"What's this?" The tiny blade looked ludicrous in his meaty hands.
"Corn parer. For the feet." Tarbhal had no idea whether it was true or not.
"You give me a call if you find the Athair's feet are bothered by corns." The soldier pocketed the blade.
Tarbhal nodded, smiling, trying not to think about the entirely more substantial knife strapped to the meat of his left arm.
“On you go, then.” The soldier swung open the double doors to the Athair’s private chambers. “I hope you do him some good.”
Tarbhal walked through slowly, beads of sweat crawling along his back. He tried to ignore the decades-honed nerves on the back of his neck that warned of watching eyes.
Let them watch. Let them remember.
Even in The Athair's personal suite the Citadel held no warmth. Narrow windows faced onto empty courtyards. Stone walls met stone floors, unrelieved by rugs or hangings or softness of any kind. Meagre-scripted quotes from their damnable book glowered from every flat surface. No sketches, no arms, no painted masks. A most uncivilised people.
Finally, an armsman-guarded door, unremarkable in all but its guard.
All those years of pretending, of knowing what the mark wanted to see and giving it to him with bells and whistles. All working towards this.
My last play. Better make it a good one.
"Am I in time?" He veined his voice with worry. "Does The Athair still live?"
"Your business?" Not easily swayed, this one.
"Searrach of Dun. You'll have heard of me, of course." Self-satisfied smirk.
The armsman crossed his arms and said nothing.
"Physician to kings?" A tinge of anxiety, a smidgen of outraged dignity.
Nothing.
"I hope you'll have heard of the Ard, then." Tarbhal leaned more heavily on his dignity and pressed the document into the armsman's outstretched hand.
"Wasn't told to expect a new physician." This soldier read the document without recourse to his finger.
"And I wasn't advised that so many would see fit to delay The Athair's improving health." This earned a promising glare.
"Flann usually looks after the Athair's physicking. He's late today."
Tarbhal gave a short, annoyed nod. "He was to meet me at the South Gate two hours ago to see to the formalities. The Ard will hear about this in my report."
At least Ushna had forgiven Tarbhal far enough to delay the doctor like they had planned. Knowing Ushna, Flann wasn't even safely dead.
"Come on man, let me in or send me packing. My time is too valuable for this." Irritation layered with the finest threat of rank-pulling.
"Tell you what, why don't we step in together? Until Flann arrives." The guard slapped the note of introduction into Tarbhal's chest.
Tarbhal followed the armsman through the opened door, modulating his soldier clump into a soft-pawed patter. The way his luck was running, Flann would arrive next with Ushna by the ear.
The room's stink almost knocked him from his feet. This was death's place. It seeped from velvet drapes and deep carpeting, teemed within every susurrus of breath that barely stirred the corpse's chest.
Not a corpse, then, if it breathed. But it had more right to the Hooded One's embrace than many of the trunk-thewed farmer's sons whose final expressions haunted Tarbhal's dreams.
White as bone, shrivelled as rawhide, chill as midwinter the old man lay. A single sheet covered him lightly. Beneath eyelids thin as membranes his eyeballs twitched and rolled.
"What are you waiting for? Get on with the healing." Impossible to interpret the twist of the armsman's lips.
The sound of raised voices stopped Tarbhal’s answer on his tongue. In the corridors somewhere; close and coming nearer. More than one voice. Impossible to hear the words.
"Don't so much as raise his covers before I get back." The armsman raked Tarbhal with a single, skin-peeling look. "And remember. I know your face." And he was gone at a run with the door slammed at his back.
A mistake lad, and mighty grateful I am for it.
Not much time. The blood pumped in Tarbhal's ears and he savoured it for his death-march. Three limped strides to the bedside; no sound from the thick-piled carpet. A slow breath to be sure that he would do this. The fingers of his right hand inched into his left sleeve.
The heavy door creaked inwards, spewing the armsman and a fine-built blond man into the room. The blond one's blue tunic was shredded at the left bicep and stained bloody all over. Tarbhal's fingers slid from the sleeve.
