Always moving inside her; spreading, insidious. Like death maybe, a cailín mara entangling her life in its long black hair. Drawing her closer to its clammy, silver-scaled grasp and the gape of its pale pink, angle-toothed maw.
Death like she had brought to three soldiers on the road from Macha, and to the pair on the mountain. Brutal, bloody, direct. A very different thing from the crushed garlic she had laced into Proinsis' meals. She had darkened in the road from Dealgan. Ushna had sensed that. Maybe Tarbhal had smelled it on her too. Anú had known, and had coveted it.
So, she would go to Tearmann and make of it what she could. The people there might find that they did not like their bargain. The only wonder was that Anú had so easily allowed her to leave.
It should have surprised Sionna when Heliod flew into camp, slapping the air with long, lazy wingbeats.
Instead she snorted, disdaining to point and goggle like the others did. The old woman wouldn't give up so easily, not when there was something she wanted. The question was how she thought the bird might help her schemes.
If the Dílis saw use in him, Sionna would watch him for the chance she needed.
* * *
Even without words Laoighre comforted her. His eyes followed her when he thought she wouldn’t notice, tentative but warm. There was hope there. And he had offered to come with her, forced Breag to allow it. An act of true friendship, for all that he seemed now to doubt its wisdom.
Breag held his eyes from her and said nothing. She could have been a tree-felled stump, useful for storing oddments but soon forgotten. He skirted Laoighre too, although the boy turned just as much from him.
And now Heliod. No doubt that Anú had sent him, but to what purpose?
Sionna put it from her mind, flexing her shoulder against the spreading fire. If she could use the bird she would seize her chance. Otherwise he was just one more force weighed against her.
Breag looked at the bird, snorted, then turned his back on it and busied himself again with the fire. He knelt with Cú heavy against his side, his hand straying occasionally to tangle in the animal's coarse black hair.
"I'm not sure that swapping the guard for a bird was the smartest way to go. Better a bow, eh?" Laoighre's eyes tried to slide from her face, but each time he forced them back to meet hers.
"Or a pile of coin and an empty road."
"Not North, though." Laoighre's face tautened and his eyes slipped again from hers.
"I've had no great successes in the Tiarna. Why not try someplace new?" Sionna spoke the words lightly, but they filled the air around her with a satisfying weight.
"Someplace with nathair and the bean gruaige and Murchu's Hunt, and who knows what else?" Laoighre's voice peaked in shrillness.
The set of Breag's shoulders said that he had heard, and that he waited for her answer as sharp as the boy did.
"And Lupes?" The hugeness of the word divided them one from the other.
A wash of pink tinged the paleness of Laoighre's face. He said nothing, long fingers coiling around one another in his lap like a nest of the nathair he feared.
"When I left my home I hated Lupes as much as I feared them. It's different for me now, and not just because . . ." No need to finish. "Lupes and humans take what they want and the Gods help any who get in their way. A nobody girl has no more future there than here."
“So why are you going?” No ‘we’ this time.
“Because I have no choice.”
“Choice.” Heliod’s croak came from the darkness outside the aura of the fire’s light, making all three jump.
“No choice.” Sionna shouted the words this time. The maunderings of self-pity crisped before an anger that seared her clean. The Lady damn her if a lice-picked bird would force her hand along with everybody else.
“So where now?” Sionna squatted in front of Breag for long enough that he had no option but to raise his head and face her.
She had survived the mountain. She wouldn’t bend her knee to this.
“Back to Macha. The ferry and the road North.” A mumble.
Sionna shook her head, a single, ugly jerk. “Have you no better plan? They’ll expect that, whoever hunted us before.”
“We have no choice. It’s no accident that there’s only one road onto or off of Ullach.” No more words than he needed; still not meeting her eyes.
Laoighre shuffled, uncomfortable with the tension they exhaled with every breath. Wedged between them Cú grumbled, adding his protest to the boy’s.
