Chapter 31
Chapter thirty-one
RORY
Rory stood frozen, clinging to the cold hand of her nephew and staring at the red, red mouth of the witch
Aoife was here, hungry and powerful beyond belief, and she – she was helpless as a lamb led to slaughter.
And she had surely been led to slaughter. There was no chance this was a coincidence, this midnight meeting here at the entrance to the cave of cats. It was, as that smothered sense of intuition had tried to warn her, a trap. But she did not think that she was the sole target.
“You,” Locke snarled. “You knew I’d come for the boy, eventually. You deliberately let it slip where he was hidden, knowing I’d come for him.”
Aoife’s smile widened. “You were never as clever as you believed yourself to be,” she said. “Or perhaps you were. But it matters not. What matters is that you could never be as clever as me, little lord.”
“Nothing little about me,” he said, and even through the thundering of her heart, Rory couldn’t help but admire it – that bold-faced defiance of his, even in the face of all but certain death.
A ripple in the darkness, and a shadowy figure appeared beside Aoife, its only discernible features the wild, wicked gleam of bone-white teeth bared in a twisted parody of a smile.
“Come and have a dance,” it said, crooning and low.
“Dance with me, past the breaking of the dawn and the falling of the night, until your eyes bleed and your mind shatters.”
Locke made a strangled sound, a wordless noise of horror, and Aoife’s pale hand fluttered in his direction. “You can have the man,” she said. “Do as you like to him. The woman belongs to me.”
“Och,” said the amadán dubh. “A pity, that. But I shall enjoy dancing with him, very much indeed.” The dark fool slid forward, as smooth and soundless as black-rot water pooling at the base of a stream, teeth gleaming, its obsidian eyes barely visible against the blackness of the night.
“Pretty mouth,” he said to Locke, waggling his brass-colored pipe in his direction, claw-like fingers tapping along the tone holes, teasing and slow. “I like that.”
The barest hint of a tremor ran down the silver blade of his sword, even as his expression remained stony and unmoving as he stared down the sídhe-demon before him. “Rory,” he said, so quietly she could barely hear him. “I need your help.”
She let her eyes flitter close for the briefest moment, searching for any hint of her still-slumbering power, but whatever voice had whispered to her so tremulously before had settled back down into sleep, drugged and drowsing and deaf to her call.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply with no further explanation, and she watched him straighten his shoulders, set his feet more firmly in the grass.
A fighter’s stance, she thought, and a bleak one at that, to face such terrors, to be so hopelessly outmatched.
“I’ll give you as much time as I can,” he said, and impossibly, hot tears stung at her eyes.
Rory tightened her grip on the boy’s icy hand still clasped in hers, watching as the witch began to advance towards them, leisurely and slow, a fox playing with the hare caught in its den. “I can’t outrun her, Locke. The horses are too far away.”
“You don’t have to make it to the horses,” he said, and a chill slithered down her spine. “There is one place where you can go and where she cannot follow, and it is very close by.” He blew out a breath, steadying himself. “You only need a moment, and a few drops of blood.”
The image of that narrow breach in the rain-weathered rocks, shrouded by the gray-white trunks of those new-blossoming hawthorn trees.
Into the cave, he meant. To flee, to take shelter within the sídhe – the cave of cats, the land into which no one, mortal and immortal alike, ever entered and returned unchanged.
She remembered uncle Kieran, stroking her hair by the fire, as he spun his stories for her on cool autumn nights, whispering of black-winged ravens and an eternal wasteland of naught but ice and snow – the birthplace of death itself, he had said, and none who ever looks upon death itself can ever remain unmarked by its kiss.
That feeling of impending doom, that blurry knowing that soon she would see her fate fulfilled – she, the wielder of the Mórrígan’s truth-magic, and the boy, her brother’s child, the goddess’ firstborn with the serpents in his heart – in that primal nest of death.
What nightmares might they become, what horrors might they create, the two of them together in such a place?
Her attention snapped back to the present as the witch cocked her golden head to the side, a stone’s throw away from where she still huddled behind Locke, the boy’s hand held fast in hers.
“I see that you have met my little éalú croí,” she said.
