Chapter 37
Chapter thirty-seven
RORY
They left the soldier’s corpse at the mouth of the cavern, his bloodless face forever frozen in an expression of abject terror, his fingers wrapped tight around his own throat.
“Nasty way to die,” Locke said, her arm looped around his bare waist, careful not to touch the open wounds festering on his back.
He had been whipped, Rory realized, once they’d emerged out of the underground cave and into the wan light of the just-breaking dawn.
Brutally, and often, by the looks of his bare back, the skin flayed almost down to the bones of his shoulder blades.
Rory had seen the loose strips of his flesh, the raw red sinews of his once-strong back laid open and exposed, and let the blubbering soldier pay the price for the answering fury that had swept through her like a thunderstrike.
“If one does nasty things,” she said, guiding him away towards the woods where she had left horses tied, “then one should expect to die in nasty ways.”
“Truly a proverb worth remembering,” Locke said, grimacing with each step, despite how careful and slow Rory walked. “Our children’s children shall bless your memory for leaving them such words of wisdom to guide them through life.”
“Shut it.” She blew out a breath, staggering a little under his weight as they made their way towards that distant copse of trees. “You’ve grown as thin as a reed – by the harp, how are you still so heavy?”
“Well, my lady, when a man is as gifted in the girth as I am, then –”
“Again,” she said through gritted teeth. “Shut it.”
“I may be more than halfway to my death,” he said, and her chest reacted strangely to the words, delivered so calmly in such a weakened, watered-down version of the voice she remembered being so strong and deep and full of life. “But I shall go out the way I lived – boasting of my manhood.”
She made no response, and they both fell silent, her watching and wary for any signs of soldiers she might have missed when she’d first arrived, him no doubt focusing what little strength remained to him on continuing to put one foot in front of the other, of staying upright when he was so clearly in unimaginable pain.
They were well-hidden among the lush greenery of the trees before he spoke again. “How long?”
She understood. “Three months,” she said. “The Beltaine fires were lit a fortnight ago.”
He was quiet, absorbing the information. “Three months,” he repeated, so softly she could barely hear him. “A long time.”
“You survived.”
“So I did.” He exhaled shakily. “Were you there, in the cave of cats, the entire time?”
She shook her head, unwilling to yet tell him about Magh Meall, about Niall, and he nodded once, wincing as they fumbled their way up a slight incline. “And what of the boy? Is he safe?”
“He is.” For now, she thought, but said nothing further. No need to worry him with such business now. Focus on getting him away, getting him well, and then they would deal with the rest.
She could barely believe that he was alive, despite the lady of death’s assurance in the sídhe, despite her own shadowy glimpse of him, locked away in those gloomy, bone-ridden tombs, which she had seen when she’d searched for any sign of him in her knowings, as soon as she had returned from the shores of Magh Meall to the mortal realm.
She had seen him, pale and thin but undeniably alive, and had not thought once of abandoning him, of riding west to find Finn or Dil or the new boy-king of Connacht, but had slipped into a nearby village and stolen the horses of two drink-addled Albion soldiers, riding hard through the night until she had arrived to where he was, unerring and unstoppable as the most true-aimed of arrows.
Rory refused to think of why, exactly, she had done so.
“You came alone?” Locke asked, and she tightened her grip in response to his stumbling steps, the heavy weight of him sagging against her shoulder.
Too weak, she thought with a strange twisting in her chest. He was far too weak.
What had they done to him, buried deep down in the dark, all these long months, to cause his once-strong shoulders, his steady hands, to shake so from the exertion of a mere walk in the woods?
“I never thought you to be so foolhardy, my lady.”
“Be quiet,” she said. “Save your strength.”
“Worried about me, are you now?”
“Hardly. But know that if you pass out, I shall not be dragging you through the woods. I shall leave you where you fall for the wolves to find without a care.”
He laughed, soft and rasping. “What a waste that would be. You came all this way, went to all this trouble, only to leave me to die in the woods. You grow more and more imprudent, my lady.”
“I did not come for you,” she lied, even as she breathed a sigh of relief as the waiting horses came into view by the banks of the river, noses buried deep in the leaves and grass as they grazed under the moonlight.
“I have unfinished business with Ironstring. I thought he’d be here. Finding you was – fortuitous.”
