by Tom Deitz
David’s heart skipped a beat and he jerked away, as if fleeing that accusation.
“No it’s not!” he screamed. “No it’s not! No, no, no!”
And back in the tub his real body flinched as well, and came desperately awake, the words still on his tongue.
“No! N—”
The word trailed off as he caught himself, and a chill shook him in spite of the steamy heat. Jesus, that had been real—so real. Too real, in fact, because some of it was real—or had been. He swallowed hard. Not a difficult dream to interpret really, he’d had it before several times in the last few months, or variations, anyway. Not always with the rain—that was a late addition, though he did tend to have it more often when it rained—but always with two elements. One was the serpent that his waking mind knew was called an uktena: a monster from Galunlati that he knew all too well because not only had he helped kill one, but because he had briefly been one, last year when the Sidhe had come seeking Fionchadd’s betrayer. Anger had welled up in him, then; anger at his helplessness, and he had become the strongest thing he knew, the thing he now most feared, because he knew it reflected part of him, the darkest pit of his soul.
Yet still the memory infected his dreams—it, and the other recurring element: Fionchadd himself, now prisoner…where? He didn’t know. He only knew that it was his fault. If only he’d—
With no more warning than a brief mechanical click the door popped open.
David sat up frantically, snatching a washcloth to obscure crucial portions of his anatomy, only to see with minor relief the freshly clipped blond head of his seven-year-old brother, Little Billy, staring him straight in the eye, his expression an almost comical mixture of surprise, concern, and curiosity.
“Sorry, Davy,” he began. “Pa told me to find out what the matter was.”
David glared at him. “Shut the door, dammit!” Then, when the little boy acquiesced—unfortunately with himself on the inside, “What do you mean what’s wrong? Nothin’s wrong ’cept I just had a whole afternoon blown to hell!” He spoke deliberately loud, not caring if he were overheard.
Little Billy twisted in the frustrated consternation of one whose good deed has gone awry and prodded David’s abandoned jeans with a small, bare foot. “No, Davy,” he said patiently. “I mean why was you yellin’?”
David rolled his eyes. “Was it that loud?”
Little Billy nodded solemnly. “Sho’ was.”
“Jesus!” David slumped further down into the water, leaving only his head and knees exposed.
“Is something wrong, Davy? You been real jumpy lately. And you been talkin’ in your sleep a lot, I can hear you even in my room.”
“Christ,” David groaned for variety. “What about?”
Little Billy shrugged, sat down on the toilet lid, and dragged both arms inside his Batman T-shirt, which gave him the appearance of an armless but well-endowed female dwarf. “Don’t know, ’zactly. Mostly just stuff like now. You know: ‘no, no, no,’ and ‘it ain’t my fault,’ and all. You woke me up doin’ it last week. Two times!”
David didn’t know whether to be irritated or grateful. His brother’s room was across the hall from his own, closer than his parents’ lair, which shared porch frontage with the living room. He always slept with his door closed, even when it was really hot, as did his folks. But the kid didn’t. It was thus irritating to be spied upon, but a relief that it was his brother and not his parents doing the reconnaissance.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Little Billy inquired hopefully, freeing his hands again. “Everybody’s been real grouchy lately.”
David started to reply that yes, he was angry, at having his bath interrupted and his sanity questioned by a seven-year-old, however precocious. But then he saw his brother’s face, saw the real apprehension there.
He swallowed hard. “No, kid, I’m not mad, just tired. Tired and worried, and feelin’ kinda bad about somethin’ I did.”
“Finnykid?” Little Billy asked, hopping down from his perch.
“Yeah,” David acknowledged, as he levered himself out and wrapped a towel around his middle. “Finnykid.”
“It wasn’t your fault, y’know,” Little Billy observed, and scooted out the door David obligingly opened for him.
The door closed abruptly and David found himself facing the steamed-up mirror on its back.
“Oh yes it was,” he whispered to his strangely hollow-eyed reflection.
