Chapter 8
Chapter eight
LOCKE
Locke had never been at ease with the night.
At least, not with the true nature of the nighttime.
He very much enjoyed evenings spent by a warm fire with a flagon of whiskey and a thick book, or raucous feasts in a hall filled with bawdy songs and roaring laughter, or in a rowdy bruiden surrounded by pretty, wanton women and boozy, boisterous men.
But whenever he was caught outside the castle walls on a late afternoon ride that stretched on for just a bit too long and the night fell around him in an all-consuming shroud of silence and shadows, he always found himself sitting a little straighter in the saddle, his fingers gripping his sword a little tighter than necessary, wary and watchful for whatever might be lurking just beyond his sight, waiting to strike.
Locke had also never enjoyed surprises. He was a planner, meticulously so, attentive and aware of every last detail of every aspect of his world, and there was no room in his life for the unexpected.
So a midnight rendezvous with his very scary, very volatile bride-to-be was not to Locke’s preference.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and stamped his boots restlessly against the ground as he waited a healthy distance away from where she stood, unnaturally still and eerily calm. She certainly seemed at ease here in the darkness, he thought sourly.
“Rest easy, Lord Locke,” she said. “You will come to no harm at my hands tonight. This is merely a demonstration of our mutual trust – I need to trust that you are sincere in what you offer to me, and you, that I can in fact do that which you have demanded of me.”
A half-forgotten memory of ènna as a young boy, shrieking with laughter, fingers waggling in his ears and tongue out, taunting, sure, but full of mirth, surfaced before him.
“There’s really no need to kill ènna,” Locke said.
“I assure you, my lady, I have the utmost confidence in your abilities. I believe in you, unconditionally.”
“Och.” She shrugged. “Faith is belief without proof, it’s true, but it’s a feeble thing, faith – the chosen virtue of fools.” She paused, a deliberate taunt. “You are not a fool, are you, Lord Locke?”
Another memory – he and his three brothers as boys, tramping through the midlands, muddy and carefree, and behind them, whistling through the brand-new gap in his teeth, courtesy of Locke’s own fist, was énna, the youngest of the MacMurchada cousins – the most obnoxious, too, without a doubt, whiny and a bit too full of himself, as evidenced by his missing front teeth.
But a MacMurchada, nonetheless, and therefore one of them, bound to him by blood if not by love.
He hissed through his teeth. “Will it be quick? Whatever it…is…that you will do to him?”
“Rest easy, Lord Locke,” she said once more. “I have no intention of killing your cousin. I merely wish to show him something.”
Locke shivered. “Show him what?”
She smiled again, and he decided then and there that he much preferred her stoic and serious, her lips curved into a forbidding frown or an angry scowl, anything rather than that small, knowing smile, which whispered of unimagined terror that meant misery for him and pleasure for her, because anything that gave her joy, he knew, promised to only bring him pain.
He looked away, fixing his attention instead on the broad-shouldered bárd waiting in the trees, a looming giant of a man, silent and still as a slab of rock cut from a mountain. “And you,” he said. “What’s your role in this little production? Are you her servant, her bodyguard, her lover?”
The man stared back, immovable and stone-faced. “None of your concern.”
“I think it is, seeing as how it involves both my kin and my future wife.”
“Finn is not my lover,” interjected Rory. “We are simply old friends with many mutual interests.”
Locke smirked sympathetically at the bárd leaning against the tree in the shadows. “Couldn’t close the deal, boyo?” He clicked his tongue in mock ruefulness. “A shame. I’ll let you know, soon enough, how she was.”
“Soon enough,” said the bárd, lip curling, “I’ll have taken my sword and removed your –”
“Finn.” Locke stiffened as Rory moved forward to lay her hand on the bárd’s forearm – a familiar, intimate gesture – then her gaze came up to latch onto Locke’s, cold and unyielding as the ice-slicked rocks in a midwinter freeze.
“Your cousin approaches, Lord Locke. Perhaps you should take a step back.”
He hesitated, guilt twisting in his chest. There was surely no love lost between him and énna, but he deserved better than whatever horrors his murderous bride had planned for him.
From behind him, he heard the familiar drawl of énna’s off-key song, slurred and muddled with drink, as he stumbled through the trees.
There was a thud, and the singing stopped abruptly, followed by a gruff laugh.
