Firebrand (2 page)

‘The Satan-spawn won’t smile when he’s burning in Hell!’

Hatred rushes over me in such a hot violent tide I’m dizzy with it. It’s the tail-end of the sixteenth century, for gods’ sake: when do these people plan to evolve?

My fingers tighten on the crossbow. Then I can feel his mind inside mine, soothing, reassuring, the way it’s been since I was a feral snarling infant and he tamed me.

~
Murlainn. Little brother. Don’t lose your focus!

~
Conal, I can’t fire twice! I haven’t time!

~
Yes, you have. Don’t panic
. Turning his face briefly to the girl, Conal manages to kiss her hacked and shorn scalp before she is yanked away and hauled up onto the pile of firewood.

~
She’s nothing to us. She’s one of them!

Conal’s head angles very slightly upwards, as if he’d like to look right at me and give me a real piece of his mind. I see the flicker of a smile.

~
She has a name, Seth
.

I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know her damned name. I’m here for Conal.

~
Catriona. Her name’s Catriona
. His eyes almost find mine across the hazy dusk, and he half-smiles. And
with that he knows I’ll do it. He must have known I’d do it anyway. I’d do anything for him.

He’s dragged up behind her and bound to the same stake, ropes tightened around them both. He strains his fingers enough to touch the girl’s, and he’s speaking to her again, but I doubt she can hear him above the noise of the baying crowd. The pale-eyed priest steps forward, robes billowing, a black crow hungry for carrion. He stays in the long shadow of the courtyard wall; I notice that. Smiling, he raises his bible.

~
Be calm, Seth. Hands steady, both eyes open, remember
.

~
Conal, I
…

~
I love you, little brother. I’ll see you again, I promise
.

Oh, no, we’ll never meet again. I stare down at the priest, his ringing declamations of hatred raised above the yells of the mob. Not in that devil’s heaven. It doesn’t exist, and worse, there’s no hell for him to go to after he’s died screaming at my hands.

That’s
my
promise, Cù Chaorach.

But I don’t let Conal hear it. I block it coldly away, because he wouldn’t approve, even now. My hands are steady now; my hatred helps a lot. I’m glad I don’t have time to shoot the priest as well. A bolt to the heart would be too fast.

~
I love you, Cù Chaorach. I’m sorry
.

~
I’m glad you’re here. Don’t be sorry. Be quick
.

I roll onto my stomach. I won’t be seen; I do have time. No one’s looking upwards toward my hiding place, no one wants to miss a moment of the spectacle. Probably they’ll take a while to realise what’s happened in the confusion. I may hate crossbows but
I’m good with them: he taught me himself. I can get in two shots. I can reload, fire, and still get away.
Yes
.

I level my gaze and aim. The girl first, so she’ll know nothing, and so Conal will know I’ve done it and be pleased with me.

And then, Conal. My brother, my friend, my Captain. My father in every way that ever mattered.
Oh, please, you nonexistent gods, please give me the strength
.

Two men step from behind the priest, blazing torches held high.

That’s it. I blink away the sweat and the tears and the terror. And my mind is as cold as my heart as I tighten my finger on the trigger.

You deal with him
.

That was the first and last communication my mother ever had with my father about me. My father was more surprised than angry when my mother’s emissary rode through the dun gates with a sullen brat on a pony behind him and an expression of pained endurance on his face. The man had ridden three days with me and I’d made sure they were the longest three days of his life. He was so glad to see the back of me, he didn’t even take bed and board from Griogair for the night; he stayed for one meal and a very stiff drink, then turned right round and rode back the way he came. I hope Lilith made it worth his while.

Even later my father was never angry about it. He wasn’t involved enough for that; at most he was mildly irritated. Deep down I’m sure he wasn’t convinced of my existence, that he thought I was just one more of Lilith’s illusions.

My stepmother believed in me, all right. I used to feel Leonora’s cold blue gaze like frost on my skin, and if I looked up, she wouldn’t look away. She was the only one who didn’t. The rest of the clann averted their eyes, as if I was a colossal embarrassment. Well, that’s what I was, so as soon as it became clear Griogair wasn’t going to embrace me as his long-lost heir, they adopted the policy of pretending I didn’t exist. The small band of children took more of an interest, the
older ones freezing me out or taunting me at best, and giving me thrashings at worst. The younger ones ran from me: I made sure they did.

