Chapter 42 #2
Eamon shook his head. “Locke,” he said, all trace of his earlier teasing vanished. “It does not take eyes to see that you are not, nor could you ever be, your father.” Tadhg nodded his agreement, expression fierce, and Locke loosed a resigned sigh.
King Locke MacMurchada of Leinster. How many times as a boy had he dreamed of those words – a distant, foolish dream, what with three elder brothers in line before him – but still he’d imagined it, over and over again in his boyhood.
If he were king, he’d thought, whenever he’d witnessed an injustice uncorrected, too many times to count, he would be different – a good king, fair and just, merciful and wise.
Or at the very least, he would try to be.
Here it was now, his for the taking, if he could bring himself to face his fear of the darkness once more, to seize the chance that an indifferent fate had given to him.
“All right, lads,” he said, glancing backwards again towards where Rory awaited him, patient and calm and cool. “Let’s go then, and see about making me a king.”
As far as acting kingly goes, Locke knew that he was not off to an auspicious start.
For one thing, he could not stop staring at that yawning black hole that was the entrance to Dumha na nGiall.
How many bodies lay buried down there, he wondered, back soaked with perspiration, entombed in the dark, lost to the cavernous, sunless belly of the earth?
How many souls slumbered there in the shadows, how many lives had been lost and forgotten, how many men and women gone forever unremembered and unhonored, the memory having been buried along with their bones in this ancient cairn?
He had been so close to becoming one of them.
Locke forced himself to breathe and in through his nose – to focus on the figures approaching through the encroaching twilight.
Aoife, he recognized easily enough, the golden gleam of her hair shimmering as bright as befitted her name.
Ironstring, too, broad and barrel-chested, his black beard a little more lined with gray than a few months before, but still a formidable sight, his mace draped over his saddle in front of him.
A small cluster of heavily armed men, unsmiling and grave, swords and spears glinting in the fading light, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
They were no band of weaklings themselves, Locke assured himself, despite Finn’s murmured suggestion that they leave the gargantuan hound of Lugh behind and out of sight.
“Best save that surprise for the battle,” he’d said, green eyes grim, and Rory had nodded, lips growing tight as she realized, no doubt, the implication of his words – that parley or no, there was no version of this meeting that did not end in blood.
But even without him, Locke thought, they were a formidable lot.
There was, first and foremost, Rory, of course, seated atop a silver gelding whose coat exactly matched the color of her eyes, her brother’s sword on bold display at her side – and above all else, that otherworldly power of hers a frosty, shimmering thing in the air, a mass of serpentine shadows swirling about the hooves of her horses, soundless and silent but pulsating with barely-restrained savagery.
An echo, surely, of their mistress’ mood, confronted once more with those she most hated of all creatures living in this world.
The kings too, grouped about her, were a fierce-looking lot – Mac Duinn, battle-scarred and sneering at the Albion general, a wordless promise of what their reunion on the field of war might bring; young Dermot ó Briain, hand vibrating with fury where it gripped the shaft of his spear, all his pent-up grief and rage for the death of his father simmering underneath the surface; the king of Connacht too, Eóin ó Flannagáin, dark head thrown back in defiance, swords at the ready, proud and unyielding as he stared down the immortal being who fastened her gaze on him with a look of unmistakable hunger.
Rory had not, to the best of Locke’s knowledge, spoken a single word to this young half-brother of hers, but at the sight of the cailleach’s ravenous stare fixed on his face, Locke saw her nudge her gelding over a few deliberate steps, positioning herself between Aoife and the boy-king, the fog that slithered through the legs of their horses intensifying, the deepening chill in the air an unmistakable threat of violence.
Slowly, the cailleach tore her gaze away from Eóin to stare into Rory’s eyes, the blue and the silver, two ancient and terrible enemies destined to duel to the death.
A gloved hand slipped forward to rest on Rory’s knee, and Locke breathed a little easier, despite the instinctual twinge of annoyance at seeing another man’s touch upon his wife.
Finn – Oisín, the most famous bárd in all of éire’s long and rich history – sat at his Rory’s side, the ostensible voice of reason and restraint, but Locke knew the truth of him, a warrior through and through, prepared to die in the defense of his home and his queen.
