“Padraic!” Caith shouted to it. “Padraic, man, set to!”
He swayed on his knees, caught his balance on his burned palm and the pain of his hand was enough to take his sense away. Enough ... to summon souls out of hell, if that was what the Sidhe favored. He thrust his hand straight into the coals, denying the pain, and now not Padraic only came forth. In a shieking rush of blue fire round and round the room, more and more forms appeared. The ghost-fire consumed wood to ash wherever it touched, massive beams going to powder, stones falling, draperies going up in light and wisps of ash.
Blue fire overtook the men that ran into the great hall. Living torches carried the fire where they fled. The booming of the cauldron resounded through the keep and clamoring and shrieking attended it. Red fire was everywhere about him,
“Dubhain!” Caith cried, in one desperate effort to find his feet and stay on them. Burning wisps floated in the heated air, comets of blue fire shrieked past him, and his legs wobbled and went out from under him. A timber crashed down and bounced, close beside him as he lay, and went to ash in the blink of an eye. More stones fell and rolled, and a dog’s footprints showed in the ash beside him. A panting breath heralded a wet lap at his ear.
The fire blazed up, more footprints appeared, and the mac Ceannann’s hounds went hunting souls in the flame and falling ash.
Caith struggled to his knees, seeking a way out and fell, made it up to his feet again and as far as an inner hallway, reeling back and forth between the walls, as best his legs could bear him. Fire from the great hall was rolling smokeabove his head, and the stones quaked with the thunder of the blaze.
He reached a downward stairs, stumbled down them and came up against a door, and a hall and a door, and that last let out on steps.
He was lost. He had no idea which way to go, except away from what passed in the hall.
“Dubhain, damn ye!”
He stumbled on the downward course, entirely lost the next step in the near-dark.
Strong arms caught him from behind. “I hae ye,” Dubhain’s voice said against his ear. “I hae ye fast, my prince, an a’ hell gaeth wantin’ t’night. Where would ye?”
“Out of here,” he said on the breath he could catch. Dubhain’s hands and arms were scratched: he saw it in the wan torchlight. Dubhain was dripping wet, cold as a fish, and not a stitch had he on— he had come that quickly. “Out of this cursed place! Nuallan is free!”
“Up wi’ ye, then,” Dubhain said, and pulled him up onto his feet, hastened him down the steps and down a long passage.
Fire gusted out the open door atop the stairs they had left. The floor jolted, and a massive jagged gap opened across the floor, masonry set askew.
There was no going back now. Caith gripped Dubhain’s arm with a hand from which the skin hung in ragged blisters, caught his balance against the other wall as Dubhain drew him along. He caught his breath only when Dubhain stopped to lift a bar from a door, and shoved it open onto the loch-smelling vault. Torchlight sheened the water before them, and showed another shape waiting there, a huge hulk, half in the water, half on the stone floor.
Caith balked, then and there, but Dubhain seized him and hauled him down the steps, down and down, while the black, glistening thing lurched toward them, splashing and grunting and clattering as it went, rattling its ill-assorted bones. It was a race for the open ground. They reached the very last steps with Dubhain’s speed, and it lunged to cut them off, hissing as it came.
Dubhain jerked Caith off the steps and dodged, and in the next stride had his pooka shape, the hellfire gleaming alike from his eyes and the beast’s, one nigh as mad as the other.
“Take us out of here!” Caith yelled at him, and seized Dubhain’s mane with his left hand, trying to get astride. Dubhain surged across the muddy vault floor and leapt into the fire-stained water with a jolt that almost lost him. The illusory mane slipped through his fingers, the water surged with the force of the beast as it rounded and plunged after them and past, to cut them off.
A long, low squeal sounded through the water from in front of them, and Dubhain took them under, where that sound assaulted the ears and quivered through flesh and bone, a mournful, sorrowful sound, on which Dubhain drove them up and up again, to the blessed air, and to shallow waters on the shore of the loch.
