Chapter 35 #2
She stared at him, silent and contemptuous.
He licked his spoon before glancing back up at her, those guileless blue eyes, the purest blue she had ever seen, the color of the spring sky freshly washed with rain, peeking out from her underneath a shaggy thatch of golden-wheat hair.
“You know who Oisín is? The son of Finn McCool, who ate the flesh of the salmon of knowledge.” She watched as he nibbled at his bottom lip with his teeth, fingers tapping against the side of his brown bowl.
Nervous, she thought. He was nervous – but not afraid, even though he knew enough about her to be frightened.
He was a fool – but a brave little fool, she’d grant him that.
“He was a great warrior like his father,” the boy continued, “but a bárd as well – a poet of old, you know, blessed with song-magic, thanks to his father’s eating of the bradán feasa.”
“I know the story of the salmon of knowledge,” Rory said. “I’m not a fool.”
“I only meant –”
“But I’ve never heard of this Oisín.”
“Oh! He was the one who wrote it all down – the stories of his father and the Fianna. The poems. He was the greatest bárd ever born to the land of éire, you know.” He rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand.
“Anyway,” he said. “I like them – the poems of Oisín and the Fianna. They’re my favorite. ”
“I’ve never read them.”
“Oh well, you should! Don’t worry, I’ll show it to you, the book, when you come back with us to Soghain.”
“What?”
He blinked at the sharpness in her tone. “When we go to Soghain,” he said. “You’re to come back with us, to live in the castle. You’re a princess of Connacht, after all.”
“I’m the princess of the vale, and I will not be going with you anywhere.”
“But –” He hesitated, his shoulders hunching a little as he spoke. “But you’re my sister –”
“I am the princess of the vale,” Rory said again, then sat up straighter, stiff-backed and menacing, emboldened at the sight of him shrinking underneath the venom of her glare. “And you are no blood of mine, boyo.”
She turned on her heel and stalked away, hands shaking, stomach churning, because no matter how much she wanted to dismiss his chattering as the rambling of a foolish boy, that unnatural knowing inside to her whispered, low and faint and inevitable.
He was, she knew, speaking the truth.
How she had hated him in that moment, Rory remembered now, through a blur of tears, as she stared at what was left of her brother, so patiently waiting for her to come to him as he stood by the eternal river.
He had rarely been patient in life – always so eager, so energetic, always pushing and pulling and demanding her attention, her affection.
What else had changed about him, since he had crossed over the star-studded sea?
Leave, she thought to herself. Leave, and never find out.
Yet she didn’t move.
She had walked away from him once before, and see what it had cost them both.
Her brother who had suffered so much, who had lost everything, because of her – now here he was, waiting for her, as he always had.
He had spent their whole lives, it seemed, waiting for her to give something that she had been too stubborn to provide, and he had paid the ultimate price for her selfishness.
A light touch on her wrist, and she gasped, whirling around to see the boy staring down at her, his brow furrowed, and it was yet another blow to her already beaten-down heart, the sight of those wide blue eyes and straw-colored hair falling across his thin face.
Niall, both here and there, kept safe yet forever lost.
His hand slipped into hers. “Who is he,” the boy whispered, and Rory closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, gathering her strength.
“Come with me.”
It was like a dream, slow-motion and wobbly, how she rose to her feet and stumbled forward to the bank of the crystal-pure river, the slight pressure of the boy’s hand in hers the sole anchor keeping her weighted to the ground.
Her vision swam and her heart thudded as the slight figure straightened, his shoulders rolling back in that familiar way, and in that all-clearing light of the otherworldly sun, she recognized it for what it was, a bracing for a battle that he had never wanted to wage with her.
She halted a few feet away, unable to dislodge the glass-pointed shards of fear that were lodged in her throat, unable to speak.
The ghost of what once was Niall remained with his back towards her, head tipped back as he surveyed the pink-and-gold sky above them, and despite her terror over what he might say to her – would he curse at her, scream at her, spit at her for her betrayal of him her failure to save him, as she’d always vowed to do – Rory ached to hear his voice, longed to know if it was had returned to the same as it was in their youth, as light and lilting as the warble of the wren in the springtime trees, as though perhaps in death, the broken, defeated man was at last free to become again the lighthearted boy of whimsy that she had once known and loved so much, whom the cruel hands of time and fate had misused.
The wordless moment stretched on, the river-water singing as it slipped by, and in the silence, her heartbeat steadied, letting the peaceful hum of the bees and the soothing whisper of the summer-warm breeze brush across her skin, and slowly, that familiar sense of quietude that she had so rarely known settled along her shoulders, in her chest.
She had forgotten this – how calming it was, how soothing, to stand in silence with him and simply let it all be.
Then he turned around, slow and languid, and she choked back another cry, to see the familiar features of his face blurred and imprecise, a golden shadow of who he once had been, and it coursed through her like a thunderstrike, that he was truly gone, the brother she had once known and abandoned, and that this being who stood before her was a mere reflection of him, a refracted beam of white-gold light that had once been his soul.
And then she was crying, as she hadn’t cried in years, because it felt as though she had lost him all over again, to see him like this, composed of nothing more than strands of sunlight and ethereal dreams.
Over his wraithlike shoulder, movement caught her eye.
