Faery Moon Read online

  So much of the structure being stone, he still hoped that he might be altogether mistaken in his fears, and that he would find the cottage unharmed— in which event he swore to pass quietly and quickly from this place, if the Sidhe would only let him reach the woods again.

  Constantly he laid out such patterns of escape for himself, ready, always, to bolt from the Sidhe’s plans, knowing, always, that from something the Sidhe wished to go amiss, there would be no time to bolt and no ready escape if he gained the will.

  But when he came within view of the house, he found the thatch was burned: the smoke was going up from the mere shell of what had been a house, and furnishings, and all. The posts of the sheepfold stood with the railings scattered, and the shed was knocked flat. With all of that before him, his heart sank to the pit of his stomach.

  So much destruction, and for the taking of two harmless folk— he asked the Sidhe in silence. And he asked himself, disquieted, utterly: Is their blood on my hands? Badbh and Macha, ... could I by any imagining have done this myself, and not know?

  He could not but come closer, to the very wall of the house, trying to see what had happened here; and the whisper of a footfall warned him as he went past the corner. He spun about in alarm, against the anger and despair of the boy in ambush there. Young Ceannann, it was, not rushing blindly to the attack, but grimly on his guard, well knowing he carried a sword beneath his cloak— not such an utter fool, given time to think, as to fling himself on an unseen blade.

  “Where is Firinne?” he asked Ceannann, the only question he thought the boy might hear; and it did for a moment seem to take the breath and the assumptions alike out of the lad, while he declined to draw.

  “Who are you?” Ceannann cried. “Who are you but her servant?”

  “A second time, this ‘her.’ I know no ‘her,’ boy, unless you mean the thing that took the goats, and such as that is, I do doubt it sent the horsemen.”

  “Laugh as you like,” Ceannann said, bringing the sword up, and Caith stepped back a pace out of fighting range and held up his other hand.

  “I am not laughing, boy. I came back to help if I could. If we must be at blows, at least tell me the reason. Who were these men?”

  The youth looked the more distracted, the more desperate, wanting to believe, perhaps, but fearing him— very wisely, since there was everything wrong about him. Draiocht and geas, Dubhain had said. It was here. It was staying the lad’s hand, as it had brought him back here— but it did not inspire the boy to trust him.

  “Peace,” Caith said, ready to draw, but reluctant, and pitying the boy. “Ye cannot kill me, not me, lad. And I know your thinking, that a quick end could be so much easier than going on from here, but will ye have those men get away free? Where is Firinne?”

  The sword lifted, trembling with such violence the sun flashed from it like lightning— then crashed point to the muddy, trampled earth. The lad was weeping when he turned away, and found no place to lean his head but the stone of the ravaged cottage wall.

  “Ye know the fay,” Caith said, “and ye know— ye know, lad, that there was a Sidhe beneath your roof last night. But he wished you peace.”

  “Is this peace?” Ceannann cried, tears on his face, and swung the muddied sword an arc about him. “Is this peace, that’s come on us?”

  “Where is Firinne, man? Was she in the house? Did they take her away? What happened here?”

  Ceannann drew a ragged breath. A helpless gesture, the boy made, with his empty left hand, and a second one before he found a voice to answer that. “They took her with them. — I was out searching. I hoped ... I hoped maybe a goat or two ... We quarreled, and I still had hope ... Oh, gods, if I had listened to her and been home...”

  “I smelled the burning,” Caith said, and forbore to tell the other matter, how he had seen the riders pass: the youth regarded them with suspicion enough already, and had not asked him about Dubhain’s whereabouts, that was how scattered the lad’s thoughts were. “I tracked the horses. They came from along the brook, upward to the hill.”

  “I know whose they are. I know where they come from.”

  “Then whose are they? Creatures of this ‘she’ you speak of?”

  The boy turned to look at him, with bleak and burning eyes. “Her men. Yes. And are you not one?”

  “I came down from Teile. I know no one in Gleann Fiain. But while we stand talking, we might be on their track.”

  “I have nothing but what I stand in.”

