Chapter 42 #3
A restless murmur broke out among the soldiers behind them. Mac Duinn raised his gnarled hand, and they fell silent immediately. “We will need time to discuss this,” said the king of Ulaid, and Locke forced him to remain quiet while Finn snarled.
“There is nothing to discuss,” the bárd said. “She is the rightful High Queen of éire, not a lamb to be led to slaughter.”
“That has not been established,” said Mac Duinn quietly.
“And one life for the price of many, for the sake of our freedom, so that our children and our children’s children may live independent of an oppressor’s yoke –” He shrugged.
“I think even the lady herself would agree that it is at least worth a discussion.”
“The lady,” said Rory, without taking her eyes off Aoife’s bared-teeth smile, “will allow for a discussion.”
This time, Locke’s outraged shout mixed with Finn’s, both of them swiveling towards Rory in identical motions of indignation, of dissent. “Absolutely not,” Locke said, and refused to quail when Rory deigned to grant him a brief, chastising glance.
Finn was similarly unimpressed. “You speak of independence – are you such a fool, a coward, so desperate to escape the heat of battle that you would bargain away your one hope at true and lasting salvation?”
Mac Duinn’s face darkened, with rage or shame, Locke couldn’t tell.
“You dare call me a coward?” Definitely rage, Locke amended.
The battle-scarred king practically shook with it.
“Look at my face, and see the wounds of war that I bear there. Look –” The king ripped at his doublet, baring his chest, similarly ravaged.
“Look at what I have borne for the sake of my people and my realm, and call me coward again, boy.”
“I am no boy,” Finn snarled back, “and I have bled on the field of battle when you were nothing more than a shadow of a thought.” A confused murmuring arose from his listeners, and Locke noted that even Aoife’s vicious gaze wavered from Rory’s face for a moment, narrowing at Finn as he spoke, towering over the rest of them from where he sat in his saddle, shoulders thrown back and moss-green eyes blazing with some unnamable force.
He looked every inch of the warrior that he truly was, Locke thought – a hero of old, the last of his kind.
“What freedom she promises you – and make no mistake that this is her doing, her evil machinations at play – this freedom with which she teases you, it is only the freedom of death,” Finn said, pointing at the cailleach, who continued to watch him with growing interest, nose twitching as she strove to catch the scent of him.
Locke shuddered at the sight of her, the bloodthirsty beast that lay hidden underneath her soft facade of loveliness.
“Ask her what it is that she possesses, what she wishes to wield against us, once she has killed our queen and resurrected a horror the likes of which we will not survive.”
A tense silence greeted this pronouncement, the sonorous notes of his voice echoing across the stones and the trees in the twilight air, until the young king of Connacht cleared his throat, nudging his black mare a few steps forward, and looked, for the first time, directly into Rory’s icy silver eyes.
“I will not submit,” he said, his still-boyish features set in stubborn lines.
“I will not yield, even though it cost me my very life, and the lives of every Connachta-born warrior who swore their service to their motherland, to defend her with their blood and their bones, until their last breath, if fate deems it so.”
He bowed his dark head, and Locke saw it, flickering beneath the unmoving expression she kept frozen in place on her face – that old, still-raw hurt and regret – and he knew that when she looked at this boy-king, this newfound half-brother of hers, she only saw Niall.
“ brother,” she said, very softly, and Eóin’s head jerked upwards, eyes widening to hear the endearment on her lips. “I swear that you shall not die for my sake.”
Locke’s stomach clenched even as Finn grew deathly pale, both of them realizing the full weight and significance of such a vow, but before either could speak, Rory turned back to face the general and the cailleach, the latter now staring again at Eóin, her ocean-colored eyes burning bright with renewed hunger.
“I am no tyrant,” she said. “I have the might of the Mórrígan, but not her indifference, the callousness with which she looks upon life and death alike. I know love, the deep and abiding agony of it as well as all its many joys, and I will not see that which I love suffer for my sake, if there is any other path.” She held up a hand to Finn, anticipating his protest, and Locke forced himself to be silent, to keep still at her side, despite the fear gouging at his chest. “I will let the kings of éire, the representatives of their peoples, who have suffered so much and who I would not see suffer any longer, decide what my fate will be.”
