So he left Ceannann perplexed, set down the jug by the side of the house, and went along the river-edge, among the frames with their rotting nets, expecting Dubhain at any moment to leap out at him or tweak his hair or some other such foolishness.
They were not in imminent danger. To Dubhain it would be an invitation to mischief. And in truth— it was better than Dubhain sulking.
But the wight was not there either. Perhaps he was hiding half in faery, as he could do, perhaps listening to the search and smirking to himself. There had been that business last night, when he had challenged Dubhain’s cleverness; and true, Dubhain had been fey and difficult, since.
If he could only trust it was one of Dubhain’s pranks, if he were absolutely confident that were all it was, he could damn the wight with a clear conscience and go camp outside the bothy until, an hour from now, Dubhain would spring up with some wicked trick to scare him.
But if it was a prank, it was still cursed ill-timed, and dangerous with all they had at risk, and tired as he was and angry as he was, he cared not now what Dubhain did to him, so long as Dubhain showed up safe and in good humor. By all the rules he knew, at least of Sidhe magic, a spell always found its way into the weaknesses of a thing— and Dubhain was both the greatest strength in their company and their chiefest weakness, in ways not even he was apt to be.
Whether the witch’s workings were the same as Sidhe magic, and bound by the same strictures Dubhain had named, of give and take, he did not know how to guess— but magic was magic in its grossest points, as best he did guess, and this disappearing truly began to frighten him.
So did the vacancy of this place, and the vacancy of the land, and the twins going straight for it, the way they had gone for the hill fort, and all it held of ghosts.
“Dubhain, you rascal. You’re not helping us. I did take ye for cleverer than that.”
That last, he said to sting Dubhain’s pride, and give the rascal the excuse to appear, scare him, and claim some plausible excuse for his vanishing—
Oh, not weakness to the witch’s charms.
Never that he might have been tempted to a wickedness greater than his ordinary wicked self.
Not that something the twins had summoned was whispering to him out of the water and out of the earth and bidding him play the ultimate, wicked, unexpected prank.
“Here I am, Dubhain. Ye can’t touch me and get away before I catch you.”
But it drew not a flicker of presence from a misbehaving Sidhe. Not a stone thrown. Not a breath of a whisper at his ear or ruffle of his hair.
Shaking his head, he walked from among the nets and around to the back, half up on the knoll, and down and around again, giving Dubhain every chance at scaring the sense out of him, but there was never a hint or a sign he had been there at all.
The twins stood and watched this foolish, helpless search in the gathering dusk. They were perplexed, and shrugged and looked troubled, when at last he gave it up.
“You cannot find him?” Ceannann asked.
“No, damn him,” Caith muttered, which he wished instantly he had not said: twice foolish answer to a foolish question.
To hell with ghosts, he thought, and, the hut being the only resource before them, and that being the only place left to search, he took hold of the door by its edge and dragged at it.
The leather of the middle hinge gave way, and the door sagged down of a sudden and scraped his ankle as it swung open on its last leather hinge. He swore and recovered himself on the uninjured foot, holding his ankle, with a view of the dark inside— no ghosts, no bogles evident.
And no Dubhain.
Ominously enough, too, the place was still stocked. No fisherman would have left his nets, and, by his experience, neighbors who knew a prosperous old man had died would by no means have left his belongings for the badgers and the foxes.
Yet the light from the open doorway fell on clothing left hanging and cooking pots left unthieved. A cot, a table, a chair, floats and weights and other oddments of the fisher’s trade all lay abandoned. If there had ever been a boat, he had seen none near the shore, so one could choose to believe the fisherman had taken it and abandoned what seemed too rich to have been a seasonal abode.
In expectation of return the next season?
Maybe his boat had sunk— but why had no one missed the fisherman, and come looking, and eventually carried away the goods?
There was too much good here— a condition that had all the look of a place under some curse, if he had to hazard a guess, a place where the neighbors would not willingly venture.
