Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
NIALL
The vale of Inagh was just as he remembered it from his boyhood days – peaceful and calm, a quiet glen of deep greens and soft dove-grays. The rest of the realm was tense and on edge, teetering on the precipice of an inevitable war, but here, those fears seemed a world away.
For a moment, he merely sat and breathed it in – that cool, soft, cedar-scented air, last night’s rain still lingering on the breeze.
The castle was nestled below him, covered in ivy and vines, horses wandering in the fields behind it, nibbling at the gorse and heather beginning to bloom.
It was a scene he’d witnessed dozens of times, arriving here in the early days of summer in his youth, galloping back after a lazy, carefree day spent running wild through the glens, rooting for berries and herbs in the woods, Molly perched on his shoulder.
She was on his shoulder now, just as then, but this time, her talons dug into his shirtsleeve, restless and on edge without Murph.
Without Rory.
“Little prince.” The witch moved her horse up next to his, studying the idyllic scene waiting below.
“Our son grows strong, little prince,” she said, her cornsilk braid slipping over her shoulder, coiling like a golden-skinned snake around her arm.
“Day and night he moves within me, restless and eager to be brought out into the world.” She turned her smiling face towards him, her sea-swept eyes gleaming in the sunlight. “Would you like to feel him?”
Niall’s belly rolled with disgust, with horror. “No thank you,” he managed to say through stiff lips, and again he caught a glimpse of Aden’s tense expression, Deaglan’s black-gloved hands tight on the reins.
He had disgusted them too, he thought, shame rushing hotly up his neck and into his cheeks. Disappointed them, betrayed them, all in the name of saving them.
One day, hopefully, they would forgive him.
Perhaps it was no more than he deserved, he thought as the soldiers of the vale began to pour out of the castle, bows bent and swords drawn, ready to greet the visitors who had intruded upon their home.
Perhaps it was his just deserts, to be abandoned by everyone he held dear, the blood-debt owed for that first betrayal, so many years ago.
It was a warm autumn afternoon a fortnight before Samhain when he dared bring it up again, testing the boundaries of that vow he’d made in the aftermath of the witch’s attack, high among the stony peaks of the Mhám Toirc.
“Rory,” he said as they sparred with swords in his father’s courtyard, the dull thwack of the wood reverberating through the air.
“D’you think you’ll ever use it again – your magic? ”
She startled, her sword faltering in her hand, and he leaped forward triumphantly to smack her shoulder. “Ow,” she said, rubbing at it balefully. “Too hard.”
“Sorry.” He wiped at his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “But do you suppose you’ll ever try to use it again?”
“You’re not supposed to talk about it, Niall.”
He pointed gleefully. “You made me promise not to tell anyone,” he said. “Didn’t say that we couldn’t talk about it together, just you and me.”
“Well, I’d rather not.”
“Talk about it, or use it?”
“Both, you donkey.”
“Well, why not?” He waggled his sword in a silent invitation, and she huffed once, then shrugged. “If I had magic, I’d use it all the time. I’d use the shadows to do my chores so I could play all day.”
“You don’t have any chores.”
“I have some chores,” he protested as they reset in their sparring positions, swords at the ready. “Before he died, Granda used to make me shovel out the chicken coops whenever I skipped lessons. I wish you could’ve met him, Ror. He was the best – funny and kind, and he told the best stories.”
She gave a quick nod, and they both lunged, wooden swords thwacking against one another as they sparred. She ducked underneath his swipe, then whirled away to the other side of the courtyard. “Was it from him, then, that you learned all your tales?”
“Yes,” said Niall, advancing on her step by careful step, a clumsy cat stalking a cynical mouse. “He told me all the stories of Cúchulainn. He even told me how he died.”
Rory blocked his attack with a half-bored swing. “I don’t know that one,” she said. “How did he die, the great Cúchulainn?”
“Och, it was very sad. He broke his geas, you see, to never eat the meat of a dog.” Niall stepped back, lips pursed, their sparring paused as they faced one another in the soft light of the afternoon sun.
“When you break a geas, you seal your doom – sometimes, you even die because of it. The Mórrígan tricked him into eating the meat of a hound, and then Cúchulainn rode into battle against the children of Catalan, and they slew him.” He paused.
“But Cúchulainn was a hero to the end. He lashed himself to a rock so that he would die on his feet and not on his knees.”
