The Raven Queen

by Jules Watson

  Cúchulainn grunted, shaking his head. Above, shreds of cloud shrouded the gold of the low moon.

  Ferdia dropped his voice. “The warriors admire Naisi and think this is just the jealousy of an old stag for a daring younger one. The chiefs see the king’s behavior as indulgence.”

  Drunken voices broke through the music. Their sense of danger heightened, Cúchulainn and Ferdia glanced at each other and, without a word, sought out the source of the trouble.

  King Conor’s youngest son, Fiacra, was staggering before his best friend Illan. “You dare say that about my father?” Fiacra bawled. His breaths were explosions of vapor.

  Illan was in turn the son of the great warrior Fergus mac Roy, who had been king before Conor. Illan and Fiacra had been raised as brothers—almost twins, they were so close.

  Illan jutted out his jaw, his eyes glazed. “No one can tear Naisi from our hearts! You are Red Branch. We are your first loyalty!”

  “Naisi betrayed us by stealing my father’s bride! Why can’t you see it?”

  “He didn’t do any such thing,” Illan slurred, teetering on his heels. “And tonight’s for honoring the dead, isn’t it? Because they may as well be dead!”

  Other youths weighed in on both sides, bellowing over each other, and it swiftly descended into a brawl. Cúchulainn dragged Illan off, and another Red Branch hero, Conall Cearnach, took hold of the struggling Fiacra.

  At that point King Conor strode into the firelight, his appearance cutting off both the baying and the flailing of fists.

  A hush settled, punctured by the crackle of a bonfire and the wail of a babe. Conor gazed around, marking every young brawler’s face. His eyes were bloodshot from drink. He swung toward Illan. “It is treason to take the side of a traitor like Naisi.”

  Cúchulainn’s nostrils flared. He was about to speak up when a deep voice boomed out behind him.

  “Treason, Nessa’s son?”

  It was Fergus. The old battle-horse shouldered men aside to stand by his son Illan. His mane of silver hair crowned his great bulk, his craggy face wrathful. “Illan did nothing but repeat a song your own bard once wrote for the sons of Usnech.”

  Conor knotted his thin lips. “Nevertheless, I forbid it.”

  Cúchulainn glanced between them, his heart pounding a warning. The Ulaid could not afford to have this old wound broken open. Not now.

  Thirty-five years had passed since Conor’s mother Nessa had seduced and wed Fergus, then king of the Ulaid. Conor had been fifteen. Boisterous and hearty, Fergus soon tired of the onerous duties of ruling a kingdom and set off adventuring, feasting and fighting his way across Erin and Alba.

  Nessa convinced Fergus to let her son Conor rule while he was gone.

  The cunning young man proved so able, however, that when Fergus returned, the lords of the Ulaid voted to give the kingship to his stepson, ousting the older warrior. Used to battle-blows, Fergus declared himself relieved and soon moved on to other wives, who bore him braces of sons and daughters.

  Sons he would defend to the death.

  Fergus’s eyes nested in wrinkles but still held the power of a great lord who commanded many men and the loyalty of every Red Branch warrior. “Words and thoughts are free.” Fergus’s thunderous voice carried over the hushed crowd. “By honoring the comrades with whom he shed blood, my son fulfills his Red Branch oaths.”

  His expression held another message: that Conor wouldn’t know about those warrior vows because he had never taken them.

  Conor tilted up his long nose. Their gazes locked. “Naisi gave up that honor when he betrayed me. And that is why no man will sing of him or his brothers, for they are traitors, all of them.” Unsteadily, he turned on his heel and strode away with his guards about him. Fergus led his drunken son in the opposite direction.

  “They stir up a pit of coals,” Cúchulainn murmured to Ferdia. “Soon we won’t be able to quench them.”

  Ferdia gripped his shoulder, his hand resting there as if they were one flesh. No other man dared touch the Hound like that.

  Cúchulainn could not look away from the bonfire as it roared through the wood, logs breaking apart with a gush of sparks. “We must leave no stone unturned to find Naisi and his brothers.” Cúchulainn forced out bitter words. “Not all those who seek them want to save them.”

