Chapter 26
Sentanta woke before Scáthach. She’d taken to sleeping with her head on his shoulder with one long leg thrown across him. He wrapped his arms more tightly around her. She murmured something unintelligible in her sleep and snuggled more closely to him.
They would find Curruid today. Their quest would be over. Then they would return to Dunscáith.
It might be hard to believe, but he wished the quest was more complex, the realm bigger, the task more difficult to finish. He was in the frozen land of the unrepentant dead, a place filled with nightmares personified, and Sentanta did not want to leave.
* * *
It took all Scáthach’s willpower to leave the cave when the coal sky lightened to slate.
She and Cuchulainn spoke little but touched often.
It was one of her favorite things about him being her lover—those brushes of intimacy—fingers that lingered when she passed the mead skin to him, shoulders that pressed lightly together as they broke their fast, looks that were long and said so much without a spoken word.
Leaving the cave was difficult, especially when they emerged from their cocoon of warmth and serenity to reenter a frozen realm of horrors.
It was snowing again, small sharp flakes that slanted sideways in the bitter wind.
Scáthach almost stopped, spun around, and reentered their cave.
She had no doubt Cuchulainn would gladly follow her, gladly remain in that safe place with her for as long as she would have him.
As the two of them trudged through the calf-deep snow back to the path, Scáthach wondered how long they could remain here in this realm of death and cold while the mortal world kept spinning.
If they stayed longer, would her Little Fry be a gray-haired matron when she returned?
Would Scáthach be a grandmother? Perhaps even a great-grandmother?
A shudder passed through Scáthach at the thought of missing half of a lifetime with her daughter, Tabiti, her Shadow Guard .
. . no. That she loved Cuchulainn was one truth.
A greater truth was that she had a life and a family waiting for her. She would not, could not, forsake them.
Cuchulainn’s voice broke through her morose thoughts. “It’s good to be back on the path. Wading through that snow was exhausting.”
She nodded and smiled at him. She hadn’t even noticed they’d reached the path where the snow and ice magickally cleared for them.
His gaze met hers and she thought she glimpsed a struggle within him similar to the internal battle she was having.
She knew the outcome would be the same. Cuchulainn would realize the time they had left together was short, and there was little they could do about it.
So instead of mourning or sulking or borrowing future despair in the present, Scáthach shook off her melancholy and vowed to herself to cherish the moments they had left.
She moved closer as they walked. Their arms brushed.
Sometimes they entwined their fingers. Often they shared intimate smiles.
And when they passed groups of men slaughtering other men or turning painfully to stone or being engulfed by thorns or the earth herself, they looked to each other instead.
They spoke about Chance and the pup, the training yet to happen back at Dunscáith, and imagined how much of a nuisance Leannan was being for Tabiti.
As they walked and talked, laughed and touched, the awfulness of the Winterlands became less like a living nightmare and more like an indistinct dream they passed through together.
They heard the waves before they saw the water. The path curved around a hill, and when it straightened, they were suddenly walking along a steep bank that sheered down to a dark, restless sea.
“Is that it? The Winter Sea?” Cuchulainn asked.
“It is.”
His eyes scanned the gray waters. “Curruid must be close. Should we climb down there to the water? Call him?”
“We should definitely not do that unless the shadows guide us there. I get the feeling from them that Curruid doesn’t hide,” she said.
He looked from his study of the sea to her. “Do the shadows talk to you?”
“Not with words,” she explained. “I get feelings from them. They’re like an extra sense. They can show me things, but only if those things are fairly close.”
“They haven’t shown you Curruid?”
“No, not yet. But I do know we’ll find him today.
” Scáthach stared out at the sea. She usually loved the ocean and felt at home there.
These dark, cold waters were different. They held no allure for her.
She knew too well what they hid—absorbed spirits of the unredeemable.
The smell came to her as she turned her gaze from the Winter Sea.
Cuchulainn wrinkled his nose and shook his head like a dog coming in out of the rain. “What is that terrible smell?”
Scáthach’s voice was soft and held a world of misery. “She’s not fully absorbed yet.”
