Another day or so, and she’d be strong enough to go to Far Nearing to keep her promise and ensure the village was protected. But what kinds of changes was Bride talking about that were so upsetting she hesitated to tell Catrione?
She drank down the rest of the water and was suddenly overtaken by ravenous hunger. Her stomach growled, and she hoped Bride hurried back with food.
Help me. The voice caught her unaware, even as a faint muddy shimmer flickered out of the corner of one eye.
Catrione sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Is someone there?” she called aloud. “Baeve? Sora? Bride?” The only answer came from the droning bees in the roses around the window frame.
Help me.
Catrione whipped around, for the flicker seemed to come from the other side of the room now. She reached out and encountered the edge of the bedside table. She cocked her head, listening. “Who’s there?”
Help me.
Faint and weak and far away, this time the voice was not accompanied by a shimmer or a spark. Catrione stood up slowly, clinging to the edge of the table, and then the nearest chair. She made it as far as the open window and paused.
Help me.
Catrione spun around, knocking her bare foot against the leg of the chair. Pain rammed through her, and she bit back a curse. “I can’t help you if I don’t know where you are.”
Help me.
Exasperated, Catrione felt and sensed her way around the room, to the corridor. She knew she was in the still-house, in the nursing wing. There must be other patients about, she thought. But this wasn’t an ordinary cry for help, or otherwise, someone would’ve heard and responded. She could hear someone humming a few rooms away, could hear the soft swish of a broom, the rapid click of shears in the garden. There were people close enough to hear. She edged out of the room, one hand on the wall. Her senses felt stretched, her sight a bizarre mosaic of varying hues of gray, shot through with particles of light.
Help me.
Catrione paused, listening. Doors and windows were outlined in bright white lines of light, and she realized, with a start that what she was looking at was a negative image. Show me where you are, Catrione thought, projecting the question out through her mind, into the realm of the Hag’s vision. To her right, one of the doorways suddenly exploded in pale lights that as quickly dissipated. Catrione jumped. Her heart was beating rapidly, her head was starting to spin. I’m with child, she thought. I’m with child and I’m blind. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed.
Help me.
The voice was stronger, closer, and Catrione peered around a glowing doorway, into a room where she could discern the rough outline of a man lying on a narrow bed. “Are you the one who’s calling for help?” she whispered.
Yes.
Catrione glanced over her shoulder. The corridor in both directions was empty, even though she could sense presences all around. It was almost distracting, as if she could see things in not just three dimensions, but in four or five. She stole over to the bed, her bare feet making no sound on the floor. She placed one hand on his forehead, trying to make sense of all she perceived. It was like being in TirNa’lugh and the mortal world, all at once. Images swirled around her, coiling and uncoiling like a giant snake. The knight—for there was no doubt in her mind from what she saw he was a knight—was locked in some place deep inside his own mind, a place any of the druids should’ve been able to bring him out of.
Why would they withhold healing? Clearly the knight understood what he needed—he was asking for it, so loudly she could hear him. This had nothing to do with the Hag’s vision…Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. How much do you really remember?
HELP ME.
The tenor of the images changed, assumed an urgency, a deepening of color. He needed her, she thought, needed what she could do for him. The knight didn’t understand why he was lost, didn’t understand why he wasn’t being helped. He knew what he needed.
Catrione felt a sense of deja vu come over her.
“What are you doing, Catrione?” Niona’s voice took her entirely by surprise.
Catrione startled, heart in her throat and saw only a dark gray shimmer in the open doorway. “Niona?”
“Catrione, this isn’t your bed. Come with me. Bride said you were awake.”
Catrione felt her upper arm seized. She was pulled firmly into the corridor and propelled toward her room and in Niona’s grip, she read no mercy. “Niona?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” The woman pushed her back and Catrione felt the bed behind her knees. Forced to sit, she stared up, wondering why she couldn’t see anything of Niona but a shadow.
She’s afraid. She’s afraid and gone into hiding. “What’s wrong?” Catrione whispered again. Suddenly she was afraid for herself, because Niona stood over her, black and menacing and somehow all-encompassing. Did the woman intend to kill her?
