Dubhain said, against his ear: “Man, ye’re going. Mind where ye wander when ye dream, tonight. Her nets are spread wide.”
That sent a chill through him. He tried to draw back from the edge of a sleep so precipitate and so needed he felt his wits scattering in all directions. But Dubhain whispered, then, “I shall carry ye tonight, my Caith. Ye stay close wi’ me....”
And he was carried in a rocking silence that took on the easy nature of a horse’s motion, with never yet a sound except the thunder. He rode, in this dream.
Then the air was under them, and the loch water was a black pit below the mountain. Beware the beast, he tried to warn Dubhain, even knowing he was dreaming, but he could make not a sound. Lightning flashed around them, and Dubhain’s pooka shape ran at easy stretch in the flickering light. The hellfire was banked and lazy in the eye he could see from time to time, a glassy rim of red. The lightnings reflected in that eye, more pure and more placid than the fire that glowed therein. The lightning flickered over Dubhain’s sleek hide and lit the windswept walls of the glen They soared high, high above the troubles and the fear in the place.
Then Dubhain struck some slope in the sky, and it was down and down, a long leap headlong toward the loch itself. Caith clung to Dubhain’s neck, and he might have cried out— at the very moment Dubhain hit some level in the air that pleased him and he ran well above the water.
Dubhain’s stride was smooth, but the pace became a gallop now, effortless, as seemed— Dubhain was satisfied, Caith thought, having scared him with that descent.
But it was a perilous place they had come to. From moment to moment in the lightnings and ahead and below, he could see the lady’s castle crouched like a living creature at the end of the loch. Lower they swept. “Be careful!” he said, and bit his lip, for the pooka-shape was contrary, and took its inspirations from his warnings.
Lower still, at the level of the tower roofs they came; and Caith gripped the smoke of the pooka’s mane, recalling how Dubhain had gone out from under him at the lady’s borders, had turned to smoke and vanished ... or had that been another dream?
They flew above the keep of Dun Glas and, close in, Caith saw the faint cold gleam of moon-silver pouring through the bars of the lochside vault and onto the black waters of the loch itself. It was a faint gleam, but a sign of the Sidhe held and holding there, still alive.
“M’ lord,” Caith said in this dream, although he knew Nuallan was likely too far to hear him.
Or, it being a dream, Nuallan could hear him very well.
And that made calling on him a foolish thing to do.
Then a second dream opened like a door within his dream— a black plunge toward the castle, in the heart of which the lady waited, bespelling him, weaving magics— he did not know how he knew this, but he heard the thunder of the cauldron, the blackness and the fire was all about him.
Danger, he thought ... and Dubhain shied up and skyward with him, snorting and shaking his mane, up and up, with great leaps of his black, lean body.
Only when he was high above the loch did Dubhain settle to a long, free-running stride, up where the wind blew, a wind no longer cold, only an element in which they moved, more swift than thought or wishes.
Caith no longer knew where they were, or where they were going, but the flight was high and it was wild and it shot through the crooked course of the lightnings and the deafening buffets of thunder. The whole sky ripped asunder in front of them in a white, jagged rent, and Dubhain leapt above that stroke of destruction, sailed through a thunderclap so great it shocked Caith’s heart and mind at once.
For an instant he was numb. Then he caught the rhythm of the running and the malice and the freedom a man could not, dared not, should not learn to love.
It was Dubhain’s own dream he was slipping into. He tried to remember he was a man, and that he could not fall down to the beast like Dubhain and ever come back again, but wild laughter raced under him like a shaking of the earth, headed for a plunge like a suicide off the edge of the sky.
“Dubhain!” he cried, but they were already gone, a dive like a bat, sheer delirious plummet through the wind.
And with a clap of thunder, the earth was abruptly under him.
He jolted aware in Dubhain’s embrace, under a sudden spatter of cold rain, with the patterns of lightning still branded in his eyes.
They had never left the ruin at all. The lightning flickered and flashed and the thunder rolled above their heads. The rain poured down in a fitfully-lit veil outside their sheltering arch.