He could most often feel a Sidhe touch in a house that had gone quiet enough, or feel a haunt if one was about and ready to wake. Yet this small hut and its gravelly shore was void of all feeling of harm or help— all except his niggling unease that it existed so conveniently and so conspicuously in an otherwise vacant land— and most of all that the twins had found it.
He even held up the elfshot stone, with a trepidation of seeing something otherwise invisible.
Blurred, unnatural shadow fell on the cot and the wall, and for a moment his heart jumped, but the twins had moved behind him in the doorway, blocking the dying sunlight.
“D’ ye feel anything?” he asked them. One of them being Sidhe, he thought he might expect some advice or some opinion from them, or even some explanation why they had come straight for this place.
But they shook their heads to that question, seeming more interested in the shelves.
“There are blankets,” said Ceannann, and, said Firinne: “We have a roof above us, at least.”
Shelter, the woman said.
Macha, he was exhausted, and without Dubhain to keep the dreams away, he did not want to sleep, least of all in a place this strange. The sea was where they were going ... the great sea shore was where he had far rather sleep tonight, if he could only muster the strength to keep going another lengthy walk. It was in sight from here. It was the only thing that truly beckoned to him with safety, and he had not the strength to reach it, or, truth, the conviction to leave this place where he had last seen Dubhain.
But meanwhile the sun, the traitor, was slipping to the horizon and whatever went abroad by night on this shore would be abroad.
Maybe, after all, the twins knew where they had to be, and where would they be going, before the sun set, but where their luck had led them?
And for all he knew, it was the right luck. The twins came out of hazards unscathed, the twins kept their lives, and got to safety ... so stay as near to them as he could, that was the wisdom that offered itself, in Dubhain’s absence.
And if the selkie had swum the river to the getting of the one twin on Fianna, it could certainly reach them here. In the way of the Sidhe, it would be here just as fast as the selkie willed to reach them— which could be in the next instant, or tomorrow, or a fortnight hence.
Meanwhile the twins were into the shelves and pots, interested in plunder. Firinne had already gotten off with the only blanket they had made off with from the mountain keep— his blanket, as happened— and she shared it with her brother, but never once, not once, had they considered him on the way here: Firinne had had the blanket to herself all during the climb, the warmest-clad of all of them, with her abundance of skirts and her plaid, and maybe with the strength of the Sidhe to sustain her.
Now, like a good thief, and maybe with a heart as selfish as Dubhain’s, she was losing no last bit of the light in searching through the shelves and looking into every jar for whatever spoils she could lay claim to.
Well, fisher-ghosts and the sun-born Sidhe be damned, he said to himself, he was weary of going cold. He spied a man’s shirt hanging on a peg, nothing fine, but good muslin, and clean, given the dust from its hanging on its peg.
In a small tarred box below a counter, he found good stockings, more than one pair, and in the same box, a leather bag the thong of which broke to powder when he opened it.
In it he discovered a razor, a whets
tone, and a good knife, not too far gone in rust, along with a few fishhooks and some weights wrapped in cord that might still be sound enough to land a fish.
Worse and worse news for what had happened here, then. What with the knife and the cord and the hooks, the little bag was the sort of kit a fisherman might habitually take with him, if he liked his comforts, and used his razor now and again.
“We could live here,” Firinne was declaring to Ceannann. “We could mend the nets and be fisher-folk.”
Macha save him, it had all the echo of the cottage in the glen, above Guagach’s haunted waters, a high, hollow echo of folly. He heard in that utterance the very words Firinne must have used six years ago, when they had fled the beast and left the hill fort. Padraic’s memories were as dim to him now as yesterday’s dream, but they rose up in bitter rage at Firinne, for all the death and the pain and the destruction her mother’s folly had brought down on Gleann Fiain.
Nothing would happen, no, no one would die, they would live on forever in an idyll of innocence.
“Why,Ceannann,” Firinne would have said, just as blithely, looking about the cottage those years ago, “we can live here and be shepherds....”
