Bloodstone Read online

  ‘Aw, come on—’

  ‘An order.’ Conal winked. ‘I’m not half as scared of you as I am of my sister.’

  Aonghas looked down at the unconscious boy in his arms, a smile tugging his mouth. Yup: baby-brained. ‘Well, do it fast. I don’t want to have to come in and save your arse, not with a child on board.’

  They were not expecting us. They were expecting nothing but poorly-armed farmers, who must have refused to give up tithes to Kate or one of her captains. The crofter was dead already, but the captain of the raiding party hadn’t yet put his sword through an older boy; he was still gripping him by the neck while the youth kicked for air.

  ‘Put him down,’ barked Conal, and made him do it.

  The leader’s death left us only one each, and a spare, and Conal was in enough of a rage not to share nicely. He was flinging himself off the black and slamming the third one to the ground, his teeth grinding in the man’s ear, while I was still chasing down the last panicking horseman and trying not to harm the even smaller child screaming under his arm.

  The fighter backed his horse into a corner by a burning shed, and as if that wasn’t stupid enough, he dropped the child. I didn’t bother with my blade after that, or only to strike his sword out of his hand. He was so scared of the roan he was barely watching me, so I grabbed the neck of his shirt, pulled him to me and punched him as hard as I could. And again. And again.

  I was still punching when Conal yanked my other sleeve. ‘Wasting time,’ he said, and spat out another bit of ear. ‘Get that child. Its mother’s alive.’

  Its mother was half-blind with blood and grief and rage, but she was indeed alive and she had enough wits about her to know she shouldn’t have been. And she didn’t have a choice now, and anyway her croft was gone and her beasts slaughtered along with her lover. She took the smallest infant from my arms, and the middle boy from Aonghas’s, and she and the older boy scraped up weapons from the raiders’ bodies and limped in the direction Conal showed them. The dun was two days’ walk at most, and they wouldn’t be safe outside it.

  I was sucking on my bruised and skinned fist by now, and sulking at my own stupidity.

  ‘Stings?’ Conal winked. ‘Eejit.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Aonghas told me. ‘You’ve got style.’

  ‘I know I have. He’s jealous.’

  ‘You’ve got style, and he’s stuck with morals. Course he’s jealous.’

  I laughed. ‘You say morals, I say politics.’

  ‘Cynic.’

  I was still grinning at him as his laughter died. He wasn’t looking at me any more; he’d raised his head to stare across the burning croft. I felt my heart shrink.

  ‘Conal!’ he yelled.

  Conal rode to our side, staring with us at the distant riders. They were coming on fast; perhaps the remainder of this patrol. I’d wondered why there were so few of them. ‘Damn. Let’s go.’

  ‘It’s okay. They haven’t seen us.’

  ‘No, but they’ll have to. We’ll have to draw them off. Shit.’

  Well, of course we would. We knew what would happen if this new patrol caught up with that woman and her children. I swore through my teeth, just to relieve my feelings, and then we put our heels to our horses’ flanks and rode for it.

  We crossed their line of sight in the full flare of that late sun and the burning buildings. They couldn’t miss us, and we couldn’t miss their shouts of shock and triumph.

  ‘Cù Chaorach! Cù Chaorach, you rebel bastard!’

  It wasn’t a chance they’d pass up. Every one of them came after us, and I had time to be glad the crofting family were out of it, and to regret my brother’s suicidal altruism for maybe the five hundredth time. Then there was only time to draw breath and ride.

  There were trees ahead, and that made it easy for us. The roan leaped a fallen log and we were plunged in among birks and thick undergrowth, Conal to my right and Aonghas to my left. I saw them only as blurred movement broken by silver trunks, and I could hear only my breath, and the roan’s hooves, and the yells and the thunder of pursuit.

  It was fine. As I risked a glance over my shoulder, I knew it really was fine. Relief swept through me on a giddy high and I let myself whoop. We’d been far enough ahead and we’d taken them by surprise; we were going to outpace them with ease. I knew this land and I knew where Conal was heading as I swerved the roan around a slalom of birk trunks. He’d taken a wide sweep round but we were almost on the north-east edge of the dun lands now, back on our own territory, and Kate’s patrol would never follow there.

