A Rush of Wings, page 17
Rowenna scrambled to her feet, breath coming hard and fast, and looked down at Elspeth. “You don’t just want me to help you, or to break a ward. You want me to use my craft to do murder. And you gave me over to a tyrant to make sure I would.”
“Don’t think we haven’t tried ourselves,” Elspeth said sadly. “We have, and we’ve kept trying since you came here, but it’s beyond us. I made that ward too well.”
Elspeth smoothed out her skirts—a small, unconscious gesture. Rowenna hated it. She hated Elspeth’s finery and her discipline and the fact that she’d seen fit to meddle in someone else’s life for her own ends.
“The truth is, swan maiden, there’s no one here in Inverness that hasn’t been using you from the start. Torr wants you to use your craft in his defense. Gawen and I want you to use it to kill him.”
Rowenna shut her eyes, and the wind, sensing her distress, came to her.
Our love, our light, it murmured.
Our dark-hearted girl, Rowenna finished on its behalf. And dark-hearted she must be in truth, if all she ever seemed to people was a threat, or a knife to be used. Mairead must have known that about her—that her nature and her craft would become a weapon when tempered together.
“Why are you telling me all this now?” Rowenna asked Elspeth. “If there’s no way for me to get free of Torr without killing him, why not just keep me in the dark, until I’ve done what you wanted or failed in the attempt?”
Elspeth looked out at the glimmering surface of the Ness, slipping away not twenty feet from them. Her face, in profile, was pale and drawn. Her shoulders slumped wearily, and when she turned to meet Rowenna’s gaze, there was helplessness in her eyes.
“I’m telling you because I’ve spent two years as a tool in someone else’s hands,” Elspeth said, “and I am sick to death of it. I know what it is to be used—to be pushed and prodded to do things you’d not have chosen otherwise. From the start, I’ve wanted you to know the truth. Gawen and I never saw eye to eye on that. But Rowenna, we’re not people to the likes of Torr with his ambition or Gawen with his blood oath. We’re just craft in their eyes—no more than witches or saints, depending on whether we take their part.”
Gawen’s voice echoed through Rowenna’s mind.
I like a lass who’s a little more trouble…. If I ever fall for someone, she’ll be half thorns and stings….
It’s not my own shape I miss…. Nor anything about my own self. But I do find myself wishing to hear your sharp tongue.
Had he meant any of it? Or was it just a ploy to ensure Rowenna would do as he wished when things came to a head with Torr Pendragon? She’d fallen for it, after all. Let him woo her. Come near to doing violence with him already, that night on the riverbank with Greaves.
And then there was Torr himself. Though he’d kept his identity hidden at first, he’d done little since to hide his true desire, which was to raise Rowenna up and trade protection for her power. He, at least, had been honest about his intentions.
“I’ll understand if you hate me now,” Elspeth said softly, getting to her feet. “We put you in an untenable position, Gawen and I. It may look like you and I have our freedom, but there’s never a moment that Torr’s eyes aren’t on us. He won’t let you go again without a fight.”
Rowenna crossed her arms about her middle and tried desperately to do as she ought.
Forgive if you wish to be forgiven, Liam would say. And she did feel badly for Elspeth, who’d endured much and been bound to a life of distrust and constraint.
But the very darkness in Rowenna, that Torr and Gawen and Elspeth all sought to use, kept her from relenting.
“You should leave,” she told Elspeth flatly. “I don’t want to see you again. But none of this changes my reasons for being here. I will free my brothers, get out of Inverness by whatever means necessary, and pry my father from our monster’s clutches. I want nothing else.”
“And after that?” Elspeth pressed, her tone gentle, her lovely face sorrowful. “Can you and your family truly stand to live the rest of your days in a land being ground down beneath the heel of a butcher and a tyrant?”
“Leave,” Rowenna snapped. With a nod, Elspeth obeyed. Rowenna was left alone on the hillside, and as Elspeth disappeared behind the curtain wall, the pain in Rowenna’s hands seemed to redouble. Bitter tears finally rose up in her eyes, but Rowenna dashed them away, the salt water burning her blisters like fire.
