It might have been Sionna's warning, or maybe Laoighre's grimace, that conjured the healer to the door.
"Think you're going someplace?" Authority hummed through Anú's tone like rung steel, yanking Sionna to her feet.
"I'll take Cú to find some rabbits while you're figuring this out." Sionna directed the courtesy towards Laoighre, but the unspoken permission was begged from Anú.
"Don't go far, the country here isn't safe."
A nod of promise, and Sionna slipped through the still-open door with the black hound at her heels.
* * *
The hills around Caislean weren't like home. Everything was harder here; sharper, more stark. Like the North might be, if ever she got to see it.
The stories told of gem-fanged nathair dripping venom from iridescent scales, and the Bean Gruaige who stole babies and ate them raw. Excitement moved in Sionna at the thought she might soon know the truth of it for herself.
Cú vaulted over trickling rivulets that careered blind-eyed towards the sea, and rolled in hanks of marram grass good for nothing save scratching. It lightened Sionna's burden to watch him play.
Would Breag's people let the cub stay? And if she found a way to escape, could she take him and Laoighre with her?
She followed a crumble-edged trickle further into the hills for no reason except that she could. No choice but go back, not really, but for now a soft-fingered breeze played with the hem of her tunic and a blackbird bubbled from the scrub. Just to one more patch of wetgrass, then back to her duty.
"Look what's turned up on our mountain." The voice from behind Sionna was nasal and sounded barely old enough to be broken.
She turned slowly, dread liquefying her bones to uselessness. There were two of them, both in army blues. The innkeeper, she thought at first, confused. No, this man had broader shoulders. Shorter legs. The same face, though, and the same flat eyes.
Not that she needed that much to know she was in trouble. The tilt of the leader's head, the plant of the taller one’s boots, told her all she needed to know.
"Is it for us, do you think?" The stretch of a smile, but not for her.
Neither bothered to meet her eyes. She wasn’t a person, not here. Which meant that they didn’t have to be.
"Be a shame to let it go to waste." The short one reached for her. Certain. How could she object, a girl, powerless?
Sionna knew what to do. Go deep, hold on until it was over. Breathe in, out. Abide. Time enough for licking wounds later. Her arms slumped to her sides, waiting, her blood a conch-shell of timelessness in her ears.
For no reason a picture formed in her mind; Breag. Hair tightly braided, the cub he didn't want leaned heavy on his leg. Fighting. Going on.
“No.” Her voice shook, but she forced the word out.
“Oh, I think yes, sweetness.” The tall one grabbed her arm and sank pointed fingers into the meat of her bicep.
“No!” The word burst from her chest, trailing streamers of knuckle-white agony. Tears of fear and rage hid the soldiers for a moment, then brought them back doubled.
Sionna squirmed free. She dug an elbow in the tall one’s ribcage. A smile bared her teeth.
Thank you, Breag.
There were two of them, the soldiers. It didn’t take long.
The tall one grabbed her arm again, grinding the bones of her wrist until she whined in pain. His smile was a rictus now. Something hit her in the face, hard, and she groaned as her nose exploded. The blond one grabbed her by the shoulders, breathing heavy, enjoying it.
Cú growled with an intensity that Sionna hadn’t heard from him before. Groggily she shook her head, splattering fat drops of blood. The tall one sank his fingers into the nape of her neck, grinding the bones there until she crumpled to her knees.
Cú sank sharp teeth into the blond one’s leg. Not sharp enough, not for this one. The soldier swung his bata, roaring, and connected with Cú’s shoulder. His yelp of pain was a knife in Sionna’s gut.
Enough fighting. Time to survive. Sionna plunged deep, down where she knew she would be safe. Proinsis had been worse than this. She would live, she would heal, she was strong.
She found something new in the dark places. Far away the soldiers spoke to one another, their voices high, excited. That didn’t matter now. Something bright burned down here, fizzing through Sionna’s skin and setting delight to bubble deep in her throat. Beautiful! How had she never known?