  As we broke from the trees and galloped headlong onto the high moor, I almost laughed. Luck had held solid for Conal again. Beyond the saddleback hill I knew I would see the first boundary stone of the dun lands. Thank the gods for fast horses and stupid enemies.

  Their frustrated yells were growing more distant, and as I saw the boundary stone flash past my left foot, I knew that one by one the pursuing riders were drawing up. There was a strange note to their shouts, though; a funny mixture of disappointment and triumph. I didn’t have time to think about it. I swerved the roan down a rocky slope and into the next belt of trees, Conal a neck ahead of me and Aonghas at my heels.

  A few hundred yards on Conal reined the black horse to a halt and spun to face me, laughing. The roan danced to a stop at his side and we turned to meet Aonghas, grinning.

  He was upright on the horse’s back, so for a moment I thought I was seeing things. He was playing some stupid joke. Typical, but a bit inappropriate in the circumstances. My grin froze, and I felt it die.

  Aonghas was looking at Conal with regret and aching grief. A smile trembled at the corner of his mouth, and a bead of blood. His khaki t-shirt was stained wet, and the stain was spreading onto his jeans. Everything was so vivid in that slanting light, and I’ll never forget the colours: the green of Aonghas’s t-shirt and the brighter green of his eyes, the dark mud-red of the spreading stain, and the inch of quivering silver that stuck out from his ribs.

  ‘Aonghas,’ I said.

  He said nothing. His voice was already gone, and his life went as Conal hauled him off his horse and into his arms, weeping and screaming his name.

  I wanted to say something: I wanted to tell Conal that the jutting point of the blade was hacking at his chest, mingling his blood with Aonghas’s, but I don’t think he’d have cared. I think, just then, he’d have taken the whole foul thing in his own heart, if it would only bring Aonghas back.

  I had to hand it to Griogair’s women: they were tough. Hard as permafrost. What were their souls made of, Reultan and Leonora? Steel in the genes.

  It wasn’t that Reultan didn’t want to follow Aonghas. It was just like her mother and Griogair: she made herself stay. And she did have a choice. Whatever any full-mortal thinks, she had a choice. We’d have taken the child and raised it; not my vocation, I grant you, but we’d have done it. I reckon we’d have made a better job of it.

  Maybe if it had been Conal alone, she’d have left the child with him. But she had to factor me into the equation, and I knew that was what she did that day at Tornashee, in that drawing room flooded with summer sunlight.

  Her eyes were bloodshot and she clutched the infant against her like some sort of lifeline. It was an ugly little thing, black-haired with startled eyes, but it was endearing when it wasn’t squalling. It fascinated me. I could imagine growing to love it, the way you do with babies. The rest of the prediction was inconceivable, but Reultan must have feared it anyway. She couldn’t look at me, but she was glaring at Conal with inextinguishable rage and grief.

  ‘She’ll stay here,’ she hissed. ‘Fionnuala stays here, where she’s safe. Forever, Conal. Do you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you, Reultan. I—’

  ‘Don’t call me that! Ever again.’

  ‘Reul—Stella, don’t make decisions now. Please. It’s not the time.’

  ‘Yes. It is. And you will never tell Finn about that—other place. Never
. She’s what’s left of Aonghas and she’s staying with me. Shut up, Seth!’

  I held up my hands. ‘I never—’

  ‘It’s none of your business. Stay away from my child. She’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I know that. I—’

  My block was down and it was a cheap shot, but she took it, knocking me physically backward with the force of her contempt. I rubbed my temples, trying not to curse out loud, to make allowance for her grief. But I was afraid of her, now; afraid of what she might do.

  ‘Get it through your stupid heads,’ she hissed. ‘Kate cannot be beaten. I was her friend and adviser for seven decades and you will not beat her. And I? I’ve betrayed her for love, and my lover is dead. She has half her vengeance. If I go back there, she’ll take the other half, and it isn’t me she’ll kill. I know her better than any of you. She’s too cruel to kill me.’

