Chapter 17 #2
They stared at one another for a moment, the bustle and noise of the camp fading away to a mere blur, and Locke had a mad urge to cross to her, to tug her inside the quietude of that tent, to wrap her coolness in the warmth of his arms and confess all his secrets, all his conniving, to tell her the truth of why he had brought her here to this gods-damned pit of vipers, to throw all caution to the wind and to trust instead, against all odds, in those hollow vows they’d made one to another in the fading winter twilight, that they might lose their hollowness and become real.
A meaty hand descended on his shoulder. “Locke,” he heard his father say. “Best not keep them waiting.”
“No,” said Locke. “Best not,” then turned and went inside the Albion general’s tent to discuss the demise of his wife and her bárd, the last two lingering remnants of the magic of old éire left in the world.
He had made his choice.
Sometimes Locke found himself wondering if mass genocide was a key component to the mythical elixir of eternal youth and long life, because it never ceased to amaze him, how virile and vigorous Ironstring invariably looked, ruddy cheeks and unfailing good humor, despite his advanced years.
“Young MacMurchada,” the general said, striding across the tent, clapping a hand to his shoulder in greeting. “The man of the hour – a true hero!” He let out a rolling, raucous laugh. “What news of your new bride, my good lad?”
Locke bowed at the waist, even as his stomach roiled in self-loathing. “She is a fearsome creature indeed,” he said. “But never fear – she’s come to heel quite nicely for me.”
“Of course, she has – I’ve heard the stories the ladies and the lads alike tell of you as well, Locke my boy. The finest cock in all éire, they say!” He grinned, and for a moment, Locke could see it, the evil of this man, that lurked underneath his jolly-hearted grandfatherly persona.
Locke smiled tightly. “The truth is that she does not seem to have much fight left in her – at least, not since your glorious victory which we’ve gathered here to commemorate.”
“Flattery,” said Ironstring. “I don’t trust it, not a whit, never have, but I certainly don’t object to it. You’ve raised a clever one here, Dáithí – cunning like a fox and slippery as a snake in the grass.”
“He’s certainly something,” his father said, a bit bitterly, Locke couldn’t help but notice, but Ironstring laughed again, booming and deep-bellied.
“Well,” he said, sinking into the chair in the middle of the tent, gesturing at the wooden bench opposite it. “Enough chit chat. Sit, and tell me about her.”
Locke eased himself down to perch on the edge of the bench, fingers curling over the raised edge. “What would you like to know?”
“Don’t play the fool with me, boy. I want to know if she's a true threat or not,” said Ironstring, the mask of the jolly, red-cheeked granda vanishing in a trace.
“My wife swears she is, swears that she’s come here to destroy us all, if we don’t stop her, and I want to know if that’s true or if it’s only female foolishness – superstition and whatnot. ”
“Far be it from me,” said Locke, very carefully, “to contradict your wife.”
Ironstring grinned. “Afraid of her, are you?”
“Very.”
“More afraid than you are of your wife?”
“That’s what you want to know, isn’t it,” said Locke. “You know very well that she is in fact what they say she is – a goddess reborn, the phantom queen of death – but what you really want me to tell you is which of them is more powerful – your wife, or mine.”
“As I said,” smiled Ironstring, “a clever lad, this one. Yes, young MacMurchada, that’s what I want to know.”
“Yours,” said Locke. “Your wife is more dangerous. By a longshot.”
“And what makes you so sure of that?”
“I’m alive, aren’t I? If she were half as powerful as she claims to be, then I would be a corpse rotting away under the dark waters of a loch somewhere, the fish gnawing at my bones.”
“Not much of an argument,” said Ironstring. “I too have wedded and bedded a highly volatile woman myself and lived to tell the tale, and yet I assure you, she is very dangerous, my wife.”
“But your wife has no reason to want you dead,” Locke shot back. “Quite the contrary, if what I have heard about her and the boy are true. You provide them both, I have heard, with the sustenance that they both crave, harvested fresh and bloody from your fallen friends and foes alike.”
“Ah.” Ironstring leaned back in his chair, crossing his boots at the ankles. “So you’ve heard about the boy.”
“The heart-eater,” his father said from his position in the doorway of the tent, and Locke shivered at the flatness, the impassivity in his voice.
The little prince must be a terrible thing to behold indeed.
“I have,” said Locke. “Do you know what she plans to do with him?”
“Use him somehow,” said Ironstring with a careless wave of his hand.
“He’s a weapon, isn’t he? That’s what she keeps telling me, why I continue to tolerate his presence, and he does require a good bit of tolerance, he does.
Unnaturally big eyes, that boy has. Bluer than any waters I’ve ever seen, but empty somehow, like the endless void of the sea.
” Ironstring’s fingers drummed for a moment on his thigh, then he shrugged.
“Skinny little thing, to be such a powerful creature, as she claims.”
Locke bowed his head, but his mind was whirling.
So Ironstring didn’t know, then, the full scope of what manner of monster he was playing host to.
One thing was for certain – if Rory found out that the prince was here, then everything, all his carefully laid plans, would all be for naught, because she would unleash the bowels of literal hell upon them.
He had to make very sure that she did not find out.
“Tell me about them,” said Ironstring. “These powers of your wife’s. You’ve seen them for yourself?”
énna’s writhing body, his piercing shrieks of agony, flashed before him, and then a second, equally unpleasant memory – his cousin, as he had last seen him, before he had departed Loch Garman, crouched in the dirt in a corner of a tent, covered in filth, his eyes, vacant and dull, babbling incoherencies.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen them, and they are terrible indeed.
