“Ye’d tell us, perhaps,” Dubhain said, “how this wonder came to be.” He wrenched off another joint. Crack. “And what help might ye be to the Sidhe lord we hae left in less pleasant lodgings last night— if Herself hae not made breakfast of him? Is ’t her doing that left this place in ruins?”
“Aye,” Ceannann said.
“And born of the Sidhe,” Caith said, straight to the point, since Dubhain was here to deal with the consequences. “— Are you not?” But Padraic had believed only one of them was Sidhe. “Twins, you are.”
“Twins.” Firinne broke her silence. “With different fathers.”
He regarded her doubtfully, although Padraic had known that. It fit that memory like a key in a lock ... but there was so much else that no one had known.
“It is truth,” said Firinne.
“What else is truth?” Caith asked. “Twins, aye, well. But what more? What ought friends of yours to know, if we made common cause wi’ ye against this lady of Dun Glas? Ye twain slept upstairs in this keep the night it came down. And why? What was the quarrel with the witch?”
A midnight rite in the hills, Padraic’s recollection was; women’s rites, women’s powers. Most uneasily, Caith remembered a sad, fair, frightened woman he had never met.
“Our mother,” Ceannann said, “our mother was the lady of Gleann Fiain, when we lived in Dun Glas. She wanted a child, and she went to the spring in the mountains...”
“Are we to another ballad?” Caith said, his skin prickling. “The last tale ye told me was a harper. Were you ever a harper’s son?”
“Nay,” Ceannann admitted, and looked into the fire.
“Nae, see,” said Dubhain. “Ye do offend the lad. Ye hae such a mortal lack of grace. — Prithee go on, young gentleman, and where might She in Dun Glas come into this tale?”
“The lady who lived by the spring?” The twins never called the name of Moragacht when they could avoid it; and with a witch or a power, in Caith’s experience, there was every good reason to be careful. “A wise woman was all she appeared, and our mother bargained with her to have a child. She let the lady weave an enchantment over her, and she did everything that the lady said.”
“Wi’ what bargain?” Dubhain asked. “There maun always be a bargain i’ such affairs.”
“There was,” Ceannann said. “The witch said our mother would bear twins, and that the witch would choose one for herself on the night we were born.”
“Foolish woman,” said Dubhain with a shake of his head, and Ceannann frowned.
“She wanted a child,” said Ceannann. “She thought that she could lose one for the sake of the other she would keep. She never planned for our father to know.”
“But when we grew in her,” Firinne said, breaking her silence, “she regretted what she had done.” A poke at the coals with a rabbit bone. Sparks went up like stars, and the end of the bone went to ash. She dropped it all into the coals and drew back her hand in haste. “ ’T was a night magic; and she had to have a lover.”
“A lover of the witch’s choosing.”
Firinne nodded, her eyes downcast, and she lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “And once it was done, you know, then— it was too late to change the bargain.”
“Our mother,” Ceannann broke in, “was not a stupid woman. She must have been under a spell from the time she went up to the spring. And the way it was, she had sworn to the witch that she could make her choice of us. So if the witch took the mortal one of us, it would put her husband’s true child in the witch’s hands and a selkie-child on the throne of Fiain.”
“A selkie,” Caith said, with a feeling of cold down his back, and even Dubhain moved uneasily.
“That was the bargain she made,” said Firinne, never looking at him, never acknowledging the dire nature of the creature. “That was the lover she had, only one night. Only once.”
“That does often suffice,” said Dubhain.
“Behave!” said Caith. “Go on, lass.”
“When we were born, and the witch came to make her choice, our mother confessed to our father what she’d bargained with the witch, and that the witch was promised one of us. But she did not tell him about the selkie-lover. She never told anybody that but the women who knew it already.”
“And you,” Caith said.
“And us,” Firinne said, looking down, “when we were twelve.”
“The witch came back every year to ask,” said Ceannann. “But our father would not give us up. And the sheep all died. Our father hired a priest to set wards about us and all about the loch. But every year something worse would happen, until finally the beast came, and we had to move from Dun Glas.”