Dubhain let him slide, then. Caith could not keep his grip beyond that, with the water dragging at him, and the heaviness of his own body pulling Dubhain’s mane from his grip. He fell on his knees in the water, and fought his way to the silty, reedy edge, among the rocks. There, on land or what passed for it, he looked back to see where the beast was.
The waters of the loch churned, and turned red with blood. A huge crooked limb lobbed the water. Then a vast grey back broke the surface and sounded again, in pursuit. And after that the deeper water roiled up, and waves went out from that struggle. They came ashore among the reeds, rocking them to and fro.
The grey back reappeared, sounded with that mournful cry, and vanished into the loch.
From the keep above, bits of ash came wafting on the wind, and cinder, that met the waves, and went out, snowflakes out of hell.
Dubhain, naked, in his man’s form, rose out of the water, waded into the shallows and squatted down beside Caith, at the edge of the ripples. “Och, such a lovely stew, my darlin’ Caith. An’ th’ selkie proves the stronger, now, d’ ye think? A wicked, wicked lass, our lovely Firinne, wi’ such a bluidy grudge....”
Caith stared at the place where the grey back had vanished, coughed and wiped his nose on his arm— numb, except for burns that hurt with the chill. But he had no complaint of that. The rest hurt less with the cold, and he was not willing to move for the while.
But Dubhain set a hand on his shoulder, and at that the cold itself grew less, as the wicked strength came back into him.
He tilted his head back to see the smoke billowing out from the keep of Dun Glas, and moved back as a wave from far out in the loch rolled ashore and splashed them both.
“Come,” Dubhain said to him. “Come. Hae ye not invited me to this merry hunt? We’ll dance wi’ th’ wind an’ the rain tonight!”
The baying of a hound rang down the shore, and the waves splashed out of time with the wind.
“Out on ye!” Caith said, and took solid hold of Dubhain’s arm, with a wary eye to that troubled water.
The creature that had haunted the loch was Moragacht’s hound, indeed, fat and greedy as the mouth of hell, but Firinne was a sun-born Sidhe, and the daughter of the grey ocean. He did not fault Firinne for anything she had done. She was what she was.
So was he, and he did not belong in this place.
“Och, hey!” cried Dubhain, hauling him about— and the lightning struck the tower of the keep with a flash and a sound like doom. “Ill-tempered woman, the witch!”
“Come along!” Caith said, thinking of the likes of that bolt landing closer. “Get your clothes, ye shameless creature! This is no weather for games!”
The hell-light glimmered in Dubhain’s eyes. Merry wickedness danced there, and in the light from the fires above, a grin flashed wide.
“Dubhain!”
“Oh, aye,” Dubhain said, and scampered off and retrieved his bundled clothing from before the witch’s gate. He pulled his shirt on by the light of the fire and the destruction, and wrapped his kilt about him, clean and mostly dry, oh, aye, of course they were, and Dubhain himself in a rare fine mood.
The silver key, Caith had time to think, was safely back in faery, this key which all Moragacht’s draiocht had not discovered. The key that Nuallan had said would open every gate— including the silver gates of faery itself, belike; and presumably the very gates of hell.
Hand him that to carry, had Nuallan, and, for a lark, escort the selkie-get from out of the witch’s hands?
Then break the twins’ geas by bloody murder?
Damn him!
The core of the vault came down, with a rolling tide of smoke and a sou
nd like thunder. The towers followed, falling inward. A great wave rolled out from the shore and sparks flew high and thick, whirling on the wind.
“Hoosht!” said Dubahin, skipping up to him, catching his arm and drawing him on to the road. “A grand, great bonfire ye hae raised, my prince!”
“Good riddance,” he said, walking with that strength Dubhain lent him, a giddy, unworldly flood that made a dangerous turbulence in his own heart. It was the headiness of the storm, the lure of the hellish power in the earth and in the sky of this place.
“Black roses,” Dubhain said, looking back. “How pretty they do grow. D’ ye no see them, my Caith, all along the way?”
Caith caught his arm and dragged him along a resisting step or three before Dubhain shook free.
“I can walk for mesel’, man!”
“Fractious, we are. Come, Dubhain, fair Dubhain, ye’d hae hated her if ye’d stayed.”
