dubhain had suddenly caught his breath before touching that water, he felt, even with his mortal senses, the heaviness of the air.
“A care, ye say?” Dubhain had just found something in the calf-deep water, and bent and snatched it up in a dusky, strong fist, triumphant. The stone, Caith guessed, that stone which a creature of Dubhain’s shape-shifting kind had always about him.
And in his recovering it, the wicked sparkle came back to Dubhain’s eyes and the confidence flowed into his movements.
Nor was Dubhain done with his searching. He went poking about with his toes and feeling about him in the peat-strawed water of the loch edge, a very soup of floating peat and unhealthy reeds that clung about Dubhain’s bare legs and questing arm.
“Ah!” said Dubhain, and bent again and retrieved the sword— of course, the sword, the cursed thing. Caith caught it crosswise as Dubhain cheerfully tossed it to him. It weighed what he remembered, it filled his hand with a known and familiar shape, it settled into his possession like a bad habit, a source of confidence he had far rather not rely on in the world.
“’T is no cleaner for its bath,” he muttered sullenly, wishing he did have the fortitude to leave it in the mud, but faery would not abide that challenge. The Sidhe would surely devise some way for him to regret losing it before the sun slipped below the horizon— as the sun was fast doing now.
The waters of the loch were less and less to trust, where Dubhain was splashing about to wash the peat off his legs. “Come out,” Caith said, “before you make a supper for what lives there. If your clothes went in, they’re gone altogether.”
“No, here,” said Ceannann, who was making his own search on dry land. “This would be it, perhaps.”
It was indeed Dubhain’s small bundle that Ceannann had found among the reeds, dry and clean, as Caith himself was not. Caith frowned as Dubhain held up his hands for it and Ceannann tossed it at him.
Caith shot out a hand and caught it instead, put-upon and angry with the Sidhe andtheir luck.
Faery Moon Page 18