Prologue II: Behind the Lines
(north of Erenn—high summer)
The selkies had been swimming for three days and the nights between and not always through water—though what the curious red-purple stuff was they had passed through a half-day’s hard journey back, neither had known. All that was certain was that it had offered less resistance than sea-water and had tasted and smelled like flowers: alarming, yet pleasantly strange. And this morning something far more perilous had happened: when seeking to escape a curious kraken, they had dived too deep and come fearfully close to an Edge! Indeed, Tagd, the larger one, the male, had accidentally slid a flipper through and still felt in the long slender bones the empty cold that lay below the World. The rumors were true, then: there were places to the north of Erenn where the sea bed had begun to unravel—either that, or had not yet taken form.
No such uncertainties had troubled them lately, though; and now a gradually rising bottom and the half-sounds of waves on a not-too-distant shore told them they were approaching land. Anticipation awoke in them, gave them direction, gave them drive. Tagd swam ahead, rising toward the surface since the waters were now too shallow for the ship-long basking serpents that were their chief threat. The female, Erioch, followed, swam faster, and breached beside him. Afternoon sunlight shimmered across sleek dark fur, even as it glittered on the endless water like diamonds strewn across a slab of rippled jade. Ahead, halfway to the horizon, was their goal: a shard of island, scarce more than a dark line above the sea, except for that which glistened there like a wet black finger accusing the cloudless heavens.
Another dive, through red coral now, though the sand it rose from was silver and black; another breach, and they made landfall.
Tagd dragged himself ashore, suddenly awkward, where before had been only swift, sure movement. He grunted, for the rock was hard and vitreous and bore many a scarce-smoothed edge that cut at his belly and flippers. A particularly sharp ridge gashed his tail, and he yipped, then stopped, feeling foolish, for he already endured far worse hurt than that. He glanced toward his right forelimb, saw what glittered there—at once the source of his pain and the key to his mission. It was a ring of silver completely encircling one of the slim bones, but overgrown by the skin and flesh that webbed it to its fellows, making it for the time a part of him. But that would not be much longer.
Erioch joined him, and he barked an order. A harsher bark was the reply. He closed his eyes and reached into his memory, found a shadow-shape there and called it forth.
There was a rush of pain, as if his whole sleek body had exploded and collapsed onto itself once more, and when he raised his lids again, he saw through the green eyes of a man. A woman stood beside him, slim and naked and well-muscled, with the same wide swimmer’s shoulders and blue-black hair as he. A ring glistened on his black-nailed finger. Before him the tower taunted the sky.
He stared up at it appreciatively and a little in awe, for it was thing of rumor, a tale from the distant past made manifest. It did not look like the stuff of legends; much more it resembled a work of nature gone awry: a giant tree trunk grown from that hard black glass which sometimes oozed from the bowels of the earth in the Mortal World. Black it was, indeed; but in no wise uniformly, for in places he could see through a little way, and here and there complex patterns had been etched and hewn and blasted into its sheen. Its height, he could not guess. As tall as half a hundred folk as tall as he, it well could be. And a fit birthplace for a warrior king.
Lugh Samildinach had been born here,
so Finvarra’s druids told; he who was now Ard Rhi of the Daoine Sidhe in Tir-Nan-Og, southwest across the sea beyond their own Erenn—he who was now their foe. Balor of the Fomorians had hidden his daughter Ethlinn in the distant top, fearing a prophecy that declared that a son of hers would destroy him. But in spite of all his efforts, a warrior of the Tuatha de Danaan had found her, and the child he had begot had grown to be lord of the youngest and strongest realm of the Sidhe. Even now Finvarra’s fleets fought his in the south, and neither side was winning, though that was due in large part to aid from the Powersmiths and Arawn of Annwyn, who so far had kept Lugh from being overwhelmed by Finvarra’s more numerous and far fester vessels.
“Truly, it is a wonder,” Erioch breathed behind him. “But we have no time now to stand staring.”
