“A plague on your humor!” Caith coughed. His side was a knotted misery and his wounded ankle a burning one; his flesh shrank under the pealing thunder-strokes and the cold battering of the rain, and he grasped Dubhain’s warm arm and held to him for fear of Dubhain’s vanishing a second time, as the smell of smoke came strongly to him on the wind.
So he had run to the very place he had tried to avoid going. His teeth began to chatter. He was chilled to the soul, fearful of what manner of folk might have their claim on that fire and that shelter.
But meanwhile his left leg was aching from the ankle to the knee. He limped a tentative step uphill, and a burning pain shot up the inner leg, as if poison were moving in it. He flailed out wildly for balance, and at once Dubhain caught his arm and flung that arm across his shoulders, bearing him up the slope as if his weight were nothing to him.
He failed to struggle. He had no wish to be abandoned on this barren slope, and he had a keen terror that Dubhain might well leave him here, Dubhain being mad and fey and bound by geas. But he had no great desire to go where Dubhain was taking him, either.
“Foolish man,” Dubhain chided him the while, “poor, foolish man, fighting against shadows and powers, now ye maun speak me fair.”
“Brave Dubhain, my fine Dubhain, —” His breath rasped through a raw throat. He was held in Dubhain’s warmth and Dubhain’s unlikely strength, supported through the driving rain and thunderous dark with a force he could neither resist nor want.
Perhaps Dubhain had come to help him— he had been in dread, and in pain, and perhaps the wounding was the anguish Dubhain’s fey saying foretold.
“Again,” Caith gasped, reeling and staggering in that warm, inexorable embrace, “Dubhain, I beg you, I ask you. Is that enough to make amends, a second and a third time— Oft as ye like, Dubhain, I ask.”
“Nay.” Dubhain’s arm tightened about his waist, and Dubhain’s hand on his wrist hauled him up despite his faltering steps. “Nay, sweet Caith, I can nae hear ye yet, I can nae listen t’ ye, the thunder drowns your voice, though I do love ye well, my Caith, and bear ye safe— hoosht, now, ye see, ye see, here’s rest for ye!”
Caith blinked the rain from his eyes and saw the crest of the hill taking on a man-made shape, the low ridge of a cottage roof. The place showed no light. Its shutters were tight and let nothing escape. But its smoke came to him, smelling of wood-fire rather than the peat more common in Teile; and, most madly, most heart-breakingly wonderful... smelling of bread recently baked.
They passed a pen beside a shed. Goats stared at them in slit-eyed curiosity, in the lightning strokes. A ewe bleated, rain-soaked and frightened by the thunder. Caith stared back, helplessly carried past the rough railings, affrighted at where Dubhain was taking him, seeing in the goats and the sheep a figure of the trapped and the damned in this cursed night, of himself and Dubhain penned here together with something more fell than he could reckon of still hunting him through the storm. He could beg Dubhain to loose all the animals into the dark, for fear it would come here. But that freedom was no kindness to a sheep. It was what it was.
And it was no kindness close at his side, which bore him limping and stumbling along in the storm— it was not kindness that Dubhain served tonight or any night.
“The shed,” Caith protested as Dubhain took him toward the cottage door. “We can lodge there, Dubhain. We have no need to trouble these folk at all!”
The house with its lightless shutters might be as dreadful on its own terms as that woods down in the deep glen; but there was that smell of baking, that argued for some gentler presence— and he feared they might be some innocent folk, a family, children, even— all chances he feared with the fear of the damned. He tried at the very last to push free and to stand on his own feet, but the wounded leg gave way beneath him and the ankle turned as Dubhain haled him up to the door, at which Dubhain rapped cheerfully.
“Help, hey!” Dubhain sang out. “Travelers in need of shelter’och, help for me master, have mercy, ho!”
“Give o’er!” Caith gasped, and shoved away and leaned instead against the stone wall, for Dubhain’s humors appalled and frightened him. He caught at Dubhain’s white-shirted arm, warm despite the chill of the rain on them both, and got only Dubhain’s broad grin and a toss of Dubhain’s head as a peephole in the door shot open. Dubhain instantly stood a-tiptoe, presenting himself to be seen, instantly suffering in pitiful, rain-drenched shivers.
