Lochlan waited until her footsteps faded down the hall, then said, “I suppose you’re wondering what that’s all about?”
“Unless there’s more I can’t remember,” Morla replied, and the ghost of a grin flickered across his face. “What’s going on? Why’d you tell that woman we’re married? And why’d you tell her different names?”
“I told them we were married so I could stay in here with you without questions being asked. And your name’s Moira.”
“Moira?”
“I thought it close enough to Morla you’d answer to it.”
“But why? Don’t you trust Grania?”
He rubbed his hand across his face. “It’s not Grania, though she’s plenty cagey about which side of the fence she’s sitting on. She’s one of the ones Meeve’s been supporting over the years, but you see Meeve’s been supporting more than one claimant for the kingdom of Gar and has played them off each other when it suited her. There’s not much love, apparently, between Meeve and Grania. Fortunately she doesn’t seem to remember me behind this beard.” He stalked to the window and peered out, thumbs hooked into his sword belt, then glanced at her over his shoulder. “Tell you the truth, I’ll be glad to leave. I feel too vulnerable here, too exposed somehow. Sooner we get you to a druid, the better.” He paused, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and as if there was something else he wanted to say, but he only shut his mouth and stared out the window for a moment. Then he turned swiftly on his heel and stalked to the door. “I’ll let you rest, while I see to getting a wagon. This Grania’s a tight-fisted one, but there’s no way you can ride.” With his hand on the latch, he turned and looked at her. Their eyes met and in the depths of his, she saw something dark and painful.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head and spread his hands. “Morla, I—” He hesitated, clearly struggling for words.
“None of what happened is your fault, Lochlan,” she said. Pity welled up in her. He did consider himself responsible, she knew that without a doubt.
He sighed. “I doubt Meeve will see it that way. The sooner we find a druid, the better I’ll feel.”
“Me, too,” she quipped. Their eyes met once more and this time, despite the pain and the worry and the fear, they smiled.
A single ray of moonlight pierced the leafy canopy of the tree directly outside the room where the young man lay, still and silent, on his pillow. The light fell directly on his forehead, into the space between his eyes. His eyes were closed, his one hand on his chest, the other arm lying bandaged beside him on top of the light-blue blanket. Catrione hesitated in the doorway. His damp, sun-streaked hair was fanned out on the linen pillow, his chiseled lips were the color of ripe peaches, and his fresh-shaved cheeks were nearly luminous as a sidhe’s. Her ears and her face still burned with the quarrel she’d had with Niona.
Catrione watched the young man breathe. Druid-healing was the most sacred of all the druid rituals, and Niona characterized her wish to help the young man as something selfish. But that’s not true at all…after all, he’s the man I am to marry, thought Catrione. She sank beside him; he opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her. She was acutely aware she was naked under the linen shift, that beneath his thin cover, he was naked, too. A breeze brushed her cheeks and on it, she fancied she could smell the sea.
Don’t you ever wonder if someday a man will come…Deirdre’s words taunted her. She glanced over her shoulder. The still-wives had been called to keep order in the outer courtyard among the refugees, while the druids were up on the Tor, attempting to locate the khouri-keen.
The two of them were truly alone. Catrione stole over to the low cot and knelt beside it. She drew a deep breath, deliberately breathing him into her, drawing his essence deep into her lungs. She touched his arm and began to stroke his skin with long, gentle strokes, focusing on her fingertips, on the way the fine hair grew on his muscled forearm, the way the skin stretched over the curve of sinew and bone. It was like being gradually enveloped in a mist, or like allowing fog to enter her mind, insidious as ivy around an oak. It was like trying to wrap one’s arms around someone with his head in a blanket. He was fighting her. The harder she tried to penetrate, the harder he fought against her. Like a swimmer coming to the surface, Catrione forced her awareness back into the chapterhouse.
