A humphed breath from Sionna reminded Breag that his audience was more than one enthralled boy unused to tales and attention.
“That’s what the old women say, at least. The truth of it’s lost in the Dawntime, along with the horned boats and the Fiach.”
“Food.” Tarbhal handed around venison and fire-baked yellowminn root, and Breag was happy to let the conversation go. Following the boy’s questions had taken him deeper into thought and memory than he was comfortable with.
A plate replaced the cub’s warmth in Breag’s lap, and he watched Cú bounce to Sionna for his share.
The girl was careful always to keep herself apart from him, and Breag was gritted-teeth careful not to notice. Was it the dead soldiers, he wondered, or his own viciousness? Did it matter which?
It mattered. He’d sunk low that he’d pretend it might not.
Low enough to terrify a girl who’d already learned that life held much to fear. Could he blame Eithne for everything he was?
Breag sat silent and apart as the others talked and ate. Sionna had no reservations with Tarbhal, her smile tangling with his as he muttered some pleasantry or other.
Just me. Just the Lupe.
It surprised Breag that this could hurt--he had thought himself far beyond that sting.
Laoighre steered clear of Breag’s scowling sulk, keeping the fire between them and flashing him the occasional, wary glance. Cú took the opposite path, an unmoveable weight in Breag’s lap, his cold nose prodding bare flesh when he felt his mark’s attention falter.
The boy was first to his blankets with a muttered word and a crinkled brow. Tarbhal followed shortly after, pleading the ache of old bones. Sionna kept her head down, busying herself with folding the now-mended tunic. She scuttled as far from Breag as the firelight would allow, and for once he made no bones about watching her.
“I owe you an apology.”
Sionna started. Her hazel eyes met his before they found the ground again.
“I behaved badly. There’s no excuse for me.”
“It doesn’t matter.” The hunch of her shoulders said otherwise.
“It matters.” Breag leaned forward, prompting a grunt from the cub. “I want to explain.”
Sionna opened her mouth to speak then changed her mind. She settled onto her knees, the firelight bronzing her pale skin, and waited.
“My family lived close by here, you know.”
The change of topic startled her, he could see.
“Inish, a small town up the coast. My mother was a child when the Purging came. She and her Da were the only ones to make it safe.”
“I’m sorry.” Sionna didn’t sound sorry.
“I never knew them, no need to be sorry. My family weren’t the only ones in Tearmann that woke screaming in the night.”
“A lot of people have ugly secrets they don’t want to tell.” Sionna’s face in the flickering flame-light was shadowed and strange.
“It’s good to have people who understand. Who won’t ask for what shouldn’t be shared, but who’ll listen when it’s time for you to talk.”
“I don’t want to go to Tearmann.” Sionna sat rigid, forcing the words through stiff lips.
“I know.” Breag’s throat knotted with her pain. “But you’ll like it when you get there. I promise. There are five villages of our people, remember, and once you’re there you won’t need to follow any path but your own.”
“I’ve always done what other people think best. They haven’t always been right.”
Breag found nothing to say. Proinsis stood between them, always.
“Does life ever bring us what we deserve?” Sionna shuffled closer to the fire.
“The Lady gifts us with what She thinks best.” But Breag wasn’t sure he believed that anymore. It seemed to him that Odharna favoured the strong, the sleekit, the powerful.
“Your Lady wasn’t very generous to the soldiers outside Macha.”
Did that still gnaw at her? “We did what we had to, Sionna. If they’d taken us, the Brotherhood would have had no thought of mercy. They wouldn’t have gone easy on us.” Breag tasted her name on his lips for maybe the first time.
“And we should be as cruel as they are, just because we can?” Sionna jerked to her feet. “No. Not me.” She unfolded her blankets and spread them by the guard’s. “I really am sorry about your family.”
A dismissal, and a clear one. Breag couldn’t pretend not to understand Sionna’s feelings. How could he argue with them? He knew how it was to be pushed about on another’s whim like a pawn on a gameboard.