Inside her secret place, Sionna found something pure and right and glorious. And, unbelievably, it was her. She stretched for it, everything outside forgotten, needing to feel it burn through her.
And it did. Oh, it did.
Sionna stretched, twisted, and was made new. She Changed. Quick, strong, sinuous; she was more than before. The world was more, with promise bright in the beetle under every rock. Alive.
Was this what it meant to be a Lupe?
An ammonia-stench of fear burned rank in her nostrils. The blond soldier sprawled at her feet, their positions reversed now. Fear goggled his eyes and gaped his mouth. He looked so stupid that she dropped her own jaw in a noiseless wolf-laugh. Her first one. So many new things to savour.
The blond snaked a hand towards his weapon and Sionna ripped out his throat.
“Behind you.” A new voice came, along with the scent of new growth and fertile earth and rain on still water.
Sionna whirled. She contracted strong hind legs and sprang towards the tall one. Her weight bowled him over. By the time he hit the ground her muzzle was sodden with his blood.
“Thank you.” Sionna-wolf turned to face the newcomer, tail held high.
Cú.
15
Cú! How?
Sionna slammed back to herself. She wasn’t a wolf. And Cú didn't speak.
The tide of rich scent in her nostrils, the soak of lifeblood on her tongue, told a different story.
No. Not this. Worse than an animal. Proinsis.
Fear-prickle in the scent glands of her anus. Sionna cast deep inside herself, searching although she didn't know what for. Escape. Something.
This time it sang to her. Bright and golden, so beautiful it scorched her with its fire. And it was her. The impossibility of it beaded her eyelids with wet. Sionna wrapped her arms around the shape of it--of herself--and drew it skin-to-skin.
Not wolf. Long legs and capable fingers. Small, even teeth and mobile lips. A straight body, heel to crown. Breasts, gently swelled and only two. Human.
Not human. Lupe.
Sionna used the heel of her palm to lever herself to her feet. The soldiers sprawled half in and half out of the water. What was left of them. Blood feathered its way downstream. The bright-splash flow diluted it again and again until it was indistinguishable from the water, mingled particle to particle beyond all division.
She was a Lupe. No denying it now. She was the thing she hated most in the world. So much the worse that she had gloried in it.
Late-season sun sparkled on russet leaves wet from the morning’s rain. The brown-red-yellow of sacrifice--a part of the tree given up to death that the whole might live--made Sionna’s throat ache. The shrill gak-ak-ak of gulls swooping somewhere out of sight drowning for a moment the stream’s splash as it re-plotted its course around the obstruction. And the scent.
Thick and copper. Accenting dreadfully the unnamed taste in her mouth, salt and brown. And the greasy weight in her swollen belly.
No. Don’t think about it.
Sionna swallowed, and the revolt it prompted in her stomach threatened to bring the thing she desperately didn’t want to think about to the front of her attention.
Nausea could come later, and grief, and regret and horror. Now there were two dead--savaged--soldiers bleeding into the water. Somebody would miss them, maybe soon.
Breag wouldn't help her. Not now. He hunted her kind. Her kind. She was like Proinsis now.
Cú yipped from the water's edge and Sionna startled. Time to act. Save herself, or die. The re
st would wait.
Dead men were heavy.
Sionna started with the short one, the one who looked so much like the innkeeper. She manoeuvred herself between his splayed legs, wrapped an arm around each thigh and hauled it out of the water. His gaping throat grinned at her.
The left thigh wouldn't stay on her shoulder. Sionna bent almost double, her arms wrapped around the body's waist. It should have made her uncomfortable, his groin so close to her face. Instead his throat smirked at her, and she was glad of a place to fix her eyes.
She managed only five paces before she needed to lower the weight to the ground and rest. The low patch of whin-bush scrub she aimed for was maybe a hundred paces distant. Hide the evidence, get back to Tarbhal, to Breag and Laoighre, get out of town.
A hundred paces, when she could manage only five at a time. There were two bodies.
