The Dagda save them all, so innocent the twins looked, now, sleeping.
If they never had been born, he thought.
If he had followed Fianna and the women that night, into the woods.
If the mac Ceannann had only honored his wife’s unholy bargain and not fallen into Fianna’s wrong-doing himself, denying what Fianna had sworn, foul as it was....
All of these things Padraic thought, while Brigid delayed over-long and longer about fetching the blanket. She delayed, and he paced the floor and grew increasingly uneasy, thinking of his uncompleted rounds.
The lads on the gates and on the wall were not careless. No one would take chances this night of all nights. Everything was shut. If something wanted guarding, it slept in this room, in this bed. Of all places he must not leave unguarded ...
Something banged, downstairs.
Fear leapt up in him. That would be her. He had to go down to the mac Ceannann. He had to be before his lord in dealing with the witch— it was Feargus and mac Guigan on the lower door, but the mac Ceannann might well awake at that thump and take matters in his own hands.
And by the gods, Padraic meant this time to part the witch from her head.
Something splintered. He was across the room in two strides and jerked the door open as the twins started awake, calling out, “Uncle Padraic!”
He looked back, his shoulders against the open door, as the twins scrambled from their bed. “Stay inside!” he bade them, and shouted down the hall for Brigid, but the old woman was already running toward him as fast as she could, the blanket left lying in the hall. The twins ran out of the room and clung to Padraic in fright, but he shoved them into old Brigid’s care and sped down the hall, and down the wooden stairs to the lower hall as fast as his legs could carry him.
The outer door splintered. A wet darkness flooded into the hall, overpowering the fire. It surged across the floor and toward the stairs, all shadow and teeth...
“Lord!” Padraic shouted, drawing his sword— but the wooden stairs were swept from under him, and the beast struck out in every direction at once, splintering wood, scattering fire, crazed with the killing, as men rushed into the hall and died.
This much Padraic saw, in the dark and the ruin, before his life went out.
“Padraic?” Firinne was asking urgently.”Is it Padraic?”
He did not know where he was. He was murdered here, in this room, he was a murderer, himself, from Glen Teile. He was old and young, angry and crazed, and the next breath would not come into him, for the shapeless beast had torn out his throat.
“The fire, the fire,” Firinne cried, and dived toward it. She caught up a burning piece of wood in her bare hand and whipped it into her lap, smothering the ember with her skirts, bent in pain, and the smell of burned cloth was in the air— while of the fire there was left only a heap of glowing embers, giving off an ordinary red glow and an ordinary heat.
Suddenly there was breath to be had in the room, and Caith drew in what he could— but he had been Padraic, he had died in this place. He had seen, with his dying sight, his lord die, and ached with a heart more loyal and more giving than his own.
Of that came the anger, the consuming anger, that entangled with his own rage at all masters, and especially the one he served. He knew not what to think, did not understand what raged through him. It hurt to know that so great a goodness had existed, and had died here, all for nothing, all for a senseless woman’s will.
“Oh, Firinne!”Ceannann whispered.
Firinne bit her lip as Ceannann unfolded her seared palm, but she shook off his help, seeming grimly triumphant with the prize she had gained— a charred splinter, a piece of the inside stairs, that pile yonder had been, that she had saved from the burning.
“Padraic’s blood is on it,” she said, and tucked it into her skirts.
A chill went down Caith’s back. In that instant he remembered women’s magic, he remembered the stairs buckling under him; and witnessing the mac Ceannann’s death. Ripped limb from limb, the mac Ceannann had been, and last of all, the beast had come to Padraic.
When that wood had burned, Padraic had found his way free.
And Firenne saved that unburned piece for a talisman ... a spell....
“Oho!” Dubhain said cheerfully, a sudden shadow in the doorway. He skipped barefoot down the stone steps, a brace of hares dangling broken-necked from his hand. “Breakfast! And a fire all down to coals, noo! Here’s quick work!”
Chapter Seven
Dubhain proposed to cook breakfast over those same coals— not a breakfast that at all appealed to Caith’s sensibilities, considering the nature of the fire, and what had happened in this room. He had died. He had felt it— and could in no wise shake that memory.