“The gods damn you, Locke MacMurchada,” he heard his cousin call, raspy and garbled.
“Why the hell you want to meet way out here? I can’t even see the hand in front of my face, don’t you know. ”
Locke’s throat tightened. “Please,” he said once, staring at the beautiful woman before him, as the bárd slipped away, retreating further into the darkened woods. “Please. There must be another way. This kind of petty vengeance is beneath you, my lady.”
“No,” she said. “It really isn’t.”
énna stumbled again, tripping over the underbrush as he lurched towards them. “Locke?”
He took a deep breath, then backed away, fists clenched at his sides, hovering on the edge of the clearing as he watched his cousin stagger into the cool circle of moonlight that pierced through the shadowy branches crisscrossing overhead.
Locke saw the moment that énna realized that he was not alone. “You,” he said, face twisting in an ugly leer even as he glared at Rory. “Trying to escape, are you now, whore?”
“Hardly,” she said, and Locke shivered at the sight of that smile, serpentine and aching with wicked delight. “I was waiting for you, énna MacMurchada.”
His cousin sneered, lurching forward a few steps, and grabbed her chin in his fingers, twisting her face towards his.
Locke made an involuntary sound, but the bárd lingering in the shadows of the trees did not move, his arms folded across his chest, stone-faced and unconcerned.
“Everyone in this gods-forsaken camp is afraid of you,” énna snarled.
“But not me. I don’t believe you’ve got any magic, whore.
It’s all a pack of lies.” Locke watched as his fingers dug into her skin, cruel and undoubtedly painful, but she didn’t push him away, only stood straight-backed and steady, watching him with that same, secret, smile.
“I don’t believe in fecking magic at all. ”
“What a shame,” said Rory. “But there will always be magic to be found within the land of éire, don’t you know. Would you like to see?”
énna shoved her backwards, slamming her against a tree, and stepped forward, his hand raised to slap, but an unnatural chill descended over the glen, far colder and more brutal than the usual coolness of an early spring night.
Then she spoke, a strange, guttural invocation, in a bone-chilling language which Locke had never before heard, something unearthly and unfathomably fearful.
From all around them, rising up from the watching trees, came a dense and black fog, riddled with ice, creeping in towards where énna stood.
His cousin whirled around, no doubt at last coming to his senses and ready to flee, then abruptly, his face became distorted and twisted with abject fright. “No,” énna gasped. “No, no – get it off, get it off, get it off –”
He fell to his knees, fingers digging into his scalp, his nails scraping against his cheeks, screaming out in senseless, wordless shrieks of terror, clawing at his skin until rivulets of blood ran down his face, his arms, dripping onto the earth.
The shadows around them swelled, twisting themselves into massive, smoky creatures with spindly legs and gaping mouths, hissing as they converged on where énna scrabbled about in the dirt, tearing at his skin and his hair with his nails.
“No,” he screamed again, shrill and loud. “No, no, no –”
The spider-shadows pounced, slithering across his cousin’s convulsing body, and his screams rose to a fever-pitch. Locke staggered backwards, stomach rolling, and Rory turned to face him, still smiling, still inconceivably cruel.
“Lord Locke,” she said softly. “Do you not find my demonstration to your satisfaction?”
“What the hell,” he said, his voice sounding, even to his own ears, reed-thin and shrill. “What the hell are you doing to him –”
“Nothing at all,” she said, calm and unruffled. “I have not touched him.”
Behind them, énna’s screams turned to erratic, high-pitched wails, followed by the unmistakable sound of vomiting.
“The shadows take the shape of what he himself sees in his mind’s eye,” Rory continued conversationally, as Locke’s own stomach twisted and heaved in response to his cousin’s torments.
“He had walked through a spider’s web, it seemed, as he stumbled drunkenly through the woods on his way to rendezvous with you, Lord Locke, and it seems that the disgust of that encounter lingered with him even now.
” Her gaze flickered past Locke, studying the spasming body of his cousin with mild disinterest. “Look,” she said. “They have shifted again.”
Locke swallowed the bitter bile rising in his throat and forced himself to turn, to bear witness to the torments his cousin was enduring – because of him, énna was suffering because he had allowed it, had sacrificed his cousin for the sake of his own ends, perhaps he was more like his father than he had thought – and saw the shadows merging and blending together, taking the shape of snarling, salivating dogs, fangs bared as they pounced on énna, ripping at his hands and his feet with their merciless shadow-mouths.