“Did ye ne’er care what was going on around ye?” he wanted to shout at Firinne, himself: “Did ye never ask who lived in that snug cottage afore ye, or what happened to them?”
But he said nothing, only searched up the makings of fire, kneeling at the little hearth.
He hated such fecklessness. He had lived in his own illusions, on the shores of the salt sea, and he had cherished his own misled dreams, and he knew the harm it had brought on him and everyone he touched in his bitter home-coming— in his youthful delusions who his father really was—
Macha, it was the oldest of stories. He did nothing new. There was no new wrong-doing under the sun.
There was nothing new of folly either, or fond delusion.
Or perhaps it was the truth he hated most of all— and he was no one to lesson them. He could not, in his own heart, and apart from Padraic’s bitter feelings, fault the twins too much, who were young, who had never known any life but the one their foolish mother and mortal father had given them, their little shadow-play of happiness between annual murders and calamity—
How could they have known better than he could had known his own truth? When the Sidhe damned a man— they owed him no truth. They gave him no leeway, and no excuses. That was for men to give themselves, the better to deserve their fates.
And were they truly thieves? They were a lord’s children. Who but the witch had ever denied them anything?
Who had ever told them the cost of their illusions and the glamor of the pretendings that a fond father had cast about their nursery, while the gate-guard died, and the flocks died, and the people died bloodier and bloodier deaths? They were safe. They slept soundly. No one had told them the cost.
Have peace with them, he decided. If they proved contrary tomorrow, he would seize the best of everything himself and leave them to their fate: thus, twice or so in every hour of his life, he deluded himself that he had a choice— or that they had. He did not know their fate, he did not want to know it— he could grow angrier and more desperate for himself if he let himself think long in that vein, and he refused to listen any longer to their childish play and their bubbling delight over a dead man’s treasures.
“I’ve the makings of fire here,” he said aloud. He had found a lamp, and it held stale oil. Its wick was dry, but he soaked it and drew it up again, with oily fingers. “Lad, will ye strike us a spark afore the light goes?”
Ceannann came and squatted by him, piling his swag on the sandy floor and taking out his flint and steel. It was near the sea, and very little was entirely dry, but a wisp or two of oiled wool and lint, and a little dead grass that had blown in, and then a few sticks of driftwood.
A little fire took in the tinder. A careful haste put larger and larger bits to burn, until the fire strengthened. Driftwood twigs followed.
It smoked and did not draw. The chimney, such as there was, was clogged, and they would have a pall of smoke above their heads and stink of it if they let the fire burn. Caith lit the wick, and its weak, wind-blown flame spread light about, and cast their three towering shadows like giants among the shelves and rafters.
They let the fire die, then, having light to plunder by.
Caith only appropriated a cooking pan and a tin cup, that was all else, with apology to the dead. He put the blade and hooks, wrapped in cloth, into his own pouch, wrapped the pan and the cup into a piece of muslin Firinne had not yet found, tied it up in tarred cord that had not rotted too badly over the years, and took his pilfered goods outside to await Dubhain, when he came, the wretch.
That was all the baggage he needed, besides the shirt and the stockings, all the wealth, at least, that m’lord Nuallan was likely to let him keep—
Once they had rescued Nuallan from the witch. As ’t was only Nuallan’s due to be rescued, and Caith mac Sliabhan’s due to go penniless, oh, aye, it was.
He thirsted, and there was the whisky jug by the door. He had a sip of it.
Gone all desire of further traveling tonight, gone his restlessness to reach the sea.
His knees ached, and his stomach was empty, and Dubhain would be back, he had every confidence he would. The wight did go off at times for simple reasons that made perfect sense to Dubhain. Responsibility was not often foremost in Dubhain’s thoughts. It was not often in Dubhain’s thoughts.
But in that consideration, if Dubhain had felt hungry and decided they were staying, Dubhain might even be off chasing their supper, in perfect innocence. He had done that before.
