“Nae riders’ll try this slope, at least,” said Dubhain briskly. “A horse could nae do ’t. I should know, d’ ye say?”
“Fools would want to do it.” He looked down past his feet, into the shadowed deep of the glen.
The sun was not yet over the mountains, but it came past its shoulder and made Loch Fiain a sheet of silver far, far below; and the forward thrusts of the mountain on the other side a velvet heathery orange and purple. A man could think it was a safe place down there. The air was rain-washed and clean. With a breakfast in him and warmed by a fire, however unwholesome, and with the smell of the clean air, a man could think not all the world had gone to dark and mud— if he forgot that the horror up here on the heights existed because of Moragacht and the powers that she wielded down in that silver loch.
A man could think that, if the twins had gotten themselves away as they claimed, the twins surely had the luck about them, and now the luck had struck twice, counting that they were free this morning.
But that was the twins’ luck, saving them. At least one man was dead that had hunted them, and the lord Nuallan stood in their place in m’ lady’s prison.
Luck, of the sort that had come to the hill fort, was it not?
“Let be, let me walk,” he said to Dubhain. He had caught breath enough, and warmed his limbs at least enough not to fall down the mountain, and he was off his balance and at the mercy of Dubhain’s humors, with only Dubhain’s arm between him and a fall to the loch.
“Ye’ll break your neck, my prince.”
“I’ll rather break the witch’s. Trust me that I’ll live so long.”
He wished then he had not said it. Some sayings hit the air and hung there, fraught with meaning a wicked power could take and use.
But it was true, now, that he had to go back to Dun Glas. It became true that moment that he admitted the Necessity and spoke it aloud.
Geas. A little one now, but on his life, he had made that pact with the Sidhe, and now he had second thoughts about trusting his own legs, since his wit showed itself none so keen.
Of course that was the moment Dubhain let him go, and he staggered a downward step on uneven rock, on the narrow boundary of earth and empty air.
That view would wake a man and stop his heart.
“Ye see?” Dubhain chided him, and grasped him by the scruff of his shirt, and steered him down.
What passed above, he had no wish to know.
Chapter Eight
Heather grew more frequent, in small tough clumps, clinging among the stones. The rain-fed spring Caith had searched for so desperately in the night was here in tumbling career, cutting its way into barren rock, a white thread that plunged a long, dizzy distance down the cliffs, toward its spoiling in the loch.
Here, where a little stonework bridged that stream, the twins turned aside from their course across the mountain shoulder, and took the steep, slow descent, climbing from one rock down to the next.
“What are they doing?” Caith asked. The twins must be following some childhood path, some foolhardy short-cut which grown men were hard put to follow. “What are you doing?” he called out to the pair some little distance ahead of them and down a tumble of boulders. “Is there something ye’re looking to find?”
Ceannann steadied Firinne as she jumped down to him from a cascade of rocks, and Ceannann did not answer nor even look up at him.
“Surly, now,” Caith muttered, but Dubhain, squatting by him, hopped down onto the same course, jug and all, and landed and spun about with a skirl of his kilts.
“I’ll catch ye, man, ’t is no great bother. Jump!”
Boys and a hoyden lass had the spring in their knees to bounce goatlike down the slide. His own had carried him too many miles and taken too many falls already, and that rock was rounded on its top.
“The hell with ye,” Caith said, got down on his knees, turned around and slid off the drop, losing skin on the rock. The sword banged at his side, and having it fall down into the rocks or off the mountain would be, he thought, a splendid piece of luck.
By the time he turned again, Dubhain was already skipping down the next two rocks. Dubhain turned to wait for him there on that flat place, beckoning him impatiently with one hand, the whisky jug unbroken in his left.
He did it as he could, at his own pace, and with the loss of more skin on his knees and his hand. One of the young pair they tracked was Sidhe, and lending the other strength, he told himself, while Dubhain, damn him, was naught but a force of nature, the night’s own dark wind skirling and sporting down the mountainside. A man could not hope to keep up with the likes of the twins, nor to land so lightly as Dubhain did on bare feet.