  “Nor I.” Caith said, made a motion of his hand toward the trail, and started walking, hoping the boy would listen, and he did: Ceannann set out with him, rubbing with the back of his hand at the tear-tracks on his face, which only spread the soot.

  “Is your friend below?” Ceannann remembered to ask, finally, when they were halfway down the hill.

  “Dubhain? He comes and he goes.”

  Ceannann gave him a second look, not seeming to trust that answer— small wonder, Caith thought: but what choice had the lad? They descended the rest of the hill in that uneasy silence, a long space of it, until they were all but within the woods again.

  Then the boy cast him a misgiving glance, as if he were having second thoughts about this place, or him, or Dubhain’s whereabouts and abilities.

  “Where do you come from?” Ceannann asked him, at that last moment.

  “From Teile. I told you. Mind your feet, lad.” It was rough ground and the boy misstepped, with his eyes set suspiciously on him, not the tree roots that laddered the ground. Ceannann scowled, but he went surely enough in the woods once he paid attention to his steps.

  Not so graceless or unclever a boy, Caith thought, then, far from it: he was Firinne’s very image. Ceannann had that true white skin that no sun could tan, on which the wind only brought a blush, give or take the smudges of soot. His eyes were the clearest sea-green Caith had ever seen: granted, he had not met Firinne’s gaze so closely except by firelight, but he was sure they would be that color, given all the other likenesses. Wife be damned: the hair, the lines, the face, everything said close kinship between the two.

  And the same line of thinking said that Firinne in soldiers’ hands would not fare safely unless those men held a great dread of the woman who had sent them.

  But that was not a thought to put forth aloud, not to the boy, and not now, when they could go no faster nor do more for the girl than they were already doing.

  Dubhain, Caith wished silently, desperately, into the forest shade. Dubhain, Dubhain, do you hear me?

  But of Dubhain there was still no wisp nor shadow. He felt keenly, the further down the hill and the deeper into the forest they went, the despair rooted in the place. And Dubhain’s absence began to weigh on him like a foreboding of harm. Once in dread, once in pain...

  It isn’t enough, Caith thought with a sudden chill. He’s vanished into thin air, damn him, while the riders were up there burning the cottage and kidnapping Firinne. It’s only once he counts my calling, up there with the beast in the dark. Or this is one of his damnable jokes.

  But whatever offense I gave ye, ye cursed wight, surely, surely I paid for it. Did I not? Is worse yet to come?

  They reached the stream and the path again, where tracks of riders crossed each other in the mud, and he marked how Ceannann half-knelt to have a close look at the ground— seeing whether his footprints overlay the horses’ hoofprints or not. Canny lad, Caith thought, to be certain whether the trampled earth told the same story he had told him up by the house. He saw the glance Ceannann darted at a new print of his, by the others, that were filling with water. And he read what Ceannann might well read there, if he knew how.

  “Whence did you follow them?” Ceannann asked. “How long ago?”

  “From hiding. I heard them riding along the river. I saw no reason to bid any strangers the good of the day. But I saw the way they were tending and they had the look of trouble.”

  He knew already how short Ceannann’s temper was. He wished h
e could mend matters in his answer, besides that there were hours missing in his account, which Ceannann was surely reckoning— such as how the riders had come and done their work and gone off another way, and still met their old trail, which his footprints overlay by considerable.

  His, and only his, Dubhain’s bare feet not having touched here.

  “Dubhain and I had words,” he said, trying to patch that matter at least, “and being the vain and silly ass he is, —” That for Dubhain, that for the woods at large if he had the Sidhe’s attention, “— he cast a sleep on me and left me, when the riders came through.”

  Taunting Dubhain was another thing he realized as rash the moment he heard himself doing it. Troubles enough had fallen on their heads, and Dubhain was not the only Sidhe who might be listening to a foolish man trying to mend and cobble the story he told. It was a tale which clearly Ceannann did not altogether find reasonable, since Ceannann had never yet sheathed his sword, so long as they had been walking in this haunted woods, and walked most often at his back.