Sionna jerked to her feet again, dragging the dead weight backwards. Its head bounced against a blue-grey oval of limestone and she winced. Flinched from knocking the soldier's head, but look at its throat! Sionna's cheeks were wet, somehow, and salt dripped from her nose into her panting mouth.
"Easy girl, take it easy. I'm here now."
Sionna skittered sideways. She scrambled to the water's edge, her scream swallowed before it crested free. Too late.
The claw of a hand closed around her shoulder, but gently. "Hold on to yourself, cutty. It’s not time yet for falling to pieces."
Anú. It couldn't be.
It didn't matter how or why. The old woman was here, and she was helping. Sionna didn't understand, didn't care. It was going to be all right.
"That's right, little one, you take that end. We'll fix this up in two shakes of a lamb's tail."
Sionna did what she was told. The old woman couldn't possibly have strength enough to haul her share of the dead man's weight. But she managed, somehow. The second body too. That one weighed more, and they stopped half-way to the scrub so they could both catch their breath. Cú whined, trotting from them to the patch of whin. No wag to that tail now.
Did he really speak to her?
Anú poked about by the side of the stream, scratching a stick through the disturbed earth and rolling slick, red stones into the water's reach. She collected stream-water in her belt-pouch to lave the darkest stains. It made very little difference to the mess.
So much blood.
"Pig-phlegm! It'll have to do. There's no more time."
Only when Anú wrapped a shawl of moss-green wool around her did Sionna notice her own nakedness. The realisation brought a new gout of tears.
Later she wouldn’t remember how they made their way back to the healer's home. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
* * *
Sionna couldn't stop shivering. She held a mug of thick brown broth between her palms, warming herself on its heat. Each time she raised it to her mouth her taste buds squirted sour copper.
The hurts had mostly healed themselves, the outside ones at least. Her body had plenty of practice in healing in the years she lived with Proinsis.
Cú curled by her feet, just a baneling. Another puzzle with no answer.
"How did you know?" The question plagued her.
Anú raised her head from the green-sharp decoction that bubbled on the stove. "About you, do you mean?"
Sionna nodded. She didn't trust her voice.
"I felt it when you took hold of Bliss.”
Anú a Lupe. Stupid not to have guessed, but in truth the suspicion had never flickered through her mind. What about Tarbhal, then, or Laoighre? Were none of them human?
“Every Daoine will have felt Bliss hum in their bones after what you did."
Breag. No, that thought for later.
"But how did you know I needed help?"
"I knew you wouldn't have changed for no reason, and I knew there was nobody to help. Not many would know you by feel, only Daoine that spent time with you. The rest wouldn't know the feel of you from any other, not unless they had the gift of it or practiced long and hard."
Something in the old woman's explanation didn't make sense to Sionna. It flowed too easily, like the meat from a rotten egg.
A thump sounded through the wall, followed by words muttered too low to make out. Curses, if she knew Laoighre.
He couldn’t know about her.
"I'm glad to see you coming back to yourself. You have choices to make, and time is short."
"What choices?" Sionna huddled deeper into the shawl's prickly warmth, Cú's weight a satisfying heat on her lower legs. She had no strength to spare for making decisions.
"Don't be crack-brained, girl. What you did has consequences, and we need to decide how to deal with them."
Sionna bowed her head against a rush of resentment. Anú was right; the crime had inked the sand blood-black, and it couldn't be hauled back because she was sorry.
"What can I do?"
"The easiest thing is to collect up those friends of yours and get yourselves off Ullach. Get as far as you can with the light, and don't stop running till Dorchadas."
"Does it have to be all of us?" A hard thing, that all of them should pay for what she did.
That all of them should find out, you mean.
"Think, will you!" Anú's voice snapped with temper. "What do you think will happen to a stranger here, when those two are found chewed into nathair-bait?"
Sionna's gut slithered into her throat. Chewed. She had no reply for the old woman, focused as she was on keeping her stomach where it belonged.
