A spy. Reporting. So many things made sense now. Nothing he had done was for friendship.
"Sionna." Laoighre shook his head, urgently, pleadingly. "I can explain."
"How? Everything you told me was a lie."
Tarbhal left, and she moved on from it. Breag ripped the heart from her, but he apologised and she forgive. Sionna had no absolution left in her.
"It was that way to start with, but things changed. I changed."
"And what about Cú? Do you think he forgave you before the sword went in?"
"Sionna, please." Desperation squeezed his voice near to transparency. The hand he stretched to Sionna reminded her, stupidly, of her first sight of him. Hiding; offering his help to strangers in trouble.
As false as the rest, most likely.
"Heartbreaking as this is, I can't stay for more." Again the suppressed bubble of triumph in the Tánaiste's voice. "I have a nest of Lupes to cleanse."
Laoighre moved faster than thought; faster than reaction. This time, unlike any other time, he didn’t use words. The small, quick hands of a thief snaked to the Tánaiste's belt. The raw need of an orphan boy powered the knife to the Glór-hunter’s throat.
And the instinctive hesitation of a life spent in fear stole his victory.
Garbhan's sword blocked the knife with its first pass; its second rammed into Laoighre's chest and twisted there. The boy fell to his knees. The expression of surprise on his face should have been comical.
Sionna felt the keening burst from her throat. The black blood that bubbled from Laoighre's mouth was hers as much as his.
"I forgive you. Of course I do." Words came piecemeal through the sounds of her grief.
Laoighre's open eyes held no answer.
Too late.
27
At least Sionna is safe.
Breag slid two exploring fingers over the top of the collar and ran them around the circle of it. The metal felt smooth and chill, with the indentation of engraved patterns covering both the outer and inner surface. There was no evidence of a join.
Cú will take care of her.
Strange that he should miss the wolf inside himself so much after a lifetime of denying it. So long spent unforgiving of those who embraced both parts of the Daoine nature, and now he mourned the sudden loss of half of who he was. Ludicrous.
Laoighre will get her out. He's a resourceful boy.
Breag paced the room, four strides taking him from the too-tiny window to the empty wall where his father's spirit-cloth should hang. Gone now; The Ceann had always hated the brightness of its reds and greens. Its place over the hearth was the only thing Breag could remember his mother ever raising her voice for.
She's probably riding for the pass without a look over her shoulder. Who could blame her?
Home. After dreaming of it every night and working for it every day, eight long years of cold winters and dry summers. Here he stood in his grandfather's house, surrounded by the things and the people he had fought to win back. Alone. The taste of it putrid on his tongue.
The old, familiar door-creak came accompanied by the clatter of the Ceann's boots on wood. Breag didn't move from his contemplation of the empty wall.
"Have you nothing to say to me?"
"I'm betting you took it down as soon as she was in the ground." So many world-sized angers condensed to ignite at this tiny thing.
"Sooner." A pause. "I buried her in it. She would have hated to leave it behind."
The rage bled from Breag, leaving him tired and feeling cheated. He turned to face his grandfather.
The old man's face had grown new lines in the near-decade from their last, violent argument. The only time Breag had dared to challenge the Ceann, though it had won him nothing.
"There were things I didn't want to leave behind."
He had stormed from the house that last time, a child in the body of a man. He would bring Eithne, make the Eolaí see that their promise was too strong for breaking. If that didn't work they would leave Tearmann and flee to one of the other Daoine villages further from the pass. Anything, so long as they could be together.
But Eithne never came. She chose Odran instead.
He had waited the whole of that long, dark night on their rock by the river just in case she would change her mind. The washed-out spring dawn saw Breag presented to the gathered Eolaí as their newest Marbh. Only the Ceann watched him walk from Tearmann and into the pass.
For this he had twisted Sionna to a shape that should never have been hers. No surprise she left him the first chance she could.
I'm sorry. I would have made it up to you.
