Chapter 40
Chapter forty
FINN
Finn had lived nearly five full centuries, most of them spent wandering the plains of eternal delight in the company of the fairy-queen herself, yet it was by far the most satisfying moment of his life – seeing the utter shock, swiftly followed by mortified awe, transforming Locke MacMurchada’s cocky features.
Petty of him, sure, and even though he’d certainly lived long enough to have had enough time to overcome those worser parts of himself, he could not deny that it was blissfully, gloriously satisfying, nonetheless.
“Oisín,” Locke half-whispered, staring wide-eyed, before he seemed to catch himself, and fell silent, torn between trying to recover his accustomed suaveness with a sardonic quip, or to sink to one knee and bow his head in a belated attempt at respect. “The bárd of the Fianna. It’s truly you?”
Finn preferred neither. “Indeed,” he said, glancing at Rory, who was watching him, brow arched in faint surprise. “It was overdue,” he said, only to her. “Too long have I hidden my shame. This is no time for such weakness.”
“There is no shame, Finn,” she said, but he recognized it for the lie that it was. He knew, all too well, that same shame, that same guilt, festered within her own heart, just as in his own.
“But how?” Locke was asking, fingers locked behind his head as he began to pace, back and forth, in front of them.
Finn almost smiled at it, the sight of this arrogant young prince – not arrogant, he amended silently, but bold and clever, and very self-aware of those attributes – so stupefied by this revelation.
“The legend of Oisín – of you – is well-nigh five hundred years old. You should be dead, a dozen times over.” He halted, arms dropping to his side as he studied Finn with narrowed eyes.
“In fact,” he said, “by all accounts, you are – wilted away to dust and ash as soon as you set foot upon the earth of éire after returning from the shores of Magh Meall. So how are you still alive?”
Finn looked once more to Rory, her silver gaze steady and unflinching, remembering, he knew, when she stood before him that long ago morn in Cymru, broken and weeping, her grief and her guilt a fledging in her chest, screaming at him for answers, for hope – if you still live, she’d sobbed, if you still stand here, never aging, never dying, then there is hope still – desperate and wild, searching for a way, any way, to retrieve all that she had lost.
Finn had recognized that feeling, that feral, heartbreaking hope.
He had known it too, once, when he was young and reckless and wild as she was now, and that icy, world-ending rage he’d felt thundering within him ever since Gareth had delivered the most unbearable of news – éire, his éire, which he had sworn as a mere boy of sixteen to protect and to serve, to die a thousand deaths in the defense of, had fallen to foreign hands – that fury had quieted at the sight of that frenzied, half-mad wanting he saw blossoming on her tortured face.
“I cannot resurrect the dead, Rory,” he had said, and had seen it then, the final breaking of her heart.
“There is none left in this world who can.”
Now, Finn forced himself to look away from her and back at Locke, to give him the same answer that he had given to her, all those years ago.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I ate the food and drank the wine from the fairy-queen’s own table for three hundred years, so I suppose that it took its toll, in this small taste of immortality that it has given me.
Once I realized how long I had been gone, what I had lost due to my abandonment of the vows I made to my father and my king, to my brothers-in-arms and to my country, I turned my horse for the nearest bay and boarded the first boat headed anywhere but here.
I stayed away, and for almost two hundred years, I waited to age, to die – and yet here I am, even as I was on that long ago morn when Niamh first saw me. ”
Until now, he thought, but did not dare speak aloud, remembering the warning his cold-eyed Niamh had given him, the censure and the scorn in her once-lilting voice as she spoke to him.
“Tell him the beginning.” Both men looked up at Rory, who spoke so quietly that it was barely audible, but the command underlying her soft voice was unmistakable. “Tell him all of it, just the way you told me, that morning by the river.”
He inclined his head, a wordless acknowledgment.
“Time passes differently in the land of the sídhe,” he said, as Locke leaned back against the table, brow furrowed.
