So Ceannann could carry steel on his person and work with it.
And, now that he recalled the pots in the cottage, only one of which had been copper, Firinne could deal with an iron kettle, and an iron pot-hook, and had used an ordinary knife for her bread. Lord Nuallan, he was sure, could not even eat the bread an iron knife had cut.
Wards, the two of them had set up in their little cottage— against all faery, was it? Or only a certain kind of fay?
And had they not recognized Dubhain’s nature, when Dubhain had skipped, invited, through their doorway and those wards had slipped quietly down?
Blind, the draiocht could make one ... but against whom else were their wards, if not only the lady?
And why had their breaking those wards made it sure the house would fall to the lady’s men, who had nothing of the fay about them that he could see?
It was the luck, he supposed. The breaking of the luck of the house would do it— but were they such common stuff, these rustic wards, the wards against which the lady, She of Dun Glas, had been working all this time?
Unable to breach rustic wards, she next put out her nets and snared a lord of the Sidhe?
She had let them fall through the mesh in the doing of it ... far smaller fish than Lord Nuallan.
So surely the siblings’ luck had not all turned against them.
And perhaps the twins to this hour were steadily working a magic that took all their effort, and they would not let power go out of them, only to make simple fires, this close to the witch’s land.
So he sat at their fire with arms crossed on his knees, thinking bleak thoughts and wondering what they were, and having no certain answers for his wonderings at all.
The little fire they had made had been gold, bright gold ... but with the adding of more splinters, it had gotten to be a very bright little fire, suddenly and uncommonly hot, just as the fire on one side of the hearth went from gold to an unnatural blue.
Ceannann sat back on his heels and stopped feeding it, and Caith looked at it amazed, sure he was finally about to see something of sun-folk magic ... as the blue-centered gold ran down the splinters like a rime of light.
The blue fire met the dusty stone of the hearth and spread from there. It raced up the wood it touched and covered it. Gold-rimed blue became black-hearted then, and the blackness grew until the blue was only the thin outer shell of it.
Dark fire, Caith thought, his hand straying uneasily to his sword. That was certainly no wholesome thing.
Then, at the heart of the black, a gray wisp like smoke appeared. Where that smoke was, the wood turned quickly to red embers, and the fire snapped and spat red sparks across the hearth. Caith jumped at the sting of an ember and scrambled up to his feet and stepped back. So did Ceannann and Firinne.
The white wisp showed twin darknesses placed like eyes. And the twins retreated, not the masters of it, no.
Moragacht, was Caith’s immediate fear. He hovered in doubt whether they dared douse the fire, and what they had to hand to put it out.
Then the fire roared up with a rush, consumed all the wood at once. The death’s-head in the smoke formed jaws and filled its empty sockets with the shadow of sullen, living eyes.
“Murderer,” the apparition said— it seemed to look straight at Caith, and Caith’s own guilty soul said, fearfully, It knows me.
The fire seemed to suck away all the warmth it had just given him. The stifling closeness of the stone room seemed overwhelming, an oppressive weight on his soul.
“Murderer,” the ghost said louder, eyes roving to the world at large. It was no longer speaking to him, it seemed, and Caith dared draw a breath again, chilled and shaken.
Now only the eyes of the apparition remained, a double trail of fire that whirled suddenly about the walls and toward the rubbled steps where Firinne had gotten the timbers.
It wanted something up there, Caith thought, up to a doorway which stood in ruins, a dark doorway filled with rubble.
But, frustrated and angry at what it found, it shot around the walls faster and faster, up and down and around and around, while they ducked and dodged. It was not them it was seeking at all: Caith believed that— until in the very instant it rushed at his face.
He stepped back, and spun once around...
And was in the same room before the fireplace, on a rainy night like last night; but the fireplace, alight with fire, showed no ruin, and there was a chair before the fire, two great hunting hounds, and a man sitting there he both loved and called lord....
Ceannann mac Ceannann was this lord’s name, lord of Gleann Fiain; while the name he called himself was Padraic, and the body he had— he looked down in astonishment— was a fiftyish, stout-limbed man’s, wearing a tartan he did not know.
Chief of the lord’s household, he was, in this grim fortress which was not their proper home, nor a home they willingly occupied to this hour.
And on this night Padraic, he, with a shapeless terror in his heart, devoutly wished them elsewhere and wished all his lord’s past choices undone.
Padraic had a cup of the barley water in his hand, as he crossed the room. He offered it to his lord, and stood there leaning on the mantel of the fireplace while the mac Ceannann drank, his lord all the while musing darkly into the fire.
But as well as Padraic knew Ceannann mac Ceannann, as long as they had been close as brothers, he could not tell tonight what his lord was thinking, whether mourning over Fianna, gone and in her grave, or over choices already made, or whether he was brooding on the midnight and the choice to come.
It was both the twins’ fourteenth birthday, and the same day a year ago that Fianna had died. Laid to rest in a cairn of stones, in the lower hills, was the lady of Gleann Fiain, not the first or the last of the misfortunes of this house.
On this same day for fourteen years some new and terrible grief had come to them; and a new one was coming tonight. Neither of them had any doubt of it.
