by Lisa Henry
“Shut your mouth,” Noel said again.
There was more going on here than Darragh was being told, but there was no point in asking. Instead, he worried about what might happen next. He wouldn’t drag another human being into slavery, and no way he’d kill a man for just daring to try to live freely in Boru’s kingdom. But he also couldn’t be seen not participating. Maybe he could hang back a little, chase a nonexistent shadow down. Better they thought him stupid or useless than wilfully disobedient.
He hoped he could fake his way through this, the way he hadn’t been able to fake his way through the encounter with Ciaran.
The van roared up the road, the men swaying together in the back.
In the grey light of the dawn, Drumcondra appeared deserted. Rows of brown brick terraces in various states of decay lined the streets. Windowless, gaping open.
“Coming up on Milbourne now,” Seamus called from the front seat. “What the—”
The windscreen smashed. Cold air and glass hit them, and the van veered off the road and into a bollard. The impact pitched the men together in the close confines of the van, and Darragh grunted as he caught someone’s knee in his stomach.
He smelled the petrol the second before it ignited. The second before Seamus started screaming.
Not the petrol tank but something thrown through the smashed windscreen. All that worrying about how not to kill someone, and it turned out he should have worried about how not to die.
Michael pushed open the back doors, and the king’s men stumbled out onto the street. Except for Seamus. Darragh twisted his head, but the fire had taken hold in the front already. He thought he saw the shape of Seamus flailing inside, through the smoke and flames. Too late for him. Too late for any of them.
“Look out!”
Glass smashed on the street, and fire flared.
“The windows!” one of the men shouted, but suddenly there was more to worry about than where the missiles were coming from.
Must have been close to twenty people spilling out of one of the vacant houses, both men and women, and all armed. Darragh saw at least three with hunks of metal piping and another with a fire axe.
Jesus. He was actually going to die here, bashed in or cut up in the street.
There would be a kind of a justice in it, maybe, for swearing his allegiance to a man like Boru. For what he’d done to Ciaran.
These men and women, they were, more than likely, the heroes of this story.
That was, if anyone would ever deign to write such a story and memorialise it in one of Ciaran’s books.
I deserve to die here.
And yet, he didn’t die. All around him, men and women came to blows, makeshift weapons clashing together in a cacophony of noise, metal on wood and wood on flesh—a duller sound but all the more chilling. All around him, people fell.
Darragh hadn’t even raised his hurley. Barely realised it was still clutched in his hand.
It was like he was separate from the world, a ghost at the centre of the chaos. Maybe he was. Maybe he’d died with Seamus, in the fire.
But then—
“Culchie! You stunned fucking gobshite, move your arse!”
Noel. It was Noel, shouldering past him and holding a gun. And not a rusted old shotgun like the one Darragh had left behind in his village, a weapon meant for protecting sheep and hanging over the hearth. This was a soldier’s gun, or perhaps a mercenary’s, polished and new and deadly. The crack of it firing at close range made Darragh’s ears ring.
He saw a woman drop to her knees, clutching her bloodied stomach, but he couldn’t hear her screams.
When the ringing faded to a vibrating hum, it was replaced by the sound of more gunshots, dozens of them in quick succession, as Noel’s gun mowed down the king’s men and so-called rats alike. Heroes and villains fell indiscriminately, but then, maybe Boru would consider it a worthy sacrifice, to lose his men if it meant eradicating this encroaching threat. Stamping out this taunting flame.
Darragh didn’t know, didn’t pretend to understand any of this.
This slaughter. A rebellion? A fight over territory and resources? A coup with one tyrant seeking to replace another?
Someone struck out at him, and he used the hurley to block the blow. Didn’t even think. Didn’t need to. That wasn’t what the king had picked him for.
He was a brute. A thug. An animal. A trained bear in chains. Maybe the king saw something in him, saw to the heart of him, in a way he couldn’t see himself. Or maybe the king saw nothing in Darragh at all, nothing beyond what he intended to shape and create.