“Me master,” Dubhain cried, as the golden light from within fell on his face and shoulders. “Oh, mercy, there’s something hunting in the woods! Mercy, let us in!” He seized up Caith in his arms, dragging him all unwilling into that light. “We’re perishin’ o’ the cold out here! Hae ye mercy, let us in!”
An eye stared out that peephole and scanned the dark behind them. In no case to walk even as far as the shed, Caith hung within Dubhain’s arms, teeth chattering, hoping in the honest part of his heart for that spyhole to be thrown fast shut and Dubhain’s cleverness for once thwarted. Dubhain was a familiar damnation to him, one he knew how to suffer and endure tonight, only so long as Dubhain did not abandon him to that rattling thing by the riverside, only so that horror was not this moment snuffling and sucking and rattling its way up the slope like all the bones of the damned arisen from some hallowless and dreadful bog.
In that latter thought he cast a look past Dubhain’s shoulder, onto a slope lightning-lit and overgrown with whin, full of shapes any one of which might be that creature.
The bar thumped within the house and the door swung open, dazzling his eyes with firelight and making of the tenant only a hazed shadow as Dubhain dragged him inside perforce, into warmth and light.
Then in that tidy small house, as the householder shut the door and the bar dropped down with a sound like doom, the shivering and the dread came on him in earnest, the pain in his leg grown all-encompassing. Caith caught his balance on one foot, then gripped Dubhain’s shirt for fear of fainting in the warm air, as Dubhain turned him to regard their host.
Caith saw three things: first, a door warded with iron and with knotted rowan-sprigs, a charm against faery (but not against faery once bidden enter); second, a youth, fair as the Sidhe himself, all golden in the firelight; and, third, a sword in that youth’s hand the blade of which gleamed with lamplight and the point of which threatened his undefended heart. By the shimmering of the blade, the hand holding the hilt was trembling, which could give the helpless object of that fear no comfort.
Dubhain, to be sure, stood holding him to the fore like a shield, for Dubhain had no great love of iron at all.
Chapter Two
“There is the fire,” the young man said, although the sword never dropped its line toward Caith’s heart. “Sit there, if you wish.”
“Your mercy,” Caith breathed, in what voice he had left him. He struggled lamely to turn in that direction, and solicitously Dubhain bore him toward the hearth, past a table on which was set a supper: a half a loaf of bread, a bit of white cheese, a pitcher with a chipped rim... things better than gold to Caith’s eyes. He hoped for the offer of a supper even while he was hurting too much to think of courtesies or escapes.
But the setting of two plates caught his attention. Two earthen brown cups, and two plates with crumbs on them.
So it was in no anticipation of visitors that table had been laid.
More, a rough-spun curtain screened the end of the room.
“Me master thanks you,” Dubhain said to the youth, facing him about, “thanks you from the bottom of his heart.”
“Have mercy,” Caith said through his teeth, ill-liking Dubhain’s false and dangerous courtesy, while he felt the iron strength of Dubhain’s fingers bruise his arm to the bone.
“Och, me master,” Dubhain said against his ear, setting him down on the warm fieldstone hearth, and began to unfasten his cloak pin. Caith struck at Dubhain’s hand to prevent him. Resist more than that, he dared not, dared not provoke doubt, or alarm
the youth more than he was alarmed already. In bringing him under this roof, Dubhain had gained a hostage for his ‘master’s’ good behavior, a hostage who stood looking doubtfully on them both, sword in hand. “The cold hae tried him sair,” Dubhain said to the youth.
“A plague on your pity,” Caith rasped, hugging his sodden limbs into a knot about his sword, his teeth chattering with a racket like the boggy thing below. The pain in his leg had shot to his groin, now, burning and aching at the same time. His stocking was ripped, and the wound that showed through the raveling was muddy and already purpling with corruption. That sight made him shiver more than from the cold, seeing death inexorably climbing his leg to his vitals.