Chapter Nineteen
Rowenna kept herself scrupulously apart from Gawen, unable to bear the thought of speaking to him. Wherever he was, she was not. But she still went to her trysts with Torr Pendragon, for fear of losing his trust before her curse-breaking work was done. And she kept an eye on her brothers, who had only a handful of hours in human form remaining to them each night.
Get us free, get Athair, and run was her heartsong now—the length and breadth and depth of her desire.
After the rabbit came a lamb. Rowenna stole its breath, and the fuath tore it in two before swallowing each piece. Then came a calf. That required rending into quarters. Rowenna killed them passionlessly, numbing herself to the act of bidding the wind to burst a creature’s lungs, and each time, Torr looked briefly disappointed. But Rowenna realized, after what Elspeth had said, that he was taking care with her. Biding his time. Choosing not to push her craft too far, for fear that it would break as Elspeth’s had done.
The morning after the calf Torr had nothing with him. No helpless creature, just his own self, standing on the gravel before the fuath’s cage.
“Do something to it.” Torr pointed at the mottled deepwater monster hunched miserably in one corner of the iron cage. “Don’t kill it, just… work it up a little bit.”
But Rowenna had no wish to test the tenuous regard the fuath seemed to have for her. She’d too much respect for the monster’s capabilities—one of its kind had pitted itself against Rowenna already, and she had no intention of making an enemy of another.
So rather than test the fuath, she tested Torr. Instead of doing as she was bid, Rowenna crossed her arms and shook her head.
Torr frowned, the line of his shoulders tense. “All right. We’ll just have a stroll round the menagerie this morning then. No witchery. No miracles. Will that suit you better?”
When Rowenna nodded, Torr offered his arm, and she took it, fearing to push him too far. They passed by a dozen strange and unfamiliar creatures before coming to a cage that contained a beast Rowenna recognized.
It was an enormous cat, higher than her waist, with a tawny-and-black-striped pelt like that on the creature she’d seen at the wharves, upon first arriving in Inverness. Perhaps it was the same beast, but if so, it was sadly changed. The cat she’d seen had been sleek and well fed, rippling with muscle. Its coat had gleamed, and every movement it made had spoken of restrained power.
But the sad animal before her was skin and bones, pacing endlessly up and down the length of its small enclosure. At the sight of Rowenna, it snarled and threw itself against the bars of the cage, reaching for her with hooked claws the length of her fingers.
In spite of herself, Rowenna startled. Torr turned to her and, for the first time that morning, gave her a genuine smile. Behind him, the cat paced and paced, its wide eyes gleaming in the midmorning light.
“This is Neera,” Torr said. “She’s not like the fuath—not willing to bear a witch’s touch. I tried her on an old woman like you, and Neera tore her hands off.”
Rowenna’s stomach dropped out from inside her as she realized what was about to happen. She thought of edging away, and as if he could read her thoughts, Torr shook his head.
“I wouldn’t run if I were you,” he said. “Move from that spot, and I’ll have you tied to a stake and burned.”
Rowenna stayed motionless. She kept her face a careful blank, but inside, her mind was a maelstrom of memories. Water, rushing into her mouth and nose. Hands on the back of her head, holding her under—both the steward’s, and Mairead’s. The thing in Mairead’s skin, watching her with its vicious eyes. The sting of nettles, the weight of weariness. Cam, telling Rowenna he wanted her gone. Elspeth, confessing that she and Gawen had only ever wanted Rowenna for her craft.
Torr Pendragon took a long, spiked metal rod out from a mass of bushes at the base of the cat’s enclosure. With one hand, he used the spike to fend off the snarling beast. With the other, he drew a skeleton key from his pocket and reached for the lock.
Rowenna shut her eyes. She heard the clang of the bolt being drawn back. The scrape of rusty hinges. The heavy thump of the cat’s body, dropping down from its cage, suddenly grown wary and circumspect at the prospect of freedom.
