They looked around, then, and, perhaps at the grimness they saw in his face, or at something they saw in Dubhain’s, Ceannann put his arm about Firinne and drew her behind him as if they might murder her in parting. The terror on two innocent faces and the desperate plight this attack had set them in made Caith yearn to do something to prove himself of worth— such as staying and helping Ceannann search the hills for their flock, in the case one or two goats might have escaped, their kind being somewhat nimbler and far cannier than a sheep.
But their faces invited no such offer of help— in fact, Ceannann’s was hostile and suspicious; and he feared staying long here, given Firinne’s brazen, perhaps simple-hearted approach to him and the distrust he had already felt in the house.
“Let us go,” he said to Dubhain. “Let us bring no more harm on these folk.”
“Nay, thou forgettest, thou hast no longer my summoning.” Dubhain skipped a step across a puddle, light and barefoot to the bitter morning chill. Dubhain looked back at him, then, a wicked grin on his dusky face. “Ask them, man. Ask them whence they come and why they lodge in this lonely place. Does curiosity fail thee?”
“I ask them nothing,” he muttered, and waved his sword at Dubhain to send him ahead of him and away. “we’ve done them harm enough! Of mercy, let them be!” An acute foreboding was on him now, an overwhelming anxiousness to be away, so vivid a foreboding that he felt a sweat start on his body, and he overtook Dubhain in the sloping yard and caught him by the arm.
As well grasp the stone of the mountain— and Dubhain was so happy with the world this morning. “Of mercy,” Caith hissed into Dubhain’s ear. “D’ ye hear me, Sidhe? Take it of me later. Take what you will. Bring nothing on their heads!”
“They hae brought it on themselves and will deserve more,” Dubhain said, and, turning in his grip, tilted his head. Wild, dark eyes leered at him from beneath Dubhain’s thick forelock, brown eyes which glowed with inward red like embers, and Dubhain grinned. “Is ’t not ever the way of men?”
“Let be, let be!” He flung the cozening rascal a step further downhill. A chill had settled over his skin, as if the storm had come back and obscured the wan morning sun. He stalked away down the hill alone, Dubhain lingering to spite him, and where he went now he cared not at all, only that he distance himself from this cottage and from Ceannann’s suspicions as quickly as his legs could carry him, before more and worse befell the two of them, or pushed him into fatal confrontation with the boy.
“Hoosht! Hey!” Dubhain overtook him effortlessly, skipping along beside him on the rain-wet grass. “What a leave-taking! And you a king’s son! Who ever taught you courtesy?”
“The same who taught me murder,” he said shortly, and strode on downhill, toward the woods below, the quickest way off the hill. For a time he heard nothing at all, not even Dubhain’s footsteps near him.
But there was no shaking Dubhain or his humor.
“The Sidhe decreed,” Dubhain declared cheerfully, skipping up beside him, when he was well toward the trees and the dark depths of the glen, “the Sidhe foreknew what would happen here i’ the night. Draiocht and geas, d’ ye nae feel the weaving of webs and black witchery in this place? D’ ye nae feel Necessity weighing every word and syllable?”
“A plague I say!” Caith tried to walk faster, blind in his going, and slid down a rain-slick patch of grass, almost under the trees.
Draiocht. Sorceries.
Geas. Compulsion.
And by that, he knew that there was indeed no trail through this glen but one, and that his cursed temper was leading him down and down again beneath the trees and toward the black water. All his course into and through this valley was alike, no matter what his choosing. His path brought the shadow in the deep glen up the hill or brought him down to the shadow, it was all the same.
And it was another Shadow which skipped blithely by him.
“Things are greatly out of joint here,” Dubhain said, mincing along a bank of dead bracken. “Look ye, how the forest comes sae neatly up to the hill where that pretty pair hae made their nest. And the burn here below winds a’ through it, convenient for mischief.”
“Let be, I say!”
“D’ ye go a-hunting to-day, sweet Caith?”
“I do nothing! I brought them nothing, I take nothing away from this place, I do them no harm and I mean them none!”
“Necessity, necessity, necessity...”