” He hesitated. “Forgive me, but she is sure, your wife, that she knows how to render them null and void, to overpower them?” Overpower her, he thought uneasily.
Overpower Rory, shatter her, break her, as wholly as she had broken énna.
But at least énna had deserved it, at least in part.
He did not believe that Rory at all deserved the fate that awaited her tomorrow night.
“She’s sure. She’s been preparing for this confrontation for some time – years, if she’s to be believed.
” He smiled, thin and humorless. “She holds a grudge, my wife does, and she has nursed a grievous one against your wife for a long while, it would seem.” He huffed.
“It doesn’t matter. She says that she can bring her down, and that’s good enough for me.
” Ironstring studied Locke closely for a moment.
“And you? No second thoughts, no sudden desire to save your new bride from her doom?”
“Considering what I’ve been promised in return,” Locke said coolly, “her death will hardly cost me a single night's sleep, I assure you.” He paused, running the pads of his fingers along the rough edge of the wooden bench, feeling the sting and prick of dozens of invisible splinters threading their way underneath his skin.
“About the boy,” Locke said carefully. “It would be…unfortunate, and very unpleasant, were my wife to discover his presence here.”
“Oh, he’s not here. She packed him up and sent him away somewhere, with one of her sisters or something like that – Rah-cru-something-or-the-other, I think she called it.”
“Ráth Cruachan.” Locke and his father spoke in unison, sharp and strident, and Locke cleared his throat, rubbing his clammy palms over his knees. “She sent him to Ráth Cruachan?”
“How the hell would I know what it’s called,” said Ironstring irritably.
“Damned names are all so bloody impossible to pronounce anyway, in this godforsaken place. What does it matter, anyhow? The boy’s gone, for now at least, and good riddance too.
” He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, studying Locke with a hungry intensity.
“What matters is how tomorrow night will go for you, Locke MacMurchada.”
Locke nodded. “Of course. As I told my father earlier, make sure her companion – the tall, black-haired man, goes by the name of Finn – make sure that he is dealt with during the night. Near dawn, if you can – that’s when he’ll be the weakest, when the night is at its weakest, most fragile state.
No less than a dozen men, I’d say, to take him down. ”
“A dozen men.” Ironstring snorted. “Maybe a dozen of your lot. Shouldn’t take more than three or four of my lads to do the trick.”
Locke smiled thinly. “As you like,” he said. “But it’s no skin off my nose, to see them strung up and gutted like fish on a wire. They’re your men, not mine.”
Ironstring harrumphed, mouth tight. “A dozen men,” he conceded at last. “I’ll see it done. And your bride – what of her?”
“I’ll keep her occupied, distracted during the day tomorrow, before the feast itself.” Locke rose, brushing his hands against the front of his doublet. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to do so, to keep her from noticing that her old friend isn’t lurking about in the shadows.”
“And?”
“And,” said Locke, “at twilight, I will escort her to the feast with a smile on my face and sit by her side as she wines and dines to her heart’s content, and then watch as your wife carves her apart, to make an example to all those –” he would not let voice trip over the word, no matter the wrongness of it, to name a defense as a rebellion for the sake of his own neck “ –rebellious Connachta whelps.”
“Especially that little no-name bastard who dared to set himself up as puppet-king,” said Ironstring. “What’s his name –”
“ó Flannagáin,” said Locke.
“That’s the one. Cheeky lad, I’ll give him that.
Anyway.” Ironstring grunted as he shifted in his chair.
“He’s been stirring up resistance in Connacht, making noise about how this wife of yours will return and save them all – that he saw her, once before, use her magic, that she is destined to return and be the savior of éire, or some such shit.
” Ironstring’s face twisted with annoyance.
“I’ll send him her eyes, plucked from her skull. That’ll shut him up.”
“Indeed it will.”
Ironstring grinned back at Locke. “And then?” He asked. “After that wife of yours is dead?”
“And then, as her ever-so-grief stricken widower, you will name me the lord regent of both Leinster and Connacht, to govern them in your stead, and their flaiths will swear fealty to me – and thus, by default, to you – or they will die, just as she did, and this nuisance of a rebellion will be squashed once and for all, and Connacht will at last brought to heel, as the rest of the provinces have.” He smiled. “Did I miss anything?”
Ironstring leaned back, a satisfied smirk playing across his lips.
“That’s it,” he said. “But know this, boy – double-cross me, and you’ll wish I’d kill you as cleanly as my wife will kill your bride tomorrow night, and I know for a fact that she intends to make quite the mess of her pretty face. Understand?”
“Perfectly.” Locke gestured towards the tent flap. “Am I free to go?”
Before the general could answer, a murmur of voices arose outside the tent, one deep and drawling, one lyrical and light, a song without words, a rhythmless melody that whispered of ancient runes and forbidden tongues and knowledge long hidden from the minds of men.
Locke’s spine stiffened, bracing himself for what creature he knew was about to enter through the doorway.
Poor Rory, he thought with a pang of guilt, of longing. She deserved so much better than this fate he had led her to, than this death he had contrived for her, at the hands of this callous man and this duplicitous, evil creature.
But there was nothing for it.
What was done, he thought, a sour sensation twisting his gut, was done.
“Tell me, young MacMurchada,” said Ironstring, rising from his chair to greet the smiling, golden-haired beauty who appeared in the open doorway of the tent, pressing a tender kiss to her moon-pale cheek. “Have you met my wife, Aoife?”