by Erin O'Quinn
“Me mother, Queen Máirín,” said Torin. The woman next to him looked at me with wide, hazel eyes and smiled. Her gown was of wool and silk, interwoven so cunningly that the fabric seemed to dance and shimmer in the light of a hundred candles flickering from sconces on the walls, mounted between the shields. It was dyed yellow, and the long, billowing sleeves of the léine underneath were layered with blues and pinks and greens, all seeming to undulate in the uncertain light.
Unlike her husband, her eyes held a sharpness and humor that told me right away that she was indeed in control of her own mind and emotions. She said in perfect Breton, “Caylith. It is an honor to meet the one who saved my son. You would honor me by sitting across from me and my husband. And who is your, ah, companion?”
“Queen Máirín, I present my trusted mentor and longtime friend, Jay Feather.”
Jay bowed deeply, first to the king and then to the queen, his fine-featured face a study in quiet strength, his luminous, blue eyes fired with quick perception.
“Please sit next to Caylith. And darling Lugh, my Torin, come stand by my side. For I have sorely missed you these four long years, and I would have you be our advisor.” I heard the quiet emphasis she put on the word “you,” and I started to hear a conversation within a conversation.
I saw her eyes flick to the two dark-robed men who stood just behind King Leary. Her quick, unguarded expression spoke to me as though she had told me a tale and then rolled the scroll back so quickly that none could read further.
I gazed on the two men, whom I recognized immediately. I had seen and heard them at the ritual of the Judgment last autumn, when they strutted and recited and made arcane gestures in front of the king and the assembled onlookers.
Torin caught my quizzical eyebrow and said, “Ah, yes. Caylith, may I present the duo—who by the way, understand not a syllable of Britonnic—the duo known as Loch and Lucet, personal druids to my father.”
I understood the game right away. We may imbed our conversation with honest speech as long as we blended it unctuously with bland table talk.
I inclined my head gravely to the two hollow-eyed, sallow men whom I thought must be brothers. They wore no beard or mustache, but the tendency for a man’s facial hair to grow had given their faces a dark gray cast where a beard might have been. Their hair was dark, long, and lank, lying limply on their sloping shoulders. Their robes, unlike those of most of the druids I had seen, were dark and somber. All in all, quite a cheerful pair, I thought, and I smiled at them wanly.
“…to meet you,” I mumbled, and Torin did not bother to translate.
“Caylith,” said the queen. “Not to press you—for you are very welcome here—but how come you to be in Tara instead of your new holdings?”
“Do not translate this part, please, but I have come to give you urgent warning in a matter regarding your youngest son.” I kept a bland smile on my face as I spoke the words, and my eyes bored into the queen’s.
“Indeed?” she murmured. “Yes, I am happy to hear that you are doing well.” But her eyes were full of sudden anguish, and she bent her head to her cup to hide her expression.
Torin, meanwhile, was repeating some sort of gibberish in Gaelic, something about the fair weather.
One of the druids, who had been watching me rather closely, now spoke through Torin. “Lucet remarks that ye seem different from the demure young lady who once stood in our company. Ye perhaps have come with a dread purpose, perhaps even against our own king. Now, Caylith, ye may strike back.”
I looked not at Lucet but at the king, who seemed suddenly frightened by his priest’s words. He shrank back somewhat and spoke to Máirín.
“My husband would know why you have come before us bearing weapons.”
“I bear arms only against my enemies,” I said evenly. “The High King is one I bow before as the ruler of all Éire. He is no enemy, but a benefactor to me.”
I waited until Torin had translated my words. “But I do indeed present my warrior aspect to any who would do harm to my king.” And I raised my eyes and stared boldly at Lucet, then at Loch, while Torin translated to his father.
Loch now spoke. “If you would be such a friend to our king—and indeed a formidable healer—then you would cure him of his dread headaches that threaten to cloud and storm his mind. If you do not do this, then may I suggest that your own evil influence is what sickens our glorious ruler?”
