Chapter 7 #2
She waited, yet nothing happened, and a sob burst from her lips — the first she had allowed herself to give voice to since that first day she had been pulled from her mother’s arms and taken away to a faraway home, surrounded by those who either hated or feared her.
Except for him.
Niall, her almost-twin.
As though she had spoken it aloud, his hand emerged from the water, trembling fingers wrapped around the shattered branch, and Rory’s breath whooshed from her lungs in a stuttered, sobbing rush as she reached out to grab his wrist tightly in both her hands.
His head, tawny locks plastered to his too-pale face, followed, eyes half-shut, jaw slack, and her sobs grew panicked and uneven as she dragged him out of the water, his upper body flopping limp against the sapling.
“Niall.” She straddled the trunk, palms pressed against his cheeks. “Niall – wake up. Niall!”
Desperately, she slapped him, as hard as she could, and Niall coughed, heavy and wet, his eyes fluttering open. “Ror?”
“Oh, thank the gods.” Her head dropped to rest against his, her chest heaving. “I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead.” She sat up, pulling him further out of the water. “Are you all right? How do you feel?”
“I think –” Niall licked his lips. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
He lurched forward, vomiting a belly’s worth of river-water, and Rory gagged, falling backwards into the river, the roar of the current filling her ears before she grabbed the sapling and pulled herself back up, sputtering and coughing. “Niall, what the hell –”
“You saved me,” he said dazedly, watching her spit like a furious cat as she sat astride the sapling bobbing low in the water. “You saved my life.”
“Yes, I am aware of that. What are you doing in the damn river, Niall? Are you mad?”
“I know, I know, but I was thinking about what you said, about there being witches in the woods, so I was playing, and then I thought I saw a woman in the mist across the river, so I tried to cross over the rocks and – well. I slipped.”
“You utter gobshite of a donkey. You almost died!”
“You were supposed to come with me! Where were you?”
“I had lessons – and so did you, I might remind you. Must be nice, being the pampered little prince, allowed to skip off and miss lessons whenever you please.”
Niall slapped his palm against his forehead. “I forgot, oh no, Da is going to thrash me – this is the third time in a fortnight I’ve missed a lesson.”
Rory scoffed once before she began edging her way along the sapling, back towards the shore. “That’ll be the day.”
“What do you mean?” She could hear him behind her, his breathing still labored and heavy, and she made a note to march him straight to the healer.
No. She would do no such thing. He was not her responsibility, this foolish boy. It was no matter to her if his lungs were half-full of water, if he caught his death of cold after all but drowning in the frigid river.
Rory leapt to solid ground, then turned to watch Niall do the same, albeit with weak hands and shivering shoulders.
“He would never thrash you,” she said as Murph and Molly appeared to fly in slow, leisurely circles above their heads.
“Your father. He would never thrash you, no matter how many lessons you missed.”
“Our father,” Niall corrected through chattering teeth. “And yes, he would. It’s you he’d never thrash – he’s too afraid of you, just like everyone else.”
Rory froze, shoulders stiffening. “You’re a donkey,” she said after a moment. “Now come along – you’re freezing.”
He trotted after her, babbling away despite the violent chattering of his teeth, but she ignored him, too focused on the inexplicable stab of pain burrowing its way deep into her chest.
Of course they were afraid of her, she thought, the people here in Connacht.
They’d knew enough stories to fear her – stories of her ancestor, the dread Beast of Connacht – but even without those stories, Rory knew that they were right to fear her.
She was a creature of ash and fog, with the power to call forth the shadows and transform them into ravenous beasts of fang and claw.
She could look into the murky darkness of the unknown and see the truth, to shape it in her hands and form something terrible and new.
She was a child of the Mórrígan, the most dread being to ever walk upon the earth of éire, the goddess of war with ice in her veins who left nothing but death and destruction in her wake.
This was her birthright, and yet she had run, half-choked by terror, to save this boy from what the fates had decreed to be his rightful end, to which all living things must come.
She should have let him drown, she thought savagely as she stormed up the castle steps without another word to the boy, shivering and purple with cold, she left behind.
Next time, there would be no saving him.
Next time, Rory would stand by and watch as the witch in the woods did her dirty work for her – Niall on his knees, the lethal-sharp tip of her finger pressed underneath his chin, turning his bloodstained face up towards hers as her lips parted in a hungry, malevolent smile.