“that’s silly,” said Rory, tapping the tip of her sword against the ground. “What does it matter how you die, on your feet or on your knees? Dead’s dead.”
“It matters a great deal,” Niall said indignantly.
“Cúchulainn left this world on his feet with his sword still clutched in his hand, even after he died! The son of Cú Roí tried to take it, you see, but he couldn’t pry it from Cúchulainn’s grip, so he cut off the arm of Cúchulainn, but even then, that it didn’t leave his grasp.
In fact, when the son of Cú Roí cut off his arm, it fell, the sword still tight in his fist, and sliced off the son of Cú Roí’s hand in the process. ”
Rory scoffed. “It did not. That’s not even possible.”
“That’s how the legend goes.”
“Well, it’s a foolish one,” said Rory, raising her sword anew in challenge. “No one keeps a grip on their sword when their arm’s been cut off.”
“I think it’s true.”
“Of course you do, you muppet. You think that Nolan the stable-boy is a changeling, that the real boy was stolen away in the night as a babe and replaced with a fairy from the sídhe, and that’s why he’s so odd.”
“He is odd!” Niall squealed. “You know he is! He’s got orange eyes, like Molly’s, or Murph’s, and his teeth are too white, like bone. He gives me the shivers.”
“Everything gives you the shivers, you donkey.” She gestured impatiently. “Now come on. We haven’t got all day.”
He lunged, and she parried – easily enough, as everyone seemed to do.
Niall hated it, being small and slight, not like the other children of his age, who were already tall and strapping with strong shoulders and lean, muscled arms. He had always been a bit – well, scrawny, the disappointing runt of an illustrious, and it made it worse, he knew, that he was the only son, the prince, the heir of Connacht, and look at him –beaten down on the iomáint field, in the sparring ring, at a good-natured brawl of fisticuffs in the yard, day after day, by every challenger, with seemingly relative ease.
Not like the heroes he so adored – Cúchulainn and Cú Roí and Ferdiad, the legendary fighter of Connacht, and of course Oisín too, the warrior-bárd of Leinster, of whom it was said towered over the heads of other fighters by at least the length of a grown man’s stride.
Niall could not deny that he was nothing like them, skinny and weak with thin arms and short legs, good for not much more than writing quaint verses about butterflies and the fresh smell of brown bread baking.
Useless, pretty things.
A surge of real anger erupted within him, and he threw himself into the fight with his sister with renewed vigor, determination coursing in his veins.
Rory’s eyes widened before meeting him blow for blow, each deflecting and lunging with sure, practiced steps, knowing the other as well as they knew themselves – their pivots and their fadings, the way that the other sloped and shed, a teasing taunt as the rough wood of their swords vibrated together, a dance they had done dozens of times.
He feinted, and swift as a snake, she struck, the blunted tip of her sword pressed up underneath his chin, pinning him in place, as she grinned, feral and gleeful.
“I won.”
Niall threw his sword down with a petulant stomp of his foot. “I never beat you!”
“It’s your fault, you donkey.” She twirled her sword between her fingers, head cocked to the side as she watched him. “You’re too –” Her voice trailed away, but Niall didn’t look up, kept his tearful gaze locked on the ground.
“‘Too’ what? Too small? Too weak? I know, Ror, I don’t need you to tell me that, and what am I supposed to do about it anyway? I can’t make myself strong.”
“No,” she said, and he did look up at that, because there was something odd about her voice, a faint chill settling into the hitherto warm autumn breeze.
Her eyes. A shiver danced down Niall’s spine at the sight of them, blurry and vague, their silver dulled out to a hollow, ashen gray, and her expression was distant, far away as a faintly glowing star in the blackest part of the night.
“Ror?”
The chill vanished, and she shivered once, her eyes growing focused and sharp again as she looked at him. “It will be the ending of you one day,” she said in an odd, stilted voice. “That move.”
“What move?”
“You feint left,” she said, dropping her wooden sword with a dull clatter on the stones and turned away, wiping at her face with her sleeve. “Every time someone steps across your right side. It’s very predictable.”
“Maybe for you.”
“For everyone. You trust too much, little brother. You trust that your foes will all share your same strengths, your weaknesses in battle –”
“All I have are weaknesses,” he grumbled, but she shook her head fiercely.