Tagd scowled at her, but his expression softened as he took in her naked beauty, their own smooth skins being fair enough for Faery eyes, and there truly being no time for the weaving of such frivolities as clothing from foam and stray seaweed. And then he saw her eyes shift and narrow as they caught some movement behind him. He followed her gaze, called upon Power to see farther, and saw as she did what broke the southern horizon: Ships at full career coming their way—long, low golden ships with blood red sails, each of which showed a golden sun-in-splendor. And above them, but a little behind, more vessels—but these rode the air a bow-shot above the waves, their oars slowly beating among the breezes.
“It appears we have come just in time,” Tagd noted wryly.
A gull’s cry answered him, and he turned to see a large white fellow gliding easily through the salty air toward them. It alighted on a knob of glistening rock, and before he had time to notice any more than a glittering around its throat, its shape shimmered and twisted and became a tall, pale-haired man, also nude.
“In time indeed,” the stranger snapped, casually conjuring a short green kilt from a handful of kelp. “Know you that I am Engol, Watch-Warden of Ethlinn’s Isle. If you have business here it would be wise to state it quickly.”
“I am Tagd,” the selkie informed him. “This is Erioch. If you are whom we seek, you will know how to receive our message.”
A frown bent the Warden’s dark, slanted brows. “You come from Finvarra?”
Tagd held up his hand. The ring caught a beam of sunlight and turned to fire.
Engol stepped forward and removed a similar ring from the chain that hung around his neck. He pressed it against the one Tagd raised to meet it. Light flared at the juncture for an instant, Engol’s face froze for a fractioned moment more, and then he nodded.
“You are who you say,” he acknowledged. “If you will follow, we may yet fulfill your errand in time.” He indicated a shallow indentation in the glass of the tower, inserted his ring into a hollow there, and motioned Tagd to use his likewise. “By your entering thus, those within will know you bear a true message. Come, we must hasten.”
For an instant the only sound was that of the slapping of waves on the glassy shore, and then a hidden something clicked, and a section of wall angled outward.
More men stood behind, and women, too, all of them tall and slim and dressed in serviceable tunics of green and gray. Their eyes were fierce and wary, and all clutched weapons hastily snatched from a series of trestle tables where they had evidently been rapidly donning armor, to judge by half-laced gauntlets and part-buckled vambraces that clad them, the shields and high-domed helms that lay about. The large, round room was lit by a shifting, gray-green light, and was empty save for the tables and attendant benches—probably some sort of seldom-used guardroom now awakened to use. The ceiling was domed, but not perfectly, for the circle of the walls was not exact, and a long ramp looped around the opposite side and disappeared through an oval opening between two carved obsidian ribs.
A few stared at their visitors’ gleaming skin as Engol hurried them past, but most, when they saw their commander’s haste, went back to their feverish vesting.
“How goes the war?” someone called, with the nervous tremor of one who had believed it would never touch him.
“You have only to look outside to know that,” Tagd shouted back as he and Erioch sprinted after their host. “I think your spear will soon find living sheathing.”
A murmur of alarm swelled the ranks, followed by a dull metallic clatter.
“But truly, how does the war go?” Engol asked in turn as he bounded onto the ramp. “Orders are not information.”
Tagd shrugged as he joined him on the slope, though all kept moving. “Stalemate as of three days ago, which is the last we heard. You still guard Finvarra’s prisoner; the Powersmiths hold theirs and add to their number daily, and among them Finvarra’s daughters. Finvarra’s main fleet encircles the Powersmiths’ flagship in the Middle Seas as they have done all winter, but still cannot come at them, for Ilionin has raised a shield of Fire that burns the very water—though now that the Tracks are strong again, that could quickly change, if she grows restless with captivity and sends for reinforcements. Meanwhile Lugh and Arawn harry Finvarra’s back and the southern shores of Erenn as well, when the Tracks permit—hoping, I think, to destroy Finvarra’s ships faster than he can build them. Lugh has the air ships, too, but few of them, and they are frail, though even now some come this way.”