But with the smell of clean smoke, and on a second consideration of his weak knees and hollow stomach, the witch’s cauldron itself would not disgust him this morning, if porridge came out of it. The sun had followed Dubhain through the doorway, and when one thought of the two hares to feed them all— there followed close upon that thought a greater hunger, and an intimate knowledge of the ruin, the cellars, and the scullery.
“One wonders if the castle was plundered, at all,” Caith murmured, putting his practical banditry to the fore. If there was horror left in this place, he was surely on fair speaking terms with Padraic, at least; and now that Dubhain was back, to deal with other ghosts that might lurk about, he began to think of practical matters.
And below, if the lower stairs he had Seen were in any way intact, he had a curiously vivid recollection of the scullery, the larder, all the lower portion of the fortress.
Considering the ruin was itself not that old, considering it had had no two-legged survivors to scavenge it, nor invaders to loot it, as seemed— there might well be jars and well-kept stores. Flour for cakes; and salt, and honey: these might not have lasted, granted, unless the stoppers were tight, and the mice would have been at the blankets, but bowls and pots and pans...
Dubhain had squatted down and, with a small flint blade from his pouch, set to work on his catch. Ceannann was consoling Firinne for her burns in the light of the far doorway, and no one paid attention to Caith as he rose, dusted off his hands, and walked back where the inside stairs had stood.
The downward course from here was stone, and intact— dark, but none so disturbing a darkness, so long as Dubhain was within hail. He heaved a timber aside.
Stones shifted and rolled, and Firinne leapt up and cried out.
A shattered skull rolled out from the heap of rubble. It gave him a queasy feeling, when he realized it must be Padraic’s; but he squatted down and shoved it back decently and tenderly under the pile of timbers and rubble that partially filled the corner. If a felon’s touch counted for a burial, and the touch of a caring hand, he did that office— and immediately the place did feel better and cleaner.
But with Padraic’s dying fresh in memory, he became a little less eager to go below and search the dark down there, stirring up ... the gods knew what. There was more than Padraic’s ghost here.
“What are you after?” Ceannann asked, having come to stand at his back as he looked down into that dark place, and his heart skipped a beat.
“Oh, a barrel of this or that.” He did not like Ceannann behind him at the head of these steps. He could not say why, but he disliked it. And he looked across the room, to the fire. “Dubhain, leave me the skinning and go ye doon. Here’s work your eyes are apt for, ye dark-loving wight. The storerooms are below. Would there be whisky there, d’ ye think?”
“Och, now,” Dubhain said brightly, and immediately came over to the stairs, bloody-handed and stuck about with bits of fur as he was. He peered down into the ruined lower stairway, then skipped down onto the littered steps.
“’T was the cellars,” Ceannann said doubtfully, as Dubhain nimbly picked his way over the tumbled stone and splintered wood. He called down, reckless of the silence of the place: “There were two rooms b
eyond.”
“Are yet,” Dubhain’s voice floated up to them from distance now, echoey and chancy. Stone crashed. “Well, well.”
“The roof might cave in,” Firinne said to Caith, beside him. “Tell him be careful!”
The hares Dubhain had already brought were their sure prospect of breakfast.
But considering the night he had just spent,and the damp clothes he still wore.in this drafty place, he conceived of other interests. “One would be the store-room,” he called down to Dubhain, “and the other the scullery. Ye’ll see a door leading out to a stairs down to the spring. Ye might get some light on the matter if ye can open that door.”
“Och,” Dubhain’s voice floated up from the dark, “ye were after fixin’ our breakfast, pretty Caith, not giving advice, were ye? And whence d’ ye know such things?”
“A passing breeze told me,” he shouted back, in disregard of Ceannann standing beside him. His legs ached from last night’s climb, but he shifted to squat on the top of the stairway, arms on knees. “The same breeze says there might be a blanket or the like down there the mice have missed. There’d be no plundering, and who would do that, with the folk of Gleann Fiain all in the belly of the beast?”