  ‘Stella, we’ll protect the baby. You know it—’

  ‘Damn right you will, and this is how. Listen to me, Conal,’ she snarled. ‘All of you. I swear on my life. You are my witnesses, and I swear I will never go back there.’

  I stared at her. ~ Don’t. Please. Me, begging Reultan. For the first time, and the last.

  Deliberately, coldly, she turned her back on me. ‘I will never cross the Veil again. On my oath, Conal. On my life.’

  In the silence, I heard the unaccustomed sound of Leonora weeping.

  ‘Stella,’ whispered Conal. ‘What have you done?’

  Ah, the lies that child was told for the next sixteen years. Still, it was nothing to do with me.

  She grew up alone. How could it be otherwise, with a mother who was cold even by Sithe standards? She lived in the shadow of the Veil and she never knew it, so there was no question of even trying to get herself noticed. She wouldn’t have known where to start. Of course she couldn’t be told anything. Leonora would have liked to tell her; Conal even more so. But nobody could argue with Stella.

  And she was nothing to do with me. I certainly wasn’t going to argue with that.

  A surly little thing with pale protuberant eyes, she reminded me of a deep-water fish. The older she grew, the more I tended to think of a Moray eel, lurking in darkness, shy and alone, hiding lethal teeth. And let me tell you, you haven’t felt native hatred till you’ve seen it in the eyes of a six-year-old.

  She detested me because I ignored her, because I kept my distance, because I made no secret of my distaste. She wasn’t loveable, but then that suited her mother, who seemed satisfied with our mutual standoff. Sometimes I could feel sorry for the fatherless child with the distant mother; sometimes I recognised the desperation in her eyes and hesitated, thinking I could defy Stella. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  And then I’d see Finn chewing a lank strand of her black hair, watching me with wary loathing. That was when I’d have liked to know what she was thinking, but I didn’t dare try. Well as I blocked, if I pried Stella would have known; and if she hadn’t, the child might well have sensed it herself. And over the years I’d made myself not care.

  If Aonghas had lived it would have been so different; Stella wouldn’t have feared me so much, feared the prophet’s stupid ramblings. But he hadn’t lived, and everything changed for all of us, and most of all for Finn. I wanted her to question her false life, and I daresay it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t, but it was easier to shrug my shoulders and blame her obtuseness than to discuss anything with Reultan: Reultan, who was so bitter and grief-eaten she denied even her name.

  You’d think the child would have the native wit to know what was being kept from her, especially when things went wrong, or far too right. I suppose little Fionnuala thought she had no friends because she was boring. I suppose she thought no-one took any notice of her because she wasn’t worth the effort, and I suppose she thought her teachers forgot her because she was too stupid to bother remembering.

  But you’d think she’d have asked herself about the other things: the chemistry teacher who fried his hand on a Bunsen burner when she so dearly wished he would; the uncongenial classmate who sliced off the tip of her thumb with a craft knife at Finn MacAngus’s whim. The child could have willed a gullible acolyte into its own death, that’s what I thought. Finn could have used her Sithe blood even though – quite literally – she didn’t know she had it in her. She could have used it to kill: it wouldn’t be the first time Sithe blood had done that, in an otherworld with no guard up, and children can be ruthless. The gods know that, and so do I.

  Conal watched her, and worried. Conal virtually brought her up, Stella being as useless a mother as any Sithe woman despite her impulsive hysterical oath. I was glad the child had Conal, and was reassured, and I thought that despite everything, not much harm could come to her when he was around. For all her ugly charmlessness he adored her. To be fair, that was not an unprecedented reaction for him, the insufferable saint.

  ‘When she grows she’ll look like Stella,’ he used to say, and Leonora agreed with him. I thought it outrageously unlikely, but I wasn’t about to say so.

  Leonora doted on Finn just as Conal did, and tried to teach her silversmithing, and jewellery work, and the imagined traits of stones. The girl had a feeling for the stones – or so Leonora said; to me they were geological trash, tumours hacked from pure rock – but at the rest of it, apparently, she failed dreadfully. Too clumsy, too impatient, breaking a hundred saw blades and burning her fingers on the blowtorch. It didn’t stop her spending hours in the old woman’s workshop, watching Leonora work or playing with her evil raven-familiar (which was fond of her).