“No.” Locke lunged forward in his saddle, seizing Rory’s wrist. “You will not do such a thing.”
She met his panicked stare, cold and unreachable as the winter stars burning far above in the midnight sky. “As the rightful king of Leinster,” she said, “if that is your vote, then so be it.”
“This is no salvation, Rory.” He kept his fingers tight around her wrist, feeling the erratic jump in her pulse, despite the unflinching stoicism of her expression. “This is not how you keep your vow to him.”
“It is not only to him,” she said, so quietly that he knew it was meant for his ears alone, “that I made such a promise, Lord Locke.”
His pulse quickened in answer to her own. “This is not the way,” he said again. “You know this. We will die, all of us. You know what she will unleash upon us – you know what doom awaits us if she kills you.”
Her eyes flickered, but he understood.
His wife was ready to let the witch take her – and then unleash every last drop of her power on Aoife, killing the cailleach and herself, most likely, in the process.
He dropped her hand and swiveled to face the other kings – Mac Duinn, who sat tight-lipped and stiff-backed; Dermot ó Briain, who appeared torn between his deep-seated desire for vengeance and his hope that he might spare his people, further suffering; and Eóin ó Flannagáin, looking somewhat panic-stricken and more than a bit terrified, the poor lad.
“Have faith,” he said. “Have faith in what you were promised, in the power that she possesses – the power to save you all, to drive them from our shores and restore our home to the glory and the majesty she once knew.” Eóin inhaled sharply, some of the fear lining his faces vanishing at his words, and ó Briain sat a little straighter in his saddle, eyes glowing, but Mac Duinn – the king of Ulaid stared at Locke, grim sorrow etched across his ravaged features.
Locke looked at him, speaking only to him.
“You talked of hope,” he said. “The hope that her brother’s death gave to your people, to you – do you not see that the hope that she will give you is in her living, and not in her dying, as he did?
You must believe, Mac – believe in the magic of old éire, the stories that gave the boys we once were the strength to become men, the heart and soul of our land.
” Locke pointed to Rory, who watched him with silver eyes gone soft.
“She is those stories, Mac – she is that dream which we all have dreamed – of seeing the great gods and heroes of the past walk amongst us once more.”
For one terrible moment, that seemed to stretch on and on, suspended in time, Locke feared that it was all for naught – that the great king of Ulaid would refuse, would turn and lead his forces away into the night, would leave them to face the fate of their homeland without the might and the strength of Ulaid, a fractured, broken realm once more.
But then Mac Duinn looked to Rory, and slowly placed his hand on the hilt of his sword, and in a wordless sign of acquiescence, bowed his head.
ó Briain followed suit, and then the boy-king of Connacht, until all eyes were on Locke, who swung down from the saddle to kneel before his wife, head bent with his fist pressed to his heart.
His queen – the High Queen of all éire.
He kept his gaze fixed on the ground, even when he heard the swoosh of her gown as she dismounted, felt the pressure of her hand on the top of his head as she stood by his side and faced down her enemies. “You have your answer, general,” he heard her say. “This parley is over.”
Without another word, only a sneer in her direction, Ironstring wheeled his horse around and galloped away into the fast-falling night, back towards where the Albion army encamped in the distance, his men close upon his heels.
Aoife lingered for a moment, her hungry stare an unspoken promise of the violence simmering between them that soon would explode, an eruption that would be felt across worlds, no doubt – then with a final lick at her blood-red lips, she followed the general back across the darkening plain, and was gone.
Locke looked up from the ground to see his wife staring down at him, no trace of ice or shadows in her gaze, only dove-gray softness, a warm enveloping of pride, of affection.
“King MacMurchada,” she said, glancing back to where the other kings waited.
“Kings of Munster, of Ulster – of Connacht. Tomorrow,” she said, “we go to war.”