Shapeshifter (14 page)

But the Dark Man had come. Hidden in the woods, wrapped in the shadow-spell that faded him to a dim hint of a man, he waited. He waited until Sive had cautiously released her golden-haired boy from her tight embrace. He waited through their morning meal, until Sive stopped peering fearfully into the woods at every snapping twig and rustling leaf. He waited until the sun’s wheel had carried it to the highest point of the sky, until Sive relaxed her guard and sent the boy for water. And as Oisin walked carefully back from the brook, both arms wrapped about a heavy earthenware pot, Far Doirche stepped out from behind the blackthorn and scooped the boy into his arms.

Oisin nearly got away. His mother had taught him well, and keeping hold of him was like trying to pick up a nest of weasels. He twisted, he bit, he kicked out viciously with a child’s version of his father’s thick-muscled thighs, and in the end Far held nothing but a fistful of blond hair which he did not doubt the boy would gladly tear from his own head if it meant escape. When he felt Far’s iron blade bite against his neck, though, he had the sense to grow still.

Sive had come flying from the cave at Oisin’s first screech and stood before them now, wild-eyed and agonized.

“There will be no more games.” Far snugged the blade closer and pressed, enough to make the boy wince and bite his lips. Eyes round and blue in a white, scared face. He gave Sive time to imagine the next steps and then continued calmly, “You will come to me now, or I will kill your child in front of you. Choose.”

Oisin Remembers

“You must send him to his father,” my mother begged. She was frantic, weeping, and I was numb with terror, though she had tried to prepare me for this day. She clawed at the Dark Man’s cloak in desperation. “You will send him? You promised me!” Her voice shrill with fear, the bleak knowledge before her that she had no power to hold him to anything at all.

“I have already said I would,” he said absently, like a husband half-listening to a scolding wife. His concentration was all on the words and gestures that wove his invisible web across the entrance to our cave. He had bound me carelessly and tossed me in the far corner of the cave, and I wrestled frantically with the knots, trying to free myself before he was finished.

And then he dragged her off.

The ropes fell away and I hurled myself into that barrier again and again, trying with all my might to follow. I howled and screamed and threw myself against the unseen wall until my voice was a husk and my face smeared with blood.

My mother kept twisting herself to see me, yet she did not fight to escape him. He had laid his hazel rod upon her, and she could not but obey him. But she cried out my name, screamed it as though it were ripped from her heart by a clawed hand, her beautiful face a mask of loss.

Soon she was gone from my sight, and the only sound in the woods my own hoarse cries. I battered myself against the Dark Man’s wall until exhaustion swallowed me up like an ocean wave. One minute I cried and fought; the next, darkness took me and I, too, was gone.

SEVENTEEN

S
ive couldn’t say how long the journey took to Far’s house or what path brought them to his door. She saw nothing but her last glimpse of Oisin crying after her, fighting to break through the spell that held him fast. The thought of her little son locked in that cave, the swelling fear that the Dark Man would simply leave him there to starve, shrilled inside her like a silent scream.

The house was hidden deep in a darkly wooded valley, as unwelcoming a dwelling as Sive had ever seen. Far strode inside, dragging her behind him and pushed her to the floor.

“I have much to do,” he said. “You will not leave this house until my return.”

Sive hardly heard him. Hours of weeping and begging while stumbling over rough country had left her gasping and choking on her own breath. But she had to try again. She lowered her head to heave in a lungful or air and managed to find some voice.

“My son. Please…”

It was as though she had not spoken. Far did not pause or look at her as he strode to the door.

Before he left he looked back.

“You will not kill yourself. And you will remain in your woman’s body at all times.”

And so Sive was left, alone and unguarded, in a house she could not escape. She slumped on the floor where he had tossed her, and the silence settled around her.

She had made a catastrophic mistake. “Why do you say
in thrall
?” she had asked her father, so many years before. Now, too late, she understood. She was trapped. Anything she might do to defy or escape him, even unto death itself, he had only to forbid.

She was beyond weeping
.
The unseen sun sank toward the horizon, the forest darkened to twilight, and still she sat, unmoving and silent. There was no need for torch or candle. No light would brighten the pit she had fallen into.

