Firebrand (Rebel Angel Series) Page 5

  6

  ‘So what happens now?’ I asked Eorna. Stumbling to my feet, I dusted the sand of the arena from my clothes and limped to the fence, leaning on it while I got my breath back. My entire body ached like a giant bruise, and my head was still ringing from the blow he’d caught it with his hilt. The bastard wasn’t even out of breath.

  ‘What happens now,’ he said, ‘is you unwrap your blade and spend an hour sharpening it. Then you might have a chance in hell if you ever have to use it, you useless greenarse. Assuming you don’t cut yourself first.’

  He was unwinding the cloth from his own sword as he spoke, and I eyed the naked blade with wary respect. It had hurt more than enough getting hit with the bound-up version.

  ‘And then,’ he added, ‘you get your scrawny backside back here so we can practise with short swords. Your father won’t thank me if you get skewered in your first battle.’

  ‘My father won’t give a shit,’ I told him.

  He shrugged. No argument. ‘Your brother, then. And when I say your first battle, I don’t mean the next one coming. You’ll only get in everybody’s way. I never saw such a hopeless piece of crap in my life. What have you been doing with your time?’

  I knew fine I wasn’t that bad, but Eorna never smiled and he never praised me; indeed he was relentlessly obnoxious. Practically a soulmate. I liked him.

  ‘Not what I meant, anyway,’ I said. ‘I mean, what happens with Kilrevin?’

  Eorna’s good-looking face darkened. ‘Kilrevin will raid the dun lands to pick a fight, and your father will kick his impudent backside, and if Kilrevin is lucky Kate will exile him for another few years to the otherworld, to live with the full-mortals. And it’s Alasdair Kilrevin to you, greenarse. You may as well show the bastard some respect, since you’ll never show him a naked blade at the rate you’re going.’

  I ignored that. ‘What’s so bad about exile? Doesn’t ever seem to bother him, does it?’

  Eorna shrugged. ‘It’s not that easy. You’ve never met a full-mortal, have you, short-shit? They don’t get along with the likes of us. Never have. They don’t get along with different.’

  ‘We’re not different,’ I said.

  ‘No, but they are. They can’t…’ He tapped his temple with a forefinger, lost for words to explain it. ‘They can’t do this.’

  It took me a long moment to realise what he meant, and then I gaped at him. I remembered, now, what my mother had said: the otherworlders are cripples. Suddenly I knew what she was talking about.

  I couldn’t imagine such a disability. ‘They can’t?’

  ‘No, and if you ever have to live with them, you won’t let on that you can, either.’ He shook his dark blond head, growling. ‘It’s terrible over there. They’re all ruled by priests of one sort or another. Their women are downtrodden like you wouldn’t believe, they put them in skirts all the time and they can’t even fight, they just breed, all the time. Aye, and they burn them. They burn their women for wearing trews, they burn them for picking herbs. Men too, mind you. They’ll burn men too if they don’t like the shape of their backside.’

  ‘You’re making that up,’ I told him scornfully.

  ‘It’s true, I’m telling you. They can’t bind themselves to a lover, either, not of their own free will. Not at all, if they want one the same sex. Even a man and a woman need permission from priests, and then they’re not allowed another lover. Not ever.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ I said, my jaw wide.

  ‘And you’re a naïve greenarsed infant. Take it from me, you want to stay on the winning side here, so you never have to be exiled. Which means being fifty times better than you are right now, and that’ll do no more than keep you alive. Eili MacNeil could whip you into butter, you dirty waste of space.’ He was glowering at his own blade then, so he didn’t see the shudder go through me at the mention of her name, the flush race into my cheekbones. ‘Aren’t you thirteen now? When are you planning to grow, shortarse? Same time you plan to learn to fight? Now piss off, you’re wasting time. Mine and yours. Back here this afternoon, and I want to see your blade sharp enough to cut thrown silk, or I’ll give you more than a hiding. Get to work.’

