Chapter Seventeen #2
She gathers up her crumpled rainbow robe, draws it about her shoulders, shrouding the body beneath. Some new, raw part of him feels it as loss. A fresh, hard-to-decode hurting, to add to the well-stocked winter store he already has. Mebhuranon rises, as elegant as when she arrived, turns to leave—
Oh, and Duncan. Looking back over her shoulder. Be wary of what you say about the Forest. What feelings you vent about it. It listens, you know.
And it never forgets.
She wanders away between the trees, singing to herself now, low, limping cadence, antique, ornate words even his eleven-year-old grasp of Skogurtal can only paw at. Maybe it’s a spell, he thinks.
And years later, he thinks instead that it had the tone of a lament—though what for, he could not say…
Anyway.
He loses sight of her.
Loses the sound of her voice.
Loses whatever might have been.
Only this hot, new ache remains.
He looked impassively back at her across the flames. “We’re wasting time, Meb.”
“Speak for yourself, mortal. I have all the time there is.”
There is no response to this worth making, no truth he can wield to defeat hers. He feels the cool granite chill of eternity blowing off her. For just a moment, he feels as small and grubby and alone as he did that day. He breathes hard on the embers of his rage, draws them to him.
“Nice for you,” he said. “In the meantime, Miriam Rush, her mother, and I are all in a hurry living and dying like the mortals we are. So how about you stop fucking around and bring the girl out, and we can all go home.”
She looked at him in silence for a beat.
“It won’t help,” she said.
“What won’t?”
“Little Mimi. Little Ellie. Little Eduardo. All the others. It doesn’t matter how many children you bring out of the Forest, Duncan. The one you could not save will always be here. The one you cannot go back and find and comfort, the past you cannot unwind. You will not heal this way.”
Duncan nodded. “Who told you I wanted to heal?”
“Then perhaps you can tell me what you do want.” An odd urgency in her tone now, something he might have read in a mortal woman as desire.
He stifled his memories of the body beneath the cloak as best he could.
“You need only ask, Duncan. Look around you. The world is made anew. And it belongs to us now.”
“I wouldn’t jump to any early conclusions on that if I were you, Meb.”
“Early?” She smiled, more gently, no teeth now.
Her voice was low and musing. “I was here when men first came to burn these forests. I saw them lay waste and take away our domain, acre by acre, hill and dale. I heard the trees scream. I saw empty pastures and rutted mud fields replace my world. In time, I saw even that razed and raped abomination of the land clotted over in turn with brick and black smoke and ruin. And I waited, Duncan, because it was always foretold that the cycle would turn, and our time come round again. I waited, and counted centuries, and waited again. You think this is early? I have waited six thousand years for your race to exhaust their dream and give in once more to ours.”
Duncan thought about Martin Hardy, ex of the Coldstream Guards. The offices on Albion place, the sober, subdued bustle in the corridors there. Another kind of war.
“I don’t think we’ll go under without a fight,” he said.
She shook her head. “You are already drowned. You are emptied out, all of you. You are hollow men. You drained yourselves fighting each other to a standstill in a pit of mud, and for what? Your fires and iron are become your funeral pyre. Your gods are tumbled, their promises broken. You have plumbed this dream of mastery you once had and found it a shallow, malnourishing lie. You cannot master the living world; you cannot even master yourselves. You have nothing left to resist us with.”
“Tell that to Stordalen.”
A muscle in her cheek twitched. It was the only indication she gave that his barb had gone home. She rolled out the carnivorous grin again.
“Stordalen was a fop. A swaggering youth who mistook rank for prowess, ancestry for wisdom. He was barely two hundred years old. Do not mistake him for the best of us, or the most powerful. That is not the fight you are facing.”
“Is that right? What is the fight I’m facing, Meb? Is it that fuck Svalenkari, maybe? Because he’s welcome to step up. Just name a time and place. Oh—or is it you?”
Her smile deepened. “Oh, Duncan—all that rage, and still you cannot see? Still you do not hear? Listen to your poets! To your learned men! The fight is within, it always was, and you have already lost—all of you. We do not come as warriors, to conquer you with blades and flame and arrow shafts. We come bearing gifts, Duncan! We bring you the roots of being, the ancient swooping rise and fall, the gut deep depths of dark joy and abandon, the cravings you could never feed with all your dreams of measuring and mastery and mind.”