“I told myself that I would spend but a day with her – from dawn to dusk. One day for myself with no war, no blood, no strife. That was what I told myself that morning by the shores of Loch Léin, when Niamh stole me away – though that’s not true.
I went with her willingly enough.” He was silent for a moment, remembering that moment – the shimmer of her golden hair, despite the rain and the fog of the early morning air, the brilliance of her lilac-colored eyes as she sat upon her mare, the curve of her bare legs as she leaned down, hand outstretched towards him in invitation.
“She was beautiful,” he continued after a moment.
“The most beautiful woman that I had ever seen, but that’s not why I went with her.
She held out her hand and somehow, I knew that she was offering me the one thing in the world which I otherwise would never be allowed to have – me, the son of the great Fionn mac Cumhaill, the bárd of the mighty Fianna.
She offered me peace. Peace and everlasting quiet across the star-studded sea.
” He laughed, bitter and humorless. “Believe me, I no more loved her than I loved the horrors of war itself – such a fierce, eternal thing was her beauty, the likes of which no mortal could ever hope to survive – but I would have married her even if she had been a three-horned goat on the side of the road if it would have given me even the smallest glimpse of the peace which I so desperately craved.”
Locke rubbed at his chin. “Why did you come back? To éire? Why leave paradise and all the delights that went with it – immortal youth and the bed of the fairy-queen herself, who is not, as you say, a three-horned goat at all – to return here?”
Finn closed his eyes, letting himself remember it again, that trembling in the otherwise ever-peaceful earth of paradise, that answering shudder of awareness in his own spine – an awakening of sorts, a coming back to life from a long, dreamless slumber.
“I felt the shift, all those centuries ago, when the gods first disappeared from the earth. There was a shiver that rent the air in the otherworld, like the silvery peal of a frost-coated bell, and then a hollow kind of silence.” The first time, he thought, that he had felt fear in so long that he hardly recognized it – the ash-like taste of it on his tongue, clogging his throat, quickening the otherwise lazy beat of his heart.
“I panicked, suddenly aware that I had no idea how much time had passed in the world of the living while I idled there on those sun-kissed shores – I worried for what it meant for the family that I had left behind, but Niamh told me that she would not be able to bridge the gap between the two worlds without that magic bond enjoining them together. So I waited, and I swear to those same gone gods, it felt like only a matter of hours when the air shivered again, that silent clanging, and Niamh told me that they had returned, that the magic of the gods was flowing through the world of men once more.”
“And he wanted,” Rory said softly to Locke, though her gaze remained fixed on Finn, “to go home.”
Home.
Such a simple word, that – but so much more than that, the summation of all their lost loves, both of them, a sanctuary that he knew they both had imagined would always be waiting for them, whenever they chose to return to it, a free-flying falcon sweeping through the skies, arrowing its way through the wind and the clouds towards its eyrie high on the rain-drenched cliffs above the ever-changing sea, constant and steady by its stone roots reaching deep down into the earth.
They both knew better now.
“And I wanted to go home,” he said simply.
“Desperately. I was frantic with worry. What had happened, what earth-shattering event had occurred that could overpower even the gods themselves,? What carnage had been wrought on my motherland, to whom I had sworn my faith?” He laughed again, shaking his head.
“Imagine the irony of it – I ran away from the life of the Fianna and the vows I had made to them, all for the sake of a little peace, and even though I had found myself in the most peaceful place imaginable, I spent most of my time there racked with guilt, torn apart with fear, not knowing what had happened to the land that I had loved destroying my very soul.” He ran his hand down his face.
“So I pleaded with Niamh, and at last she relented. She gave me the horse to carry me back across the water and told me to return when I was done. And she made me swear – swear that I would return to her, like a pet being granted a few hours of freedom from its cage. I agreed, and rode like the wind across the dark sea on her white mare, the spray from the ocean stinging my eyes as we sped across the waves.”
He could almost see himself, the wild-eyed poet he had once been, flying across the endless black waters of the sea on a moon-kissed steed, the light of the stars dancing across the salt-drops gleaming on his skin.