SHE JUMPED AND SHRANK back when the door banged open, but it was not the Dark Man. Oran shouldered in, a hamper filled with peat bricks in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. He stopped when he saw the woman on the floor. Her features were hard to make out in the dim room, but he knew who it was.

“So he has you at last,” he said sadly. “I am sorry.”

Sive was grateful he did not say more but continued on to the back of the house and presumably the kitchen.

She could hear him moving about, and soon tendrils of scent—first peat fire, then cooking—floated into the front room. And then his worn boots stood before her, and he spoke to her again.

“I’ve made dinner. It’s not—well, I don’t imagine it’s what
you
would call dinner. Just oatmeal and turnips; it’s all he allows. But there’s food if you’re hungry.”

Sive shook her head.

“You might as well eat, you know.” The words were blunt, but Oran’s tone was gentle. “If he sees you’re starving yourself, he’ll just order you to eat.”

“Not tonight.” Her voice not much more than a whisper.

Oran nodded and returned to his meal, but now Sive was faced with a new problem. She hadn’t relieved herself since midmorning. Talking to Oran and smelling the food had made her aware of it, and now it was a clamouring need.

Reluctantly, she got up and followed the smell of turnip until she found Oran. He looked up from his bowl.

“Change your mind?”

“No, not that. Oran—” She was embarrassed to ask, but there was no getting round it. “Where is the latrine?”

He pointed with his spoon to a door, smaller than the one at the front, at the far end of the room.

“Out there. Take the path to the right. Not much more than a pit, I’m afraid.”

She couldn’t open the door. She walked up to it, unbarred it, and could not make herself push.

“Oran, I can’t…”

“Trouble with the door?” He jumped up. “It sticks sometimes. Here.” He put his shoulder against it and gave it a good shove, and almost fell as it opened without resistance. “There, now.” He held it wide and waved her through.

She couldn’t do it. Could not take one step over the threshold, could not seem to make her legs understand what was required. She strained to pass any part of her body through the opening until the sweat stood out on her forehead— and failed.

And the memory crashed in:
You will not leave this house
.

“I can’t,” she said, slumping against the frame in defeat. “He forbade me to leave.”

IN THE DEEP BLACK silence of the night, the door opened again. This time, it was the Dark Man. Sive knew him by the tendril of cold air that snaked along the floor ahead of him and licked over her shoulders, freezing the base of her neck. She knew what that cold air was: it was the breath of evil.

But he strode past as though she were a piece of furniture, and it was Oran who crept in at first light, silently coaxing back the fire. He put a cautionary finger before his lips when he saw her watching and then waving vaguely toward the far end of the house, put his hands under his head and closed his eyes.

Sive nodded her understanding. She was in no hurry to wake Oran’s master either.

My master
. The thought came unbidden, unwanted.
He is my master now
.

ONE LONG, ANXIOUS DAY stretched into another, and Far Doirche showed no interest at all in the prize he had waited so long to capture. At Oran’s timid suggestion, Sive was given a pallet and blanket against the west wall of the house, and permission to go out to the latrine. Apart from that, the Dark Man spoke to her only once, in a tone of complete indifference that did not hide his harsh message.

“I’m told it is very unpleasant to eat under duress,” he said, biting with fierce gusto into a roasted rock pigeon. Though his tone was contemplative, his voice carried easily across the great open room that made up most of the house. Oran, who appeared to be Far’s only servant, flicked his eyes over to Sive where she crouched on her pallet.

“More ale, Oran! Pay attention!” Far snapped. Oran winced and bent hurriedly to pour from the heavy pot in his arms.

Sive thought about it, imagining her hands pushing food into her mouth, her throat swallowing mechanically. The next day she took the fried oat cakes Oran offered and made herself eat them.

Far Doirche, it seemed, was rarely at home. Sive could well understand why he would prefer to stay elsewhere. His was the meanest house she had ever seen in Tir na nOg. Finn’s house in the mortal lands was far better appointed. As far as she could tell, the house had only three rooms: the great room in front—all but empty, with neither feast tables nor sleeping nooks for guests—Far’s private chamber, and the kitchen.