“The priest ?” Dubhain asked.
“He died,” Ceannann said.
“She ne’er should hae broken an oath to that lady,” Dubhain said with a shake of his head. “It gave her all manner of power against ye. ’That is nae common witch, ye maun know.”
“We do know,” said Ceannann. “We do, that.”
“So ye lost Dun Glas and came here,” Caith said. “Ye refurbished this old place, and ye held out— how long?”
“Till our fourteenth winter. The priest died in our eleventh. And the most of the people in the twelfth. And our mother in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth, she killed our father and all the rest, and ruined the hall here.”
“Twice seven years, seven for each of ye,” said Dubhain. “That was a great spell the witch was working, and a great protection ye must have had.”
“How did you escape?” Caith asked, and sat up. Padraic’s memories did not extend beyond the beast’s foray in this room, and they were too vivid yet, a fast-moving shadow full of claws and teeth.
“One of us,” said Firinne, “took the other to safety.”
“By magic,” Caith said, recalling the twins in their bed, inseparable. And by unwanted experience in the affairs of the Sidhe, he had a niggling suspicion there was much more than something unnatural in it.
“Aye,” said Ceannann.
“Escaped where? To that cottage by the burn?”
“Aye.”
Padraic’s memories were a momentary blackness. And pain, oh, yes, pain.
“And that cottage was defense enough— for how many years? You’ve more than fourteen winters.”
“Twenty and one.”
“Anaither seven,” Dubhain said under his breath.
“She never came,” said Firinne. “We found the sheep and the goats gone wild. The beast found us, but by that time we had our wards set, and she could not get so much as one of our flock.”
“Very strong, those wards were,” said Dubhain. “I could nae pass them, meself— excepting your hospitality.”
“And why?” Ceannann asked angrily, in the way of a resentment put away but never forgotten. “What had we done that you had to break our defenses? We had done no wrong to the witch, and she had nothing in us to take hold of but a promise we had not made for ourselves. And what was that to you?”
Caith shrugged. “With your beast on my heels, young sir, I ran. And that was not my choosing. What the Sidhe chose to do, and why, you’ve only to look at Dun Glas. That is a powerful witch, who can hold him against his will.”
“But none of it would have happened if you had never come there,” Firinne said. “None of it. And it went wrong, everything went wrong!”
“Ye did nae ask, lass,” said Dubhain, “which power drew us to your door. I did nae say ’t were the High Folk.”
For some blind reason Caith himself had not even thought of that possibility, and the thought was like a blow to the stomach.
Besides ... a small something went bump at the back of his memory and tumbled into place when Dubhain said what he had said.
“I’ve a question,” Caith said. “The witch’s men had no time to ride out from Dun Glas and attack you after we came down into the glen. ’T is much too far a ride. Either they came from closer, or they started earlier. And how did the witch know the war
ds would be down?”
“She would,” said Ceannann, “if you were hers.”
Caith fixed him with a cold stare. “If that were her treatment of her own, man, I’ve seen better i’ the world. And thanks to your driving us off your land, where we might have saved us all a deal of trouble, now one of the bright Sidhe is in her hands. Our particular lord, in whom we have a very pressing interest—”
”Please,” said Firinne. “Peace. Peace on us.”
He could not say why he took fire so readily with Ceannann. His temper had led him astray so many times, and he smothered it.
“I meant,” Ceannann said hotly, “if she had sent you and you not known. That could happen, man. I never call ’t ye a liar.”
“Hoosht, now,” said Dubhain. “Ye two, like two cocks in a henyard...”
“Ceannann, please,” said Firinne, laying a hand on his arm, and Caith looked down at his hands, found the meeting of his own thumb and first finger smoother than they ought to be, and wondered about that rather than thinking about killing Ceannann.
There was the red, healed brand of a rose on either finger, itching like mortal sin at the moment, where Nuallan’s key had burned him, and he shut his fist to take away the sight and the memory— thinking suddenly of the central question, the thing Padraic had not known and regarding which the twins had deceived even Dubhain:
“The truth,” he asked of Firinne. “Which of you is the selkie?”