She leaned in. Her eyes threw back twinned flames on black. Her lips drew back off her gleaming teeth. Her face became a Greek theater mask, harshly lit and shadowed, as her lips mouthed.
“Know this, as I have known it for millennia—you will embrace the gifts we bring, just as you did before, because the call to them is as strong and urgent in you as it ever was!
We smell it on you, now as we did then. We hear you calling, crying out for dark simplicity and savor and release, and we have answered you, as we did in the time before.
“Now look into your heart, Duncan, look into that truth, and tell me what you really want.”
He sat very still, let himself feel the languid ooze and thrust of her power, the glamours flickering around her words.
He’d expected this. He knew how to withstand it, knew where to look inside himself for the strength.
He’d known at eleven years old, with nothing on his side but childlike hate and loss.
Now, France and Flanders lived in his head, a hammered-iron certainty of self that Mebhuranon’s conjurings broke against like waves on a granite headland.
In a way, he was almost disappointed.
“All right,” he said mildly. “Tell you what. Bring me Svalenkari’s head on a spike. Then we can talk.”
He locked gazes with her, let his senses sift outward for any sense of ambush up and down the platform. He watched the grin ebb slowly from her face. The sharp white teeth covered, the last ghost of her smile glimmering out.
“Very well,” she said. “I tried.”
“Aye, you did. Didn’t work any better than last time, did it?”
She looked aside, a sudden shrugging motion, as if she were finally offended beyond recourse. Something seemed to go rippling down the platform in the direction she looked. He sensed movement in response, vague shadowed comings and goings at the fringes of his vision.
Then, from out of the shift of shadow, a diminutive pale figure. It stood for a moment, then made hesitant steps along the platform toward the fire. Duncan felt his pulse pick up.
“Just her,” he said. “Everyone else stays back.”
“Of course.” Mebhuranon stirred impatiently where she sat. “If it had been our aim to contest the girl here, you would not even have sight of her. Come, Mimi. Come to me.”
The little figure tripped meekly closer, stood at Mebhuranon’s side like a summoned maid.
Dark uncombed hair, stunned pale face, smudges of weary blue under the eyes.
They’d wrapped her in a simple robe of some sort, not the rainbow glories they wore themselves, but still—it was cleaner and more cared for than the rags Duncan had made do with during his time in the Forest. It covered her, shoulders to toes, had tailored sleeves her pale hands peeped their fingers out of.
It had a sheen, a bluish tinge that seemed to slip about on the fabric with the flicker of the firelight.
In one hand she clutched a grubby little rag doll that had seen better days.
Duncan made a smile. Made his voice gentle. “Hello, Mimi.”
Nothing. The girl stared back at him numbly.
“Mimi, your mother sent me. I’ve come to bring you home.”
Still nothing. But he saw a flicker in her eyes. The vivid liquid fill of tears.
“Would you like that? To go home and see your mother?”
Her throat moved as she swallowed. A tear tripped the holding wall of her eyelashes, striped down her cheek. She made a tiny noise. Bobbed her head.
“Well, good. Come and stand by me, then.”
He saw how Mebhuranon twitched with the effort of restraint, of letting the child walk away from her. He made his face stone, stared intently across the fire into the candles of her eyes. Let the rage boil up in his blood so she’d feel it, so she’d know.
Miriam Rush reached his side of the fire.
She clutched the rag doll in both tiny fists, tight under her chin, so its mud-streaked face brushed her lips.
Duncan lifted his right hand from the McCulloch, offered it to her, but she just stared back at him, hollow-eyed.
He dropped his hand again. Under his coat, his left tightened on the trench knife, clenched in anger.
Perhaps Mebhuranon saw.
“We won’t try to stop you, Duncan. Not right now.” Her voice hardened. “But you should be aware that what you have done will strain even the bonded word of the Final Isles. You have woken older forces than you know. Sooner or later, there will be a reckoning even I am powerless to stop.”
Stir of old terrors—Duncan forced them down, ignored Mebhuranon’s gleaming lit-wick gaze, twisted instead to look into Miriam’s four-year-old face. He made himself smile again.
“Don’t worry, Mimi. It’s all right. Here, take my hand.”
“Are you a knight?” she whispered, big eyed.
He grabbed on to his smile, just stopped it sliding into a startled cackle. “Something like that,” he said as seriously as he could. He cleared his throat. “I’m a soldier, like your daddy was. I’m working for your mother.”