“Are they abed?” the mac Ceannann asked, touching Padraic’s very thoughts.
“Aye, lord,” he said, quietly. “Brigid is with them. She will nae leave— no, nor sleep, tonight.”
“Well enough,” the mac Ceannann said, and looked him in the eyes, resting his hand the while on the head of one of the two hunting hounds in the room. The mac Ceannann had aged sadly in the last bitter year, gone entirely grey, while the lines that laughter had once made about his eyes had become a map of sorrows, these fourteen years. “ ’T is almost the hour,” the mac Ceannann added softly. “And a bitter thing, Padraic. She hae saved us for the last. — Was I wise?”
It was a terrible question. What could he say to his lord? No, lord, you were a fool?
The mac Ceannann had done what he had done for blood of his own..
Or should he say, now, You should have quit this fight years ago, lord?
It was too late for that, and the dead, year by year, would not come back again.
Padraic squatted down in front of the fire and looked up at his lord, his hand on the worn arm of the chair.
“You could nae hae surrendered, lord. It would have done nae guid. ’T was never only the child the woman wanted.”
“And which child?” the mac Ceannann asked, to the very heart of the matter. “Can you say which is which, Padraic, even yet?”
They talked awhile, in the dying of the fire, of small things that would not stay in the mind of a living man, while harm hovered all about the keep, harm from out of the earth and out of the loch, and from all the dark forces of the air ... and both of them knew it was coming. There were few of them left now to defend the fortress. They were the scant remnant of the men and women of Gleann Fiain, in the ruins of what had been a rich hold, above what had been a rich land. The cattle and the sheep had died years ago. The farmers had fled, or were dead with their flocks, the year that a great beast had come up from the loch, which they had hunted to no avail.
The airy loch-side hall of Dun Glas had passed into the hands
of their tormentor, and this high, rough keep was the last refuge they could find ... this hold built against the reivers who had used to come up the river from the sea, in their grandfathers’ fathers’ time.
Now it was the last refuge of the lord and the people of Gleann Fiain, the twenty and nine of them remaining who had not died by the beast, by the famines, or by the plagues.
“Bid the household all go,” the mac Ceannann said. “I have a foreboding, Padraic, that tonight is the last. Bid them take whatever they want of the stores and go, tonight, before the hour.”
“My lord,” Padraic began. It was an argument ten years old at least. He would not go, the mac Ceannann knew that very well.
“At least the youngest should go,” mac Ceannann pleaded with him. “At least the young lads, and their wives.”
“And leave us old men defenseless?” Padraic said, weary of the yearly argument. “And them dishonored?”
“To flee whate’er plague she sends? To flee things ye cannae see or feel? What defense hae we, Padraic? What defense can there be?”
“What pride do ye leave us, then? No, lord. They will not leave ye.”
“Put it to them. Give them all the chance, I say. Before midnight, Padraic, ask them. Swear it.”
“I will, that,” he said in a low voice, to give the lord mac Ceannann peace of mind in something, at least, for the hour that remained. But he knew none of the lads would go, and none of the wives, either. They had sworn it in blood, the men, young and old, who had stayed around the mac Ceannann when the others fled. And if he gave the mac Ceannann’s word to the lads that guarded the wall tonight, they would give him back glum stares and ask who else was going.
They had done the same last year, before four of them had died.
And the women had sworn their own oath, or whatever women did when they banded together. They worked their women’s magic against the witch, with singing that set a man’s skin to itching.
Them there was no persuading. They had no retreat. They were mortally engaged against the witch, in ways, he suspected, that no man could ever be.
The mac Ceannann drank until his head nodded, until the hand with the empty cup dropped from the chair arm.
Padraic was satisfied, and, tenderly easing the cup from mac Ceannann’s numb fingers before it clanged against the pavings, set it aside on the hearth and began his rounds that he made every night, checking all the doors and all the shutters, in the remote chance (for all the lads and lasses of the house were careful, and for all it could only be done, on this night, by magic) that someone had been forgetful.
Once he had assured himself of the downstairs, he climbed the stairs, inspecting the tower shutters as he went, and, on the upper level, stopped by the twins’ room. He put his head in, saw that shutter latched, and that latch bound with rowan sprigs and barley knots.
The twins’ nurse was sitting there, the twins soundly sleeping, and he was about to go on his way, but old Brigid got up from her bench, came quietly to him and whispered to him that she was cold, that she wanted to get one blanket more from the chest in her room.
What could a man say? It was a fearsome station the old woman kept, braiding her barley strands and muttering to prevent forces a man did not deal with.
What wonder she might want a comfort tonight of all nights?
“Watch them,” she asked him, and, feeling the chill in the room himself, Padraic agreed.
“But hurry about it,” he warned her. “I’m on my rounds.”
“Aye,” Brigid said. His own mother’s cousin, the old lady was, withered and stern and utterly devoted to the house.
She was the one who truly grieved for Fianna tonight, he thought, more than the mac Ceannann could, the truth be known. Aunt Brigid had been Fianna’s nurse, and now the twins’ guardian, and she was taking precautions of every sort tonight. Working her angry, women’s magic, her little knots and mutterings ... that had not saved Fianna from her folly, or her death.