“Who indeed but the lady’s men, the black hearts? But I may hae found your door here.” Dubhain’s voice was faint and far. “Oho!”
Came a dreadful crash and rattle of stones. Caith flinched for fear of the entire floor going down under them. A cloud of dust rose up the steps, and Caith stood up in offense.
But there was dusty sunlight in the depths then, and Dubhain popped back into view, a shadow in that grey light, his eyes glowing faintest red.
“Here’s the bones of dead men,” said Dubhain, “and the strewing of grain about, but the mice hae had a’ that. Was there aught else ye said ye’d be wanting?”
“Sealed jars.” Mice and moths. Against those marauders no shelves were high enough, and barrels and burlap were no defense. “A jug, wight, if ye can find ain.”
Dubhain vanished again and in a moment skipped up on the littered steps to hand him up a white rock the size of a man’s fist. Salt, by the sticky feel of it. That was welcome. “The mice and the foxes hae had a share,” Dubhain said, “but we hae the last lump for our twa’ hares. Hold a bit.”
“Something to cook the hares in, Dubhain, sweet Dubhain. What else?”
“A mort of empty barrels. The wee pirates hae a taste for barley.”
“Cloth, then. A blanket. A bit of rope. Damn ye, look about ye!”
“Nay, rope there is, but ye would nae trust it, man. Ah!” Dubhain came back into view and, half climbing the steps, handed him up a nest of shallow copper pans.
That was a prize. They had cooked their breakfasts on makeshift spits, and never had owned a plate or a pan for boiling.
“Porridge we can have hereafter,” he said to Dubhain, “whene’er we find some farmer’s field. But blankets, pretty Dubhain. Sacks. Rags. Something against the cold.”
“Against the cold, is ’t?” Dubhain skipped back down the stairs into the dark.
“Aye,” he said sharply, teeth chattering, and felt cold of a sudden, a chill down his backbone which had nothing to do with the wind between the two doors. He turned his head and saw Ceannann back at the coals, spitting their breakfast on splinters of oak and looking as if he felt nothing. Firinne stood in the inner doorway. Her shifting about might have channeled a draft from outside.
But his hair prickled, and he shivered, hearing a small crash below.He called down: “Dubhain, do ye feel aught? I have nae liking for the feel up here, Dubhain.”
A few more rattles came from below.
“More dead men’s bones,” said Dubhain. “Nae few souls hae perished down here.”
“Leave them!” There was a very bad feeling to the room of a sudden, not Padraic, he thought, but something slower to wake and far, far more dangerous. “Dubhain. Dubhain! Come up here!”
Dubhain’s shadow appeared in the dusty light below, and Dubhain’s eyes glowed like coals, as disquieting as the feeling of something upstairs in the room with them, behind him, watching him, prickling the nape of his neck.
And never yet had the twins seemed to notice it.
“Dubhain, my friend, come upstairs, will ye, quietly, the while?” A glance over his shoulder and the sight of Ceannann and Firinne oblivious to the cold spot in the room lent him no comfort at all. Like two children they were, absorbed in their own doings, while this thing prowled the margins of the room, more aware by the instant.
Whatever it was, it was nothing of the light, neither the moon nor the sun, and he was not altogether certain Dubhain himself was safe from it, as Dubhain quietly came up from below and laid something on the dusty floor.
“Och,” said Dubhain, looking at nothing in particular but a shadowy corner, “the bluid, the bluid hae waked it. ’T was stirrin’ aboot last night, I felt it, and the pretty ones did, and we preferred the rain in the courtyard tae the company i’ this room. But by day, ... well, ’t is quieter. Dinnae provoke it, and keep an eye on our pretty birds the while.”
At which the feckless wight dived below again, leaving him to mind the haunt above alone.
“Dubhain!” Caith whispered furiously.
But Dubhain had left a pile of dusty cloth on the step beside the bowls’a blanket, it looked to be, and Caith glanced back to the room at large, torn between his misgivings toward the ghost and the prospect of warmth from the constant chill and the damp.
