Firebrand (Rebel Angel Series)

by Gillian Philip

‘It was my fault.’ Eili was inconsolable.

  We clustered around Sionnach in an anteroom off the great hall, Eili and me and our furious men. We’d have been better to give him some air and some space, but we couldn’t bear to leave him. The healer summoned by his father’s lieutenant was struggling to seal the wounds, but they were deep and vicious, there was blood everywhere, and the point of the blade had gone through to the inside of his mouth. There was no way he’d be left unscarred. Kate had done my mother’s work well.

  ‘No.’ Sionnach’s voice was distorted and mumbling but it held only patience, and sympathy, and a terrible undercurrent of pain. ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘You did not do this to him,’ said one of our fighters angrily.

  ‘Hush,’ said the healer, wiping sweat from his forehead. He pressed another linen cloth to Sionnach’s cheek, and gestured for one of the fighters to hold it there. The healer had been working for most of the day and half a night, and he was getting next to nowhere with sealing the wounds. Sionnach had lost consciousness several times, and he’d lost a lot of blood before the healer staunched the flow, but he’d never cried out or cursed. He’d left that to Eili and me. He was his silent self, as if holding onto the part of him she couldn’t change.

  ‘Witch. Witch.’ Eili could barely contain her rage and grief and remorse.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I hissed, eyeing the strange healer, and afraid for her.

  ‘No! I swear, Seth…’

  ‘Stop.’ Niall’s lieutenant’s head snapped up. ‘Listen.’

  ‘What?’ said Eili irritably through her tears.

  There was a silence of unease about the place. The idle murmuring talk out in the forecourt had stopped. Booted feet shifted; spear shafts dragged on stone, swords creaked loose in scabbards. A horse, unnerved, scraped its hoof and gave a shrill whinny. I thought I could even hear the sigh of wind in the trees far, far beyond the cavern mouth.

  It was his mind we felt first: his cold enraged mind. You couldn’t help gritting your teeth when you felt it grate on your own. Then I heard them, we all heard them: the hoofbeats of a devil horse.

  ‘He’s come,’ I said. ‘He’s here.’

  * * *

  Thirteen hours after I’d called him, my brother rode his horse to a clattering, sweating halt in the forecourt. Conal didn’t look at me as he strode in; he didn’t look at anyone but Sionnach. Very gently, he took Sionnach’s face between his fingers and gazed at it. Releasing him, he stroked Sionnach’s hair. Then he turned and flung open the hall doors, and shoved past the stunned guards. His footsteps rang and echoed on stone as the great hall too fell silent, and he marched right up to Kate’s dais.

  ‘What have you done, Kate? Where was the need for that? Just to placate Lilith’s vanity?’

  ‘The twins have always been a little above themselves, Cù Chaorach.’ Kate smiled up at him affectionately. ‘Perhaps this was a necessary lesson. It will do them both good. Humility is a fine virtue.’

  ‘You had no right. They were hostages for me! If their father was alive he’d be at war with you.’

  A light dry laugh, a flutter of lashes. ‘He isn’t alive.’

  He was ice and steel. ‘But I am.’

  Languidly draping yourself across a chaise is fine for flirting with your courtiers or your captains; it’s fine for striking a pose so your people can admire you better. Kate had made a huge mistake staying there to receive Conal. He stood above her, and he looked a great deal stronger, and nobler, and more dignified. He looked a thousand times angrier. Not all the sympathy in the hall was with Kate, and not all the respect, either. Kate’s flirtatiousness looked suddenly foolish, and I wasn’t the only one who saw a tiny shiver go through her. Almost, for a second, there was fear in her eyes: a distinct focused fear, like a woman eyeing her own death and knowing it. You could have heard a feather fall to earth in that hall, and I’ve often played that scene over in my head and wondered if Conal could have put a stop to everything, then and there, if he’d demanded the kingship from her. But he’d given her his loyalty, and despite his growing distaste he hadn’t yet been driven to betrayal.

  The moment was gone, and Kate gathered herself.

  ‘Are you questioning me, Conal MacGregor?’

