The Raven Queen

by Jules Watson

  Ruán’s laugh was no more than a croak. He had spent all that time thinking he knew everything, but it seemed he had always been blind. He panted, smiling, as something hard left his heart.

  He flailed to sit upright, and as he did his arm hit another stone at the heart of the circle. It was a low, crouching thing. Ruán hauled himself up and laid his head back on it, his face turned to the sky. There he smiled again as the strength bled from him.

  The sídhe had not taunted him. They sang for him in his illness, rocking him with song, and their rays of fire, their brilliant light, had given him a last glimpse of sun on the water.

  So … let him rot away now and feed the land and its creatures in return for that. He was no more than mud and water anyway, and always had been—and suddenly that was a wonderful thing. He was only ever made of earth. How could he not have seen it? Let him melt into it now, for the Mother was earth and water, too …

  As his pulse slowed, Ruán heard a humming. What tune was it? He realized that something was stirring into life in his belly. A growing pressure, a pain. Heat. It moved up to his breast and pushed on him from the inside. At last it crested, and something in him tore open. He gasped.

  His memories burst into life all around him, as if he walked through them again.

  A girl came whirling through a sunlit glade. Orla. Without hesitation, Ruán dived back into that day when he hovered between boy and manhood. Before he ever sought for anything.

  “Blow!” Orla demanded as she spun in a cloud of dandelion seeds. “Harder, Ru!”

  “I’ve got no more breath left, I swear.” The boy Ruán collapsed, strewing the empty dandelion stalks on the ground. Orla’s brown hair had become a crown speckled with seeds, and her frayed dress whirled as if woven of fine wool. He could not breathe. “You look like a princess.”

  She giggled, bounding up and sitting on his belly. “A princess of the cows, of the porridge pot!” She stroked his face, her fingers callused from the flour-stone at her father’s fire.

  Ruán caught her red hand. “You are my royal lady.”

  “You talk too much.” She kissed him with berry-stained lips.

  Ruán drank her in as she pressed her fresh young body into his. Though his shoulders had not filled out, one part of him was fast flowering into manhood. The blood rushed to his groin, and he could not stop it.

  Orla raised her head. “Can’t lie on you with that poking me.” She leaped up and streaked off.

  His face flaming, Ruán scrambled after her.

  Through the lush woods they ran, splashing through streams and jumping up to touch each tree bough as they passed. At last Ruán pinned Orla against an oak. The beat of his pulse made everything vivid—the leaves brushing his cheeks, Orla’s eyes, the smell of the rich earth.

  “Ru.” Orla’s breast fluttered. Turning from his lips, she began to sing against his cheek. “Marry me, my strong one, my dark one, my fine one. Marry me at Samhain when the frosts are in the air.” She trailed her fingers through the ruddy hair over Ruán’s shoulders. “Marry me, my deep one, my red one, my sweet one, marry me at Beltaine when the blooms are in my hair …”

  The adult Ruán thudded back into awareness among the stones, the song trailing from his lips. His voice cracked and faded, but the singing carried on.

  He went still. The singing became deeper, more resonant, until it echoed off all the stones, rebounding back on itself and growing louder. It vibrated through his heart, and the stone beneath him rang like an anvil.

  Spires of flame kindled all around him, their crests radiating flares of light.

  Sídhe.

  Their brilliance seared into his mind, as if they moved through layers of the worlds that had nothing to do with his scarred, useless eyes. As they came closer, their light blinded him for a moment, and when it cleared again the night sky of Thisworld spread once more above him. A round moon swam through shredded clouds. The stones were black against the stars.

  They made him see.

  The sídhe girl was once again kneeling beside him in human form. The moonlight shone from her skin, setting her aglow. To gain what you seek, you must surrender, not strive.

  Ruán did not see her mouth move: her meaning rose inside him as if it was a thought of his own.

  So stubborn you are! But now you glimpse it at last.

  At the moment he gave up, willing to melt into water, rot away into soil … so at last they came to him.