But my stepmother didn’t bully me or fear me or ignore me. She watched me. I thought it quite likely she’d eventually kill me, but I never could read Leonora’s eyes, let alone her mind. It wasn’t that she felt threatened by me; she wasn’t threatened by anyone. I’d watched her and my father together and I’m sure he never smiled at my mother like that, or touched her so gently, or spoke so tenderly. Certainly he never treated me that way. If he caught sight of me his brow would furrow and he’d set his teeth and look exasperated, as if I was a reminder of some great mistake, a souvenir he couldn’t get rid of. Leonora? All I could ever make out in her was pity and a degree of contempt, and I hated her for it. I’d have liked to hate my father too, but I couldn’t. All I ever wanted was his love, or if I couldn’t have that, his notice would do.

I never had a chance.

But my mother sent me back to him anyway. She was living at court by then, an adviser to the queen: oh, her exile had brought her up in the world. From being Griogair Dubh’s afterthought lover, she’d risen to be one of the most powerful courtiers in Kate NicNiven’s halls. What she didn’t need was a truculent attention-seeking toe-rag who was always getting into trouble, calling the captains names and the courtiers worse ones, getting thrashed on a regular basis and generally being an embarrassment. So she sent me back to Griogair.

I liked it better with my father anyway. The women of our race don’t do motherhood well, it’s a known fact, so I didn’t really miss Lilith, not after a while. Sithe women make wonderful fighters, wise and wily counsellors. If they’re healers or smiths they do it well; when they’re witches they excel at witchcraft. What they do not excel at is motherhood. It’s not something that happens easily, we’re not a fertile race; maybe that’s where those ridiculous stories come from, the ones about us being baby-stealers. Let me tell you, our women can barely tolerate their own brats, let alone someone else’s. Our women don’t yearn for children, because what’s the point mourning for centuries over something that may never happen? Instead they harden themselves, and even if they do breed they never quite shake off that hardness. Anyway, some of them don’t even take lovers, the loss of their virginity is so physically painful. Must be, to stay loverless for centuries.

Well, my mother must have got over that problem. She had plenty of lovers, though what she wanted more than anything was to be Griogair’s bound lover and that was something she’d never get for all her wiles, because he’d bound himself to Leonora decades before Lilith came along. When it became clear I wasn’t going to advance her cause in any way, Lilith lost interest in me altogether.

Which was fine by me. Being sent away from Kate NicNiven’s labyrinthine caverns was like breathing for the first time, and there was no-one I missed from her pale and haughty court. There had been even fewer children underground than there were above it, but
anyway, I needed neither friends nor mother. At my father’s dun I was content to skulk in the shadows and watch; that way I could see how the fighters trained, how the children scrapped and competed, how the strange and complex hierarchies of dun life operated. There were daredevil games on horseback that I might have liked to join, and when the wild racing music played on moonlit nights I used to half-wish I could throw myself into the dance with the rest of them. But it was fine, I was fed and clothed and relatively safe, and I was learning a lot—not that anybody made me study, or even tried to make me work the fields or learn a practical skill. My education was self-inflicted and unconventional, but I knew that the lessons would come in useful for the rest of my life. The most useful of them was the one I learned first: I was responsible for myself. In life and death you’re on your own, and I knew that better than any of my peers.

It seems stupid now that I looked forward so much to living with my father. I must have had some childish romantic picture in my head, me and him doing father-son things together, fighting and hunting and laughing and confiding.

But it turned out he already had a son, a perfect one, so he didn’t need another.

I was fishing that morning. This was what I liked best about living in my father’s dun: it was in the open air. I’d hated Kate’s underground caverns. They were beautiful, breathtaking, but lightless. You couldn’t see the sky.

