Storm Maker

by Erin O'Quinn

  Gristle was explaining to all of us where we needed to go so that we would not have to talk or raise our heads while we were moving into place. I kept my body low to the ground as I tried to copy the lithe movements of my armsman, and all around me a company of fifty experienced warriors moved almost as one.

  As I moved, part of my mind could not help thinking about Liam’s thrilling rescue less than an hour ago. How Glaed and his men had stepped from the trees, almost trees themselves in their stolid bulk. How Liam’s captors were felled so quickly that their very horses did not miss a step as they trotted through the underbrush. How the unkempt drovers cowered and begged for mercy from men who understood not a word of their frightened speech.

  Glaed himself stopped the bay gelding that carried Liam, lying bound across the saddle. He seized the bridle, repeating Angus’s name in a soothing way until the horse stopped without panicking. Then Glaed reached out and lifted Liam off the saddle in both arms, almost as though he were a small child. I had seen him do exactly the same with my own mother the day she fell outside Sweeney’s slave holdings more than a year ago.

  My eyes were fastened on Liam’s unmoving form, and I followed Glaed as he laid Liam at the base of a tree. I knelt and looked down at him, lying pale and absolutely still. His head was caked with dried blood.

  I tore the soft foxtail from my tunic bodice and placed it under his head, affording him a cushion. I signaled to Torin, who began to untie his hands, and then his legs.

  “Gristle. Where is Gristle? Ah, you know what to do.” My armsman was at my elbow already with a wineskin full of water, ready to put it against Liam’s lips. He handed me a ragged square of cloth. I spilled a large amount of water onto the cloth and applied it gently to Liam’s head, trying to find the wound.

  It took several minutes of tender probing before I found the place where blood had begun to ooze again—behind his head, up near the crown, where all the long hair lay matted and tangled. I pulled the hair back and cleaned carefully all around the area. I saw that the wound was deep, at least as deep as the one he had suffered at last autumn’s fair in Tara. Thankfully, it was in a different place.

  I removed the healing powder from my belt and poured a fair amount on the wound. Still the blood oozed. I cleaned around it again with a clean corner of the cloth and a bit of water. And then I poured even more powder where the blood was thickest. I packed the cloth against it to staunch the blood flow.

  While I was waiting, I applied powder to the skin around his wrists, upper arms, and ankles where the ropes had bitten deeply into his skin. It must have been painful, and I was half hoping that Liam would protest. But he did not respond at all.

  I felt stringent tears coursing down my face, for I felt the pain that Liam should have been feeling just now. A corner of my mind saw that the welts from the ropes had already begun to shrink, and his skin was slowly returning to its normal healthy color. That meant the healing potion was working. But it was not working well enough, or quickly enough, on his head wound.

  Was Liam unconscious from the pain, or was he in a kind of stupor? I remembered that he may have been kept drugged by his captors in order to keep him quiet. He would need an internal potion as well as the poultice I had already applied.

  My eyes sought the ground where Liam lay. Growing in a patch of sunlight where the tree canopy was thinnest, I saw a bright patch of loosestrife. “Torin,” I said. “Please bring me a handful of that plant.” He followed my eyes, and then he got to his feet and tore a bunch of tall stalks from the loosestrife.

  With the coming of cold weather, the loosestrife had lost most of its purple flower heads, but the dried capsules contained hundreds of small seeds, and the stalks had turned bright crimson.

  “Where may I find a container of any kind?” I despaired out loud. Ryan held out a large vessel that usually hung by a leather thong from his belt—a hollowed out bullock’s horn that he sometimes used for his grog. I ground several seed capsules between my shaking thumb and forefinger, and I dropped the resulting powder into the horn along with more of my own healing powder. Then, shredding the dry crimson stalks, I added that to the mix. Last, I squeezed water into the horn until it felt right to me, and I swirled the mixture again and again to blend it.

