Chapter 27
Chapter twenty-seven
RORY
Say one what one might about her husband, Rory thought begrudgingly to herself, but the man could cook.
“The stobhach is delicious,” she admitted, and much to her surprise, his face lit up with a smile that made his features seems softer, more boyish.
“My mother’s family’s recipe,” he said, digging into his own bowl of stew. “But I’m afraid that I can’t tell you the secret ingredient.”
“Perhaps I can guess it.”
He waved his hand. “By all means, feel free to try.”
Rory sniffed once, twice, at the slight curl of steam drifting upwards from her bowl. “Dried mutton and rooster potatoes. Carrots, onions, parsnips, and – barley.”
“Obviously.”
“Rosemary and sage.” She paused, considering. “Fennel too.”
“Well done. Anything else?”
Rory took a tentative slurp. “Carraway seed.”
Locke let out a surprised laugh. “Very good, my lady. You have many talents, I see.”
“As do you.” She reached out her hand in a silent request for the flagon of whiskey Locke had also obtained in the nearby village. “I admit that I’m impressed, Lord Locke. When you said that you would take care of supper, I assumed that I’d be eating raw hare and juniper berries.”
He grinned as he handed over the flagon. “Fortunately for you, I had quite a bit of silver in my saddlebags for shopping.”
Rory hmmed as she bit into the soda bread. “In the village,” she said presently. “Were there many soldiers?”
His face shuttered before he glanced away towards the small campfire burning low between them and the horses grazing by nearby the riverbank.
“They’re in every village in Leinster – and Munster, and Ulaid.
Parts of Connacht too, even.” He shook his head.
“They’re everywhere, my lady. You do not, I think, understand the full extent of their power after the battle of Tara.
” Her stomach clenched at the mention of it, that unwelcome glimpse of knowing she had unwillingly been privy to flashing through her memory once more.
She set her half-finished bowl aside with unsteady hands, her appetite vanished, as Locke continued, oblivious to the grief rolling through her in waves.
“I say battle, but really, it was an annihilation – they did not stand a chance, my lady.”
“They might have,” said Rory through stiff lips, “had your father joined with my brother and his allies rather than betraying them.”
Locke was quiet for a long moment, staring into the fire.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t think so.
It would have only delayed the inevitable.
” He moved restlessly. “I am not defending him – my father. He was wrong. Make no mistake about that – his wounded pride, the loss of his throne, is no justification for what he did to his, our, motherland. And yet, in the end, knowing Ironstring and the other Albion lords as I do now, my father’s offer to them – to assist them in their invasion, to turn on his home for the sake of his pride – it was merely an excuse to put their plan into action, a plan which had been in the works for quite a long time. ”
“To invade, you mean?”
He nodded. “My father’s offer was merely the excuse they needed,” he said again, more firmly this time, as though it was himself he was convincing, as though repeating it would make it believable. “It was inevitable, their attack. There was no stopping it, once it came.”
Rory studied him from underneath her half-lowered lashes, watching the way the smoke from the fire shimmered in the twilight between them, sending ripples across his once-more careworn face.
She felt an odd twinge of longing for that boyish grin, the lightening of his features, that had transformed him a few moments ago.
What must he have been like, she found herself wondering, this cunning, cautious man, before the harshness of time and war had roughened whatever youthful softness might once have been, leaving behind only cynicism and scars and half-forgotten dreams?
The thought prompted her to take another swallow of whiskey. “That soldier,” she said. “The one who attacked us – why didn’t you kill him?”
His brows arched. “Perhaps I did. I didn’t linger long enough to check for a pulse.”
“No.” She shook her head as she watched him. “You were clearly the superior swordsman. You could have killed him…but you didn’t. We both know you spared his life.” She took another sip. “Did you know him?”
Locke loosed a long breath. “I did not,” he said.
“At least, not personally. But in another sense, I suppose I did feel like I know him. A man who was born among the same green-grassed hills as myself, who savors the smell of the flowers and the sea mingling together on a midsummer breeze, who has sung the same ballads as I and fished in the same rivers and – well.” He shrugged.