Fool! You could have cut his throat before they made it through the doorway.
"Leave me now, Edda. I would speak with the Athair alone." The blond man's voice was dismissive, but beneath the tone was . . . something. Exultation?
The armsman didn't want to leave, it was plain, but neither could he object. "If you're sure, Tánaiste." He moved backwards through the doorframe and pulled the door's weight behind him with a creak.
Carad or Fodhla? Tarbhal would bet six months' back pay that the slender man was Carad.
Whichever, he ignored Tarbhal and crossed to the Athair's bed.
"I came straight here." A peep of tattered flesh through the torn tunic said he told the dead man the truth.
If he asks me to dress that I'm as dead as the old man.
But the Tánaiste noticed his mauled arm as faintly as Tarbhal's hovering presence. He bent over the Athair, and for a horrified moment Tarbhal feared he would kiss the corpse's still lips. Instead he turned his head slightly and whispered something in the old one's ear.
These Glór-Hunters, there's not a sane one among them. Tarbhal swallowed his gorge and settled into an innocuous position by the small table that displayed the Athair's pills and potions. With luck this Tánaiste would have small news to whisper.
"Tánaiste Carad, Garbhan sent me to say--" The door burst open again, spilling another disciple onto the blood-red carpet.
Aod! Ushna would see the hand of the gods in this for certain.
"Tarbhal?" The lad's face pinched and twisted as it had when he was a lad suffering over his bow.
Never smart enough to be a guard, no matter what his brother might have hoped. Always too dull and too slow.
Take the chance or lose it. Tarbhal dived for the bed, his fingers groping for the knife in his sleeve. One final chance, no matter how thin and desperate. Either way he was a dead man.
No possibility of reaching the old man; too many bodies in the way. Tarbhal lunged instead for Carad, a Tánaiste, sure to have blood enough on his hands.
The Tánaiste fumbled at his belt for a sword that wasn't there. His face twisted as though he would attempt to kill Tarbhal through strength of will.
Doesn’t work, my friend, or I would have ended your kind years ago.
But Aod was there, between Tarbhal and Carad. Aod's sword was right where it was supposed to be.
Tarbhal felt a flare of white-hot pain in his gut. He screamed; sight, sound, everything was screaming. Fire started in his belly and splayed outwards, consuming all. Pure pain, hot and high and sweet.
There was a rug, blood red and soft against Tarbhal's cheek. Movement made the screaming start again, so Tarbhal lay as still as he could. Outside of everything now. A watcher, not a mover.
Thick legs; Aod stood over him. The lad might have said something, Tarbhal didn't know. His hearing ebbed and flowed with the pain.
And Carad stood behind Aod. Carad pulled a long, thin blade from its sheath at his ankle. Carad slipped the traitor's blade into Aod's back, between his ribs and into his heart.
Aod grunted, an understated sound. He tried to turn but his knees buckled. He looked surprised; they always looked surprised. And fell. Heavy, on Tarbhal's sundered gut.
Tarbhal screamed again. Screamed until everything turned black.
* * *
"That's him." An ungentle boot to Tarbhal's shoulder roused him to consciousness.
Pain, white and pure. A pain that laughed at the po
sturing of his winter knee and the pretending of his lower back. Tarbhal had never known pain before this.
"Pretended to be a physician to get past the sentries, killed the one outside this door. My man and I arrived just too late to save our Athair." The voice hummed with suppressed emotion.
What? From where he lay Tarbhal could see a part of the bed. Gore-soaked. Slashed with stab-marks, what seemed like a hundred wounds in the once-white linen.
No rasp of strained breath. No shallow rising of the sheet.
It's done then. No satisfaction in this. No absolution by another's hand.
"It defies belief." A softer voice, padded with shock and the edges of grief.
"That it does." And a third man, dark-voiced, saying more than he spoke.
"He trusted too much, Garbhan. He opened his back to the old guard just because he knew him as a boy."
The shock of it opened Tarbhal's eyes. So he had slaughtered Aod, had he, with a knife to his back?
