by Morgan Smith
“Which,” she added, “is damned peculiar, and I don’t quite understand it, but it’s true.”
I shook my head.
“All my life,” I said. “All my life tells me you are wrong, Arlais. Now let me go.”
She wouldn’t budge, though. After a while, I gave up arguing and instead led all four of the horses up over into the open field above the road and lay on my back watching the clouds scud by, while the others talked.
The two men, they wouldn’t look at me, not directly, after they’d read what Eardith had written. The book had been handed back to Arlais, and I’d seen that my presence was making them all feel constrained and gone my way, but not too far, because Arlais was being so damned stubborn about me not just leaving them to face whatever was going on.
“You can’t outrun your fate so easily,” she’d said. “You’ll just carry this with you, and it will curse you still. Why do you think Eardith left the book for you to find?”
“As a warning?” It was the only sensible explanation. But Eardith had had plenty of chances to send me packing, and hadn’t done it. It seemed to me that she had regretted it at the end at least, though, and I said so.
Arlais just waved that away. She said severely that I should at least trust that she knew more of another holy one’s reasoning than I did, and would I please just wait and let her work this problem out properly?
I couldn’t tell what Guerin and Cowell thought about it. I had gone far enough away that I couldn’t overhear their conversation. I didn’t want to know how disgusted my very existence made them. Not yet.
And I was worried about other things, too. I was fairly sure that Ilona already knew the book existed, that she suspected that I knew now what I was, and that this would force things to a head before anyone had the time and knowledge to prepare for - for whatever it was that she would do.
And if she didn’t yet know these things, what was to stop Cowell from telling her? I had no idea why, after decades of loyal service, he was suddenly being trusted to betray her. How did any of us know he was not her spy?
How did I know Arlais was not her creature, either? Or Guerin… but here, logic reasserted itself. If Guerin was playing false, then I might as well give myself up to madness right then.
And then, just as if I’d called his name out loud, Guerin was walking up the rise toward me. If he was really smart, I thought, he’d knife me in the ribs before ever I got my sword out of the scabbard. Aye, and then slit my throat and burn my bones, just to be on the safe side.
He did none of those things.
He sat down beside me, and he was silent for a good long while.
And then he smiled and said, “A hell of a day, isn’t it?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We didn’t speak much after that. We just sat there companionably watching the horses.
I didn’t understand it.
Why was nothing changed for him? Why did he still see me as simply me, without doubts or shadows? He ought to have been keeping his distance and making signs against the evil eye. He ought, at least, to have been back on the road with Arlais and Cowell, arguing for stringing me up on the nearest tree or at least convincing them that the sooner I left Dungarrow and Keraine far behind me, the better for everyone. But he was doing none of those things. He just sat there, occasionally observing that the grass was taking on the green pretty early this year, and that Balefire looked fit.
And at long last, Arlais and Cowell walked up to where we sat, and I saw that Cowell, too, seemed perfectly comfortable sitting down with the demon-spawn.
This worried me all the more. I couldn’t distrust him utterly, we’d known each other too long for that, but I couldn’t put my full faith in him either. There were more mysteries here than I would have ever guessed at, even a seven-day past. I didn’t like it, and finally I nerved myself up to say so.
He merely shrugged.
“No,” I persisted. “You’ve taken her coin for years. Tell me why I should believe you don’t feel any loyalty to her now, all of a sudden, like.”
“She’s killed before,” he said, goaded. “She’s turned good people into monsters and forced others to kill for her. And if I’d known all that before this spring, no power on earth would have made me accept so much as a beggar’s bit she’d touched.”
I don’t know if I believed him, not entirely. His tone was bitter enough, but after this wholly uncharacteristic outburst, he was silent, refusing to tell me anything more, and I didn’t see why, having decided his honour was at stake, he hadn’t just left Ilona’s service, instead of becoming an ally and spy for a priestess he’d known for less than three days.
“I still think me leaving here is safest for everyone,” I said. “And we should burn that thing. If she wants it, for any reason, we should make damned sure she doesn’t get it.”
“That’s the problem, Caoimhe. You can’t destroy these things so easily. And Eardith was stronger in Gifts than most, and she spent years learning to hide things.”
“Then give it to me and I’ll toss it into the sea somewhere between here and Fendrais.”
“You wouldn’t get within ten leagues of the coast before Ilona caught up with you. The moment you run, she’ll know that you know and she’ll come after you. You saw what happened to you last night. And that’s only because she suspects you know what you are.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you? For everything you want, at any rate. All right, then. What do you propose we do?”
It was lunacy, her solution was. It was idiocy and madness, it didn’t have a ghost of a chance of working, and I said so.
That’s the trouble with the holy ones, though.
Outsiders, ordinary folk, we don’t know enough to argue these things decently. The holy ones, they just look at you with those pitying, superior eyes and explain, as if you were a toddler, that their reasons and methods wouldn’t make sense to you, and that you must just put your faith in them because they know all those secret things the Mother entrusts only to them.