“Perhaps it makes me weak, or a fool, or whatever you might call it, but I could not, in good conscience, kill such a man if there were any way around it.”
She was quiet for a moment, considering.
“Perhaps it does,” she said at last. “I would have killed him, had it been my choice.” For a moment, she thought she saw the brightness of his eyes cloud over, something like disappointment drift across his expression, but then it was gone.
Rory cleared her throat and looked away.
“What river is this?” She jerked her chin towards the sounds of the water churning over rock from behind them.
“I know it must feed on the Sionainne, but I don’t know its name. ”
Locke leaned forward to pluck the flagon from her fingers. “An Eithne,” he said after he drank. “Some say she’s named after Eithne, the daughter of Cathair Mór.”
“One of the High Kings of éire,” said Rory softly. “He had thirty sons, did he not?”
“He did indeed – much good it did him. Cathair married his daughter Eithne to the man who would eventually betray him and kill him for his throne – Conn Cétchathach, the king for whom the Lia Fáil roared for the first time since Cuchulainn split it with his sword.”
“I remember,” Rory said again, a sad smile playing at the corner of her lips. “The ancestor of the legendary Niall Noígíallach himself.”
“And so it goes,” Locke mused, staring into the fire.
“All of us – the Connachta and the Leinster-born, Ulaid and Munster and Bréifne and Osraige, all the realms – fighting and squalling and embattling each other, destroying ourselves from within rather than standing guard against the threats which come from without.”
“How philosophic of you.” Rory shifted on the ground, fingers plucking at the cool grass beneath her. “‘Some say,’ you said. Are there other legends about the naming of the river, or is that poor doomed princess the only source of its name?”
Locke leaned back on his elbows. “Actually, most think that she is named after another being altogether – Ethniu, the mother of Lugh himself.”
“I don’t think I know that tale.”
“Och.” Locke smiled at that. “So we are back to telling one another stories now, are we, my lady? Is that how we shall pass our time betwixt now and our arrival at the dread cave of cats?”
“Did you have something else in mind?” His smile widened wickedly, and Rory scoffed even as a tantalizing warmth flooded through her at the unwelcome – albeit very pleasurable – memory of another night which they had spent together, which had begun with story-telling and ended in far more intriguing ways.
“Tell your story, Lord Locke, and do try to behave yourself.”
“Now you sound like my much-beleaguered grandmother, the gods rest her.” He settled back against the grass, arms folded behind his head as he stared up at the fast-darkening sky.
“Very well,” he said. “Ethniu was the daughter of Balor, the one-eyed Fomorian war-lord. Upon her birth, so the legend goes, a druid made a prophecy that one day she would birth a son who would be the slaying of Balor, and thus the Fomorian, in his dread, locked his daughter far away on a remote island in the northern seas, imprisoned within a great stone tower, and forbade any man ever to approach its high walls.”
“A familiar tale,” said Rory, “for the women in my family line.”
“So I’ve heard, and might I say, my lady, having met you and seen for myself what horrors of which you are capable, I find it hard to disagree with the impulse.
” She kicked at his boot and he laughed.
“So Ethniu lived alone,” he continued, “save for her maids that came and went as fleetingly as the winds which wailed outside her tower walls, until at last, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann – Cían, the son of Dian Cécht – made his way to her island in search of a magical cow which had been stolen from his pastures by the Formorian king himself. He caught a glimpse of the beautiful girl in the window above, and with the help of the queen of hearts, the leannan sídhe, he won to his heart and his bed the daughter of Balor.”
“But alas, the Fomorian king was not easily dissuaded. When he learned that his daughter had grown heavy and round with child, he waited until her time had come, and then snatched the babes – three in number – from her weeping arms and ordered them cast into the river to drown. So the first two slipped beneath the waves and passed into the other-realm, as swiftly and as quietly as they had entered the world of the living. But when it came time for the last babe to be tossed into the whirlpool, the river itself took pity on the wailing babe, and rose up in response to her call, presenting into Ethniu’s arms her last child.
The babe grew into a fierce and hungry warrior, until at last he slew the Fomorian war-lord with the might of his arm, and thus, his mother’s suffering and his brothers’ lives were avenged, and the prophecy realized. ”