  I didn’t take Eorna that seriously. I knew I was better than he told me, knew that he knew it. He was fond of me in his own surly way, and he only wanted me to be safer, so in my arrogant youthful idiocy I decided at that moment that I’d be at the battle. Not fighting, maybe: I believed him when he said I’d get in the way. But I’d watch. I wanted to see what it was all about, I wanted to teach myself some tricks, just by observing the experts. I was tired of being called greenarse and shortarse and besides, I wanted to see my father hand the traditional whipping to Alasdair Kilrevin. I wanted to see the brute routed.

  He was already burning crofts close to my father’s lands, taking the cattle and slaughtering the inhabitants, and he was doing it simply to taunt Griogair. Griogair hadn’t risen to it yet, but everybody knew his glacial control was close to cracking. The atmosphere in the dun was unnaturally still, febrile with bloodlust and nerves. You could feel the tense thrill of longing in the air, like a wire running through every vein and every mind. All the fighters wanted it begun, every man and woman, and there would be no real peace till it was finished.

  Maybe Griogair was wound as tightly as the rest of us; maybe that would account for it. Maybe he was just looking for a distraction from the irritation that was Kilrevin, but whatever the reason, he began to appear near the arena fence while Eorna was putting me through my paces. At first he gave us little more than a passing glance; later he would wait to watch, for minutes at a time. Sometimes he said nothing at all, then snorted and walked on to more important business, but on one or two occasions he shouted something to me. Never with fondness or paternal concern, it’s true, but he was at least addressing me directly. The first time it happened I came to an abrupt halt in such astonishment that I almost fell, and then Eorna finished the job for me and struck me to the ground with his staff, a blow that put an end to my training for the day. In my daze of pain I remember seeing my father spit, shake his head, and walk off towards the stables.

  I thought he wouldn’t bother to come back, but three days later he was leaning on the fence again, giving me a disparaging look as I ducked from Eorna’s slash.

  ‘You!’ he barked.

  Respectfully Eorna backed off, and I stood there and stared at my father.

  ‘What’s the armour of a Sithe?’

  ‘S—speed,’ I managed to choke.

  ‘What is a Sithe’s defence? What’s your shield?’

  ‘Speed,’ I mumbled, and when he glared at me I gabbled, ‘and speed.’

  ‘Greaves? Breastplate? Helmet!’

  ‘Speed,’ I replied, my voice now high-pitched with nerves. ‘Speed! Speed!’

  He fell silent, giving me a long stare that held all the contempt in the world.

  ‘So why,’ he said at last, ‘are you moving like a pregnant three-legged ewe?’

  As he walked away I thanked the gods that I knew what greaves and breastplates and helmets were, because Eorna had lectured me on how the full-mortals fought in battle, and why the Sithe never used armour like theirs. All our defence was in our quickness, and we didn’t even carry shields or targes; if we carried anything in our left hands it was only a short sword to deflect and parry. Our battles were not the grunting chop and stab of the full-mortals; they were swift deadly dances of lightning flight and slash and lunge. Our weapons were long and light and they had to be as fast as we were, or we were lost.

  And so the next time I caught sight of Griogair at the arena fence, I tried to be clever, leaping high and twisting to catch the back of Eorna’s skull. My tutor dodged my stroke with laughable ease and I stumbled clumsily to the ground, earning another whack so hard it left me retching into the sand.

  ‘Left yourself exposed, you fool,’ yelled Griogair. ‘Feint and come at him from below.’

  So when I had the cha
nce, I did, rolling with his strike and jabbing my staff upwards. It sent Eorna grunting to his knees, voiceless with pain as he clutched his groin. He’d done it more than once to me, and I felt no remorse, only glee and a dizzying pride. I turned for Griogair’s reaction, but he’d gone.

  Next time, I promised myself and him. Next time you’ll see it. Next time you’ll smile.

  But the next time I saw Griogair it was two days later, as he rode out of the dun gate at the head of thirty of his favourite fighters. He was smiling then, all right. Most of them were laughing and grinning: I remember that well. I laughed myself, dizzy with it. Kilrevin was an outlaw and a bandit and they wanted him punished, we all did, but there was nothing noble or altruistic about the song in our blood that morning. It was the thrill of killing that set our hearts racing when Griogair walked out into the courtyard that day and shouted for his horse and his sword. Even Leonora was smiling as she kissed him goodbye. And in my ignorance I was as thirsty for blood as any of them. These days I’m as familiar with a human being’s innards as I am with the palm of my sword hand, but I’m not and never have been so proud of it as I was that day, a stupid know-it-all child who had never seen real blood.