“You lie in some dream-driven stupor for a whole half quarter, and you dare ask what’s wrong? Didn’t Bride tell you? Meeve’s dead, Ardagh destroyed, the charnel pits full to overflowing.”
“Niona, what are you talking about?” Catrione wiped spittle off her cheek. She felt as if she’d awakened into a looking-glass world, that might bear some resemblance to the one she’d known but yet was nothing like it.
Niona stalked to the door. “Stay in here, Catrione, and stay away from that knight. I’ll have no more of that sacrilegious coupling. That’s what started all this. That’s the first thing I’ve made sure will stop.” Without another word, she slammed the door shut behind her, and Catrione heard the outside latch click shut.
She locked me in. For the space of a few heartbeats, the reality didn’t register and then she had to clench her hands into fists to prevent herself from rushing to the door and demanding to be allowed free access. But something told her not to do that.
In a few minutes, the latch clicked up, the door opened, and Baeve, not Bride stepped into the room. She was carrying a tray from which Catrione could see slow spirals of white steam rise. She had something else, too, a flowing piece of something that looked like fabric, giving off the scent of the OtherWorld. She shut the door behind her, set the tray on the table beside the bed and enfolded Catrione in a warm embrace. “Oh, child,” she murmured over and over. “Oh, child, thank the goddess you’re home.”
“It doesn’t feel like home, Baeve.” Catrione raised her head and stared at the stillwife. “What’s happening to Niona?”
“She’s turning into her fears, I suppose you could say. Though truth to tell, Catrione, things are so…so different. No khouri-keen, no goblins. At least none of the other trees have shown blight. But the land’s reeling. You can feel it—the people are confused, Meeve’s dead, at least six have claimed the High Crown—”
“And Niona’s blaming me for all of it?”
Baeve’s sudden silence was all the answer Catrione needed.
“We—Bride, Sora and I—we think you should go to Eaven Avellach. You’ll have no peace here, and there, your father—well, whatever else he is, he loves you. He’ll not let anything happen to you or your child.”
“You think Niona would threaten my child?” Instinctively she placed both hands on her belly.
Again, Baeve hesitated. “Catrione, she blames you for not taking Deirdre’s child sooner. She blames you for misusing your druid-skills, for sorcery and sacrilege. I made this posset with my own hands. I don’t advise you to eat or drink anything anyone else brings—”
“B-but, Baeve.” Catrione gripped the woman’s hands and shook them. “Baeve, I’ve seen things, I’ve done things—I’m not really blind, I know I don’t have eyes, but I’ve another kind of sight I can see you—I swear—”
“Hush!” Baeve pressed two fingers against her lips. “Hush. Catrione, I can tell you see me. I don’t not believe you. But I know how Niona will take what you say and twist it, turn it. We—Bride, Sora and I—we’re only still-wives. We can’t
outsay her. We’re hoping more druids come, for she’s got these twisted around her fingers…” She heaved a sigh. “That poor knight in the other room…Niona won’t let us touch him, Catrione. She’s given orders—”
“Why don’t you defy her?”
“I’m defying her by sending you away.”
“What about that young knight? Surely you can’t mean to just let him—I can hear him, Baeve. I didn’t go into his room because I thought it was mine and couldn’t see. I heard him calling.”
“No one else does.”
“I’m telling you, Baeve, I’m different.” Catrione paused. “And you know I’m right—maybe you can’t hear him, but you know what I’m saying is true. Please. If you won’t defy Niona, at least leave the door unlatched. It’s not human to leave a man in that kind of pain.”
There was a long silence broken only by a long sigh, the rustle of skirts. Finally Baeve cleared her throat. “Drink that posset. You make ready to leave, I’ll leave your door unlatched.”
“Hello, Catrione.” Bran’s voice took her by surprise as Catrione sat beside the window, listening to the bees drone. “I’m glad to see you’re better.” She heard the latch slip shut, felt the rush of air as he came to stand beside her, smelled his sweat. “I’m sorry about your eyes.”