  And perhaps, Caith thought, Ceannann had his own cause to fear the Sidhe— the young couple had deserved their fate, Dubhain had gibed, to his indignation at the time Dubhain had said it; but it might be true in the balances of the Sidhe, which had nothing to do with mortal justice.

  Or perhaps Ceannann’s thoughts were set only, desperately, on Firinne. Ceannann had said not a thing further about Dubhain, nor had Ceannann quarreled with his account of what had happened, only set out at a breathless pace along the track the riders had left, once they had left the place all tracks crossed.

  “Have a care,” Caith advised him. “Silence is an ally too.”

  “Take care for yourself,” Ceannann retorted, hardly pausing. “It’s no good if they reach her lands. No one can go there against her will.”

  Her lands. Her will. “What,” Caith asked, with the sun sinking fast behind the hills, now, and the trees around the narrow bank growing darker with the shadow of the deep glen as they walked, “what happens to be your quarrel with this woman” Who is she, that she has such guards about her?”

  He was recalling the faery-wards, the iron and the rowan, he was recalling how Dubhain had had to be asked in, and most of all he was asking himself now the same question which Dubhain had bidden him wonder in the morning, how they came to have their house up the hill from such a dreadful brook as that, and biding in such apparent contentment there.

  “The lady of Dun Glas,” Ceannann said shortly. “I was her harper. I fell in love with her maid. We ran away together.”

  Doubtless such things had happened in the wide world. But as the truth, it made a fine ballad.

  “You”ve fair readiness with a sword,” Caith said. “Of what harper did you learn that” And where is this Dun Glas? Is it in Gleann Fiain?”

  Ceannann glanced darkly back at him, only that, for an answer.

  “Are they all in that lady’s hall,” Caith asked, “so fair-haired and green-eyed as you both? I thought at first glance you were brother and sister. But I have been mistaken before now.”

  Ceannann turned on him. “My wife, man! By the Badbh, you’re fond of other people’s business!”

  “Clearly I’m mis—”

  Came a sound, the faintest of sounds, a single stone rattling against another, which cast Caith’s thoughts instantly back to the night and the dark and the rain. In that way it had begun, signalling there was something else abroad— or someone.

  “— taken,” he went on quietly, and, under his breath: “— Something clattered.”

  “I heard.” There was panic in Ceannann’s eyes. But the sound did not come again, which made Caith think rather less of bogles starting up their evening’s mischief and rather more of a misplaced mortal foot.

  “Does your beast— hunt by evening?”

  “By night. Always by night.”

  They were standing in too much quiet in this deathly woods, with only the sluggish voice of the brook beside them, and whoever had misstepped was undoubtedly aware both of his mistake and their sudden silence.

  “Well, well,” Caith said aloud, and more loudly: “it’s pranks he’s playing, now. — Dubhain, you foolish fellow, where have you gotten to?”

  “What are you doing?” Ceannann hissed, resisting his sudden hard grip on his arm. “Let me—”

  ”Get to cover. — Dubhain?— I detest his humors. Hide and seek like a very fool!” And under his breath, as Ceannann resisted him: “— Get ye down the bank, lad. Whoever dislodged that stone knows we heard. The trap will shut. There’s treacherous ground here. — Dubhain, you cursed wight, I weary of ye, do ye hear me?”

  He held Ceannann an instant longer, hoping the ambushers might delay their assault to account for an unexpected third man. “Sheath the sword,” he said softly. “It flashes, and you have the smell of trouble. Let’s walk, only walk, quietly, lad, and set us something solid at our backs. If we have to run, we meet at the rocks up there.”

  Ceannann made a shaky disposal of the sword into its sheath and they walked, as calmly as two men could, while the presence in the woods waited ... for something.

  A movement caught Caith’s eye: and in that instant Ceannann tore free of his light hold and bolted. Shadows parted from the brush and the rocks in pursuit, while Caith stepped behind a thick-boled oak, squatted down and stole a glance upslope to see how many others Ceannann’s headlong flight might draw out.

  A dozen at least, Macha pity the boy, who was clearly not going to reach the rocks. Caith took a quick breath, then committed himself to the unguarded straight course along Guagach’s margin, below the outcrop, and then behind it.

