Kingmaker's Sword (Rune Blades of Celi) (37 page)

“No, lad,” he whispered. “‘Tis a mortal wound. Save your strength for yourself….”

I put my hand to his belly, then gasped as I felt the empty numbness there. He had no strength left to draw on, and my own was not enough. I was unable to reach into the wound with the healing force. Even as I tried, I felt him slipping farther from me.

Kerri dropped to her knees beside us. Her hand went to Cullin’s forehead. “I have some skill as a Healer,” she said. “Please, Cullin. Let us try. We have to try—”

“No,” Cullin murmured, his voice barely a whisper. “It will do me no good.” His right hand came up and I grasped it with my left. “Am I avenged now, Kian?”

“Aye,” I replied hoarsely. “Twice over. I accounted for Dergus, and Kerri’s sword took out Mendor.”

He laughed softly, then coughed. A trickle of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth, and Kerri gently wiped it away. “I don’t know if that will make this business of dying any easier or not,” he said. “You’ll see me home, then, Kian?”

“Aye,” I said. “Aye, that I will,
ti’vati
….”

He smiled. “You’ve been a good son to me,” he whispered. “You’ve been such a son as any man could wish, son to me as much as the girls are my daughters, for all you sprang not from my seed.” He groped for the pouch at his waist. “The parchment….”

“I’ll see to it,” I said.

“It’s uncommon cold for summer,” he murmured. “I can barely see you, Kian. It’s so dark here...” He closed his eyes and I felt his spirit gently part with his body, painlessly at the end and in peace.

I laid him back against the grass and bent to touch my lips to his forehead. It was the last thing I remember before darkness closed in around me.

***

Pain was everywhere, surrounding me, a solid presence in the dark. I couldn’t breathe for the agony ripping through my chest. I tried to reach for that centred well of quiet deep within my spirit, but the torment was too much. I couldn’t find it, couldn’t grasp it with the pain slashing and tearing at me like knives.

Kerri was there with me in the flickering darkness. Her voice came to me faintly through the haze of agony. “Work with me, Kian. I can’t do this alone.” Her hands were cool on my fevered forehead and cheeks. “Please, Kian. You have to work with me….”

Gradually, after a lifetime—a hundred lifetimes—the pain diminished. Breathing still hurt, but no longer felt like monstrous jaws crushing my chest. Kerri faded from the darkness and receded until I could no longer sense her presence.

Then there was an old man. No, not old. Young seeming, but with hair and beard silvered and patriarchal. Behind him, faint and indistinct, rose the columns of a temple. Not a temple. Rock. Living rock, in a circle…. The Watcher on the Hill. I recognized him and despair washed through me as I waited for the appearance of the opponent who had met me twice before in the dream. I was unarmed now, weakened and hurt. I could not defend myself against anyone. But my opponent did not appear, and when I turned as stiffly and painfully as an old man, I saw why.

Cullin stood there behind me, dressed in his plaid and kilt, his sword held ready in his hands, guarding my back as I had guarded his so many times. His white teeth flashed in the grin I remembered so well. Then, when I knew finally my opponent would not come this time, I turned to see Cullin watching me, his eyes sorrowful and grave. When I reached out to take his hand, he shook his head and faded into the darkness. “Not yet, Kian.” His voice came from a terrible distance, so faint, I hardly heard it. “Not yet….”

***

I awoke on the pallet in the ruined tower. Kerri knelt beside me, her attention on a cloth she was dipping into a bowl of water. She wrung it out and placed it on my forehead. My side was stiff and sore and each breath hurt enough to make me dizzy. I groped with my right hand and found a thick padding of bandage. Kerri gently pulled my hand away and laid it back on the pallet.

“Lie still,” she said quietly. “You’re healing now. For a while, I was afraid you were lost, too.”

Very slowly, moving myself piece by piece, I managed to sit up. The pain in my side was like a knife. Kerri put her hands to my shoulders and tried to force me back down onto the pallet.