“Two hearts I fed to him, long before he was a mewling babe in my arms – your father’s first, long gone cold and stiff and bloodless buried deep in its stony cairn, and then – ah, and then your brother’s, still hot and trembling in my hands there on the field of battle echoing with the screams of dying men, pulsing with fear, rife with despair.
” She drew in a hissing breath through her nose, nostrils flaring, and Rory’s stomach rolled violently, a wave of unwanted remembrances, of visions she had not asked to see, thundered through her – Niall, on his knees, his freckled face corpse-white and blood-splattered as he looked up, up, up into the face of the witch, her nail under his chin, her knife at his bared chest –
The knife. The knife in the dark.
The blood on the rocks.
“But yours,” the cailleach continued, a terrible kind of jubilance lighting up her face, as the amadán dubh crept closer, pipe hovering at his lips as he slavered with anticipation, his unholy gaze fixated on Locke, who still stood, sword in hand, even as he trembled.
“Your heart, though – well. That one he himself will enjoy with his own lips, savor the taste of despair and of terror with his own tongue, and at last – the beast he bears within his own feeble heart will awaken and rise forth, in a storm of fire and fury.”
“Maybe,” Locke interjected, his gaze unwavering on the fairy who prowled closer and closer to where he stood. “Or maybe he won’t care for the taste and spit it right out on the ground. Might taste a bit bitter, you know, all that blood. What then?”
Aoife ignored him, merely continued to smile serenely at Rory. “Your friend amuses me, a pheata.”
“He’s not my friend,” said Rory. “He’s my husband.”
For the briefest moment, Rory could have sworn she saw a smile flicker at the corner of his grim-set lips, but then Aoife spoke again.
“Regardless,” she said. “His concerns are unnecessary. My son has fed on many hearts in preparation for yours, which my Albion friends were happy to provide in exchange for my blessings on their endeavors.”
“Your curses,” Rory said flatly. “You cursed your people to a lifetime of subservience, of submission, of pain and suffering.”
Aoife smiled, almost tenderly. “Not my people, a pheata. My people are older than the trees that stand around us even now, their birthing buried deep within the tallest mountains of the northern realms. And they will survive whatever delights my son will belch forth from the depths of his heart, once he has fed upon yours – but your people, these feeble mortals who have brought so much strife into our world?” She tsked tauntingly.
“They will not, I fear,” and for the first time, her gaze drifted away from Rory to come to rest on Locke.
“Fool,” she said to the grinning fairy beside her.
“Take the little lord. I want her to watch.”
The amadán dubh hissed through his bone-white teeth, black forked tongue flickering with delight, then raised the pipe to his thin lips, drawing in a breath as he prepared to play –
From far above her, a piercing shriek splintered the night sky as fury incarnate descended in a storm of sleek gray wings and razor-sharp talons, and the amadán dubh made another hissing sound, this one of pain, as Murph slashed at his lips and tore from his grasp the brass pipe.
A single feather floated down, down towards the earth, cradled in the rocking arms of the midnight breeze, and despite everything, a thrill of relief went through her at the sight of it – tangible proof that it still lived within her, this gift or curse or both, however dull, however broken.
“Now,” said Locke, lunging forward, sword swinging at the fairy’s skeletal shape contorted in pain. “Rory – run.”
She turned and fled, dragging the crying boy behind her, pulling her knife free from her belt with her free hand, and concentrated on the cave so close and yet so far, refusing to acknowledge the ear-splitting sounds erupting behind her, of snarls and yelps and dull thuds – refusing to let herself wonder if it was Locke landing those blows or receiving them.
She couldn’t think about it, because she couldn’t save them both, the boy and Locke, and all she wanted in this life was the setting to rights of that terrible, terrible wrong, that unforgivable sin of abandoning her brother, of not saving him when she knew, deep down, that she could have.
He was beyond saving now, but his child was not – this boy with blue eyes and freckles and serpents in his heart, who had been tormented and used, and who would continue to be used and tormented, would have what remaining pieces of humanity, of Niall, torn out of him and ripped to shreds so that nothing but the nightmare remained, if Rory did not save him.