  Bowing my head over the horn, I intoned, “Lose this strife, save this life…” I held the horn to his lips and dribbled the contents into his mouth. The liquid simply drained down his chin. It would not work unless he swallowed. I pinched his mouth into an O and poured again. This time, I made sure his head was back all the way, and I smoothed his throat where the liquid needed to drain.

  At once he began to cough, as though choking. Any sign of life was better than his former coma-like state. I poured again, all the while repeating the incantation and stroking his throat to ease the liquid down. This time, he swallowed without choking. I poured part of the loosestrife potion over his head wound, which was still wet with fresh blood. And then I waited.

  No other people existed as I looked at my beloved Liam, stroking his throat, then his shoulders and chest. I memorized all over again the shadow that his long lashes made on his cheeks, the amber-honey color of his mustache, the soft arc of his mouth. I inspected his head wound again. To my delight, I saw that the blood had stopped flowing. Indeed, the edges of the wound had begun to dry and shrink.

  I began to touch his beard and mustache, and I stroked his lips with my fingers. Wondrously, his mouth opened, very slowly, and he drew my finger into his mouth. His mouth began that slow, rhythmic sucking motion that had always been powerfully stimulating to both of us. I put my head next to his. “Dia duit.”

  He opened his eyes. They focused on my own. “Hello,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse, but I heard him. “I love ye.”

  I kissed him then, very tenderly. His mouth answered softly, then with growing urgency, until I realized that Liam would definitely survive. I lifted my head—very reluctantly—and spoke to his anxious kin. “It is time for you three to take over. I will return within—”

  “Twenty-four hours,” they chorused.

  “Yes,” I said, and I smiled a real smile for the first time in more than three days. I quickly bound his head with the cloth Gristle had given me and then I stood, ready to leave.

  Before I joined Gristle and the rest of my men, I drew Liam’s shillelagh from my belt and handed it to his brother. “This belongs to Liam. Please give it to him when you think he is ready to wield it.”

  Torin reached out and accepted the weapon. “You have not warned us to be careful,” he said with a little twitch around his mouth.

  “You are a seasoned warrior, Torin. Your cousins also know how to take care of themselves. I will say this. Sweeney is as cunning a man as I have ever met. There may be strangers close by watching you, ready to strike. But I know you will remain alert.” That was my way of telling him, “Be careful.”

  “Ryan, you know to send my signal each hour until sundown.”

  He nodded, relieved. “Good work, Caylith.”

  Michael had been watching me, and he, too, spoke a few kind words. “Not just Liam, but all of us are fortunate to have ye, lass. I will say it outright—be careful.”

  Reaching down, I drew the foxtail from under Liam’s head. I murmured, “I am sorry, a mo chuisle, but I will need my foxtail today. Please know that I wear it for you.” I tucked it back inside my bodice and left my lover to the care of his kinsmen.

  My mind snapped back to the matter at hand—somehow climbing the bluff over Sweeney’s holdings as though I were both invisible and a sure-footed mountain sheep. I waited until I was almost halfway to the top, and I glanced down to get my bearings.

  Below me stretched a mile or so of rocky, desolate beach. Sitting five hundred feet from the shore were three buildings that, from our distance, seemed huddled together, though I guessed they were about twenty feet apart. A fourth structure was little more than a ramshackle shed, perhaps containing poultry or small livestock.<
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  The round-house was light colored, but not the brilliant white of the normally limed clay-and-wattle houses. From its smoke hole a ribbon of gray, sinuous smoke lifted into the cold autumn air. The smoke told me that Sweeney was inside, waiting.

  The smallest building was just as the owl White Face had described to Jay—a rock pile. Surely it could not be as sturdy as its builders would hope, for there would be no way for any mortar to keep the rocks from caving in if someone decided to kick it in. Or if a prisoner decided to kick his way out. I thought again, as I had before, that Sweeney’s men were a bit slow when it came to wits.

