Queen Among the Dead, page 5
The bottom of the little skiff scraped on stone as Ronan pulled up the oars and threw a leg over the side. He could see threads of smoke just over the treetops from cooking fires spiraling up into the dusky air. Blackwater was just a short stroll away.
“As for gods, lad?” Swift called out, pushing the skiff back out into deeper water. “You don’t have to believe in them. But you might, at least, pay them a little mind once you find that they believe in you.”
“MACHA’S GENTLE MERCIES. You look like proper hell.”
Ronan had finally made his way back to the cramped little roundhouse at the very edge of town, where he shared a dirt-floor room with an apprentice blacksmith named Cavall. As he’d shouldered past the flap of ragged leather curtaining their doorway, a zang-zang sound reached his ears. Cavall—who was also Ronan’s occasional comrade-in-theft—was perched on a low stool near a glowing brazier with a whetstone and a blade. Unless he was asleep or eating, Cavall was almost always sharpening something.
“Been adventuring, then?” he asked, pausing to take in Ronan’s appearance.
“You’ve a keen eye, Cavall.”
Cavall snorted. “Better ha’ been worth it. You’re supposed to be saving up your strength for the Samhain revels tonight.”
Ronan cast a wan eyeroll at his friend as he crossed the room and dug around in the little wooden trunk for his second-best—now first-best and only—tunic.
“Cavall, my lad”—Ronan shrugged the shirt on over his head and re-fastened Neve’s leather belt around his waist—“you have no idea.”
“Well, unless I’m mistaken, you’ve no purse to show for it.” Cavall waved a hand at the place on Ronan’s hip where a fat bag of coin had rested for a brief glorious moment that afternoon.
“That I haven’t.” Ronan sighed. “Lost it in the Blackwater, if you can believe that.”
Cavall chuckled. “Thieving filthy town.”
“Filthier river.”
“You lost it in the river?” Cavall shook his head. “You mean on. Or, perhaps, beside.”
“Definitely in.”
“And you’re not dead! We’ll celebrate your miraculous survival at tonight’s festival!”
“About that—”
“You’re not missing it.” Cavall shoved the blade he’d been working on into a heavy leather rucksack.
Ronan eyed the leather pack. “How much is Cliona offering this time?”
Cavall flashed a grin. “More than usual. Enough to keep us in mead for a month. And maybe even a bit of nice meat. Good thing my bastard master is drunk more than half the time and sleeping or puking the rest, else he might have noticed I’ve been skimming off his wares.”
He hefted the straps of the sack over his shoulders. The contents made a clanking, discordant music, appropriate to the occasion. The Festival of Samhain also marked the anniversary of the Faoladh’s historic defeat in the war against the Tuatha Dé. At the Battle of An Bhearú, when the river had run crimson for three days.
Ronan could tell the tale by heart. The Scathach, in her victory, had been so impressed by the fierceness of that one small band of female warriors, she’d granted them the kind of mercy she denied all the others. Which was to say, she let them live, in exchange for their absolute sworn fealty. Not just to her, but to the Lia Fail—the Stone of Destiny—itself. The most sacred, most mysterious and powerful treasure the Tuatha Dé possessed, the Stone was the chooser of kings. So what the Scathach, in truth, demanded was loyal servitude to whichever ruler the Lia Fail chose, down through all eternity.
The Faoladh swore their oath. She accepted. And then the Scathach, using the power of that sworn blood oath, had her court sorcerer—a Scythian possessed of great and terrible magic—cast an enchantment that stripped the Faoladh of their riastrad, the shape-shifting battle-madness magic they commanded. And so the Faoladh—and their descendants—remained, bound by eternal servitude to the throne of Temair. Compelled to defend their conquerors to the death should they ever be needed.
Of course, they never had been, because the Fomori had never returned.
Yes, Ronan could tell the tale by heart. Every Fir Bolg could.
Cavall shrugged. “Where’s the harm in keeping the fires of an old legend or two stoked? Give the rabble something to look forward to. Me? I look forward to getting paid.” Cavall hefted a pair of earthen jugs from an alcove and handed them over to Ronan, then fished out two more to carry himself. “You can earn your cut with an entertaining telling of your day’s adventurous deeds while we walk.”
