Chapter 44
Chapter forty-four
FINN
Finn stood alone at the field of battle, the dawn a mere hint of purple and gold just beginning to blossom at the edges of the gray horizon.
He watched, waiting for that moment went it broke free from the shackles of night, a crescendo of color and fire streaking its way across the dark sky – his favorite moment of the day, when nature itself breathed forth verse and rhythm and rhyme in the purest of poems.
He ached to see it, to drink it in, every last hue and breath of it – his last dawning.
He’d almost told her last night, had almost confessed to Rory the price that the fairy-queen had extracted for him in retribution for the dishonor he had done to her all those centuries ago.
It seemed incredible to him, that still her anger and her resentment lingered after so many years, but then again, to her it had been barely any time at all since he’d left her bed, never to return.
Meanwhile, he had lived lifetimes, seen the rise and fall of so many nights, and counted an innumerable amount of dawns.
No longer. No more, after this one.
At last, it happened – the breaking of the sky, a whirling explosion of reds and purples and golds, gorgeous and infinitely grand, the kind of beauty he had strove all his life to capture with his words, within his songs, and never quite succeeded.
Perhaps, if he were granted any final grace from Niamh in the next life and she allowed him to wander the plains of eternal delight, then – under the light of that most blessed sun, surrounded by the everlasting peace he had always craved but had never known – perhaps then he might succeed.
Five hundred years since he last rode to war, he thought as the slumbering army around him awoke and began to prepare itself for the fast-approaching battle – steel clanking and horses snorting and iron clanging, the sounds so familiar yet so foreign to him now.
Would he still remember how to sing the song of war, the ballad of blood and battle, or had so many centuries of gentle songs have softened the steel of his voice and robbed his verses of their strength and their power?
There will be plenty of time, he had said to Rory last night, for us to face our ghosts.
He knew that he had far less time than she.
And once he had faced them, he would join their ride, back down into the valley of shadows, and far across the star-studded sea – never, this time, to return.
He was the last of the Fianna, the last bárd of éire, the last living soul who remembered the land as it once had been, an isle of mystery and song and magic, and today, he thought as he watched Rory emerge from her tent – clad in black-and-gray, her dark red hair falling down her back in a long, tight braid, her sword at her side and ice in her eyes –
Today, he would die.