He was not cold now. The wind and the rain soaked him and soaked Dubhain, vast grey curtains of it blowing across the ruin in the lightning flashes, a storm churning about their mountain that made trivial the violence of the mortal world, a force as great and as wild and heartless as the magics of the Sidhe.
Men perished in such storms. Their houses and the works of their lifetimes were swept away in an instant. What cared such forces?
It needed a while to recover his own self, while he lay half-awake and warm and letting the flashes blind his eyes and the heartless power run through his mind.
He had to find again the measure of his own thoughts, had to take in the feeling of the mountain, the essence of the Sidhe, different than himself. He had to feel the simple, mundane fact of soaked clothing and the limits of mortal wit and mortal senses— that was where Caith mac Sliabhan touched the world. That was all the wisdom he had, that he wished the cold and the discomfort back, to be sure he was a man and no other than that.
The storm blew past in a last spatter of wind-blown drops. Came a silence then as dreadful as the storm, when a man could lie against unnatural warmth and remember the night at a distance.
But by the first touch of the daylight the recollection of it began to fade like any dream, leaving him only pale, water-puddled stone, the huddled shapes of Firinne and Ceannann in deeper shadow, their fair heads bowed together in slumber, and themselves all damp with rain.
Thunder muttered in the far distance, as the storm walked away over the loch and down the end of the valley.
Beside him, Dubhain stirred and stretched, dislodging him from his warm rest.
“A fair dewy dawn,” said Dubhain, arching his back and looking at the sky. “And the pretty pair all asleep yet. What shall we do and where shall we go now to amuse us, me darlin’ Caith?”
“Give over,” Caith said glumly. His stomach was empty, he was soaked to the skin, and far and long from his last meal. “Find us something to eat, kind Dubhain, fair Dubhain, can you manage?”
“Och, we begin a day with polite asking. How rare.”
“I do ask, Dubhain, most politely.”
“Why, then, let us see.” Dubhain scrambled up with a lightness which Caith could in no wise match, swept a grand bow and skipped off through the doorway, downward bound through the shadows.
Then, while Firinne and Ceannann slept, Caith gathered himself up in the grey morning light and went as far as the tumbled ruin of this, its uppermost level, and up a short and rickety wooden stairs to what had been a walk along a defensive wall.
The world was wide from that view: the mountains, the broad valley, the hills in velvet folds, and a score of waterfalls likely sprung to life in the rain last night, white threads on dark rock, where bright streams ran down to the loch and whatever lay beyond.
There the streams would find escape or fall into the loch— but by the placement of this fortress here, and by the fold of the mountains he saw, he would wager his only shirt there must be a pass through the mountain ridge, just in that fold nearest. This keep had been built on this difficult height for some reason, most likely to guard that narrow water below, either keeping something in or keeping something out— and either circumstance indicated a passage existed there, at about that point.
Yet, unassailable as this fortress might have seemed to attackers, it had fallen to some violence, and the owners had not rebuilt it. By the unrotted condition of the
wooden steps— he gave the railing a small shake— it had fallen within mortal memory.
That told a tale of sorts: a fall, not all that long ago, but either forgotten or the land left so desolate around about it that not even the remnant of its country folk durst come here— not a single living soul to plunder it of iron for smithing or stone and wood for cottages and fences.
With the lady of Dun Glas for a neighbor, there might be a reason the humble folk stayed away. The country folk might say there was a curse on the place— but he thought not. Although he often could feel the harm clinging about such a place, he felt nothing harmful in these stones, this walkway. He felt— if anything, a pervading sense of sadness and confusion.
A slighter wind whistled about this exposed height, a wind cold and damp with recent rain, urging him to go down, and he set carefully in his memory that prospect of Loch Fiain and that fold of mountains. That was a way they might walk safely out of this cursed glen, bearing generally west. That was what he had climbed up to this chill height to know, and it was enough He took the shaky stairs down to the roofless hall, with its sheltering arches.