He’d give her that, if he could. The decision loosened Breag’s shoulders and deepened his breathing. If he found a Lost One in Caislean, the girl would have her freedom.
And if not? Eight years he’d searched and only a single Lost One found. Would he sacrifice her freedom for his own? Breag didn’t know.
Absently he stroked the Fiacal knife at his hip. The next Lost One he would take living. No matter how much the knife fought him.
* * *
Strange, the walk into Caislean. So short a time ago Breag had walked into Dealgan, alone, no more hope for the town than for any of the others that pater nostered in his wake.
The time it took to walk from Macha--and as long again from Dealgan to there--had added length to Cú’s puppy-legs and breadth to his shoulder. No chance of carrying him in a pack now. The cub bounced ahead, and behind, and through every interesting scent by the road and on it.
Brindle. Creasing brows and pursing mouths wherever they passed; reeling in attention when they needed to draw none.
Strange, that the cub’s company should work so much better than he had expected, and yet the situation had become dangerous in a very different way. Could it be the Daoine villages were about to acquire their first gadhar?
The road was quiet in the brisk chill of early morning. Laoighre walked with Sionna, the pair of them conspiring in lowered voices. Tarbhal led, eyes sharp and back straight. Breag lagged by a handful of paces, disoriented.
So many people in his company. So many to consider. His single-mindedness crumbled under the weight of their expectation.
Caislean hunched in the place where two rivers met, the tang of salt water in the air hinting of a shoreline concealed by the land’s upthrust shoulder. Rough-bristled and uncouth, this place was an entirely different animal from Ciarraig’s sinuous curves.
Sionna’s pace lagged, and ahead Breag could see Tarbhal stop. A farmer, knot-thewed and hard, harvested potatoes from a family-sized plot on the side of a hill.
“Well met.” Tarbhal’s voice was pregnant with uncomplicated greeting. “It’s good to see a friendly face after so long on the road.”
The face was friendly only in the eyes of a blind half-wit. With his back turned.
Tarbhal took the man’s silence as encouragement. “We’ve come a long way to bring news of a friend. Can you direct us to Proinsis Ainlemac’s people? About your age, he was, and left here coming twenty years ago.”
The farmer’s bushy brows lowered over tight-screwed eyes. “There’s nobody that fits that description hereabouts. The likes of us don’t tend to stray much from where we belong.” He turned his head and spat.
A gob of yellowish mucous flew in gelatinous strings to land less than a span from Sionna’s boot. Breag was at the farmer’s side before he even counted the decision made.
“No need for that.” Breag stood half a head shorter than the farmer, but his shallow-breath control loomed over the bigger man. “We asked a civil question.”
“Your pardon.” The farmer’s eyes followed Cú’s happy wanderings. “I can’t help you.”
Tarbhal offered thanks. Breag did not. Long accustomed determination straightened his back as he led his company onward. He knew the squint-eyed looks and the whispers that followed when he walked away. Eight years of this, no different for five than for one.
Caislean’s main street rivalled Dealgan’s for breadth, but it f
elt cramped even so. Shuttered windows framed narrow single doors; nothing open, nothing free. The women wore high collars and close-fit headscarves, the men curve-brimmed hats and set jaws. Every head turned to watch the strangers pass; furtively, illicitly. Caislean was not a place for questions, or for answers.
Tarbhal indicated an inn with a question in his eyes and Breag nodded. His bones protested the exposure, but this place allowed no choice. Breag marvelled to think that he had once labelled Dealgan suspicious.
Laoighre followed hunch-shouldered at his heels, and Sionna shadowed Tarbhal just as close. Cú was the only one to feel nothing, jaunting tail high from one adventure to the next. Cú, focus of every eye.
Damn the animal! He’d see them killed yet.
The inn was small and dark, its keeper large and fair. “A meal is it?” His deep and musical voice invited them to ask for more.
“If you please.” Tarbhal was all charm and twinkled eyes. “We’ve come a long way, and it’s fair to say we’re famished.”