“It’s all right, Bran, I can see.” She turned her head to him. He was a blaze of rose and purple light. “It’s a different way of seeing, but I can see.”
He cleared his throat.
“What’s wrong,” she prompted.
“It’s Lochlan,” he said. “He needs help and—”
“It’s all right, Bran.” She put her hand on his shoulder and smiled. “I hear him, too. Tonight, I mean to help him.”
“The other one—the other cailleach—she tried to help him, several times, but he wasn’t ready to come back and so it didn’t—”
“Ah.” Catrione’s brows rose. Niona was saving Lochlan for herself, perhaps? Or perhaps that’s why she felt the sacred rites were no longer effective. “Well. That’s interesting. But how do you know that?”
“He comes to me and tells me. But I told the brother, and he didn’t do anything. I know that. Lochlan told me.”
Catrione patted his hand and contemplated the information. “Bran, maybe you should come with me.”
“With you? With you and Lochlan? Where?”
“I think, from what I’m sensing, that Lochlan will head to Allovale. But I have another errand—a druid errand. Maybe you’d like to come with me? It’s no more than three or four days, I think. And then we’ll go to Allovale ourselves.”
“What kind of druid errand?”
“There’s a village and a pair of little boys without a father. He asked me to check on them. It’s a promise I need to keep.”
“Of course, I’ll come with you,” he said at once. “I don’t want to stay here. They’re making me learn blacksmithing. I hate it.”
“Every druid needs it,” she replied. “But I don’t think we should stay here, Bran. Something tells me our kind of druid isn’t welcomed here much more.”
“Where shall I meet you?” he asked. “Here?”
In the stables, she almost said. “No,” she answered. “Come to Lochlan’s room. Once I bring him back, he’s likely to be very weak. I’ll need your help to get him out. All right?”
“All right,” he said. He got to his feet, then leaned down awkwardly and kissed her cheek. “Thank you. I’m very grateful that you saved me, Cailleach. My mother’s very grateful, too.”
“You see your mother, Bran?”
“Once in a while,” he shrugged. “It’s more I hear her voice—she always tells me to do what I don’t want to do. She annoys me—I have to tell her to get out of my head.” He paused. “That’s what Morla used to say. She’d tell me to get out of her head. I didn’t understand what she meant.”
“But you do, now?” Catrione smiled. He would make a good druid when he learned discipline and self-control. I had those things, and I wasn’t a very good druid, she thought. Maybe I’ll be a better druid now.
“I do now.” She heard him walk across the room.
“How will you know what time?” she asked, amused, as he lifted the latch.
“Lochlan says he’ll tell me. He says I’ll know.”
“How?”
“I won’t hear him like I do now.” Then Bran was gone, in a flash of emerald brilliance that made Catrione smile for no reason at all.
She didn’t need the knight’s permission—she had it already—but in the moonlight, she paused. He was lying still on the bed, hands clasped just below his breastbone, eyes closed, mouth still. Only the even rising and falling of his chest and his rigid erection bulging beneath the sheet hinted that this man was anything but close to death or lost in sleep.
She saw the sheet as a translucent barrier, his body a coiled dark red flame. She felt the flesh between her legs quiver. If I weren’t pregnant already, she thought, we’d make a child tonight. That’s what had happened with Cwynn, she realized. All that energy—it had to go somewhere.
She felt a little dizzy. She went to the side of the bed and peeled the sheet back. This is what the Hag sees, when she lies with her lover, Herne—all these beautiful colors and lines, thought Catrione, and the need that went through her made her knees weak. She pulled off her tunic and moved his hands off his chest and felt the first flicker of pressure in his palms, heard his first sigh. “Lochlan, will you take me in?” she whispered.
His hips bucked from the bed and the tip of his phallus ensnared itself in the folds of her flesh. With a groan of pleasure, she slid down and back, pulling him deep inside her, pulling him up and back and out of the pale gray void.