“Badbh and Macha,” he moaned, although no gods had help for him. He felt desolate of every hope. He had never a doubt that evil was his lot, both the doing and the suffering of it, but he had never foreseen himself a cripple, or dying convulsed from some foul night-creature’s poison, with no reason for it ever offered him.
“Ah,” said Dubhain, and stripped down his stocking and laid hands on the wound. Warmth and pain were both in that touch, a pang so delicious and so acute that Caith let the sword fall and threw back both hands to brace himself against the hearthstones. Back went his head and the breath hissed between his teeth as Dubhain’s hand moved and sent heat and cold at once bone-deep. He could not see for that instant, could not get his breath; some shout seemed to hang in the numbed, blind air, and it might well have been his.
“He hae set his foot amiss,” Dubhain was saying, then, to the youth who hovered, firelit, behind Dubhain’s shoulder. “A wrenching of the joint, I think. — There, me master, there, lean yourself against the stone. ’t will pass, ’t will pass, ye’ll take nae harm of your foolishness.”
Dubhain lifted his hands from his ankle. There was no wound. The flesh was unscarred. Caith stared at it with a helpless loathing of the power that went singing through his veins like strong drink— at once corrupting judgment and wit, telling him he had no need of leaning against anything, or of rest tonight or any night. It was too much. It was not a human thing, yet his all-too human body must contain it, quivering. The blood buzzed in his ears, making him want to get up and walk and be rid of it. The breath would not come fast enough, even so, and he was near to fainting. More, he realized the threat still hung over him: the drawn sword in the youth’s hands had never gone to sheath— in dazed calculation of which, he took the belt of his own sword, and, still struggling for his every breath, he giddily passed it over his head and shoved the sheathed blade aside on the hearth-stones, out of convenient reach.
“Peace,” he said. “The gods’ peace, man, I am no bandit, and my lad is no thief.”
“There is bread,” said the youth, “and milk and butter.” Saying which, he walked away toward the door and, with a wary and misgiving glance at them, took up the sheath of the sword and put it away with a hiss of metal. “I have little to spare, but be welcome to it.”
So the young freeholder invited them reluctantly to his supper, while from behind the curtain at the back of the room there peered another young face, a young woman’s face, fair-haired as the youth, gloriously beautiful.
“Aha,” Dubhain said with immediate and lascivious interest, and the youth glanced behind him in dismay.
“Firinne,” he chided her.
“What harm?” she asked gently, this Firinne, and Caith felt he had heard no sound in all his wandering so entrancing as that soft voice. She came out from behind her curtain into the lamplight, and he found nothing else in all the world to look at.
It was, perhaps, the spell the house cast, in its quaint homeliness, the work of her hands, he was sure; and it was the sum of all those things a man accursed could never enjoy. Perhaps it was only the unexpectedness of her, so quiet and gracious and so giving of her hospitality— but in that one unguarded moment he would have given up the last shred of his soul if she would look at him kindly and never realize in him the danger that had taken shelter under her roof.
Not, to be sure, that his thoughts of her were altogether pure, even in the instant of seeing her; but he set any desire of her as far off as he could put it, and at once, for all their safety. He was willing to adore her for no other thing than that she was fair and gracious and brave enough to welcome strangers in her house— precisely that bravery which most folk lacked toward things of the Sidhe, and especially toward strangers unexpected on their doorsteps. It was that true gentleness of heart she had, to which Dubhain’s care of him could never attain.
At least that was what he wished to see: he gazed at her from the depths of his bartered soul, while she set about the housewifely business of setting him and Dubhain a generous plate of food and pouring them a cup of milk apiece from the chipped pitcher on her table. Everything the pair offered them was the hospitality of householders who owned no superfluity of cups and dishes, nor even of sustenance, and to a houseless wanderer’s eyes there was beauty in every simple thing Firinne did.
“She is my wife,” the youth said sternly, and Caith glanced at the youth to find him standing grimly near the door and beside his sword. The warning fell harshly on Firinne’s gracious welcome; and in a second breath Caith did not at all believe the youth had told him the truth about Firinne. The two of them were as alike as brother and sister could possibly be.