“Be quiet!” Caith slouched on down the decline of the hill in a dour and bitter mind, discovered the black water in front of him, and found that, as the only open ground afforded him, he must walk beside that stream.
And why he did not then set his face back toward Teile and the sunlight he could not say, even while he walked doggedly in the other, hellbound direction. He wished with all his heart to do exactly that, and go home— but home was a deception, and turning back to Teile and the remote, tormenting hope of the folk he loved ... all that now seemed unreachable to him, like calling back a word once spoken, or restoring blood once spilled. He could not do any of these things.
And, most immediately threatening, turning back required going back near the hillside, and passing within sight of the cottage, and all too close to the lives of the young folk he swore now to leave, if he could, without more harm than had already followed him to their doorstep.
“Geas, my sweet prince. A curse is on this land as strong and as bluidy as your own. Ye feel it. Oh, aye, ye can See it in the water and in the clouds. Bluid, bluid, and bluid.”
“Damn your Seeing!” He thrust a branch from his path and climbed along the uneven bank, below a place where great boulders had erupted from the side of the mountain, rock grey and black and shattered in some ancient violence. Dead bracken brushed his legs with last night’s rain, as limp and cold as dead flesh. Fallen leaves were black and rotten underfoot, a few rags still clinging to the trees, dripping with water.
“Rash, my Caith, rash,” Dubhain chided him. “And where are ye going now, sae angry, d’ ye know?”
Caith had no more idea than before where he was going now or even whether the water would lead him the quickest way out of this accursed glen. Reason told him, now that it was too late, that he should have taken the climb from the cottage to the high hills and over the heathery heights the sunlight loved, however cold the nights in the mountains above. What drove him along this darksome path was not reason, and it was a minuscule part of his torment that he constantly knew better than he did. But he dared not go back across the young couple’s land, that was the solitary resolution he had formed, and he clung to it as the only way of escape from the Sidhe’s doings, no matter what power had brought him here.
The bank went level a time, and dead, dry bracken gave way to a margin of forest leaf-mold at the water’s edge. Then it was a less breathless walk for a space, but gradually the outcrops of tumbled stone thrust closer and closer to the stream, forcing them nearer and nearer to its brink, where, about the occasional black rocks that had tumbled down into the water, Guagach murmured with a dizzy sound, and became a white frothed, peat-stained rapids.
That, Caith hoped, might mark the convenient range of the creature that he suspected lived in it, although the Badbh knew it could go on dry land if it liked. He walked beside that white-frothing water, and Dubhain skipped along the perilous rocks, sometimes peering into the still side-pools of the stream and then running to catch up.
“Why, man,” Dubhain said, “ye are sae glum today. Shall I amuse you? Shall I? — Hoosht, man, something is coming. My ears hear it. Are ye deaf? Or is it human folk at all that hear this thing?”
Dubhain’s chatter often had more of mischief than of sense; this morning, it had became noise to him. Then the meaning came to him as well as the mischief, and he stopped still, knowing Dubhain both warned and mocked him of what was fated for him in this valley. He looked helplessly about him, scanning for ambushes, and gazed up the pillared darkness of the trees about this autumn stream c
ourse, where a great fall of rocks came near the stream and left only a narrow muddy bank.
Then his ears caught what Dubhain’s faery sense had surely caught before him, the moving of many horses together, a warning treacherous and sourceless in this narrow, rocky place. Trees and rocks cast echoes this way and that, but, as best he could tell, it came from downstream and ahead of them. They were walking the only path that offered itself, and that left them exposed and vulnerable, after leaving abundant tracks along a bank where he was suddenly, reasonlessly certain that no intrusion was welcome.
And their tracks led straight to the cottage on their backtrail.
“O gods,” he said, looking back.
“Come along, man, shall we play these riders a joke?”
“Damn you!”