20
A bloated orange moon hung low in the sky over the peaks around the sprawling keep of Eaven Avellach. Morla gripped the stone railing, squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “I can’t marry you, Fengus-da,” she said. “I can’t marry you—not even for a year and a day.” No, no. That wasn’t right. “Not even for a year and day” sounded weak. And “can’t” sounded weak, as well. “I won’t marry you, Fengus-da,” she said aloud. “I won’t.”
If there was one thing she’d learned in the short time she’d been here at Eaven Avellach, Fengus took advantage of any sign of weakness, ruthlessly ready to exploit an opponent. He wasn’t going to be happy to be told she’d changed her mind.
The preparations for the feast alone were staggering—he must’ve slaughtered a whole herd in preparation. Well, why not? he was counting on the fat herds of Mochmorna. Daily, more and more knights arrived in response to Fengus’s decision to call for a tournament in which the winner would be crowned harvest king. Fengus was broadly suggesting Morla celebrate Lughnasa by being the harvest queen, a suggestion to which Morla hardly knew how to respond. She had to remind herself that this was a wedding—her wedding. But Morla felt herself in mourning.
Meeve’s passing gave her an excuse to postpone and delay the ceremony, but Fengus’s mother, old Fierce-eyed Fearne as she was called by everyone in the keep, including her son, seemed to know there was another reason. She watched Morla with black beady eyes that reminded Morla of the vultures perched on the trees above the corpses as they cleared them off the battlefield before the gates of the druid-house. Bald head and beaked nose, pointing down to her chin. Every day saw Fengus brooding on the walls, looking for some word of his daughter, but each day found him disappointed. Morla hoped for word from White Birch, too. She hoped for word of Lochlan. She hoped for word of Bran. She gazed out over the jagged peaks surrounding Eaven Avellach and felt herself even more a prisoner than ever. But she had given her word. She had made a promise. A year and a day. She could do that, she thought. A year and a day wasn’t so long.
But just the thought of Fengus’s gnarled hands on her body, of his bulk pressing her down, made her pulse race to the point of dizziness. I just don’t think I can bear to do this, she thought, as she gazed out
over the moon. How can I give myself, heart and soul and body to a man I don’t love, even for the sake of the land? She’d done it once, and while her time with Fionn had not been unpleasant, still, she longed for the passion and the connection she’d shared, however fleetingly, with Lochlan. She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, gazed at the moon, and declared, “I can’t marry you, Fengus-da. I just can’t.”
“But will you at least come down to dinner?”
Shock made her knees weak. She spun around to face Fengus standing in the doorway of her antechamber. “Fe-Fengus, it’s not—I didn’t mean—well, I did mean…” she began, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand.
“If you’re not happy here, Morla, you shouldn’t stay. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is.” Fengus’s words sounded reasonable, but his mouth thinned as he spoke and the purple vein in his temple began to beat. Morla swallowed hard. He could push her, over the railing of the balcony, she thought, and for a split second, he looked as if he wanted to do that. “I’d never hold you prisoner. If you wish to leave, you can leave in the morning.” His fists jerked closed.
Morla squared her shoulders. “If you’ll just wait a moment, I’ll come down with you.”
“Thank you.” He turned on his heel and shut the door carefully—too carefully—behind him.
Morla stared at the polished steel mirror, heart thumping. You’d go further if you learned to be agreeable, echoed Meeve’s voice out of her memory. Well, she hadn’t learned. Somehow she doubted Fengus was going to let her go tomorrow as easily as he agreed to tonight, in front of no one else. And it occurred to her that if she disappeared, or was found dead, as the result of an unfortunate accident, Fengus would have the perfect reason to claim most or all of Dalraida and Mochmorna. There’d been no word of her brother Cwynn. Deirdre was dead, Bran was a druid. If she turned up dead, Fengus would assert a bride claim and say her untimely death had deprived him of a wife, and he was entitled to some compensation to help heal his grief. And with no other immediate family to claim it—other than possibly Cwynn…her thoughts trailed off into a tangled knot of panic. She was alone, as alone as she’d been in that horrible camp.
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