“You won’t believe any of it.”
“I don’t have to. I just have to get in a good laugh or two. Come on.” He paused as he noticed his friend’s new finery. “Nice belt.”
“Aye. Fit for a princess.”
Cavall raised an eyebrow at Ronan. Then his gaze narrowed and he whistled low as he set the mead jugs down and plucked Neve’s dagger from the sheath at Ronan’s belt. He ran a practiced thumb along the edge, inspecting the polished ebony hilt wrapped in fine silver wire, and the pommel—also silver—carved to look like a flower, petals fanning outward, with a small blue jewel at the center. But it was the blade itself that captivated the apprentice smith. Finest iron, dark gray with a silvery sheen that flowed in a pattern like waves along its surface. Even Ronan could tell the thing had been crafted by a master weapons maker.
Cavall held out the dagger, one blunt finger tapping the blade just below the hilt, where the iron bore a mark that looked like the head of a wolf, with a long, tapered snout and high, pointed ears.
“Like I said”—Ronan took back the blade and returned it to its sheath—“you won’t believe any of it.”
“Add it to the tale.” Cavall headed to the door and pushed aside the curtain. “Let’s go.”
V
I DON’T FARM AND I don’t pray,” Ronan grumbled as he and Cavall made their way along a little-used path heading away from town into the forest, “so I don’t really see the point in these harvest rituals …”
Cavall laughed. “Don’t be so prickly,” he said. “Where there’s a ritual, there’s food. And drink. And girls.” He fell silent for a moment, and then added, “And salvagers …”
Ronan stopped abruptly on the path. Cavall winced at his reaction.
“Now, come on—”
“No.” Ronan glared at him. “No salvagers. I told you. I’m out of that trade. There were harrow hounds in Blackwater today, Cavall.”
“So I heard.”
The way the apprentice smith looked at him, Ronan wondered for a fleeting instant if Cavall knew he’d been the ones they’d been hunting. Him and the princess. Cavall had seen the dagger blade marked with the wolf head. He was smart enough to figure out something strange had happened to Ronan that day. And he was clever enough to try to use it to get Ronan to throw his lot in with the salvagers.
“Just talk to them, that’s all I’m saying. The salvagers have coin—who knows where from, I don’t ask—and they have conviction.” He put a hand on Ronan’s shoulder. “You’re a minor legend to these folk. The rogue Druid’s apprentice! What’s wrong with giving them a little bit of hope even if you can’t ferret out any actual magic? You know enough tricks—I’ve seen you do it before. Why let all that Druid lore that’s stuffed up in your head go to waste? You don’t owe the Tuatha Dé anything.”
Ronan glanced down at the old pale scar on his palm and felt the stirrings of the magic that lay sleeping beneath his skin. Cavall may have seen him cast a few small—so small—magics. Barely more than herb and stone spells. Mostly because Ronan had spent most of his young life trying very hard not to attract the sort of attention he’d garnered that day.
He shook his head and let the matter drop as they entered a clearing. A few handfuls of folks from both the town and nearby farming hamlets had set up trestle tables, lit fires, and hung sheaves of grain and autumn boughs between the trees.
“Cavall!” They both turned to see a young woman striding toward them, arms stretched wide in greeting. “Ronan! A blessed harvest to you both. What a day!”
“Can’t argue there.” Ronan shook his head, grinning at the sight of Cliona, leaves in her hair, mud on her boots, fresh from the forest like some kind of fierce woodland spirit. Her eyes sparkled and her cheeks were flushed as if she’d sprinted to get there.
“We just had the most excellent Samhain hunt …” She wrapped Cavall in a heartily bone-crushing embrace until he uttered a creaky whimper of surrender and then let him go with a shove. “The stag was glorious! What a chase he gave us!” she continued, turning her attention to Ronan.
“Uh!” He ducked the embrace. “I’m fragile, Cliona. You know that.”
“Ha! Sleek as a weasel you are, but hardly delicate. You’ll survive us all somehow, I dare say.”
“I am good at escaping traps. Were I your stag, you never would have caught me.”