At my father’s dun there was sky to spare. The fortress rambled across a rocky headland, its stone walls falling sheer to the sea on its western side. It was as much a part of the land as the great grey rocks that jutted from the earth, mottled with yellow lichen, hacked and split by the weather of aeons. To the north and south were blue bays; inland was the machair, wild with flowers, and an expanse of moorland so huge it blurred to a haze at the horizon. I had no sooner seen it than I loved it and knew that I’d die here.

The sooner the better, if you asked my new clann.

I didn’t care what they thought of me. Now I could run free where and when I liked; I had no boundaries, no limits. I could swim and fish and snare rabbits; I could spend the whole day taming a wounded falcon while I ate what I found or caught. It was a loveless existence, but so what? I was eight years old and I was free for the first time in my life. Nobody knew or cared what I did or where I was. It was a kind of heaven and a kind of hell, but I fixed my mind on the heaven part and it was fine, it was a good enough life for a boy who wasn’t meant to be born.

On the first day of my twelfth month in the dun, my life as a ghost ended.

That summer day, the hours stretched ahead of me like a gift, sunlit and lazy. The lochan on the moor was still and steel-blue: not a good day for fishing, but I had nothing better to do with my time. Was there anything better? My ribs still hurt from my last beating, but my nose had stopped bleeding and I had the blood of my enemies on my own knuckles, their skin under my fingernails, and I’d cost one of them a tooth. My pride was intact and I knew it always would be. I was bruised and battered but the breeze was warm on my skin, the heather smelt of honey, and I was happy.

I’d been teasing that trout for almost an hour. I didn’t use my mind. It’s hard and boring to enter the mind of a fish, and anyway, I liked the challenge. This was a cunning old one; plenty of people had tried and failed to catch him, and I wanted to be the one to get him. I had some vague notion of presenting him to my father, seeing Griogair’s eyes light up with pleasure and maybe a little respect.

So there I was, on my stomach in the scratchy heather, letting my fingertips graze the still surface of the lochan, singing softly to my trout. He was sleepy and fat among the weeds, and the water so brown and cool that I longed to curl my fingers round his sleek body, but I knew I mustn’t rush it. When I let my forefinger trail a delicate line along his spine, and he didn’t stir, I knew I had him. Gripping him firmly, I tossed him out of the water with a yell of triumph.

He floundered on the grey rock, looking stunned
and a little betrayed. My delight faded as I stared down at his gasping, flopping body. Now he didn’t look so fine.

I thought about my father again. This morning I’d seen him ride back from a dawn hunt with my half-brother, a sleek roebuck slung across their garron’s back. This half-brother had returned to the dun a month earlier, from secondment to another clann seventy miles to the north, but since his arrival he’d shown no interest in me. Well, the contempt was mutual.

As they rode right past me the two of them were laughing together, easy companions, and you could see the pride burning in Griogair’s eyes when he looked at Conal, the love nearly choking him. I half-wished it would. Griogair had barely registered me there, but Conal’s gaze had slewed towards me, unreadable. He didn’t try to get into my mind—that’s how far I was beneath him—and I’d no intention of going near his, even if he’d let me. I didn’t want to read his scorn and superiority, his first-born arrogance. I did notice there was only one arrow missing from his quiver. He’d got that buck first shot, and it was a beauty.

A fish? My father wasn’t going to care a damn for a fish.

I picked up a stone to stun it, but once I’d hit its head I found I couldn’t stop. I went on smashing the stone into the pathetic creature long after I’d put it out of its misery. There was translucent flesh all over the rock, and bits of skin and shattered pale bone. Still I went on pounding, till I began to wonder how I’d ever stop.

‘Well, don’t take it out on the fish.’

I leaped to my feet, the stone clutched in my fist and raised to strike.

Conal was watching me from a rock outcrop, barely six feet away, his arms resting casually on his knees. Gods, how I hated him. He was everything I wasn’t. Grown-up, for a start: he had to be more than a hundred years older than me. He had his mother’s dark blond hair, cut short but unruly, and Griogair’s light grey eyes, dancing with laughter. He had everything of Griogair’s, not least his love and trust. And all I had was Griogair’s black hair, like the villain I knew I was destined to be. I decided then and there that I’d grow it long.