Chapter 9 #2
“Well, we’ve only just turned eight,” said Rory with a roll of her eyes. “We don’t have to worry about any of that for a very long time. Oisín wasn’t that old either, was he? He just sounds selfish, if you ask me.”
Niall reached out to swat his sister’s arm, and from the trees above, Murph let out a shriek of protest. “Oh, stop it, Murph, I barely touched her. And no one did ask you, though, did they.”
“Listen here, you little muppet –”
“Anyway, he ended up paying for it,” Niall continued as they panted their way up the mountainside.
“The legend says that he grew restless in the land of Magh Meall. He started missing what he’d left behind – his father and his kin, the Fianna, the songs they would sing and the hunts and the feasts – so he asked Niamh to go back.
She was sad, but she agreed, and let him sit upon her white horse to ride back across the star-studded sea.
‘But you must promise me,’ she said. ‘Promise me you will not set foot in the land of éire, lest you never be allowed to return to my arms.’
‘I swear,’ said Oisín, and then he was off, flying across the surface of the sea on the back of the white-fairy horse.
He was so excited, so happy to be at last coming home.
But when he arrived –” Niall shrugged. “When he arrived, it was no longer the éire that he had known. He thought he’d been gone a short while, but he soon learned that three hundred years had passed since he’d rode away from the shores of éire, and that everyone he had ever known, all of the Fianna, his father, everyone – they were long dead, had been slaughtered in the very battle in which he was meant to fight alongside them – and the éire that he had come home to was not the land that he had loved.
The forests he had once hunted in – they were gone, chopped down and made into pasture lands.
The castles of his kin were nothing more than heaps of stones, crumbled and moss-laden, nothing remaining of their former grandeur and majesty.
Even the people, he found, were diminished things, weak and small, nothing like the warriors of old, their shoulders as tall as their shadows stretched out on the ground behind them, mighty and fierce.
The time of heroes –” Niall’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“The time of heroes had passed, and no one remembered them.”
For a moment, Rory said nothing, her silver eyes for once alight with something like interest, tinged with sorrow. “What happened to Oisín then?”
“Well.” Niall scratched at his chin. “The story goes that he was riding along on the back of the fairy-horse – he hadn’t dismounted, because of what Niamh had told him, about never touching the land of éire, lest he not be allowed to return – when he came upon a group of men trying to move a boulder.
Only they couldn’t, because it was so big, and they were so small, so Oisín leapt down without a thought and lifted it himself, far above his head, and cast it aside.
But as soon as his feet touched the earth, the legend says, he began to age, his skin shriveling, his hair graying, as he shrunk away, smaller and smaller, until there was nothing left of him but a bit of dust and bone lying there in the road. ”
Rory looked away from him, up the steep mountain slope, her expression thoughtful. “You are good at it,” she said. “Telling stories. You would make a decent enough bárd, if they still existed.”
“Thanks. Did you like that poem I sent you yesterday? I wrote it in your grandmother’s solar. It’s a very poetic place, that. I like it very much.”
“It’s very important to my family,” said Rory loftily, lifting her hand in a silent summons to Murph, who came swooping down through the thick greenery above them without a sound to settle on her shoulder, nuzzling at her hair with his beak.
“The first queen of Inagh, my ancestor, Rozlyn ó Conchúir used it as well.”
“Maybe that’s why I was so inspired. The ghosts of the great queens of the past sang to me.”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, you donkey.” She huffed, then nodded towards a distant grove of yew trees towards the peak of the mountain. “That’s it. That’s the cottage of the cailleach.”
Niall frowned. “It’s just a bunch of trees.”
“You can’t see it. You have mortal blood, and it’s enchanted.
” She pointed, and Niall squinted, peering into the distance.
“Once you get close, you’ll see there is a patch of mushrooms just inside the trees.
They’ll form a perfect circle, and once you cross that line, enter the ring, you’ll be able to see her house.
” She glanced over at him, strangely calm, her silver eyes watchful. “You have your knife?”
Niall swallowed nervously. “Yes.” He hesitated, reaching up to stroke Molly’s soft feathers with quivering fingers. “Rory – are we sure this is a good idea? I don’t –”
“For the love of Dagda’s harp, Niall, you haven’t shut up about it since Samhain, how you wanted us to be like the heroes of old and slay a cailleach.
Well, there’s your cailleach, waiting to be slain.
