Chapter 41 #2
“And then unleash the destroyer,” Locke added. “Whom she also now possesses, despite mine and Rory’s risking our lives to keep him well away from her, thanks to Finn here playing fast and loose with the fairy-queen of Magh Meall.”
“My father died,” Finn said. “Forgive me for having other concerns than the pleasuring of an immortal goddess with hundreds of bedfellows at her fingertips.”
“She seems to have wanted you alone, boyo. It says quite a lot about your cock. Well done, really.”
Rory rubbed at her aching temples. “I thought you two were passed the hating of one another, Locke.”
His brows arched in surprise. “Oh, I was being genuine, my lady. Truly, a worthy feat, to make such an impression on the fairy-queen herself. You must be a beast in bed, at least.”
To her complete and everlasting shock, Finn’s chest puffed out, his smile shifting to smug and very well-satisfied with himself. “It is flattering, isn’t it,” he said, and Locke nodded eagerly.
“Very impressive. Rather troublesome, for us, I’ll admit,” he added hastily, seeing the dour expression on Rory’s face. “Would have served us better if you’d, you know, ‘impressed’ her a bit less thoroughly.”
“I’ll keep it in my mind for future encounters,” Finn said, far too gravely to be serious, and Rory huffed.
“I’ve changed my mind. I think I preferred it when you two hated each other.” Rory made an impatient gesture with her hand. “When do they arrive? The armies from Connacht?”
Finn glanced at the parchment before him on the table. “It’s a large force,” he said. “They’ll move more slowly than the others. A fortnight or so, perhaps – just before Lughnasadh.”
Rory pressed her fingers to her temples. “Do we risk it – risk bringing him here, within her reach? Or should we write and tell him to stay in Connacht, far away from Aoife?”
“We don’t have enough soldiers as it is,” Locke objected. “We need Connachta.”
“More than we need to keep Meiche dormant and sleeping within the boy? Because if he awakens, all the soldiers in the world will not do us a bit of good.” Rory shook her head, inhaling deeply, trying in vain to stifle the sudden trembling in her fingers.
“I don’t know what is right,” she said after a long moment.
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to protect –”
Her voice broke slightly, and Locke leaned forward to take her hand in his. “It’ll be all right, my lady,” he said, his voice low and steady. “I have faith in you, in all of us. éire will not fall to anyone, cailleach or colonizers, not so long as you live.”
“A lovely sentiment,” she said, “but your faith alone will not save us.”
Finn studied them, moss-green eyes dark as she had ever seen them. “There’s one way to calm your worries,” he said after a moment. “If you care to try it.”
Locke’s grip on her hand tightened, but Rory nodded slowly. “I know,” she said. “I could look, to see what will happen in the battle.”
“It would be helpful, yes.” Finn inclined his head, a silent apology for what he was asking her to do. “It would be foolish to neglect to use what weapons we have, especially if they do not possess the same advantage.”
“No,” said Locke, rising to his feet, and her chest warmed to hear the fierceness in his voice – fierce for her, she thought, in defense of her secret softness. “She does not need to have such horrors in her head.”
“I can see the future, Locke,” she said quietly. “And this is war. It is an advantage well worth my enduring a few horrors.”
Their eyes met, and she knew that he was remembering another battle on another day, only a little way from where they now stood, and the horrors that he had seen and been powerless to prevent, that he would spare her the sight of now.
“I’ll see them soon enough, in the flesh. There’s no stopping that, Locke.”
He blew out a breath and looked away, jaw set. “No one would shame you,” he said, careful to keep his gaze averted from her face, “if you chose not to do this.”
“Locke –”
“Who knows what else she will see?” He spoke to Finn now, pleading and almost desperate.
“If she seeks to see a battle here, in this place, who knows what else she might find in the shadows, the memory of what was still lingering in the earth? I would spare her that,” he went on, ignoring Rory’s low protest, still looking at Finn, eyes burning.
“I would not trade her peace for all the advantage in the world. Would you?”
“It’s not his choice.” Rory withdrew her hand from Locke’s, gentle but decided. “You mean well, Locke. I am – honored, that you should take such a care of me –”
“I promised,” he said, as fierce as before. “I swore.”
She nodded through the tightness in her throat. “But Finn is right,” she said. “I would be a fool to fail to use every weapon at our disposal, with the price of failing so great.”
And she was a weapon, she thought as she turned and wandered away, out of the tower and into the night, mind whirling, palms clammy, not with magic but with dread.
She had been born to strike terror and wreak horrors in the hearts and minds of men, to rend them limb from limb.
It was what she was, and always had been, and ever would be.
She sank to her knees in the grass, head bowed against the breeze of the summer night, fingers curled around themselves.