“Kian, no,” she said in alarm. “Lie down. You must rest.”

“No.” I warded her off and fought my way to my feet, swaying as dizziness and pain swept through me.

“What are you doing?” she cried. “You’re gravely wounded. You have to rest—”

“I live,” I said shortly, pushing her aside. “And while I live, I have a duty to perform. Where is he?”

She gestured to the doorway. “Out there.”

Something akin to fear clutched at my belly. “You haven’t buried him already, have you?”

She shook her head. “No. I thought to wait until you were out of danger.”

I let out a quick breath of relief. “I have to go to him,” I muttered. I tried to take a step. To my dismay, my knees buckled and I would have fallen if Kerri had not clasped her arm around my waist and propped her shoulder beneath my arm.

“Kian—”

“Please,” I said, steadying myself against her. “I have to go to him.”

I could hear the raw, intense need that filled my spirit rasping in my voice. Kerri sighed, then acquiesced. “Very well,” she said, taking most of my weight on her shoulder as she helped me to the door. “You should be dead, too,” she muttered. “The wound is a bad one. I’m not much of a healer—”

“I’m all right,” I insisted.

“Can’t you heal yourself first?” she asked. “You’re in too much pain now—”

“I’ll sleep too long afterward if I do,” I muttered  “And I won’t have enough strength. I have to do this now. Before it’s too late.”

Cullin lay under the open sky in the broken shell of the upper room, cushioned by the cloak of one of the dead mercenaries. Kerri had laid him out with his arms crossed, and covered him with his plaid. I stumbled to my knees beside him and reached out to touch the forehead that had the colour and chill of pale marble. I took the plaid, folded it carefully and laid it to one side.

I had seen this ritual performed only once, years ago. Cullin himself had done it for a clansman killed by a bandit. Now I had to do it for him. “You’ll see me home, then,” he had said as I cradled his head against me, and I promised him.

Every clansman carries a square of oiled parchment in his wallet just for this purpose. Cullin’s was carefully rolled and tied with three cords, two silver and one black. I took it from the wallet and unrolled it before I set it atop the folded plaid. The two daggers, hilts inlaid with silver and gold wire, were still sheathed at his belt. I took one of them and placed it to the left of the parchment. The second one I drew and touched the hilt first to my own forehead, then to his.

I gripped his braid carefully, then slid the dagger between my hand and his temple and sliced it cleanly from his head. I placed it meticulously at the top of the parchment, then turned back to remove the earring and laid it at the bottom edge. I clenched my hands for a moment to steady their trembling, then gently unfastened his shirt to expose his breast. My breath caught in my throat and I tried not to look at the terrible wound in his belly.

The next part was the hardest. I had no stomach for this. But I had promised him, and there was no one else to do it.

“I’ll see you home,
ti’vati
,” I whispered, then took a deep breath, placed the point of the dagger under his breastbone and opened him. Behind me, Kerri made a soft, horrified sound, but she said nothing, and she made no attempt to interfere.

There was very little blood, of course, but my stomach contracted sharply and I had to fight the nausea that threatened to choke me. I found his heart and freed it from the large vessels holding it in his chest. I was shivering uncontrollably as I drew it out and placed it gently in the centre of the square of parchment. I wrapped the braid around the heart, placed the emerald earring on top, then carefully folded the parchment into an envelope and tied it with the black cord.

Tears blurred my vision and I could hardly see what I was doing as I rolled the parchment packet in the plaid. I placed his sword on top of the roll, then cleaned the dagger on my own kilt and crossed both daggers on the blade of the sword. I tied the bundle in the middle with his belt and each end with the silver cords, then sat back on my heels, still trembling.

“I’ll see you home, Cullin dav Medroch dav Kian of Clan Broche Rhuidh,” I said distinctly. “In this task I am both your son and your liegeman. I will see you safely home.” I had to sit there for a long time before I could turn and look up at Kerri, who stood behind me. She hadn’t moved.

“We can bury the body now,” I said. “I’ll see him home tomorrow.”