“It certainly was. For me.” She felt him shift his weight to glance at her, but she kept her gaze firmly ahead, refusing to look at him. “Well,” he said after a moment. “Regardless, I thank you, my lady. I did not much fancy the idea of dying without ever again seeing the sky and the sun.”
“You wouldn’t have.” She helped him lower himself to the ground next to the horses, noting the taut lines of repressed pain on his too-thin face, his hissed wince as the rough trunk of the tree bit into his raw and bloodied back. “You were to be executed tomorrow morning – publicly, I believe.”
“Ah. Why now, if I may ask? You say it’s been months since I was taken – why wait for so long?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She paused, risking a glance at his wan face.
“I think that, perhaps, they intended at first to use you as bait, for me, and then when I failed to come – well. There have been rumors that Ironstring wishes to move ahead with his invasion of Connacht, and is putting his affairs in order here in the east before marching on the west.”
Locke grumbled under his breath. “A loose end? That’s all I am to him? Cockless swine.” He spat on the ground. “How was I to go?”
“Disemboweled,” she said, turning to dig through the saddlebags, searching for ointments and clean cloths to tend to his wounds. “Then hung from the gibbet and left to die.”
“A fine clean ending, then.” He huffed out a half-laugh, half-sigh. “I might have preferred a quiet death in the dark to that, I believe.”
“Well, now you have neither.” She crouched by his side, studying the wan angles of his jaw, his cheekbones, the ragged rise and fall of his bare chest. “You’ll need to turn over,” she said through the lump in her throat. “I need to tend to the injuries on your back.”
His eyes fluttered open for a moment, his hazel eyes dull as he looked at her. “I don’t see that there’s much point to that, my lady.”
Her hands, already reaching for him, stilled. “What do you mean?”
Locke continued to hold her gaze with those horribly lackluster eyes.
“You freed me,” he said. “Spared me from a terrible end. I am grateful to you for that, my lady – inexpressibly so. But I am too weak to ride, more than a little half-starved and lacking too much blood.” He made a motion as though it were meant to be a shrug, then stopped abruptly, as even such a minor movement caused him unbearable agony.
“We both know that to linger here much past the dawn is a death sentence for us both.”
“I handled the Albion soldiers once,” she said. “I can do so again. Turn over.”
“It will not only be soldiers who come for you in the morning, Rory.” His pale lips moved in a half-hearted attempt at a smile. “Aoife will know that you are here. She will come for you, Rory.”
“Let her come,” Rory said, something like a snarl rising in her chest. “She will not walk away from a battle with me again. Now. I have ordered you twice to turn over so that I might tend to your wounds. I shall not ask you thrice.”
His phantom smile grew more substantial, more real. “Have I ever told you,” he said, “how very attractive you are when you are threatening me, my lady? It makes me wish that I weren’t hovering on the threshold of death, that I might show you exactly how enticing I find it.”
In spite of everything, a laugh burst out of her. “Only you, Lord Locke, would proposition a woman when you scarce have the strength to draw breath.” She shook her head. “Please,” she said, more softly. “Turn over. Let me help you.”
For a moment, they stared at one another, then he nodded once and rolled to his side, bracing himself on trembling elbows.
Rory bit hard on her lip, forcing herself not to cry out at the sight of his ruined back.
It was clearer now, under the brightness of the morning sun as it slowly made its way over the distant horizon, the brutality more evident than it had been in the murky blackness of the tombs.
His lean back was shredded, from the tops of his broad shoulders down to the narrow angles of his hips just before they disappeared into his trousers.
The once-smooth skin lay in tattered strips, the raw red of his muscles exposed to the springtime air.
“I’m sure it’s not a pretty sight,” Locke said, his voice muffled from where his face lay buried in the leaves. “As soon as it started to heal, they’d lash me again.”
Rory made sure her voice was steady before she spoke, as she began to apply the salve in slow, careful strokes to his mutilated skin. “Why so often?”
“To keep me weak, I suppose.” A long pause. “Or perhaps simply for the sport of it. I didn’t feel the need to ask.”
She said nothing for several moments, intent on massaging the ointment as gently as possible over his wounds. “Well,” she said as she unraveled the linen to bind them. “We’ll never know, I suppose. They’re all very dead now.”