  With a smile, the sídhe leaned in and breathed over him. It was not breath, though, it was light. It rushed through Ruán and ignited, low in his groin. Orla. He recoiled from that dangerous surge, that old desire of the boy in the glade.

  No, the sídhe said. This is a good place you have gone. Live in your body, not your thoughts—feel all the life of the world! Her smile flashed and she laid a hand on his chest. Her true self was flame … towering, streaming flame … and now her fire entered him and Ruán was back there once more.

  His body sank into Orla’s, and in delight she reached up and spread her hands to the sky, drawing the grasses through her hair. As if she was earth and he the sun … He poured himself into her.

  In the stones, the same quickening went through the adult Ruán, but instead of pleasure, the burning in his body grew more intense. The fireball in his groin began to surge up his body. As it did, it forced out old, buried things.

  Hidden things.

  He stood on a sea-rock with Orla, the pleasure of the forest forgotten. The boat was waiting below, tossed on whitecaps. Orla’s crying was pitiful. “What happened to you?”

  The spray stiffened Ruán’s face. He had to force his cold lips open. “It is a rare chance for one like me, Orla, to study under the druids.”

  “You want to run from me—from all of us!”

  “No. I have to be pure for my studies. I have to be able to think.” His voice cracked. “I try to bind my body to my will, but I cannot when you are near.”

  “You are so cold,” she wailed, clutching his arms. “Kiss me the way you used to!”

  Ruán fixed his gaze on the gray sea. The other novice druid, a youth from a neighboring island called Áedán, was beckoning to him from the little boat. Hurry, his wave said. Here is the way out of it all. The hungry farmers and fishermen, scratching a living from thin soils. His mother’s face, pinched and white.

  “The training will take all of me, Orla. I’m going to the Big Island. It is a great honor that Lord Mulach will have me.” He gritted his teeth. “You will marry a fisherman, someone who will sit by the hearth with you.”

  Orla shook her head as she wept. She bent over with arms crossed, as if he was pushing his feelings out of his heart and into her.

  Guilt, the edges jagged.

  On the muddy ground between the stones, the fire in his body flared again and Ruán began to shake. His pores ran with sweat, wetting his hair. His belly burned, the pain making him cry out. The singing of the sídhe peaked, the resonance of their voices at last shattering the guilt into sparks that blew away, purging him.

  But there was no relief; the molten heat only moved higher. Now Ruán saw Lord Mulach’s face, carved with grief for his dying son. The boy tossed in a delirium, his skin running with the same fever that gripped Ruán now.

  Save him, Mulach had begged Ruán. You have said you see all.

  Ruán had tried, with all the powers of his training, mind, and willpower. But not his heart. He could not go there. And so, he had failed.

  The boy died.

  The fiery column now reached Ruán’s heart. It was shame … hot and bitter.

  Ruán gasped and arched his back as, again, he felt callused fingers holding him down—Lord Mulach’s men—and he watched the glowing fire-iron coming toward his eyes.

  So now, the lord said, you will see nothing.

  Ruán’s great cry of agony was lost among the singing of the sídhe, as the fire burst from the crown of his head, his whole body a spire of flame like theirs. Ruán’s awarenes
s of himself—limbs, mind, pulse—was burned away.

  His life-force fountained up. For one glimpse, a single heartbeat, that power flared all over the land, and he saw himself as Erin itself. His bones became the rocks, his flesh the living soil, his blood the streams and seas. His hair wove the grass and trees, and his pulse fired the life that ran through everything.

  He was the king-in-the-land.

  Then the sunburst was gone, and Ruán fell back into his own body with a shock that woke him to his human shape, and the moon, and the night wind.

  The sídhe girl’s laugh still held the ecstasy of that rush, that great flame of life.

  So you burn away what was! Now you can become something else.

  The day was sinking to dusk when Maeve reached the great hill that stood alone on the west shore of Connacht, looking over the sea. It was crowned by an enormous cairn of tumbled stones. Others thought it haunted by the sídhe of the Otherworld, but Maeve had always craved being scoured clean by wind.

  The sea was copper beneath a red-streaked sky, the trees down the slopes burnished with the same shades of ocher. All the green was gone. There was only the rust of iron, of blood.

