“Nothing from Ciarraig?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.” Carad inspected the Athair closely, but the old man had been in power for over four decades and his face gave nothing away.
“You think on what you hear, Carad, and that's a rare talent. Your reports hold me in life, although I know that's far from your intention.” The Athair raised a palsied hand to shush Carad's protests. “You don't allow emotion to shape your judgement, and that's of prime importance in an Athair.”
Carad’s heart leaped. Finally!
But the Athair continued to speak. “My doubts, though, are grave.” He sucked in a long, slow breath. “Fodhla has many faults, you know that better than any. He’s slow, soft and limited in intellect. But he would hunt the Unclean to his dying breath.” He thumped the bedsheet for emphasis. “You, I’m not so sure.
“You’re a ruthless man, Carad, but I have no confidence in your commitment to the faith. We have a purpose and a great duty, to annihilate the Unclean to the last mewling pup. We have no place in the Brotherhood for any who would spare a single spawn, least of all at our head.”
The violence of his passion stained his face a mottled purple, and his eyes rolled suddenly back in his head. His cheek twitched once, again, and the healer was at his side in an eyeblink.
“Time for you to go.” His words allowed no argument, and Carad offered none.
He had much to think about.
* * *
Carad was eating when word came.
He sat alone at a table along the west wall of the busy dining hall, one of the many privileges of being Tánaiste. His eyes were drawn again and again to the east wall, where Fodhla shared his own packed table with disciples and penitents both. They sat elbow to elbow, vibrant with movement and raucous with shared laughter. Of their number only Searlas didn’t make merry. He watched Carad instead.
There had always been two Tánaiste, right from the time that Fearg and Bran had both served the Lone Man in the days he walked the face of the Tiarna Beo. The stories never told what had happened to Bran once Fearg ascended to Athair, but Carad suspected that his end was a short and brutal one.
The Brotherhood didn’t reward second place, and no Athair allowed another to stand too close to him in power.
At the southern end of the room, the Athair’s table stood empty. It would have been an inch thick with dust had the cleaning women allowed it. His advisors schemed to claim the space, but even bed-bound the Athair was careful of his dignity.
Carad always ate alone. An occasional disciple greedy for power would sometimes slide a plate and cup alongside him, but a chilly lack of civility limited each of those encounters to a single occasion. Two, with the most hungry for advancement, but never more.
A disturbance at the hall’s massive double doors raised the noise level in the room above the usual ambient hum. Where the purple-robed messenger passed, an absolute silence fish-tailed out. The armsman’s face blazed with pride, reflecting the Athair’s official insignia emblazoned on his breast. He seemed overcome by the honour, his lips moving in silent rehearsal of his message as he passed through the muted crowd. He climbed the shallow steps to the Athair’s dais and turned to face his audience.
“Our Athair, Neachtan, blessed receptacle of the power and spirit of The Lone Man,” Edda spoke with slow and studied care, “requires the presence of his Tánaiste, Carad and Fodhla both. He bids them come now, along with all who wish to bear witness, so that the succession can be decided in a manner satisfactory to all.”
Muttering rippled again through the gathered brothers, spiking sharply as Carad pushed his plate away and rose. Across the room Fodhla mirrored him.
Carad tightened his palm-scarred hands into fists as he watched his rival’s progress slow to a crawl under a weighting of back-slaps and whispered good wishes. His own silent passage between the long, full tables stood in painful counterpoint.
Have sense, man. Did you expect it to be otherwise?
A single nod speeded him onwards. Nuada, assigned to him last time he had ridden out in the Athair’s name. A dull man, Carad remembered, and not an ambitious one.
This was it.
Carad took three long breaths and forced his heart to slow its anxious tattoo. He picked over the implications of the messenger’s insignia, the official seal of the Athair’s seat. The seal had last seen use at the heart of the Purging, when Sagart, first Athair and Lone Man, had led the entire Brotherhood to a tangled nest of Unclean in Barst, the Ullish capital. The sigil of the sword-impaled wolf was used only in the gravest of circumstance.
