by P. C. Cast
Fand and the big gelding temporarily forgotten, Kyna had tugged on Cuchulainn’s cloak for his attention. “Watch me catch the snow with my tongue!”
Still crouched beside his wolf cub, Cuchulainn had watched the little girl throw her arms wide and spread her dove-colored wings. With the innate innocence of childhood she stuck out her tongue, twirled and jumped, trying to catch the elusive flakes. Soon she was joined by dozens of other children and he was surrounded by the timeless laughter and joy of youth. For an unexpected instant he’d felt the suffocating pain of losing Brenna shift and ease and become almost bearable.
Cuchulainn thought he would remember that moment for the rest of his life. Though he didn’t realize it, thinking about the children relaxed the tight sadness that had claimed his handsome face since Brenna’s death. He almost looked like himself again, the Cuchulainn who had been quick to smile and laugh and had been filled with life and hope and the promise of a full and happy future.
Now, with a soft woof, Fand slunk low to the earth, pulling Cu’s thoughts back to the present and shifting the focus of his attention to the trail ahead. Silently Cuchulainn moved forward. Readying an arrow, he peered around the next boulder to see the wild, white sheep pawing through the snow at a patch of yellow lichen. Taking a long, slow breath he notched the arrow, but before he could draw and aim, he heard the distinctive twang of a loosed bow and the sheep dropped, a quivering arrow neatly embedded at the base of its neck.
Fand’s growl changed to a yip of welcome when the centaur Huntress stepped from behind a concealing ledge.
3
“YOU TOOK MY shot, Huntress.” Cuchulainn’s words were gruff, but he smiled and grasped the centaur’s forearm in greeting. He was surprised at the pleasure he felt at the sight of Brighid. With her came a vision of MacCallan Castle. Until that moment he hadn’t realized how much he had begun to long for home. And then on the heels of his remembrance came a wave of fresh pain. Brenna would not be there. All that remained of her was a monument carved in her image and a cold grave.
“Took your shot?” The Huntress’s unusual violet eyes sparkled. “If I remember correctly the last time we hunted together you hit nothing and chose to bring your prey back alive.” She returned Cuchulainn’s smile, even though his had faded into an odd grimace. She clasped his forearm warmly before frowning down at the young wolf that was leaping around her hocks. “I can see the creature is still alive.”
“Fand is an excellent companion.” He motioned for the jubilant cub to leave the Huntress alone. Fand ignored him.
“She hasn’t learned any manners.” Brighid kicked a hoof absently at the squirming cub, who decided it was a game and began biting at her hock.
Cuchulainn growled low in his throat, sounding remarkably wolf like, and, looking dejected, Fand stopped her mock attack and flopped down on her belly to stare with soulful eyes at the warrior.
Brighid lifted a brow. “Seems I have come just in time. You obviously need some civilized company.”
“Meaning you?”
The Huntress nodded. “There is nothing more civilized than a centaur.”
She waited for Cu’s return gibe, which did not come. Instead the warrior tucked his arrow back in its quill and began striding toward the sheep.
“My sister sent you, didn’t she?”
“I volunteered. I don’t like to see her worried. And—”
Cuchulainn whirled around and cut her off. “Elphame is well?”
Brighid heard the thinly veiled panic in the warrior’s voice and was quick to reassure him. “She’s quite well. Renovation of the castle moves ahead. The Clan is happy and healthy. The first new MacCallan Clan member has been born within the castle’s walls. And, as I was about to explain, the game in the forest is so thick that even humans can easily hunt it. So I thought I would kill two birds with a single arrow.” She grinned, raising her empty bow. “I’d alleviate my Chieftain’s worry for her errant brother, as well as hunt something more challenging than deer that are practically domesticated.”
As she spoke she studied Cuchulainn’s face. The panic had dissipated, leaving him looking tired and relieved, and then, as she watched, even those small emotions fell from his face, until it seemed he was wearing an expressionless mask. He had lost weight. His eyes were shadowed by darkness and new lines feathered from their corners. Was that gray in his sand-colored hair? He bent to pull her arrow from the sheep’s body and she looked down at him. Yes, it was, indeed, gray that glinted around his brow. The man before her looked easily a decade older than he had two moon cycles earlier.