The drums were pounding up on the Tor, the chanting a near continuous drone. The scent of burning cedar filtered through the heavy air. She reached over and shut the door, swinging the latch shut. In one swift motion, she pulled off her tunic and the blanket from his body. She straddled him, her hands flat on his chest, her body inches from his. Except for the bandaged stump, he was beautiful, she thought. His eyes opened, and she gasped.
“You’re the one,” he said as if he’d opened his eyes expecting to see a naked woman straddling him.
“Do you remember your name?”
“Cwynn,” he said at once. His body lay motionless between her thighs. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Catrione.” She felt as much as saw his blue eyes flicker over her breasts, down her belly. She had never felt so self-conscious before a man.
“That thing is all I see.” He shut his eyes with a groan and continued through gritted teeth. “As it died, it looked at me. I saw its eyes…I see them still. That’s all I see.”
“Cwynn, will you let me help you?” she asked. She leaned over him so that the tips of her nipples brushed his chest.
“What happened in there?” he whispered. “What was all that?”
“I can help you, if you let me.” She ran her fingers over his head, over his face, touching his nose, his eyebrows, the tips of his ears. And I hope you can help me.
He closed his eyes, and his chin bobbed up and down in the barest of nods.
He thinks he’s dreaming this, she realized. She stroked his hair, she touched his face, she ran one finger across his mouth, from right to left, the direction of banishment. She leaned down, so that her breasts touched the broad plane of his chest. “Cwynn, will you let me touch you, hold you, help you, heal you?”
Again, he gave that barest of nods.
She bent lower, kissed his eyelids, his earlobes, the vulnerable place beneath his chin where the blood beat visibly. She touched his nipples with the tip of her tongue, painted a backward swirl around his heart, his navel and finally, kneeling between his thighs, she paused. “Cwynn,” she said, louder this time. The drummers picked up the beat. She took his phallus in her hands and stroked it up and down, gently, as it hardened and thickened. She touched the tip with the tip of her tongue, kissed the tiny opening. “Cwynn, may I take you in?”
This time the answer was a restless lifting of his hips, the clenching of his fist, a sigh. Catrione smiled and bent her head.
He was riding, riding across the water-pocked sand, Shane hard at his heels and a white dog running along beside him. Eoch didn’t seem to notice or care that the dog was there. Eoch! The name of the horse exploded into his mind, and he felt as if he’d suddenly cut through something that was constricting him. Suddenly, he was fighting off a goblin. There was someone else beside him, something that flashed, and the goblin was gone. The light shifted into a kind of golden green and a soft peach glow filled his mind. A cloaked silhouette moved across the glow, followed by the outline of a horse. Eoch! The shadow wanted his horse, he understood that now, but Eoch was his, raised from a foal. He looked down and the land had changed from spongy moss to a rocky, windswept road. In the distance he saw a glow and a dark hill rising starkly against an orange sunset. The shadow-figure jumped on Eoch and rode across the broad plain, directly toward the Tor.
Outrage roared through him, bringing a diamond-hard clarity that ripped across another layer of his memory. He remembered charging across the plain as the moon rose, guided by Eoch’s shape standing outlined on the Tor. It had taken nearly half the night, but he had made it, bursting into the dark, rock-lined cave in time to see a figure with an enormous writ
hing belly lying on the ground, legs splayed wide. Her skull was bald and mottled, her cheeks striated. Her body was covered in leathery skin that hung off her bones in folds. As Cwynn took a single step closer, she looked at him with eyes like a snake, and hissed.
Drops of clear fluid, slippery as honey, oozed from his phallus. Catrione rose up, caught Cwynn’s mouth up in hers, and positioned herself over him, nudging the tip into the opening between her legs. She sank down and the shaft plowed into her warm, wet flesh as she arched her back and groaned. “Show me his face,” she breathed, though she thought she knew exactly who it was. “Let me see his face.”
A moan split the hot air, followed by a long, keening echo. A shiver went down Cwynn’s back as he looked around and saw what looked like thousands of stars glittering in the walls. Not crystals, he thought as they winked and moved—they were eyes, he realized and nausea rose in his gut. “I’ll kill you, mortal,” the figure roared.