“Come a long way you say.” Suspicion warred with interest in the innkeeper’s face and came up short.
“Aye. From Macha.” Tarbhal winced, knuckling the small of his back. “A long road for these old bones.”
The keeper bustled with offers of food and wine, and with subtle questions about the length of their road. Breag would have found it amusing if less had balanced on their success in this place.
“A well connected man like yourself might help us.” Tarbhal’s comradely grin twinkled again. “We’ve come to find the family of a friend who left these parts some twenty years ago.” His voice lowered to a hush, and he leaned forward to share a confidence. “We bring news.”
“You need the healer, then.” The big man’s dark eyes picked Sionna apart seam by seam, the direction of his thinking plain. “Anú has birthed and buried us this forty years now. Take the street two turns down on this side, you’ll know her place by the herb-sign on her door. If your...friend did come from Caislean, she’ll know him.”
“Forty years?” Laoighre leaned forward onto the table to better see the keeper’s face.
The innkeeper straightened, wiping dry hands along the length of his dark green apron. “Anything else I can get you before you leave?”
Breag’s kick connected with Laoighre’s shin too late to heal the damage, but apologetic eyes over a yelp of pain said that the slip wouldn’t come again. The Purging was a delicate subject in any of the Tiarna, but in Ullach only the truly lack-witted thought it a fit topic for conversation.
Laoighre should have known that, young though he was.
They fed well on hot food and cold ale, leaving a copper for the keeper’s trouble when they finally stood up to leave. The fair-haired man thanked them with a smile, and seemed to thank Sionna more closely than the rest of them. The girl stuck close to Tarbhal as they left the inn.
The healer’s place wasn’t difficult to find. The streets were busier now, discomfiting Sionna and Cú with the press of bodies and the weight of hostile eyes. The hound cringed between Breag’s legs, coming close to overbalancing him.
“Watch it, you!” Breag grabbed Tarbhal’s shoulder to steady himself. “Trip me again and it’s back in the sack with you.”
The healer’s place was as small and grimy as the houses that surrounded it, the three-whorled scratch of herb-sign the only thing that distinguished it from its neighbours. Breag rapped the stained wooden door with knuckle instead of fist, pretending not to hear the whisper of a slow-approaching presence inside.
The door slid open on smooth-gliding hinges. The woman who greeted them was old; white-haired and hump-shouldered, but with no trace of a second childhood in her expression.
“You need a healer?” Her eyes flicked from one of them to the next, the aroma of must and spice and stranger things whirling about her like a cape.
“In a round-the-houses way, ma’am.” Tarbhal spoke into an uncomfortable silence. “We’ve come a long way to find the people a friend of ours left behind. We were told you’d know how to direct us.”
“You’re right to come see me.” Anú stepped back and waved them through. “Best you come and sit, then, if it’s to be an interview.” No doubt that she noticed Cú, his tail thunking against Breag’s leg as they moved.
She led them along a poorly-lit corridor towards the back of the house, coming finally to a kitchen, warm and snug. Breag heard a dusty shuffle from the shadowed corner nearest him, but it ceased before he could identify it properly.
“So, who is it you want to know about?” Anú settled into a ragged armchair by the smoking black stove, head cocked to one side.
“Proinsis, our friend was called.” Breag spoke before Tarbhal this time. “Left here twenty years ago, about. Middle height, thin, brown hair. Had a wife name of Nimh.”
A good pile of cousins, please, and a brother or two better yet. Breag needn’t count so much on it with Sionna already under his hand, but even so his heart hammered hard in his chest.
“None name of Proinsis ever lived in Caislean, nor any Nimh for that matter.”
Breag’s breath flowed away in a disappointed hiss. No choice for us then, girl. Lucky at least that she didn’t know how much hung in the balance here for her.
“You’re sure?” Disappointment strong in Sionna’s voice. She had her own reasons for finding Proinsis’ people.
