Chapter 45 #2
Rory let her arm drop to her side, listless and hollow, and watched the bodies of the men tumble to the earth and lie unmoving and still on the earth at her feet.
The shadows encircled her, closer and tighter than she had ever before known, an all-encompassing shroud of ice and fog and bitter, undeniable truth.
Distantly, she was aware of Locke, fighting for his life and for hers, sword ringing, fists flying. “Rory,” he screamed again. “Rory, you have to run –”
Yet she was frozen, rooted to the ground, watching the fall of warriors all around her, like mighty trees toppled by unforgiving axes, screaming as they crashed against the earth, their bodies twisted in pain, their last breaths drawn in agony and pain.
She had walked with nightmares for all her life, had looked long into the warped mirror of fate and seen nothing but perversion leering back, vicious and sharp-set with an insatiable hunger to consume all of life in its greedy, unforgiving mouth.
She had never seen anything like this though, the undiluted horror of war.
This, that terrible knowing within her hissed. This is what he had known, her brother, in his last few moments of his too-precious life. This is what he had seen, down upon his knees, as he lifted his blood-sodden face to the sky.
He, who had known nothing of shadows – a boy of pure sunlight – had died like this, in the darkness.
Come and see.
And against her will, the fog rolled in even tighter around her shoulders and her cheeks, encasing her eyes and her lips in thick, dark layers of ice, and with it the one knowing she desperately never wanted to witness.
She could see him, blue eyes dazed and frightened, golden hair matted and crimson-dappled, slumping to his knees in front of a silk-clad figure, the familiar line of his body misshapen and unwieldy.
His arm.
He was missing his arm – they had cut off his arm, the arm that had thrown her a ball and wrote her notes and splashed her with river-water as the hills echoed with the sound of their laughter, they had cut it off, the hand that she had once held –
“Rory!” Finn’s voice thundered from across the plain, and she vaguely registered the familiar sight of him, sitting atop his bloodied stallion, his face a mere slash of pale skin and black beard among a sea of steel and iron and the impenetrable fog that loomed all around her, an icy curtain, cutting her off from the rest of the world, until it was only her and him, the phantom figure of the dying brother she had loved so much. “Go!”
She didn’t move, the shadows curling closer now, whispering to her infelicitous knowings – the roaring in his ears, the rattle in his chest, the agony shredding its way through his breastbone, the fading of the light as he slumped to the ground, the ooze of the mud seeping into his nose, stifling his final breaths –
Two gloved hands seized her shoulders, shaking her furiously, and the shadows snarled once before receding down to her ankles, the ice vanishing in a trice, and the thunder of the battle came crashing back down around her, the screams and shouts of dying men, the clamor of steel, and two hazel eyes, panicked and wild, still bloodshot and raw, staring into her own.
“Rory!” Locke’s fingers dug into her arms, far too tight. “Rory – what are you doing, you have to move, you have to go to the Lia Fáil –”
“I can’t.” It was impossible to breathe, suddenly, her knees weak, her heart thudding erratically.
It was here, she thought dazedly, it was here, right here, that he died – here, on this field, in this spot, he had died, his blood and his bone had kissed this ground, he had rolled to his side and thought of her as everything faded to a lackluster gray.
“I can’t – it’s too strong, the knowing, I can’t control it, I can’t make it stop –”
“You have to, Rory, you have to get it under control, or we are all going to die!”
“He died,” she said, vacant and numb. “This – this is where he died. I saw – I saw it, saw him –”
His grip tightened even further. “Rory,” he said. “Rory, I’m sorry, I am, but we will all suffer the same fate if you don’t get to that rock, Rory.”
“I can’t –”
“Use it, Rory.” His fingers caught her chin, forcing him to look up at him, urgent and demanding.
“You can see him, can you? Then use that, Rory – give him this chance to relive the past, to rewrite the scene, to grant him the ending he dreamed of, he deserved.” Abruptly, his hand dropped away and he spun, sword flashing, to clash with a blue-and-gold clad soldier who rushed towards them, spittle flying as he screamed.
Two quick, blunt feints, and the soldier staggered back, face mutilated, a hideous parody of what once had been a man.