Cliona shot him a sharp glance at what, he realized belatedly, was very nearly an unspoken dare. Ronan breathed a little easier when Cliona laughed, slapped him on the back, and reached past him for a large, heavy jug of beer. Cliona swung the jug up on her hip as if it weighed no more than a basket of carded wool, and walked back toward the bonfire. The dwindling daylight tinted Cliona’s hair—a pale, silvery-blond mane bound up in winding plaits—a rose-gold shade, and cast shadows that emphasized the long, strong muscles beneath her fitted leather tunic and leggings.
It wasn’t everyone who could get away with joking about Faoladh rituals in her presence. But Ronan had known Cliona for years—ever since he’d left the Druid order—and he was well aware she took her sacred duty as leader of the Faoladh, and her dedication in particular to the warrior goddess Macha, very seriously.
The truth was, Ronan thought, if he didn’t like Cliona as much as he did, he’d be outright terrified of her. Her and her band of feral sisters. He’d learned most of what he knew about their sisterhood from his time in the Order. In fact, the Faoladh were—indirectly—the very reason Ronan was no longer in the Order. As an apprentice, he’d stumbled over a reference to them in one of the forbidden histories stored in the Druid archives he’d been wont to peruse in secret. The stories of the ancient sect of shape-changing women warriors had intrigued young Ronan enough that he’d relaxed his vigilance on one of his late-night forays into the locked cell full of scrolls and tablets. His Druid master, Eolas, had caught him and banished him from the Order.
Just as well, he thought, not willing to admit the sting of his banishment was still sharp, after all those years. But then he cast a glance in the direction of the ragged revelers—about a dozen men and women—that he’d pegged as Cavall’s salvagers. They huddled together beneath an ancient oak, all mutterings and furtive glances. Who needs Druid spells when you’ve got those hardy souls keeping magic alive in the land?
“Salvagers” were, in essence, the remnants of the spell dealers that had scattered after the óglach had found and raided Blackwater’s dark market, back when they’d first started to crack down on the use of magic. A shady, loosely allied band of Fir Bolg folk, the salvagers were intent on gathering and hoarding any bits of stray magic they could find, by any means necessary. They’d tried—with varying degrees of success over the years—to recruit Ronan, with his particular skills and knowledge, to their cause. A few years back he’d disavowed them when they started to become more erratic and dangerous—taking the kinds of chances that prompted brutal reprisals by the óglach and their spell-harrows. Ronan used to know a handful of salvagers by name. These few strays he didn’t know at all.
Among the lot of them, Ronan thought, they look as though they could barely farm a turnip, let alone coax magic from springs and groves.
“That’s Nym. And Gwylon.” Cavall came up beside him and nodded his chin first to a slim, sandy-haired man with eyes that looked everywhere all at once; then to an older, broad-chested man with an open, guileless grin and a baldric sheathed with half a dozen bronze-bladed throwing knives. “They’re the ones I’ve talked to. Seem normal enough—relatively speaking.”
Ronan grunted in reply.
“The twitchy one over there,” Cavall continued, “is Sparrow. Dunno the names of the others.”
Ronan glanced at the girl with the delicate, pointed features and wide dark eyes perched—very like her namesake—on a tree stump, the toes of her boots curled around a sawed-off branch. With his Druid training, Ronan could tell in an instant that she had old blood. Traces of Fomori somewhere in her lineage. Not enough to give her any actual Fomori magic. Just enough to make her yearn for it. He had no doubt that, somewhere in her family history, there’d been a shapeshifting ancestor who hadn’t just resembled a bird. He felt a welling of pity for Sparrow. He’d known others like her over the years who would have killed for the power to fully manifest what their blood whispered to them they might have been …
Sparrow tilted her head and glared at him. “What are you lookin’ at?” she called in a high, harsh voice.
He didn’t answer, just went to pour himself a libation.
Hopeless, Ronan thought. Did they actually think they could prevail over the Dagda and the Tuatha Dé? Somehow wrest back control of Eire’s fading magic and usher in a return to an idyllic age? The salvagers were fools. Just as deluded, in their own way, as the Faoladh. Only the Faoladh, for their part, were blameless, doomed to spend their lives mourning a magical gift that would remain forever trapped in their blood, waiting for a call from the Dagda that would never come—
“We’re going to war with the Tuatha Dé.”