“Sure as sure.”
Again the whisper of cloth or paper from the corner. Breag’s head turned to the sound and Anú’s bright eyes followed him.
“You can’t know everybody who might have lived here so long ago.” Breag focused back on what was important.
“So you can tell me what I know and what I don’t?” Amusement crinkled Anú’s deep-lined face. “Go right ahead, I’m needing a diversion.”
“I meant no offence.”
“I know that, boy.” The others might have walked past her out the door for all the attention she paid them. “A healer knows all sorts of things, and what she knows she doesn’t forget.”
“We go home with nothing, then.” Tarbhal draped a comforting arm around Sionna, his face unreadable.
“Home?” Anú’s smile faded. “Would that home be in Ciarraig, now?”
“How do you know?” Breag itched to bring the conversation to an end and get out again into the cool, clean air. The scents of the healer’s trade made his head spin.
“All sorts of stories coming out of Ciarraig.” The healer ignored his question. “I’m wondering if you heard of a town name of Dealgan.”
Sionna keened deep in her throat. Cú whined in sympathy, understanding the mood if not the words.
“Lots of stories about Dealgan these days.” Anú’s eyes glittered sharp and dark. “Lots of stories since the Brotherhood took notice of it.”
“Tell me.” No false friendship left in Tarbhal’s face.
“Seems they chose Dealgan for an example against the power of the guard. Some dead and plenty wish they were.”
“Tell me!” Tarbhal was on his feet. “Give me names, if you have them.”
“No names. The head huntsman, he angered them most. Man with a baneling same as yours, except not the same colour maybe.” Her eyes fixed again on Cú.
Raghlan.
“Some others.” Anú laid pain on pain. “An innkeeper. A turnip farmer, and his daughter. The baker’s apprentice, don’t know the whys of that one. Some more.”
Tarbhal looked sick to his stomach. “All dead?”
“I’m sorry to bring bad news.” Anú didn’t look anything other than old. “You’re long from home, I think?”
“Too long.” Tarbhal growled the words, the skin of his face drawn so tight that his cheekbones were white slashes under slitted eyes. “And not long enough.”
11
Sionna had never seen Tarbhal lose his temper before. He slipped into the mood like a drunkard into the day’s first mug, his body rigid with control.
All the same. All o
f them.
No. That wasn’t fair. Tarbhal’s anger was justified. And he forced it back like a hog into its pen--unwilling, but mastered all the same. The old woman had nothing to fear from the guard, and neither did Sionna.
But should they be afraid of her instead? An animal in their midst, if only they knew it. What would happen when they did know it?
Sionna shook her head to banish ugly thoughts. She drew the home-scent of Anú's kitchen deep into her lungs--sage and elderflower, names dredged from the deep places of her memory. This moment belonged to Raghlan and to the others lost at home, not to a silly girl who thought the world centred on her.
It took an effort to think of Dealgan as home. Dealgan was Proinsis and a nightmare that she had no chance of escaping. Until Breag came.
And brought worse trouble. She had a place before, and knew who she was even if she didn’t like it. Now she was filth, no different from Proinsis, and home was a thought that belonged to other people.
“No!”
Every head turned. Sionna cringed into the elbow between stove and wall, wishing for the floor to rise up and devour her.
“I’m sorry, lass.” Tarbhal’s posture unstiffened by a hair. “I was forgetting that you’re rooted just as deep in Dealgan as I am.”
Sionna ducked her head against a scald of shame. The old woman’s eyes, sharp and cold as fleshing knives, flayed her to the bone.
Breag spoke words of farewell and led them back through the dim-lit corridor. Sionna watched the others troop after him and, for a moment, wondered what would happen if she decided not to follow.
Through the quarter-paned back window. A half-dozen steps to the green-painted gate. And away.
“Are you going, little one?” Anú’s voice bit sharp as cider vinegar, jerking Sionna from her daydream. It took a moment to realise she meant door, not window.
Requiem for the Wolf Page 13