That was how they’d grown so rich. That was how they’d grasped power centuries ago, and maintained it for so long, unchallenged. The way they managed it, they could keep the rest of us ignorant whether we willed it or not, forcing us to take some of it, at least, on trust.
So when she said that she needed me there to break the protections, that she was sure Eardith had incorporated something of me or mine into the spell she’d laid on the thing just before she’d folded it into my second-best shirt, and that to break that part, Arlais would need my presence, well, I couldn’t argue. Daft as it seemed, it was just the kind of thing Eardith would have done. What any servant of the Mother who had trained at the holy island would have done: used whatever or whomever came to hand, without a by-your-leave or a thank-you afterwards, because what else were we for, but to be used?
Arlais had plans for more than destroying the book. She knew how to do that, right enough, she said, but there were preparations to make, and the timing needed to be right. She didn’t say, of course, that there were some things that Eardith had found or worked out, that she intended to either memorize or copy down in her own asarlaíoche, but I knew instinctively that she meant to.
She only needed a day or two to get things ready, Arlais said. There was a moonless night in two days’ time, and that would be a night where her ability to break the protections and destroy the book would be greatest. Better still, she had found a way, she thought, to bind that thing up in the mountains, bind it so securely that even Ilona, be she never so wise, would not ever be able to find her way past those wardings.
If we could just stay that little bit ahead of Ilona for two days, she said. If we could just give her the chance to use her knowledge and craft her solution, then when I ran, it wouldn’t matter so much. Whatever knowledge Eardith had found would be lost to Ilona, and Arlais would be free to force Ilona’s hand, and cage that mon
ster in the mountains more securely than ever. She’d be able to end this, for good and all.
There were a hundred questions I ought to have asked, and a hundred more I needed better answers to. I knew that.
There were a hundred reasons why none of what Arlais said was necessarily true and there were a hundred more why I shouldn’t have trusted any of these people anyway, and I knew that, too.
But I hadn’t slept or eaten properly for far too long, there were three of them there, presenting a united front, and the sun grew warmer, my stomach rumbled, and eventually I gave up the quarrel.
“Two days,” I said. “I’ll give you two days. And then I’m off, no matter what, Arlais.”
Back at Rhwyn, Arlais solved the problem of getting my things back to our room without remark by the simple expedient of imperiously ordering one of the village girls hanging around flirting with the soldiers from Keraine to take them upstairs for her.
And I went off to the practice ground, because at least this explained why I was fully armed so early in the day, and I attempted, for lack of anything better to do, to teach Lannach to throw a fake that any goatherd couldn’t have predicted in their sleep.
Chapter Thirty
I dreamed deep that night, deeper and truer, maybe, than ever I had before. The holy ones, of course, put a lot of stock in dreams, but I never had. My dreams swayed between the impossible and the impenetrable, when they didn’t veer into the horrific, and none had ever had the precision of truth.
But that night, I dreamed in a way that woke me gasping on a stifled scream of rage, a dream so strangely real and so hideously painful that I felt as if I were drowning in it, unable to find even the ghost of a hope to cling to. Not that hope had ever been a constant companion of mine, of course. But I had had glimpses of a world that had held its promise, at least, and now I felt none.
My cousin Iain, asking me mockingly if I wasn’t tired? Wasn’t I weary? Wasn’t I?
And I was falling, now…
She spoke my name.
No. She cried it out, in fear and despair, and I was pounding on the door that lay between us.
And then it opened, showing me a weeping girl, who reached out to me in desperation, pleading, begging for something I could not give.
“She has my heart,” she whispered. “She cut it out with the killing blade.”
And then Feargal was there, pale and rotting, a gift from the grave.
“I didn’t want this,” he said. “I didn’t do this. She made me as I am.”
But my mother was there, too, angry and accusing, dragging her bloated green corpse behind her, all along the hallway at Penliath, and then the laughter sounded in my ears, so loud it blocked out everything else, until I turned and ran, kept running, as if I could somehow escape all this torment…
I lay in the dark, listening to the echoes of that dream, for a long, long time. I felt bruised and aching, as if I’d been sparring on the practice ground with someone much better than me, and I worked hard, in that hour before dawn, to wall myself up again, to close up every avenue of feeling, and to cloak myself in uncaring.
Be a rock. Be a wall of stone. Be no living thing.
After all, what good would feeling something do me now?
Chapter Thirty-One
The traders who unexpectedly arrived the next day weren’t any of the ones who ordinarily came to Rhwyn.
It was early in the season, but this enterprising little group had heard that the Camrhyssi had been raiding the tiny villages and farmsteads that eked out their livings along the foothills, linked by the track running north from Ys Tearch. Against the odds, they’d decided there would be some extra coin to be made by bringing their wares along that way, ahead of the usual crowd. They’d followed Birais’ forces at a fairly brisk pace, whilst driving hard bargains all along the way.
Consequently, they were in fine and cheerful moods to begin with, attitudes made all the more smug by Birais inviting them into the hall to quiz them personally for news from the south.