When he
was
home, Far spent hours hidden away in what Oran called, in a nervous undertone, “The House of Magic.”

“What is that?” asked Sive.

“It’s where he keeps all his materials for enchantment, where he makes his spells.”

“Where is it?” There were no buildings that she had seen within view of the back door or the latrine.

Oran shook his head. “We are not permitted to know.”

“You’ve never been there?”

The young man’s pale features grew drawn, the eyes dark with memory. The lips pulled tight, barely allowing his whispered reply to pass.

“Once.”

Sive was silent, sorry to have stirred up whatever evil memory Oran was reliving. But when he came to himself, she blurted out the question she could no longer keep to herself.

“Oran, what is he up to? He hunted me for so long, and now that he has me, he pays me no mind. Which I would have go on till the end of time,” she hurried to add, “but it makes no sense. Has he given up on using me?”

“Ah, no.” Oran shook his head. “He never gives up, Sive. Never. But he is careful, a schemer. I do not know just what he is doing, but he will be laying his plans, setting all in place. When he is ready, he will put you to work.”

IGNORED BY HER CAPTOR and confined to his dark house, Sive could not escape her own thoughts. She thought of Finn and their short season of happiness together. She thought of her years in the wild as a deer and wished bitterly that she had remained a beast and never tried to regain her life as a woman. And she thought, always— the way a song can play through your mind, insistent as a heartbeat, whatever else you are doing—about Oisin. The memory of her little boy battering himself against Far’s barrier haunted her.

Oran was a quiet friend, coaxing her to eat, finding a head cushion for her thin pallet, bringing her a sprig of bluebells or the deep red valerian that grew in the cracks of the stone well. He talked lightly of the weather and the thrushes nesting under the eaves—and just once, of Oisin.

“I know how you fear for your son,” he said. Sive lowered her eyes. Just hearing it said aloud made her tremble.

“I do not know what the master did to him,” Oran continued. “And if I ever have the chance, I will go to the cave and see if he is there.” He cut off her rush of thanks. “But Sive, what I wanted to tell you is this: I do not think he left your boy there. Why else did he set out so quickly after bringing you here? And”—he groped for words—“it may be I have imagined this, but…there is something about Oisin, and his father as well. Something that disturbs him. I have never thought this about him before, but I almost think he does not dare to kill your boy.”

EIGHTEEN

A
fter a two-day absence, the Dark Man blew through the house like the cold gale that scours the western coast. “You!” he snapped as he swept past Sive. “On your feet.”

Sive’s legs were pushing her upright before her mind had confirmed that she was the “you” in question.

“ORAN!” The bellow blasted through the empty room and brought Oran running in from his chores, ax still in hand.

“Master?” The young man’s chest was heaving, and Sive wondered uneasily just how far away he could have been and still heard Far Doirche through the heavy walls of the house. It was as though the Dark Man had yelled directly into his ear.

“Baths, Oran. Two of them. The girl first.”

Oran ducked his head and trotted away. Seconds later, Sive heard the back door bang.

A bath. Despite her grief, Sive’s heart gave a little flare of eagerness at the thought. It guttered out soon enough; Far’s clipped orders saw to that.

“I have clothes for you. After you have washed, choose a dress suitable for traveling. You can put on a more elegant gown when we arrive. You will have to do your own hair for now.”

The green eyes flicked over her. “What are you waiting for? The bath is in the kitchen.”

Sive scuttled past him to the kitchen. She prayed he would not follow her.

SIVE HAD NOT THOUGHT such gloomy lands existed in Tir na nOg. Two days’ travel through dense woods and bog under a dark sky had brought them to this house, modest by her old standards and absolutely splendid compared to her master’s home.

“Like me, Donal has few neighbors,” Far remarked as they approached the house. “It has been easy to cultivate his friendship, and he is eager to host a celebration of our wedding.”

He reined in his horse, and Sive’s mount stopped without any direction from her. It had been like that for the entire journey: the horse carried her like a load of grain, and completely ignored her attempts to direct it. Oran, she noticed, did not even bother to hold his reins.