"You're not the first that I've given up to duty."
Breag started. They had been silent so long he had forgotten that his grandfather stood behind him, gnawing at the marrow of the same past.
The Ceann didn't wait for an answer. "A daughter, a son and my last child's husband. I can't stop to question the price now. The paying’s already been done."
"Your duty, and your choice. Not mine. I have debts of my own to pay." And slim chance of ever finding the chance.
Sionna was gone, just like Eithne. She had better reason, maybe, but the bones of the thing were the same. Breag lacked something--small, maybe, but vital--and everybody he cared about could feel its absence. Why else would none of them think him worth fighting for?
"Think long and hard on it, lad. You'd do well to give the Eolaí the answers they want. A great many things are changed for you now."
"But I'm the same. I want no part of your duty, or your Eolaí. Coming back was a mistake."
The Ceann shook his head. "Then I can't help you. Someone else will come to take you on."
Breag didn't watch The Ceann walk away; he traced the old man's leaving by the creak of boards as he passed. His anger followed behind. He felt empty.
The deliberate thump of boots at the door told him that his solitude was an illusion, like so much that he had taken with him from Tearmann. Not yet time to run, but soon. Watch sharp; take his chance. He could learn much from Sionna.
He would leave Tearmann to choke in its own foulness. He had found her once; he would again. He had promised her explanations; she would hear the ugly bones of his story.
The collar let him taste what he had stolen from her when he gave her to the blade. Hard to understand that loss until he faced it for himself. Emptiness sounded inside him, the ring of false coin against a merchant's goldstone. Without the wolf he was less than he pretended to be.
Forgive me, Sionna. I didn't understand.
The collar's cold weight strained his back and neck.
* * *
Eithne was next to come. Breag realised that he had been expecting her as soon as he heard the soft scrape of her basket against the door's aging wood. A matron now, her hair woven tight to the nape of her neck like the older girls she had laughed at when they were together. Too quick to take the mark of a husband, she had said; when she wed, her husband would be the one to weave his hair.
Her face showed only the occasional, bright flash of the girl she had once been. Her hands clenched white-knuckled around the basket’s handle.
"Breag."
"S-Eithne." An unhappy mistake.
Her face tightened. "The Ceann asked me to come. I told him it was a bad idea."
"What did he expect you to do?"
"Talk to you. Convince you that he's right. Stupid that I'm the one he thinks will change your mind."
"He knows you were important to me once."
The truth of it smothered their words.
Breag examined Eithne, measuring her against the weight of so many years' longing. She seemed smaller. Somebody's mother; somebody else's wife. The echo of a past made irrelevant by the act of finding it.
"I would have done anything to be with you." Breag's voice was softer than he had thought it would be. "It sliced me in pieces to find you didn't feel the same."
"There were things you couldn't understand." Eith
ne turned her head to the door.
"Too many years ago to matter now." The truth, and it lightened Breag to speak it. “I saw that you have a son.”
Eithne nodded, her brow knit to darkness. "I'll tell The Ceann that he chose the wrong mouthpiece."
"The collar doesn't incline me to listen."
"It wasn't meant for you, though. The collar." She stopped in front of the door, her fingers knotting through the blue fabric of the basket's lacings.
"The fault was mine; fitting that the punishment should be." Clipped words; Breag's skin twitched to think of talking to Eithne about Sionna. About what he had done.
"You gave her my promise knot." Eithne spoke in a monotone, her eyes fixed over Breag's shoulder.
"Not yours this many years." Cruel to leave it at that. "I made Sionna a promise, that I would put right the harm I've done. I keep my promises."
Eithne's face screwed into lines of time and regret. Still she wouldn't meet his eyes.
"I'm sorry." So many nights of honing the words for this meeting, and now that the moment was here, all of the apologies were his.
"Did you tell her that it was mine?" A whisper.
"I never spoke to her of you."
