by Morgan Smith
There was a crackle of undergrowth, very faint, off to the east of us, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, we saw a huge stag boar, nosing its way through the trees from the south. It was only for a moment, and then the shape disappeared, swallowed up by the fog, which had not lifted. Indeed, it seemed to have thickened, rising up out of the little dell below us and deadening both sight and sound.
There were suddenly some crashing sounds, and a yelp of surprise or pain, I couldn’t tell which. We were all of us on our feet, snatching up our spears, and then a pregnant sow came out of the trees below, barreling straight up that trail beside us, and we leapt from our hide and were after her.
It was stupid, what we did. We should have known better. We did know better. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go at all.
Within moments, I became separated from the others. The trail didn’t allow room for all of us, and we’d spread out into the trees, rushing headlong after the beast, and even though I’d noted that the fog was still rising, that it had been steadily thickening, I didn’t stop to consider that we were being idiots. I just ran, like everyone else.
For a long time, I could still hear them. I could still catch glimpses of them through the trees. There were flashes of intermittent sunlight on spearheads, there were shouts of excitement. There was an occasional bit of movement I only saw out of the corner of my eye, there was the sound of tree branches being pushed aside, the thump of feet through the underbrush, and occasional squeals of rage from the boar.
I was still running, not really caring where my feet were taking me, not noticing that the sounds from my companions were growing fainter, and unaware that I had no idea what direction I was heading. I saw, just frequently enough, those tell-tale markings to believe that I still followed my quarry and that the sow was not far away.
Even so, I was beginning to think I’d lost my goal, just beginning to sense that something was vaguely not right, when I saw the blood.
In a heartbeat I could feel the excitement coursing back through my veins. I was instantly certain it was a speared boar I followed, and I was off and running again. The blood wasn’t in profusion. It was merely wounded, that boar, and I could think only of how good it would be to be in at the kill, and not of the danger a wounded and desperate animal can be when brought to bay.
But then the trail was fading, it was trickling away, it was gone, and so, gradually, I realized, was everyone else. The mist was still waist deep and swirling, enveloping me in it and slowly, as the blood drops disappeared into the trees, so, too, finally, did the thrill of the chase. My footsteps slowed and then halted, and I looked around me.
I was lost. Well, not entirely, I thought, considering everything. The trail had run more or less north and eastwards, as far as I could remember, and I didn’t think that I had really strayed too far from that direction, overall. But with the fog, I couldn’t say, in truth, that I knew where I was, or even how far I’d come.
I gazed up the slope. It seemed to me that there were clearer views if I got higher, maybe above the tree line, and from there I might be able to get a better idea of where the road was from here. Eventually, I reckoned, everyone else would make for the place where we’d left the horses, whether any of us had managed a kill or not.
The hill was steep. It took me some time to reach a place where my sight lines weren’t obscured by mist or by the forest, and I was tired, far more tired than I expected to be. I leaned against a tree-trunk, to catch my breath.
When I finally looked around me and down into the valley below, I noticed three things.
The first thing I saw was how much time had passed. The sun was well past its apex and that made no sense. I couldn’t possibly have been running after the sow for that long, could I?
The second thing I noticed was that the road was not visible from here at all.
And the third thing? The third thing was that I knew, roughly, where I was. And that was not a good place for me to be at all.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I felt no sense of panic. It seemed inevitable that, try as I might to change it, my course had been set long since. The choices had always been limited, and they had never been mine. There was no reason that this time should have been different.
Even so, I took a good look around, to see if there was any way I could avoid this. The terrain offered few options. And truly, I thought, this was no unfortunate happenstance. This had been carefully managed. I had been manipulated, certainly, and probably magicked into being here by someone or something that wanted things that only my existence could deliver.
You can’t outrun your fate, Arlais had said. I wondered, then, if she had meant it as a warning or a persuasion. She hadn’t seemed to want me to go on this little adventure, but I couldn’t tell, at this point, if that had been a real fear based on secret knowledge, or simply a ruse, a way to deflect suspicion, knowing that I would go anyway, whatever she said.
I could, I surmised, try to scale down a bit of rocky scree I could see, just a little off to the west, a way that might let me down into the woods below, skirting the one place I wanted to avoid. It wasn’t too terribly dangerous.
I could, of course, try to retrace my steps back down the mountain. It would be dark soon, and I would need to find some place to spend what would certainly be a cold and lonely night, and from there, I thought, I might even take the road south and escape, veiling my past and sinking into anonymity in some faraway place.
If I had learned anything these last few hours, though, it was that probably that none of these choices would do me any good. Something would happen to lead me back up towards that place where Joss and I had killed the wolves. I had, I was convinced, been witched in some fashion into coming here. It was obvious I had been witched before, when the need had arisen. I would probably be witched again, if it proved necessary, and the only things that running would net me at this point would be more tired, more resentful, more confused and thus more prone to poor judgment.
Running away, hiding away - I had done a fair bit of that, over the years. None of it had really served me all that well, in the end, had it? Maybe it was time to try a different tack.
