Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels)

by Gillian Philip

  Stepping past, Iolaire took a shocked breath. ‘I know him. He’s one of Kate’s.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Jed dryly, ‘how do you know?’

  ‘Scar.’ Iolaire pointed to a dismembered thigh. ‘Distinctive. I was there when he got it.’ Crouching by the remains, he touched a swollen hand gently. ‘And he’d lost this finger long ago. Poor Turlach.’

  ‘I think I’m going to throw up now,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Go ahead.’ Jed released me, squeezing my shoulder. ‘Nobody’s looking.’

  Leaning on a pine trunk and retching with as much dignity as I could manage, I decided I liked him.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Jed asked Iolaire.

  ‘Burn him.’ Seth was behind us. ‘What’s left of him. I can’t be responsible for him. Burn him with the kelpie.’ The blue roan’s reins were in his left hand, the other arm around Rory’s shoulder. Across the roan’s withers lay the senseless black dog.

  Rory’s voice was icy. ‘Why didn’t Eili stay for Branndair?’

  Seth’s fingers tightened on his arm. ‘She wasn’t thinking, a gràidh.’ But I saw the look he exchanged with Jed, the sour tightening of Jed’s mouth. They were hiding something from Rory, I knew it.

  That wasn’t all they were hiding, thank God. Their bodies blocked my view of what lay in the undergrowth. I thought: it could have been just an animal. Maybe. If you thought of it like pictures in a book, if you broke it down into its constituent parts – no, bad thought – if you thought only of a toe, or a hank of hair, or a finger that was missing anyway, you could think of it quite dispassionately.

  ‘What about my friend here?’ Iolaire nudged the corpse gently with his foot. ‘Not taking a walk in the woods, was he?’

  ‘There’s another thing.’ Sionnach crouched to pick up his crossbow.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There.’ He nodded, turning the weapon in his hands. ‘Another.’

  ‘Shit,’ whispered Seth.

  The dove-grey filly was adorable. Well. She was adorable till she sleepily raised her head from the long grass, blinked her lashes, tossed her silky mane and bared her teeth in a hungry, hating snarl.

  There were scraps of flesh in her teeth. Scrambling to her long legs, she gave a screaming desperate whinny at the corpse of the white horse. When she got no response she half-reared, then spun on her hindlegs and fled.

  In silence we watched her spring for the water and dive.

  Sionnach spat. ‘No wonder it wasn’t for mastering.’

  Seth rubbed a hand across his face. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid bastard.’

  ‘Not,’ Finn quoted him acidly, ‘your fault.’

  ‘I should have guessed. At least it was weaned; it’d had a go at Turlach. Rory, don’t even think about it.’

  Rory was gazing hungrily at the disturbed water where the filly had submerged. At Seth’s words he turned, and the horse-lust turned to high and angry concern.

  ‘Anybody want to tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘I froze,’ growled Seth. ‘It happens.’

  ‘Oh, treat me like a three-year-old, why don’t you? It was your back. You went into a spasm. It was your bloody back.’

  ‘Fine. It was my back. Leave it.’

  ‘Like you have? Gods’ sake, Dad. Why won’t you let Eili fix it?’

  Jed eyed Seth. Seth avoided looking at Sionnach. Iolaire looked at his fingernails.

  It was Finn who fascinated me, because she wasn’t avoiding anybody. The woman’s fists were clenched and she was shaking, but it wasn’t nerves. Finn wasn’t scared, I realised: she was furious.

  ‘Dad, let Eili see it. Please. For me.’

  ‘If it would do any good, Rory, I’d do anything for you. But it won’t. Trust me on this one.’

  Rory looked hopelessly at the rest of them. Nobody was taking him on, least of all the silently simmering Finn. In the awkward silence he turned, spat, and seized his horse’s reins. Flinging himself onto its back, he kicked its flanks and drove it into an insanely fast gallop, back in the direction of the dun.

  There was nothing I hated more than a family domestic; it reminded me too strongly of my own home life. I stumbled up through the sandy scrub and unhooked my chestnut’s reins from the stump; his flanks were still shivering, but he was quieter now, and his nose snuffled at my pockets in search of a mint.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Jed behind me.

  ‘Dandy. What’s wrong with Seth’s back?’