“Here,” Brighid said, swiveling at the waist to pull two long leather cords from one of the travel packs slung across her back. “Tie this around its legs. I’ll drag it.”
Cuchulainn returned the arrow to her after wiping it clean in the snow.
“My gelding isn’t far from here.”
Brighid snorted. “I hope your camp isn’t far from here. I’ve seen little of the Wastelands, but I already do not savor the thought of spending the night in the open. Not in this Goddess-be-damned wind.”
For an instant she thought she saw amusement flash in his eyes, but all he said as he took the cords was, “The camp is not far, either. But we should hurry. The nights are cold.”
Methodically he squatted by the sheep’s rear haunches and began tying its legs.
Elphame had been wise to worry. It was obvious that the Cuchulainn his sister knew and loved was disappearing under the weight of grief and guilt. Brighid could only imagine how much the sight would wound her Chieftain. Brighid hated seeing what Brenna’s death had done to him, and he was just her friend.
She smiled sadly at the warrior’s back. Theirs had been an unlikely friendship. Cuchulainn had known too well the segregationist beliefs of her family concerning humans and centaurs and he had been leery to trust Brighid. And, quite frankly, the Huntress had thought Cuchulainn an arrogant womanizer. At first they had snapped at and circled one another like restless beasts protecting territory. But as the Huntress had watched the rakish young warrior fall in love with the Clan’s newly appointed Healer, she had seen the real Cuchulainn—the compassionate, loyal man who lived within the skin of the dashing warrior. And she had won his trust in turn. First, by helping him track Elphame after she had taken a nasty fall, and finally, regrettably, by fighting at his side when they captured the hybrid Fomorian Fallon after she murdered Brenna.
“Brenna’s death is a heavy burden to bear,” Brighid said solemnly.
Cuchulainn’s head was bowed in concentration as he finished securing the cords, and she could see his back stiffen. He stood slowly and met the Huntress’s sharp gaze.
“Yes.” He bit out the word.
Brighid didn’t flinch from the anger in his voice. She knew from her own experience that anger was part of grief’s healing process.
“Your sister planted those blue wildflowers Brenna liked so much all around her grave. The Clan talks about how beautiful the tomb is, and how much Brenna is missed.”
“Stop,” Cuchulainn said between clenched teeth.
“As long as we remember her, she is not completely gone, Cu.”
“Not completely gone!” Cuchulainn laughed humorlessly. He threw the cords he had been holding to the ground and spread his arms, palms up, looking around them. “Then show her to me. I don’t see her. I don’t hear her. I can’t touch her. To me, Huntress, she is completely gone.”
“Brenna would hate to see you like this, Cuchulainn.”
“Brenna is not here!”
“Cu—” the Huntress began, but the warrior’s gruff voice cut her off.
“Leave it be, Brighid.”
She met his gaze squarely. “I will leave it be for now, but you cannot continue like this. Not forever.”
“You are right about that. Nothing continues forever, Huntress.” Abruptly he bent and retrieved the leather cords. Handing one to her he wrapped the other over his shoulder. “This way.” He
pointed his chin back the way he had come. “We need to hurry. Night will fall soon.”
Mimicking Cuchulainn’s motions, Brighid placed the cord over her shoulder and together they dragged the sheep’s body. As the Huntress glanced at Cu’s haggard profile she thought grief had already caused night to fall within Cuchulainn’s wounded soul. Could anything, even his Goddess-touched sister’s love, ever bring the light of happiness to his life again?
