Firebrand (7 page)

He fell silent, giving me a long stare that held all the contempt in the world.

‘So why,’ he said at last, ‘are you moving like a pregnant three-legged ewe?’

As he walked away I thanked the gods that I knew what greaves and breastplates and helmets were, because Eorna had lectured me on how the full-mortals fought in battle, and why the Sithe never used armour like theirs. All our defence was in our quickness, and
we didn’t even carry shields or targes; if we carried anything in our left hands it was only a short sword to deflect and parry. Our battles were not the grunting chop and stab of the full-mortals; they were swift deadly dances of lightning flight and slash and lunge. Our weapons were long and light and they had to be as fast as we were, or we were lost.

And so the next time I caught sight of Griogair at the arena fence, I tried to be clever, leaping high and twisting to catch the back of Eorna’s skull. My tutor dodged my stroke with laughable ease and I stumbled clumsily to the ground, earning another whack so hard it left me retching into the sand.

‘Left yourself exposed, you fool,’ yelled Griogair. ‘Feint and come at him from below.’

So when I had the chance, I did, rolling with his strike and jabbing my staff upwards. It sent Eorna grunting to his knees, voiceless with pain as he clutched his groin. He’d done it more than once to me, and I felt no remorse, only glee and a dizzying pride. I turned for Griogair’s reaction, but he’d gone.

Next time, I promised myself and him. Next time you’ll see it. Next time you’ll smile.

But the next time I saw Griogair it was two days later, as he rode out of the dun gate at the head of thirty of his favourite fighters. He was smiling then, all right. Most of them were laughing and grinning: I remember that well. I laughed myself, dizzy with it. Kilrevin was an outlaw and a bandit and they wanted him punished, we all did, but there was nothing noble or altruistic about the song in our blood that morning. It was the
thrill of killing that set our hearts racing when Griogair walked out into the courtyard that day and shouted for his horse and his sword. Even Leonora was smiling as she kissed him goodbye. And in my ignorance I was as thirsty for blood as any of them. These days I’m as familiar with a human being’s innards as I am with the palm of my sword hand, but I’m not and never have been so proud of it as I was that day, a stupid know-it-all child who had never seen real blood.

What did I know?

Eili was on the dun walls, watching too, and I met her laughing gaze. She was as hungry for the fight as I was, I could tell by the wild light in her eyes. I thought of taking her with me, then decided against it. Later, I decided as I quietly blocked my mind and made my sneaky way to the deserted northern wall. Later I’d tell her all about it, I’d boast of what I’d seen, but for now I wanted to do this alone. I didn’t want company, not even Eili’s.

That’s why my heart sank when I felt the tug of a hand on my sleeve.

I glared over my shoulder. I should have been a fraction of a moment faster. Already up on the parapet, I had one leg swung over the northern wall, ready to clamber down using the handholds I knew were there. I didn’t want to be held back because I already had a lot of catching up to do, and there was the risk my father might finish it before I’d seen any of the fun.

Orach gripped my sleeve tighter. ‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.

‘You must be joking,’ I growled. ‘I’m not missing this.’

‘Seth, please. Please don’t. I had a bad dream.’

I stared at her. There was a hint of chill in my bones because it wasn’t like her, to be honest; then I decided the atmosphere of the last days and weeks must have got to her more than I’d realised. Softening, I touched her cheek, then impulsively leaned down and kissed her.

‘I’ll be back tonight,’ I assured her. ‘I’ll tell you all about it. We’ll go to the caves, right?’

The promise didn’t bring a shy smile to her mouth the way it usually did. She only looked afraid. I felt the touch of her mind on mine, begging me.

~
Seth. Please don’t go
.

I couldn’t be doing with it. Not now. Almost brutally I broke the mental contact, yanked my sleeve from her grasp, and swung over the wall.

I ran with the devil on my heels, but still the sky was darkening by the time I found them. My lungs ached and my limbs trembled with exhaustion, but I found them. It was the sounds I followed, of course; if I used my mind, they’d know I was there and there would be hell to pay. But the sounds of a battle are unmistakeable. Unbearable, unmissable, but unmistakeable.