Firinne and Ceannann had waked. They watched him now, the two of them sitting together in their shelter.
“We should make a fire,” he said to them as he came down the steps. “There’s wood enough about, and Dubhain is off catching breakfast of some sort.”
“Aye,” Ceannann agreed, and rose stiffly.
“Would we’d had a fire last night,” Caith said. “Will the room down there vent enough through the doors, do you think?”
“There is a hearth down there,” Ceannann said, “if the chimney still draws.”
Still draws, saith the lad. The boy knew what ruin had been hid in pitch-black last night.
That was curious, Caith said to himself.
And Ceannann disappeared into the dark interior of the vault below.
So the boy knew the lay of things. Their father’s castle, was it? And they had been here while it stood.
And yet they had camped out in the cold last night, choosing the storm.
Well, well, he thought, it had been a dark hole of a place last night. But fire down in that close vaulted room might dry their clothes this morning. Warm fire, warm stone ... they could sit a while in a closed space with a good blaze in a fireplace and the stones giving back warmth instead of chill, and the Badbh take the witch and her men.
The witch’s men might smell the smoke, might well see it. That was worth a second thought.
But the old place still had its defensive virtues. Let them come huffing and puffing their way up here, all a-straggle and poking into things. If they had to deal with the witch’s men, he could like those odds.
And warm clothes and warm bones were worth the risk, this morning.
So he thought, intending to lend a hand to the fire-making— until he took that first step down into that shadowy vault.
Then all cheerfulness drowned in an oppression so thick it seemed to come in on his drawn breath.
Last night he had felt a little of that feeling. This morning it was thick and close, despite the dim sunlight from the broken doorway, and he wanted immediately back up out of this room and this level of the ruin.
But Ceannann, down there in the wan light, was paying it no heed at all, and pride held a grown man from bolting back up to the daylight and leaving the boy alone. If it was a haunt in the place, it was also daylight out, now, which limited the power of ghosts. The baneful kind would not love the daylight. Besides, a comfortable fire usually kept such ghosts quiet, at least until nightfall. A bit of bread or a sup of beer could sometimes do still better than that to appease the lonely dead.
And there was indeed that fine broad fireplace, in which Ceannann was, fearless of haunts, or deaf to them, peering up the chimney, doubtless looking for bird’s nests.
The lad seemed right at home in the place— knowing there was a fireplace here, and all.
Considering that there was Sidhe magic involved with the pair, he had not trusted Ceannann even before this sudden familiarity with the lay of this place.
A little mad, Dubhain called their kind, and talked about the sun and lies.
Dazzle and dance, Dubhain had said last night, and something about trickery.
A shadow dimmed the light from the door above. Caith looked that direction in some alarm; but it was only Firinne, venturing into the upper doorway and down onto the steps.
“The chimney is clear,” Ceannann said, looking up, and got up and set to work, dragging over a fallen timber from the damaged mason-work around the outer door— a heavy piece, nor easy to move.
Caith came the rest of the way downstairs and helped him settle it by the hearth, and Ceannan laid into it, using a stone for an axe, and it did not break willingly, Sidhe magic or no. His heavy pounding produced only a few splinters.
“It must have been green oak they used,” Caith observed. He was about to say that his sword might split off a few splinters, loath as he was to dull its edge on hard oak.
“’T is what we have, man,” Ceannann said angrily, and went at it in increasing temper, smashing as much of the stone as of the wood and putting his fingers at risk.
Caith said not a thing more. He wanted no quarrel with any Sidhe: and if the sun-born Sidhe had not a trick or two better than that with the fire-making, Ceannann was the only one going to get warmth out of that wood until Dubhain turned up.
But that was no surprise. The Sidhe were quick to temper and arrogant, the lot of them fancying themselves better than Men.
Fair dark ones, had Dubhain called them, or had his wits been all addled last night? The saying had made no sense to him, except it wound round and round the thunderous memories of the witch’s chamber, and the old gods, the staring-eyed stone gods, those that the young gods had sent to hell....