Locke wiped at his own face, his glove coming away covered in gore.
“Rory,” he said, his hazel eyes glowing beneath the mask of blood and brains coating his features.
“Do whatever you need to do, but you have to get to the Lia Fáil.”
She stared at him, her reluctant husband and sometime lover, the man she’d thought to deceive and then betray, who had lied to her and manipulated her and used her for his own ends without apology, who had worshiped her with his body and his tongue and his cunning, ungentle hands.
Locke, who had lied to her, betrayed her, even tried to kill her – but had never once left her.
The sword in your hand, he had vowed to her. The shield at your back.
“I need you to come with me.”
He didn’t hesitate, but reached for her, his fingers tight around her own. “I’ll clear the path as best I can,” he said. “Can you help?”
Frightened blue eyes in a corpse-pale face, too much blood.
A sight of suffering which she had never wished to bear witness to, a sight she never wanted to endure the seeing of again.
“Rory.” Locke’s lazy drawl was stretched taut, impossibly tight. “If you need me to go with you, then I need you to see.”
To you shall I be the star in the night, the brightness of the day.
She inhaled sharply, preparing herself, steeling her heart against what she knew must come next, and then let herself become lost in the swirl of frost and smoke and fog, seeking that bright beam of knowing, shifting through the jumbled pieces of the past and the present and the future, all at once, a kaleidoscope of indecipherable truths –
Two children, playing at heroes by the flowering banks of a stream, wooden swords clacking, hair flying, the red and the gold, mingling together as they whirled and laughed and parried –
Two translucent hands, worn down by time and age, clasped together, an unmistakable peace –
Two oaks, crisscrossing trunks that formed a narrow arch, a half-hidden path through the tall green grass –
A boy on his knees, face upturned towards the sky, knife pressed to his chin and a pair of sea-swept eyes that smiled and smiled and smiled –
Rory gasped, shuddering. “There,” she managed to say. “Through the trees – a clear path to the rock.”
Locke grasped her hand in his, and they ran, through the mayhem of screams and sprays of blood, the blade of his sword growing darker each time she cared to look, whenever the shadows parted long enough for her to see.
She stumbled through the howl of the wind flecked with midnight and ice, blind to the battle raging all around her, the distant feel of Locke’s hand tight around hers the only thing keeping her from falling to her knees, from trying to claw out her own eyes so that she no longer had to see it – that slight frame slumped against the ground, his halo of wheat-colored hair distorted by the spreading circle of crimson-black, his sword still lying a stone’s throw away in the loosened grip of his bloodless hand.
How he had suffered.
How frightened he had been.
His fear still lingered in the air, suffocating and dense, the sour taste of it drowning her lungs, filling her mouth like brackish water left out too long in the heat of the summer sun – she was drowning in it, drowning in his terror and his pain and her own unending grief –
Then Locke was shaking her again, fierce and frightened, his voice muffled and faint in her ears, as though she were slowly sinking deep below the crushing black weight of the waves of the sea as he called out to her. “Rory, wake up – Rory –”
Her shoulder twinged, half-a-dozen sharp talons digging through the leather and wool of her breastplate, and the fog cleared somewhat.
She blinked to see a familiar pair of round orange eyes staring at her, Murph’s beak brushing against her frozen cheek, and Locke in front of her, sweat-soaked brow and ugly purpling bruises on his face, under his reddened eyes, blood covering his hands and his deep black doublet.
“We’re here,” he said, grasping her by the elbow as he pulled her towards those same two crisscrossed oaks she had seen in her vision, the barely-there path that led to the top of Cnoc na Teamhrach and the rock of destiny that waited her there.
“Almost there, my lady, be strong, just a little longer, it’ll be over soon –”
Then he was swearing, low and furious, shoving her towards the path as he whirled around, blood-dark sword raised, and Rory vaguely registered, through the swirling storm of fog and frost and blindingly bright knowings that still surrounded her, the past and the present and the future all blending and melding together, reality itself fracturing into a thousand glass shards around her, a dozen Albion soldiers bearing down upon them, maces swinging, crossbows aimed at –
At Locke.
No.
The word was a mere whisper on the wind, a barely-there command of horror, of denial, but it was enough.