Even those great velvet paws made the smallest of noises as the creature crept forward across the menagerie’s graveled path. A step. Another.
I don’t want to hurt you, Rowenna thought at the beast. Everything about this felt different—with the rabbit and the lamb and the calf, she’d just been one way of dying. They’d always have ended up dead, whether she was the agent of it or not. And she’d been in control, able to ease them mercifully out of life, through just a little slip of the wind.
She was not in control now. Every nerve in her burned with fear.
Step. Step. Each one stealthy, as if the creature expected her to bolt.
Please turn around. I’m not who you want. I’ve never done you wrong.
Step.
Step.
A silence.
Rowenna’s eyes flew open. She found the cat crouched not four feet from her, belly to the ground, tail lashing, every muscle in its body taut and ready to spring.
“Show me your mettle, little saint,” Torr Pendragon whispered from behind the relative protection of the open cage door.
At the sound of his voice, the creature sprang. It moved like quicksilver, like a storm at sea, like summer lightning, and like regret. But it was not faster than Rowenna Winthrop’s blistered hands, which flashed through the air, one strangling, the other pushing.
And neither cat nor girl was as swift as the waiting wind, which slammed the cat aside and to the ground in a spray of blood that burst from both ends of the creature as the wind tore ruthlessly through it from mouth to tail. Crimson drops spattered Rowenna’s face and clothing, and the great cat convulsed once before falling still.
Rowenna’s fear and her fury flickered and died in the face of what she’d done. She wanted nothing more than to drop onto the gravel and curl into herself. To become small, and less. But Torr Pendragon was watching, so she stood tall and straight-backed and dry-eyed instead.
A force to be reckoned with.
Let me vanish. Let me dwindle into nothing, like a candle burned down and gone out, she thought to the ever-present wind.
Rowenna, the wind sang. Our love, our light, our dark-hearted girl.
Above the wind’s reassurances, Rowenna heard Torr’s bemused voice.
“God be praised,” he said. “A miracle indeed. How many uses I shall have for you, my little saint.”
The wind played about Rowenna, murmuring and soothing, running gentle fingers through her hair. It smelled of blood and iron and salt, and everything about Rowenna’s life she wished could be undone. For whatever Mairead had feared in her, she had become all that and more.
* * *
It wasn’t clear to Rowenna how much her brothers and Gawen remembered from their time in swan form. They’d told her it felt muddled and had an obvious distaste for the change, and that had been enough to keep her from pushing for particulars.
But as her brothers wandered away several hours after dark, seeking the privacy of some nearby copse for their change, Gawen lingered. He dogged her steps and kept his uncanny gaze on her, and she had a sinking feeling that the moment he shed his feathers, things would come to a head between them.
Rowenna had just hauled a last bundle of softened nettles from the river when the smell of peat and woodsmoke rose up. It was a cool evening, with a thin, misting rain cloaking the pines around the castle hill. Rowenna was damp through, her hem soaked from working in the shallows, raindrops beading on her hair. She blinked yet more rain from her lashes as Gawen stepped out from the shadows around the hut, fully human once more.
“You’re angry with me,” Gawen said immediately. “And you’re trying to fend me off with coldness instead of telling me what’s gone wrong. Let’s have it out between us instead, so we can get back to the way we were.”
Rowenna rolled her eyes. Predictable. He was utterly predictable, and yet she’d fallen for his charms.
“There’s no getting back to how we were,” Rowenna muttered. She crouched beside her nettles and began splitting the stalks apart, tugging the loosest flax fibers free as she went. “Because there never was a we. There’s only myself and my brothers and this curse I’ve got to unbind. You were caught up in it by mistake, and once I’ve undone it, we can part ways again.”
Kneeling before her, Gawen reached out and set one hand on the nettles to still her work. Rowenna watched his eyes widen and his throat work as the stalks stung at his palm, still wicked to the touch after a night soaking in the Ness.
“Is that what you want?” Gawen asked.
Rowenna looked away at the moonlit river. She would not lie to him, as he’d lied to her. She’d not pay back his sins with a transgression of her own.