  What did I know?

  Eili was on the dun walls, watching too, and I met her laughing gaze. She was as hungry for the fight as I was, I could tell by the wild light in her eyes. I thought of taking her with me, then decided against it. Later, I decided as I quietly blocked my mind and made my sneaky way to the deserted northern wall. Later I’d tell her all about it, I’d boast of what I’d seen, but for now I wanted to do this alone. I didn’t want company, not even Eili’s.

  That’s why my heart sank when I felt the tug of a hand on my sleeve.

  I glared over my shoulder. I should have been a fraction of a moment faster. Already up on the parapet, I had one leg swung over the northern wall, ready to clamber down using the handholds I knew were there. I didn’t want to be held back because I already had a lot of catching up to do, and there was the risk my father might finish it before I’d seen any of the fun.

  Orach gripped my sleeve tighter. ‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.

  ‘You must be joking,’ I growled. ‘I’m not missing this.’

  ‘Seth, please. Please don’t. I had a bad dream.’

  I stared at her. There was a hint of chill in my bones because it wasn’t like her, to be honest; then I decided the atmosphere of the last days and weeks must have got to her more than I’d realised. Softening, I touched her cheek, then impulsively leaned down and kissed her.

  ‘I’ll be back tonight,’ I assured her. ‘I’ll tell you all about it. We’ll go to the caves, right?’

  The promise didn’t bring a shy smile to her mouth the way it usually did. She only looked afraid. I felt the touch of her mind on mine, begging me.

  ~ Seth. Please don’t go.

  I couldn’t be doing with it. Not now. Almost brutally I broke the mental contact, yanked my sleeve from her grasp, and swung over the wall.

  7

  I ran with the devil on my heels, but still the sky was darkening by the time I found them. My lungs ached and my limbs trembled with exhaustion, but I found them. It was the sounds I followed, of course; if I used my mind, they’d know I was there and there would be hell to pay. But the sounds of a battle are unmistakeable. Unbearable, unmissable, but unmistakeable.

  Seven miles inland and further south there was a cluster of crofts that lay within my father’s area of control, and Griogair owed the community protection in return for the grain and meat they sent to the dun. The cottages huddled round an ancient well that was sunk below ground level, with cropped grass sloping down to it as if the earth was trying to swallow itself. Roofed and walled in wet green stone, it had never run dry and the water was sweet without a hint of brackishness; I knew because one of the crofters had shown me it once, and given me a beakerful of the water. It had been a hot day, and I’d wandered miles, and I was nine years old and ravenous and parched. He’d laughed his head off as I glugged beaker after beaker of the water till I finally threw some back up, and grinned at him. Then he’d given me some bread and dried beef, just because I made him laugh.

  I stepped over his corpse as I ducked behind his cottage. I knew it was his corpse because I recognised the face grimacing at me, and his red hair; and that head on the spike of the fence seemed to match the torso at my feet.

  Laughed his head off, indeed.

  And now I had a bad feeling about this. The feeling was no more than a feeling, because I still didn’t dare reach out with my mind, but that was no longer about getting an earful of trouble from Sionnach’s father or my own. Now I found I didn’t want to give my position away because I didn’t want my head on a fence spike. I looked back at the crofter’s face again, knowing from his expression he hadn’t died well. I suppose the other body parts scattered round the yard were his lover, but I had to count to make sure. The gods knew where her head was.

  What was the point of being a wild thing if you couldn’t listen to your wildest instincts? I stopped then, right in the centre of the blood-boltered yard, and listened, really listened. Dusk was well advanced now, the day only a strip of pearl above the horizon, so I could forget my eyes. I forgot my mind too, forgot my crazy fears and conjectures, and let myself smell and feel the battle. I let myself hear it, hear it properly. That wasn’t hard, because it was drawing closer. But it could only be drawing nearer to here if my father was in retreat.

