Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
FINN
Finn lifted his arm gingerly and winced at the answering stab of pain lancing its way through his shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” said Dil, slapping at his hand in reprimand. “You’ll open the wound again.”
He blew out a frustrated breath. “I need it healed.”
“I’m aware,” she said, wiping her hands on a linen cloth. “But have patience – these things take time.”
“You had an arrow buried in your chest, a hair’s breadth from your heart,” added Gareth from where he sat by the fire, tending to his own wound – a shallow slice in his thigh. “You might show the gone gods a bit of gratitude that healing, however slow, is even an option for you.”
He’d suffered far worse, Finn thought, and healed far faster, but remained silent, absently running his fingers along the tightly-wrapped bandage around his shoulder.
It wasn’t the first time that he’d noticed it, since he had returned to éire, that he moved a bit slower, his bones a little achier, than he’d grown accustomed to.
He didn’t care to linger long, wondering what it might mean, these small, all-but-inconsequential signs of aging, of long overdue decline.
“I’m well enough to ride,” Finn said. “Rory is counting on my finding the answers we need in the sídhe – éire is counting on it. Without her magic, we’re all doomed.”
“We know all that, Finn.” Dil’s voice was gentle, a contrast to the irritated gleam in her eyes. “And we all agreed upon it – but that was before you were injured.”
“We’ll be needing you as well, don’t you know,” Gareth chimed in. “A dead bárd’s hardly as useful as a living one.”
Dil snorted. “It was put a bit bluntly, but he’s not wrong.”
“I appreciate your concern –” he did not “– but I shall be fine.”
Will you though, that same whisper asked, for it seems that the debt you owe has at last been called to account.
Finn gritted his teeth “Regardless, the answers I seek are far more valuable than what meager magic I might provide.”
Gareth and Dil exchanged a skeptical glance. “About that,” said Gareth, licking his lips. “What is it, exactly, that you can do? Because you and Rory have been very vague about that.”
An old memory from his youth arose within him – himself, sitting astride his great black steed, Eimar, the swift-hooved, his voice soaring with the flow of his song, the riverbanks and the tree roots and the rich loam of the earth itself rising up to listen, to move in harmonious rhythm with him, each of them an unmatched force of nature.
He remembered too, more recently, a youth no more, a restless nomad drifting from land to land, none of them his own, which had once lifted its voice in song along with his, and which now would no doubt remain silent and still in censure of all the ways he had failed her.
He remembered that inexplicable pull he had felt that long ago night, drawing him in towards the torchlight and raucous laughter of a rundown little tavern in Cymru, something calling to him, irresistible and implacable.
His feet had seemed to move of their own according, seeking the source of that call, closer and closer, until he had stumbled upon them – four men, drunk and disheveled, clustered around a girl in a dark alley.
He had had only a fleeting moment to register her, to take note of her pale features, the icy stillness which with she stood, surrounded by men who clearly meant her a great deal of harm, pinned in on all sides, her dark red hair gleaming as a flame against the darkness of the night.
Only a moment, and then he was upon them, sword drawn, half-feral with that primal, all-consuming urge to protect and to defend her, and even as his sword flashed, as the men shrieked and blood besplattered his face and his hands, he had known – for whatever reason, he would die, a thousand times over, for the sake of this girl.
He knew now that it was not her, so much as the hidden presence of that ancient magic thundering deep within her veins, that called to him so irresistibly, but in that moment, in the dark of the alley, chest heaving, coated with blood, when their eyes had met – such strange silver eyes, he’d thought, flat and cold and supremely unafraid of the gory sight of the men bleeding out at their feet – he’d thought, here was a queen worth serving.
He’d knelt, head bowed, and offered her the hilt of his sword, as the heroes of old. “A bhréone,” he’d said, because that’s what she seemed to him – an unquenchable flame, a light in the darkness.
“I know what you are,” she’d said, after a long moment. She’d tilted her head, staring down at him, eyes narrowed into two speculative slits of silver as she studied him. “The way your sword sang as you fought – I’ve heard the legends.”
“I know you, as well,” he’d said, still on bended knee, as he had not knelt in a long, long time. “What runs in your veins.”
“I assumed you did,” she said. “No one else has ever bothered to drop to their knees and beg for mercy, as you have.”
“I don’t recall begging, a bhréone,” he’d said, and her smile grew wider, less serpentine – more human, he’d thought.
“My name,” she’d said, “is Rory, and I won’t be accepting that –” she’d nodded towards his bloodstained sword “– until you clean it first. It’s disgusting.”
He roused himself from the reverie to find Dil and Gareth staring at him, twin expressions of puzzlement on their faces. “Nothing significant,” he lied. “Not like Rory.”
Finn turned away, forcing himself to forget what he once had been and had long lost, and threw himself astride his waiting mare, ignoring the flash of pain in his shoulder at the movement.
“Send Murph to Rory,” he said. “Let her know we’re all alive.
Tell her that I want constant, or I’ll hunt that husband of hers down and slit him open from mouth to gullet. ”
Dil nodded. “I’ll send word right away. Finn –” She reached out and caught his stirrup in her hand. “Are you sure that you’re all right? Perhaps –”
“We all have our duties,” he said. “You, Dil, to the north, to Ulaid, and Gareth to the south and the realm of Munster. Tell the kings to gather their forces and to prepare to march on the east. I will to Magh Meall, and then to Tara to reconvene with Rory.”
“Is that wise?” Dil crossed her arms, lips pursed. “To take her to where her brother died?”
“She must face it eventually.” Still, Finn hesitated, remembering the youth he’d once been, urging a snow-white mare faster and faster, galloping through the night, the lowlands of Munster a panicked blur of green and blue as he rode.
The nausea burning at this throat, the splintering of his heart, as he sank to his knees in front of those rain-weathered gray stones, the cairns of his father, his cousins, his brothers-in-arms that he had abandoned in their hour of need, left to die in that self-same spot, their blood and their tears long vanished from the earth, while he alone had lived.
“The tower of Ceanannas,” he said. “That will be our rendezvous point, should either of you need to find me. It’s close enough to Tara, and easily defended, should it become necessary.”
Dil and Gareth both nodded their agreement, and Finn dug his heels into the side of his mare – a different horse, for a different ride, roan-colored and short-legged, rather than tall and broad and pure, unearthly white – and loped away towards the southern realm.
To Loch Lein, and the one who no doubt would be waiting for him there.