So why now? Why with pomp and ritual and – above all – the witnesses? The Athair’s words hinted that the decision still hung in the balance, and Carad could find no configuration that bent events to his favour.
Perhaps the path Brother Ultan had placed a starveling street boy on when he plucked him from the gutter had finally come to its end.
* * *
Edda led both of the Tánaiste through the high-roofed entrance hall. Behind them, brothers followed in whispering knots. They segregated themselves by novice, penitent and disciple, conferring in tones just below audibility. The eyes Carad felt on him were not kind.
He expected that they would take the wide marble staircase to the Athair’s state apartments, but instead the armsman turned left, along the shadowed West Corridor and towards the public rooms. A formal audience, then.
For a moment Carad entertained notions of the old man’s death. How outside of a coffin could so broken a man hold audience?
But no. The messenger had come in his name.
The Athair slumped in his throne of teak and twisted silver, his shrunken body slumped on a shoring of cushions like a child’s abandoned ragdoll. All three healers hovered, their shoulders bowed under the weight of their impossible responsibility.
Behind him stood the bloated and gimlet-eyed advisors who earned their meat by pouring doubt into the ears of power. The youngest, Manannán, resplendent in a black and silver echo of the throne. Donnchadh, longest serving, solicitous of the old man’s comfort. And Giollaíosa, his sharp-edged gaze divided between Fodhla and Carad.
Fodhla greeted them with a nod; Carad didn’t bother.
The dais held two lesser seats below the Athair’s throne. Carad moved towards the closest of these, but Edda halted him with the tiniest headshake.
Slowly the Athair’s head raised. His sharp eyes flicked from Fodhla to Carad, then to the press of brotherhood hovering by the hall’s doors. His mouth opened but closed again without a sound.
The purple-clothed armsman gestured both Tánaiste to their knees in front of the dais, glaring at the straggle of brothers until they found shuffled places on the benches along each wall, under the banners that dressed the chilled granite in garlands of purple, green and white.
The Athair raised his head again, and this time the silence was total.
“Tánaiste Fodhla and Tánaiste Carad,” he spoke in a slushy wheeze, and the strain of listening ears was palpable. “I’ve summoned you because my time is short.”
The silence splintered into a susurrus of protest. The old man raised a liver-spotted hand and his people obeyed him to a man.
“The time has come for the succession to be decided. My advisors prod me on it daily. Clearly they consider my mind to be as rotted as my body.”
Behind him, the lace-girdled Donnchadh grimaced.
“However, it is not. My reasons for waiting are my own. Let any who would demand them of me step forward and do so.” His words broke onto an icy silence.
Nobody stepped forward.
“I want all of you to witness the charge I lay on my Tánaiste today.” He gestured Carad and Fodhla to their feet.
Carad’s blood pounded in his ears, and he forced himself not to gulp great lungfuls of air. He would know, finally, whether he had a place here. Whether a street-boy could truly work his way through the ranks of the Brotherhood and be found worthy. He held himsel
f calm through strength of will alone.
Beside him Fodhla took short, ragged breaths.
The Athair held them in silence a long moment, his head turning vulture-like on his wattled neck, inspecting first one then the other of them.
“I have a duty for each of you. A chance to step to the head of our Brotherhood.”
Carad’s breath hissed between his teeth.
“Fodhla, you will travel to Dun. I want you to find the Ard’s ear.”
The big man flinched.
“My illness has weakened us in his eyes. Lately he has been demanding instead of supplicating. We have ground to recover with him. Reclaim it.” The Athair’s words ended on a cough.
Behind him his advisors nodded in unison.
Fodhla’s face was a frozen mask as he indicated his assent.
“Carad, you are to go to Ciarraig. To the town of Dealgan. Reports come to me of a nest of Unclean there. Root them out. Find a way to cast shadows on the guard. Build the power of the military. You know what to do.”