“Perhaps not tomorrow,” she said gently. “But as soon as you’re well enough to travel. We’ll see him home together, Kian.”

***

Drakon was dead. Dead by my own hand, as was Dergus. Mendor was dead, felled by Kerri’s sword. Cullin was avenged. But it wasn’t enough. By all the seven gods and goddesses, it wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough, because nothing could bring him back. Grief and loss were tangible presences in my restless sleep. Troubled dreams I could not remember kept me tossing fretfully on the thin pallet, shivering with the cold, hollow ache in my heart.

Then suddenly, in the dream, another’s grief merged with mine. Along the faintly throbbing tendrils that bound me to the sword—and to Kerri—came the awareness of a deep and infinite sadness.

The shared need to comfort and take comfort pulsated quietly between us in the night. I turned and found solace and understanding in the form of a slim, warm body next to mine, and gentle hands brushing my hair back from my forehead. Smooth, silken skin felt gloriously alive under my stroking hands. I found her mouth in the darkness, and it was sweet as spring water, soft as rose petals, beneath mine. My readiness was a sudden hard urgency, and hers a welcoming openness.

The bond between us merged us into one entity, a wondrous
we
far more than merely the sum of
she
and
I
. She filled all the hollow, empty spaces within me, completing all my patterns perfectly. Sensation crackled back and forth between us along the threads of the bond until I could not tell where I left off and she began. Slowly, we moved through all the stylized rituals until all the gifts that were there to be given and taken were presented and received, and we subsided together into the sweetness of shared sleep.

In the morning, I awoke to see Kerri wrapped in her cloak, fully dressed and fast asleep, curled on a pile of furs near the wall by the door, and I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed our coming together, or if it had been real.

We made
ready to start north shortly after dawn two days later. I strapped the heart bundle securely behind my saddle. My hand lingered on it for a moment before I mounted. For the first time in eight years, Cullin would not be riding beside me. He would not be there to help and guide me. From now on, for the rest of my life, I had only myself to rely on.

Kerri’s mare stood saddled and ready. Kerri knelt in front of the two cairns, hands resting on her knees, head bowed. She had fashioned a hoop of ivy to place on Cullin’s grave, decorating it with a narrow braid cut from her own hair. She didn’t bother explaining it to me, but I recognized the gesture as one of respect and honour and was grateful for it. Cullin had deserved her regard and had more than earned it. I had already paid my final respects to Jeriad, and taken my leave of him. I would say my farewells to Cullin at Broche Rhuidh.

I mounted and caught up the lead rope of the stallion. Kerri looked up, then got to her feet and mounted her mare. She glanced at the heart bundle behind my saddle, then at me, but said nothing. We rode out of the river valley in silence.

Patrols of Isgardian soldiers watched the roadways, questioning travellers moving both eastward to Maeduni and west toward the coast. We were accosted several times in the first day and questioned closely. Since I was obviously a Tyr and we were moving north rather than east or west, we were not detained long.

We saw unmistakable signs of a country preparing for war. Many of the small villages we passed through were bereft of all men of fighting age. The fortified landholdings bulged with soldiers who spilled out into clusters of tents pitched around guarded walls. Everywhere, the banner of the Ephir fluttered above the standard of the local landholder. Strangers, once welcomed in the small inns and taverns, now met hostility and suspicion.

“They’re frightened,” Kerri said quietly as we left the tavern where we had stopped for the midday meal.

“Aye, but they’ve reason,” I replied. The sword on my back shivered as we turned north again. It had been troubling me all morning. It wanted to go east, not north. A sensation much like an aching tooth shot through my spine. I reached behind me to put a hand on the heart bundle and ignored the sword. The ache subsided.

For the rest of the day, the sword kicked up a minor fuss, but I managed to ignore it. Dark found us well into the foothills, a long way from any villages or towns. We found a sheltered space by a small stream and made camp for the night. While Kerri saw to the horses, I prepared a sketchy evening meal.