“I am,” said Firinne; “I am,” said Ceannann.
Temper rose up, quick and continually frustrated. “Has either of you ever once told the truth?”
Their brows furrowed, and Ceannann looked down rather than meet his eyes. “Truth... we aren’t sure, ourselves.”
“Not sure, man!”
“So perhaps the witch herself can’t tell,” Firinne said.
“And can’t separate you. Is that a fact?”
A wincing. A glance down at her hands. “Perhaps.”
“Someone hae laid sich a glamour on them, perhaps.” Dubhain sat, chin on fist, listening, with small movements of his almost-brown eyes. “Perhaps before they were born. I feel the strength in the bond o’ these two, but I still get nae sense at all about the source.”
A geas so strong the twins themselves might not overcome its command to keep the secret, a glamour so strong, even they might not know their own natures? He was far from convinced, and slid a glance toward Dubhain, wondering how far a dark Sidhe gave it credence. “Could you not know what you are?”
“Och, man,” Dubhain said, “magic is such a troubled pot. Ye stir a mother’s desire into it, ye stir in a witch’s schemes, and a priest of some power’s counter-workings, and ye cannae say what kind of stew maun come fra’ out of it. Nae thing convenient for the mother nor the witch, by the look of this hall.” Dubhain’s eyes made a circuit of the ceiling, and flicked back to him, faintly red in his shadowed face. Last, then, he turned to the twins, with a cynic look. “And shall we go and ask the selkie, now? This is the feither ye wish ’t tae find?”
“We cannot defeat her ourselves,” Ceannann said, “the two of us, or even yourself, m’ lord Sidhe.”
“M’ lord,— I?” Came a little lifting of Dubhain’s brows, the tweak of a wicked grin.. He fairly preened. “Och, now, such a polite young man.”
“He doesn’t know you,” Caith said darkly, disturbed at this sudden merriment. He wanted a word with Dubhain, aside from them. He saw a fey amusement he did not like.
“We need your help,” Firinne said in a small voice. “’T is power she’s after, power to deal fear, power to take and to have and to have more. If she takes ’t from him...” A little tremor came into Firinne’s voice, and she lifted her hands and let them fall. “I don’t know what in all the world might prevent her, then, except our father, or yourself. M’lord Sidhe, can you not find him? Can you not tell the other Sidhe what happened in this glen, can you not?”
“Oh, they surely know,” Dubhain said. “The halls of hell do know what happened, lass. The question is what the Sidhe maun do about it. — D’ ye know your selkie feither at all? Hae ye ever met him?”
Said Ceannann, in Firinne’s silence, with a shake of his head. “Our mother never saw him after.”
“Well,” Caith said, settling back upon his elbow with a sigh. “well, but we have no help else, if ye can find him, if ye can call him, whatever it is ye can do.”
“Perhaps we have the calling of him,” Ceannann said. “But our mother thought not. We—”
A step scuffed, outside, in the daylight. Caith stayed a move of his own and held his breath, saw Ceannann and Firinne and Dubhain in the same blink glance toward the door, before he rolled onto his knee, for deeper shadows...
The white skulls of two hares shone almost under his hand. They were the hides and whole heads Dubhain had cut off and tossed aside. And in the few moments as they talked something had gnawed them almost clean, bits of flesh still clinging to bone that shone bright as milky glass.
Revulsion hit his stomach. He drew his hand back and scrambled to his feet as he heard a step just outside the door, and while he was drawing his sword, a man’s shadow was on the edge of the threshold, a man who must have smelled the smoke, and whose shadow grew an arm and a sword an instant before the man himself rushed the entrance.
“No!” Firinne cried, embracing Ceannann, and, sword in hand, Caith could not draw a breath to move, the presence in the room grew so intense and so violent.
The intruder screamed and fell over in his tracks— limp before he hit the stone floor, arms and legs twitching loosely as if an unseen pack of wolves were tearing at the corpse.
Caith caught himself and breathed the breath he could finally find. Cold, Macha and the Badbh, but he was cold!