Eithne nodded again, eyes screwed shut so briefly that Breag could have imagined it. "You did right. What we were then has nothing to do with now. Life takes us in unexpected directions."
Again the creak of the outer door opening. Breag and Eithne jumped apart. Strange, the feeling that they did something wrong.
"Eithne!" Surprise in the man's voice. "I didn't think to find you here."
Odran. The years had broadened his shoulders and eased his stork-like gangliness. Stamped on his face the comfortable look of a man who knew his place in the world. He wore his straw-blond hair braided, not woven.
"The Ceann asked me to come. It was a mistake." A flush ran along Eithne's jaw.
"He had good reasons, no doubt." A practiced smile, and a hand run along Eithne’s back to clasp her waist. His eyes raked Breag for reaction. "You should go now. Our son is calling for you."
Eithne bowed her head, meeting neither man's eyes. She slipped out the door without a word or a look for Breag, just as she had done eight years ago. This time there was nothing in it that could hurt him.
Sionna will be through the pass by now. Laoighre will see that she's out of trouble.
"The Ceann sent me too." Odran paused for reaction. "He thought you should see the other Namhaid."
"Collared ones in Tearmann?" Not possible. He would have known.
"We look after our own. Not many, but you aren't the only one to go against the Lady."
Breag followed as Odran led him towards the street, through a house he had once known so well. A guard stood at the door; broad, and too young to know from the pack of youngsters who had once scrambled to oil his sheath and lace the boiled leather of his breastplate. The blank face that turned from Breag's showed no spark of recognition.
The mid-afternoon glare caught his eyes, making him squint and stumble. Odran didn't offer a steadying arm.
Breag had expected that they would find the Namhaid in the Plas Teanga, but Odran turned left instead of right and led him through the heart of Tearmann. Heads turned as he passed; whispers followed his path through the people who had been his, once.
Something stung his left shoulder and he flinched, breath hissing through clenched teeth. Another stone clattered against the wall by his head. He turned, glimpsing the scramble of small boys into an alley. No voice shouted to end their violence.
Time to leave. An unguarded moment and he would run. Shiny new torque or no, better anywhere than mired too long in this place of death.
"Traitor!"
A growl from the tangle of faces that lined Breag's path. He turned his head, tired.
Aonghus, grey-stubbled and shaking, tried to murder him with eyes sharpened by hate. Breag stuttered to a stop, wounded despite himself.
"Aonghus, is it you?"
"Don't speak to me, filth." Aonghus spit into the road's dirt, a gob of mucous spidered scarce inches from Breag's boot.
"You know how it is out there. You know that the world is bigger than five towns of Daoine." A Marbh should understand if none else did.
"Don't line my name alongside yours, oath breaker. I held my faith when I hunted the Tiarna. I returned a Lost One to Grace. What you are shames those who went before you and died trying."
Numb legs carried Breag forward to an Odran impatiently waiting. These people were blind, as he had been once, and not long ago, before Sionna opened his eyes. These people, once his people, had their eyelids sealed from birth.
Aonghus' words opened the sewer-locks on the blame Tearmann would heap on him, and Breag squared his shoulders against the spew of their hate.
Powered by fear, Tarbhal would have said. They unsheath their claws to swipe at you through the bars, when really it's the cage they fight.
No comfort in the understanding. Even Tarbhal had left him.
* * *
There were fourteen Namhaid.
The building that housed them was new-built in the years of Breag's exile, although enough like Tearmann's others that it defied his memory to recall what had stood there before.
They were penned like animals, each enclosed with a raised bunk, a bucket for waste and room for little else. Nine men and five women, they gazed at Breag with the lost, empty eyes of a deer in the wolf's jaws.
No longer Daoine, they were Namhaid and their tribe numbered only these fourteen. And now Breag.
"You see now why the Ceann fights so hard for you." Odran fixed his soft, repellent grip around Breag's bicep. No surprise that he argued the Naomh’s point. The Naomh, who had given Eithne to his favourite nephew by binding Breag to the knife.