  Many times Maeve had stood, chin stretched to the west as if this hill was the prow of a ship that would bear her away. It had never gone further than fantasy. If she had ever defied her father, she would have ended up with nothing. No one would have harbored her in Erin, and over the sea she’d have been an exile without rank, prey to men who did not know her gods.

  Though it was already encased in tough leather, she caged her breast with her arms. A faint sound escaped her throat. I endured you, Father, and you leave me to be raped in filth?

  Maeve ground her chin into her shoulder, her gaze dropping toward the southern foot of the hill. There sat a cluster of stone tombs, gray humps with gaping mouths. They had been built by the ancestors, but it was said the sídhe guarded the mounds now, the beings of the Otherworld.

  Maeve’s eyes burned. Once, hardly more than a girl herself, she had cast herself upon those tombs. Railing at Ros Ruadh, at her father, she had wept for her lost child as if torn in two again by her birthing.

  When she still had tears for that pain.

  The farmers always left little carvings of the goddesses there, and she had clasped them to her, their swollen bellies and breasts promising the fruitfulness of the Great Mother. The favor of the Mother. But though she pleaded, their eyes had remained blank to her. No help had come from the magical sídhe then.

  And no help would come from them now. The mounds must be long dead, after all.

  Maeve turned her head, but still that memory rose within her in a silent howl. At last she sank to her knees, as she had here on this hill every time the losses became too great to bear.

  Her children, gone.

  The moments of peace she had carved out in Laigin and Mumu, torn away by the whims of kings.

  A knife on her bare skin … death in her brother’s eyes … vile curses spat into her ear …

  Leaning over, she buried her mouth in the carpet of heather so she could bellow into the earth and no one could hear. Her lips open, Maeve let each cry be swallowed by soil and rock.

  Hidden, secret—dark disgorged to dark.

  Ruán knelt by the lake, staring across the water. The glints on the waves danced. Within the orbit of the sídhe, it appeared he possessed the sight in his eyes, both in Thisworld as well as the Other.

  You must mark your body, they had said in the stones.

  Drained, he had not questioned that, walking back on trembling legs through the meadows of marsh-grass touched by dawn. There he plunged into the lake, scouring away all the mud and blood. When he emerged, he took up the stone blade by the hearth.

  Mark the journey in your flesh, so you always remember.

  Ruán carved nicks in his skin, tracing the slabs of muscle across his chest, the dip of his breastbone, and the flat of his belly. He was as clear as the water, as calm as the dawn.

  The blade trailed fire, and when his palm grew slick he paused to wipe it and carried on. Once it was done he smeared the wound with the sacred matters: fire-ash, earth ocher, and plant juice. The offering of blood was his own, and the water already coated his skin. Slowly, he worked it all into the cuts.

  Branding himself, he had scored the great spiral that continues curving forever inward, and forever outward. All druids knew that symbol.

  The journey in seeks the heart of the One truth that joins All together. The journey outward, the growth and expansion of a soul.

  When the sun ignited the frost on the grass, Maeve opened her eyes. Wrapped in her leather mantle, she had fallen into an exhausted stupor and lost the night.

  She was lying among the heather, her knife in her hands. The cut had opened in her palm again, and blood gleamed in the dawn. Unrolling, she knelt. The sun spread down her side from the east, and her head instinctively swung toward it. She stopped herself. East was her brother, at Cruachan.

  West was exile over the sea. There, without kin, she would be enslaved.

  South was barred to the likes of her, a pit of heart-sorrow among the sídhe mounds.

  Maeve’s gaze rose higher. She got her legs beneath her, took a few steps up a rise and at last faced the north.

  The Ulaid.

  She could almost feel Conor’s eyes upon her now, baleful amid curtains of gray hair and beard. She had wounded the King of the Ulaid. But now he had lost both her and Deirdre, and had been utterly unmanned before his Red Branch warriors.

  Her father’s doubts over Conor’s intentions—and her own denial—had bound up Maeve’s fear over this past year and hidden it away. Now it broke free again, sharp in the clear air. She wiped dew from her cheek with a shaking hand.