The old man slumped into his cushions, shaking. “Act quickly, both of you. There isn’t much time.” Translucent lids slid shut.
Giollaíosa nodded slowly from behind the Athair, his gimlet eyes working hard to catch Carad’s. There was a message there, for one who chose to see it. Carad did not.
He turned on his heel, paying no mind to Giollaíosa or Fodhla, or to the hissed outrage of Donnchadh at the lack of a parting courtesy. Where he passed the murmurs grew louder, but now they lapped over him like warm water.
He strode through the hallways, plans bubbling in his mind. He would take a division; twenty men. Trackers. A stableman to see to the mounts. And an Allsayer.
Ciarraig lay ten days’ ride to the south and what he knew of Dealgan placed it more or less in the middle of the Tir. Fodhla would have settled in place and begun to act before Carad so much as set his eyes on the place.
Today he would plan. They would ride out at first light.
He had something to do, a concrete task to win his place. Eliminate the Unclean; break the power of the guard. He had done so half a hundred times before. This time he would hold nothing back.
Dealgan would burn.
4
Breag was lost.
Bliss felt so right, so natural. The Lady created her Daoine to be man and wolf both, Breag understood that now. What choice had he except to embrace Her will?
“Fight it, lad. Don’t let it beat you.”
The words came from far away, along with the brisk shaking of strong hands on his shoulders.
That kernel of distraction loaned Breag the strength to resist. He grappled with the immediacy of the change, a single breath away from relaxing into its glorious comfort.
How could any living creature reject a part of itself? But Breag could. He would.
Slowly, so slowly, the urgency of his need subsided, and the feeling of Bliss slipped away. The loss was immediate and overwhelming.
A mistake, a bad one. He was a shadow of who he should be, the painful return to a half-life existence. He had turned away from the best of himself, the part touched by the Lady.
Breag stood over a dead man, his face wet with tears.
Tarbhal’s hands gave a final squeeze of support and dropped from his shoulders. With surprising delicacy the guard turned his attention to the dead man.
Breag crossed the clearing on legs wobbly as a newborn fawn’s and sank to his haunches below a half-grown oak stripped for winter. Above him, a raven watched silent from its highest branches. The scent of rain-soaked ground filled his nostrils with rich browns and cool greens.
His gut clenched with emptiness. He had broken his people’s strongest, strictest taboo. Had desecrated everything that he had held to so tightly through long, fruitless years of searching.
A thought for later, for poking and prodding like a sore tooth by the solitary night-fires that stretched long into his future. He wrenched his attention back to the guard, and to the Lost One.
“I know that man.” His voice was steady. “I saw him in town yesterday.” The drunkard, the one who had supped from a flask in the main street in full daylight.
“Aye, that’s Proinsis.” Tarbhal nodded. “A good man and a steady one, up to this last year at least.”
“What happened last year?”
“His wife came down with the Shakes last Harvest. Proinsis nursed her through the winter but she was dead by Brighid’s Eve.” A flicker of sympathy showed on the guard’s face. “He let his place fall apart, grew no crop worth mentioning this year. Falling apart himself is what it looked like.”
“Were there children?”
“None.” Tarbhal killed the hope new hatched. “Nimh had a fall one time, and a babe born dead. After that, nothing.”
“Brothers, or cousins maybe?”
“None local.” Tarbhal hesitated for the length of a breath. “Proinsis and Nimh weren’t born here in Dealgan.”
“So where did they come from?”
“From Ullach.” Tarbhal bent to straighten the dead man’s limbs. “A town on the sea-coast, name of Caislean.”
Caislean. Breag turned the name on his tongue, pondering the implications. Family ties for both the Lost One and his wife was his best hope, meaning a good trail to follow towards others of their kind. And for Breag, too; his mother had lived on Ullach before the Purging drove her North with so many other broken families.
A good omen. Caislean could be the place where he finally fulfilled his duty.