"There must be." Sionna ran her fingers through the tangles of her hair.
"We left easy answers behind with Anú, girl. There's no going back." Bitterness there.
"I know it." Against her will Sionna allowed despair to leak into the words.
“What would you have me do?”
“Think, will you, before you push us into the open arms of the military. There are secret ways, surely, else how did Ushna get here so much faster than us?”
A look told Sionna she manoeuvred wrong in mentioning the guard. “What do you know of Ushna?”
"I know that he reached Caislean before we did, and I’m certain he didn't pass us on the road. That's what's important."
Breag reared to his knees, teeth glittering in the fire's red light. At his hip the knife's hilt gleamed an oily yellow. "We stay on the road, and we take the ferry at Macha. There is no secret way, not unless the guard told you different."
"Then we’ll be done for."
"There is a secret way off Ullach."
Laoighre's voice startled Sionna, reminding her that the night stretched further than Breag and herself. She grabbed the tattered ends of her temper and folded them back where they belonged.
"What way?" Breag's voice was taut enough to hum.
"Near Mullan, in the north of the island. It's a route people use when it isn't safe to pass through Macha. The crossing's dangerous and it costs serious coin, but it's well tried." Laoighre muttered to his clenched fists. "I shouldn't be telling you this."
"I'm grateful you spoke up, lad." Breag's voice flowed like warmed honey.
It's only me he's angry with. Sionna's own irrationality angered her all the more, and her temper burned in time with the pulse of the wound on her hand.
"To Mullan then. We’ll take the chance." Breag's voice rang with certainty.
A chance? No chance; no choice. Sionna had known a single breath of freedom, and now she was back in the cage. Except that this time she understood what had been taken from her.
She unrolled her blanket, too sick for eating. Their eyes tickled her back and she hunched her shoulders against them. The night was a cold one, but still she moved her sleeping place as far from the fire and the others as she safely could. Blood thundered in her temples.
No way to stop the burning. Sionna reached for Bliss without a solid idea of what she would do when she changed. She knew only that the wolf's shape calmed her and gave her back to herself. There, she would know what to do.
Breag might come with her again.
She found nothing. Inside, she was empty. Bliss was still there somewhere, the warmth of it called to her, promising comfort. But where she expected to find the truest part of herself she found only the knife's mocking kiss.
From Heliod another rustle-feathered croak. No words, but it toned like a bell sounded in sympathy.
Sionna burrowed into her blankets, and for the first time since her early days with Proinsis she cried herself to sleep.
* * *
Breag woke her just as dawn claimed the sky, lightening it to hopefulness over a land still wreathed with night. The nasal twang of Laoighre's snore still sounded from a huddle of blankets near the now-dead fire. Cú curled in the circle of the boy's body, head raised and stump-tail thumping. He didn't move from the warmth of his nightspace.
Sionna wished she could pull the blanket over her head and lie still until she set as hard as the stone at her back. Her eyes scratched from a long night of tears, of fa
iling to reach Bliss and of trying again. Her body, chilled and heavy, felt like it belonged to somebody else.
Her right arm dangled heavier than the rest, with shafting darts of dull pain that forked into her back and neck. The fingers still clenched when she told them to, but sluggishly.
"We need to move fast today." Breag's low-scuffed tone signalled his unwillingness to wake the boy. "The season is later than I would have liked, and I don't want to run into snow in the pass."
Slate Pass. Sionna had heard the name whispered in many firelit stories, and now it was part of her own. An unwilling shiver racked her muscles before she could clench against it. It took little effort to turn shiver to yawn; it would have lessened her for Breag to see her fright.
“Past the Citadel?” Laoighre’s voice interrupted from his blankets, spiked high with fear or something else.
“No. We’ll follow a different route home. Our people know the mountains much better than the Brothers do.” Breag’s lips tightened.
"How long will we travel this time?" Sionna's voice was rough with sleep.