“I want the truth,” she said at last. “And I told you so at Drumossie, but you didn’t give it to me. Elspeth Crannach told me instead.”
For a moment, Gawen fell entirely still. Then he got to his feet and walked away, to stand on the hill path that led to the castle and stare up at the shadowy gray shape of it, stark against the night sky.
“I didn’t lie,” he said at last. “I know that’s not enough, but I do want your help finding my father. Only thing is, I swore to him I wouldn’t even go looking until Torr Pendragon lies dead.”
Gawen turned back to Rowenna, and the emptiness she’d seen in him when he’d held a knife to Greaves’s throat was back. “When he and I were at Drumossie, he made me promise that I wouldn’t come for him or anyone else in our family unless I’d put an end to Torr. We stood over my brother and watched him take his last breaths, and then my father ordered me to run—to leave the battle behind and live, so that there might be someone left who hates the tyrant enough to cut him down. That’s why I’m alive today. Because I did as I was told, and ran like a coward. I’d be dead at my brother’s side if not for that.”
“Everyone ran in the end,” Rowenna said, and she could not help but be gentle with him, despite her anger. “My father was part of the rout, once it became clear the uprising was doomed. I overheard him tell Liam so. He said he barely escaped, what with Torr Pendragon’s men slaughtering the Highlanders who were retreating.”
“But I was already gone by then,” Gawen said, running a hand across his face in frustration. “There was no danger of me being caught in the bloodshed during the retreat, because I’d left hours before. And after, when I’d gone home, my mother and my sister made me swear the same to them. Then, when Torr’s soldiers came for us, they hid me and let themselves burn to give me another chance at cutting Pendragon’s throat.”
Rowenna thought of Mairead, and of how very different things had been between them. Her own mother had denied her the least bit of responsibility or power for fear she would wield it amiss.
“Your family would not have sworn you to this path unless they believed in you,” Rowenna told Gawen, tension underpinning every word. “Unless they thought you were enough for what they wanted done. That belief is a gift.”
“It’s not.” The denial came out of him raw and half-broken. “You want the truth from me, scold? The truth is that I’d rather be dead than living under the weight of that sort of expectation. Half the Highlands banded together to put an end to Torr Pendragon’s rule, and they couldn’t. Now I’m meant to succeed in their place, and I keep failing. I fail at every turn, because there’s no getting past the work Elspeth did to save her mother’s life. It’s like we’ve all got trapped, wandering in a circle trying to keep our families safe and live up to what they wanted from us.”
“You could have just told me all that,” Rowenna said. “Why didn’t you?”
Gawen shook his head. “If I’d said to you at the beginning, Rowenna Winthrop, I mean to give you over to a tyrant, to learn craft from him because he’s wicked and will push you like no one else would, and because I need you to become a knife and cut his throat, what would you have done?”
“I’d have taken my brothers and left you behind without a second thought,” Rowenna admitted.
Gawen fixed her with his dark gaze, and for a long moment, they looked at each other.
“I promised them,” he told Rowenna after a time, his eyes still on her face. “I swore to do an impossible thing, and my family died to give me a chance at it. But I can’t… I can’t do the impossible. I need you to do it for me. I need you do it for them, because I loved them with every bone and every breath, and I don’t think they’ll rest easy until Torr Pendragon is in his grave and the Highlands are free.
“Scold, please,” he begged, all of his darkness and humor stripped away. “I can’t do this without you.”
“Then ask for my help,” Rowenna said. Her voice trembled on the words, because she did not know yet what her answer would be. She’d not know until the moment she gave it.
Gawen cleared his throat and crossed the little distance between them, kneeling on the grass before her once more.
“Rowenna,” he said, reaching out and taking her hands in his own, “will you do what I can’t? Will you step into your power, and kill a tyrant to avenge my family and free the Highlands?”
“You’re asking me to become everything my mother feared I would,” Rowenna whispered, cut to the quick. “She saw me as shadowed. Thought I’d use my craft for violence.”
“But will you do it?” Gawen asked again.
