Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
LOCKE
Dún Ailinne was just as Locke remembered it – a magnificent place of deep-buried magic and wonders undreamt of by most mortal men, the ancient coronation site of the great Leinster kings of old.
He stood, hands in his pockets, head tipped back, staring up at the base of the Cnoc Ailinne, shrouded in bright green and lush-growing grass, despite the lingering chill in the air from the waning winter months.
The usual hubbub of an army encampment surrounded him – men shouting and guffawing, the clang of armor and swords, the braying of the donkeys and the whinnying of horses – but he ignored it, his gaze fixed on the circular hilltop with its smooth timber columns stretching endlessly towards the cloud-gray sky.
This is where he might have stood, might have watched as hundreds upon hundreds of Leinster’s finest men, women, and children bent the knee to his rein, where he might have recited the ancient vows of kingship and duty to his people and his land.
That glory and majesty, that had belonged to so many of his ancestors for a thousand unchallenged years, might have been his, had his father not traded it all away out of pettiness and spite, for the love of a woman who was not his wife.
Not that he blamed sweet Dearbh, he thought.
By all accounts, that husband of hers – the king of Bréifne – had been a bit of brute, and good on her, he had always thought, to not stand by him, to stay with him, to endure him, as too many women had in the past centuries of éire and the world beyond it too.
She had been an impossibly beautiful woman, and she had used that beauty, that charm with a calculated and cunning hand, securing her freedom from her husband’s tyranny in the form of his weak and too-easily tempted father, running away with him in the night, and the rest, he supposed, was history.
So. Not her fault. How could she have known, what disastrous effects her leaving of a cruel and brutish husband would have on this land that he, Locke, so loved?
The chief of Bréifne had called upon the other kings of éire to censure his father for the stealing of his wife – as though her personage could be reduced a simple stolen good, Locke thought disgustedly, a piece of mere property that had been purloined, rather than the living, breathing, thinking woman who had boldly met the gazes of the provincial kings and declared that her leaving had been her own choice, not coerced, and that she would never return to the bed of Bréifne, come what may.
Yet the ancient laws still held sway over the other kings – Munster, Liam ó Briain, and Ulaid, Mac Duinn, and of course Connachta himself, the soon-to-be-murdered Pól ó Flannagáin – had declared Dáithí MacMurchada, king of Leinster, to be king no more, banished forevermore from the lands of éire, and that the MacMurchada bloodline would rule no longer in Leinster.
No, Locke thought again, staring up at the coronation mound of his ancestors, he did not blame poor Dearbh at all, for doing what she had to do to survive, to achieve whatever small slice of happiness she could in this life.
But he did blame his father.
Because look at what he had wrought, behold the devastation and destruction, the suffering and the death, that his father had brought upon their home, all for the sake of his thwarted pride.
He had aided foreign armies in the raping and pillaging of their motherland, the slaughtering of her sons and her daughters, and tomorrow night on the sacred feast of Imbolc he would sit by the right-hand of the conquering general and toast to him and his health and his continued victory over the oppressed and suffering peoples of éire – a toast to the destruction and subjugation of Connacht, the last province still struggling to resist their Albion overlords, still fighting, still inspired by that flickering, feeble hope that their true queen would one day return and grant them victory over their oppressors with that terrible, whispered power of her.
And Locke – Locke would smile right along with them, raise his goblet in unison with theirs, and drink to the death of his wife and her people, because what choice did he have?
He closed his eyes, inhaling through his nose the cool afternoon air, breathing in the scent of meadowgrass and heather struggling to bloom.
He sensed rather than saw his father appear at his elbow, the impression of his arms folded across his barrel-chest, his wiry bronze-colored beard reaching now almost to his navel – a good bit longer than the last time Locked had seen him. “Son,” his father said. “So you’ve done it then.”
There was no need for him to elaborate. “I have.”
“It’s official? The marriage?”
“I’ve bedded her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
His father shuddered. “Witnesses?”