“The moon will come new tomorrow,” Dubhain said faintly, and with a shiver unaccustomed in him: “Och, man!”
A grisly thing lay smoking in the road, one of the witch’s men, Caith supposed, escaped from the ruin, but not having escaped the fire. A second time he seized Dubhain’s arm, to draw him past the sight.
The lightning showed a bright sword lying in the rain and the ash, under a blackened arm.
“Damn the thing!” Caith cried. “Damn it to hell!”
His sword was back. He yearned to walk past it, ignoring Sidhe gifts.
But it would come back to him, again and again, he had no doubt of it.
With a shudder and a curse he picked it up, hot as it was from the fire, and carried it, there being no choice in the matter at all.
Chapter Thirteen
The ripples went out from the great creature that breached and dived in the loch. They flashed bright under the sun, and rolled among the reeds, and pressed even a little distance up Gruagach’s stained stream.
But a selkie would not stay in the loch. The next surfacing they saw was further on, and the next waves came more faintly, merely rocking at the peat-straw along the shore.
The new moon was in the sunlit sky. Ash was still sifting along the way. The wind kicked it up, and blew it on, and Dubhain was in a fine humor, skipping along, halfway up this grassy hummock and that, prying into mischief, startling a frog the beast had missed in its hunting.
“Leave it be!” Caith said when Dubhain gave brief chase. “Macha! is there no end? The creature’s lived here through all of it— give it peace!”
“A canny wee creature,” Dubhain said. “D’ ye ken, the frogs hae a king? A great green fellow, he is, all over wi’ spots. Ye may hear him pipin’ th’ kindreds t’ the springs again. It hae said as much.”
“Lies,” Caith said.
“I? Mistake the truth?”
“Bend and break the truth and trample on it daily, ye wicked wight!”
A strange figure caught Caith’s eye, then, a brown, hobbling thing ahead of them on the shore. He gave a quick and uneasy thought to the sword he bore, and the remote chance there was of meeting any traveler in Gleann Fiain.
“And who would that be?” he asked. And the moment he asked it, the figure was gone.
“Who?” Dubhain asked.
“I saw someone. I swear to you, there was someone on the road.”
“A touch of fever, it might be. Or the fay. The gates are opened, the sun is risen wi’ the new moon, an’ the horns of faery hae sounded, did ye nae hear them wi’ the dawn?”
He was too weary to argue the matter. They had walked all the night, rested seldom. Neither of them knew what might have escaped, besides themselves. And Lord Nuallan— who never yet had said kiss my hand for the rescue.
But there were signs of healing already in the glen. The morning sun laid a touch of gold on the water, where only grey had been. The howling in the hills was gone. One could hope the ghosts were satisfied.
They did not catch the Brown Man. But they saw him again, well up on the heights, and heard the faery pipes. A little frost lingered where the shadow fell, but the sun found it and melted it away.
A graven stone they found, later that day, half of a god, but it lay in the loch, head foremost, and over-thrown.
Dubhain pitched a pebble past it, across the loch, but the waves swallowed it quickly.
“Enough,” Caith said. Dubhain grinned at him and hopped atop a flat stone lying along the edge of the water: there were three such stones, and he skipped from one to the other, defiant of disasters.
The wight never missed a step, not one.
Afterword
by
Jane Fancher
Quicksilver and Dynamite
That’s what the British reviewers said of Faery in Shadow.
U. S. reviewers were, I think, puzzled by this book. C.J.’s American editors were scared by it, calling it disturbing— when they’d talk about it at all.
Personally, I think it’s one of her most overlooked masterpieces, highlighting two of her best talents: that for turning archeological research into a fascinating story, and that of capturing ‘alien’ mindsets. And that’s why I’m playing hooky from my writing to reread it and write this recommendation.
In recent days, I’ve been granted the distinct, if back-breaking, pleasure of helping sort out the boxes of Carolyn’s ‘author’s copies’ books, a process that has roused a whole panoply of memories, just in handling the books. When I got to the box marked ‘Caith,’ I was thrown into a particularly dizzying spiral.
