Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
LOCKE
Locke couldn’t tell if it was because the horses were jittery and spooked, or because his wife was neither, but being so close to the dread cave of cats had his stomach tied up in knots.
They had barely spoken a dozen words to one another since their altercation late last night, and Locke had spent most of the tense ride silently cursing himself for a fool. He had thought that there was a chance for them, a possibility, however so slight, to mend the rift between them.
No longer.
The hell with this. He wasn’t going to cower meekly in silence just because she was too proud, too stubborn to understand that not everyone was stupid enough to choose dying needlessly on a battlefield for the sake of some idealized notion of honor over doing what had to be done to survive – to ensure the survival of the innocents who depended upon him to protect them.
Had she even heard, he wondered, the full account of the horrors that had occurred in Connacht, when the Albion legions, led by Arnaud Montrose, landed at the port of Loch Lurgain and began slaughtering everything in sight?
That was on her brother’s head, as far as Locke was concerned. A king’s duty was to his people, not to his pride, and Niall ó Flannagáin had abandoned that duty in pursuit of some false dream about a king-naming rock and a united realm, and his people had surely suffered for it.
Still, it echoed mournfully through him – the memory of that straw-haired young man, so slight and frail-looking even underneath his heavy armor, sword and shield in hand as he stood before his army in the mist of the dawn, so long ago now, brave and defiant and heartbreakingly doomed.
Poor lad, he thought now with a twinge of pity. He had watched from afar as Niall ó Flannagáin had paid the price for his own naivety, his romantic foolishness. Fairy-tales were well and good for children snuggled up by the hearth-fires of home, but they had no place on the battlefield.
The gray mare underneath him shuddered, her tail thrashing in agitation, rousing him from his reverie. He leaned forward in the saddle and laid a soothing hand on her quivering neck. “Easy there,” he whispered. “Easy.”
“It’s the cave.”
He looked up at the clipped sound of her voice. “I beg pardon?”
Rory nodded toward the barely-visible outline of the gently sloped mound before them. “We’re nearing Ráth Cruachan,” she said. “It makes them nervous, the horses, being so close to the cave of cats.”
“Let’s leave them then.” Locke swung down from the saddle, wrapping the reins around his hand and leading the mare towards a small stream.
“We’ll tie them here, let them rest, while we go and search for the boy.
” He glanced in Rory’s direction as she dismounted as well, her kestrel alighting from his perch on her shoulder to disappear into the trees – hunting, no doubt, for whatever mice or hares might be wandering about in the night. “Do you think he’s in there?”
She didn’t ask him what he meant. “I doubt it. I’m hardly an expert, but I do not think that a cailleach has the power to break the confinement spells placed upon the sídhe. She would not be able to go beyond its boundary.”
Locke’s eyes narrowed as she hesitated. “But?”
Rory was silent for a long moment as she knotted the leather reins to a tree close by the stream. “But,” she said at last. “He is the son of the Mórrígan.”
“Reborn.” Locke leaned his shoulder against the tree, arms folded across his chest as the horses nuzzled their noses deep into the tender shoots of shrubs growing along the banks of the stream. “Reborn to the Bright One and your brother, neither of whom have a drop of divine blood in them.”
She nodded, absently stroking her gelding’s neck. “I know,” she said. “And yet – I have this foreboding that I cannot seem to shake.”
He straightened. “Your magic is returning?”
“No,” she said. “Perhaps. I don’t know. It’s nothing so clear as my visions usually are. It’s surreal – a vague sense of dread, that something terrible will befall me here, and I can’t help but think –”
Her voice trailed away, and Locke studied her – the tight, drawn expression; the paleness of her lips; the dark circles under her silver eyes. “You think it’s me,” he said. “The threat you sense – is that it? You believe that I have led you to your doom.”
She raised her head and met his gaze, steady and unafraid. “Haven’t you?”
Locke blew out a breath and stepped back, shaking his head as he turned to make his way towards the waiting sídhe-mound of Ráth Cruachan and the cave of cats, and the monster which awaited them somewhere in its shadow. “I guess you’ll find out.”
Twilight fell, starless and cold, wisps of fog sliding around their ankles as they searched first the great hill itself, then the surrounding mounds and their looming stone monuments – the grassy banks and the cairns.
“Do you think we’ll find the bones of Medb’s bull?
” Locke asked as they made their way through the gathering dark, searching for any sign of the boy.
“That’d be a nice tale for my grandchildren one day – once in my youth, I hoisted the rib of Donn Cuailnge himself.
” Rory shot him a narrowed glare, and he shrugged.
“We’re bound for a year and a day, my lady.
Are you thinking I intend to remain celibate for the rest of my days after we have said our final farewell? ”
“Good riddance, I say, and my condolences to whatever poor lass you rope into bearing your hell-spawn into this world.” Rory put her hands on her hips and studied the mounds around them, her gaze at last coming to rest on the small grove of hawthorn trees that stood clustered around the narrow opening to a limestone cave. “Perhaps he is in there, after all.”
Locke linked his hands behind his head as he eyed the mouth of the cave, barely visible in the fast-falling gloom. “Let’s exhaust all other options before you decide to take a peek inside and find out,” he said. “Shall we to Daithí’s Mound?”
“What if he’s not here?” asked Rory, frowning. “You’re certain that Aoife brought him here?”
“Very. It makes sense, too, you know. The Mórrígan’s realm, the original birthplace of Meiche. No doubt she thinks it will make his awakening easier, once she decides to bring him forth, if he is here, close to his damned roots.”
She rubbed at her biceps. “I need to see,” she said, almost to herself. “I hate this – I need to know.”
