All oath-bound brothers who are near the fortress of Dún Eavan, your aid is needed there now! Make haste!
This time when the next labor pain hit her, she didn’t need to pretend to cry out.
Aine’s call echoed in Eoghan’s head, laced with a compulsion he couldn’t resist. Focused so strongly on reaching Carraigmór, it took him several minutes to realize he was no longer fighting against the flow of men but rather getting swept up in waves going the same direction.
“Sir!” A young man, barely old enough to have taken his oath, fell into stride alongside him. “Lady Aine is being held against her will at Carraigmór. What are your orders?”
His orders? He needed to know what they faced first. Aine? Are you there?
Eoghan, the baby is coming.
The pronouncement jolted him, but not as much as the rambling briefing that followed. Conor is hurt at Dún Eavan. I sent men from the area to go help him. Keondric thinks I’m incapacitated. Morrigan is only helping him because he’s holding her sisters. I don’t know if she’s on our side or his now.
What do you want me to do?
He’s completely mortal, Eoghan. Ordinary. As long as he has the rune, he doesn’t have any powers. But I don’t think he knows we know that.
Instantly Eoghan’s mind clicked through the possibilities. How many guards on the hall?
Aine was gone long enough to make his heart rise into his throat. Aine?
I don’t think it will be as long as I thought.
Aine, tell me. How many men?
Twelve, perhaps? Others scattered throughout the fortress, I’m sure.
A dozen men. Not so many, especially if Aine really had managed to turn Morrigan to their side. If he was wrong, though, or she had miscounted, he could easily be serving himself up to someone who wanted him dead.
He didn’t even hesitate as he broke into a run toward the fortress.
Conor hit the ground hard, knocked to his back by the impact of the arrow. For a moment, he was unable to comprehend the reason for the shaft sticking out from his middle. And then the pain came, a searing, burning feeling that made him think he’d been stuck in the gut with a hot poker.
Ailill was saying something to him, but he couldn’t make out the words. The other man lifted him by the arms and dragged him back through the open door of the fortress as arrows continued to fly around them. Then they laid him down on his side against the wall. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Conor thought it was strange that none of the other men had been hit even though they had preceded him out of the hall.
“Sir, you need to hold this here.” Ailill wadded up the hem of Conor’s tunic and stuffed it against the spot where the arrow shaft protruded. “You’re bleeding.”
“I was shot by an arrow. Of course I’m bleeding.” His attempted laugh came out more like a moan. Blast, getting shot by an arrow hurt. Almost as much as what he’d experienced in the sidhe’s illusion. Except this was real blood darkening the fabric of his tunic, a real arrow sticking out of his body, a real expression of concern on Ailill’s face. When he’d talked about opposition, this hadn’t even registered as a possibility.
“Who shot me?” he remembered to ask. “Are there guards after all? Warriors?”
“Shh, stop trying to talk, Conor.”
“Tell me.”
Ailill’s expression darkened. “It was Keallach. I’d never have taken him for a traitor.”
“It’s . . . the . . . sidhe.” Conor groaned and stifled a curse at the burning pain that was spreading through his whole midsection. The sidhe had taken their guards before they could get to them, convinced them to shoot Conor. The men probably didn’t even comprehend what they had done. They were just being used for the spirits’ purposes.
The spirits. The bodies. He’d never told Aine what he needed to tell her.
Comdiu, protect us. Comdiu, watch over us. He didn’t know if he whispered it aloud or not, but Ailill took up the refrain. “Keep doing that,” he said. “Just . . . a while . . . longer.”
Aine—
I’m here. Oh, dear Comdiu, Conor, what happened?
The panic in Aine’s voice was the first indication that he might have reason to worry. Listen to me, Aine. Morrigan is a traitor. She is being used by the druid. The sidhe are holding Etaoin and Liadan hostage. But tell her we have them. We are going to get them out.
I know, Conor. I know Morrigan is working for him.
Not of her own will. There are others.
Do you know who?
He realized she was not asking the identities of the hostages but rather whom they might belong to at Ard Dhaimhin. But he had no way of knowing when they were unconscious. No. No one else I recognized. Tell Morrigan. I promise, Aine, we will get them out. We will get them all out.
Blair darted inside the hall and barred the door behind him. “We have a problem.”
“Is it an arrow sort of problem?” The pain and now the resulting numbness was making Conor feel giddy. He looked down and realized the blood had soaked into more of his tunic than just the bit he had pressed around the arrow shaft. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
“It’s a warrior sort of problem. Men in boats, crossing the crannog.”
Aine, we are under attack.
They’re here to help, Conor. They’re Fíréin. Stand down.
How do you—
I sent them. Ask them. They’ll tell you.
Conor conveyed the message to Blair, who looked doubtful. “She sent more men? What’s to keep the sidhe from taking them as well?”
Aine, do they have the rune?
A long pause, and then Aine’s distressed voice. No. They don’t.
“I need my harp,” Conor said weakly. “Get me my harp!”
“It’s on the shore. We can’t get it.”