No, a man was apt to break an ankle, or his neck, and a man could not make all the descent at once. He had to sit down at a flat place by a thread of a waterfall, with a third of the descent to go, his heart thumping as if it would burst, and the sweat running on him.
The spray that the wind dashed on him from the falls was as cold as a Sidhe’s heart, and it numbed his hands when he dipped up a drink from the pool to ease his throat.
With that icy draught the memory of Dun Glas came back to him vividly, the vault and the silver vines trying to grow through the stone— but not as a memory. In his mind, Nuallan stood as he had, still with the pale light of faery about him, but other branches had grown up among the silver, and a black rose budded, insinuating its thorny branches, black as night.
In the light of Nuallan’s presence, it unfolded petals to him. Nuallan put out a hand to it as a breeze shook the branches, and instead of the rose, Nuallan touched his thumb against a thorn. Blood started bright on his moonlit hand, blood-red in mortal day.
Nuallan put the wound to his lips, thoughtfully abandoning the rose, then reconsidering it.
“My lord,” Caith whispered, affrighted. There was danger in the black branches, and he knew that Nuallan should not reach toward that rose.
But who had ever trapped Nuallan before, and when had Nuallan ever understood the meaning of duress, or feared for his immortal life?
And if Nuallan fell, if Nuallan failed to hold his own will in that place, then where was he?
Nuallan recognized his presence, then, as if he were truly there. Nuallan looked at him as if to say he had not seen him until now and did not want him here now.
Play not the fool, that glance said, Man. You are not up to this game. Quick, run away from here...
He took it for warning. He tried to remember where he was, which was the streamside on the steep— but he could not see it. He had lost his way. Nuallan’s pale face became Moragacht’s dark smile and Moragacht’s basilisk stare— her with the empty bed and the hunger to take and use: the carnal and the charnel were one thing in that bed of hers, and a Sidhe lord would not satisfy her long, nor could he, nor Dubhain nor any creature on earth or in faery or in hell. She was appetite incarnate. She had begun with a little cleverness and now, in a black rose and a sharp thorn, she wielded power that a Sidhe lord had not resisted.
Nuallan’s will— The rose moved and grew at her command, adding more black, jagged leaves, more thorns.
Nuallan’s strength— She directed it. She directed everything they did.
“Why should I let you escape?” he imagined her saying. And he imagined her smiling, answering her own question to him, “What matter, that? You’ll come back.”
He did not want to hear that. He tried simply to look away, and started when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder and shook him hard.
It was Dubhain, and the bright empty sky all around, and Dubhain’s fingers biting into his shoulder.
“Ye witling!” Dubhain cried. Like the wind, Dubhain might have come up the rocks. In the blink of an eye and the drink he had taken from the pool, everything might have happened. Anything might be true. His soul was still wide open to the knowing and the Seeing of faery— he was still half here and half there, and only the pain of Dubhain’s grip held him to the mountainside and
only his sight held him to Dubhain and the open sky.
“He is in trouble,” Caith said, catching a great breath.
“We’re all in trouble, man, and mair than trouble, when ye gae wit-wandering like that! She reads the waters, that’s where her magic lies! We could nae cross the stream, we did nae count it wise, man, we turned back frae that water, and here ye do all but bathe in it!”
“Ye said nothing to me about reasons, ye cursed wight! Get your hand from my knee!”
It was more than the torn skin Dubhain mended, it was a giddy wave of power that came from his knee up and through all his limbs. The breath came in at his nostrils and went out to the ends of his fingers and his toes, and charged the air he breathed. His hair might have crackled. It prickled on his body, the way amber would make it, rubbed across the skin.
“She says,” Caith said, “that we haven’t escaped, that we’re all doing what she wants...”