  “Dubhain,” he muttered, ducking down into the scant cover he could find in the brush, right on the black water’s brink. “Dubhain. D’ ye hear?”

  Fool, he cursed himself bitterly. And what way else would our enemies lay an ambush, but ahead, the way we would follow ... Macha, where were my wits?

  He watched the chase upslope, Ceannann miraculously dodging this way and that like a hare before the hounds. Ceannann, driven from two sides, made a desperate uphill jump over a deadfall and tried to go on climbing upslope from that disadvantage.

  At which Caith shook his head and wanted not to watch ... Wrong choice, boy, he thought, seeing how the pursuers came in from the flanks, while the boy had lost all his advantage of agility in that straight, panicked flight up that steep hill.

  There was no more to do for the boy, then. Caith eased into better cover while all their attention was on the youth, wrapped his grey, mud-stained cloak about him for cover in the autumn thicket, and called himself a coward for sitting here while the boy ran helplessly into ambush.

  But the boy was nothing to him, he told himself. The boy had distrusted him, had gone at him with a drawn sword, while his was still in its sheath. The lad had acted the fool this morning, or he and Dubhain might have been there when the riders came— acted the fool just now, bolting like that...

  He heard Ceannann curse the bandits to their faces, and winced before he heard the thump that followed. He should have done something. But it was too late; and more, he thought, stealing a cautious look upslope, through the drab leaves and the dead bracken, they were carrying the boy off in one piece. The riders that had stolen Firinne evidently wanted Ceannann alive— which was not at all a surety in his case, and he could do nothing for either of the young folk by rushing out of cover and impaling himself on their swords.

  Besides, when the Sidhe wanted to tilt the balances, they could make sights and thoughts and recollections fall clean out of a man’s head. It had happened to him just now and perhaps it was happening with the ambushers, or perhaps they were more interested in taking Ceannann away than in finding Ceannann’s recent companion ... because only three or four of them came back along the stream and searched the area, beating the brush with their swords and bowstaves in what might suffice for another fool-catching, but not, thank the Badbh, for catching a man experienced
in escapes and in being hunted. He stayed very still, as one searcher trod almost on his foot and bashed the bushes overhead, sending down a drift of dead leaves.

  But after a little time of desultory searching, the last few searchers followed the others away, downstream, where, the thought then occurred to him, they might have Firinne as well.

  But being not the lad’s sort of fool, he stayed in his concealment until he was certain the riders were gone. Then he crept out carefully and set out on the riders’ trail, wrapping the uncertain color of the cloak around him and watching very carefully the woods about him.

  It had been an effective ambush, and he did not at all put it past them to play the same trick twice, figuring that the man they had missed catching might follow them and fall headlong into—

  At Caith’s back, amid the trees and the thickets, a horse snorted and moved.

  His hand lit on his sword and he had the sword half from its sheath as the thinnest of grey shadows shifted among the dead leaves at his shoulder, shifted like a trick of the eye’s very edge, and glimmered like the moon in daylight. He turned his head, and in that eldritch shining, turned the rest of him to face the tall figure which had stepped out of his nights and into his waking, if indeed he waked at all.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “Where one of you fails, why, look for the other.” He drew his sword the rest of the way, cold and murder-cursed iron, which the bright Sidhe loathed, all the while remembering what pain could be. To curse Dubhain was one thing; but to strike at Nuallan ... the bright Sidhe were in their way more terrible. The Fair Folk could strip his anger from him with a gesture and leave his soul naked in the world, that was what Nuallan might do to him— for a whim or for a lesson. He already felt the roots of his soul loosened in Nuallan’s presence, as if a breath might whirl it away from him.

  “Peace,” said Nuallan. And if Ceannann and Firinne had ever reminded him of the bright Sidhe, the illusion vanished in the terror of Nuallan’s beauty, in the gaze of eyes that pierced him to the soul and a fairness that was itself only a seeming the elf wore. Nuallan moved his hand as if he were sweeping some spiderweb from the path, and the iron sword in Caith’s hand gave downward gently, a weight grown slowly too heavy.