This thing had found me, and pretty easily, too. There was really only one direction to go. Old Badb had been wrong. Ill winds didn’t just follow me. They had been pushing me, all along, driving me like a ship into the shoals, all my life.
I wanted some control back. I might never have had much. I might have never had any, all things considered, but I wanted it now.
Even so, after everything, after a lifetime of suspicion and mistrust, I was not happy to see what was there in the ruins of that ancient temple, waiting for me. Unsurprised, but still unhappy, because it knocked away the very last spindly prop I had left.
Arlais lay, in an awkward, motionless heap, in the centre of the clearing, and the figure that stood over her was clearly not sorrowful about this.
There was no scent of blood in the air, no signs of violence, but I had seen death too often not to know it, even from a distance. Yet, I felt strangely unmoved, perhaps because I had turned this one over in my mind so often in the last day or so, it was only the finality of a suspicion confirmed. I had told her it was madness, and I had not been wrong. Whatever Arlais had tried to do, she had failed, and it had cost her.
It had cost everyone.
“You took your own sweet time,” the figure standing over her said, crossly. “You should have been here long since.”
I shrugged. Even I, with not a speck of the Mother’s power or gift or talent of any kind, could feel the pull and swirl of sorcery around me.
How strong were they? One doesn’t grow up surrounded by the gifted and the priestly without gaining some comprehension of how these things work. There are limits to the control and to the ability to force even one person to act against their own will.
They had had years of training, though, years of collecting forbidden lore, and years of practicing in secret how to w
ield their talents and their knowledge to the most efficient ends. They would have learned to mask those skills, not allowing anyone around them to know just how deeply they had gone into the abyss.
***
She had been one step ahead of me, all my life, had the Lady of Gorsedd.
She must have known what kind of hell I lived in, and therefore, when the time came, just the right blend of kindness and caring to apply that would leave me indebted and uncritical. She had bound me as tightly to her as she could have, and without the slightest of efforts, really. Even Meryn, and Meryn’s obvious and increasing talents, and my devotion to Meryn, these had all just been useful tools.
She had had me there, right under her nose for years, and later, I realized, carefully watched and probably reported on and discussed, by both Iain and Feargal.
Not that I thought that Feargal, at least, would have been a willing spy. More likely, he’d have thought the same as me and assumed her questions were all ones born of affection and care.
Even after all he’d done, the hell he’d unleashed in one single night, I simply couldn’t see Feargal as some kind of grand conspirator in this. And remembering those last days at Gorsedd, coupled with this new way of seeing Ilona’s behavior, her every word and gesture now charged with a completely different meaning, it finally dawned on me that nothing about Feargal’s actions or mood had been quite right, from that first night at Gorsedd onwards.
At first, nothing was different. With Feargal, nothing ever was. You could almost predict when he would come up with a joke, or a challenge, or a wild prank. But then, somewhere between the fourth bottle and when I’d finally gone off to bed, something had altered. I frowned, trying to remember.
He’d just gone suddenly, strangely quiet. And he’d seemed drunker than he ought to have been, he had a good head for drink, had Feargal, and he’d had a lot of practice. But he’d been staggering when we’d left the last tavern and made our rambling way back up to Gorsedd Keep.
And his eyes. No laughter in them, the next day, no anything in them, I thought suddenly, and then she’d come and taken him away and he’d been in her solar for hours, even though, and I remembered this with a shock, Ilona herself hadn’t been in there, not the entire time, anyway.
In my mind, I could hear Iain’s voice, asking me if I were too tired to come with them the second night, pushing through that odd, thick feeling in my head. I’d thought maybe I’d got a cold coming on, and stumbled off to my old room.
It had all, I saw now, been very carefully planned, and for a very long time. She had seemed to genuinely care for Meryn, at least, and Meryn for her but then, at the end, I realized now, that it was not so much me that Meryn had been avoiding, but Ilona.
***
“Come,” she said. “There’s a lot to do.”
“What do you mean?” Keep her here, I thought. Keep her here talking and maybe something will happen to end this before it begins in earnest. What that might be, I had no clear idea. No one knew I was here. It seemed unlikely anyone knew that Arlais had come here. With Guerin goading him, Birais and Owain might worry enough to send out a few troopers to look for us, but there was no reason to think they’d come so far this way.
She looked at me suspiciously.
“Do not play the fool. You found Eardith’s asarlaíoche. I know one of you must have, else it would still have been in that hovel you shared.”
That was something, at least. Arlais had said she could keep it safe, and it seemed she had been right about this, if nothing else.
Ilona had a mad kind of faraway look in her eyes, now, fixed on her own goals and filled with a kind of anticipatory triumph. There was nothing else in the world for her, just now.
“I knew her so well. She would have written it down, all the secrets. She couldn’t help herself - she was always trying to change things back, trying to “fix things”, instead of grasping the nettle by the thorns and using what we won. I saw how it would be, from the very start. She never understood what truly matters. And I have waited too long and planned too much for this to delay any longer than I need.”