“I knew it,” Engol spat. “I told Finvarra it was a mistake to hide the prisoner here, but he would not listen. He had vessels enough to defend this place, he said. Lugh would have to pass the entire coast of Erenn to come here, if he even knew where the prisoner was. And this way the war would not ravage his land. His lands, no; but what of the seas? What of Manannan mac Lir, whose domain they are? Does Finvarra invite a fourth foe?”
“I have heard no word of Manannan,” Tagd replied. “He keeps his silence, which in itself is strange.”
“But where will Finvarra move the prisoner, then?”
“We are to take him from here and swim north; no more would it be good to tell you.”
“Ah, surely you are right, for siege will be joined, and I could be captured. Still—”
“Can you not go faster?” Erioch interrupted pointedly. “This tower is passing high.”
“Aye,” Engol chuckled. “But there is more to this ramp than seems apparent. One more turn and we are at our goal.” And so it was that they reached the top of Ethlinn’s Tower.
Once more the rings unlocked an unseen door, and once more Tagd passed into a large round room.
And at last came face to face with the one who, through no fault of his own, had set the greater realms of Faerie in contention.
Slumped in a window alcove opposite, he did not look like much: a slender, fair-skinned, gold-haired youth not quite fully grown. Nothing special there—nor in his slanted brows, clean-angled jaw, and full lips; all the Daoine Sidhe had them. Not even his clothing was worth note, simply a long robe the same colors as the room: black and gray and white and silver. But his eyes were something else: green and afire with anger and pain. He met Tagd’s gaze when the door opened, and started to rise. A heavy clank drew the selkies’ attention toward the noise.
Another thing was also true, then: Finvarra not only had a prisoner, but that prisoner was shackled with Iron. He shuddered at that, fearing even the presence of that ever-hot metal, and wondered how the boy stood it. Wyvem skin helped, of course, and the boy wore cuffs of that stuff around his wrists and ankles, so that the heat was barely tolerable. But still, it was not a fate one of his race would have chosen.
The boy blinked back fury, his face contorted, and then Tagd remembered another thing: this lad had already known the Death of Iron, had suffered a spear-thrust (from Ailill, his father, so it was said) that had pierced both his body and his soul, sundering both, destroying one, and wounding the other past hope of healing. Well, the boy obviously had a new body now. But the wound in the soul…ah, those never truly healed. And the Iron shackles would sufficiently inflame it that it would take all the boy’s Power to remain sane. So th
at was why he had not escaped.
“Not much, is he?” Engol laughed harshly. “Such a little thing to start a war.”
“Boredom is what started the war,” Erioch snapped back. “A thousand years, nearly, since the last one, and that because of a heifer!”
“A bull,” Tagd corrected. “But you were the one who would hasten.”
“Aye,” said Engol. And with that, he reached into a compartment on the ramp side of the archway, withdrew six hand-sized squares of silvery leather, and gave two each to Tagd and Erioch, keeping a third set for himself. “You may have to touch his bonds,” he cautioned.
The prisoner did not resist when Engol jerked him to his feet, did not react when the rings applied to the locks made the chains fall from the shackles.
Nor did he protest when he was taken down the spiraling ramps and into the chaotic guardroom, nor when he at last faced open ocean.
Tagd scanned the horizon apprehensively. Lugh’s fleet was closer now. He did not need to call on Power to see the suns glittering on the sails.
“Barely in time,” Erioch observed irritably.
“What would you now?” Engol inquired.
“That you will see,” Tagd replied, whereupon he stared at his left hand until a bit of webbing showed there, then gritted his teeth and tore the thinskin free. The prisoner saw, and fear enflamed his eyes, but it was too late. Engol held him while Tagd and Erioch stripped him, save for the Iron rings about his wrists. When he was naked, Tagd slit the skin at the base of the boy’s neck with a fingernail and slapped the skin-patch across the bleeding wound. The boy shuddered, cried out weakly, but by then the change had come upon him. Tagd watched until it was finished, made sure the Iron bonds were still locked around the flesh above the flippers, now almost overgrown with skin. The prisoner-seal snarled at him when he grasped its shoulders, but he slapped it, then began his own change, even as Erioch did.