Seven miles inland and further south there was a cluster of crofts that lay within my father’s area of control, and Griogair owed the community protection in return for the grain and meat they sent to the dun. The cottages huddled round an ancient well that was sunk below ground level, with cropped grass sloping down to it as if the earth was trying to swallow itself. Roofed and walled in wet green stone, it had never run dry and the water was sweet without a hint of brackishness; I knew because one of the crofters had shown me it once, and given me a beakerful of the water. It had been a hot day, and I’d wandered miles, and I was nine years old and ravenous and parched. He’d laughed his head off as I glugged beaker after beaker of the water till I finally threw some back up, and grinned at him. Then he’d given me some bread and dried beef, just because I made him laugh.

I stepped over his corpse as I ducked behind his cottage. I knew it was his corpse because I recognised the face grimacing at me, and his red hair; and that head
on the spike of the fence seemed to match the torso at my feet.

Laughed his head off, indeed.

And now I had a bad feeling about this. The feeling was no more than a feeling, because I still didn’t dare reach out with my mind, but that was no longer about getting an earful of trouble from Sionnach’s father or my own. Now I found I didn’t want to give my position away because I didn’t want my head on a fence spike. I looked back at the crofter’s face again, knowing from his expression he hadn’t died well. I suppose the other body parts scattered round the yard were his lover, but I had to count to make sure. The gods knew where her head was.

What was the point of being a wild thing if you couldn’t listen to your wildest instincts? I stopped then, right in the centre of the blood-boltered yard, and listened, really listened. Dusk was well advanced now, the day only a strip of pearl above the horizon, so I could forget my eyes. I forgot my mind too, forgot my crazy fears and conjectures, and let myself smell and feel the battle. I let myself hear it, hear it properly. That wasn’t hard, because it was drawing closer. But it could only be drawing nearer to here if my father was in retreat.

Now I could hear individual voices, individual screams and howls and yells among the clangour and screech of metal against metal. There were some voices I recognised, and those were the ones panicked by defeat. There were some I did not. Those were the voices raised high in vicious war cries.

I ran.

The trouble was, I didn’t run far enough and I didn’t run in the right direction. My instincts had had their moment, and now I lost it as panic swept over me. I ran towards a copse of windblown pines, and knew it was a death trap. I ran back the way I had come, and knew suddenly that on the open moor I’d be exposed for miles, and my enemy was on horseback. So for hideous seconds and minutes, fear turning my muscles to ice and my innards to water, I stood in the centre of the ravaged cottages and their destroyed inhabitants, and I could not move.

I don’t know what made me run to the well. It was a place to be cornered and caught, but it was a place to hide, too. I could feel minds hunting other minds, but I was better at blocking now. If I blocked Kilrevin’s searching mind long enough, Conal would find me. Of course he would. He’d come for me. He’d said he would.

But I couldn’t call out to him, even in this rout. The battle was on me, now, the noise of it numbing my ears and dazing my brain, and I didn’t dare look back as I stumbled down the treacherous stone steps cut into the slope. Below, in total darkness, I could see the maw of the well, no longer welcoming but ready to swallow me whole. I was terrified of pitching forward into the black glistening water, and more terrified of not getting down there fast enough. I grabbed for the wall, scraping my palm, almost losing my balance and then sinking up to one ankle in coldness. For an instant I froze in terror, but the shouts were louder now, the
clang of steel more vicious, the grunts and howls of dying men clearer. Gripping a ridge of rough stone with my fingertips, I swung myself round and backed against the unseen inner wall. I was up to my thighs in water but I didn’t care that the cold bit into my flesh like the teeth of the underworld.

Men were fighting their way down the steps after me: two of them. Edging further along the wall into deeper darkness, I saw flames flicker on the black surface, but as the tiny waves I made rippled wider, the flame-light briefly sputtered and went out. I tried to breathe without a sound, but it was hard.

Then that problem was solved, because I stopped breathing. There was the hideous ring of steel, the laboured hissing breath of men intent only on killing one another. One staggered back; I heard his sword scrape on the stone close to me. The steel-clangour echoed now from the stone roof: the men were inside the well-cavern. The first one grunted as he fended off a blow, and I knew it was my father.