  But it was Conal who took her down to the river and taught her to swim; he taught her to climb trees, and stuck plasters on her knees and icepacks on her head when she fell out of them. Conal knew a thousand rubbish jokes to make the surly girl laugh; and he hugged her and consoled her when she came home crying from the bullies. He taught Finn to drive his precious jeep, and didn’t even slap her when she drove it into a ditch. He bossed her around, kept her under some sort of control, told her where to get off when she threw her many tantrums.

  I was irked that he was so patient with her, rarely losing his temper and never whacking her soundly on the ear (as she so often deserved). Conal was that child’s father, in all but biological reality, and sometimes I wished – for Finn’s sake and for his – that Stella would disappear up her own arse and let him get on with it.

  I fought with Conal about Finn. I told him his sister was wrong, but it’s not as if I had to: he knew it. So, as was always the way of things, he got angry with me instead.

  ‘It’s Stella’s decision,’ he would yell at me, point of a blunt sword at my throat. The cellar below the old barn was empty and echoing, a fine place to practise swordplay and settle quarrels. ‘Her choice! Her child!’

  ~ Her fat-headed stupidity, I would tell him, rolling away before he could blacken my eye.

  But as time went by, I learned it was a waste of time to argue. I didn’t interfere any more. The girl was nothing to do with me. Prophecies were the wild woven fantasies of charlatans, nothing more.

  If I had got involved more, if I’d focused on my life and my family in the otherworld, it’s strange to think what might have happened instead, and what might not have happened. Strange to think how different things would have been, had I not come over homesick again, had I not gone to the watergate that early spring night.

  Maybe they wouldn’t, though. Maybe it would all have happened, but in another way, in another time. Who knows? It can drive you mad, wondering. I did go, that’s all. I did go to that watergate, the dank kettle loch in the small wood by the main road. If I hadn’t, I’d never have seen the boy.

  So it might have happened another way, but it didn’t.

  It went like this.

  The black water reeked of weed and rot, and in the trees the dusk had thickened to night. The boy stood still, listening to nothing, and fearing it, and wishing he hadn’t come.

  I knew
all that. I crouched in the darkness and watched the boy and I knew it.

  No distant traffic rumble; barely a streetlight glow. He shouldn’t be here, stupid child. What was he likely to find that was worth stealing? Because that could be his only motive.

  I had my own business, and I wanted to get on with it. I wanted to smell the air and taste the water of home; I wanted my horse and my wolf and the woman I sometimes loved. I itched with lust of many kinds: a ferocious homesickness, unbearable impatience, and the most ordinary lust of all.

  I couldn’t go through the loch till this skulking little thief was out of the way. I didn’t trust the boy not to notice me; he was too close, too antsy, too suspicious. His nerves almost crackled inside his skin. I looked longingly at the watergate, glassy, inky with shadows and night. He was polluting it with his fear.

  What had driven him here? Mischief? Boredom? Desperation? I wondered once more what he imagined he could thieve from the ramshackle hut, the one hardly anyone noticed, the one that blended into the wood as if it had grown there.

  Any shine had long rusted off its tin roof. A faint sky was visible beyond it, a patch of black cloud tinged with orange, but the sickly urban twilight didn’t penetrate the trees. That unnerved the boy. Good.

  The old tramp had left earlier, I knew that. I’d watched him myself, striding away from his shack, the plank door swinging shut behind him and bouncing off its rotting frame. He walked off in the only shabby clothes he owned, shrouded in his long filthy leather coat. His hard arrogant face was half-hidden as always, by the brim of a water-stained hat, by thick-lensed glasses taped at the hinges.

  I’d waited, silent and patient, till I knew he’d gone. I wasn’t scared of the old bastard, but I didn’t want him to see me go through the Veil to the other side. I didn’t like other people knowing my business, never have.

  And then I’d spotted the boy, sidling through the murk, an eye to the main chance. I’d almost laughed out loud. The idiot child.