He opened his eyes as the woman arched her back, her high, round breasts flushed, her honey-blond hair cascading down her back as her body shuddered. He felt her flesh contract around his and he shut his eyes as his seed boiled up from the base of his belly and the memories flooded into his mind.
13
Timias hauled himself out of Macha’s lair, the pain burning in his groin nearly crippling him. Behind him, he heard the drumbeat begin to swell and the howling chant to rise. AR-DAGH…AR-DAGH…AR-DAGH. Even if the khouri-keen—the gremlins—hadn’t removed all the crystals, the goblin horde was so grown in strength and size, Timias believed they might simply overwhelm the unsuspecting druids and overrun the very heart and center of druid power.
Assuming he lived long enough to know. He felt as if his guts might boil out either orifice as he scrambled through the tunnels, the pouch with the khouri-crystals clutched in one hand. He didn’t want to be a goblin—he didn’t want to live in a world where goblins ruled. He hesitated, torn between returning to the MotherWood, and ensuring that the gremlins had done his bidding, and going to the Forest House, to learn what had happened to Loriana.
He was sure that the head directly above Macha’s throne had been Auberon’s; the one beside it, Melisande’s. But I’d know if anything had happened to Loriana, he told himself. I’d feel it. He remembered the way she’d looked at him as she’d thanked him for saving her life. And how had she responded when he said he didn’t think the king expected him to ever return? You came back in time to save my life. There was a bond between them, a connection forged in those moments they’d fled the goblins. Of course there was. There had to be, and she couldn’t be dead, couldn’t be gone.
And suddenly, he knew with perfect clarity exactly what he had to do, if not how to do it. He had to find a way to make Faerie everything it should be—not just beautiful, but safe; not just healthy and whole, but secure. “There has to be a way,” he muttered as he slipped through the Forest. Loriana, whether she accepted him as her Consort or not, deserved a place to live as fair as she was—after all, the world was called Faerie. It was meant to be fair, not overtaken by goblins. Of course there was a way—a way now. He hefted the pouch, reveling in its weight, imagining how much heavier it would be when it was filled with the crystals from Ardagh. Pleased with himself, he smiled. She would love him for what he alone could do.
The sun was up and it burned his goblin skin. The leathery surface dried and cracked, forcing him beneath the trees. He smelled the smoke almost immediately and under it, a bitter almost metallic odor. I should make myself into a sidhe, he thought, but he didn’t want to stop. He scrambled as fast as he could through the trees, until the smell and the smoke nearly overwhelmed him and he was forced to stop on the edge of a clearing he realized had once been Loriana’s bathing pool. Foul black water bubbled from the center, and dead creatures lined the water’s edges. He sank down, and the ground beneath him burned. This is what silver does, he thought. He remembered the patch of silver poisoning he and Loriana had come upon. Could all this have spread from that, or had more silver somehow gotten into Faerie? Warily he backed up and realized that a thread of corruption ran all through the Forest, directly, like a path, to the Forest House, where the smoke was black and billowing.
Choking, he fought his way through the smoke and the trees to where the Forest House lay desecrated, the great trees that formed the walls and the supporting framework mostly smoldering black columns of ash. A few sidhe moved within the wreckage, stumbling blindly from side to side, place to place, and he realized they were looking for the wounded, or for bodies. Then one looked up, a warrior with smudges on his face and deep shadows beneath his eyes. He squinted into the trees, directly at Timias. “Goblin!” he cried, raising his spear, and Timias backed away into a piece of the hedges that were supposed to form the first line of defense around the Forest House. He stepped into them, heedless of the razor-sharp thorns, into what felt like mushy mud that stung like bees. He looked down and in the flickering light radiating from the ruins of the Forest House, he saw the bottom of the hedges were black, and that the earth below each plant was a soupy dark mess. Silver, he thought as he dodged onto firmer ground. That’s silver and it’s rotted out the trees—rotting out the hedges. He turned to look at the trees in the immediate vicinity and saw telltale lines of black encroaching up from the ground.