If it had been Conal I’d have gone to help him, I swear I would. But he wasn’t Conal, and I barely knew my father, and the stark truth is, I was rigid with terror. All I did was watch as the reflected flames flared again and Alasdair Kilrevin beat my father back towards the black pool. They both looked worn down, as if this was a fight that had lasted too long, and there were no lightning moves from either of them, only a relentless bloody slash-and-parry.

Griogair was so hacked about, I was amazed he was still moving, let alone fighting, yet even at that moment
I was afraid of him. A gash had been opened across his face from right temple to left jaw, and I think one of his eyes was dead. His arms and chest were ripped in great slashes as if a great cat had played with him, or a well-fed wolf. I remembered now, that was what they called Kilrevin: the Wolf, and now I knew why. Griogair’s face was distorted by rage and hatred as well as the sword-slice, but even as he beat my father back, Kilrevin was smiling.

Griogair’s foot caught on the last uneven step and he toppled back, and Kilrevin leaped with him, dropping his sword as my father lost his grip on his. Kilrevin closed his fingers round Griogair’s throat, and shoved his mutilated face under the water.

I must have breathed, eventually, but my father didn’t. He never got another chance. Kilrevin straddled his body, shoving him down as his limbs thrashed for an age, then only twitched, then grew still.

I pressed myself against the stone, motionless. I mustn’t make another ripple, not while Kilrevin stood staring down thoughtfully at my father’s drifting corpse. One clawing hand twitched again, so Kilrevin lifted his sword and thrust it casually into Griogair’s throat, withdrew it and wiped the blade on his sleeve.

He stood very still. So did I.

He silenced his breath. I did the same.

His mind reached out. I closed my eyes for fear the light of them would be reflected in the black pool.

Then he spat, and turned, and ran back up the steps.

Trembling, I stared at my father, thinking: I’ll never know him now. And I stood there thinking that, over
and over again, till for all I knew hours had passed. The noise of fighting faded, and eventually so did the screams, and the darkness became complete. Only then did I get my mind back, and only then did I scream in my head like an infant for Conal.

* * *

I think my father must have called out to Conal earlier, when he realised he had somehow been deceived into his own death, because my brother came faster than I could have hoped. I’d clambered on all fours up the well steps, because I could not stay in there with Griogair, not for anything. When I looked around me in the firelit darkness, I sat down on grass that was saturated with blood and entrails and the gods knew what else. There were no moans or cries from the wounded because there were no wounded. Those who hadn’t escaped were dead, and I tried not to think about what I’d heard as I stood frozen and shivering in the well, waiting till all the screams had died.

I sat there on the blood-sticky grass for the whole of that long cold night, till dawn broke grey and weary at the far edge of the moor and I heard Conal coming. Two of his lieutenants came with him at the gallop, but what was the big hurry? Long before they drew to a halt they must have known they were hours too late. Slipping off their horses, they murmured together, awed by the slaughter, already planning how to deal with the corpses. In the morning they’d bring a detachment to recover them, but there were too many
for proper rites just then. Niall Mor MacIain lay with his belly open from crotch to breastbone, his throat slashed and drained; I’d sat and stared at him for an age in the darkness, wondering what I could or should tell Eili and Sionnach about his end. There were limbs and heads and charred bodies strewn around the crofts, male and female fighters alike. Raineach’s brother had been crucified against a barn door, so they took him down from there, at least, and they also took the head of my red-haired crofter from the fence spike and laid it beside its neck stump.

You know what the full-mortals call us?
The People of Peace
.

They flatter us. Why? Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s folk-memory.

I heard none of what Conal and his lieutenants said to me. They did bring away two bodies: Conal went with Righil down into the well and they carried up my father’s sodden remains. Of course they took those and Niall MacIain’s. When the bodies were roped to the other two horses, Conal picked me up and put me on his, then swung up behind me, and he brought me back to the dun like a living corpse. I could feel the warmth of his body behind mine, the pulse of his blood and the rise and fall of his chest, as if it was the only thing in the world that was real.