Dubhain grabbed at his arm then and shoved the twins toward the cellar stairs on the other side of the room.
Caith let himself be drawn along past the doorway, where no other fool showed at all; and, he could not help it, he glanced down at the twitching corpse as he passed it. A curious white spot gleamed and widened at its forehead. Bone: the flesh being eaten away as if teeth were gnawing it with frenzied speed.
The mastiff dogs flashed into his mind, lying by mac Ceannann’s chair, tame to his hand; but it was not only the dogs, it was...
A yank at his wrist hauled him in Dubhain’s wake. Down the cellar stairs they went into the grey, dusty daylight an open door let in, and through the rubbled ruin of the scullery, toward that clear view of the hillside.
But Dubhain was for diving back inside that cellar again, and, fearing Dubhain was going back to fight the creature, Caith grabbed at him, missed him, and, followed him in.
“Fool!” Caith began to say, but Dubhain had snatched up a jug from the floor inside and came back in a great hurry.
They fled out the door onto a narrow ledge and a sudden halt, over a view straight off the side of the mountain and on into the empty air.
It was Dubhain’s snatch at his shirt that prevented him going right off the step, with Ceannann and Firinne already on the downward slant, sharply to the left, on a narrow set of steps.
His heart pounded, laboring to catch up to the rest of him.
“Fool, I?” quoth Dubhain, and flung an arm about him, the jug handle caught in a finger of the other hand, the two of them walking like lovers downhill.
Caith’s legs shook so that now he might have fallen down in a heap, but Dubhain would not wait— hastened him from one crumbling step to the next.
“Stand and gawk, will ye? Linger to bid the haunt th’ blessin’s o’ th’ mornin’?”
“The dogs,” was all he could say, between breaths and trying to keep his feet under him. Sweat was running into his eyes and he was chilled through. Dubhain laughed wickedly and shook at him as they walked.
“Hoosht, now, afraid of the dark, are ye?”
“It was the dogs, I tell ye, wight. And it was something else... in it... too...”
�
��The father. The father, the lord mac Ceannann. There’s an angry, angry spirit...”
Padraic had tried to tell him something that was still rattling around in his skull, something Padraic was ashamed to think.
But that was it, he thought. All that anger and all that madness— that was the mac Ceannann, with his hounds.
That, the witch had left of him.
“Only he would not ... kill the twins ... but any creature else...” Breath failed him, in the chill of what Padraic had seen over the years. Vision almost went out. His ankles turned on the rocky track and he would have gone down in a faint, if Dubhain had not had an arm around him.
As it was, Dubhain hoisted him up with a snap of his head and the sky and the mountain steep swinging giddily in his vision. He had his feet under him at least, and a death-grip on Dubhain’s shirt, Dubhain giving a little dance step and laughing as they went.
“ ’T is light on your feet ye are t’day, me darlin’ Caith. But nae sae light ye may take wing. Mind your step there.”
“Aye.” He was too exhausted to quarrel with the wretch. His aim now was to get down the cliffside stairs without falling down them. He saw Firinne and Ceannann ahead of them, two heads and one grey blanket ... which he had not. “Oh, damn it to hell, I left the blanket....”
“Ah, well,” said Dubhain, “I provide for ye and look how ye do care for things....”
“There had to be ... another man ... out and about.”
“Chary of that door, he’d be, the noo.”
“Going around to the other door...” He tried to look over his shoulder to see, and Dubhain swung them around, balancing on one foot above a sheer drop, that was Dubhain’s wit.
But in the sudden thought of a second enemy, he was not even thinking of falling. He was looking up at their last view of the face of the keep, the steep, rubbled shoulder of the hill about to come between them and that doorway. Whether anyone was coming around the keep, it was already too late to see, and Dubhain spun them both around again as his leaning almost pulled him over the edge.
Almost. The wretch.
“There could be somebody on our trail,” Caith said, and caught a whole breath, but his legs were no better. The cold of the haunt was finally leaving his limbs, but only enough to let him know where his feet were. “I couldn’t see, damn ye, ye bloody wight! I was tryin’ to see above!”
Faery Moon Page 24