Through the blurry haze of her tears, suddenly she could see them, dozens of shadowy figures sitting side by side, their heads bent towards one another, murmuring indistinctly to one another: her father and her half-sister, and a little ways apart from them, her beloved mother, dark-haired and lovely as ever, and her uncle, too, from those long lost days of her childhood, standing by the golden-watered riverbanks, laughing among a bevy of unfamiliar, half-blurred faces; a curly-haired, red-headed woman with her arms around a man and a woman; a black-bearded man with a booming laugh, a child with a pointed chin and rose-red lips, and a dozen other faces; and there, a little ways to the side, a tall man with the brightest of smiles and eyes as blue as the midnight sky, and next to him, despite the blur of her ethereal state, stood the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with piercing gray-green eyes and fine-boned cheeks, her arm slipped through his, her long black braid falling over her shoulder almost to the ground.
Rory shivered when she realized that the green-eyed woman alone was watching her, unblinking and intent, as though measuring her worth.
She looked back at Niall still watching her, patient and calm and unmoving, his ethereal face shrouded in golden-light, then down at her own hand still clasped tight in the embrace of her brother’s son’s fingers, forever ice-cold by her side, despite the warmth of the eternal sunbeams dancing along her skin.
The sunshine and the shadow, the two of them had always been. The light and the dark.
The joyful boy that this empty-faced ghost had once been, and her, a girl with ice in her heart, terrible and merciless as a midwinter moon. She had been an abomination, much like this boy, and the gods know she would have become far, far worse if it had not been for Niall.
From behind her, a light sea-breeze swept across her shoulders, ruffling the loose strands of her hair, and she turned away from her ghostly brother to face it, the endless stretch of the star-studded sea, the roll and crash of the white-tipped waves, the clean-cut line where the night met the dark in the sky far above her.
“I will find a way to save them,” she said, able to speak for the first time now that she could not see the opaque eyes of her brother. “Your son, and our people both. Somehow, Niall, I will find a way to save them all.”
She didn’t expect an answer, nor did it come, so she looked down at the boy by her side, who stood in silence, staring up at her with solemn blue eyes, unfaded and bright as Niall’s once had been. “Stay with him,” she said. “He will protect you, until I return.”
He nodded once, then she pulled her hand free, tousling his straw-colored hair with her icy fingers, as she had done dozens of times before to his father, and then stumbled away without a backwards glance, back to where the blue horse still stood in the waves.
She pulled herself onto his broad back, hands shaking as she nudged her heels into the sides of the horse.
Then they were gone, flying across the endless dark sea as they galloped away from those two silhouetted forms shrinking on the distant shore.
She kept her eyes closed tight, refusing to yield to the tears that threatened to burn down her face in two twin rivers of remorse, only opening them when she felt the sleek muscles of the fairy-horse beneath her slow to a brisk trot.
The lady of death stood before her in the surf, her rose-pink gown shimmering under the starlight, just as she had been when they had left her, in this strange, timeless existence that stretched on and on and on here in this realm of eternal and unending things.
Rory slipped from the broad blue back of the énbarr, who tossed his sleek blue mane and disappeared into the churning waves without a backward glance. She watched him go, letting her gaze linger on the invisible shoreline far across the sea, hidden from her view.
She thought of Niall, as she had first known him, loved him, his boyish face shrouded in the shadow of the overarching pines, freckled cheeks flushed with the chill of the brisk mountain air and the remnants of his fear, his warm hand trembling in her cold one, their shaky voices twining together as they spoke.
It’s a promise, they had said, a childlike vow of protection and trust.
She thought, too, of Locke, the schemer and the liar, bearing the burden of a traitor’s legacy on his shoulders, that glib smile and those clever hazel eyes that masked so much pain, so much grief, over all the people he had not been able to save.
She thought of him, his sword pressed against her throat.
She thought of that same sword, flashing through the air, swift and sure, shoving her to the ground, covering her with his body.
Launching himself, defenseless and bloodied, at the Bright One, putting himself between her and the malevolent creature who wished to carve her heart still beating from her chest, shouting for her to run.
Two very different vows, one made in love and the other in loathing, but only one that she still had any hope of keeping.
She turned to face the lady of death, still waiting, still silent, her all-seeing, golden-fire eyes burning with a fierce, unearthly light. “How much time do I have?”
“As I have said,” the lady of death said, running her hands down the front of her silken skirt. “There is no time in the sídhe. It simply exists, untouched by such irrelevancies.”
“Very well. How much time, then, does he have?”
The lady of death’s eternally beautiful face softened, ever so slightly.
She tilted her head, the fiery brilliance of her eyes flaring brighter, fierce for a moment.
“He is in great pain. Soon, I will be called to his side.” She blinked, and the wild flames faded away, settling back into a steady, eternal burn. “Best hurry.”
“I thought you did not concern yourself with the workings of the living,” Rory said to her deathless ancestor, who smiled in response – a genuine, very human smirk.
“Perhaps I fibbed a bit,” she said. “I do not often concern myself with the workings of the living – but neither do I wish to see my woods darkened with the souls of so many innocents.” Her smile faded, withered away into mourning.
“There have been too many already.” The briefest moment of hesitation, and then her hand reached out to clasp Rory’s own, gentle yet unfathomably strong.
“Do your part, child, to see that there are no more.”
Rory closed her eyes, seeking it then – that shadowy spool of ice and fog and diamond-bright knowings.
It rose up within her as a thunder-swell of power, roaring to life, darker and colder and far more ravenous than she had ever before felt, as though it sensed that at last its time had come, that soon it would be unbridled, set loose and unchecked in all its terrible, eternal glory.
She willed it away, soothing it back down to slither around the deepest confines of her soul, coiled tight and ready to strike. “Very well,” Rory said, and could have sworn she saw something like pride glimmering in the lady of death’s eyes as she watched her. “It’s time for me to go home.”