He flung off Dubhain’s hand. Dubhain’s nostrils flared, his head came up and the red showed clear within his eyes. “’T is the weird on this land that the Sidhe hae decreed,” Dubhain said, gazing at him as if his flesh were no barrier to those red eyes at all. “And thou’rt within it, thou, and I.” The voice hissed and whispered like a spring within deep rocks. “O my sweet prince, that sword ye carry mends less than most of its kind. Will ye draw? And what will ye seek with it? Blood? But whose, my sweet murderer?” Dubhain grasped his arm and drew him aside, while the noise of horses and riders came closer and clearer through the woods, a jangling and jingling of harness, a splashing of shallow water and hooves striking mud and stone just around the winding of the stream.
Dubhain dragged him perforce toward a den in the tumbled boulders. Caith resisted, and Dubhain’s grip became stronger, became ice, became watery cold in which sense and resistance drowned. Caith staggered at the last and the bank and the forest reeled in a cold haze. He fell down into this dizziness and knew himself cradled in Dubhain’s arms, down in that dark place among the rocks, as half a score of riders came by so near their concealment that a spatter of rotten leaves struck his arm and leg. He struggled to be free, and to take his own fate into his hands, but now his whole body grew numb.
“Sleep,” Dubhain whispered against his ear, and stroked the hair aside from it. Dubhain hummed a tune and breathed that humming into his brain like the gentle thrum of bees in summer heat, the purring of a cat, the sighing of the wind in midsummer leaves. “Sleep, sweet Caith. What they will do is geas and neither you nor I can stay it. ’T is the trouble men are always having. Ye gae sae blind through the world.”
The sound of the riders died away. Caith’s wits reeled and spun and the sound filled his ears, become a whisper of a voice, the roaring of the sea.
“Bluid,” Dubhain whispered, “d’ ye nae taste it, d’ ye nae smell it, my prince?”
It washed between him and the sun, like a stinking flood, like a darkening curtain.
“’T is geas,” Dubhain said while the tumbling went on and on into dark, and the earth shook under hoofbeats. There was blood, and there was fire. Perhaps it was all in memory.
Or yet to come.
“All Necessity,” the voice whispered. “And where there is bluid to be shed, thou ‘rt most apt. The Sidhe weep for thee, my puir damned prince; and use thee, for they hae nae gentler weapon.”
“Do not make me See this, Dubhain, no more, no more...”
“Nay, nay, I make thee blind, I make thee deaf, I unweave the pattern of thy sense, my Caith. I gie thee nae Sight to trouble thee, thou willt go blind to the doing of the deed. How tender thou art. And how passionate is thy mischief in the world.” Dubhain gently traced the line of his cheek and smiled his merry, wicked smile. “Sleep and dream, sleep and dream, most dear and damned fool.”
The humming filled his ears, and there was nothing beyond that but the dark.
****
Came an acute pain of cramped sleeping, of limbs settled not where he would have disposed them, one leg unnaturally bent in the cold and the damp. Caith saw shadowed stone above his head, felt cold earth beneath him, and with a grimace stirred and levered himself from the icy crevice in the rocks where Dubhain had abandoned him.
Two things he knew then about the world. One was the smell of smoke on the wind, and the other was the sun standing at afternoon above the skeletal trees and the rocks.
And when he had gained his feet, there was nothing he could do in this knowledge but to lean his elbows against the stone which had sheltered him. He smothered his anger and clenched his fists against his skull, to draw still breaths of reason and to try not to weep or to shout in his rage.
“Dubhain,” he whispered then hollowly, lifting his face to the woods at large. “Dubhain, is it over now, will you come, or have you any more for me? Are they dead, those two? And was it by my hand? For the gods’ sake, let me remember!”
The wind blew, stirring the black water, sending dead leaves down onto the surface, raising the stench of death and rot.
“Sweet Dubhain, fair Dubhain, Dubhain thou hellspawn, what happened? What have I done? What am I to do? Where am I to go? Can ye not come and tell me at least that, Dubhain?”
Bubbles rose and burst, nothing more.
“D’ you leave me now? D’ you leave me to my own devices, Dubhain? I warn you, I warn you, wight, they are not always to the Sidhe’s liking!”
The forest gave back not so much as an echo. The trampled earth proved the horsemen were no dream. And the reversed hoof-prints, filling with muddy water, proved that some of the riders at least had ridden back again.