“She? Who?” He sneezed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Oh gods, did you say absorbed? Not another one.” He cast his gaze to their left and the rocky hills.
“Not there,” said Scáthach. “In the water. You’ll see her soon.”
“But I shouldn’t look?” he asked wryly.
“You absolutely should not look. Neither should I.”
“But we will?” he asked with the ghost of a smile.
“More than likely,” she agreed.
They continued on silently, both flicking gazes seaward and then back. The smell got worse.
“Is it rotten fish? It smells like that mixed with—” He paused, sniffed delicately, and then sneezed again.
“Shit,” she finished for him. “It smells like fish and rot mixed with shit.”
“Good description. Is that a weeping willow?” He answered his own question before she could.
“No, it can’t be. There is no normal foliage here.
It has to be something awful that’s . . .
” Cuchulainn’s words faded as they drew closer to a small bay.
The sand was black, and a tree grew where the beach met the dark sea.
Its trunk was slender and it bowed under the weight of long, skirt-like branches.
Scáthach said nothing. She kept walking.
She glanced once at the tree, noting the small changes that had happened over the many years since the last time she’d been in the Winterlands with her mother, and then her gaze focused on Cuchulainn.
She saw the moment he understood. His handsome face blanched from a healthy tan to a sallow color somewhere between milk and bile.
He jerked to a halt, staring at the beach below them, the tree, and what it held.
“That’s . . . I don’t . . . are those her intestines?” Cuchulainn pressed the back of his hand against his mouth.
“They are,” said Scáthach. “She’s being absorbed into the sea slowly as it dissolves her—skin and muscle, organs and fat first, and then bones. She was here when last I visited, which was more than two decades ago.”
“Lugh’s balls! That is ghastly.”
Reluctantly, Scáthach looked from Cuchulainn to the tree.
At first glance it did appear to be a willow—except the long, leafless branches that arched down to the sea ended in a person.
Her arms were raised over her head and had become fused to the branches so that she was held over the water.
Dark waves lapped against her, each flow of the sea engulfed her to her waist. Then the wave ebbed, revealing what was left of her.
Entrails spilled from eroded skin, flowing around her with the tide and mixing with her long, dark, hair-like tentacles.
The ivory of hip and leg bones seemed too bright in the grayness.
The horrible sound of rattling bones lifted to Scáthach and Cuchulainn along with the stench of rot.
The waves washed against her again, ebbing and flowing unendingly.
A sharp-toothed fishlike thing with the head of a man swam to her and began feeding from her entrails.
The woman screamed and screamed and screamed.
Scáthach hooked her arm through Cuchulainn’s and strode briskly forward, pulling him with her. “Move, Sentanta. I cannot bear the smell, the sight, or the sound.”
He nodded and hurried along with her. When the woman was out of sight behind them and they could no longer hear her shrieks, he asked, “What could she have possibly done to deserve that?”
“I asked Mother the same question. She explained that the woman had spent several lifetimes embracing her most base nature. She’d been held in the Autumnal Realm after her past three lifetimes as generations passed in the mortal realm.
After each lifetime she eventually showed remorse, so three times Béfionn allowed her to be reborn.
During her last life she became angry with her father for showing favor to her brothers.
She was the eldest and expected to inherit his property, but her father had realized that she was unfit to inherit anything, which is why he favored her brothers.
They were just little boys. She poisoned them, cut them up, and made a stew with them that she fed to her grieving father—and then she gleefully told him what she’d done. ”
“He killed her for it?”
“No. He died from the poison in the stew, weeping and in despair over the loss of his children. She inherited his land and married a decent man whom she also poisoned. Then she was arrested and hung.” Scáthach shook her head.
“My mother blamed herself for the death of the boys and the father and the second husband. She said she should have known the woman was unredeemable.”
Cuchulainn shuddered. “I think your mother was correct.” He glanced at her and asked, “Do you not agree?”
“Oh, I do. But I also agree with my mother. She was responsible for the deaths of the children and the men.” Scáthach sighed. “I don’t say that with disrespect for Mother. I say it with understanding and a wish that the Goddess of the Underworld was infallible.”
“Or that she spent more time here,” Cuchulainn said softly.