Rory had seen it all, that morning in the barn, how the knife would flash in the sun, swooping down in a merciless arc, buried to the hilt in the chest of that weeping boy.
Rory knew the cailleach meant to kill her brother.
Just as she knew that she would stand aside and let it all happen.
She shook away the memory, the still-bitter guilt of that long ago girl’s anger – a righteous anger, but one that had been sorely misdirected – and looked down, away from Locke, to study her own fingers, the nails bitten to the quick.
“I see the truth of things – or, at least, the truth of what may come, if I will it so, but I see it as through a darkened mirror – shapes and swirls of meaning and thought, but very rarely clear and defined. I can see the pattern, the framework of a castle that is to be built, but I cannot see the stones themselves being hauled into place, cannot see the ivy that will one day creep along its sides. I see the trees growing wide and tall and lush with leaves in the forests, and know that they will one day, if I do not interfere, being shorn of their foliage and shaved into the timbers that adorn the castle walls, but I do not see the timbers themselves.”
“And the shadows?”
“The shadows,” she said, very quietly. “You’ve heard about the shadows. Yes – they are quite fearsome indeed.”
“What can –”
She raised her hand, cutting him off. “It is something that is better seen than described, Lord Locke.”
“Then show me,” he said, edging closer to her. “Swear to marry me, and I will bring you before my father, the traitor, the man who has brought so much ruin and damnation to your family and your people, and show me how truly terrible the queen of nightmares can be.”
There was an undeniable ring of sincerity in his voice, yet Rory could not shake the sensation that this was a trap into which she was being led, unfettered and willing, coaxed into ensuring her own destruction under the guise of freedom.
“Prove it,” she said. “Prove that you are willing to betray your father and his allies, and then I will do as you ask.”
“Very well then,” said Locke after a long, wary moment. “What proof do you require of me?”
She lifted her chin to look him coolly in the eyes.
“There was a man. A soldier of yours. When I was brought into your camp a while ago, he spat in my face and called me a whore.” He did not look away, even as she saw awareness flood through him, his shoulders grow rigid as he realized what proof, precisely, she wanted from him.
A blood-debt was, after all, a time-honored tradition in éire.
“I want,” she said, “for you to bring that man to me.”
Locke licked his lips. “How am I to know who he was, the man who did this to you? There are quite a few of them, you might have noticed, parading around in that gods-forsaken blue-and-gold get-up.”
“I know his name,” Rory said, letting a cruel smile curve along her lips. “énna MacMurchada.”
He drew back sharply. “énna is my cousin, my father’s brother’s son.”
“Your cousin called your future wife a whore, Lord Locke.”
“He did not know you were to be my wife at the time, I think.”
“I don’t care. All that matters,” she said, “is what you intend to do about it.” A tense silence followed this challenge, but Rory could still feel the sharpness of those bright hazel eyes boring into her face. “You asked for my trust, Lord Locke – here is your chance to earn it.”
She held her breath as she waited for his answer, ignoring the uneasy swell of doubt that threatened to rise up within her.
She was improvising now, implementing changes without consulting Finn.
Would he approve, she wondered, or would he call her a fool, for deviating from their carefully constructed plan?
This negotiation – that had never been part of it.
“What would you have me do?” Locke asked, his face tight and unhappy, but resigned.
Determined, like her, to see this through, no matter the cost.
“Bring him to me an hour past midnight,” she said. “At the edge of the encampment.” She inclined her head. “You asked for me to show you – and now I shall.” He said nothing, and she smiled. “Are you reconsidering, Lord Locke?”
A long pause. “I have heard rumors about it, you know,” he said, low and curt.
“Each contradicts the rest. Some say you can shift into a wolf, a boar, a black-winged raven, just as the Mórrígan could, while some say it is an inferno of ice which you call down from the skies, consuming everything in its path.”
She had heard those rumors too, all her life. The girl of ice and shadow, the queen of nightmares.
They were all wrong. She was but a girl of many griefs, a queen of nothing but shattered dreams and bitterness.
“Then see for yourself,” she said. “One past the midnight hour. Tell my friend, as you say, to accompany you as well. You will need him.”
“Whatever for?”
It flashed before her, the memory of that shattered tree, mauled bark and broken branches, its still-green sap seeping into the roaring waters of the raging river as it breathed its last, her shadows’ ephemeral fangs still buried deep within its trunk.
“To clean up whatever is left.”