“Frustrating, isn’t it? Welcome to the fate of the rest of us mortals, doomed to live out our days in a perpetual state of ignorance as to what the future holds, helpless to stop it, to change it, even when it does at last arrive.”
Rory huffed. “And yet you would bring children into such a world?”
“Who said anything about children?”
“You did.” Rory elbowed him as they made their way towards the next waiting mound, riddled with looming stone monuments that glistened with an eerie silver gleam under the cloud-darkened moon. “You said it would be a story to tell your grandchildren, were you to find the bones of Donn Cuillnage.”
“So I did. Well,” said Locke, reaching out to place a steadying hand on Rory’s elbow as she stumbled over her gown at the base of the hill.
He let it fall away immediately under her sharp gaze, flashing a too-charming smile in her direction.
“Clearly the twilight air has turned my brain. Oisín’s beard, but I’d be a terrible father.
I eat biscuits for supper most nights, and I never keep to a proper bedtime. ”
“That I do believe.” Rory halted suddenly, raising her hand as she tilted her head, brow furrowed. Locke moved closer, his eyes searching the gloom and the fog before them. “I heard something,” Rory whispered. “Just over there – a mewling sound, like a cat crying for its milk.”
“Both fitting and terrifying,” Locke murmured into her ear, “considering our location. Are you certain it was a cat?”
Rory shook her head, but before she could speak, it came again, louder, more insistent, a soft, keening wail – not feline, Locke though, but not human neither.
“Stay close,” he whispered. “And keep behind me. I have no intention of spending the rest of my days being hunted by that gargantuan beast of a bárd of yours because you came to harm.”
“He’d slit your throat in your sleep before you ever knew he was hunting you,” Rory whispered back, then tugged on the sleeve of his doublet when the cry came again, mournful and sharp with pain, with sorrow. “Locke,” she said. “It’s coming from the cave.”
“Not from inside it.”
“No,” she said. “But close by.”
They slipped forward in tandem, two shadows moving soundless through the dark, until Rory stopped, her silver eyes glowing with a strange, unnatural light.
“I can feel him,” she said. “Locke – I can feel him, something cold and bleak, a yawning void of nothingness. It’s him.
” She shuddered violently, and again, in an impulse born of some instinctual urge to soothe, he reached out and slipped his hand into hers, palm to palm.
“I know it’s him. It feels like whatever it is that lives inside me, magnified a hundredfold.
” She inhaled a long, shaky breath. “Locke –”
“It’s all right, my lady.” He raised their joined hands to his lips and pressed a soft kiss against the back of her trembling hand. “I’ll do what needs to be done. Just find it for me now, the destroyer. Find it, and I’ll take care of the rest, I swear.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, the twilight breeze ruffling the loose strands of her hair, murmuring in a lilting language which only she, it seemed to Locke, could understand. He watched as she listened, head bowed, until she shivered. “He’s close,” she whispered. “Follow me.”
“Rory, no, let me lead –”
She ignored him, moving with that same swift, ethereal grace he had come to expect from her, a doe flitting through the glen, fearless and unbothered by the archer with bow in hand, confident in her speed and her suppleness over brute force.
Closer and closer they came to that ominous grove of hawthorn trees, the yawning slit in the limestone rocks, that drew the fog to its mouth with an inexorable, irresistible call.
Her steps faltered, slowed, until she came to a stop, staring into its hidden depths, her silver eyes murky with whatever power was struggling to reanimate itself within her, and Locke’s heart ached at the sight of her, clearly at war with herself, fighting to reclaim a curse she had obviously never wanted to wield in the first place.
“My lady,” he said. “You should know that I would endure bitter cold and savage winds for the sake of your smile, would follow you to the very ends of the earth, but I will not go with you into that damned cave.”
“As heartwarming as that is,” she answered, “it’s irrelevant, as you would not be able to follow me there even if you were willing.” A faint smile tugged at the corners of her too-pale lips, a hint of flush creeping into her cheeks, and some of the tightness in his chest eased at the sight of it.
A stone’s throw to the left of the cave, though, he saw it – a flash of movement in the dark – and heard it too, a clink of something hard and cold and iron-like, followed by another low, keening cry.
“There.” Locke pointed, his other hand going to rest on the hilt of his sword as he moved to stand in front of Rory. “Past the trees, by the rock.”
As he spoke, the fog rolled back without a sound, as though it had been waiting for his approach to reveal its secrets, and Locke saw him for the first time – Meiche, the serpent destined to destroy and to devour all things.
It was a boy, skinny shoulders and frail, with limp, straw-colored hair, huddled half-naked against the great gray slab of rock, and Locke could see the faint glint of iron around his pale ankles, his wrists.
Chained. Easy enough, then, to slip up and catch a fistful of that tawny hair in his hand, jerk it back and expose that skinny neck to the sharp edge of his knife, and be done with it.
Because no matter how helpless the creature before them might look, how pitiable and small, Locke knew that it had to be him – the born-again child of the Mórrígan herself.
Even as he thought it, the boy shivered, then looked back over his shoulder as though his name had been spoken aloud rather than in the quiet of Locke’s private thoughts, and even through the darkness, Locke could see a pair of brilliant blue eyes shining out of the twilight gloom.
Beside him, Rory let out a low wail, mournful and soft as a wounded dove, and then she was running, as he had never before seen her run, arms outstretched, sobbing, as he had never before heard her sob.
“Niall,” she wept as she stumbled to her knees before the blue-eyed boy, reaching out to touch his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “It’s Niall.”
And Locke knew.
They were all doomed.