Either way, why fight it? Darragh certainly hadn’t last night, when Ciaran had trembled under his hands.
The next time he raised the hurley, it was with purpose.
Dublin was a violent, twisted place, a ruined city at war, and at last, Darragh waded right into it. Became a part of it. Finished the transformation he’d begun last night. He broke the jaw of a man who’d brandished a knife at him. The man fell back, clutching his face, howling, the knife fallen into the debris scattered on the road. Darragh turned from him to see a woman with a bloodied face running at him with an axe, and put her down, jabbing the heel of the hurley into her throat.
Noel and his gun had cut a path of carnage through the road, back towards the building the rats had come from. Darragh would have to follow him through it. What else was there to do? There’d been no plan, no objective, no indication of who was even in charge.
That was before Noel came running back to him.
“Back!” Noel shouted. “Back! Retreat!”
Darragh barely heard him.
The woman on the ground wasn’t moving.
Dead? No, couldn’t be dead. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t like the others.
Another man came at him, his face twisted with rage.
But I’m on your side, Darragh thought, raising his arm to block the man’s swinging club. Pain sank down to his bones. Maybe there were no sides here. Maybe this was no different than fighting the dog pack back when he was a boy. Maybe the only thing to do was not get killed, whatever it took.
He had to stay alive, had to make it home, even if the people he’d left there wouldn’t recognise him anymore.
The man who’d hit him with the club had a knife in his other hand. Darragh pushed him back, sent him barrelling into someone else, and swung the hurley at his face. The crack of the impact reverberated into his arms, and then the man was down.
Darragh scrambled after Noel, who was still waving the gun around.
“Don’t!” Darragh managed.
Noel was wide-eyed, wild.
“Don’t use it all up! Keep them back, and we run!”
Dog packs regrouped when you turned your back to them, tried to bring you down again from behind. These people might try the same.
There were five of the king’s men still standing, Michael among them. His face was covered in muck and blood, and he was limping. Darragh reached out to him, looping an arm around his waist, and the pair of them made their laboured way back in the direction they’d come. There was no backup. The van was gone, burned away to a blackened husk. They were on foot, and alone, with the rats behind them. If Darragh had any idea how to use that shiny gun he might have taken it off Noel, to make sure they didn’t remain unprotected in their retreat.
“Go,” he said to Michael. “Come on, which way?”
The five of them grouped together, with Noel and the gun at their rear.
Darragh heard more shots, but didn’t look back. He didn’t really want to know if the rats were getting closer or if they’d fallen back. His adrenaline was starting to flag, leaving his body trembling and his heart racing, and his various injuries all throbbed with newly urgent pain. Michael wheezed at his side.
Darragh’s own breath rasped.
This was a nightmare. A black, bloody nightmare of his own making.
He wasn’t sure they’d make it back to the king’s court.
He wasn’t sure they deserved to.
“Five men dead,” Noel announced to Boru. “Including Seamus. The rats saw us off.”
Ciaran ducked his head. Maybe Noel was hurt enough, angry enough, that he’d forgotten to watch his tone. Everything about it was accusatory. Everything about it blamed Boru for not allowing him the men and the supplies he’d asked for the night before. The explosives and weapons he’d never give in any great quantity for fear of depleting his hoard—or possibly out of his growing paranoia that they’d be used against him.
The people on Milbourne Avenue were not ordinary rats, just as Noel had said. It had been an ambush.
“You let them die because of rats?” Boru asked in a low, dangerous tone.
“They were organised. They were ready. If the culchie hadn’t been there, none of us would have made it back!”
Ciaran slipped unnoticed out of the room before Boru’s temper erupted. The king’s rage would be too big to feed on just his pet this day; he’d bluster and shout and bellow and roar at Noel for hours. Bigger fish than Ciaran.
The distraction was welcome. It allowed him, for the first time in long days, the opportunity to be alone. These opportunities were rare and, at first, always left him feeling strangely bereft. Not that Ciaran missed Boru or had become somehow emotionally reliant on him. If Ciaran missed anyone, it was the person he’d been before all this. Solitude was a reprieve from cruelty, but the quiet reflection that came with it, wasn’t.