  “Who trained Naisi not just in sword-skill, but in tracking, woodcraft, hunting, running? You did. What you gave him, he will use to escape Conor’s clutches.”

  Cúchulainn’s thought was bleak. But how will that bind anything together again?

  Emer slipped to Cúchulainn’s side, winding her hands in his fair curls. “This is a night for laughter,” she scolded, her voice husky. “And here I see you two with faces as long as spears.” Cúchulainn pulled her in to smell soap and bread, women’s herbs and wool, on her skin. She batted his lips away. “Not before Ferdia!”

  Ferdia’s smile was strained. “I think I need to seek other company anyway.” He had rumors to uncover.

  When he had gone, Cúchulainn let out a deep sigh.

  Emer went on tiptoe to kiss his nose. “I am forced into finding some way to bring your smile back, husband.” She tapped her teeth. “Now … what could that be?”

  Cúchulainn gazed down into her beloved face, blessing it for its quirky flaws: the untamable black curls, snub nose, and wry smile. Emer did not possess the beauty to set warriors at odds, and he was grateful for it.

  She pouted at him. “You are far away.”

  He buried his face in her neck, lifting her off the ground. “I’m right here,” he said, breathing her in.

  A line of torches snaked away from the Connacht marsh like a vein of molten copper in the darkness.

  The men holding the flaming brands reached dry ground again. Now that they had made their offering, they turned their backs on the sacred place, crossing their breasts with an arm, touching their brows.

  The spit of land that reached into the lake behind them was only tenuously attached to the living realms, almost cut off by channels of dark water and reed-beds that exhaled mist.

  An island of the sídhe.

  At last the torches disappeared over the hills and the chanting of the druids faded. The body of Eochaid, king of Connacht, lay at rest on a bier by the water. He had been honored with the triple death. First, he was laid out naked for his flesh to be consumed by the creatures of the land. Then, his weapons would be sacrificed to the sídhe in the lake. Finally, his bones would be interred in the mounds of Cruachan with his ancestors.

  Pitch brands still flamed at his feet and head, until at length they guttered out and the world sank into blackness.

  For a time all was still, until a full moon broke over the hills. The lake-water flared into life. The reeds were tipped with silver, dipping and whispering. The streams and pools ignited into sheets of brightness. What had been clear in the day and empty in the dark now became something blurred. Gray. Silver. Indistinct. An in-between place.

  Maeve emerged from the woods.

  She approached the silent bier by the water, her legs leaden. The breeze chilled her palms, and only then did she realize they were damp. The sídhe cannot hurt me, she repeated. They never answered my prayers; they don’t care what I do. I exist alone.

  Something splashed in the shallows and she whirled toward it. A duck. Maeve wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Unlike the tombs, this place was not dead. Goose bumps rose over her arms; she could feel something. She reminded herself that royalty could pass from Thisworld to Otherworld—and back.

  And yet in that moment she was also a child again, her pulse galloping as her old nurse Brenna whispered of what happened to mortals who strayed into the lands of the sídhe.

  But nothing had struck her down by the time she reached her father. A deerskin covered his legs, his naked torso gray and cold in the half-light. The druids had rested a jug of milk next to him, and a basket of bread—an offering of food for the sídhe while they waited fo
r his jewels. She was glad his eyes were covered with bronze disks, for it took away the humanity of his withered face, and a childish part of her realized he couldn’t hurt her now. His shade was gone; the druids had sung it away.

  A breeze must have scythed across the reed-beds, for their murmuring grew louder. Maeve’s nose wrinkled at a waft of decay and she fixed her eyes on his ankles. Across them lay the king’s sword.

  She drew toward it. If she was to be felled by an invisible blow, it would come now. No one had ever taken a king’s sword from a funeral bier. No one had ever dared.

  No one but me.

  The sword was unsheathed, and light played over the blade—and for a moment she was sure it breathed in time with her. Then she realized it was just the shaking of her body. The hilt was deer-bone shaped into a stag, its muzzle the grip, its antlers flaring into the guard. The carved eyes of the stag were impassive—or challenging?