Blair was right. They couldn’t risk the men’s coming to shore under the sidhe’s glamour, but they didn’t have time to return for the harp without the boat—assuming the men didn’t turn on them before they reached it.
For the first time, Conor realized he might have promised far more to Aine than he could deliver. And as Ailill knelt before him, his expression grim, Conor wondered if he would make it from Dún Eavan alive.
Conor, don’t say that. Don’t give up. You can’t give up. We’re depending on you.
Aine, I love you.
Conor, listen to me! You have to pull yourself together. You cannot die. All those people are depending on you. Etaoin and Liadan, they are depending on you. Now what are you going to do?
Outside the fortress, the first sounds of battle began, the clash of swords, the shouts of men, all unaware that they were fighting—killing—their allies.
He needed the harp. He needed to set up the shield, connect it to Ard Dhaimhin, share the magic that seemed to grow stronger with each ward he established. But he was feeling so tired, even the pain didn’t serve to keep him awake.
It took six men to escort Eoghan into the great hall from the balcony. He supposed he should be flattered. They had taken his weapons—his sword, his staff, and his knives—yet they still treated him as if he were a great danger.
If he thought it would get him anywhere, he might be.
But that would give away his play, and it would tell Niall they knew he was powerless beneath the rune and the wards of Ard Dhaimhin. It was a mark of desperation that the sorcerer would come here without his magic, or maybe a mark of arrogance. All of the havoc that he had wreaked across their land, yet now he stood here as an ordinary man.
Eoghan stumbled forward, scowling at the men holding his arms, while he took in the scene. Half a dozen warriors stood by a man who could only be Niall, surprisingly young and handsome in his host body. Beyond, in the corner of the hall behind the Rune Throne, stood Morrigan and, he realized a moment later, Aine. She didn’t seem to notice him, her face twisted in pain and concentration, gripping Morrigan’s hand. Niall was forcing her to deliver her baby here?
“The uncro
wned king,” Niall said quietly, a smile on his face. He paced forward, his hands linked behind his back. Add theatrics to his list of vices. “Yet you come as a prisoner, a penitent. Tell me why.”
Eoghan nodded in the women’s direction. “Release Lady Aine. I want her escorted to someplace safe.”
“You are hardly in a position to make demands. What will you give me in return?”
Eoghan infused all the sincerity he could manage into his voice. “Me.”
“You? You, proclaimed king of Seare, would give up your throne and your life for another man’s woman? Come now, I don’t believe you are that selfless.” Niall’s eyes narrowed as he studied him. “Unless, King Eoghan, that child she carries is really yours.”
“How dare you suggest—”
The druid waved him off. “Enough, enough. I don’t truly suggest. But you just told me what I needed to know. You’re certainly not worried about your own reputation. Tell me, how does it feel to love a woman and know you can never have her?”
Eoghan knew he was just being mocked, knew Niall was trying to cloud his thinking with anger, but the question hit its mark anyway. He prayed Aine’s focus was too divided to have heard. “Unlike you, I accept there are some things in life that are not meant for me. But I’m not willing to lie and kill for them.”
“Aren’t you? Didn’t you send Conor off on his mission, knowing that he might not return? And somewhere deep in your heart, didn’t you wonder if—after he was out of the way—you might have your chance with his wife?”
“No.”
“And now you are lying, which you said you would not do.” Niall smiled an ugly smile, twice as disturbing on Keondric’s face. “And right now, Conor is lying in a pool of his own blood, hundreds of miles from here, sent by your command. Within hours, if not minutes, you will be the murderer you accuse me of being.”
Eoghan stared, stunned. That couldn’t be true. Aine would have told him. Wouldn’t she have? Unless she didn’t know.
Or she didn’t want to distract him from his purpose.
Or maybe she isn’t as loyal as she claims to be. After all, you and she have become . . . close. Do you think, knowing how Conor feels about it, she would have accepted your friendship had she not felt something more?
They sounded like his own thoughts, but they weren’t. He knew they couldn’t be. Even though he hadn’t been able to get his unruly emotions in check, he’d never truly contemplated the things running through his mind now.
Can you live with yourself? How will it be to look her in the face and tell her you are responsible for the fact she’s a widow? How can you tell her you are the reason her child has no father? Do you really think you could step in and fill that role?
The voices in his head grew to a volume he could no longer shut out. “Stop. I don’t believe them. I never intended that. I’m not responsible. I didn’t even send him on this mission.”
He realized he was on his knees. That was significant somehow, but beneath the barrage of ugliness and doubt, he couldn’t think why.
“Do you think I would really come here unprepared?” Niall asked, satisfaction thick in his voice. “Your weakness is enough to break you. If you’d just owned up to your desires, accepted them, you wouldn’t be susceptible to the whispers.”
“No.” Eoghan pushed away the voices with effort and struggled to his feet. “That’s the one thing you could never understand, and the one thing that will be your downfall.”
“What’s that?” Niall smirked.
“Loyalty can be neither earned nor broken by threats.”
Niall stared at Eoghan in confusion. Then he looked down in shock at his own body.
A blade protruded from Niall’s chest.
And then it slid back out with barely a whisper, bright with blood and held in shaking hands.
Morrigan.