  My brother’s fury turned to bewilderment. ‘Since when has that been a crime among the Sithe?’

  There was a long silence, then, and all they did was look into each other’s eyes. I don’t know what passed between them; no-one did and I think no-one ever will, even now. But at the end of it Kate blinked, and rose to her feet.

  ‘Get out of my sight, Cù Chaorach. You may take the hostages back to your dun, but tell your lieutenant Righil he’s in command of it. As for you: let’s see if living with the full-mortals teaches you some self-control.’

  I backed swiftly away from the archway, horrified. I couldn’t believe I’d heard her say it, and yet where else could the confrontation have gone without an actual overthrow? I tried to make out the excited whispers and the muttering in the hall, to guess at what support he’d have if he resisted, but I couldn’t distinguish shock from glee, indignation from sympathy. I was too numb with dread.

  But Conal was smiling as he slammed the doors of the hall and walked over to join me.

  ‘Well, Seth, that’s me exiled. Across the Veil, no less.’

  ‘I’m coming with you, then,’ I said. It wasn’t bravado; there was simply no question of him going alone. I’d heard too many of Eorna’s terrible stories, I knew what the full-mortals thought of us and what they were capable of. It was probably fairy-stories, told to frighten children, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Of course I wouldn’t let him face them alone. Of course I was going with him.

  He grinned at me. ‘Of course you are.’

  So I did. And many times I’ve wondered how things would have gone, for worse and for better, if I hadn’t.

  PART TWO

  EXILE

  11

  ‘Time you learned to read, you wee barbarian.’ Conal dropped a heavy leather bag onto the rough table and grinned at me.

  I swore at him.

  ‘Your vocabulary needs work, no question.’

  I cursed again. ‘You think I’m not miserable enough?’

  He shrugged lightly. ‘You can always go home, Seth. You don’t have to stay.’

  I swore at him yet again, the way I always did, because that was a conversation we’d had a hundred times over the last grim months. Once again I thought longingly of the watergate in the damp green woods, the one we’d come through to reach this otherworld. It was so close, maybe a day’s fast ride away.

  I didn’t want to be here, but I wouldn’t leave Conal. The full-mortals were everything Eorna had warned me about: louse-ridden, disease-ridden, priest-ridden. I trusted every one of them as far as I could reach with the point of a short sword. They lived in squalor and darkness, and if they were rich they lived in finer squalor. Wash? You’d think they’d never heard of water, unless it was to brew crude alcohol that they never knew when to stop drinking. It seemed they couldn’t connect the filth they lived in with the filth and pain they frequently died in. No wonder they were fully mortal.

  Conal, of course, said it wasn’t their fault. Conal said it was the way they were built, the way their kind had developed, that they were vulnerable to disease and rot in a way we weren’t. He said short lives meant desperation and panic, and little time for study or memory or thought. He said their lives would lengthen in the end.

  My theory was different.

  Here’s what I thought: they couldn’t be inside another mind. They couldn’t know about pain or grief or death till it hit them personally, and even when it did they reckoned the pain and grief of others less than their own, and that’s why they’d never done anything about it. And maybe that’s why nature had given them so much less time. I thought my race vastly superior, and nature obviously agreed with me.

  Conal did not approve of my course of thought, b
ut he refused to get into an argument.

  ‘Don’t go getting too proud, Seth,’ was how he usually left it. Or, ‘We’re all fully mortal on the point of a sword, Murlainn.’

  I was hardly likely to die of pride in my exile. From fine rooms in our own father’s dun we’d come to a hovel, earth-floored, turf-and-heather-thatched, walled with stone and mud and dung. Inside it was blackened, since the cold leaked in no matter what we did to plug the gaps around the door, but the smoke never, ever found an easy way out. We kept our blackhouse as clean as we could, but there were limits to our enthusiasm. Conal liked its position, a good two miles from the clustered homes and farms of the clachan, and half-hidden by rowan and birch trees. There was nothing I found to like. I hated that place.