  As she reached for it, Maeve’s thoughts disintegrated. I seek not to dishonor. I will gift something of greater value, I swear. See how I will protect my people … better than any man!

  Her fingertips met a wave of pressure above the sword and she faltered. The next moment one hand was about the hilt, one cradling the blade. Filling her lungs, Maeve swung the sword around, stepping back and spinning faster until she staggered to a stop. Nothing felled her, nothing struck her down.

  She stabbed the blade into the spangled sky with a disbelieving laugh.

  The sword flashed back the moonlight, and it was alive. Her life had entered it. The stag fit her palm, the bone already warmed by her blood. She went down on one knee to thank her father, backing away with platitudes to the sídhe.

  Maeve flew across the grass, her chest bursting. She splashed through puddles and wove between the trees, paying no mind to where she was going as long as it was far away from the druids and their torches. Skirting the lake, she drank in the shine of the moonlight on water, then raced through another bank of woodland.

  At last she broke out into a clearing and shuddered to a halt.

  A man was rising from his knees at a forest pool.

  Dazzled, Maeve stared at him, every thought driven from her head. He was bare-chested, his body made of moonlight … a gleaming carving of flared shoulders and narrow waist. The light gathered in his face and she could see nothing but that blinding glow.

  He was a sídhe. One of them had come to her in man-form, after all. She had summoned him with her bravery!

  Maeve was too dizzied for sense. There was no love lost between her and the sídhe. She had always respected them, though never prayed to them or left offerings at their springs. She was outside their favor … but she knew they revered courage. Were the Shining Ones testing her, for Connacht’s sake?

  Every fear she had crushed, every frustration, and all the loneliness she had ever borne, came rushing up. She needed something wild and glorious now to sweep them all away. She needed magic.

  She stumbled forward, insane with daring. Curving her hand around his neck, Maeve of Connacht closed her eyes and kissed the sídhe.

  Their flesh met—and Maeve fell.

  A deep roaring sucked at her, as of water rushing underground. Gasping for air, she clawed her way back to some sense of the solid world, her hand dropping away.

  The moonlight blinded her to everything but the sídhe’s mouth, parted in what looked like shock. Only then did he come to life, gripping her wrists and pushing her from him.

  Maeve’s craving instantly tipped into something darker and utterly senseless. The sídhe rejected her again. Shaking with fury, her body took over, lifting the sword.

  As if in a trance, the sídhe tilted his head toward her blade. Maeve had never seen anyone look to their own death with that graceful lift of the chin, as if he did not care. But he was immortal; he could scorn her petty threats.

  Her arms went nerveless and the sword lowered. With a growl, Maeve gripped the hilt tight and, spinning about, fled with the blade trailing behind her.

  Garvan crouched in the ferns by a stream as Maeve scooped water into her mouth.

  “What is this about, spitfire?”

  Maeve wiped her chin, unable to meet his eyes. Her sight was still dazzled by the afterglare of moonlight and luminous skin. She contained a shudder. “Where is my brother? And Fraech?”

  Garvan plucked a dead leaf from her braid, eyeing her filthy clothes and mud-streaked leather.

  For three days a storm had covered the brown and yellow woods with sleet. She didn’t want to risk the lives of the herders she knew by seeking shelter with them, so she had huddled in her oilskin under the evergreen boughs of yew trees, nursing a feeble fire.

  At last the clouds had cleared, the sun warming her frigid face again. It had also melted the remnants of frost into a mire.

  “Fraech, his uncle, and his father all left the funeral feasts straight after the storm. Innel rode west, to the sea-lords who have not come out to support anyone for king yet.” Garvan looked hard at Maeve. He had accompanied her to those western forts in sun-season, where she’d drunk mead with those sea-chiefs. Innel would soon discover her efforts there, too.

  Maeve glanced over her shoulder. She had wrapped the sword in sheepskin and tucked it in the roots of a gilt-leafed oak tree. Now she felt the pull of the hidden blade, like a glowing fire on a cold night.

  A path to safety …? But so desperate, so foolish! She wavered, wanting to cling to the sword—wanting to throw it from her. And if she did, she would always be running, from her brother, from Conor, until they hunted her down.