“Oh for the love of Oisín’s beard, the whole damned encampment heard us.” The cool slide of her skin against his, her low voice, gasping out his name against his throat, the tips of her fingers digging deep into his shoulders. He cleared his throat. “We were hardly subtle.”
“And what about me,” he asked. “How did you tell her to do it? Long and slow and torturous, or make it quick and clean?”
“Actually, I told her that I didn’t care how she killed you, so long as it got done, and your stinking foulness were thoroughly erased from the land of éire once and for all.”
His father laughed humorlessly, low and dark. “So the truth then.”
“I thought it best. She seems to have a knack for unraveling lies from truth, so I kept it honest, whenever I could.” Locke blew out a breath.
“And she’s sure – Ironstring’s wife? She is sure that she can contain it?
Rory’s magic? Because having seen it, I must tell you: it is not a way in which I prefer to die. ”
“Ask her yourself,” his father said with a jerk of his chin, gesturing towards the largest tent settled in the middle of the encampment, trimmed with deep blue and burnished gold outliers. “They’ve both requested an audience with you, before the feast tomorrow night.”
“Right.” Locke squared his shoulders. “Someone needs to take care of her companion,” he warned as they strode, side by side, towards the general’s tent. “The tall one, beardless with black hair, green eyes, built like a bear.”
“I saw him – an absolute giant of a man. Are we sure he’s loyal to her? He’d be handy in a fight.”
“More than you know,” said Locke. “He’s a bárd.”
His father snorted. “Don’t be an arse. No bárds left in éire for well-nigh three hundred years.”
“Trust me,” said Locke grimly. “He’s a bárd, and he’s unshakably loyal to my lovely wife, so he needs to be dealt with, and soon.”
“I’ll put Donal and Caolan on it. Good men to have in a tussle.”
“I’d send at least half-a-dozen.” Locke paused a little ways before the general’s tent. “Take him late in the night, a few hours before dawn. He’ll be weakest then.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I read it in a book,” said Locke shortly. “I know that is a bit of an odd concept for you, but –”
“None of that.” His father leaned in close, looming over Locke, who forced himself not to flinch at the sight of those bunched shoulders, those clenched fists.
He was five-and-thirty now, a man himself, a soldier as well as a scholar, not a boy of five or eight or thirteen who was forced to endure the fist and the belt strap in silence out of fear of something far worse.
“None of your sass, boyo, I won’t be having it –”
“Not much you can do about it,” Locke said steadily. “I’m the one with the valuable bride now, aren’t I? So I'm the one who will soon hold the power you lost all those years ago with your dallying with another man’s wife.”
“Listen here, you little whelp –”
“Do you think it would cost me much grief, to turn that false request I made of my very lethal wife into a true one? Do you think I would weep for you, if I saw you reduced to dust and ash at my feet by her hand? You, whose hands are stained with so much blood, most of it our own people’s?”
“That bitch’s father deposed me,” he hissed. “Humiliated me, stole my throne – and yours, I might add –”
“And you had your vengeance. Stabbed him right in the back, didn’t you, years ago now?”
“You’re damned right I did, I –”
“So why,” Locke hissed right back, finger jabbing towards the tent before them, “why are they here? Why is your motherland crying out to the gone gods for justice, for salvation, bleeding out from every pore, all for the sake of your wounded pride, when the man who wounded it has long been dead?”
His father looked down and away at that, lips tight.
“It was too late,” he said after a moment.
“I never meant for this, merely for what had been stolen from me to be restored with foreign aid. By the time I realized the true nature of their plans, it had already been set in motion, it had gone too far, and I –” He shook his head. “What was done, was done.”
“Yes,” said Locke disgustedly. “That seems to be everyone’s favorite excuse, and a lazy one at that.”
He turned away, scuffing the heel off his boot against the grass, repulsion coiling in his belly, when a flash of auburn caught his eye.
Locke glanced up to see Rory, watching him from behind the flap of another tent on the outskirts of the encampment – their tent, he thought, the first time they’d be alone since the night of their hand-fasting, almost a full fortnight ago.