"We were half a month walking from Macha to Caislean, and we have further to go back." Breag thought a moment. "We'll need horses. I don't like it, but there isn't another choice."
"Do we have coin enough?" So strange to talk as though nothing lay between them.
"Yes; I have what I expected to see me through until planting. That isn't the problem."
Sionna waited, even when the silence stretched into awkwardness.
"I don't like horses." Breag met her eyes, finally, for the first time in two days.
Sionna withdrew hers. "Nobody likes to be forced to do what they would rather not."
"I wouldn't have chosen this if the choice was mine." Spoken so low it was almost lost under the bubbling of morning birds.
The stupidity of Breag's words blew the smouldering edge of Sionna's anger into flame. "Whose choice then? Mine?"
"I'm sorry."
"Don't you dare say that. Your regrets should have come before you did this to me." Her body shook.
"I had no choice."
"Choice, choice, as though your Eolaí stood behind you and forced your hand. The choice was yours, Breag, and the responsibility for what’s happening to me. You did this."
Sionna caught the muskiness of him as he turned from her and walked towards the sea's invisible roar. Man-smell; not unpleasant. Not summer sun stored in the heart of granite. Not bramble, holding tight to what it would call its own.
Dry-eyed, she turned to poke the dead fire back to burning.
21
Carad cursed the Lone Man's mother and her thrice-cursed decision to reproduce. And the Athair's unforgivable reluctance to die. And the entire population of filth-eating, fish-smelling Lupe sympathisers that crawled like lice over the Tir of Ullach and this town of Fairge in particular.
"You forgot goat-shagging." Nuada listened in arm-folded amusement, half leaning against the cow-shed's outer wall.
Carad glared at him until he unfolded himself, chastened or at least seeming so. Lately Nuada had become over comfortable as the Tánaiste's strong right arm.
The stench of dung was thick in Carad's nose. Driven to secret meetings in outhouses to keep his movements from his own men. Not the actions of any sort of leader.
Except maybe a living one. "Tell me exactly how it happened. Leave nothing out this time."
Nuada straightened further. "Conn brought the first news at dawn. The Allsayer’s newest supplicant died in the night, and the lad was son of an Ullish councilman."
"What did the boy confess?"
"Little of worth." Nuada grimaced. "Some rumours, most of which the patrols had already brought us."
"And then?"
"I requested a full accounting from the time we arrived on Ullach. The Allsayer was most unwilling to give that." Another grimace.
I just bet he was. "But you insisted?"
Nuada nodded, the gesture barely visible in the barn’s half light. "I insisted. The account was less than pretty."
"Tell me."
"Eight supplicants. All knowing nothing, all prominent or well connected. If I could see any sense in it I'd think he picked them for that."
"What next?" The conversation felt dream-streaked to Carad, less real than the huffing breath of the cattle that shared the barn’s false twilight.
"I'd scarce put down the report when Garbhan came with what he had to tell."
"And that was?"
"That every mouth spoke of nothing except our Allsayer, who had lifted the Speaker's wife and she heavy pregnant--or was, at least. That his patrol barely made it back to town in one piece. And that there's whispers about now being the time for the military to pull together against all its enemies."
"Against the Brotherhood?" The thought beggared belief.
"Seems they think we’re hand-holding with the guard on this." Nuada shook his head. "And that's the bones of it. I left Conn to call in the patrols and came right here."
"And what does the Allsayer say?"
"I thought it best you ask him yourself." So much unsaid, all of it there in Nuada's face.
"I intend to."
It was faintly possible that this mess could be put right. A suitable apology layered over hints of the Brotherhood's influence Tiarna-wide. And the Allsayer, eviscerated and dragged door to door behind his horse.
That part would be a pleasure.
Carad gathered himself and followed Nuada through near solid rain and near empty streets. Here and there he caught the swirl of grey at the corner of his vision, twitched through a door or twirled around a corner and then gone. And always, silent, the watching.