They spoke little as they traveled steadily in the direction of the waning sun. Together they had quickly dressed the sheep and folded it into the leather carrier Cuchulainn strapped over the big gelding’s hindquarters. There were several questions Brighid wanted to ask, but the warrior’s manner was so withdrawn, his few words so brusque, that she had learned little more than that he’d easily found the hybrid Fomorian settlement, that there were almost one hundred of them, and that they were eager to return to Partholon. When she asked him what they were like he’d said only, “They’re just people,” and withdrawn again into silence. Brighid had decided that conversing with him was like cuddling a porcupine. Not worth the trouble. She was a Huntress. She would observe the hybrids for herself as she would any other creature of the Wastelands and then form her own opinion.
And she would always keep in mind that they had been fathered by a race of demons.
“Do you like children?”
Brighid raised her brows at the strange question, not sure she had heard Cuchulainn correctly. “Children?”
He grunted and nodded.
“I don’t know. I don’t particularly like or dislike them. They don’t usually figure into the life of a Huntress, unless you count that I have to consider them as extra mouths to feed. Why do you ask?”
“We are almost to the settlement. There are—” he paused and glanced sideways at her “—children there.”
“I expect children. Lochlan told all of us about them back at the castle. You know that. You were there.”
“Lochlan didn’t exactly tell us everything,” Cuchulainn said cryptically.
“That’s no surprise to me.” Brighid snorted.
The warrior gave her a lidded look. “You don’t sound like you trust Lochlan.”
“Do you?”
“He saved my sister’s life,” Cuchulainn said simply.
Brighid nodded slowly. “Yes, he did. But it was Lochlan’s coming to Partholon that placed her life in jeopardy in the first place.”
Cuchulainn said nothing. He’d already thought over and over again about how Lochlan’s presence had changed all of their lives. But he found it hard to blame his sister’s lifemate, which did not mean he was willing to fully embrace the winged man. It only meant that Cuchulainn was most willing to blame himself for the events that had culminated in his sister’s sacrifice and Brenna’s death. He should have known. He would have known had he listened to the warnings from the spirit realm. But Cuchulainn had always turned from the use of spirits and magic and the mysterious power of the Goddess, even though it was obvious from an early age that he had inherited his Shaman father’s spirit gifts. Cu was a warrior. It was all he’d ever wanted to be. His affinity with the sword was the only gift he desired.
His stubbornness had sealed his lover’s doom.
“I thought you said we were almost at the camp. I see nothing ahead except more of this empty, dismal land.”
Cuchulainn dragged his dark thoughts back to the silver-coated centaur who trotted by his side.
“Look more closely, Huntress,” he said.
Brighid glowered at him. Friends they may have become, but the warrior still had a knack for getting under her skin.
Cuchulainn almost smiled. “Don’t feel bad. I didn’t see it at first, either. If I hadn’t been with Curran and Nevin I would have probably toppled blindly over the edge.”
“I don’t…” At first the landscape appeared to be a snow-patched, treeless plain. Red shale, the same color as the great boulders that flanked the Trier Mountains, littered the ground. But then her vision caught an almost imperceptible change. “It’s a gorge. By the Goddess! The land is so bleak and similar that one side matches the other almost perfectly.”
“It’s an optical illusion, one the human mothers of the New Fomorians thought to use to their advantage more than one hundred years ago when they were desperate to find a safe place to build their settlement.”
“New Fomorians?”
“That’s what they call themselves,” Cuchulainn said.
Brighid snorted.
“The path winds down from there.”
He pointed at Fand’s disappearing hind end and clucked his gelding into a gentle canter, pulling him up just before the land dropped away beneath them. Brighid moved to stand beside him and drew in breath sharply at the sight below. The gorge opened as if a giant had taken an ax and hewed an enormous wedge from the cold, rocky earth. The wall on which they stood was taller than the opposite side of the canyon. The sheer drop must have been at least two hundred feet. A small river ran through the middle of the valley. And nestled against the gentler northern wall of the canyon was a cluster of round buildings. Brighid could make out distant figures, and she strained to see wings as the self-proclaimed New Fomorians moved between circular-shaped houses and corrals and low, squat structures she thought might be animal shelters.
She could feel Cuchulainn watching her.