The shouts coming from what remained of the Forest House as he scurried away told him that some of the Court, at least, had survived. He heard voices calling for the captain of the Queen’s Guard. The Queen’s Guard! Loriana must’ve survived—she had to have survived because otherwise, there’d be no Queen’s Guard. So he had a little time, at least, to come up with a plan that would save Faerie, that would keep Faerie free of both goblins and silver.
Some sort of border or boundary, he mused, had to be created, something that would keep silver out, the gremlins in and the goblins contained. But how to make such a thing, let alone maintain it? All the magic in all four races would never be enough….
A line from the rotting bark scrolls the druids kept ran unbidden through his mind. Four globes has the Hag—one for each Element. There was even a druid symbol meaning balance—a large circle with four smaller half circles evenly spaced around it. It was meant to be the Hag’s Cauldron, balanced on her globes, the still-maid, Sora, had so charmingly explained, her big eyes earnest and blue. Four elements…four races…four globes. The druids assumed that the gremlins, the khouri-keen, were the Earth elementals, the sidhe, the race born of Air. Mortals, they believed, were expressions of Water, and goblins, Fire. But the gremlins had been made when something larger had been shattered.
The globes, he thought. The Hag’s globes—were there really four? Or were there only three? The druids really didn’t know—they didn’t know lots of things, but made assumptions based on what they saw unfolding around them. As above, so below, they liked to recite incessantly, when questioned. As within, so without.
But not one of them had ever been Below. Something was holding him in goblin form, he realized, and he suspected it was the khouri-crystals, which only seemed to reinforce his theory of how their magic would work in Faerie. It would help to be in goblin form, though, to pass Below. He had no doubt it was there…he could feel it the whole time he’d been in the MotherWood, calling him, seductive as a young sidhe, tempting as a live mortal. He flicked his tongue over his maw and decided to heed its subtle invitation at last.
It’s Tiermuid…Tiermuid…Tiermuid is the child who can’t be killed…who was sidhe and mortal and goblin all at once…who was everything and nothing. Catrione came reeling back to herself with a start as the implications of his many names and true nature and the fact he controlled the crystals and the khouri-keen crashed on her like an avalanche. She was crouching on all fours above Cwynn and she knew exactly who he was—Meeve’s son, Deirdre’s brother and the man her father thought she should marry.
He was lying flat beneath her, their bellies sealed together with sweat, eyes wide, his soak
ed hair curling from his temples, fanned out across the pillow, his one hand twisted in the sheet. She pulled herself off and away and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. She sat on the side of the bed, trembling, trying to make sense of all she’d seen.
The monster was dead, thanks to Cwynn. Tiermuid, Timias—whatever his name was—was gone back into TirNa’lugh, presumably. She tried to recall if any of the brothers had remarked publicly on any strangeness in Tiermuid and could remember nothing. Even Deirdre never once mentioned the possibility that he was anything other than he appeared to be.
“Ca-Catrione?” Cwynn touched her shoulder hesitantly. He was sitting up, the sheet pulled modestly up to his navel. “Catrione—is that your name?”
With effort, Catrione forced herself to focus on Cwynn. He sounded confused. This was the reason one never attempted the healing without other druids present. She imagined Niona’s sneer. She pushed her hair off her face and tried to smile reassuringly. “Yes, that’s right—you remember?” As he nodded, she continued, “Good. What else do you remember now? Do you remember the Tor?”
He sat up. “I—I think I remember it all.” He looked up and around at the whitewashed walls, at the wide window. “This is—this is a druid-grove, right? And what you did, what we did, just now—that’s what you druids do?”
She ignored him, her mind racing furiously, putting pieces and images together. The child who can’t be killed by the hand of woman or of man…with the khouri-crystals and reason to hate the druids…What’s he planning? she wondered, as she reached for her clothing. Cwynn gripped her arm.
“Please?” He shook her arm and she realized he’d asked her questions. “I don’t understand what’s going on here, but I believe my children, my family, my village—”
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