  ‘Crossbow scars.’ Jed was fully into the clann tradition of never meeting my eyes. ‘He got shot years ago and the wounds never mended properly. They’re infected.’

  ‘Do I look like I came up the Clyde on a banana boat?’ I scowled. ‘He got shot twelve years ago. If they’d been infected all that time he’d be dead by now.’

  Irritatingly, Jed didn’t take any offence; he just made a laughing sound in his throat. ‘Blood poisoning doesn’t happen to Sithe.’

  ‘In that case, he’s imagining it. He needs therapy, not a doctor.’

  Jed sighed, and his voice when he deigned to answer me was icy cool. ‘Every night, those wounds wake Seth. Since my brother was a baby. So Rory’s always known the world’s a place full of pain, and he doesn’t remember a time when he thought otherwise.’ He tilted his head thoughtfully. ‘Not that Seth screams. He never screams. I suppose he’s used to it.’

  I swallowed. ‘How do you know? I thought you and Iolaire were the item.’

  He smiled, uncurled his fist. There was a deep brutal scar across his palm, a ridged line of white. ‘I don’t let anybody near my mind, so we did this instead. Blood brothers. I know when Seth’s in pain because I feel it.’ Turning his hand, he examined it thoughtfully, clenching and unclenching the fingers. ‘There were nights I thought his spine was going to burst out of his back.’

  There was bile in my throat, but I was determined not to be sick again. Jed glanced at me, seeming to remember suddenly that I was there.

  ‘You coming, then?’ He mounted his dun horse.

  I shook my head as I stroked the chestnut’s neck. ‘This one’s all wound up and so am I. We’ll both walk.’

  Jed didn’t tell me not to be silly, he didn’t remind me there were monsters in the mere, he didn’t say that of course he wouldn’t let me stay out on my own. All he said was, ‘Walk fast, then. Liath’ll stay with you.’

  And then he rode away at an easy amble to where Iolaire waited for him, and they disappeared into the trees.

  I twisted and tightened the reins between my fingers. The white dog sat there patiently, tongue lolling, pinning me with her big yellow eyes. I could tell I wouldn’t be giving her the slip any time soon.

  ‘Come on then, Lassie.’

  She cast me a withering glare, but she rose to her feet, stretched and padded languidly along the shore without a backwards glance.

  ‘Oy! You’re supposed to be babysitting me, remember? The dun’s that way.’ I pointed off to the left.

  Now that the dog was ignoring me, I was all too aware that I didn’t want to make my own way home after all, but all the others were out of sight and I didn’t want the dog to vanish too. I tugged on the chestnut’s reins and with some reluctance he followed me, head low and ears back. Partly out of spite and partly because I didn’t want to lose sight of Liath, I yanked him into a half-hearted trot.

  When we caught up with Liath, I swear she looked smug. The chestnut settled into a truculent plod and I wiped sweat from my forehead. Some way behind us, a column of oily black smoke curled lazily into the sky. I averted my eyes, swallowing.

  ‘So where are we going, Lassie?’ I asked the dog. ‘Is Rory trapped in the old mineshaft?’

  This time she ignored me altogether, which made me feel like an idiot. I was much more reluctant now to let her out of my sight, and she seemed to know it. If Jed’s intention had been to put the wind up me, he’d done a good job. My skin prickled, and I had to stop to pull my jumper back on. I rubbed
my arms briskly.

  ‘This had better be a shortcut.’ I felt I had to keep talking. If I didn’t say anything, the silence was horrible. Liath’s whole posture had changed; she was low to the ground, tail stiff, as she slunk into the pinewood. Where the pines thinned, where the heather and the scrub petered out and the ground fell away into a crumbling sandy cliff about ten feet high, she stopped altogether and lay on her belly, ears back and hackles high. But she didn’t as much as growl at the moving horse shape I could see across the glade and through the trees. She pricked her ears at me with a curious sort of perplexed trust.

  Cold horror loosened my guts as I stared past her. It hadn’t occurred to me there might be more than one fully-grown horse-monster in the woods. In my mind’s eye I saw clearly what I’d seen in the blaeberry scrub: not something out of a school anatomy lesson, not a dead animal: something that used to be a man. I clamped my lips together. Just as well there was nothing left in my stomach.

  And then I heard the voices.

