Chapter 13 #3
Rory buried her face in her mother’s chest, inhaling deeply, the earthy, rich scent of her. “I do,” she said, and silently vowed never again to call forth the frost and the fog, to know the unknowable, to become again a girl of ice and shadows.
No matter how much Niall might need her to.
Finn’s voice, low and rippling with urgency, pulled her from the memory. “I do not trust him, a bhréone,” he said. “The young lord MacMurchada. We ought to reconsider.”
“Reconsider? Finn – they’ll be gathered together at the castle, for the feast of Imbolc, as we thought. There’s no turning back now.”
“I do not trust him,” he said again. “We might have underestimated him, this husband of yours. He was meant to be our pawn, easily used and more easily discarded, but I feel more and more that he is playing a match all his own, one that we are blind to.”
Rory shook her head, lips tight. “He let me torture his kin into madness – asked me to kill his father for him, Finn. He would not do so lightly.”
“He is cunning, that one,” Finn countered. “A fox in the thicket, hunting the hare, ever-patient, ever-sly, biding its time until the moment is right to strike.”
“Enough of your damned poetry, Finn.” Rory sighed and rubbed at her temples. “Perhaps he is plotting something, but what of it? What hope can he have against the two of us? Let him conspire, let him scheme. In the end, I’ll kill him as easily as I will the others, so –”
“Rory.”
“Or you can do so, if you like. You seem to dislike him rather intensely, so –”
“Rory,” he said again, tense and low. “Look.”
She turned and peered towards the distant grove of willow trees, bent low and weeping towards the rock-riddled ground, their spindly, barren branches whistling hollowly in the wind.
And Rory knew.
Something sinister waited within that grove – an untellable, awful thing, an abomination, like her, yet but not sprung forth from the workings of the long gone gods, terrible and mighty as they were, but a monstrosity of unutterable horror brought into the world by the hands of men, bloodstained and nefarious.
Ice prickled along the ends of her fingers as she began to move towards the waiting grove, almost in a trance, her eyes fixed on the wizened limbs of the trees, her ears echoing with that low, keening sound of the winter wind rattling against its bony branches.
“My lady,” she heard Locke call from behind her. “My lady, wait –”
She didn’t, but kept moving forward with that same sluggish tread, her heart thudding slow and heavy with grief, with rage, with dread of what she knew she soon would see.
Bootsteps thundered behind her, and then she felt the smooth warmth of his hand in his leather glove slide around her elbow. “My lady, stop –”
“The trees.” It was not quite the otherworldly voice of her knowings, but close to it – a discordant sound. “There’s something in the trees.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw him glance towards the willow grove. “Leave it,” Locke said, grip tightening on her arm. “Leave it alone, my lady.”
She turned to face him then, studying the grim lines of his mouth, the tightness at the corners of his hazel eyes. “You already know,” she said after a moment. “Tell me, Lord Locke – what is it that I will find within that grove of trees, should I dare to look?”
He was silent, his gaze flickering away from hers to stare at the barren branches still lowing, mournful and sad, in the brisk winter breeze.
“There was a battle,” he said at last. “Soon after the Albions first invaded. A few of the Leinster-clans banded together, in defiance of my father’s orders, and met them in the field.
” He gave a half-hearted shrug, but Rory could see it, the strained pull of his lips, the shadows in his eyes.
“It was little more than a skirmish. They were disorganized and leaderless, not to mention vastly outnumbered. It was over swiftly enough, from what I was told. A mercy, really.”
No, came the grief-stricken warbling from the shivering willows. No mercy, no swift, clean ending. No honor, no peace.
Rory trembled once, then closed her eyes, breathing it in – that barely-there scent of corruption, of screaming, of a slaughtering of pink-eyed lambs and their hapless ewes, of half-blind, ancient rams stumbling to their doom, an endless, unceasing weeping.
Beside her, Locke swore as she felt the rising chill settled against her skin, seeping through her clothes, freezing her blood. “Look,” she said without opening her eyes. “Look and see, Lord Locke, the truth of things.”
Something cracked once, thunderous and ice-riddled, and she opened her eyes to a barren wasteland of bone-white snow coating the earth, stifling the feeble green buds of spring that dared to begin to push their way out towards the light, stealing their breaths as it swept over the land.
Locke didn’t seem to notice, or to care.
He was staring, lips white, eyes wild, at that forsaken grove of ever-weeping trees, watching the shadows that swirled and sighed within their depths – two armies, one great and one small, warring together, swords and spears clashing, men dropping, one by one, to their knees, their shadow-throats cut, their sternums split, their stomachs distended, a relentless, bloodless cycle of death, until at last it was a few dozen men, broken and bruised, bound and gagged together, eyes wheeling in their shadow-skulls, as women and children were dragged out of their homes by their hair, weeping and pleading for mercy, mercy please, have mercy, and thrown to the ground and thrown upon spears, ravaged and ripped open raw, as the shadow-soldiers vomited into the gags and writhed in the snow.
Rory said nothing as Locke sank to his knees next to her, gloved fingers digging into his scalp, watching as the conquering soldiers guffawed and laughed as they heaved the shadow-bodies of the women and the children, the venerable and the wounded, piling them high before the survivors, now gone silent and vacant-eyed, waiting to die, then set their torches to them, the flames catching hot and greedy on their tattered and bloody clothes, leaping hungry and high against the scream-sodden sky, burning and devouring both the living and the dead, till nothing remained but smoke and ash and a few charred bits of shadow-gray bone.