She would save him. She would.
There was the cave, so close now, and she slipped her hand free of the boy’s icy grasp as she ran, palm outstretched, but even as she lowered the tip of the knife to her skin and sliced, she heard a low, melodious voice behind her, a chanting of strange, unknowable words, and then –
Then she was on fire, burning alive, smoke clogging her throat, nostrils filled with thick gray ash, choking and gasping for a breath that could not be taken, consumed by unseen flames eating away at her very bones from the inside of her body.
Vaguely, she felt the ground rush up to meet her, the sharp tips of the rocks scratching at her face, her arms, but it was a distant kind of pain compared to the sheer agony enveloping her as she burned and writhed under the scorching heat of invisible flames.
A curse – the cailleach had cursed her, she would die, here in the dirt, screaming with fear, with pain, just as her brother had, she would die, she would die, she was dying right now –
Through the pain-addled haze that consumed her, she heard a faint groan, then a blast of arctic wind swept over her, and the invisible inferno devouring her whole seemed to hiss in consternation, retreating, and the agony in her limbs subsided somewhat, enough for her to pry open her ash-coated eyes and gaze blearily at what lay before her.
The rain-weathered rocks that lined the opening to the cave of cats, gray-black and smooth, glistening in the night with a few spatterings of dark red blood, and there among the crimson drops, something wet and silver glowed.
Her hand, she thought dully. The knife wound from her hand had spilled blood on the rocks, and for a moment, as she stared blearily into the yawning depths of the mouth of the cave, she thought she saw a pair of strange yellow eyes, unblinking and preternaturally bright, gazing back at her.
She had opened the sídhe.
Behind her, Aoife shrieked – in shock or in protest, she couldn’t be sure – and Rory pressed her trembling and bloody hands onto the ground, striving to raise herself up, to stand on legs still shaky and burning with the aftereffects of the witch’s curse, but she was too weak, too dazed, it was too late –
A cold hand wrapped around her wrist. “Get up,” said her brother’s son, blue eyes glassy. “You have to get up – she’s coming.”
Rory rolled, and there she was, the golden-haired cailleach with eyes as depthless and terrible as the remorseless churning of the sea, her moon-white hands raised, blood-red lips parted in a triumphant, terrifying smile.
“Not very pleasing, is it, the burning – do you remember, a pheata, how you locked me in my hearth, how you stoked the flames and fed the fire and left me screaming?”
“You survived,” said Rory hoarsely, throat raw from the lingering sensation of smoke and ash. “Unfortunately.”
“So I did.” Aoife looked past her to the boy crouching behind her, his hand still wrapped around Rory’s wrist. “I will have her heart for you soon enough,” she said, “but I first will take my time in the harvesting of it. How she shall scream, how she shall beg – and you shall thank me for that, my darling éalú croí. It will taste so much the sweeter for it.” Aoife raised her hands and her sea-glass eyes met Rory’s as she smiled again, wicked and wild.
“Let’s see if you die as frightened as the little prince did. ”
Rory screamed, a cry of rage more than of fear, but before she could throw herself at the witch and meet head-on whatever terrible curse was to be thrown her way, a blur of movement to the right and the cailleach went flying, the force of Locke’s shoulder against her sending her crashing to the ground with a surprised shriek.
He turned towards her, chest heaving, swordless and bloodied. “Go,” he said. “Hurry.”
She staggered to her feet, the boy pulling her urgently towards the cave. “Locke –”
“It’s all right,” he said as the witch rose to her feet, her fury a palpable thing in the air all around them, a gathering storm of rage and retribution. “Go.”
“Locke,” she said again, voice breaking, but then the world around them exploded into flame, a veritable sea searing of orange and red blazing across the ground, up the trees, devouring anything green and growing in its path.
A wall of heat and smoke billowed in front of her, hiding Locke’s bloodsmeared face from her sight, and an unearthly howl arose from the flames as they continued to burn, higher and higher, fiercer and faster and impossibly hot, an unnatural inferno of dark magic.
Rory let out a choked sob, then yielded to the boy’s insistent tugging and without a backwards glance, followed him into the darkness of the dreaded cave of cats.