The game, I knew, was on in full force. “Very well,” I said. “I will call upon my powers as reincarnation of terrible Macha, she of war and death to all enemies. I will first ask the king to give me his ruby-inlaid cup.”
This time, it was his wife who spoke to Leary, and he waved at his cup dismissively, allowing me to seize it.
I poured the contents of the chalice into a bowl sitting on the table. “I would have fresh, clear water.”
The queen silently proffered her own chalice. “I drink only water from my personal well, Caylith. There is none purer.”
I picked up her chalice and turned away, quickly pouring a fair amount of healing powder into it, pretending to utter magical incantations. Turning around, still mumbling gibberish, I raised it high. Some of the druids’ own incantations at the ceremony of the Judgment came to my ready mind, and I intoned, “Spirit of sun, soul of fire…breath of wind, mouth of earth…Render unto our most glorious king the gift of health and sound reason. May he look into the eyes of his enemies with profound understanding in the moment before he slays them.”
I gently placed the chalice before the king and bade him drink. At a quiet word from Máirín, he took a sip.
“More. Please drink the entire contents.”
And so he did.
I waited until I saw the clouds in his eyes begin to clear. “My king,” I said gently, and his wife translated my words, “you will begin to lose your headaches. Your mind will begin to clear. Do not be frightened at what I am about to do. You must trust me, as you trust your own wife and your son.”
I glanced at the druids. They were huddled together, their eyes darting swiftly about the room as if seeking reinforcements. But at that moment I called my own reinforcements. “Jay,” I said quietly, “please bid my friends to sit on my shoulders.”
I stood in a dramatic pose, holding my arms in front me. “By my sisters of the Morrighan, by Neaim and Badb, and by the great ravens of battle and death, I hereby pronounce the king healed of his malady.”
Just then, in a great fluttering and rousing of iridescent black feathers, two large, black birds hurtled through one of the unshuttered roof windows, and they settled onto my outstretched arms.
I heard loud gasps, and even cries, from the brave warriors lining the massive table. And still I stood, my arms heavy with the weight of Talon and Claw, watching the Brothers Druid.
They were clearly frightened to the bone. They both threw themselves to the floor and pulled their own robes over their heads.
“Heal!” I shouted.
“Awwkk!” cried Talon.
And King Leary stood, speaking through Torin. “Clearly, ye are come to favor us. If ye have a boon, I will grant it. Ye have only to ask.”
At a raised eyebrow from me, Jay released the birds from my outstretched arms, and they flew out the high window as quickly as they had entered.
“O king, first I ask that I be able to speak with you and your family in private. Not a boon but a simple promise.”
“Done,” he said. He looked around the room. “Please leave us.”
All the warriors shuffled out, leaving Loch and Lucet cowering on the floor. “Ye may leave also,” said Leary. I will deal with ye later.”
Jay and I sat at the huge, polished table with the king and queen and their son Torin. It was odd, I thought, to sit in a mead hall designed to seat three hundred or more souls in the company of only four. Our words seemed to echo off the high ceiling as we spoke.
“First, I must tell you the distressing news that your son Liam, my betrothe
d, has been taken captive.” Torin was translating my words, and when he heard them the king staggered to his feet, and Máirín cried out in grief.
“Wait. Wait, it is not so dreadful as you may think. Please hear me out.” Slowly, the king sank back onto his high bench. “The evil plot has been designed by Owen Sweeney himself, whom you thought had been drowned by the mercy of the sea. But he lives, and he is bent on revenge and on recovering all his lost property. So he holds Liam in the hope that you will restore his lands in exchange for your son.”
The king said, his voice slow and heavy, “And his hopes will be fulfilled. I am sorry, Caylith, but I will do anything to keep him safe. Even unto the tearing down of me own edicts.” I saw that tears were coursing down his face, and Máirín, too, was overcome, yet unable to speak.