If she sensed my fury, it didn’t show. I reminded myself I should keep breathing.
Be a rock. Be stone.
“Did you,” I asked, and I was astonished at how even and calm my voice was, “did you plan Meryn’s death from the start?”
“Not at the start, no, not altogether…I thought her talents might be useful, you know. I would have been glad of them today. This all would have been so much easier. But then, she was so much like Eardith, really. Always wanting things to be right for people.
“I couldn’t have ever let her go to Braide, in the end. She already suspected so much, Reverend Mother would have had the tale out of her in two grains of the glass. She was getting so hard to handle, too. She kept asking so many questions.
“So, I thought, why not be rid of them both? It wasn’t as if I needed them anymore. It was so easy, really. Easy enough to trap Feargal, at least - stupid boy, no ambition, and he never wanted to believe in anyone’s misdeeds. It could have been so different, if he had wanted more from life.
“And the power of it! There’s so much power in a blood-death, Caoimhe, you know that better than anyone, I warrant. I gave her the reasons, and I gave her the knife, but the silly bitch, she thwarted me in the end, choosing the rope and no blood shed. I should never have taught her so much.
“But it hardly mattered, even so. It comes so easily to you, the killing does. Iain said he hardly had to do a thing, a mere word or three at just the right moment, to point you in the right direction. You did what you were born to do, and you’ll do it again. You’ll do it and that bitch on the island will live to serve me and watch, as all around her burns and dies. I’ll see to that. He’ll see to that. And then there will be power aplenty, for those of us with the courage to use it.”
I swallowed, hard. It was not easy, being a rock. All I really wanted was to do was to kill her, the urge so great that for a moment, it was all I could do not to draw my sword and plunge it straight through her heart, but I was fairly sure she was prepared for that and that she had some spell up her sleeve to prevent this.
And even if I succeeded? What she had said about the power of a blood-death had the ring of truth. That thing could use it, twist even her death into a force for its own ends, I reckoned.
If Arlais had lived, there might have still been a way. If she was not lying there, so still, I might still have tried to end this here, because blood-magic, according to Arlais, was a wild thing, up for grabs the moment it was released into the world, and maybe she would have been able to catch hold of it, and use it for our ends instead. Her knowledge had given us hope, but that hope had died with her.
And Ilona’s smile told me she knew what my silence betokened, or some of it, at least. The larger share, anyway. I listened to the sound of the wind in the trees below, and the echoes of other forest sounds, and did not let myself give in to anything so optimistic now.
“Come along,” she said, again, and turned her back to me, utterly sure of herself. She walked north along the narrowing path, up into the heights above us, to the Well of Power, where that accursed thing that had sired me had remained through countless years, chained by ward upon ward, spell upon spell, waiting for us. Waiting for me.
It was like my dreams and nightmares all combined. Struggle as I might, I could not wake, and so I followed her. I couldn’t really see what other choice I had.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was a cavernous space, dark and drafty, with long, ominous shadows thrown up by the inadequate torches; a fugitive flicker that distorted the strange symbols carved into the rock, and for just a grain or two, I had the impression the place was empty.
But that was just for mere moments, until my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I saw those two figures, huddled up against what looked like a circular hearth. Only it wasn’t smoke rising from it, but a sickly, green vapour as frail and in
substantial as ghost fingers, reaching up, endlessly seeking, and then they were sucked back down into one of those two dark forms.
I hadn’t actually believed in this. Not really. Wells of Power had always seemed like the well-worn trimmings of every ancient tale, and even Ilona and her ravings hadn’t brought the truth home to me.
And then that one huddled figure rose and changed, resolving itself into the man that had been inside the wolf the day that I’d killed it, so inhumanly beautiful, and so innately fell and dark and dangerous, and he smiled at me, and I thought my heart would stop right there.
“Hello, my child,” he said and his voice was sweet, too, unbearably so, with the cadence of ancient music. In his eyes I saw that naked, predatory hunger.
I had been disgusted. I had been revolted, I had been angry and I had been frightened, too. I was merely terrified, now. The figure lying at his feet beside him, still unmoving, wore the red and gold. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew him, a little.
Ordinary soldiers, they have a hard life. They risk their lives, time and again, and yet they aren’t ever likely to be rich. They would be easy prey, be they never so honourable, if you gave them enough drinking money to do something that seemed only a prank, a wager, a jape, and I guessed easily how he’d been convinced to follow me, report on me, to slip me some charm or potion. Someone had been getting impatient, I suppose.
The sorcery was so overpowering now, you could almost reach out and touch it. It coiled and recoiled, braiding back on itself as it filtered out into the enormous, echoing space, but Ilona seemed not to even notice. Her entire being was completely focused on the Incarnate as if on a lover, her lips parted and glistening, her eyes shining with her desire.
“You see?” she breathed. “You see how I honour you, my lord? Do you see how I have brought all this to you, as I promised I would?”