  “Spitfire?”

  Maeve dropped her chin, shook her head. It was too late to back out now, for with this theft she had just invited the wrath of not only her brother’s men, but other lords and the druids. “Have the rest of the nobles gone home?” she asked Garvan, her voice husky.

  “Not while there are bones to gnaw and kegs to drain. They want to argue about the kingship without Fraech or Innel to hear them.”

  Maeve placed her hands on her knees, the gleam of melted frost on the branches blurring around her. She remembered barreling into the man who attacked her, her instincts always to throw herself at danger before it had a chance to leap at her.

  “Then first,” she said, “ask the lords to linger, for they must witness something important. Second, take one of the druids with you and track Innel down.” She looked at Garvan. “Issue him my challenge: single combat, here at Cruachan.”

  Garvan snorted. “Oh, aye.” When she did not smile, his face fell. “He will slit your throat before you’ve taken your first swing.”

  He will find a way to do that anyway, if I do not stop him now. Somehow. “Innel sent men to silence me. Now he gets his chance to kill me, if he is brave enough.” Garvan’s mouth dropped open, and now Maeve did smile. “They are the words I want you to use before his men. Alone with him, tell him if he does not face me, I will reveal the death of Donagh’s daughter and his own treachery against me.”

  “Spitfire, he’ll only send someone to finish you off in secret.”

  “If they can find me. The duel will be at high-sun in four days. Tell the chiefs to gather at the fighting green.”

  She braced to rise, but Garvan grabbed her wrist. His black brows were drawn together like lowering clouds. “You are skilled with sword and spear, more than any woman I have known. But Innel is twice your size, and a hardened warrior. How in Lugh’s name are you ever going to win, Maeve? You’re mad.”

  She regarded him with a strange calmness. She had set her feet on a clear road at last, and either way, she would be free. “Too many people call me that.” She rose, smiled, and flicked a dark curl off Garvan’s forehead. He still retained the faint brown of sun-season across his crooked nose. “You do not know all of me,” she said softly.

  “The woman is dangerous. If I have been discovered, I must leave. Disappear through the veils as you do.”

  The radiance of the sídhe girl washed over Ruán. Her
hands were beside his in the water. They both stared down into the crystal depths. A fish brushed his fingertips.

  We said your time in your world is not over. Your fate calls you.

  “Then tell me what it is! Should I escape … hide? Her touch brought foreboding into my heart …”

  The girl’s amusement rippled through his senses like the water against his legs. I cannot speak your fate, for it is not made real until you reach it yourself. She waved an airy hand. Perhaps I don’t know.

  I doubt that. He forgot to guard this thought.

  She grinned. Your will is free, not bound to ours. You might choose to wander along another path. And if you do … A shrug.

  His choice. His path. Why, then, did they save his life? Ruán chewed his lip, peering into the glints below the lake surface. He was determined he would ask no questions, demand nothing of the sídhe-maid, nor do anything to bar himself from these glimpses of sight at her side.

  Now that he was physically well, more and more they bade him to cross the boundary of the veils back to the world of men. There, he was on the same shores of the same lake, only the skies poured rain and it was cold, and he had to hunt for food with touch and hearing.

  There, he was blind, and wore a strip of deerskin over his eyes, padded with leaves to stop his scars from twisting.

  In the forests, he bathed in moonlight to sense it on his skin; to help him to remember the glow of the sídhe. But sometimes, when he still wept for his blindness, the girl woke him on a dawn like this and the world flowered around him again. And peace returned to him once more.

  A peace that had been shattered by the woman with the sword.

  The sídhe-maiden’s eyes flashed sidelong. She has her own purpose, and her will is also free. It is not for man or sídhe to turn someone away when they hear the call of the lake.

  Maeve left the horse tied up and crept through the rushes.

  The dank mists were lifting off the lake, and cold sunlight glimmered on a flock of ducks that rose in a cacophony of squawks.

  The whiff of decay from her father’s body pushed her toward the north shore of the little island, almost cut off from land by the water. Her pulse skittered. Perhaps she had only been lucky; this trespass might rouse the wrath of the sídhe in earnest.