“Oh, aye, and the naughty wench is sae honest, is she not, an’ ye believe all she says? Gie me your hand, man, up ye go—”
He needed no help. He heaved himself to his feet and made the jump down from the rock to the ledge, free of Dubhain’s hand, in a darkness that had nothing to do with the sky. It was the dark force of Dubhain’s strength that steadied his legs and gave him the agility the sun-born Sidhe shared down below, crazed, themselves, but not crazed with the wicked delight that was Dubhain. Theirs was a strength that had the lady’s power running like a growth of weeds through it.
Dubhain grew chancy and fey, and himself no less. Caith the killer, Caith who was already damned with kin-murder ... he could almost weep to know the strength Dubhain would give him if he grew any more foolish. Even now the least small corner of his sanity could feel the terror of things sliding amiss with them all, the small indulgence of his temper growing to self-satisfaction, and that, to the desire to overthrow all sense, all restraint of action...
The shocks of the landings came one after the other, now. He had gained so much strength, so much downward speed the trail was a course of leaps and mad bounds, himself no less than Dubhain.
If Moragacht had done all of this, everything, the ruin of Fianna and the Calling of the selkie and the ruining of Gleann Fiain and all of it, from the beginning, for the very purpose of laying her hands on one of Nuallan’s kind— if that were true, and he did not admit it was— still he was not caught like Nuallan. He was not the witch’s servant and would not be.
For one giddy moment he flew, and in the next absorbed the shock of landing with his knees, one great boulder to the next, until, at the very bottom, he came to a running, downhill halt.
He was no saner than he had to be when he next looked back at Firinne, and at Ceannann, the both of them seeming shocked at him.
“Go on,” he said, waving them ahead. “Go on!”
It was pleasant to be feared, even by such a feckless lad.
It was pleasant to be omnipotent as the Sidhe and to feel no pain at all.
But of such feelings a man ought to be very afraid, if his wits were not utterly sunk into the spell that fed his arrogance. He knew that, and he warned himself, as Dubhain landed near him.
He drew a deep, careful breath and walked like a sane man, afraid now that Dubhain was himself on that same slippery edge of the dark.
“You should not,” he said to Dubhain finally, “you should not do that to me. Do you hear me, wight? I detest your constant hands on me!”
“Ye like it too well,” Dubhain gibed at him, and then was gone.
“Dubhain!”
Badbh and Macha, he thought, turning to look full circle about him, in the hopes Dubhain had only skipped away too quickly for his eye to see: Dubhain could do such things, and he hoped with his heart and soul he had, this time.
But there was no Dubhain. There was no Dubhain, and the last time Dubhain had vanished, everything had gone wrong.
Macha, we aren’t done! We aren’t through what Dubhain Saw!
“Ha! Scared ye, did I?”
His heart thumped, not alone for the tweak at his hair and Dubhain’s sudden presence by him. For a moment...
“Ye damned fool! ’T is no place for your jokes!” No, he did not mean that. He caught at Dubhain’s sleeve, entreating him from his threatened desertion. “Stay. Stay, Dubhain.”
“Prithee?”
“Wretch! Walk with me. Stay with me. I have need of ye, Dubhain. It’s the lord Nuallan in difficulty, remember, and ourselves will follow him t’ whate’er fate—”
”Oh, aye, d’ ye lesson me, man?”
He did not let his temper answer that. He smoothed Dubhain’s sleeve of the wrinkles he had made in it. “Stay, Dubhain, fair Dubhain, let us give her no victory.”
Dubhain blew a breath out his nostrils, and swung away from him, walking downhill at an easy pace, kilt swinging.
Caith went beside him, or behind, where the going was hard, and saw Dubhain finally distracted by the flit of an insect, the sweep of a bird skimming the slope.
“Do we trust the pair?” Caith asked finally, with the twins far down the slope ahead of them. “Or was that ado by the fire this morning all another skein of moonbeams? ‘Not know which is which,’ they said. They make me uneasy, Dubhain.”
Dubhain was silent a moment more, walking slowly, for Dubhain— with now and again a skip in his step, hands clasped behind him as if they were on some afternoon’s stroll, not on a steep mountain descent. “And which is the selkie?” Dubhain asked. “I think one an’ then I do think the other. That is a spell, my pretty Caith. Lying in the same womb, who knows what spells they might hae worked, or had worked on them? They see what they see and nae mair.”