“Hear me out. I discovered not only that it was Sweeney, but even where he is hiding. The wretch has no way of knowing how much we know, and so he feels no threat. My own army of fifty mercenary Saxons are racing to his lair even now, on the rugged northern promontory, and he knows it not.
“You have seen that I hold certain…powers. Call me a druidess if you like, but I am able to confront and defeat Sweeney even in his own serpent’s nest. I promise—I swear to you right now—that I will defeat Sweeney in a matter of days, and I will restore your son to you—and to myself, for I intend to marry him a few short weeks from now.”
“But we cannot know that for certain,” said Máirín.
“We cannot know for certain that we will die in our sleep tonight, good queen. By the time a runner comes to you with the hostage demands, I think Liam will be riding home again, safe, and Sweeney once more a beaten man. A half man, I should say.”
“What do you propose we do?” asked the queen.
“I think,” I said slowly, thinking it through, “it will take at least three days for a runner to reach you—probably double that, but let us say three days. Remember, he would have to journey from the area of the Lough Foyle, not an easy ride. Let us say that three mornings from now he tells you the news. Before he does, you receive him in all pomp and circumstance, delaying his message by some hours, while he is flattered into thinking he is somehow important.
“When at last you listen to his hostage demands, you further delay your answer by long speeches and haranguing, by pleadings, and by the tears of your wife. Do not forget that the messenger will not be a man with a brain, but only a message. When you finally appear to agree to Sweeney’s demands, you tell him that when he rises the next morning, or the morning after that, you will call a Judgment before all the people, for only a public pronouncement will make the endowment of property legal and binding.
“Now you have put off your answer by at least one day, and that gives me twenty-four additional hours to free Liam and destroy Sweeney. I think we could do it in far less time, but that will afford us a bit more air to breathe.”
Torin was the first to consider my own participation. “If ye be here, lass, how will ye destroy Sweeney?”
“My, ah, druid ways will come into play, Torin. I will actually be somewhere on the peninsula tonight, before the sun goes down.”
He looked at me for a long time, seeming to consider his next words. At last he said, “I would come with ye. I would free me own brother.”
His mother reached out her hand to him as if frightened by his willfulness.
I looked at Jay. His eyes seemed more bright than usual, his air of assurance more evident. He gave me a small, almost imperceptible nod.
“I agree, Torin. You may join your cousins Ryan Murphy and Michael MacCool, who also number themselves among Liam’s rescuers. I welcome you and your help. If your parents will agree to grant my boon, we can be on our way immediately.”
Torin turned to his father, and he spoke for several minutes. I could see the king’s eyes change slowly from hard, to wavering, and finally to accepting.
“Very well, lass. Me father agrees. But we must find a way to signal him when we have freed Liam.”
“Of course. We will use the smoke language and the signal fires.” I explained to Torin that the clans MacCool and Murphy had devised a simple, effective way to speak over long distances. The O’Neills, too, knew the signals. Among the three clans, it would be an easy matter to alert the king within a few hours of Liam’s escape.
“Please tell your father that my own signal, well known to the clans, will be the signal of success.”
We all three stood to leave. “One final matter, King Leary,” I said.
He inclined his head to me, listening, and his wife repeated my words in Gaelic. “Your drink, and perhaps your food, have been systematically poisoned. Certain kinds of narcotics work to slow a man’s mind, to make him agree to what he does not even believe. I would closely question a pair of dark-jowled brothers, but I accuse no one. From today forward, until those very brothers be allowed to find other employment, I would drink only from the queen’s pure well. Or I would have…certain robed men…sip every drink, taste every morsel, before you do.”
I saw the old ironic glint return to his eyes, and the taunting angle of the chin I knew so well from watching his son Liam. “Indeed,” he said. “I take your meaning. From today, I may talk to me gods without robed intermediaries.”
“Queen Máirín, King Leary. I bid you both a very fond farewell.”
I stepped outside with Jay and Torin into the light of day. I was vaguely surprised at how early it was, for the shadows told me that we still must have at least two hours before sunset.