Aine felt rather than heard the activity going on around her, the competing voices in her head growing to a nauseating clamor. The fighting below. Conor and his men. Eoghan’s distress. And above it all, the insistent demands of her own body. She barely noticed when Morrigan left her side and glided around the back edge of the hall, her intentions just another thread of consciousness in the back of her mind.
Yet she felt the instant the blade pierced Niall’s body, as if some invisible thread had been cut. The spirits of the two men rushed out—one angry, shrieking beneath the runic magic that tore it apart, the other like a breath of wind. For that single moment, she felt Keondric’s soul surround her.
You’re free.
And then they were gone like a puff of smoke, only a whisper and the oily taint of sorcery remaining as it burned away beneath the city’s wards.
Aine gathered her strength, mustering her will even through her growing exhaustion. Conor needed her. She couldn’t let him down now.
Conor, are you there? Stay with me.
Aine’s voice cut through the fog, bringing Conor temporarily back to the present. I’m here. His eyelids drifted halfway shut. The magic. There was something about magic that he had been thinking about.
It was all interconnected.
Of course it was interconnected; he’d interconnected it. If he concentrated, he could feel it, those golden pools, woven together in places with fine threads, in others with corridors, great floods of magic. They felt so close he could almost touch them. But he was completely useless if he didn’t have the harp.
Are you sure about that?
He wasn’t sure if that thought came from Aine or himself, but it spooled his mind down impossible paths. Hadn’t he once said that he had the ability to manipulate magic? Isn’t that what he had done within the sidhe’s construct in Gwydden? Wasn’t that essentially what he did each time he played the harp?
“Conor, stay awake.” A stinging on his face made his eyes pop open. Ailill had slapped him. Why had he slapped him?
Right, he needed to stay awake. He refocused his thoughts. “Join the fight, Ailill. Those are our allies. Don’t let them kill each other.”
“But you—”
“I’ll be fine. Go.”
He barely noticed Ailill stand and leave the room with Blair, already reaching for the magic that lingered in the distant reaches of his consciousness. There was a fortress with a shield fifty miles away. That wasn’t so far. He reached out, mentally grasping at the edges, imagining stretching it his way. But he might as well be trying to catch moonbeams. He could feel them, see them, but he couldn’t take hold of them.
The magic. Focus on the magic. In his mind’s eye, he had been trying to capture it physically. But that was ridiculous, considering that it existed on another plane completely. If he could really manipulate it, couldn’t he just command it?
This time he thrust away the pain and thought of himself as a lodestone that drew metal to itself, except he wasn’t attracting metal; he was drawing magic. Slowly, the golden light began to shudder and stretch toward him.
Why do you think you can do this? You’re useless. You’ve always been useless, a disappointment since the day you were born. Your own father left you to be raised by a man who hated you. That’s why he sent you away.
Aine’s voice penetrated the whispers. Conor, listen to me. You must block out those thoughts.
How many men have died on missions you were supposed to be leading? How many have been lost today while you cower inside the keep’s safety? Some leader you are. It’s a good thing another is meant to be king.
The light slowly receded, solidifying to its original form.
See, it was a useless conceit. You are nothing without the harp. Nothing without your woman.
It was the mention of Aine that broke through the fog. The statement might have been meant as an insult, but it turned his attention back to the quiet, calm voice in his head.
Conor, you may not believe in yourself, but I do. And more important, Comdiu does. He has provided you with all you need to accomplish His purpose. Nothing anyone or anything else does can
change that. Now build the shield!
He sucked in a breath, which turned into a hissing sob. Why did it hurt so much? Wasn’t he supposed to go numb from shock already?
Conor, focus. You must do this! You must do it now!
Maybe Aine did have the power of command over him, because he called the magic to him before he fully comprehended what he was doing. It shot toward him like a great tidal wave, spreading out the distance between the fortress and Dún Eavan, a flood of magic consuming all in its wake. He bent it up and over the lake, the crannog, twisting it in his mind into a great shining dome that spilled down around them. But it didn’t stop there. He pushed it out until it picked up the thread of another ward, bare filaments left over from the original wards like cobwebs hanging from the abandoned covering of an old fortress. That arced the magic in a jagged line like a lightning strike where it collided with the edge of Ard Dhaimhin’s wards in a flash of light.
Conor just stared blankly, transfixed by the images in his mind, no longer able to tell whether he merely felt the magic or controlled it. It burst out from Ard Dhaimhin into a starburst pattern, connecting all the other warded fortresses and then spreading in the gaps like warm honey, reaching out . . . out . . . out until the shield of gold extended from one edge of the island to the other.
And then the screaming started.
Not just from the ensorcelled caretakers at Dún Eavan but across the land. He felt their agony, somehow, heard their cries as the magic in them clawed away from the pure golden light. He was connected to the shield now, aware of every place it touched, every swirl and eddy of magic, living, quixotic like the ocean.
A laugh bubbled up inside him. He had done it. Comdiu only knew how, away from the harp, commanding magic he barely understood. And it had been easy. All it took was his wife yelling at him in his mind.
The Sword and the Song Page 33