Faery in Shadow is a victim of mis-marketing, there’s no doubt about it. Editors make certain decisions for all sorts of reasons, most of which they attribute to ‘marketing.’ As with most readers, I find myself wondering all too frequently what marketing books they’ve studied to come to these magnificent marketing ... mistakes.
Caith was the title Carolyn gave the book: simple, straightforward, and truly indicative of the extremely internal nature of the intense and single viewpoint of the book. Faery in Shadow was a compromise with the editors, one which, I feel, was the first death knell for the book— for several reasons— mainly because that is the initial impression of a book, creating the mindset with which the reader approaches the reading experience.
Graphically speaking, in all versions of the covers, the tiny but essential word ‘in’ is lost in between the words ‘Faery’ and ‘Shadow.’ The type looks really cool, but the apparent title becomes ‘Faery Shadow’— which makes no sense even on a good day.
Add to this a spelling of a key word, ‘Faery’, which has become, in the minds of some, associated with fluffy unicorns and cuddly dragons, and you have set a wall firmly between the target reader and the book. Never mind that the spelling was, for once, legitimate— it’s a case where the reason for ‘faery’ is best left to the reading experience, as one is quickly and smoothly entrenched in the ancient lilt of Caith’s narrative, and where the more angular ‘fairy’ would be painfully out of place.
Of course, in Britain, where the Chicago Book of Style is considered humor at best, the spelling was no problem.
For the cover, Carolyn suggested something arcane and moody. Perhaps, she suggested, the leaf in the opening scene being carried over a falls from sun-drenched spring water to the peaty mystery of loch water— one of the most effective and atmospheric beginnings to a book I’ve ever read, I might add.
Again, marketing struck. Nothing so esoteric for the reading public. The Right Readers couldn’t possibly be attracted. No, we must have characters, a scene ... in other words, a standard US fantasy cover. I suppose C.J. should be glad she escaped dragons and unicorns. DelRey chose C.J.’s own brother David for the task ... a terrible thing to do to any sibling. Poor David was so determined to shine for his sister on a book he thoroughly enjoyed ... and then was art-directed into a fairly standard fantasy cover which he knew his sister didn’t want.
Well, he did the cover. A very nice cover based on a scene which is certainly directly from the b
ook and is full of action and ghosts and good looking guys in kilts. A very nice cover— for a standard fantasy. But this is no standard fantasy. It’s the dark inner workings of human free will pitted against the whims of Faery, and a subtly-drawn struggle of power between old Celtic gods and new. Mood, is the key. Mystery.
(Then, to add insult to injury...the publisher broke the cover painting in half. Literally. Cracked it right across the middle. Ruined it. That’s one for the records.)
In Britain, they had a greater understanding of the book. In the British cover, we see Caith’s back, wrapped in a grey wind-whipped cloak. He stands lonely on an outcrop, looking across a seemingly bottomless chasm toward the mocking, equally indistinct figure that can only be his bane and his lifeline, Dubhain. It’s a cool, atmospheric cover of turquoise and soft green, with eerie twisting rock and foliage. The one spot of true color is Caith’s red hair and the gold in the scabbard of the sword that is as cursed as Moorcock’s Stormbringer.
The British cover also holds a subtle key to the time elements contained in the books. Caith wears loose trousers with softly rolled hems and a subtle hint of tartan, while the distant figure of Dubhain has, without doubt, a kilt. What sort of images of social change that rouses in the minds of Scottish readers, my MacPhail side can imagine but not swear to. While this might have been purely accidental on the part of the artist, it holds, none-the-less, a subtle hint of the nature of the true conflict within the book, a contest between past and present powers for humanity’s future.
We’ll skip lightly over the publishing mystery that fouled and delayed the shipment of the US hardcover and made the British trade edition the first available. I will mention that neither I nor Carolyn ever saw the US hardcover on the stands, and to this day she has no copy of it. For all we know, it never existed.
But marketing aside, what of the book?
It’s the pairing of Caith, a dour, all-too-mortal human and the pookha Dubhain, Faery’s own answer to Coyote.
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