“It took three days and three nights,” said Rory when the shadows shivered once then dissipated, the sunlight peeking through the fog, the snow melting away, seeping back into the damp black earth without a sound.
“They camped for three nights, the defeated soldiers forced to wallow in their own filth, tied up like beasts before the slaughter, forced to watch as the Albions caroused, using whatever women were left, torturing the children and the elders, all before their eyes, taunting them with their failure, with their loss, until at last they finished with them – put the women and the children and the elders to the sword, then burned the surviving men alive.” Locke gagged, but Rory continued, implacable and stone-faced.
“They left what was left of them in a smoking heap there under the sun for the wolves and the crows, but another clan discovered them, buried their bones within the willow grove, so that they might rest.”
“The gods damn them,” Locke said, so soft and low that Rory could barely hear him. “May the gods damn them all.”
“And you with them,” said Rory. “These are the allies you have taken for yourself, Lord Locke.”
He stood in a rush, hands shaking, nose to nose with her, chest heaving. “How dare you,” he snarled, his handsome face distorted and twisted with grief and with rage. “I had no choice –”
“We always have a choice,” she said. “Three furlongs from here, I see a castle being built, Lord Locke – high walls and stone battlements, a castle that is fed and nourished with the riches of your lands. But it is not your castle, I think, nor the castle of your kin. Do you know whose it is, Lord Locke, who it is that will rule over the midlands of your realm, who will cavort and hunt in the fields where your people bled and suffered and died at the hands of your allies?”
His hazel eyes churned, blazing bright with fury. “Filip Pendreghast,” he said at last. “The Albion king granted him these lands, in gratitude for his service.”
“His services,” Rory repeated, low and even.
“What services were those, Lord Locke?” He said nothing, lips growing white and thin.
“It was the men, was it not, that he provided, the ones who came here to this village, who slaughtered your lambs and raped your ewes, who massacred your flock simply for the sport of it?”
“I didn’t know –”
“Your father was right to cede his throne, so that the rule of Leinster should never pass into your hands,” she said. “The two of you would be shameful kings indeed.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and stalked away from him, past where Finn lingered behind her, arms folded across his chest, watching her with a grimly pleased expression.
She kept going, past the huddled group of Locke’s men, all staring at her with ashen faces and gaping mouths, towards the clean, fresh scent of the rushing river beyond her.
She dropped to her knees on the muddy bank and leaned down to splash the cool water on her face, trying to soothe her erratic, violently beating heart.
Rory leaned back on her heels, damp face tipped back towards the sky, watching the larks and the thrushes swoop above her, warbling soft and low among the trees against the backdrop of a sunlit sky.
She understood what her mother meant now – that these knowings would be the ruination of her.
Would she ever feel peace again, she wondered, ever feel clean again, after bearing witness to such horrors, such griefs – ones that she might, perhaps, could have saved, had she been here?
What other horrors yet awaited her, lingering on the outskirts of her knowings, hiding deep within her shadows, waiting to be unearthed?
Her chin dropped, her breath stuttering out of her in a long, ragged rush – then she froze.
A little ways down the river bank, there stood an unmistakable swelling in the ground, surrounded by a grove of whitethorn trees, their gray-and-white bark a stark contrast against the darkness of the woods, the pale blue of the midmorning sky.
A sídhe, she thought. A doorway to the other-worlds.
She remembered Kieran’s stories of his ancestor, Riona, and her silver-tinted blood, loosening the grip on the strongholds between the land of the sídhe and the mortal realm and moving freely between them, a bridge between the worlds.
She remembered Niall, lying on a riverbank much like this one, his arms folded behind his head, dreamily telling her again the story of Fionn mac Cumhaill, a boy who burnt his thumb on the salmon of knowledge, a fish that had eaten nine hazelnuts which had fallen into the well of wisdom itself.
“When he sucked on his thumb to cool the burn,” Niall had yawned, sleepy underneath the springtime sky, “he realized that he could absorb all the knowledge in the world through the tip of his thumb, because the magic of the fish had seeped into his skin when he had touched the hot scales of the salmon. So from then on, all he had to do was bite his thumb and he knew the answer to whatever it was he most wanted to learn.”
Rory looked down at her own thumb, still cool and bloodless to the touch, then in a wild rush of determination, bit down hard onto the tip of her thumb, teeth piercing through the skin, until her mouth filled with the bitter iron taste of blood.
Not the clean and bright knowing of wisdom, she thought, but the taste of nightmares. That was what ran in her veins, cold and unforgiving as death itself.
This was what she had been born to be – a knife in the night, a wolf in the woods, a serpent rising from the foam of the sea, insatiable and indestructible, bent on consuming everything in its path.
She glanced over her shoulder, then slipped forward to the sídhe-ring, holding out her hand, the thin trail of blood dripping down her knuckles, encircling her wrist. “For them,” she whispered.
“For all the innocents who perished here, for the debt that is owed for all those stolen lives – arise, and come take it.”
Her blood shimmered for a moment in the wan light of the sun, then hurtled toward the earth, seeping into the soil and the roots of the whitethorn trees, and Rory’s heart galloped in her chest at the long, slow exhale that emanated from the earth.
She turned, wrapping her still-bloody hand in the hem of her long skirt, and fled from whatever monster she had just unleashed from her ancestors’ realm.