No. No more pretending to holy obligations or a sacred quest. That justification had long grown stale, and today it carried with it the acrid whiff of hypocrisy. No more self-deceit. He would do whatever he had to do. Anything to be allowed in from the outside.
To be welcomed home.
* * *
Exhaustion gave the morning chill an added bite. Breag shivered in his wet clothing. The pain of his mangled right arm was bearable but the itch drove him close to madness.
"A strange thing about Proinsis."
"What's that?" Breag had little interest in a dead man who could lead him no further.
"He had only four toes on each foot."
"That's because he's one of the Daoine. Physically it's all you can see that's different from you." No point in holding back now. Tarbhal already knew the worst of it.
The guard met his eyes. "Are you ready to tell me what happened?"
"I almost Fell." The words fit strangely on his tongue. "I came close to the Change."
"And that would be bad?" Tarbhal didn't understand.
"Yes!" Breag shouted, lunging forward into a half crouch. "Yes." He sank back against the tree trunk. "We aren't animals." His anger was directed mainly towards himself. How to explain what he no longer believed?
"Tell me."
"We're the Moon's Voice People, the Daoine Glór na Gealaí. We come from Odharna, Lady of the Moon, born from her mother's milk and the blood of her moonflow.
"Like her, we have a bright face and a dark one, and like her we fight to keep the dark one hidden. If the Lady shows us her secret face then the seas will rise and the mountains will tumble. And if Her Daoine turn away from the light, towards dark, they step outside of her grace and become Fallen."
Breag recited the words as he had learned them, tasting them for maybe the first time.
"And what does that mean for Proinsis, or for you?" Tarbhal's interest was entirely pragmatic.
"After the Purging, when your people murdered our old ones and our children by their thousands," bitterness grated through Breag's voice, "the Daoine left the Tiarna to go north, through the Corcra Mountains. You know that already."
Tarbhal nodded, grim.
"We've had forty years to recover but it's not so easy to forget. We're still bleeding, most of us."
"Not all of us butchered babies." Tarbhal spoke quietly. “Not everyone thought it was right.”
"The Eolaí, our wise ones, started to think about those
that stayed behind. The Lost Seed, who turned their backs on the Lady." He spoke without emotion, his eyes fixed on the dead man's face.
"And they decided that the Lady was punishing all of the Daoine for the Lost Seed's sins. The proper thing to do, they decided, is to send one of us, a Marbh, back into the Tiarna to bring back as many as possible for the Eolaí to deal with. One Marbh at a time, the best of us, so it's said." Breag's lips twisted into a parody of a smile, "We hunt the Lost Seed, and either return with them through the mountains or, if that isn’t possible, we dispose of them."
"Is your faith so strong, to choose a life like this?" Tarbhal's brow furrowed.
"Choose?" Breag's laugh held no humour. "I'm no volunteer. I'm chosen; a great honour, I'm told. They ripped me away from everybody important to me," Eithne, "and sent me here to find a Lost One who'll come back with me. Or I can die trying. Then the knife will crumble back to dust and the next Marbh will be chosen."
"How long does it take, usually, before you find somebody to go back?"
"Twenty three Marbh, there's been, in forty years." Hopelessness seeped into Breag's voice. "Two came home."
Tarbhal's breath hissed between his teeth.
"Most are killed early on, in the mountains or on this side of the pass." Breag ignored the guard's reaction. "New meat is easy prey for the Brotherhood. Those of us who make it through are hunting blind. Lorcan was out fifteen years and was mad as a land-dried cailín mara when he attacked the Citadel single-handed. It's eight winters now since I came through the mountains."
Eight long years of sleeping by the side of the road and talking to himself.
"And today?" Tarbhal pushed. "What happened?"
"Today I nearly Fell. I almost turned my back on everything I believe in and became an animal. Nearly threw those eight years to the pigs." He climbed to his feet, trembling only slightly. "And I won't let that happen again. Enough talk. Time I was on my way. Likely I'll take a Lost One in Caislean."
Requiem for the Wolf Page 5