  Warriors flocked to the Ulaid to vie for its gold and iron, making it strong in spears and swords. But cattle were the true, sacred wealth. A king could not be all-powerful without vast herds of cattle, and the Ulaid was too mountainous for this. It was Connacht that possessed the meadows and pastures, the cows growing fat on lush grass.

  And now this kingdom Conor mac Nessa had always coveted—her kingdom—was about to be riven by a fight over the kingship.

  Maeve knew all about warriors. They clashed like stags at leaf-fall, obsessed with who was strongest and boldest. They were ruled by pride and oaths, slights and humiliations. They vied for gold to hang on their limbs, swaggering about and wallowing in ale, roast boar, and women.

  With shallow breaths she looked into the mist and saw old Meara’s wrinkled face and Eithne’s wry smile. Maeve felt the tenderness of Líoch’s neck when she touched her hair in the shadowed cart. As the derbfine squabbled over the kingship, their eyes lit by greed, who would give a thought to the herders, tillers, and fisherfolk? Her brother? He cared only for fighting and rutting.

  The whims of lords had wrought too much destruction in her life. How could she stand by as the same happened to her people—the only ones who had ever made her feel in brief, precious moments that she belonged?

  Fate hung like the last stars over the sea. The echo of her father was already fading, but something surfaced now that Maeve had forgotten in her scramble to stay alive.

  The one to come after me.

  At that moment the sun lifted above the mist and flooded the hilltop, lighting up the frost on the stones. Maeve looked around her in a daze. Her skin was as white as that rime of ice, her mane as red as the dawn. Her bones were the stones beneath her feet. The blood coursed through her, roaring like the streams down the hill.

  As a mother of babes, she must be cursed, yes. But was it because … she was meant to protect all her people? The priestesses on the sacred hill said women had greater hearts than men, and wiser heads.

  A mother of all.

  Maeve put a hand over her eyes, unable to let the words take form in her mind. Instead, a fierceness swept her that was pure instinct.

  Hardly realizing what she did, she raised and then
stabbed her dagger into a mound of sedge on the cliff top that faced north. Her own blood was on the hilt. “I will not let you destroy them!” she cried to Conor of the Ulaid.

  As that cry left her, Maeve shuddered, the ripples spreading out into the land. In its wake a faint echo. I will not let you destroy me. To her brother, her cousins; to any man.

  If she ruled herself, no one could hurt her again.

  Maeve brushed that whisper aside, and panting, drew back her aching shoulders. The colors of dawn had blurred into one brightness all around her. Only then did she remember the oldest name for the mount on which she stood.

  Cnoc na Rí. The Hill of the King.

  CHAPTER 6

  Great bonfires roared on the frosted plains of Emain Macha in the north of Erin.

  People clustered around the spits strung with boar and sides of beef, driving away the Samhain ghosts with singing, dancing, and barrels of ale. Music threaded through slurred laughter, and drums beat out the rhythm of thudding feet.

  Cúchulainn and Ferdia stood alone to one side of the Hound’s fire, heads bent over their cups.

  Cúchulainn glanced at his wife Emer, bouncing another woman’s babe on her hip. Her smile held a promise. The Hound sighed. It wasn’t safe to try for a sacred babe of their own amid furs on the meadow. The Ulaid was seething with dissent.

  At least the kingdom of Connacht was quiet.

  Cúchulainn still simmered with frustration that King Conor would not command an attack while Connacht was recovering from Eochaid’s death. But Conor was obsessed with finding Naisi and Deirdre, sending Red Branch warriors after them instead of after Connacht. Cúchulainn made sure the kingdom’s defenses were still manned, and spent what time he could away from Emer and the rule of his clan riding Connacht’s borders, but it was not enough. Ferdia, with no wife or family ties, had been in the saddle for moons, gathering news.

  “The mutterings of the border lords grow louder.” Ferdia swilled water in his beaker. “Everything Conor fears is being said … that he’s an old fool with a withered prick.”