“Dubhain!”
Let the riders hear him. Let them kill him. Let them try their luck against his charmed, cursed life. He walked, knowing (he had no knowledge how) that it was not at him those riders aimed. And if they should come, why, let Dubhain bestir himself to save him, let Dubhain soil his pretty hands—
And against Dubhain’s wishes it was back along the trail he walked, back all the way they had come, a track where horses had struggled to find footing; but their going had made a clear passage for him, especially where they had left the streamside and climbed through the barren-limbed woods, up and up the hill.
So he followed that unmistakable scar on the land. He had no fear himself of meeting the riders now— the same fey rage was on him. They could not kill him: he could not, himself, be so fortunate, since he was on the Sidhe’s errand, and since where the Sidhe sent him, there was harm to be done.
Yet regarding the riders ... he had no idea at all why he should naturally count them as evil. Their riding through the woods, as sinister as it had seemed when Dubhain had drawn him off the trail ... might for all he knew be on some mission of good. They might be hunters in pursuit of the bane in the glen: they might be honest men of some lord with a lawful right to ride this land, and he might be utterly, fatally mistaken, blinded by the Sidhe and by his cursed disposition to fear harm in everyone’s actions. He was his father’s son, and that last trait was his own, no fault of the Sidhe that he saw weapons on the men and believed unquestioningly that they were for using.
Perhaps, he thought, climbing the long, wooded rise, perhaps he should turn aside, go back to Teile, and forget the fate of the young couple on their hill. Perhaps that simple act would thwart the Sidhe, or bring Dubhain back to protest his change of mind.Perhaps he should sit down where he was and refuse to budge until Dubhain did return to misguide and mislead him.
But whether it was geas or his own damnation that led him, he was apt for their mischief, having a disposition that secrets were not for keeping (too many he had endured in his life) and that darknesses were for throwing light on (few the men that loved him for it.) Worst of all, he nursed the hope that Caith mac Sliabhan might yet accomplish something in the world to redeem himself— he hoped that that, too, might be within the Sidhe’s plans. His fondest, most foolish hope was that they would grant him that chance, a gift like other faery gifts, all unwarned— he knew better, of course, and he knew the Sidhe, that, having no fault, they needed have no mercy.
But he wanted not to lose some chance they might throw
him, all to justify themselves ... so he went places he knew were foolish, and he did things he knew were meddling, because he could never tell the difference between meddling they wanted and meddling they did not, and he feared turning his back on the one escape they might be obliged to afford him.
So here he walked at the edge of a woods in which he had no right to trespass, in a stronger and stronger reek of smoke ... seeking just that small vantage farther on the steep slope he prayed would show him he was all wrong in his assumptions, that the stench was only Firinne at soap-making, or some ordinary, homely reason for so much fire. He hoped that was so, as he hoped to stay out of sight, but, failing to see any such thing confirmed, and still following the horses’ muddy prints in the grass, he ventured a little closer, knowing— knowing, damn the impulses that drove him first one way and then another, that his returning might bring down on them the very harm he had come here to prevent. Ceannann might assume the worst of his return here. The riders might have come with every right, and they might now, with every right of lordship, be hunting him, if the young couple had reported strangers pursuing undeclared business in the glen.
Still, he could see the smoke billowing from the hilltop. Bits of wool from the earlier destruction had flown even here, and clung on brush and grass stems. Every sign about him spoke of harm and hurt, from the beast, the fire, and the riders out of the glen, while the Sidhe left him without counsel in the matter.
His own damnable curiosity was touched now, curiosity which he had generally learned to ignore, to Dubhain’s sometime frustration and occasional delight ... for never yet had he escaped what the Sidhe wanted of him, and it seemed he could not now, even if he had done it once this morning.
He hesitated, a tormented defiant impulse toward one direction and the other, so intense he shivered in his indecision; but last of all he slapped his leg in frustration and skirted the hill along the horses’ track, bent on finding the answer here, constantly seeing the plume of smoke, white and abundant, rising above the hill, and, as he saw from further around the track, rising above the stonework of the cottage itself.
Faery Moon Page 12