“Oisín’s beard,” Locke choked. “Make them stop, make them stop, for the love of the gods, stop this –”
“They are not hurting him,” she said with horrible indifference.
“We did not grant them corporeality, my shadows.” His horror and bewilderment must have shown on his face, because she smiled, a terrifying parody of tenderness.
“Yes,” she said. “It is possible – to make iron and steel, claw and fang, appear from thin air.” She nodded towards his cousin.
“But for him – no. All of his torments, all his pain – they exist only in his mind. Whatever physical pain he endures, he causes himself.” She watched in silence for a moment as énna writhed and screamed, vomit eking out of the corners of his convulsing mouth.
“He believes that his hands and his feet have been gnawed from his limbs,” she remarked, as Locke keeled over, fingers curled into his palms. “That his tongue has been ripped out and fed to the dogs. Very dark fears, your cousin has, it would seem.”
“Make it stop,” said Locke, chest heaving. “You’ve proven your point, I did as you ask, now make it stop. Please.”
A long pause, while énna’s shrieks continued to reverberate shrilly off the surrounding rocks, a twisted perversion of a song, a wretched melody formed of notes that sang of abject terror and pain, until she sighed, a disgruntled sound, and spoke again, low and guttural.
The shadows vanished and the darkness lifted, the moonlight winking back down through the branches of the trees, falling across énna’s twitching, vomit-soaked body in a gentle, soothing caress.
“Finn,” she said “Clean this up.”
The bárd moved forward from where he kept watch in the trees. “Of course,” he said. “What would you have me do with him, Lord MacMurchada?”
Locke staggered to his feet, hands shaking. “He needs help,” he managed to say as his cousin continued to weep, the sound of his sobs choked and strangled, his tears and his snot soaking into his beard. “He needs – he needs – I’ll do it –”
“Finn will see to him,” said Rory. “We have much to discuss, Lord Locke, you and I.”
“He’s my cousin.”
“And Finn will see to him.” Her voice was flat and unyielding as the bárd bowed again, then stalked over to énna’s shivering form, hooking his powerful arms beneath Enna’s elbows and pulling him towards the encampment, énna’s boots twitching as they dragged limp through the dirt.
“He has received his justice, and now Finn will care for him.”
“Justice?” Locke whirled to face her, face twisted with rage. “You dare to call that justice? Are you mad? That was an obscenity, what you have done to him – a helpless man.”
Her brows arched. “Helpless, you say? What was I, with my hands bound and my face bruised, when your cousin strode up to me and spat in my eye and called me a whore?” She smiled thinly when he closed his mouth over his trembling objection.
“But in the end, it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done, Lord Locke.
I can see the shapings of what is to come, can even manipulate and ply them to my will, but there is no power that exists in this world or any other that can undo what has already come to pass,” and something far darker and more dangerous than he had yet seen slithered into her cold silver eyes.
Locke turned away, wiping at his trembling mouth with the back of his hand. “I did my part,” he said after a moment, staring at the soiled and shredded earth where énna had lain. “Now you will do yours.”
“Certainly.” The leaves rustled behind him as she moved, and he forced himself not to flinch as she came to stand beside him, so lovely in the moonlight, that earthy, bitter scent of hers wafting towards him, far stronger and more potent than before.
Of course, he thought grimly. That was the source of that scent, of ice and iron and blood – this shadow-magic that lurked underneath her skin, seeping through her pores.
“And is this what you had in mind for your father, when you asked for my assistance?”
“I just want him dead,” he said sharply. “I do not care by what means.” He looked back at her, that delicate profile outlined in the pale light of the moon. “You will keep the other part of our bargain as well – tomorrow, at sunset, you will become my wife.”
“For a year and a day.”
“For a year and a day,” he repeated. “And in return, once my father is dead and the Albion armies are destroyed, I will restore to you the governance of Connacht, and then you, my lady, will never step foot in the realm of Leinster ever again, or I swear by Oisín’s beard, I will kill you, one way or the other, no matter what nightmares you may call up against me. ”
She met his gaze, smiling, as pure-seeming as the lilies that soon would bloom in the spring. “Not unless I kill you first, Lord Locke.”