Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
LOCKE
More than even the dying itself, Locke was supremely annoyed that it now seemed he was condemned to die surrounded by the darkness.
He vaguely remembered the journey from Ráth Cruachan to here, the legendary passage tombs of, half-dead as he was from his wounds – the festering bites from his battle with amadán dubh, the blistering welts and scorched skin from whatever dark sorcery the cailleach had conjured upon him in her rage.
Oisín’s beard. He flinched even now just remembering it, the fury with which those jagged, white-hot flames of hers had bitten into his skin, ripping into him as he’d twisted and writhed on the ground, watching through pain-blurred eyes as Rory and the boy disappeared with a soundless ripple into the mouth of the cave, as he’d screamed and screamed and screamed –
When he had opened his eyes again, it had been sunlight, bright and cold, and he had been strapped to the back of a horse, arms and legs bound tight with leather straps, his mouth gagged and his face caked in dried blood, and what felt like a thousand open wounds blazing with agony all over his body.
He had drifted in and out of consciousness, hazily aware of having rancid water poured on his bruised face, trickling over his cracked lips and down his smoke-burnt throat, and had barely had the wits to recognize this place when they had at last arrived, his bonds cut and himself left to tumble unceremoniously to the ground, too weak to fight or even to stand on his own.
He had recognized it though – the familiar banks of the An Bhóinn, the graceful sweep of those green-grassed plains, the dark loom of the caverns towards which they dragged him.
Home, he’d thought hazily. They had brought him back to Leinster.
At least he would die at home, he’d thought, before the agony of his wounds surged again,his exhaustion and his pain rising up as the swell before a howling winter storm, sweeping him away into oblivion.
Each time he had awoken since, it had been to darkness, and more pain.
Locke had no idea how long he had been locked away down here in the depths of the cairns – a few fortnights or a few years.
It could easily be either, as far as he could tell.
All he knew was the ceaseless, cruel cycle that his days and nights had become – the occasional hunk of brown bread and dried mutton that tossed towards the corner where he sat chaine;, the wooden bucket of half-rancid water presented to him by stone-faced guards as begrudgingly as though it were the finest whiskey in éire; their sneered taunts and their spittle splattering his face as they came and went.
The scrape of the stones and dirt on his knees as they dragged him up against the wall, the bite and nip of the iron tightening around his wrists, the strain and the pull in his shoulders as his arms were hoisted high above his head.
The snap and the snarl of the whip as they unfurled, mocking him, and how he would close his eyes and brace himself as it came down with a lash on his still raw shoulders, his back, again and again, until at last it rose up once more to take him under, that sweet, all-consuming wave of darkness.
Over and over, again and again.
Each time he opened his eyes, he prayed anew for death.
Because they clearly wanted nothing from him, save for his suffering.
Not once did his captors try and question him.
In those first few hours of his imprisonment, he had waited there in the dark, aching head lolling against the wall – waiting for Ironstring to arrive, or Aoife, to interrogate him, to torture whatever answers about Rory that they could pry from his brutalized body, his pain-addled mind.
Yet they never arrived, and after the second round of whippings administered by his Albion guards, he realized – he had nothing of value to offer them, no secrets worth stealing, no worth or status in their eyes at all.
He wasn’t important. Not to anyone, not anymore.
So death – it would be a blessing, and his one flickering hope in the midst of so much darkness was that the blood that splattered these walls, that the suffering that racked his body every waking minute of what remained in his life, that it would be enough, to atone for all the wrongs which he had allowed to infest his land in the name of the greater good, of embracing the lesser of two evils, when any fool knew that evil was evil, an absolute and unchanging entity, and anyone who tried to apply degrees to it was a self-deluding, traitorous, damned fool.
But at least Rory was safe – and she would be able to do what he could not, to defend what he had not, to save what he had allowed to be lost.
That was why he had done it, Locke assured himself now as he breathed in and out, shallow and slow, his chest rattling.
That was why, in that all-important moment when he had seen Rory on her knees, fingers clutching at her scalp as she screamed, surrounded by flames and the witch advancing on her, teeth bared in the most awful of smiles, he hadn’t hesitated – that was why he had flung himself at that gods-damned creature even though he knew it meant his own ruin, and thus given Rory the chance to escape.
She had to survive, if éire had any hope at all – simple as that.
No other reason.
From somewhere down in the endless darkness of the cairn, he heard the distant scrape and rumble of voices, deep and rough.
He forced his swollen eyes to open – though for what purpose, he didn’t even know.
It was only ever the unrelenting blanket of endless night that greeted him, followed by more pain, more torments.
A scream, shrill and drawn-out, ripped through the dark, echoing across the damp and stony walls, and Locke jolted upright at the sound of it.
Another scream, mingling with the fading sounds of the first, and then another, until a cacophony of howling thundered through the cavern.
Locke pressed his raw and bleeding back as tight as he could bear it into the wall behind him, trying to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible against whatever nightmarish event unfolding in the shadows was causing such screams, although for what reason, he didn’t know, as death in any form would be a relief at this point –
Locke froze, his fog-laden brain slowly processing its own garbled thoughts.
Shadows and nightmares.
Rory.
Rory was here.
He shook his head, desperately trying to think through the jolts of pain ricocheting in his skull.