“Could you forget what you are?”
A skip on a projecting flat stone and a shrug, head bowed. “Could I do such a thing? Nay. But sun-born folk? Ye cannae know. It might be a glamor the selkie child can cast everywhere about. Och, who knows what such creatures may think or do?”
“A dangerous sort.”
“Och, aye, nae question.”
“But a selkie can take mortal shape.” So he had always heard. Sometimes one could trust the old women to be right.
A dark chuckle Dubhain gave, and a wicked wink. “The mac Ceannann’s lady wife could hae said. I wonder which were the greater pleasure, and in what shape. A cold and clammy fellow, but of endless variety and dimension...”
“A wicked mind you have!”
“Why, nae curiosity? And the lady at the end of the loch for Fianna’s matchmaker, and the great selkie obeys? I hae great question o’ that. I hae great question o’ that, sweet Caith, but these sparrows hae nae answer.”
It was a question why the selkie had agreed, or whether the selkie had anything to gain by the deed. And why ... ?
“If Herself could command the great selkie himself,” Caith asked, “then what use tae Herself, a selkie’s child?”
“An excuse for a quarrel,” said Dubhain. “An all that excuse let in.”
“But what use has she for a bright Sidhe or these young folk in Her sort of magic, if she can command the selkie?”
“One maun ask that, aye.”
“You missed the civil ghost, this morning. I made close acquaintance of it. A fellow called Padraic. He served the mac Ceannann, in that hall. A goodly man, he.”
A swift glance of Dubhain’s dark eyes, in which the red was kindling. “Say ye so?”
“From out of the fire. The witch’s beast killed him.” He tried not to remember that. “The fire conjured him; the lass singed her fingers saving a bit of wood before it died. This is no maiden’s keepsake she has in her possession....”
“Mayhap she is nae maiden. Hae ye asked her? Shall I?”
“Damn your humors!” Padraic’s honest ghost was all too vividly in memory, and the collapse of the stairs and the dark. The deadly fall at his left hand was straight to the loch, down a hundred feet and more. “Did ye find aught but the hares when you were out and about, this morning? Ho
w did that man get past you?”
It implied fault, perhaps. And Dubhain was never at fault. He gave no answer but a lifting of his shoulders and a frown.
“Nuallan bled, on thorns of her rose,” Caith pursued him. “I saw ’t in my dream. There by the falls. A prick of the thumb on a black rose.”
“By the falls?”
“In Dun Glas, damn you! I saw the vault in Dun Glas, and Nuallan can not altogether ignore her. There were roses, black ones, and he pricked his hand!”
“Roses, ye say.”
“Black ones. What does it mean?”
“Nae good thing.” Dubhain gave him as straight and sober a look as ever he had given. “My prince, I See no roses, ’t is no’ any roses she offers him, but mortal Sight does queer things when it tries to see the fay. This is true: if he were nae holding against her in some degree, we oursel’s would nae be free where we walk, and her borders would be somewhat wider than a day ago.”
“We need the Daoine Sidhe! We need their help, Dubhain, — beg if we must. They cannot understand what is happening here...”
“M’ lord called ye to Gleann Fiain. Thou ‘rt the help o’ the Sidhe, man, ye did nae realize ’t?”
“I? Badbh and Macha, Dubhain, — the outcast, I!”
“Things hae gone vastly awry here, man. Yet we hae these pretty sparrows for guides. And ye will swear by the battle-crow. Fickle she is, the Badbh, fickle as the Old Ones, me darlin’ Caith. Ne’er trust her. I would ye nae call on that one i’ this hour.”
“What are the fay doing? Where are they? Whence comes this silver gate?”
“What silver gate?”
That Dubhain had seen nothing of the sort, that Dubhain knew nothing he was talking about, set all his estimations in disorder.
“Between myself and faery.”
“Och that gate.”
“ ’That gate!’ You drive me mad, damn you! It’s no joke!”
Faery Moon Page 25