Locke glanced at the bárd, ready to give him a silent thanks, then blinked in surprise. Glossy black hair covered Finn’s mouth and jaw, sleek and neatly trimmed, rendering him almost unrecognizable.
“You grew a beard,” Locke said thoughtlessly, then cringed as the other provincial kings shot him confused glances.
He had not meant to say that aloud.
Finn’s lips quirked. “The gods forbid,” he said, low and quiet, although his moss-green eyes gleamed with something very like amusement, “that I deprive you of your favorite epithet.”
And then their enemies were upon them, their horses coming to a halt a stone’s throw in front of them, and Locke refocused his attention on the parley soon to commence, the back-and-forth exchange of false promises and impossible demands that they were sure to make – stupid to agree to this, a useless endeavor, when they all knew that war was inevitable, that there could be no truce made between them, not with all the blood spilled across the land and the bodies buried in the ground –
Locke’s spine stiffened. He had forgotten, for a moment, in his shock over the sight of Finn’s beard, that the dark mouth of the cairn gaped so close to him, that the darkness was again threatening to swallow him whole, for good this time, with no hope of reprieve.
Was that, perhaps, why he had done it – to grant Locke this small, silly boon?
It warmed him to think it. Oisín, his boyhood hero, his idol – now his friend, of sorts.
Rory’s voice broke across the stillness, cold as the winter wind. “Ironstring,” she said. “We have come, as requested – what would you ask of us?” Her teeth glinted in a parody of a smile. “If you seek mercy, you shall seek it in vain.”
Locke suppressed a thrill of savage delight. What a queen, he thought, seeing mirroring echoes of that same vicious approval on the faces of the three provincial kings, to ride out and stand before an open-mouthed grave, and tell the general of the most powerful army in the land to go feck himself.
Gods, she was magnificent.
Ironstring’s lip quivered in ill-concealed anger. “Perhaps,” he said. “I came to say the same thing to you.”
“Unfortunately for you,” said Rory, running a frost-bitten hand along the hilt of her brother’s sword.
“Such an offer is unnecessary – nay, an impossible one for the likes of you to make.” She looked him over, head to toe, and Locke watched the Albion general flinch underneath the icy weight of her gaze, the swirl of shadow and mist about her shoulders and loose falling hair as she stared at him.
“One first must know justice before one can offer mercy, and you have shown little affinity for that.”
He smiled, bloodless and thin. “We do come to offer a sort of mercy,” he said, gesturing towards where Aoife sat, silent still but no longer serene, as Locke once remembered her to be.
Instead, the cailleach’s beautiful face was pinched and drawn, sea-swept eyes brittle with a half-crazed hunger as she shifted her restless gaze back and forth between Rory and the young king of Connacht.
“My wife has persuaded me to offer you a deal, princess –”
“Queen.” Every head swiveled to stare at Locke, who had spoken before he could think better of it. “She is a queen, and you will address her as such.”
Ironstring laughed, a contemptuous jeer. “Or what, MacMurchada? What will you do – the lord of nothing, as you are?”
“Continue your dillydallying and you’ll find out,” Locke said, and for the briefest moment, Rory’s gaze shifted to his, bright with remembering.
She turned away, back to Ironstring. “What deal, general? Make your offer, and begone.”
“Very well.” Ironstring leaned back in his saddle. “A trade – that is what we propose. I will give the order for my army to retreat back into the southern lands, which are rightfully ours by law, thanks to young MacMurchada here, who ceded those lands to us in exchange for our forces.”
“I ceded nothing to you.”
Ironstring ignored Locke’s outburst, keeping his eyes fixed on Rory. “In return for this mercy that we will show you – by sparing your lives and leaving the rest of your realm alone – we ask that you, Rory ó Conchúir, give yourself up into my wife’s power, for her to do with as she sees fit.”
Finn let out a wordless roar of fury, even as Locke edged his horse closer to Rory’s in a primal impulse to protect – a useless gesture, he knew, when she could kill the man sooner than he himself could draw his sword from his sheath.
Only Rory didn’t flinch, but merely sat silent and still in her saddle, head tilted to the side as her gaze left Ironstring to rest on Aoife.
The cailleach showed her teeth in a terrible, hungry smile. “A pheata,” she said. “Which shall you choose – your life, or all those you love and have sworn to protect?”