“The sooner there, the sooner we will see Liam,” I said. “Come, Torin, let us seek the far trees, away from your father’s sentries.”
We walked quickly to a grove of ashes. Jay turned to us. “I will call a gathering of the feathered nations and find out where our men are. Then we will Walk.”
I gestured to Torin and led him apart somewhat, and we stood watching Jay. We saw him raise his head to the skies and heard him implore his feathered kin. Soon thirty or more birds were clustered in the trees all around. Jay spoke a while, and the birds left in a great rush of feathers. He stood for a long time, while Torin and I sat quietly, waiting. Then, in a loud beating and fluttering of wings, the birds were back. Jay listened with his head cocked first to one self-important cardinal, then to a chittering jay. All at once, with no warning, the feathered congregation lifted their wings and soared into the late-afternoon sky.
Jay walked to us. “Let us make ready, for I know where to go.”
We stood, and Jay spoke gravely to Torin. “You are about to experience a kind of wingless flight, lad. You are not a tiny bit of a thing, like my friend Caylith, but a great, heavy warrior. So the flight may be a mite…stormy. Unstable. You must begin by using any breathing skills you have learned. Have you?”
“I have.”
“Set your mind on the flight itself and not on any turbulent thoughts of your brother, nor on the mission ahead. Can you do that?”
“I can.”
I saw that Torin was resolute and calm. I admired his courage, for confronting the often dark mysteries of magic was not for the weak of mind or spirit.
Jay stood rock still, reaching out his hands to us. I took one hand, and Torin grasped the other. With a loud thrashing of wings, Talon and Claw came unbidden from a tree branch overhead and settled on Jay’s shoulders, digging their long claws into the leather strap he wore there.
“Breathe slowly, cleanse your mind,” intoned the dwarf. And so, guided by two pairs of tiny, glittering eyes, the enchanted Walk began.
Chapter 23:
Flying with the Wind
I drew a long breath into my chest, letting it take perhaps moments, perhaps ages, to be released. The swirling wind seemed to rise under my very arms, now long, graceful feathers, and they rose and flapped until I was soaring above the changeling earth. For Éire itself was but a distant emerald, a bright toy carelessly thrown into the gray-green sea as if by a wanton child.
When
at last I landed, I stood rock still as though to defy the turbulent, spinning winds. I felt my hair streaming in long, twisting strands from my head. I waited for the air to stop whirling and for my willful curls to settle back on my shoulders.
I opened my eyes. Strangely, the wind was calm. I had felt myself in the midst of a raging storm, but it had cleared. Torin was close by, but kneeling and shaking his head as if to awaken from a dream.
I saw that Jay was looking from me to Torin to make sure we were unhurt. “Jay, it never gets easier.”
“No, my friend. Not even for me. But the visions and the feelings are ones to treasure—do you not agree?”
I nodded, thinking of the wind beneath my long, winged arms and the sight of tiny, jewel-like Éire.
I looked at my surroundings. We were standing among rowans and blackthorns, almost in a thicket. Above, I heard the distinctive call of geese, but the growth here was so rampant that I could not get my bearings.
“Where are we? And where are our men?”
“We are close to the shoreline of the Lough Foyle,” he said. “It is a vast refuge to my feathered kindred. As soon as Torin can walk steadily, we will follow the geese and the ducks, for they will lead us to our friends.”
“Jay, you keep saying ‘we.’ I do not remember granting you leave to throw yourself into grave peril.”
Suddenly Jay seemed exasperated with me. “And yet how would you proceed without me? Without my telling you where you are, and where to go? Without the Owl-Sight and the enchanted Walk? Without the help of Talon and Claw? This mission is perilous, young lady—too dangerous to allow you to run alone, headlong into Sweeney’s murderous arms. Let there be an end on it.”
He spoke sternly to me, as he had a few times in the past. Each time before, he had been right. And so I let it go.
I saw that Torin was standing. “Torin, how do you feel?”