With half an eye to the room and the twins, he eased down a step, gathered the grey blanket and the copper pans up to the floor above. Mouse-eaten the blanket was, but it held together when he flung the thing about him, making a halo of dust in the light from either source.
Meanwhile Dubhain clattered and thumped about in the cellar like a good haunt, and whatever had stirred to wakefulness in the ruin seemed to have no possessiveness at least about the pans and the blanket— the latter of which in good chivalry ought to go to Firinne, he grudgingly supposed; or even to the boy, Firinne having her abundance of skirts and petticoats to keep her warmer than either of them.
But in the long road and the weather a man turned selfish with the necessities, and chivalry had gotten very much to the rear of him in practical matters. He thought, I’d share ’t turn about with the boy, perhaps ... but. . .
A thundering slide of stones rumbled below and whatever lurked hereabove sent a chill through the air.
“What was that?” Firinne asked, looking anxiously in his direction.
“It’s all right,” Caith said. There had fallen such a sudden stillness in the room that it was hard to break, a presence that had almost settled to sleep again, and now stirred closer and closer to wakefulness.
Dubhain came thumping up the steps on bare feet, his arms loaded with blankets, a jug hooked by his fingers, and a coil of rotten, moldering rope over his shoulder. “Here’s for breakfast,” Dubhain said cheerfully. “And I hae stolen all the best frae the moths and dispossessed a mouse or two frae the pantry. They could nae gnaw through the pots, me darlin’s. Thank me properly.”
“I’ll kiss you myself, ye rascal, if that jug’s what I think.”
“Two more such below. The falling shelf did for the rest.” Dubhain carried his several prizes over to the coals, well pleased with himself, and squatted down and pried the crockery stopper— mice had been at it, but they had had no luck, it seemed— from the first jug.
Dubhain had a swig of the contents and a grin was on his face as he offered it with a bow to Firinne.
So it went around, Firinne to Ceannann, and last to him. It was passable good whisky the mac Ceannann had had in store, thank the Badbh for stout crockery. Caith poured a little in the dust, for Padraic, and for ... whatever it was, for its good will, if it could feel any toward the living.
The spot dried to dust as it hit. He poured a bit more and it vanished in the same way.
And a third time. Three was a
lucky number.
At least it seemed one could breathe in the room, and Firinne heaved a sigh. So did Ceannann. So even did Dubhain.
“A polite ghost,” Dubhain said, the wretch. He could not hold his peace.
“Hush! Forbear!” Caith took his portion of their breakfast, brushed ash from it— with no spit and no pan when they had started their cooking, it was make do and be thankful for it.
And it was a far better breakfast than Nuallan was having this morning, he congratulated himself, picking well-done meat from the bone. What with the whisky, and the blanket about him, and the heat from the coals drying his clothes and his shoes, he was feeling far more sanguine about their escape.
And now what should they do?
Considering the aches he had waked with, he would gladly tuck down in this ruin a few days and catch their breaths, so long as the whisky held out and the haunts stayed quiet. But it was still an uneasy place— and it might be unsafe in the long reckoning. He had had no word from Dubhain— and he generally preferred Dubhain’s advice, with the Sidhe in question.
Nuallan being a guest of the lady, and them— perched here in the scene of old murders— no course seemed certain or safe.
Rescue Nuallan, the Badbh and Macha witness!
They had taken to the trail last night only to clear the lady’s borders— then: “Find our father,” the twins had said.
And now they were in this place. And who had been the cursed twins, and how this place had perished, he had little doubt.
“So where now, Dubhain?” he asked, leaning on his elbow. “What now?”
“Why, we go on searchin’ as we were, sweet Caith,” Dubhain said, flipping a bone into the coals. It hissed, and burned briefly, and went to ash. And vanished. A man could not but stare at that, and not feel so comfortable reclining by that fireside.
“Our one father,” said Firinne, “died here.”
“But our other,” said Ceannann, “is still to find.”
“Two fathers,” Caith said, as the Padraic-memories stirred up in him uncomfortably vivid, of draiocht, a woman’s will, and bastardy.
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