Chapter 38 #2
“You are a horrible, horrible man.”
“Well, you must admit that it would certainly make the thought of dying much more agreeable.”
“No one was naked,” she said dryly, her eyes still closed, arching her back slightly as she stretched out in the thick green grass by the side of the warm-watered river, and the hem of her dress, already bunched around her knees, crept up even higher, revealing a flash of pale thigh and –
She peeked over at him through half-lidded eyes, and he realized with a start he had not answered her question. “Why do you want to know?”
“Doesn’t everyone long to know the mystery of what awaits them on the other side of the star-studded sea?”
“You don’t have another reason for asking?” Her brow lifted meaningfully. “Perhaps a desire to know if there was anything else I encountered during my time there – anyone else, perhaps?”
“If you are referring to my father,” said Locke, crossing his ankles and deliberately looking anywhere but at the long bare legs lying so close to his own in the grass.
“I think we both know that it would be very unlikely that the fairy-queen would have granted him admittance, based on the truly staggering amount of suffering his actions have caused our motherland and her people.”
“Surely there must be someone you must have mourned the loss of in your life – your mother, perhaps? Your brothers?”
“I don’t much remember my mother,” said Locke. “Only a few vague recollections of a woman sitting at the loom, singing as she worked and I played alone on the floor.” He shrugged. “And I didn’t often get along with my brothers, so here I am, alone as always – save for you.”
She hmmed under her breath. “You’re lying,” she said after a moment.
“I’m really not. I didn’t like them at all – my eldest brother in particular, Aeddan, was an absolute gobshite of a boy, and an even bigger one as a man. One time, he –”
“No,” she interrupted. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t doubt that everyone who shares a bloodline with you is an utter gobshite –”
“Thank you.”
“What I meant was,” she said, “that you’re lying that you would not wish to see them.” She settled deeper into the grass, sighing softly. “You’re afraid.”
Locke scoffed. “Of the ghosts of my brothers? I think not.”
“You’re afraid,” she said again, a little dreamily, “of what they – your mother, your brothers, the friends you have lost – will say to you, should you see them again.” She paused. “I’m the same.”
He kept his gaze fixed on the cloudless blue sky far above them, ignoring the tightness in his chest. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t speak with him,” she said. “Niall. Even though he was my brother, and I’ve missed him so horribly, even long before he died.
He wrote to me for years before his death, and I never once answered him.
” A soft, sad pause. “But it wasn’t out of wounded pride – I was so frightened that if I did come home, if I did answer back his letters, that he would be disappointed in me, that he would never look at me in quite the same way as he used to, as I remember him doing.
” Locke chanced a glance in her direction, the blankness of her expression an unsettling contrast to the tension in her voice.
“When we were children, and even as we grew older, Niall adored me, you know. He was the only person in Soghain who’d ever looked at me with something other than fear, the only one who’d ever seen something other than a monster, someone that must either be abhorred or wielded as a weapon.
It never ceased to amaze me, that he looked at me and saw something bright and good in me.
” Locke watched as her hand drifted down to fiddle with the sleek blades of grass waving in the breeze.
“But then he betrayed me, sought to use me in the same way everyone else did – called me a nightmare, as everyone else had, my whole life. And I was so afraid that it all had been a lie, our friendship.”
“It wasn’t,” said Locke, very softly, and she smiled.
“I know. I think I knew it, deep down, even then. But when is fear ever rational, Lord Locke? When is that small, scared child that lives buried deep within our hearts ever wise?” She sighed, lips pressed tight together.
“One day,” she said, more to herself than to him, “we will be together again. One day, once I’ve made it right again. ”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that – wasn’t even sure if there was anything he could possibly say – but he was spared having to fumble for an answer by the sound of rustling wings above them.
In unison, they looked up to find Murph settling in on a branch, feathered head cocked to one side as he studied them with round orange eyes.
Rory leapt to her feet, reaching out for the scrap of paper tied to his leg. “Finn,” she said. “He said he’d send word once they were settled on their next steps.”
Locke propped himself up on his elbows, watching her face as she quickly read through the note. “You’ve been in contact with him?”
“Only once,” said Rory. “The second day, after I got you out of the cave.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You were sleeping.”
“Afterwards,” he said dryly. “You’ve had ample opportunity to tell me afterwards, and you didn’t.”
She looked up at him, brows arched. “I’m telling you now, are I not?” She lowered the letter, studying him more closely. “Do you still not trust me, Lord Locke? After all we have been through?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you not trust me?”
She said nothing, only watched him for a long moment, that newfound aura of calm fading away, a too-familiar wariness creeping back into her dark silver eyes.
He hated to see it.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I forgot.”
“Liar.”
A frown marred the smooth lines of her face.
“Fine,” she said. “I didn’t forget. I simply…
didn’t want to talk about it. About any of it.
Finn or the Albions or Ironstring or Aoife, or the war.
I wanted to –” Her voice trailed away, and he got to his feet, a little slowly, a little stiffly, to stand before her, arms folded across his chest.
“To be at peace?”
She nodded, holding his gaze with her own, unwavering and clear and a bit defiant, he thought.
“I have known so little of it in my life,” she said, something vulnerable and heartbreakingly young threading its way through her voice.
“I shall know very little of it again, once all this begins, no matter how it ends. I wanted to steal a bit of quiet for myself.”
Locke moved forward, taking her hands in his, fingers entwined together, and bent down to press his lips against hers in a gentle kiss. “I know,” he said. “I understand.”
She exhaled, shaky and slow, her forehead resting against his. “Cnoc na Teamhrach,” she said after a moment. “That’s where –”
“Yes,” he said, when her voice trailed off, answering her unspoken question. “The Lia Fáil. That’s Finn’s plan, then? The same as your brother’s?”
Rory nodded without breaking the contact between them, brow to brow, hands still clasped in one another’s. “To unite the clans,” she said. “To bring the provinces together as one and defeat the invaders once and for all.”
“It’s a good plan,” he said when she fell silent. “You have a strong claim to it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“That’s how I know you have a strong claim to it.” He brushed his nose against hers, once, twice, a reassuring gesture. “It’s not far from here. Less than half a day’s ride.”
She nodded. “The king of Connacht and his armies, the clans of the other provinces – Dil and Gareth and Finn have done their duty well. We shall all convene there, soon enough, to face Ironstring’s forces before he has time to move on the west, and ride into the battle to end all battles, that will determine our fate – and all of éire’s. ”
He kissed her again, deeper, hungrier, than before, because he knew that the time for peaceful and quiet things had ended. “Well then,” he whispered against the curve of her lips. “I suppose you’d best get to it.”
She looked up at her, silver eyes quizzical. “Get to what?”
Locke smiled. “Stealing us more horses,” he said. “After all, I am still an invalid –”
“You’re fine.”
“—still healing from my injuries, and I don’t think I’d be up to the task.”
“Lazy, good-for-nothing prince,” she said, nipping at his mouth with her teeth.
“Feral, bloodthirsty nightmare-woman,” he said, pulling her closer to his chest.
Behind them, the hell-hound of Lugh let out a grumbled growl of warning, a sound that should have had him running for his life through the woods, if he had any sense remaining to him.
Which clearly, Locke thought as they held one another there among the trees, wrapped in the warmth of the sun and the smell of the cedar and the honeysuckle and the crisp scent of the summer air, he did not.