  Carefully I looped the chestnut’s reins over a sturdy looking branch, close enough to Lassie to discourage the horse from making a run for it. ‘Don’t pick right now to move,’ I hissed at it.

  We’d left the mere behind, I realised as I crouched and crept closer, but below me was a rough beach and a smaller loch, the sand and stones criss-crossed with the tangled roots of pines. Between the straight trunks the little loch glinted calm and silver in the summer sun. It was a very beautiful place, but you could have cut the atmosphere with whatever knife had carved those holes in Sionnach’s face.

  Right now they stood out very white against his skin. He ignored the brown-haired woman who sat on a rock, carving something into a chunk of wood with the blade of her knife. All his fury seemed to be focused on his twin sister.

  ‘Oh, Sionnach.’ Eili, adjusting the buckle on her horse’s bridle, gave a low laugh. ‘I wouldn’t have let him be killed. Don’t fret.’

  ‘In what way was it up to you?’

  Eili shrugged. ‘I knew Finn was close enough. I knew she’d save him. And if she hadn’t, you or I would have.’

  ‘You made me kill a kelpie!’

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I intended.’

  Midges were settling on my hairline but I was scared to scratch at them. I was scared to move.

  ‘What was your intention?’ asked her brother. ‘To kill Seth?’

  Shit. I clapped a hand over my mouth to stop myself gasping, but Eili glanced up in my direction anyway, frowning slightly.

  She turned back to Sionnach and said, ‘I never meant to kill him. Not now, not yet. And as it turned out,’ she smiled, ‘I didn’t.’

  The silence dragged. I couldn’t breathe. Sionnach said: ‘What about Finn?’

  ‘Ah. But for Rory, she’s his closest kin. By love, if not by blood. And she’s never liked me.’ Eili’s smile was cold. ‘After all, I’d never harm the Bloodstone. I can’t hurt that turncoat bastard through Rory.’

  I wished I hadn’t come. I wished I’d abandoned the bloody dog. I wished I could be anywhere but here. Risking a glance over my shoulder, I bared my teeth at Lassie, who’d slunk a little closer. But still she lay there watching me inquisitively, her tongue hanging out.

  ‘And you?’ Sionnach’s lip curled as he looked at the other woman at last. Taghan, that was her name, I remembered. Taghan, the grumpy one.

  The brown-haired woman set down her knife and leaned back on her rock. ‘I’ve no intention of killing Seth. Anyway,’ she grinned, ‘your sister’s claimed him from me.’

  ‘Of course I did.’ Eili smiled at her. ‘I don’t see how you could have stayed in the dun otherwise, Taghan. Someone had to take the revenge from you.’

  ‘See, personally speaking, Sionnach, I don’t want Seth dead,’ Taghan soothed. ‘He’s my Captain. But why should he have her, when I don’t have Feorag? You must see the natural justice. Fair’s fair.’

  Sionnach spat. He stared at his sword and then back up at his twin. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wish I’d gone to help Conal that day he died.’

  For a moment I thought he’d plunged the sword into Eili’s belly; that’s how stricken she looked.

  ‘I told you to, didn’t I?’ she said. Her voice was brittle, like the thinnest of thin ice. You could touch it and it would break, and Eili would shatter into a million pieces. ‘It’s what I wanted. You should have. He was your Captain and it was your duty. If I could have gone to him myself, if I could have been any use to him with my last breath, with the last of my blood running out of me, I would.’ Her face was tight with unbearable distress. ‘I wish I had.’

  ‘It was him or you. They’d have cut your throat!’ Sionnach grabbed her arm, as if he wanted to shake her till her bones rattled. ‘Eili. I held your hand before we were born. I touched your face before we drew a breath, before we saw the light of day. And now you’re a stranger to me. How is that right, Eili? You’re turning into someone else.’

  ‘I am always and only ever myself.’ Eili put her fingertips to his chin, lifting it. ‘But I can’t always be the same. Sionnach, please. You’re the only love I have left.’

  He gritted his teeth. ‘Seth paid for what he did. Conal wanted you to absolve him, in his last minute on earth he told you that. But you chose Seth’s penalty and he paid it.’ He took a breath. ‘And all these years later? You’re still making him pay.’

  ‘You wanted him to pay! You were with me,’ she said. ‘For a long time.’