"We should take care not to trust, then." The dark-voiced disciple stood by as two others eased Aod's remains onto a stretcher. "A dearly bought lesson."
The door snicked shut at his back.
"Garbhan!"
Tarbhal struggled to lay hands on the streaming ends of thought. Something boiled below the surface of this room.
"The Athair deserved a different ending." Carad again. Carad with a new edge to his voice.
"He'll be remembered. The Guard will pay for this." The boot landed again in Tarbhal's shoulder, setting off fireworks of agony throughout his body. He fought for breath, fought for anything outside of pain.
When he could hear again the world came tinged with dreamy distance.
"I take no pleasure in this, Carad. If the Athair had been less clear in his wishes it might have been different." The softer voice again, pained.
From Tarbhal's place on the floor the voice's owner seemed a giant of a man, broad-shouldered and tall. He stood with his back to the blood-bright bed, more by design than accident it seemed, to judge from the way his head refused to turn in that direction.
Carad had no such qualms. He looked over the tall one's shoulder as often as he met his eyes, fingers stroking rhythmically over his scarred palms.
"I find no pleasure in this either, Fodhla." Carad's voice gave lie to his words. "But there's a thing that needs to be discussed."
"Now?" Fodhla's head turned part-way and then resolutely back.
"The small matter of Dabhna--I see you know the name."
A pause; long. “Searlas, I wonder if you would allow us a moment? Thank you.”
A murmur of protest, quickly cut off. The door opened and, after another pause, shut.
"What do you want?" Fodhla's voice could have belonged to a much smaller man.
"Unfair, Fodhla. I have no motive here but the truth." Carad's quick striding bisected the room, north to south and then south to north.
"What do you want me to do? I have coin."
Carad tutted, shaking his head. "Fodhla, you need to move past your selfishness. Think outside of yourself for once. You know what the zealots do to women who tempt a Brother from his vows. How much more angry will they be when the Brother is Tánaiste?"
Fodhla's voice paled. "Carad, I beg you, if ever we were friends. The sin is mine, not hers. I made a shame of what should have been a beautiful thing. Don't punish Dabhna for this, please Carad."
"And such beautiful children. Two sons and a daughter, isn't it?" Carad halted by the Athair's bedside, head bowed over the old man's harrowed body, hands clenched in the bloodied sheet.
I had a boy, once.
Tarbhal felt himself bleed into the scene, felt himself leak into Fodhla's desperate huffs of breath and Carad's brittle triumph. The blood on the bed was his. So was the blood on his hands.
"We'll go tonight." Defeated. "Come morning we'll no longer be your problem."
"No." Carad turned, eyes glittering. "That won't do, I'm afraid. Too many know that the Athair planned to name you his successor. You'll stay and see me settled on the throne. That family of yours will be safe under my hand, don't you worry."
"Please. Don't make them a part of this." Fodhla's innards lay spread out in his voice; heart, guts, spleen, all. "Of course I'll stay, do whatever you want. But get them away first. I beg it."
"You make a decent job of the Commencement tonight and I'll consider it." Carad's lips stretched over white teeth. "Once I'm confirmed Athair I can afford to be generous."
The waves of agony that lapped at Tarbhal's consciousness mellowed, slowly but perceptibly, into a darkness that cradled him to sleep. With a sigh he closed his eyes.
"Of course, Athair." Hopeless. Helpless. Doomed.
What have I done?
No matter. Time would swallow it, or another would put it right. Not this old man's problem any longer.
The waves broke over him, gently at first. He could hear the surf pounding in his ears, feel the prickle of salt in his nostrils. Then the breakers came, massive and powerful. Undeniable.
Wait for me, Blannad. I'm coming.
Finally, Tarbhal finished the job he had been working on for forty years.
32
They stood in the snow a long time, heads bowed, arms clasped around one another's waists. Around them, falling snow and the music of their people sealed them away from the bad things of the world.
Cú lay downwind of them, ears high and shoulders back. He would not lose Sionna again.
Breag raised his head, finally, his arms still tight around Sionna. "We should go."