” Her lips curled. “Do you think your beloved Oisín would turn tail and run at the last moment, or would he stand tall and do what it is that he came here to do?”
Molly murmured in his ear, low and reassuring, and he nodded, his hand dropping to his waist to clutch at the hunting knife strapped to his side. “He would stand tall,” Niall said, desperately striving to hide the tremor in his voice. “He would kill the witch.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Rory smile, small and satisfied – almost smugly, he thought with a twinge of doubt.
Surely not. Surely he imagined, that flash of smugness, of anticipation.
She would never lead him to harm, his sister – they were friends now.
They had spent the long winter months playing at swords and stories together, chasing one another up and down his father’s halls, sending quick-scrawled messages tied to their kestrels’ legs back and forth between their separate rooms, slipping notes to one another during long boring lectures of geography and history.
She had saved his life – several times over. Rory would never do anything to hurt him, would never betray him or abandon him in his hour of need.
If she believed that with her help, he could kill the witch and escape unscathed, then he could.
And so he would, because he trusted his sister, completely and unconditionally. She had, after all, earned it.
He unsheathed his knife and started forward, Molly squawking on his shoulder. “All right,” he said. “Best get to it then.”
This time, it was unmistakable, her smile, wide and sharp-toothed and full of secret, unsettling knowing. “After you,” she said, “little brother.”
And so it was that Niall took a deep breath and walked right into the waiting arms of a bloodthirsty witch.
“She will come.”
Roused from his reverie, Niall jumped in the saddle at the sound of that same witch’s voice. He twisted to stare at her, riding beside him, smiling and serene atop her dappled mare. “What?”
“Your sister,” said Aoife. “You are thinking of her, as we draw near to her mother’s vale. It is natural.”
“Well, yes – I was, actually.” He hesitated. “What do you mean, that she will come?”
“She will come to you. You are worried that without her, you will perish.” In the warmth of the midday sun, her sea-swept eyes glowed more blue than green, calm and clear as the glistening waves after a tumultuous summer storm. “But rest easy, little prince. She will come.”
“I am the king,” said Niall stiffly. “Not a prince. And how do you know?”
“A mother’s intuition.” Niall’s gaze dropped to her still-flat abdomen, his stomach twisting. How angry Rory will be, he thought, if she did return, to discover this new betrayal. An abomination, Eilis had called it.
She was right.
Aoife continued, either oblivious or indifferent to the sourness of Niall’s feelings towards their unborn progeny. “She will return soon enough. We both remember how unfailingly she has come to your aid in the past.”
Niall did remember.
He remembered the boom of the river’s current, the tightness in his chest, the panic in his heart as he opened his mouth to scream and the white water roared in, filling his lungs, dragging him under the crash and roll of the thundering stream.
He remembered surging to the surface, choking and coughing, and seeing a flash of red hair, the flurry of red-and-gold leaves and the slim white-gray trunk of an ash tree crashing into the water before him, his feeble, frantic grasp at this unlikely source of salvation, given to him by his sister’s small hands.
He remembered tossing in his bed in the midwinter months, his bedding tangled and sweat-soaked around his feverish legs, his throat on fire, head swirling, calling out for water, and his sister’s pale face breaking through the gloom, her cool hand at the back of his clammy neck, lifting a cup to his shaking lips.
He remembered falling into a fitful doze under the soothing touch of her frosty fingers, and waking to the scent of something bitter, the taste of something warm and vanilla and lemon.
“Feverfew poultice at your temples,” she had whispered.
“Drink this tea of honey and mullein for the pains.”
“Thank you,” he’d murmured, and then she’d sang something low and soothing, a quiet, wordless tune that made him dream of cattle lowing in a moonlit field, of old men weeping by a bedimmed turf-fire, of fairy-women and the wide rolling sea.
He remembered the witch, her beauty twisted into inhuman lines, red mouth screaming, golden hair turned orange and bright with flame, as she slammed her fists against unforgiving stone, and Rory’s ice-cold hand in his, tugging him to freedom.
But all that was over now. It didn’t matter how often she had saved him in the past, how much she had once loved him. Rory was now done with him, forever, and it was all his fault.
She will come, the witch had said, but Niall knew better, because even though most days he felt as though he were drowning in all the ignorance of all things he didn’t understand in this cruel, confusing world of theirs, he did know his sister.
“No,” he said at last. “You’re wrong. Rory is never again coming home.”