There wasn’t much. Birais had left his younger brother in command at Glaice, and his wife, still holding court at Kerris, was known to be a brilliant administrator. There wasn’t much they wouldn’t be able to handle with ease. One bit of news did give us all pause, though.
The traders had lost a guard in an unprovoked attack by a wild pig, not five miles south of Rhwyn.
Too close for comfort, said Birais, but that was merely a convenient excuse. You could tell he was excited. We all were.
Everyone loves a boar hunt. The danger is high, but the return for success is high, too, and the traders seemed quite sure it was a sow. There might even be piglets, as well, and it was obvious, if the House of Machyll and his friends stayed here much longer, we’d all of us be down to living off bean soup and barley bread in a few more days. Not the sort of fare a king was used to.
The mood was contagious. Even the villagers who had come up to the manor to help out were getting into the spirit of the thing, reminiscing about a time some ten years back when a stag boar had run right through Rhwyn village and across the green and gotten stuck in the wattle fencing behind Derryth’s garden.
“You aren’t going,” Arlais said to me.
“Of course, I’m going.”
She frowned. “It isn’t safe. And I might need you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It would look strange if I cried off. People would wonder. She might wonder.”
Arlais had that determined, stubborn look on her face, but when she appealed to Guerin to talk sense to me, she was overruled immediately.
“If she doesn’t go, it only draws attention to her, which is exactly what you said we didn’t want. Don’t worry, Arlais. I’ll look out for her.”
“I’m not the village’s idiot child,” I said. “I can manage a damned hunt without a minder.”
And so, in the small hours before dawn, I got myself quietly dressed and armed, and down into the courtyard with everyone else. Birais had already sent a squad on ahead with Joss, to scout things out and get ready before the rest of us arrived.
“Be nice,” said Guerin. “Stick close to me, so that Arlais can’t complain.”
“That worries you?”
“She might witch me into a tadpole.”
We both laughed. It had been one of Einon’s childhood nightmares, when he was very small, and he’d only admitted to it on a crazy, drunken night a few days after my fight with Mael. It was a private joke, one never spoke of it or even alluded to it if the young duke was within earshot, but it had become a kind of secret phrase for nonsensical dangers, for the few of us that had been present.
One of the king’s friends was singing the “Lament of Caderyn” as we rode. He had a good voice, deep and melodic and it carried well, but it’s one of those doleful, sad ballads filled with nothing but tragedy. It really didn’t fit the occasion. It certainly wasn’t helping my mood. Even so, it was a relief simply just to get out of Rhwyn.
It was probably only my imagination that made me sure that a pair of eyes were boring into my back everywhere I went. It was like a constant itch between my shoulder blades, even as we rode, and it made no sense. The Lady hadn’t even come down for the evening meal yesterday, pleading a headache. I hadn’t seen her for nearly two days, and more importantly, she hadn’t seen me.
I really needed to take myself in hand, I thought, or I’d be seeing a troll in every tree trunk, as the saying goes.
The signs, according to Joss, were good. The air was still damp and foggy, especially in the low-lying places, but he said confidently that the sow seemed not to have gone far, and he thought there were others, which was natural. Wild ones still like to group together. Two stags, said Joss, and maybe three sows. He couldn’t say how many had dropped their litters.
Meanwhile, he’d set up a feeder full of household scraps as bait, in a little clearing criss-crossed by several narrow game trails. The king divided us into smaller groups, four or fi
ve in each and Joss was finding stations for us, on the theory that there were only so many directions the pigs might go.
I was sent with Guerin and a couple of others to a spot on the northerly edge, where the slope alongside one of those little tracks rose gently back towards Rhwyn. It wasn’t, I judged, terribly likely that any of the boars would run this way, but we had a pretty good view down into the clearing. It would be fun to watch, at least, once the morning mists burned away.
We waited. It’s boring, of course, because you need to stay very quiet, but I didn’t lack for things to mull over.
I could wonder what it was that was driving Arlais, and why she had not immediately sent word to Braide about the situation here. Or that maybe she had, but then there was the question of how she’d managed to do that. I thought I would have noticed, had anyone been missing.
She might have confided in the king, of course. If one of his soldiers had been sent off, I wouldn’t know, except that no one was talking about a missing comrade, and troopers are notorious for gossip.
I could be suspicious of Lady Ilona’s headache. It seemed nicely timed against my own revelations, and that could not be a good sign. I could wonder about how long she had been planning all this, but it seemed I knew the answer to that, deep down, and those thoughts hurt me far too much for me to examine them more closely.
I could wonder about the thing that had sired me.
But here, my mind rebelled completely. I could not imagine it, I could not envision it. Not without puking up what little breakfast I’d managed before we set out, anyway.
Strangely, this helped me, in a way. It occurred to me, in that forced, early morning delay, that my reaction bore out Arlais’ assurance that I was not, in and of myself, evil. That whatever my disgusting origins, I still might not be an inherent abomination. I was still myself, whatever that was, and this cheered me, just a little.