  Now I could hear individual voices, individual screams and howls and yells among the clangour and screech of metal against metal. There were some voices I recognised, and those were the ones panicked by defeat. There were some I did not. Those were the voices raised high in vicious war cries.

  I ran.

  The trouble was, I didn’t run far enough and I didn’t run in the right direction. My instincts had had their moment, and now I lost it as panic swept over me. I ran towards a copse of windblown pines, and knew it was a death trap. I ran back the way I had come, and knew suddenly that on the open moor I’d be exposed for miles, and my enemy was on horseback. So for hideous seconds and minutes, fear turning my muscles to ice and my innards to water, I stood in the centre of the ravaged cottages and their destroyed inhabitants, and I could not move.

  I don’t know what made me run to the well. It was a place to be cornered and caught, but it was a place to hide, too. I could feel minds hunting other minds, but I was better at blocking now. If I blocked Kilrevin’s searching mind long enough, Conal would find me. Of course he would. He’d come for me. He’d said he would.

  But I couldn’t call out to him, even in this rout. The battle was on me, now, the noise of it numbing my ears and dazing my brain, and I didn’t dare look back as I stumbled down the treacherous stone steps cut into the slope. Below, in total darkness, I could see the maw of the well, no longer welcoming but ready to swallow me whole. I was terrified of pitching forward into the black glistening water, and more terrified of not getting down there fast enough. I grabbed for the wall, scraping my palm, almost losing my balance and then sinking up to one ankle in coldness. For an instant I froze in terror, but the shouts were louder now, the clang of steel more vicious, the grunts and howls of dying men clearer. Gripping a ridge of rough stone with my fingertips, I swung myself round and backed against the unseen inner wall. I was up to my thighs in water but I didn’t care that the cold bit into my flesh like the teeth of the underworld.

  Men were fighting their way down the steps after me: two of them. Edging further along the wall into deeper darkness, I saw flames flicker on the black surface, but as the tiny waves I made rippled wider, the flame-light briefly sputtered and went out. I tried to breathe without a sound, but it was hard.

  Then that problem was solved, because I stopped breathing. There was the hideous ring of steel, the laboured hissing breath of men intent only on killing one another. One staggered back; I heard his sword scrape on the stone close to me. The st
eel-clangour echoed now from the stone roof: the men were inside the well-cavern. The first one grunted as he fended off a blow, and I knew it was my father.

  If it had been Conal I’d have gone to help him, I swear I would. But he wasn’t Conal, and I barely knew my father, and the stark truth is, I was rigid with terror. All I did was watch as the reflected flames flared again and Alasdair Kilrevin beat my father back towards the black pool. They both looked worn down, as if this was a fight that had lasted too long, and there were no lightning moves from either of them, only a relentless bloody slash-and-parry.

  Griogair was so hacked about, I was amazed he was still moving, let alone fighting, yet even at that moment I was afraid of him. A gash had been opened across his face from right temple to left jaw, and I think one of his eyes was dead. His arms and chest were ripped in great slashes as if a great cat had played with him, or a well-fed wolf. I remembered now, that was what they called Kilrevin: the Wolf, and now I knew why. Griogair’s face was distorted by rage and hatred as well as the sword-slice, but even as he beat my father back, Kilrevin was smiling.

  Griogair’s foot caught on the last uneven step and he toppled back, and Kilrevin leaped with him, dropping his sword as my father lost his grip on his. Kilrevin closed his fingers round Griogair’s throat, and shoved his mutilated face under the water.

  I must have breathed, eventually, but my father didn’t. He never got another chance. Kilrevin straddled his body, shoving him down as his limbs thrashed for an age, then only twitched, then grew still.

  I pressed myself against the stone, motionless. I mustn’t make another ripple, not while Kilrevin stood staring down thoughtfully at my father’s drifting corpse. One clawing hand twitched again, so Kilrevin lifted his sword and thrust it casually into Griogair’s throat, withdrew it and wiped the blade on his sleeve.

  He stood very still. So did I.