  The third building was the one that all of us would be studying. It was rectangular, of wattle-and-daub construction, with no coating of chalk and lime to keep it from rotting in the sea air. Clearly it was the eating and sleeping quarters of Sweeney’s slit-throat associates—really no more than disheveled cattle drovers. I continued to climb upward, clinging against the face of the bluff, thinking about the barracks-style building. I guessed that it might house up to twenty men if they slept almost side by side. Now that Sweeney had lost his right even to have a house on this land, most of his men would be close by most of the time and not on a cattle drive. And twenty foul-smelling men forced to live so close together would be ill tempered, jumpy, easy to unsettle.

  When at last I reached the top of the bluff I saw that Gristle, Glaedwine, and a few of the Keepers were already lying prone on the ground, studying the scene below. I spoke in a low tone to my armsman, sharing my observations about Sweeney’s men.

  “I agree, Lady. Twenty is even more than I had guessed, but it does not hurt to prepare for the maximum number. And I concur that the men will be easy targets for a group of warriors such as ours. However…”

  “However,” I finished for him, “Sweeney has the wit and venom of twenty.”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet at the core he is a coward, Gristle. I saw that clearly last year when MacCool challenged him and the clansmen surrounded him. He simply gave up.”

  “Coward or not, Lady Caylith, a murderer may not quail at a bit of feathers and a beak, as you seem to think.”

  “And as I think,” came Jay’s quiet voice.

  My tiny friend had just joined us on the bluff, looking fresh and alert. I wondered, not for the first time, what experiences Jay had undergone in his long life that readied him for almost any adventure.

  “Have you noticed,” I asked my companions, “that Sweeney’s teach seems to have no windows? Knowing him, I think he is trying to keep his house as invulnerable as possible. But having no windows means having no way to see what is happening around him.”

  “Good point, Lady,” Gristle said drily.

  “But it does have one obvious entry point,” said Jay almost smugly.

  I was about to say something about the door when Glaed uttered a small exclamation, and I looked down the bluff. Two men were approaching the holdings on foot, each leading a horse. The horses were picking their way among the treacherous rocks, and I realized that if the invalid Sweeney wanted to escape with his invalid’s cart, it would not be by land. I leaned to Gristle. “Keep a sharp eye for a currach or other kind of rowboat,” I told him. “I think that is how he travels.”

  The men doggedly proceeded with the hesitant horses. When they reached the barracks building, they tethered the beasts to a stake driven into the ground near the door. I watched as they strode to Sweeney’s small shelter and stood outside the little round-house. They must have shouted, for the door opened quickly and they walked inside. Then I saw the door snap shut behind them.

  Gristle said, “Those two are no doubt roving sentries—outriders looking for any sign of trouble.”

  “They could not yet know of Liam’s escape,” I said slowly. “And yet—if they were ready to return, they would take the horses to drink and graze. They mean to leave again soon, I think.”

  “Let us hope they have the same level of competence as the ones we have already met,” Glaed observed. “That is to say, hardly any at all.”

  “How does a man as sharp as Sweeney settle for such sheep-plops as these?” I had just asked a question which required no answer, and I settled down to keep my eyes riveted on the scene below.

  After no more than ten minutes, Sweeney’s door opened and the two men left. The door closed quickly behind them. They walked to the barracks building and went inside, no doubt to seek food or drink. They betrayed no sense of urgency, and my stomach muscles lost their tenseness somewhat as I waited for them to emerge.

  No, they had no idea yet that their prize had slipped from their grasp. I said to Gristle, “I think we need to send out our own outriders—out-walkers—to look for a currach. If Sweeney has an escape route ready, we must cut it off.”

  “Agreed, Lady. Glaed has already sent three men to do just that.”

  I flashed a look of gratitude to my armsman and then turned my attention again to Sweeney’s little bally below.

  “Jay, do you think Talon and Crow could perch at the window of the barracks before the drovers decide to draw the shutters?”

  “Yes.” Still hunkered close to the ground, he called the birds, and they settled next to him after much flapping of feathers. He spoke, a language shared by only a few, and the pair of birds rose as one and flew to the building below.