The feeling of eyes picking him apart held no novelty for any disciple, but here on Ullach it was different. Instead of prying, here the eyes flayed.
Today Carad could feel the baking heat of their hatred, these men and women who watched and said nothing.
He gritted his teeth and forced his shoulders not to hunch against the rain. The island-bred idiots who didn’t see the next Athair when they looked at him would learn their error soon enough.
A word sent Nuada to see about the horses. Carad had learned early that a real man walked big but kept his eyes on the back door.
The patrol first. That it was led by Garbhan didn’t come as a surprise; that disciple was fast earning his place in Carad’s future power structure. Less welcome the fact that Garbhan’s own regard fixed more and more firmly on Aod. A promising boy, but too raw for these times and this place.
The Dealgan man was amongst a group of four that sheltered under the down-sloping porch roof of the tavern they were billeted in. Garbhan filled the door-frame, his back an entirely inadequate barrier. His patrol expanded into the cramped space like the splayed hand of a dying man.
He’s expecting trouble.
The thought chilled Carad. Trouble brought an accounting, which until now had always fallen in his favour. This time, though, the air scraped razor-silk fingers across his skin and made the hair of his neck stand on end.
"You have something to report?" Let him find his own words.
"Yes, Tánaiste.” Garbhan stepped lightly down the creaking steps, nodding for Aod to fill his place in the doorway.
Carad felt his brow furrow and schooled it to no-comment smoothness. Garbhan's blue eyes flicked to his face and then away. A clenched jaw made the freckles on the disciple’s cheeks dance.
No work-horse this one; more a kestrel tamed to wrist.
Garbhan led the way over grass that squelched underfoot, stopping below a single, sky-filling chestnut tree. No grass to squelch here--cattle had left only a mire that threatened to swallow Carad's boots.
"So?"
"Not good." Garbhan's voice was strangled by something more than the tension of the moment. "We knew this place was a nest of wasps, and now the Allsayer's beating it with a big stick."
"What did you hear?" Facts now.
"Hard looks and whi
spered words. The ale-house where we quartered in Puirte burned to the ground last night. One of our Ears strung from a fence-post, eyes and tongue cut out like the Allsayer's taken to doing. There’s piss in our ale and maggots in our meat."
"What does the military say? Do they point any fingers?"
“Nothing certain enough for hanging, even if we were that stupid." Garbhan's mouth clicked shut.
The Allsayer was that stupid. Or that calculating.
"Hold the men close." Twenty men; Carad forced away the laughter that bubbled in his throat. "Watch the horses. Answers or no, we move before dark."
Garbhan jerked his head in a nod and was gone.
The laughter came, low and hurting. It was over; Ullach was lost. With more men there might have been possibilities, but no hope now except to try to save his own hide.
Defeat snatched from the teeth of victory. Fodhla had won.
And the Allsayer was long overdue an accounting.
Rain-plastered, still laughing, Carad slipped along the street to the three-roomed town-house the Allsayer had taken for his work. His vision ribboned in light and colour, melting into the clarity that comes with high fever.
The same Uls who would turn on Carad in darkness stepped aside to let him pass. The world was silent save the hiss of passing rain and the drum of a single pair of boots following. Carad didn’t turn to recognise friend or foe.
The Allsayer’s door was shut. Carad lifted his foot and booted it off its hinges. There should have been a dry smell of splintered wood, but the odour of blood and human waste lay too thick to identify anything else.
The Allsayer straightened from the bench where he laboured. Beneath his hands a supplicant groaned, muttering incoherent syllables. The noise carried the taint of reality into Carad’s ears. He didn’t welcome it.
"You honour me, Tánaiste." The Allsayer's voice was rich and smooth as fresh-churned butter, as though his robes weren't stiff with ichor and old blood.
The supplicant had lost control of its bladder. The prickle of piss in his nose grounded Carad in an instant.
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