That, and looking for the local Sidhe. That was far more likely.
Where there were mountain springs one could expect a few of the elusive little folk; where there were broad grassy meadows like these beyond the hill, there well might be one of the domestic fay; and Dubhain might easily have hared off in court of one, if the fay in question was at all comely—
Or he might, third choice, be off exploring in faery, if the way into that land was at all easier from this valley— as well it might be.
Yet there had been a great dearth of the fay back in Gleann Fiain.
Was the ill spread here, too?
Had Dubhain strayed into trouble in faery?
Damn the wretch anyway.
Hide and seek was the likeliest game. And the river itself, that made a rushing sound over its stones and sand and drowned a man’s own small footsteps, was ever present, and offered the greatest likehood of the smaller fay— or trouble— or attraction to the watery likes of a pooka.
In his horse shape, maybe. Frolicking down the shore like a fool. And perhaps listening to things he ought not.
On that thought, Caith set the whisky jar down, gathered himself up, straightened his sword in his belt, then walked around behind the little hut. He went down past the ghostly dark rows of nets and onto the shore, where no step made a sound above the voice of the water.
“Dubhain, ye black wight. Spit out th’ stone an’ take your right shape, now. Here’s enough of sport wi’ us.”
His foot must have slipped. He was in the ice-cold river, swept along the stones, tumbled headlong into a frightening dark, where up confounded down and everything spun topsy turvy.
Then, turning slowly until down was up, and watching the insubstantial bubbles rise through the insubstantial water, toward grey light, he knew where he was— back on the very edge of Moragacht’s domain.
Of the silver gates of Nuallan’s land, he saw nothing, only drifted in a terrifying greyness, not mist, not fog, not water— no feeling at all.
Dubhain’s vanishing was not at all one of Dubhain’s pranks, nor even Dubhain’s choice, he knew that now. He suddenly found himself on dry land, in a strange dead woods.
He ventured a little distance in this place and he felt a foreboding fear that if he looked about again, something would be at his bac
k— a fear so acute he ran, not knowing where he was going, tearing himself on branches.
Then, as suddenly, he was on one knee on the pebbles, on the shore by the river, dry and whole and never having fallen in at all.
Illusion. Faery work.
“By the geas,” he muttered, shivering and getting to his feet again with the earthly wind blowing on him. “By the geas, wight! This has ceased to be a game! Ye must answer me— come to me. Now! I give ye nae choice i’ the matter! The night is gone strange an’ I need ye!”
But it seemed no good to beg the unhearing Sidhe, or even to threaten to walk away and leave the twins in the hut yonder to whatever guilt they had inherited by being born. The Sidhe would have no mercy for the twins for what they were and would have less for him if he failed them. Free, he never was.
He could suppose, in the absence of other evidence, that faery meant to preserve the twins. Their luck had saved them time and again.
Nuallan had— if Nuallan had sent them out of that prison— set them in his charge, for him to do for them what he could...
Or perhaps he was to destroy them. Destruction was the Sidhe’s principal use of him. That was his particular talent in the world. Perhaps they blamed the selkie and he was to do general murder.
But would that save Lord Nuallan?
“Dubhain,” he pleaded with the indifferent breezes. “Dubhain, if this is all a joke, I do own ye far the cleverer. Ye’ve affrighted me, I admit it, to all the height and depth of the world I do admit it, and ye can come back, now, Dubhain, at any time ye will.”
Only the wind whispered to him down off the knowe and the peat-water sighed among the reeds, while the cold stars came out.
Once in dread, once in pain...
The dire thought struck him then that the sum of his Callings might not yet add up to three.
There had been once in the yard of the cottage, with the clattering beast at his heels.
Once in the margin of Guagach ... Nuallan hae sent me, Dubhain most carefully had said, when he had arrived on Guagach’s bank, to take his pooka shape and bear him to Moragacht’s border.
Faery Moon Page 29