“The human women chose wisely. There’s shelter in the walls of the canyon and a ready water supply. I can even see a few things that might be masquerading as trees,” she said. “If I had been with them, this would have been the site I would have recommended.” In actuality if Brighid had been with them, she would have recommended they slit their monstrous infants’ throats and return to Partholon where the women belonged. But that was a thought the Huntress decided was best kept to herself.
“It’s an unforgiving land. I have been surprised at how well they have survived. I expected…” Cuchulainn’s words trailed off as if he was sorry he’d said so much.
Brighid was looking at him with open curiosity.
Cu cleared his throat and pointed the gelding’s head down the steep trail. “Watch where you step. The shale is slick.”
Brighid followed Cuchulainn, wondering at the changes in him. Were they all because of Brenna’s death, or had something happened here in the Wastelands? Even had he not been her friend, the Huntress owed it to her Chieftain to find out.
4
THE FIRST HYBRID Brighid saw was doing something totally unexpected. He was laughing. The Huntress heard him before she saw him. His laughter rolled up the trail to meet them, punctuated by mock growls and youthful snarls.
“They like Fand,” Cuchulainn muttered in explanation.
The warrior and the Huntress finally stepped onto level ground and walked around a rough outcropping of rock to see a winged man sprawled on his back in the middle of the trail. Tongue lolling and mouth open as if she were smiling, the young wolf cub’s paws were planted squarely on his chest.
“Fand rolled me, Cuchulainn. She’s growing so fast that in no time she’ll be a proper wolf,” he said, chuckling and scratching the cub’s scruff. When he glanced up and saw the centaur by Cu’s side, his eyes rounded in shock.
“Fand, here!” Cuchulainn ordered. This time the wolf chose to obey, hopping off the hybrid’s chest and loping back to her master.
The winged man stood quickly, brushing dirt and snow from his tunic, all the while keeping his large eyes fixed on Brighid.
“Gareth, this is—”
Gareth’s excited voice cut him off. “The Huntress, Brighid! It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Gareth. This is MacCallan’s Huntress, Brighid Dhianna.”
Gareth executed a quick, awkward bow, and Brighid realized that he was really just a tall, gangly youth who stared at her with open, awestruck delight.
“Well met, Brighid!” Gareth gushed, his voice cracking on her name.
Brighid could hear Cuchulainn’s
sigh and she stifled a smile.
“Well met, Gareth,” she returned the greeting.
“Wait till I tell the others! They won’t believe it. You’re even more beautiful than Curran and Nevin described.”
Gareth started to rush away, then stopped, turned back and bowed sheepishly to Brighid again. The Huntress could have sworn that the youth’s cheeks were reddened with an embarrassed blush.
“Pardon me, Huntress. I’ll go tell the others that we have a visitor. Another one!” Then he turned and, with wings spread, all but flew down the path.
“Foolish boy,” Cuchulainn muttered.
Brighid raised a brow at the warrior. “I’m even more beautiful than Curran and Nevin described?”
Cuchulainn lifted his hands in a gesture of quiet frustration. “The twins tell stories in the evenings. You are a favorite subject.”
“Me? How can that be? Curran and Nevin hardly know me.”
“Apparently they put the short time they spent at MacCallan Castle to excellent use. They listened and observed. A lot. You know how the Clan likes to talk, and the more they talk, the more deeds grow. You didn’t just track Elphame in the night through the forest to find where she had fallen—you did it all in a lashing storm, too,” he said.
“I did nothing of the sort. The storm began on our way home. And it wasn’t full dark until after we found Elphame.” Brighid tried to sound annoyed, but she couldn’t help the smile that played at the corner of her lips.
“And then there’s the story of Fand,” Cuchulainn said, shifting in the saddle as if he was suddenly uncomfortable.
Brighid’s brows went up. “And who told them about that, Cu?”
Cuchulainn shrugged and kneed the gelding to follow Gareth’s path. “They asked. And they can be very persistent when they want to know something.”
“They being Curran and Nevin?” Brighid asked his broad back.
“No. They being the children.”
And then a noise drifted to the Huntress’s acute hearing. She thought it sounded like the chattering of many birds.