Locke was right, she thought. She desperately did not want to see the sights that unfolded not so far from here, that it might be the breaking of her, if she had to stand witness to what had been done to what she had once most loved in this world.
A single brief and blurry glimpse, in that grimy dark prison cell far across the sea, had been enough to haunt both her waking and her dreaming for months now.
She could not imagine seeing it again – clearly, wholly, in all its awful fullness.
But, she thought as she forced her fingers to relax, to ready themselves to call forth the shadows and the fog and that awful, diamond-bright knowing, this was the path she was born to walk, however thorny and heartbreaking and soul-rending it may be.
She had shirked it once before, her duty to that which she loved, and she would not do so again.
Rory closed her eyes, and let it take her – the rising maelstrom of ice and fog, the unearthly speech that broke from her throat, the frost coating her fingers and lips, her shadows swirling in a wild, frenzied vortex – first an incomprehensible mass of dark, deathlike gray, until it cleared somewhat, the blinding light of her knowing bursting forth, and she saw it all, and understood none of it.
A gray, rain-weathered rock, lying cracked and broken on a green-grassed mound – two armies of shadow and bone clashing together, steel clashing and ghostly shrieks echoing across an endless field of green and crimson and gold – a sinuous figure, draped in white, mouth parted in a scream, of victory or despair, Rory could not tell, could not decipher among the swirl and swell of gray-and-black shadows – herself, ice-bitten hands slick with hot dark blood, kneeling in the mud, a shock of bone-white hair resting in her lap, coated with blood and ash, and then a glimpse of dust, floating away on a lazy summer breeze –
She made a wordless sound of dismay, racked by a grief which she did not understand, and then something else began to form in the shadows that wailed all around her – a far-distant scene, two hands joined, blue veins and wrinkled fingers, clasped tight and unwavering in front of a low-burning fire – and as she watched, heart thundering in a painful rhythm, as though it knew what was coming even before she herself did, gift of prophecy notwithstanding, a flash of bright hazel eyes in a well-worn face, gray temples and deep-carved lines across that familiar brow, mouth stretched into a soft, secret smile across the joined hands.
Locke – grown old and gray.
She knew that hearth, she realized with a jolt. Her mother’s hearth, her grandmother’s solar.
It was her hand he held, in her ancestral home.
Rory yanked backwards, and the vision shattered like glass against an unforgiving stone floor, thousands of incandescent, indecipherable shards of ice lying broken all around her.
She bent over, palms splayed out against the grass, chest heaving in and out as she fought to breathe, to calm herself, to think about what she had seen and to understand, to make sense of it.
Not, though, that last part. She wiped her trembling lips with the back of her hand.
Not that. It was impossible, inconceivable, that it should come to pass – and irrelevant, she told herself, even as she continued to shudder and to shake in the aftermath of her knowing.
It didn’t matter, the story of what might have been between her and Locke.
It was a tragedy doomed to end in death and despair – that much had been clear from their beginning.
What mattered, she told herself as she staggered to her feet, bracing herself against a tree with a quivering hand, was the rest of it – that strange, vague swirling of images and sensations and ambiguous dreaming.
She had seen blood coating the witch, that much was sure – but whose it was, she couldn’t be sure. The cailleachs bled black, she knew this much to be true, and the gore that dripped from Aoife’s face had been dark in color, but there had been an unmistakable red glint to it.
The Lia Fáil – shattered in two. It seemed ominous, an omen of ill-portent, for if the rock of destiny roared for her, naming her the true queen of éire, as Finn believed that it would, then surely it would remain upright and whole, not lie fractured on the ground, its glory and its power forever destroyed.
Rory licked her cracked lips, suppressing a whimper.
This was not how this was meant to go, she thought frantically.
Where was that clear, unshakeable certainty, that inhuman knowing, that had plagued her all her life?
Vanished, leaving only fragments of that power riddled with the cracks and crevices of ambiguity, now that she at last truly needed it, had decided to claim it as her own?
The Mórrígan, she decided with a thump of her fist against the tree, was a goddess with a truly nasty sense of humor.
She exhaled, ragged and harsh, before slowly turning back towards the tower. They were waiting for her, no doubt – waiting for her to return and give them the hope which they so desperately needed.
She thought of Dil that morning – you’re our salvation, she’d said, our hope – and knew what she had to do.
They stood in unison as she entered the council room, steady and calm as the sea after a midsummer storm. “Well?” Locke asked, hazel eyes scanning her face, taut with worry – and yes, Rory thought grimly, with hope. “What news?”
Rory sank into a chair by the fire and reached for her wine, drinking deeply, before leaning back, hands folded around her goblet. “I know,” she lied, “that we shall win.”