Chapter 15 #3
Rory’s eyes narrowed, the stirrings of that old familiar iciness crackling at the tips of her fingers. “Tell me what you were about to say, Niall.”
His blue eyes widened as he took a slow, careful step backwards. “Ror –”
“That’s why he took me, isn’t it? Why he stole me away from my home, my family, my own mother – because he hoped to use me, like a mindless puppet, to have me place my foot against the rock of the long-dead gods and hear it roar, so that he could sit on a far away throne far away and watch as all the other realms bowed down before him to lick at his boots. ”
“Ror. No.”
“Liar.” She hissed it out, her tongue flickering strangely against her teeth, and she watched as Niall’s lips turned blue and his teeth began to chatter. “Ro-Rory,” he said, pleading. “Rory, please. It’s c-cold.”
She blinked, and the room came back into focus, ice-kissed and hoary, a threatening swirl of stone-gray shadows and ethereal fog twisting and turning along the floors.
Rory swallowed, willing the cold to thaw, the shadows to dissipate, and in an instant, warmth flooded back through her fingertips, the turf-fire roaring back to its former cheery light in the hearth.
Niall shivered once more, then rubbed wearily at his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said, too quietly. “I should have told you years ago. I just knew how angry you would be, how upset, and I worried –”
“That I would kill him,” Rory finished, gaze locked on the tips of her slippers, barely visible beneath the thick folds of her gown. “You thought that if I knew why he had stolen me away, I would kill him.”
“Yes,” he said. “I thought you might kill him, and I very much did not want you to.”
“Because you love him, no matter how much of an utter beast of a man he is.”
“Because I don’t want you to kill anyone,” Niall burst out. “Because you are more than that, Rory, more than just the descendant of a death goddess.”
“Except that I’m not better than that. It is exactly what I am.”
“It is not –”
“You asked me about Ionatán, when I first came here to Soghain, ten years ago. The boy who fell from a window. You said some thought that I had killed him, and I told you I hadn’t, that it was an accident.
” She met his gaze, cool and unflinching.
“I lied. I did kill him – my first time ever doing so, and it will not be my last, you know. There’s no avoiding it.
I should know. I am the child of fate itself, after all, and this is mine.
” She looked away and shook her head. “I am no queen, Niall. Believe me when I say that there is none less worthy of such a duty than I.”
A tense silence, and then she flinched as his arm wrapped around her shoulder, tugging her close. “I’m sorry,” he said into her shoulder. “About all of it, I suppose.”
“I really would be a terrible queen, you know. I am loyal to nothing and no one – except for the vale, but even that has not been my home for so long now.” She paused. “And to you, I suppose.”
“It’s just – I’m terrified, Ror.”
She laughed at that, a little shakily, breathing in the faint scent of soap and meadowsweet and ink that was so supremely this brother of hers.
“I know,” she said. “Don’t be. You will be such a good king, Niall.
Everyone knows it to be true. Besides –” She pulled back to smile down at him, genuine and warm and wide.
“I’ll be here, don’t you know, lurking in the shadows, and if anyone gives you a bit of grief, well. ”
“You’ll give them hell,” he grinned back.
“Oh, something far worse than that, I promise you.”
They stood like that for a long time, listening to the fire crackle in the hearth, the sound of murmuring and passing footsteps in the hall outside. “Don’t be frightened,” she whispered. “I’ll always be here, to protect you.”
It was he who pulled away this time, smiling and damp-eyed. “I know,” he said. “I’m counting on it.”
But the damage had been done, Rory thought bitterly now, remembering that fateful day.
The seed had been planted, and despite his protests to the contrary, Niall had never been able to shake free of it – that harebrained idea of his, that she should be the High Queen of all éire, so that he wouldn’t need to be.
And all for nothing, it turned out. Their father had recovered, miraculously enough, a few short hours later, and for several years after that – four, to be precise – everything had been fine.
Then the gobshite had gone and died for real, in pursuit of that same, stupid, gods-forsaken dream that Niall had proposed that day in the council room, and everything between them had gone to hell, once and for all.
He betrayed her, broke that most-solemn and sacred promise of all from when they were two frightened children, just learning to trust each other, to love one another, and she – she had left, vowing never to return.
And she hadn’t – until now.
A low moan broke through her reverie. She glanced over to see Locke, fast asleep, mouth ajar, his arm still thrown over his eyes, obscuring his features.
He looked so boyish like this, his long limbs sprawled over the grass, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes smoothed away in his sleep, as though his dreamings were free of the schemings and worries that consumed him during his waking hours.
He was handsome, and clever, this husband of hers whom she meant to use and then discard, a mere means to a most bloody end. A pity, she thought again. A pity that they must always be at odds, the two of them.
She sensed rather than saw him, lingering in the peripherals of her vision – Finn, crouched by the stream, and after stealing one last long look at her slumbering, pale-faced husband, she went to join him by the stream.
For a moment, there was only the sound of the larks and the snuffling of his horse in the grass as she crouched next to him, her fingers playing in the surface of the cool water.
“Dún Ailinne is less than a day’s journey from here,” she said presently.
“Even with this delay, we’ll be there in plenty of time for the feast. Stop worrying. ”
“I worry about you,” said Finn, his hands clasped between his knees. “I worry that when it is time to strike, you will falter, a bhréone.”
“I won’t.”
“Do not forget what he is.” Finn reached out to pluck a newly blossomed green shoot from the earth, its scraggly muddy roots dangling in the air as he squashed its delicate green stem beneath his fingers. “A liar and a traitor, and –”
“A means to an end,” Rory finished quietly, echoing her own thoughts from earlier. “I know. I have not forgotten, and I will not hesitate.”
“Even though you have grown fond of him?”
Her cheeks burned under the weight of Finn’s scrutiny “I am not fond of him. He is simply not what I thought to find. I imagined him weak-willed and sniveling, a coward, and yet he is many things –”
“Arrogant,” Finn interrupted. “Insolent and cavalier, a spoiled, supercilious princeling –”
“Indeed,” Rory said dryly. “He is all those things and more, but he is not weak, Finn, nor cowardly – nor, I think, cold-hearted and cruel, as I thought to find him to be.”
A poignant pause as they sat together by the stream, the early signs of spring beginning to emerge all around them. “Still,” said Finn after a moment. “He must die, along with the rest.”
“He must die,” she agreed quietly, “along with rest.”
“Be strong, Rory.” Finn’s hand came to rest on her forearm, heavy and reassuring.
“Do not think that I am unaware of what it is you must face when we arrive – your most hated enemies, all of them gathered together in one room, ready to rejoice over your suffering, to gloat over your pain. You must be prepared to face that, to endure it without words – no matter the source from which such cruelty comes.”
She laughed at that, short and bitter. “Oh Finn,” she said. “You are not so different from him, you know, that husband of mine whom you so loathe. He warned me as well, much in the same way.”
His lips tightened. “I want you to be prepared,” he said. “For whom you will see there, what you will hear – for what you must do, no matter what.”
Rory nodded, her gaze fixed on the swirling water beneath them. “I have always been prepared,” she said, staring at the ground, how his shadow fell over her, casting the blurred reflection of her face in the water into darkness. “I know who I am.”