But, sitting spent and rain-soaked on a stranger’s hearth and expecting supper on his charity, he dared not call the young householder a liar to his face.
“Aye,” Caith said. “’T is your house, man, and we your most grateful guests. We give good peace to this roof, tonight and hereafter.”
The young man seemed in better sorts then, and to make firm the point, Caith reached eft-handed for his sword and sword-belt, which lay, at a stretch, still within his reach. With his fingertips he pushed it aside on the hearth-stones, moving the sheathed point of the sword as far as he could push it, at which gesture the young householder looked at last mollified.
“Caith is my name,” Caith said, and if his red Dun Mhor tartan or the luck that was on his house was at all known here, the youth gave no sign of knowing either: nor did he himself recognize the brown and gold plaid the householder wore. “Mac Gaelan,” Caith added, which was the name he used when he wished to avoid awkwardness in chance meetings, and it was the name he wished to the bottom of his heart were indeed his, the one which, if it were his, would make him less blood-guilty than he was and his soul less damned. He rested against the fire-warmed stones at Dubhain’s side, awaiting courteous response, and watched the young man intercept the food the young woman had prepared, to offer it to them himself.
“My name,” the youth said, when they had received their supper from his hands, “is Ceannann mac Ceannann. My wife’s is Firinne.”
“My lad here,” Caith said wryly, “is Dubhain. A fatherless orphan.” He took a sip from the cup of goat’s milk, and Dubhain drank his, with a slant-eyed glance aside at him, full of wicked mirth— for it was obligation a Sidhe gave and accepted with that small sup of goat’s milk, obligation and a binding to favor. He knew what was settled on them, and Dubhain surely knew, but most likely their hosts did not.
And when they had both drunk and eaten, Caith was content merely to rest his back against the stones of the fireplace while his rain-soaked clothing dried on his body. He would have been grateful to sit all night in that condition, fed and warmed inside, but the young host brought them blankets, and Firinne absented herself behind the curtain, to sleep, one supposed.
“Take off your wet clothes,” Ceannann said, “and wrap in these. There’s wood to keep the fire high tonight.”
Caith hesitated. He was reluctant as always to go shirtless in view of strangers, because of the scars that marked his back; but, more practically speaking, the clothes he wore were all the property he owned in the world; and being, as they were, all his protection from strangers— curiosity, he had far rather let them dry on his body than sit naked in a strange
house, with the thunder walking over the rooftree to remind him there was a haunted woods downslope and that this was a stranger house than most.
But the youth had asked no questions of him, had asked not even those few probing questions which any proper host had a right to ask of a traveler under his roof.
So one could conclude that one of them was not honest in the other’s sight; and that Ceannann either had no wish to have the answers, or thought that they would not bear close questions.
But Caith’s belly held the young couple’s food, his chilled flesh was being warmed by their fire, at which he seemed to have at least grudging welcome, and there was the gentleness of Firinne’s presence behind the curtain to restrain rough and foolish men from violence. Caith undid the laces of his shirt, while beside him Dubhain shrugged out of his clothes without a touch of shame, and wrapped himself in the offered blanket— warmth which was no necessity to Dubhain, this willful power which had abandoned him in the woods and then dragged him to this doubtful refuge. But, oh, aye, Dubhain was willing enough for any sensation the mortal world could offer him, especially the pleasurable ones.
“Och,” Dubhain said, grinning, as Caith reached after the blanket Ceannann offered him. “’T is a fine, gentle man, a courteous host, for such an out-of-the-way place. D’ ye not thank our host, my master?”
“From the heart,” Caith said, since Dubhain obliged him to say something; and because he was anxious to persuade the youth of their good will and their harmlessness. There were hurts fouler than the scratch the thing in the dark had laid on him. There was host-murder, for one.
Make me not slay them, Caith wished, heart-deep, of whatever powers drove Dubhain tonight. Leave them in peace. They’ve dealt well with us. They’ve sheltered us. They’ve fed us. Can ye ask more?
Faery Moon Page 10