"Yes. Go where?" She raised her head with his, trusting in a way that wrenched his heart.
"Tearmann, first. I owe the pack a safe return. After that, I don't know."
Home, wherever that was for him and for her now. Together. The rest they would build.
The Namhaid had kept the wolf shape, all but one or two. What was left of the Glór-Hunters' camp shivered under a weight of fur and fang, its tent-flaps thrown wide at the feet of the victors.
It would not be like this in Tearmann.
The grey female caught his eye, outside of the encampment. She crouched over the writhing shape of the injured Daoine, whistling her distress as she watched him convulse.
Too Tall. Injured too sore for healing, but too much Daoine to pass smoothly into death. And so he convulsed, trapped on the twin prongs of their nature.
The sick weight of what he had to do curdled in Breag's stomach, souring the moment of quiet. This duty was his, as the foul ones always seemed to be. He released Sionna's hand with a final squeeze and stepped squarely to face it.
The grey one would have slunk away if she could, he could see it in the way her eyes refused to meet his. Long she had led this pack, though, and she held her tail upright as Breag approached.
It would have been easier if he could do this as a wolf. But it wasn't in a wolf’s nature to plan a death.
"There are times I’d give anything to be at the tail of the pack." He needed her to understand.
Maybe she did. She pressed her nose into the warm skin of Too Tall's armpit, savouring him, inhaling his essence. Breag met her eyes for a long moment before she turned and slipped between the flakes.
Not the first time Breag had cut a man's throat because there was no other option. No easier that this time he acted to spare a friend pain. Death is death, coming or going.
Breag knelt by Too Tall in borrowed Glór-Hunter clothes and slipped the knife into the soft place below his left ear. Blood geysered from the dying man's neck, soaking Breag's sleeve with gore.
Too-Tall convulsed a final time, eyes wide, his body clutching itself close. He sighed, a long outpouring of life, and relaxed into pain’s ending.
One more killed by Breag's hand. One more for the tally sheet.
The blizzard had stopped. There should have been the peace of perfect stillness. Instead there was blood on the snow.
Time to be done with the past. A final thing to kil
l before his life became his own.
Sionna watched from beside a silent Heliod; she moved towards Breag when she saw him straighten. Heliod followed, his quick, short stride somehow not a trot.
The little man dissected Breag with his single, dark eye. "Found some clothes, I see."
Breag glowered under a shaming rush of heat. He didn't dare look at Sionna, but he could hear the huffs of her laughter smothered behind her raised hand.
Cú rumbled deep in his chest. Heliod's eye flickered to the Gadhar and back to Breag, his hands spread wide in a gesture of appeasement. They understood one another well, those two.
"We've done what we came for." Breag grabbed Sionna's raised hand and felt it clench around his in return. "It's time to go back."
Cú rumbled again, in agreement this time. Breag knelt and stroked soft hands over the gadhar's injured shoulder and down along his chest and leg. Cú whined a muted protest, but stood under the exploration. The shoulder was sore injured; it must have pained him to use it so hard.
It was mending, though. And, equally important, his pelt was showing brindle through the black. The disguise wouldn't last much longer. They had need of another wise-woman with a knack for dye.
One of the Namhaid had travelled to the night camp to collect their clothes. Breag swapped the blood-soaked Glór-Hunter tunic for his own, ridiculously glad to see Sionna's neat stitching at the hem.
"Will you return to Tearmann?" The scratch of the female's voice caught Breag part-way into his tunic.
He pushed his head through the neck-hole and turned to face her. "We'll go through it, yes, but only for the gate. We need to hurry through the mountains. One more snow and we're stuck here till Planting."
Breag had it in his head to find the Lost. This time he would watch for something new to grow instead of ripping it out by its roots. He had many years to atone for.
"We'll see you safe, but after that we want no more of Tearmann. Only a fool stretches his neck into the same noose twice."
"I'll not forget how you helped us. If I can return the favour in the future sometime then I'll be honoured to."
Requiem for the Wolf Page 31