Fianna’s troubles were at an end, last year, one could hope that much for the dead lady, charitably, at least. One could try to feel no anger while their own troubles spun down to the end—
And all of it, the whole damned business— was for the sake of Fianna and of the twins lying in their beds.
Their fourteenth year, Padraic thought with unease, and look at them, alike as mirrors of each other, and day and night still so close it set a man’s teeth on edge.
Ask the one and the other answered. They talked in turn, one finishing the thought the other had begun. Sibs did such things, his nephews, rest them, had done it, and there had never been two less fey lads than they.
But this pair— this pair. One would look up suddenly and the other, without looking, would answer an unasked question of some third person in the room.
They would not by any persuasion be parted ... even newborn, they had screamed themselves sick when Brigid put them in separate cribs. Brigid had given in to them to have peace, and, against the mac Ceannann’s own opinions, and little by little over the years, the whole house had surrendered to their wishes.
The whole of Gleann Fiain had surrendered their lives to the damnable bargain Fianna had made to get them— made, and broken, so at the last she herself had defended them with charms and spells, and finally her own life.
As children, neither twin would let the other out of sight.
If they were brought out of doors, and if by chance one strayed, the other followed at a run, or if held from following, went mad with fright, screaming, and the wanderer raced back to comfort the twin.
Now, at fourteen years, and it long since causing talk among the last loyal servants, they slept each night in each other’s arms, two heads together on the pillow, fair hair mingled, their very breath in unison.
That they were fey went without saying. They were fey, apparently more Sighted than was comfortable for anyone to be, and ’t was with a strong dose of whisky and honey they were sleeping tonight, if he could rely on Brigid’s tricks, for the twins now well understood the hour and the day, even if they had had no Sight at all to trouble them. They missed their mother, one could pity them in that ... and all their birthdays had brought death and evil.
Would that, Padraic thought, standing there at the foot of the bed, would that lady Fianna had remained barren, and would that the mac Ceannann had never had a son, or a daughter, or whichever— if either, the Dagda help them— was lawfully his.
Or would that the twins were both of them in hell, before they came to this night.
Fianna had lost two babes, and bargained with a wise-woman to have the twins, that was what Brigid had maintained, but what Fianna had confessed to her husband, the mac Ceannann had never told even to him.
Women’s magic— magic with the Sidhe, the women had said, some sort of women’s doings in a grove down by the loch, into which no man durst inquire.
Fianna had borne the twins, in due course. And contrary to the men’s natural expectations of a joyous occasion, the women of the house had gone about that day close-mouthed and grim, and gone down to the scullery and the kitchens to gossip in low voices about the birthing. The women had all known something their lord should have known that day, that had been certain at the time, but their law was something else, and uncatchable. A man could only surmise that in some way Fianna had broken faith with the women, or betrayed them, or offended their sensibilities. The Dagda might know, but no man had understood the offense, then.
No man understood now, but Brigid kept on making her barley knots and muttering to herself to this day.
And that night those many years ago that the twins were born, the wise-woman the women talked about had turned up at the gates, all cloaked in costly black and claiming her choice of the newborn twins.
Fianna had gone white as a fish’s belly and sworn she knew nothing at all of any such woman. She had sworn by Lugh and by Danu that she had made no such bargain.
While all the women gathered in angry whispe
rings and mutterings among themselves, fear had run through the scullery and through the upstairs halls. The women had sent dark, fearful looks at Fianna’s back that hour, Padraic had seen it. Every man in the house had seen it.
But in the mac Ceannann’s silence ... what could a man do?
If perhaps the gate-guard had been more courteous, if perhaps the mac Ceannann had listened then to the whispering among the women— but, no, the mac Ceannann had taken Fianna at her word and bidden the lads turn away the woman at the gates, giving her the loaf of bread and the pity a charitable lord might give the mad. With those beggars’ gifts they had answered her, and the woman had strode away without a word, the gift spurned in the mud.
That very night the guard, a young man, had fallen dead at his post with no mark on him.
And the women had answered no husbands— nor fathers— questions, not for threats, not for beatings, not for the magic the men made. As soon talk to the stones of the walls.
Came the twins’ first birthday, came the witch to ask her due, and this time Fianna was contrite, at least toward the witch, and sent word to the gate, begging to be excused of the bargain she had made.
But the witch went off in a fury and Fianna began to confess doings and rites to her husband then, only some of which Padraic had heard, the Dagda save them from reckless women. The mac Ceannann heard his wife privily, and to this day would not tell him everything, only that he forgave Fianna whatever she had done, and loved the twins so much he said he could not decide, himself, either. How could he let the heartless witch choose one, when he could not?
The third year the witch came back. The mac Ceannann met the witch at the gate himself, offered her wide lands and herds and his protection if she would give up her claim to the child— but she would not agree, and stalked away along the loch until the woods swallowed her up, and a flight of ravens went up from it.
That night the ewes all died, and the bleating of orphaned lambs was pitiful all across Gleann Fiain.
Faery Moon Page 22