"You could run, and you might even make it." Anú showed no mercy, boring into Sionna's eyes with her own. "But we haven't had a Lupe-killing here on Ullach for twenty years. There’ll be a stink from this you can smell all over the island."
"What, then?" Sionna screwed her body tight into the shawl. She would give herself up. It was the only way. Not a way she would have chosen. She had watched Lupes taken to the question. Smelled them burn.
"You could stay and let the others go." Anú's knuckles clenched white on her wooden stirrer, her eyes fixed on the pot’s green darkness. "Stay with me."
Sionna gaped.
"My time is short, though you mightn’t guess it.” Anú turned to Sionna, her face pale and set. “There’s a lot I can teach you, girl, before I’m called.”
Could the old woman be joking? Her eyes were lambent brown, no trace of twinkle. She held her mouth slash-straight, not tilted up or down. If it was a joke, it was a poor one.
“You want to teach me how to be a healer?” Even in her own ears the words sounded stupid. “How will that fix the problem with the soldiers?”
“The problem,” Anú emphasised the word, “only bites if bodies are found. I have ways of seeing that isn’t so.”
Tears of relief prickled Sionna’s eyes before she realised that the old healer was still speaking.
“I have something you want, girl. You have something I need the same way. I’m short on time, near as short as you are. You want soft-soaping and pretty words same as any young thing, I’m sure, but I don’t have the time for them, or they’d be yours and glad to. Come learn from me and your problem goes away. Otherwise ...” Anú spread her arms, bony shoulders shrugged.
“Problem. Problem. Go away.” Heliod flapped around the room on straggle-feathered wings, alighting on the open door between kitchen and corridor. He fixed his bright black eye on Sionna, unwavering.
“Stupid bird!” Anú’s brows snapped together. She flapped a half-hearted arm at the raven and settled again into her rocking chair, turning her back to door and familiar both. There was an eerie sense of satisfaction in the way the raven shook his tattered feathers in Sionna’s direction.
“Do you mean you won’t help me unless I agree to stay?” No time for stoat-footing now. Sionna needed to know exactly how many coins this purse held.
“That’s what I mean.” No blush, no sign of shame in the set of those sloped shoulders. “Your bloodline is an old one, and I have need of s
omebody to learn what I know. It’s for you to choose. It’s your hands that have blood on them.”
Not just her hands. The knowledge fortified Sionna, although it shouldn’t have. Everything had changed between breakfast and midday. She would be as strong as she needed to be. There was nobody else.
“I have questions.” And she wanted answers.
“Ask them, but be quick. The boy’s next door, don’t forget, and not so free-moving. He best start soon if he’s to be far enough by nightfall.”
Laoighre. His life in her hands. Careful!
“How long will I have, if I stay? How long before I turn into an animal, like Proinsis?”
“Proinsis was Lost? I hadn’t guessed it.” Something flickered over Anú’s face and was gone. “There’s a lot you have to forget before you can begin to learn.”
“How long?”
“I’m Dílis, loyal to the Lady, and you will be too when you’ve learned what I can teach. Your mother would have shown you, if she’d lived long enough. We don’t join the Lost; turn warg as your friend calls it. Only those who haven’t learned the path, or turn their back on it, get drunk on Bliss. I’m not surprised you’re afraid, if you knew one like that, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Trust the Lady to keep you safe.”
Sionna trusted Sionna. There had been no Lady in the cabin she shared with Proinsis, no Lady on the mountain.
“Is that how you’ll keep me safe, by asking the Lady?”
“Girl, on that you have to trust me. There’s too much here that you’re not ready to understand.”
Like the way Anú had moved those bodies. Sionna forced her mind to think of the clearing, of the old woman’s strength. No question that there were mysteries, but she didn’t accept that they were beyond her mind’s reach.
“What about other creatures? Beasts. Will I hear them when I’m like that?” She couldn’t speak to Anú about what she had heard.
“They’re animals, child. When the Daoine take wolf shape we look like them, but we’re not the same. They don’t speak to us in that form no more than they do when we’re in this one.”
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