Chapter 7
Chapter seven
RORY
Rory stared at Locke, torn between shock and suspicion. “Your father? You want me to kill –”
His palm clapped over her mouth, strong and unyielding. “Quiet,” he murmured. “I would advise discretion, my lady.”
She stayed still, noting the latent strength in his hands, the surprising hardness of his body so close to hers.
He was far more dangerous than he looked, this would-be bridegroom of hers.
“This is the bargain,” he said quietly. “Marry me, as my father wishes, and then once I have presented you as my bride, you will use whatever power you may have to rid me of him once and for all – and in return, I swear to you that I will give the kingdom of Connacht into your hands.” A grim smile pulled at his mouth.
“I hardly think that you or your bárd friend should have much objection to either of those offers, yes?”
Finn. Another shock wave rolled through her. “How could you possibly know –”
“I am not as much of a fool as you think me, my lady,” Locke said dryly.
“I may be of little value to my father, but I know my own worth.” Something vicious slithered into his otherwise lazy drawl, and Rory’s eyes narrowed, appraising him anew.
“I am a swordsman the likes of which Leinster has not seen in nearly a hundred years. I have traversed the four realms in my youth, studying the ancient texts of our people, until I know them half by heart. I am a soldier and a scholar, and yet because when my father first came to my brothers and I with this foolhardy plan of his, I would not praise him, would not grovel at the feet of our would-be conquerors as he did, all for the sake of his selfish pride and the salvation of his own skin. And so my father, my own father, renounced me, cast me off as rubbish.” He looked away, chest heaving, and Rory felt a strange pang of sympathy, of sorrow.
No. He was her enemy, a tool to be used and then discarded, an inconsequential rung on the ladder that led to her revenge, no matter how earnest his voice or how bright his eyes.
“I see,” she said simply. “And once it is done, and you have given back to me my brother’s kingdom?”
“Then,” he said, “we go our separate ways – quite happily, I would imagine.”
She watched him for a moment, considering.
“Go on,” he said. “Use it. Use your gift and see if I am lying or not.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Oh, I rather think it is.” He nodded towards her loose hands, the raw red marks around her wrists.
“Clearly you feel confident enough that even when trussed up as a lamb being led to slaughter, you can stand here unafraid that I could do you any real harm. It must be truly something, that power of yours.” His gaze was curious and incisive, probing for whatever answers she might give him.
“So tell me how it feels, to call them forth – those rumored shadows of yours. Do you ever use them for good, or are they always a herald of doom?”
Rory closed her eyes, as it thundered through her, the rumbled call of the shadow-song humming deep within her, and with it, a storm of memories long buried, rising to the surface with renewed, clear-cut vigor.
The first, but not the last time that she had saved her brother’s life.
That day started as most of those days at Soghain always did – with a note.
It arrived as she was getting dressed in her room. A fluttering at her open window, and she glanced up to see her brother’s kestrel, Molly, perched on the sill, head cocked, orange eyes watchful. “Hullo,” she said. “Murph’s not here – out for a hunt.”
Molly squawked, rustling her wings, and Rory saw, tied to her leg with a thin brown string, a folded piece of parchment, with a hint of her brother’s self-assured scrawl penned across the front.
Meet at the river at the second fork at midday.
Bring your sword.
Rory waggled the paper in Molly’s direction. “Would it hurt him, now, to say ‘please’ every once in a while? ” The kestrel, unconcerned, shot into the sky, her mission complete, and Rory grumbled under her breath. “‘Bring my sword’ – it’s a bit of carved wood, you donkey. It’s no sword at all.”
She continued to grumble about throughout morning lessons, sitting slouched on the bench in the back of the hall, head down, ignoring the other children – none of whom, she noted crossly, included Niall.
It wasn’t fair. She certainly didn’t want to be here, trapped in this stuffy room listening to lectures about another Niall from long ago, who was no doubt equally spoiled and insufferable as this one – Niall Noígíallach of the Nine Hostages, the mythical High King of éire, who claimed the throne from his four older brothers by winning the love of a seemingly wizened old hag, who was transformed into a beautiful maiden by the power of his passionate kiss.