  We waited for them to return. I was on edge again, my eyes seeking a pair of invisible birds, and I was seized with a sudden thought that made me suddenly exclaim, “Oh!”

  I raised my eyes to Gristle. “What if—this seems crazy—but what if all this scene is no more than a pretense, a show? An elaborate bluff?”

  Gristle gnawed at the thought awhile. “He is that cunning. And he has tangled with us before, so he has an idea of our tactics. Is this indeed a game within a game, Lady Caylith? Is Sweeney even here? Are we waiting up here all according to his own plan, while he escapes?”

  I bit my lower lip in vexation. Here was a crimp in the fabric I had not expected. If this were all indeed a trick, we would have to devise a countertrick. When the birds returned, I strained all my body and attention to Jay Feather, waiting for him to speak.

  Jay listened, his head cocked in his characteristic bird-like way, and then he turned his luminous blue eyes to me. “Caylith, you will not believe this. But the birds say there are two—exactly two—men inside that building.”

  “No doubt the two we saw enter,” Gristle said sourly.

  “Then we are in danger of a net settling over us,” I said. “We need to devise another plan, and quickly.”

  “Where is Sweeney?” asked Glaed. “We need to see inside his teach. But how, unless we boldly knock and ask for entrance?”

  “Someone is there, for whoever opened the door has not left. Unless…”

  “Yes, Lady. Unless you are right—unless there is an escape tunnel, facing away from this bluff. We would not be able to see it from our angle of view, for we are assembled on the only possible place to survey his holdings. He could be miles away, waiting for us to be taken captive along with the king’s son.”

  “Let us be sure who is in the house,” said Jay. The birds were still pecking the ground nearby, and he cawed and warbled in their peculiar tongue. At once they flew off again, and this time I traced their black forms to the conical roof of the round-house. And then they disappeared.

  “The smoke hole,” said Gristle. “Of course.”

  Within moments the two birds were soaring toward us with their loud squawks. “No one, Caylith. Talon says no one is inside at all.”

  “Thor’s thunder,” cursed Glaed.

  “Gentlemen, we are outwitted,” I said. “But where were Sweeney’s men going with Liam? Is there another lair nearby? One much harder to see?”

  “If we had waited and followed them, perhaps we would know. But freeing Liam was worth the risk,” said Gristle.

  “We need to send a flock—nay, a whole congregation—of birds out to search for Sweeney,” I
told my companions. “Let us seek a place of cover to plan from. Scores of clustering birds heading for this bluff can only give away our position.”

  It was too late now for us to try to hide. The only ones to see us would be the two inside the barracks…and the horses, still tethered outside.

  “Lady, I suggest we return to the closest cover. And quickly.”

  “I agree, Gristle. Let us fly.”

  I saw three Glaed Keepers walking toward us from the bay. Their hand signals said it all—there was no boat. There was no sign of Owen Sweeney.

  * * * *

  We found the clansmen soon enough. Torin was guiding the bay Angus with Liam on his back. He was surprised when we melted from among the sheltering trees. “We are fortunate to have ye on our side,” he said ruefully when we appeared in their path. “In spite of our caution, ye have caught us with our breeches around our ankles.”

  “Fret not, Torin,” I told him with a small smile. “We are not your average adversary.” I walked straight to Liam, letting my companions tell the others what had happened. “Conas tá tú, a chroí?”

  “Tá mé go maith, a Cháit.” His brown eyes were sparkling with health, and all his face was radiant with a smile. Lifting his right hand, he brandished his burnished shillelagh to show me that he was indeed battle ready. The bloody cloth on his head was like a war banner.

  “Would you help me speak with Liam?” I asked his brother.

  Torin, who had never left Liam’s side, spoke readily. “Aye, Caylith. I cannot speak enough with Liam, each was so long away from the other.”

  “First, I need to let him know what happened at Sweeney’s holdings. Then please tell him that we mean to call a conference of birds to help find Sweeney. I hope you have told him somewhat of the, um, talents of Jay, for I have failed to mention those talents to him before.”