It couldn’t be. Surely she wouldn’t be so reckless as to risk her own life, her own safety – the safety of éire itself – to come to an Albion stronghold in order to rescue him, who might very well be dead, as far as she knew.
Except that she might indeed know that he still lived, something whispered faintly within him, thanks to whatever unholy powers that were even now, from the sounds of it, shredding so many Albion soldiers into pieces, agonizing and slow and immeasurably, blessedly cruel.
Something flooded through him, a warm, bright emotion that he couldn’t put a name to.
She was here. She had come for him.
In the distant dark, the screams faded, and he strained to listen, tense and shaking, not for once with fear or with pain, but with anticipation. A few faint moans, a gurgling sound, but otherwise silence, heavy and cold, and Locke shivered against the icy chill even now creeping towards him.
Something cold and serpentine entwined around his wrists, and he yelped once, jerking backwards.
The cold retreated, and his chains fell away from his chafed wrists with a dull thud.
The chill in the air deepened, intensified, and he stared down at his freed hands, heart thudding erratically, as pure white frost crept along the mud-packed earth of the cairn, coating the iron bracelets at his feet, ambling up the walls, as naturally as ivy vines along the stony ridges of the mountains in spring.
Trembling from head to toe, Locke forced his gaze away from the sight of the frost, from his unbound hands, and looked up, up, up at the being even now advancing towards him through the darkness.
Locke had seen his wife as a prisoner, bound and bruised; as a bride, unblushing and cold as a midwinter snow; as a lover, flushed skin and arched back and sharp nails digging into his skin; as a fugitive, scratched face and loose hair tangled with brambles and thorns.
He had seen her impatient and passionate and angry and sad; had seen her laugh and had heard her cry and felt the smoothness of her skin and the unforgiving steel of her rage.
But he had never seen her like this, the beautiful bright red of her hair burning like a flame in the shadows of the underground tombs, wreathed in a veil of smoke and fog, the muted glow of ancient blue ice lining her lips and her incandescent eyes, moving towards him through the darkness – a goddess undying.
He had known, of course, the source of her magic, that strange, nightmarish power of hers – had known that it came from the goddess of death, the Mórrígan herself – but now he saw it, that awful, eternal timelessness, that had looked upon the beginning and the ending of all things and turned her back on it all, had stared into the endless, all-consuming abyss of eternity and remained unmoved.
Rory halted before him, flame-red hair and silver eyes and ice-white face, and stared down at him, expressionless and cold and preternaturally still.
“You look terrible,” she said, in a voice that was not hers at all, but something ancient and unfathomable and ruinous, and he found himself smiling, so full and broad that his cracked and bleeding lips screeched in protest.
“And you,” he said. “You look magnificent.”
“I didn’t come here to be told what I already know,” she said.
“On your feet. Let’s be off, then.” She frowned when he hesitated, a few of the shadows that encircled her knees rearing up at the motion, like a hind scenting danger as it drank from a woodland stream.
Concern, he realized with a jolt. She frowned out of concern, not from irritation. “Can’t you walk?”
He grimaced as he tried again to stand, his pain-numbed legs refusing to move. “I’m afraid I cannot, my lady.”
Her frown deepened, faint grooves appearing in the ice coating her temples.
Adorable, he thought. Clearly his mind had been addled after so many hours down here in the dark, because it was all he could think at the moment, that this goddess of war reborn looked adorable standing there before him, hands on her hips and scrunched nose and pursed ice-blue lips.
“Are you injured, or have your muscles atrophied?”
“To be honest,” he said, “a bit of both.”
“This is very annoying,” she said with a scowl. “I do not at all wish to have to carry you out of this cave.”
“My apologies, my lady. The next time I’m taken captive and locked in an underground tomb and left to die, I’ll try to stay in better shape to make your rescuing of me easier.”
Her eyes flickered. “I’d appreciate that.
” Then her head turned sharply, fingers curling at her sides, and Locke belatedly followed her gaze to see two Albion soldiers charging towards them, the blades of their swords glinting.
Locke let out an involuntary shout of warning, but Rory tilted her head and raised a hand, and he watched, mouth agape, as the soldiers froze, a tidal wave of ice rising up from the earth to envelope them in its yawning, pale blue mouth, devouring them where they stood.
“Holy gods,” said Locke, trembling in spite of himself. “I don’t remember seeing that trick before.”
“I learned a thing or two in the cave of cats,” Rory said, still in that unnatural, frost-kissed voice that did not fully belong to this world, as her gaze slid back to his, snapping with silver fire. “I have much to show you.”
“I look forward to it.” He jerked his chin towards the frozen soldiers, their features barely visible under the thick sheet of pale blue ice, where only the frantic roll of their eyes, wide and frenzied, gave sign that they still lived. “You should let one of them go.”
Rory’s lips flattened, the fog swelling all around her, an unnervingly tangible sign of her displeasure. “You would counsel mercy, Lord Locke, after all they have done – to our motherland, to you yourself?”
“Gods no,” he said. “I just thought you might like to have one of them carry me out for you.” He shrugged his bloodied shoulders. “Then you can kill him as slow as you like, my lady.”
She stared at him for the length of three unsteady heartbeats, and then she smiled, cruel and merciless yet, somehow, tinged with something akin to fondness.
“Lord Locke,” she said, waving a lazy hand towards the soldier on the right, who choked as he fell forward onto his knees, retching violently.
“I'm beginning to think that we might be a proper match after all.”