  Now Conal tugged a few dusty volumes out of the leather bag and flipped one of them open. It smelt of dust and worm, and candle smoke, and knowledge.

  ‘I didn’t say I was that bored,’ I told him.

  ‘What else have you got to do this evening?’

  I backed away. ‘I could go and clean mouse shit out of the larder.’

  He laughed and grabbed my shoulder, shoving me into a chair beside him. ‘Gods, how did this end up being my job?’

  ‘I dunno. Lilith being so nurturing and all. Where did you get these?’ I nodded at the books.

  ‘The minister.’

  ‘The priest?’

  ‘I’ve told you, he’s not a priest, not any more. He’s a minister.’

  Whatever he called himself, the priest was bearable. He was tall and thin, ascetic and often severe, but kind enough. And he had a pragmatism that appealed to me, since his religion seemed adaptable to his troubled times: even the full-mortals couldn’t decide what their god wanted of them. Priests who called themselves ministers were driving out priests who called themselves priests, and the priests who called themselves priests were either caving in (like this one) or running away. They were fighting over things I couldn’t understand, except that the new priests were keener on sexual continence and a lot less keen on dancing and drinking. As far as I was concerned the whole crowd of them could go to their hell in a handcart, where doubtless there’d be no dancing to bother anyone.

  At least this one hadn’t grown fat on the tithes of his flock, and I found his grey hair fascinating, when there was clearly so much life left in him. And when he remembered to notice Conal, he liked him. Anyone who liked my brother was fine with me, and the man never made the mistake of trying to evangelise me. If I came home to find him sharing a drink and his malleable philosophy with Conal, he would nod to me, and smile in his solemn way, but that was all. I would nod back, and occasionally smile, and get on with something useful. He thought I was brain-addled, but that didn’t bother me.

  ‘Did you tell him you were teaching me to read?’

  ‘No.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘I don’t tell anyone anything about you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. What does that say?’ I jabbed a finger at the curled hide cover of one volume, at embossed hieroglyphics I couldn’t interpret yet.

  This time it was Conal’s expression that darkened.

  ‘Demonologie,’ he said, his voice cold. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he was angry at me. ‘That’s a book you should read, not one you’d want to. Same with this one: Malleus Maleficarum. Let’s not start with those.’

  ‘Fine.’ I shrugged.

  He gave a huffing laugh, as if trying to cheer himself up, and pulled forward a third book. ‘Come on, then. You’ll be glad you did.’

  And I was. In the end I was grateful he taught me to read and write. It’s come in more useful than I’d have liked to admit when I was fourteen and already knew everything about everything. Disappointingly for me, Conal couldn’t leave it there. He tried to teach me politics, and philosophy; he tried to teach me about the modern world, and how the full-mortals had made it, and how and why the Sithe did things so differently.

  So he had to teach me ancient history too: how the foremothers had been smart enough to see how things were going between us and the full-mortals; how they’d made the Sgath, the Veil, back when our race was strong and had magic, because we couldn’t live in the same world as the full-mortals any more. How we were just too different from them. How we stayed more and more in our own dimension, till they didn’t even know us any more.

  And how, sometimes, some of us couldn’t resist going back.

  That I didn’t understand. To go into exile when you had a choice in the matter? It was the kind of thing the Lammyr were said to do. The Sithe had cut off that sickly twisted branch of our family tree, so the Lammyr chose instead to wreak havoc on the full-mortals (and find their protégés among them). Constantly, doggedly, the Lammyr slipped between the worlds, till guards had to be placed on the watergates to stop them; and still they slipped through.

  It did nothing for our reputation. They’re warped, the Lammyr. A piece is missing. It’s the way they’re built: they don’t love life, only death and pain. Who knows why the gods thought of them? Maybe they didn’t give them much thought at all. Perhaps they just happened, when the gods were looking the other way.

  I had never seen one, and never wanted to. Even Conal hadn’t, because Griogair and the other dun captains had driven them away long before he was born. But we heard stories, and shuddered, and were glad they were gone. They’d never returned: I don’t think they feared Griogair’s blade or any other, but he’d spoiled their fun and they must have found a more promising playground in the lawlessness and poverty of the otherworld.