  ‘It has been a long time,’ Sionnach said gently. ‘Too long, Eili. You’ve given him pain every night of his life since Conal died, isn’t that enough? If you healed him for that purpose, it’s witchcraft and you know it. It’s yourself you’re destroying.’

  ‘Oh, no. No it isn’t.’ She stepped back, head high, eyes cold. ‘I always wanted it to take a long time. Why did I make his sword the best in the dun? Why do I always ride at his back to protect him? I want him to last as long as it takes for me to be the one. I want him to live till I kill him.’ Her voice dropped to a serpentine whisper. ‘And I want him to know it.’

  Sionnach stared at her for one moment longer. Then he barged past, shoving her aside. When Eili regained her footing, she was trembling, but she took a breath and smiled at Taghan as the crash of the undergrowth faded with the hoofbeats of Sionnach’s horse.

  ‘Don’t listen to your brother,’ said Taghan, picking up her knife. ‘It’s your decision. Seth’s yours to kill when you want it.’

  ‘I know, But I won’t risk the clann, not while we’re at war with Kate.’ Eili mounted her grey and took the reins. ‘Finn, though? I’ve no compunctions about getting rid of her. You’re right, it’s only fair.’

  For an instant my belly was full of ice, because she glanced in my rough direction once more, a funny smile playing on her lips.

  But she can’t have seen me, because she put her heels to the grey’s sides. ‘Now, Taghan, shall we be getting back? I’m expecting visitors.’

  I couldn’t move, physically couldn’t. I was terrified that if I stood up she and Taghan would still be there, even after their own horses’ hoofbeats had faded. I just lay there in the gritty sand, shivering and trying not to shiver. It was taking up all my energy. I had a sick, tilting feeling in my head and stomach, like being abruptly disconnected from my old life, like I had no chance of seeing and living it again.

  So Eili did heal Seth’s back; she’d healed it just fine. She did it for a reason, that was all, and now everything made such a horrible unnatural sense. No, unnatural was the wrong word. I thought of the horse, and the corpse in the scrub. And Seth’s body buckling, and the yellow eyes of Branndair as he made his suicidal leap at the kelpie’s throat, and the insane delighted smile on Eili’s lips. The sense it made was all too natural, preternatural: red in tooth and claw.

  Tooth and claw. Just as I thought that, I felt hot breath on my cheek, then the rasp of a bossy tongue. I opened my eyes to stare into brillia
nt yellow ones, and Liath nudged me hard in the face. Then once more in the belly.

  That finally got me moving. I stumbled to my feet.

  I watched her tail lash. I watched her grin and pant.

  I said dully, ‘You’re a wolf.’

  The grin stretched wider. The wolf called Liath turned, and shook herself, and padded back to the chestnut horse.

  FINN

  ‘Don’t you ever dare save my life again,’ said Seth.

  Cross-legged on the woven rug, I glared at him over the inert form of Branndair. His jaw was clenched but he wouldn’t look at me, his hand gentle on the wolf’s head. Branndair’s eyes were almost closed, but between the lids a glazed amber light glowed. Seth stroked his coarse black fur obsessively with his thumb.

  ‘I could say, don’t take it personally,’ I said bitterly. ‘Like you once said to me. Or we could both grow up and you could just say: “Thanks, Finn.”’

  ‘If I thanked you for it you would do it again. Because there will be a next time.’ Seth spoke through his teeth. ‘We’re not responsible for each other. All right? I wouldn’t do it for you, so don’t put me under some stupid obligation.’

  ‘Yeah. You always said you were a bad liar, which is a very convincing lie, ’cause you’re actually a very good liar. Aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s, uh…’ His brow furrowed as he worked it out. ‘I… oh, Finn. That’s not true. Or fair.’

  ‘It’s both,’ I told him frostily. ‘What’s this really about?’

  ‘Your hot little head, that’s what.’ His sneer came back with his composure. ‘Don’t get involved in things you know nothing about, Finny. I’m responsible for my own life.’

  ‘You’re not, though, are you? Eili is. Do you like having your life in Eili’s hands?’

  ‘It’s not a question of liking. My life is in Eili’s hands. It just is.’ Seth splayed his fingers across his face. ‘I don’t want yours to be. Ever again.’

  ‘And I don’t want to watch you die. I lost my grandmother and Conal and I lost my mother too, you selfish prick, and I won’t lose you!’