He headed across to Trinity.
Oh, how he’d dreamt of Trinity when he was growing up! A great institution. Historical. Venerable. It was nothing now but empty buildings and ruins, and a slowly mouldering library. The library was his, though. All his. He’d dreamed about that as well.
Never dreamed about the things he’d have to do to earn it.
Ciaran slipped into the cool gloom of the library.
He wasn’t alone.
Darragh. The big culchie was sitting where Ciaran had sat the night before, half-hidden behind the fallen shelves, the same book in his hands that Ciaran had cried over.
“Can you read that?” Ciaran asked him quietly.
Darragh looked up, eyes wide. “I … I don’t know …”
Ciaran smiled at him and wasn’t sure why. “Have you not even opened it yet?”
“If it crumbles, someone else should … should open it,” Darragh said in his stilted English. “Make it worth it.”
Ciaran’s smile faded. “There is no one else though.”
Darragh looked at the cover of the book and ran his blunt fingers over it. His knuckles were busted, swollen and bleeding. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“The blood.”
Yours or mine? Ciaran looked at him carefully and stepped closer. “Lot of blood here. Ours is nothing special.” There was blood on Darragh’s clothes, as well. “You went on the raid today.”
Darragh nodded sharply.
“Why are you not getting yelled at by the king?”
Darragh didn’t answer.
Ciaran sat on the floor in front of him, leaving space between them. Not because he was afraid of Darragh, he didn’t think, but because Darragh seemed strangely … fragile. Like he was only halfway in this world or if you touched him he would turn to dust. “You did good, then? On the raid?”
“I did bad. Today, and last night with you.”
“Last night,” Ciaran said, and hesitated. He waited until Darragh looked up, his blue eyes wide. “You’ve never done that before, have you?”
Darragh shook his head, his pale skin flushing a deep, hot red under the brown dried blood.
Ciaran showed him another smile, this one rueful. “The things we do in this place, they’re not the sum of us.” He had to believe that, just to survive. That he wasn’t the shameless whore the king said he was. He was still a person. Somewhere. In the quiet places, he was. “Was that your first time with … anyone? Or just with a man?”
“Anyone,” Darragh admitted, the shame clear on his face.
“So you haven’t …” Ciaran bit his lip, the shame washing over him, too. “Anything?”
“Not even a kiss.”
Ciaran sat back, suddenly flustered. “Well, you didn’t hurt me.”
Darragh snorted.
“I mean, not like you could have,” Ciaran said. He wrinkled his nose. “It would have been different, if we could have taken some time. Made me ready.”
He almost laughed at the strangeness of it. Of telling a man who was at least a few years older than him about sex. But then, everything about Darragh was strange. He was like an overgrown teenaged boy, in the way he held himself, the way he looked so awkward and out of place. Unspoiled, bordering on naive. Untouched, until now, by violence and horror.
On impulse, Ciaran leaned forwards and placed his hand over Darragh’s. “You’re hurt, as well.”
Darragh made no attempt to pull his hand away. “The raid.”
Ciaran lifted Darragh’s hand from the cover of the book and held it. He brushed his fingers gently over those busted knuckles. Offering some comfort, some closeness. And realised, to his surprise, that his cock was filling. He didn’t understand. Nothing about this had been sexual at all. He didn’t even know if Darragh was gay, beyond the fact that he’d been able to get an erection last night. And that, as Boru liked to remind him, didn’t mean anything. Just meant that Ciaran was another sort of cunt.
No. Darragh was kind. He didn’t have it in him to be that way. Think those things.
Darragh’s hand was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” Ciaran said. “That you’re hurt. And I’m sorry your first time had to be that way.”
A sudden spike of self-hatred flared in him. Apologising to his rapist? That was a new low. Except it wasn’t that simple. He’d known it the night before, and he knew it now. They’d both been forced. And it felt so strange to think that, finally, he wasn’t completely alone in his unique suffering.