Ronan was startled out of his reverie. “You’re what?” he asked, looking down to see Sparrow standing before him, fists on her hips.
“Cavall said you can get us more magic,” she said.
Well, that was the thing, really, Ronan thought. It wasn’t as if magic had just up and vanished from the land. More like, the ability to access it had. Wild magic still roamed the forests, swam in the rivers—he’d recent firsthand experience with that—and lurked in mountain caves and sea coves. But it took spells and skills to harness it, and the Druids had hoarded the spells and set harrow hounds on those with the skills to craft them. Ronan had noticed that the less magic was called upon, the scarcer it seemed to be, even in its wild guise. One day soon there would be none among the Fir Bolg with the ability to carve a stone or stick or weave words on a cloth that would call the magic into use. It was as if the magic was a well to dip into … only the Druids had stolen all the ladles for their own use. Whatever that might be, Ronan thought darkly.
With a start, he realized Sparrow was still talking to him. “We’re salvaging it—”
“Yes, I know. Hence why you call yourself ‘salvagers.’”
“We’re saving it up for battle,” she said. “We’re going to burn Temair to the ground. Release all the stolen magic. Cavall said you could find us more spells. Good ones—”
“Cavall has obviously been drinking. Heavily.” Ronan glowered over at where Cavall was just that moment unstoppering a jug of mead, and then back down at the strange girl. She looked as though she might bite him. “And maybe you have, too. You don’t go to war with the Tuatha Dé.”
“Really?” Sparrow nodded back in Cavall’s direction. “Looks like they might …”
A handful of Faoladh stood in a loose circle around the smith as he shrugged the rucksack off his shoulders and hefted it up onto a trestle table. Cliona reached inside and drew out a pair of long daggers with elegant, leaf-shaped blades.
Ronan sighed. “When they go to war, they’ll be with the Tuatha Dé, as is their calling. And that, alone, should be enough to make you and your friends rethink your grand plans.”
“We’ll see about that,” Sparrow said, arms crossed over her thin chest, defiance pulsing in her big, bird-black eyes.
“All twelve of you? Well. Good luck, then.” He shook his head and left Sparrow to join his less mad friends. Slightly less mad …
“That’s quite a cache,” he remarked, peering over Cavall’s shoulder as he unrolled leather wrap after leather wrap, each containing an assortment of bronze-bladed weaponry, expertly crafted. “Don’t tell me this is the Samhain the Dagda has finally called you to his service, Cliona.”
“If he did, we wouldn’t need these,” she said flatly. “On that day, the riastrad returns to the Faoladh. And on that day, we won’t need weapons any longer. We will be weapons. Until such time, it is our duty to stay alive.”
“And that’s what you need all these blades for? Basic survival?”
Cliona’s voice lowered to barely above a whisper. “Aevinn has had glimpses.” Then she went back to examining Cavall’s wares by the light of the roaring fire.
“Glimpses …?” Ronan waited. Then gave in. “Of what?” he asked.
Aevinn walked up to them. “Of water, fire … blood.”
He exchanged a glance with Cavall, who barely suppressed a smirk. Aevinn was the Faoladh’s seeress, a diviner who claimed to receive visions from their goddess. Ronan and Cavall humored her more often than not, but even Cliona usually barely indulged her.
“Water, fire, blood,” Cavall said. “Bit general, that, don’t you think—”
“Darkness,” Aevinn added emphatically. And then her gaze turned inward, focusing on something only she could see. “A dark power rising, making its way toward Teg Duinn. A wolf on a wide green hill howling at a blood red moon …”
That sent a shiver down Ronan’s spine in spite of himself.
Teg Duinn—the mythical House of Darkness—was another thing he’d read about in the forbidden Druid archives: the Fir Bolg name for a legendary portal, foretold by oracles and augers, that would, in the last days of Eire, yawn wide and devour all those who lived, dragging them down into the Otherworld. Apparently.
As for the wolf in Aevinn’s fevered dreaming, well, Ronan figured he’d had a close enough brush with wolves already that day.
“I won’t leave this life without a fight,” Cliona said as she picked up a sword and a dagger, spinning each in her hands before stepping back and slashing the blades through the air.
