Chapter 37 #2
“Thanks to my murderous wife,” he whispered, and then there was nothing but the muffled sound of his groans as she pulled the cloths tight and firm around the still-bleeding wounds, letting her fingers trail soothingly across his abdomen and chest as she wrapped them around him.
She sat back on her heels when she was done. “There,” she said. “Try and sit up – see how that feels.”
Locke pushed himself upright, jaw clenched. “I can breathe well enough,” he said, grimacing. “I suppose that’s the best to be expected.”
“And the pain?”
He didn’t answer, merely stared down at his bare arms, thin and waxen pale, his fingers splayed out across his knees, spindly and spiderlike. “Did I ever tell you,” he said after a moment, “that I have always been afraid of the night?”
Rory frowned. “No, I don’t believe you did.”
He rubbed his fingers against the dirty, waif-thin fabric of his trousers.
“Ever since I was a boy, I feared it – the shadows and the darkness, the stillness and silence that comes with the night. It unnerved me, frightened me in a way that I could never understand.” He shook his head.
“When I was locked away down there for so long, I thought – this is justice, then. Dying here, in the dark. A just penance for my sins. I’d made my peace with it.
And then you appeared – like a flame in the night. ”
Before she could think better of it, her hand slipped forward, her fingers entwining with his, palm to palm.
“I am no kind of light,” she said quietly.
“No flame, regardless of what Finn might call me. We both know that I am the very thing that you feared about the night, Locke, made flesh and bone.”
A long silence greeted this whispered confession. “You should go,” he said at last without looking up at her. “We both know it is madness for you to linger here, and I cannot ride.”
He was right. She should pull her hand free of his, rise to her feet and leave him there to face whatever fate awaited him, now that this debt that had been between had at last been paid. “I made a promise to you,” she said instead. “A vow to protect you, whenever I could.”
“And look how well you have kept it.” Another ghost of a smile stretched across his pain-cracked lips. “You should know that you have far exceeded my expectations for your goodliness as a wife, my lady.”
“Only because you expected me to kill you that first night.”
“You can’t tell me that you didn’t consider it yourself.”
“You convinced me otherwise,” she said. “Certain parts of you, at least.”
He laughed then, low and shaky, and her fingers tightened around his, giving comfort, seeking solace, no matter how fleeting and false it may be.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “If I had let you kill the boy when you wanted, then none of this would have happened. But I –” She swallowed, suddenly nervous.
“I couldn’t do it. Not only because of Niall, because of how much he reminded me of my brother, but because when I looked at him, I saw so much of what is wrong with our land, and with us.
” She glanced at Locke, who still stared down at their clasped hands, illuminated against the slowly lightening sky.
“All I knew in that moment is that I could not let him die for sins that are not his own. There has been far too much of that for far too long. An endless cycle of hurt and rage and vengeance. It had to end – it has to end now.”
Locke nodded, still avoiding her gaze. “I would agree.”
“I saw Niall,” she said presently, and he looked up at that, some of the old keenness returning to his hollowed-out hazel eyes. “I took the boy to Magh Meall, and hid him in the realm of the fairy-queen, and it was there that I saw Niall.”
The silence stretched between them, patient and calm. “And?” Locke asked at last. “Did you find your peace, seeing him?”
The memory of her ghostly brother, insubstantial and hollow, flashed before her. “I do not think,” she whispered, “that there is any peace left in any world for me to find.”
“Rory –”
“Anyway,” she said, staring determinedly down at their clasped hands, “as far as the boy goes, it will not last long, Locke, his being kept away from the hands of the cailleach. It’s a temporary solution, as I don’t know how long the fairy-queen will allow him to remain there, but there was no other option. ”
“All the more reason, then, for you to go now, and leave me.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head, but he ignored her.
“Rory – soon there will be hundreds of soldiers scouring these woods, these hills, and Aoife with them. We both know what will happen if she kills you and gets to the boy – and you cannot fight her and them at the same time.”
She wanted to protest, to argue that she could in fact do exactly that – that she was strong, stronger than he could ever know, as implacable and as immovable as the roots of the mountains in which she had been born – but that brightly burning knowing which still lived deep within her whispered otherwise.
She risked too much by lingering here, alone and weakened by the hunger gnawing at her stomach and the exhaustion weighing on her shoulders – not only her own life, but the ruination of the world itself.
Still she sat, unmoving and quiet, here in the golden glowing light of the dawn, holding the hand of the husband she had never wanted and once hated.
“Go,” said Locke again, more firmly. “Otherwise it’s all for naught.”
Perhaps, she thought. But it might be worth risking everything, for this fleeting moment of the closest thing to peace she had known in so long.
He might be worth it, or what they might become together, if given the chance.
Locke sighed, heavy and resigned. “You’ll not be going,” he said. “Will you?”
Their eyes met in the bright, clean light of the newborn day. “No,” said Rory, pulling her hand free of his and rising to her feet, already searching their surroundings for the best position of defense against the storm she knew would soon be coming. “I will not.”