Chapter 30
Chapter thirty
RORY
Niall.
It was the only thought thrumming through her, her mind empty of everything but this never-ending wave of hope triumphant.
Because Niall was here, Niall was well, Niall was alive.
She sank to her knees before him, her fingers trembling as she reached for him. “Niall,” she whispered, the salt-warm tears spilling down her cheeks as she drank in the sight of him, her little brother, just as she remembered him to be, seven years old and her only friend in the whole world –
She froze as he shrank away from her, pressing himself flat against the rock. “Don’t – please don’t.”
Rory yanked her hand back, her heart in her throat. “Niall – it’s me. It’s Rory. You’re all right now, I’m here –”
“I don’t know you,” the boy cried, and it was as though he’d stabbed her in the gut as her frantic delusion began to fade, as she realized the truth of what was before her. “Leave me alone.”
A hand, light and firm, came to rest on her shoulder. “Rory,” said Locke. “Leave the boy be, Rory. Let me take care of this.”
She nodded, dazed, half-drowning in despair as fresh and bitter as the first day she tasted it, but as Locke helped to pull her to her feet, a whisper of dread slipped into her consciousness. “Wait,” she said. “Take care of this – you mean –”
Their eyes met. “Let me do what it is that we came here to do, my lady,” he said with unutterable gentleness. “It is not for you to strike this blow.”
“But that’s Niall,” she said. “I mean – it’s not Niall, I know that, but it’s – he’s…he’s Niall’s son.”
“No, my lady. It’s a monster that, given the chance, would kill us all without hesitation,” said Locke, less gently, but his expression was still kind, still compassionate as he watched her. “You know that, Rory. You know what must be done.”
“But Niall –”
Locke stepped in close to her, his hands coming up to cup her cheeks. “Rory, I understand that you are upset, I know, and I am so sorry, my lady, but you need to leave. Right now.”
She stared at him, hazel eyes sharp and grim. “So that you can kill him – my brother’s son.”
“Meiche, the destroyer,” corrected Locke firmly. “So that, yes, I can slit the throat of the boy who holds the serpents who will consume the world in his chest, and save all our gods-damned lives.”
From behind them, the boy began to cry, violent, heaving sobs, and Locke swore as Rory yanked free of his grip, moving backwards to position herself between him and the boy. “No,” she said. “I forbid it.”
“Rory, you knew. You knew full well that this was what we came here to do, what we must do –”
“I said no,” she said, and then a scuffling noise and a clank of iron, and a pair of small, cold fingers slid into hers, wrapping themselves around her hand, squeezing tight.
Her heart throbbed, grief-stricken with memories of other fingers, other hands, that she did not save.
Did not protect.
“We’ll find another way,” she said. “There are other ways to defeat a monster than by becoming one.” Her eyes met Locke’s, and she let her expression soften.
“You once told me that, did you not? Or was that yet another lie to keep me docile while you led me to slaughter, as you now mean to do to my brother’s child? ”
His face transformed at that, the sympathy melting away until only a slab of unyielding granite looked back at her, remorseless and unforgiving.
“Yes,” he said. “I would have said anything to keep you calm until I’d seen my plans for you come to fruition.
” Pain ricocheted through her, and she dropped her gaze before he could see the raw welts the lash of his words had made against her heart.
”But,” he continued, “it doesn’t matter, my lady.
All that matters is that you allow me to do what it is that we came here to do.
Avert your eyes, turn your back, walk away if you must – I don’t care.
But this will happen, one way or the other. ”
Those frigid fingers entwined around hers, quivering and afraid and ever-so-small.
“Rory,” said Locke. “Look at me.”
She kept her eyes fixed on the sword at his side, half out of his sheath. “No.”
“Rory, I have to do this. We have to. We owe a debt, Rory, to our motherland, and this is how we pay it.”
“He’s a boy.”
“That boy will kill us all, will be the ruination of éire itself.”
She felt the grip of his small hand tighten once more around hers, so similar to another who had once held her hand – held it in faith and in trust. I“Locke,” she whispered. “I cannot. He looks just like him. He looks just like Niall.”
Locke inhaled sharply, his stony expression crumbling for the briefest moment. “Oh my lady,” he said, so soft. “Your brother is long lost to you, sweetheart. Saving this boy will not bring him back.”
