Chapter 4 #2
It was in the way that Líadain watched her across the table that night, quiet and self-contained as always.
At first, Rory was able to convince herself that her mother didn’t suspect, had somehow not seen the truth of what she had done written in her eyes and branded onto her skin with that second sight that only they two seemed to possess.
But when at last she allowed their gazes to meet, Rory’s mother looked her squarely in the eyes, steady and cool, a silent censure, and Rory knew that she knew.
They never spoke of it though.
Not as the whispers around her grew strident and fearful, as the glances she garnered as she skipped through her grandmother’s halls turned wary and watchful rather than indulgent.
They did not even speak of it when he came, nearly a full year later – the king of Connacht, sitting high on his black-and-white mare.
Her father, who had never bothered to acknowledge her existence, until he’d heard the rumors, the whispers of what power lived inside her – not until he realized that she, an all-but-forgotten bastard-born daughter, could be of some use to him.
And her life, as it had always been, safe and secluded and quiet here in the woods of her family’s vale, was forever over.
Rousing herself from that long ago memory, Rory tilted her head back, breathing in the earthy scent of the fast-fading dawn, the smell of the trees, the dampness lingering in the air.
It had been haunting her all morning, standing in the coolness of the dying dawn, wrists bound.
She wasn’t sure why it was haunting her now, of all times – the memory of that long-ago killing.
She hadn’t thought about Ionatán in years, nor that fateful afternoon when her future was decided, the day she lost her mother and first met her father – and Niall.
Niall, the brother whom she had protected, had loved, more fiercely and more fervently than she had believed herself capable of loving anyone or anything. Niall, her almost-twin. Her friend.
Niall, who had, against all odds, loved her – and who had betrayed her.
Her eyes burned.
“No tears, a bhréone,” said Finn from a few paces behind her. “Not yet, at least. Save them for when they are most needed.”
She turned, studying from underneath the folds of her woolen hood. “You convinced them, it seems.”
“Did you doubt me?” He rested his hip against the gray stone fence. “It was eminently tragic. My wife and child, slain, and I, desperate for vengeance.”
A handful of soldiers donned in blue-and-gold lumbered by, and he glanced away from her to study them as they passed, his keen eyes lingering on the sword hilts at their sides, the longbows strapped across their shoulders.
“I’ve been asked to stay,” Finn said once they disappeared into a nearby tent.
“My tale of woe was very convincing. I’ve been recruited, given a bedroll and a place with the rest of the infantry, so I will be close by. ”
“That’s good.” Rory flexed her stiff and bloodless fingers. “Best to keep your distance though.”
“I agree.” From behind them, the distant sounds of the camp bled into the chirps of the swifts and the warbling of the wrens in the trees surrounding them. “You’re ready?”
Rory looked down at her hands, bound at the wrists and the elbows with the coarse brown rope Finn had wrapped around them hours before. A mirror image, almost, of the night of their reunion, months ago now, in an Albion prison cell. “I’m ready.”.
From the distance, a falcon shrieked, shrill and piercing. “Murph?”
“Yes. He’s worrying, no doubt.” She glanced into the trees, searching for any sign of the gray-feathered kestrel and finding none. “It’s only for a short while. He’ll be all right without me for a time.”
Finn nodded. “Make it believable, Rory – your protest at the proposed wedding. I don’t trust him, this young Lord MacMurchada.
He seems more cunning than we had thought him to be.
It is imperative he not think you to be anything but defeated,” said Finn, low and lethal.
“Marry him, use him, until we get what we want from him, and then –”
Rory tore her gaze away from her hands, rubbed raw and chafing by the bite of the rope against her wrists, and looked straight into Finn’s merciless green eyes. “And then I kill him.”
Behind them, the tent flap moved, and she caught a glimpse of her soon-to-be husband – a lean, slim-shouldered man, with tousled brown curls and bright hazel eyes. She had yet to see them in the flesh, but she knew them, knew the shape and hue of them as intimately as her own.
She had seen them once before, in a dimly-lit prison cell far across the sea – had seen their doom as well, unrolled before her like a finely-embroidered tapestry.
Just as she had Ionatán’s, she thought, as she watched the man stride towards her. Ionatán might have been her first kill, but he was not by any means her last.
“Then you kill him,” Finn whispered before he turned and disappeared among the tents of the war-camp.
No, she hadn’t thought of Ionatán in years, but she was certainly thinking of him now, that first death had started it all, the catalyst for both her greatest joy and her darkest despair, the beginning of her descent into ruin.
His ruin too, she thought, this bright-eyed, smiling man sauntering towards her even now. She would be the death of him, just as she had been Ionatán’s, and all his ilk, each and every last one of them doomed to burn and writhe and die at her feet, just as she had seen them do.
And even though Finn could no longer hear her, Rory answered him anyway.
“Then I shall kill them all.”