"I see what you people do to your own. I have no place here, with you or with them." Strong words, but Breag chilled to see the empty pen along the western wall.
"You know your place, I see." The scratching sneer marked the speaker as Naomh.
Breag refused to turn. He flicked his gaze from the empty pen quick enough to near sizzle the sockets. Too late. The Naomh had seen.
"You choose well, traitor. That’s your bed, stabled here with the others of your kind."
The hissed sibilants locked Breag's back to straightness. Still he didn't answer; still he wouldn't turn.
"No tongue without the bitch-Seed to whet it? No matter."
Gritted teeth and a clenched jaw. Better to allow the Naomh to show his hand.
"A lesson then. So be it."
The sweetness of exquisite pain grabbed Breag's throat and threw him to the ground. Fire too infinite for flame melted the flesh from his windpipe and gullet, stroking downwards to eat the meat that clothed his ribs. Screams bubbled for release, but it was impossible to draw breath.
"I hope you try to run." The Naomh spoke words thick-pelted with pleasure.
The pain eased infinitely slowly. Long before it had, Breag prayed to the Lady and any other who would listen that his nerve-endings would burn to dead numbness. Finally, after a night and an age and a single second, he found himself curled into a foetal ball of grunting whimpers, his face wet with tears. Whole, at least in body.
"You have until the sun sets. Because your grandfather asks it, and because it serves my purposes that he should."
The swish of soft leather on hard clay rasped the Naomh's path backwards and away.
"Stupid, when you know the collar gives you no chance to answer." Odran offered his arm now, tutting as he smoothed Breag to his feet. His eyes clenched tighter at every whole-body tremor.
"Thank you." That Odran should be the one to see this. To help him from his knees. Truly the Lady had listened to his prayers, and had twisted every one of them against him.
"Here, take this." Water, in a thick earthen mug.
Breag drank gladly, tremors slopping cold water over the mug's lip to soak his cotton tunic. He shivered from chill a
nd reaction.
What if I run? How far can he reach me?
Suspicion supplied an answer his mind refused to hear.
Something slapped against the prison's high windows, making Breag jump near as high as Odran. Something dark and powerful.
Heliod. The black breadth of him forced its way through a space by rights too cramped for passing and circled to the ground on lazy wings. He croaked a greeting, fixing his single eye on Breag.
Telling, the pulse of joy that leaped in Breag's throat at the sight of this lone friend.
The bird darkened, sucking into himself every particle of the room's light.
No. How?
The darkness pulsed outwards, a feather-brush against Breag's skin. Behind him the Namhaid cried out less in fear than awe.
Heliod released his hold on the light slowly, it seemed reluctantly. What stood at the centre of the room's every eye was no raven, or any other bird.
An ugly old man, squat and dark and filthy. One-eyed, naked, he stepped towards Breag.
"Quit your staring and make yourself useful." The croak no more appealing than the voice of the raven. "The Brotherhood have Sionna. They’ll burn her at dawn."
28
The day's grey light muddied to darkness without the definition of twilight to give it shape. Tarbhal glanced upwards at pregnant clouds, fat with undelivered rain. Snow soon.
"Are you ready for this?" Ushna's face was a sculpture of dignity.
"As I'll ever be."
More true than ever he'd admit. This old stump held only sap enough for one final winter. There would be no new leaves for him come spring.
The pain-lament that took him to the healer two towns back provided an excuse, but was no lie. Although he left with the healer’s writs of charter and a doctoring bag lifted light-fingered behind the man’s back, the herbs he bought there saw hard and heavy use.
"And you're certain you can do this alone?"
Already they treated him like a twice-child. Tarbhal allowed the irritation he felt to colour his voice. "I'm not doting yet, Ushna! Save your concern for Dealgan; they'll need it more than I do."
Requiem for the Wolf Page 28