Something brittle and long-broken shattered once more within her chest, that muffled agony of irreparable longing and loss breaking forth in a surge of unthinking rage.
“Come and take him then,” she said, pushing the boy behind her, dropping his hand to raise her own to the sky, a silent promise of doom.
“Come take him, but so I swear by the might of all the gone gods, a drop of which still lingers in me, if you so much as touch a hair on his head, I will rend you from crown to foot and leave your entrails for the dogs and your eyes for the crows.”
“You can’t,” he said, eyes narrowed. “You swore you wouldn’t harm me.”
“Lord Locke, you are a fool indeed if, knowing what I have endured, you think I have a care for a few broken vows.”
His shoulders tensed. “You can’t,” he said again. “You don’t have your powers.”
“Don’t I?” She smiled, sharp and serpentine, willing it to rise from its unnatural slumber, that bright-eyed, frost-bitten shadow that slept deep within her.
Was this what the boy felt as well, she wondered, with those fiery, world-ending serpents nestled dormant in his heart?
Could he sense them, smell their smoke and feel their burn against his chest?
Her brother’s child, a nightmare reborn, as was she.
She would protect him for that shared bond between them alone, as much as for the sake of his father, whom she had not saved.
Something thunderous and dark and infinitely cold rumbled within her at the thought.
Rory flexed her hands, slow and sure, and there it was – the faintest hint of ice pricking at the pads of her fingers, the vaguest sensation of a rising fog, the chill of an immortal doom.
“Come and take him,” she said again, “and find out what horrors I can awaken when that which I love is threatened.”
Locke spread his arms wide, a desperate gesture she had never before seen him make, a vulnerability she had not thought he was capable of shining in his hazel eyes.
“Rory,” he said. “Don’t you see? I don’t want to fight you – I never have.
I don’t wish for it to be this way between us, but if you continue to refuse to listen to me, to trust me –”
“Trust you?” Rory could almost taste the scorn in her mouth.
“The man who stood by and watched his homeland be butchered by callous, foreign hands, who saw my brother slain and said nothing, who would now ask me to stand by and say nothing as he murders in cold blood this last living link that I have to that same brother?”
“He is hardly an innocent, Rory. He’s an abomination.”
“And so am I,” she half-snarled, “and for all your talk of trust, you have done little to earn mine. If you are sincere, if you want us to be allies and not enemies, then prove it, Locke – do not defy me now. Do not kill this boy.”
For a moment, he stood still as a stone, watching her, expression unreadable. “What is the alternative, then? We can never be safe so long as he lives.”
Rory exhaled, long and slow, willing her heart to steady itself, to stop its wild and wicked thrumming in her chest. “I don’t know.
But I think that, for now, both of us should remember what it is we swore we would do.
” She swallowed. “To you, Locke, I granted my living and my dying, as did you. So if you draw on me now, if you choose to put your faith in yourself over me, then I tell you now that that same vow will be fulfilled this night, because I will either kill you or be killed by you before I allow you to harm this boy.”
Locke merely stared at her, his hand still hovering near the hilt of his sword, shoulders tense, and for one awful moment, Rory thought that he might do it – draw his sword and cut to ribbons whatever slender hope that there might be something more between them than vitriol and violence and mistrust, and impossibly, irrationally, those secret, soft parts of her heart that hadn’t long ago been turned to ice and stone mourned the loss of whatever bright, beautiful thing that might have been.
But then he sighed, his gloved hand dropping harmlessly to his side. “My lady,” he said, “I want you to know that is a disturbingly violent interpretation of those vows.”
A small smile, weary and worn at the corners of his mouth, but a smile nonetheless – a tired proffering of peace, of reconciliation, and her breath shuddered out of her. “Help me unchain him.”
Locke’s lips tightened, but he nodded once before lowering himself into a crouch beside the trembling, white-faced boy.
“Easy there, lad,” he said, in the same soothing voice she had heard him use to his mare a little while ago.
“I mean you no harm now.” Rory sank to the ground next to him as he examined the lock on the chain.
“I’ll need to pick it,” he said. “Can you spare me a hairpin, my lady?”