  Oh, the poverty. Since my first exile I’ve seen many things, I’ve seen them all over the world. I’ve seen degradation and hunger that was worse, but it’s never shocked me to the bones the way that first experience did. The Sithe worked hard, and we fought hard, but we lived and loved and played hard too. The full-mortals were born with nothing but their dignity, and they died with less. Out of pity there were some I’d have helped from the world, but Conal wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t allowed, he said. They had different traditions, different rules. Their lives did not belong to them, but to their god and his priests.

  Winter was more merciful than the priests: it killed off many of the old and sick, though it had a tendency to take the very young as well. Those dark months were hard, so hard. I experienced cold like I’d never known before, cold with no respite; and I knew real hunger for the first time in my life.

  There were compensations to exile, though. Even the otherworld’s open air was better than Kate’s skyless halls, and the spring that followed our first winter was a lovely one, as if to make up for the months of relentless hardship. It brought a new snow, one of gean blossom and hawthorn, and a dazzle of yellow whin heaped on every verge and hillside.

  By the time spring came I could appreciate that some of the girls were good-looking, too. Not with the delicate fierce loveliness of Sithe girls, but they had a blunt charm and an earthy outlook on life that appealed to me.

  I was downright offended that none of them took the least notice of me.

  When I’d come out of my furious sulk at Kate—I was far more indignant on Conal’s behalf than he was himself—I tried to settle down and enjoy the otherworld. That didn’t seem possible without the company and friendship of women. Unfortunately, none of the women seemed to require mine.

  I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t a troll, I looked like Conal. Conal was considered beautiful even among the Sithe—but then the full-mortal girls took no more interest in him than in me. Once or twice I saw a girl in the stinking clachan take a second look, and smile and edge towards him, but if her friends or her mother called out to her she’d be easily distracted and you could see that he’d drifted quickly out of her consciousness.

  It didn’t bother him. He seemed amused, and it was much the same with his work. Among the Sithe Conal wasn’t regarded as much of a smith, but he could fashion basic weapons and tools, and he was clever and inventive when it came t
o mending things. Nor was he a true-born healer, but he knew as much about herbs and roots and the setting of bones as any of us, and so one way or another his services were in regular demand.

  But none of his customers struck up a friendship. If we saw, say, a farmer in the inn of an evening, he’d never acknowledge Conal, even though he’d sung his praises earlier in the day for a cured horse or a soothed infant or a mended plough blade. You’d think Conal had simply slipped from memory, just as he did with the girls. Even the priest would arch his winged brows in surprise when Conal struck up a conversation with him.

  My brother at last took pity, and broke the truth to me one frustrating day when I’d finally managed to catch the eye of a girl in the clachan. Some of them, washing plaids with their bare feet in the burn, had been laughing in their raucous way and flirting with the boys. My favourite was the quietest one, a girl with a long black braid and solemn green eyes and a slight sceptical smile. I’d noticed her before, and thought I could like her. Now here she was, courted by boys who were ruddy-faced and crude-boned and fatuous, and I couldn’t bear the wound to my vanity. Sidling into the group, I grinned at my black-haired girl and dragged her sodden plaid from the water. Skirts still hitched up, slim bare legs red with cold, she rewarded me with her half-amused smile, and I felt a jolt of lust.

  ‘Well, hello!’ said one of the others. ‘And aren’t you the handsome one? Where did you spring from?’

  A red-haired boy gave me a filthy look.

  ‘Ach, you ken him,’ said another girl. ‘He’s aye up at the smith’s.’

  ‘Oh aye, I do.’ Critically the first girl examined me. ‘The smith’s brother.’

  ‘The quiet one. You know what they say about quiet ones!’

  I was still most interested in the cool black-haired girl, but I was enjoying the unaccustomed attention from all of them. ‘So tell me what they say?’

  ‘Seth.’ Conal’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘A word.’ Smiling at the girls, he tapped his finger lightly against his temple in a clear insult either to my sanity or to my intelligence.