Rory huffed, risking a peek out the window at the long inviting stretch of grass bedazzled by the bright rays of the sun.
It had been raining for days – torrential downpours, with blinding sheets of rain.
She hadn’t had a breath of fresh air in days, and she was filled with resentment that while she sat here, Niall was doubtless out gallivanting through the fields and the trees, having the time of his life.
Her crossness sparked something inside her, that half-forgotten smolder of ice she had forced to lie dormant for so long now.
Before she could stop it, the shadows crept in around her, whispering in her ear, and then it was there, a wordless tale of impending doom – the muddy banks of the river, swollen and distended, the whitewater raging across the rocks, the usually placid current bellowing its way through the rain-sodden woods, like a pack of rabid wolves prowling in the darkness, seeking something, someone, to devour.
Niall.
Her quill fell from her fingers as the truth of her knowing settled heavy in the pit of her stomach.
Niall was in the water – or he soon would be.
And he would never get out again.
She shot to her feet and sprinted for the door, ignoring the protests of the master, the wide-eyed stares of the other children, pushing past servants and soldiers, slamming her palms into the front door, down the stairs and out into the mist, her boots slipping in the mud as she ran for the river.
Her pulse thrummed in time with the name echoing through her – Niall, Niall, Niall.
Niall, who was about to die.
The shadows inside her broke loose, hissing and snarling as they climbed their way up through the branches, twisting and turning in the soggy leaves before her, writhing like snakes as she ran, a torrent of fog-laden images assaulting her senses – her brother, coughing and sputtering, his hand clawing at the waves, the tips of his fingers floundering helplessly, then slipping underneath the roaring white water.
Something akin to a whimper escaped her, a low keening cry of mourning for this bright-eyed boy who’d never once looked at her with anything save joy and wonder, who wrote gods-awful poems about the smell of bacon in the morning and the sound of the owls late at night, who thought himself to be as mighty as mountain when he was no more than the size of a mouse.
The fog growled, swelling in stature, its dense smoke caressing her cheek with a bone-chilling kiss, and she knew that he was already in the water.
Lost in a river driven wild by the heavy rains, thrashing against the current, panicked and frightened, all alone in the dark.
“I need to see!” She screamed, and just like that, it appeared before her, a diamond-bright knowing, as clear as Ionatán’s doom had been, so many months ago.
A cluster of lichen-slick rocks, a sapling tree, bent and disfigured by the heavy weight of a half-dead oak, fallen across its roots –
The sapling. She saw it unveil before her, a mystical tapestry laid out on an unseen loom, saw how its branches would drag across his half-conscious face, how his fingers would grasp it, with the last bit of their feeble strength, how he would cling to it as a pair of pale hands appeared to grasp his wrist and haul him in to the shore, bit by bit.
It was her hands gripping his wrists.
She could still save him.
She would save him.
Rory leaped forward, letting the shadows guide her alongside the roaring river, until she saw it – the bent sapling, the cluster of slippery rocks, the lean of the fallen oak. And there – the glimpse of something pale and thrashing amid the churning waters, rapidly heading their way.
She threw herself against the sapling tree, its still-green flesh protesting as she shoved, its slender trunk whining as she fought to splinter it from its roots, but it refused to give.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of wet hair, a glimpse of a flailing hand, and then they vanished, deep beneath the churning water.
Rory flung herself backwards and dropped to one knee, fingers digging into the earth, and set it free, that storm-laden voice that chanted deep within her, a language of unfathomable darkness and destruction, crying out with the force of a thousand tongues of the ruin and despair at the end of all things.
From all around her, it rose in a tempest of inharmonious song, and in answer, the fog exploded in unison.
Sharp as an adder’s fang, the shadows flew forward and buried themselves into the sapling tree until it cracked, tumbling forward into the bellowing white water.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the darkness vanished, leaving only the pale light that dribbled in through the dense canopy of the evergreens and oaks that surrounded them, and she clambered across the slippery trunk of the sapling tree to sit astride it, breathless with fear, staring down in the whirling water beneath her.
“Niall!” Rory screamed. “Niall!”