What were the sun-born kind? Not Lugh’s offspring. But not Dubhain’s kind, either. The watery sort, Dubhain had said— and sun-born at the same time.
Not to be trusted. Hair like sunlight and something of the dark and watery depths about them. He kept his shoulder turned to Firinne this morning. He kept his eyes and his thoughts alike from resting on her, looking only toward the hour he and Dubhain could put this place at their backs and be away from the witch, the twins and all their troubles.
But they could not. Ties held them. Geas ensnared them. Theirs to Nuallan— his to Dubhain and Dubhain’s to him— and this pretty pair who had given them food and drink under their roof. ’T was he who had been fool enough to accept.
Draiocht and geas. A web of all too many strands. He had been glad to wake this morning. He had felt much more sanguine in the daylight, until he had come down into this room, until he witnessed Ceannann in his fit of temper. Perhaps it was the oppressive feeling here, that made him want to dash to safe daylight. Perhaps that was what had turned Ceannann to wrath and unreason.
He could tell the pretty pair he was going to stand guard outside. He could let them stir the shadows here if they liked, fools they. Fool anyone who—
Stones rumbled and clattered. Firinne had pulled a piece of wood from the tumbled stones in the far corner of the room, and, having scared him and her brother alike, she dragged over a shattered piece of wood as dry as the dust she had raised.
A helpful woman, Caith thought, more forgivingly: let Firinne deal with her brother and his temper.
And should he offer his sword to the work now that Ceannann had bashed himself all red-faced and panting? Should he carry the heavy, dusty thing for the lass?
Not he. He stood and watched, arms folded, while Ceannann turned his efforts to the piece Firinne had brought. The easier kindling quickly made a heap in the hearth, the rock-hard few splinters of the oak beam went inside it, and Ceannann and Firinne, bending close to the fireplace to shelter their work, waved at him to stand just so to block the wind.
He did that small service for them, at least, and watched, from his respectful and safe vanta
ge, waiting for sun-born magic, something better than bashing wood with blunt stone.
But for his sole magic, Ceannann pulled out a fire-kit from his pouch— flint and steel and an ordinary little packet of oiled willow-shreds, the lady’s guards having evidently neglected to rob the lad of his personal possessions. Caith was mildly disappointed, wondering were this only a pretense they were maintaining for the mortal fool— an inconvenient pretense, if it was, and a slow and a chilly one, involving a great deal of whacking flint against steel, and a great deal more display of an unseemly, surly temper.
Mad, Dubhain had said of the sun-born folk. Full of tricks and lies. Crofters they might have been, but if that was their fire-making, well if they never let the hearth go out.
Yet Dubhain called them Sidhe. And tied to this place— Run to it unerringly, moreover, in the storm last night.
Then he remembered the elfshot stone he wore, which might show him the truth of them.
Durst he? Should he?
And meanwhile Ceannann, having drawn a wavering little flame out of the wood, seemed suddenly in bright good humor, pleased with himself. The fire at last lit, Ceannann began feeding it, and Firinne got up, she said, to go after more of the dry wood.
“The other will burn, now,” Caith said, forestalling her. Her tugging carelessly at timbers among the rocks in the corner, stones that had held their place for no few years, now, might loose a slide from above or below, and he had no wish to have the whole vaulted room come down on their heads.
So he squatted down and used his sword to hack off a few splinters, if that kept the fire fed and kept Firinne from starting a rockslide in the ruins. Sidhe were all a touchy lot, by his experience, and he saw no usefulness at all in breaching whatever pretense they chose to keep with their flint and their steel. If they wished to do things in the manner of ordinary folk, that was well, let them, and be polite and pass the wood. They had touched both flint and steel, as they had touched the iron bars ... that was worth remembering.
But that they could touch iron proved nothing, except that the dark in them must be stronger than the light, the same way that Dubhain could pick up his sword from the loch— albeit with no great desire to carry it far.
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