Darragh frowned deeply, and he covered Ciaran’s hand with his own. “I’m sorry any time has to be that way for you. You don’t deserve to be … used.”
Ciaran smiled slightly as tears pricked up in his eyes. Maybe that was even true. There was a time he would have believed it, but the past few months had worn him down in so many ways. Sometimes, when Boru teased him about what ransom his father might be willing to pay, Ciaran wondered if he was worth it. If he ever had been, but especially now, after all that had happened. Or if Boru was like one of the Tuatha Dé Danann from the old stories, stealing him away from his father’s house and leaving a soulless, empty changeling in exchange. Even if his father had offered a ransom, and even if he paid it and Boru honoured it, the king would have the last laugh. Ciaran would never be the person his father had lost.
The tears fell. Ciaran laughed at himself, at how much of a mess he’d become. Something about Darragh’s presence had set him off, as well, torn away the carefully layered defences that he’d built. The numb equilibrium that had allowed him to live day-to-day, past those first few horrible weeks when it had been so raw and terrible. And now he was returning there, all because of—
“Tears again,” Darragh said.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Ciaran scrubbed his face, his laugh breaking into a hiccough. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Darragh pulled his hand away, and for a moment, Ciaran felt the sting of rejection. Then Darragh’s hand was cupping his face, his broad thumb catching Ciaran’s tears. “Nothing is wrong with you.”
Ciaran’s breath caught in his throat. “You … you mean that?”
Darragh nodded solemnly.
Ciaran lifted his hand to catch Darragh’s wrist, to hold him there. He leaned forwards slowly, his gaze locked on Darragh’s, watching as Darragh’s worried frown grew. Unchartered territory for the man now. Darragh tensed.
“No, don’t move,” Ciaran said softly. He pressed his lips against Darragh’s—a small, chaste kiss—then pul
led back a fraction. He breathed against Darragh’s jaw and moistened his lips, and waited. For Darragh to either push him away, or—
Darragh kissed him. Hot, clumsy, awkward, but real.
A real kiss. Ciaran had forgotten what it felt like; the sensation had been poisoned by biting teeth and slathering tongues.
Darragh’s kiss was anything but: Tentative. Sweet. Enthusiastic, and then heated as his arms wrapped around Ciaran’s smaller body, gathering him close, pulling him right up onto Darragh’s lap. Ciaran moaned, feeling close to stupid tears again, and caught Darragh’s hair in his fingers. Ground into his lap a little, gasping at the feel of Darragh’s cock under his arse. Wanting more.
Darragh pushed him off, nearly dumping him onto the floor. “No. We can’t.”
Ciaran stared at him and nodded, even as the rejection made his throat constrict.
“I want …” Darragh sighed. “Dangerous. I’ll hurt you again. Or Boru will. If he finds out.”
“You won’t hurt me. There’re things we can do that don’t have to hurt. It doesn’t have to hurt. And Boru won’t find out. He won’t.”
He wondered which of them he was trying to convince. But he needed this. Some part of him needed this. Sex of his choosing. A reclamation of the part of him Boru had tried to destroy. He wondered if the fact that it was Darragh even mattered, or if he was just using the man the way he’d been used so many times.
Darragh’s eyes lit with something that might have been hope. “He won’t find out?”
A thrill coursed through Ciaran. “Not if we’re careful.”
Darragh didn’t answer for a long time. Then he reached out and threaded his fingers through Ciaran’s. His face was grave. “Then I want you, if you want me, too.”
I don’t know if I want you. I don’t know if I want you or just what you have to give me. But maybe that doesn’t matter. I can lie. It wouldn’t be my first lie here, and it won’t be my last.
“I do want you,” he said.
And Darragh smiled at him, a broad, guileless smile that had no place in this world. Darragh had no place in this world. Well, then maybe—for a few minutes at least—he could take Ciaran away from here, too.
