A Thousand Glass Flowers (The Chronicles of Eirie 3) (35 page)

‘Perhaps I can
. Even Finnian.
Jaspe
r, can you destroy the charms?
It was my
purpose to bring them to you.
I believed if you destroyed the soul-syphon, that you cou
ld destroy these abominations. My niece’s life is at stake.’
She felt a prickling in her eyes again – I
sabella, the last of her line.
‘I can’t lose her.’

‘Dear girl, it’s a terrible w
aiting game we play, isn’t it?
And it isn’t just the chi
ld’s life; it’s all our lives.
Ti
to there, my hound – his life. Bottom the donkey’s life.
The fish in the lake,
the birds in the sky.’
H
e hesitated and took a breath.
‘Lalita, I had a vision and it seems I’m not
the one who will destroy them.
It is to be another.’

‘No. Who?’ Lalita’s face collapsed.
‘Do we ha
ve to take them somewhere else?
I shall do whateve
r must be done.’
The malaise in her gut expanded and she threatened to retch on the lawn.

‘No, they stay here.
I’m not yet privy to what shall eventuate,
but mark my words I shall be. Lalita, are you well?
You’re very pale.’

‘No, I feel quite nauseou
s to be frank.
Perhaps just fatigue.’

‘Come with me now and I s
hall give you some ginger tea.
We must
have you well for our guests.
I planned to get Fin
nian and ride out to meet them.
If you rest for an hour, would you like to join us?’

Finnian.
Cou
ld I?
Bu
t then to see Isabella so soon.
‘Yes, I should like that.’

Jasper took her hand and led her away, her spirits rising just a little despite the nausea.

Chapter Twenty Two

Finnian had never felt as nervous, as sure of rejection as at any other
time in his life.
The protective mists moved with the household as they rode out and he began to have confidence in Jasper’s ability to best his g
randmother for a while longer.
But he could hear the weather buildin
g on the other side of the fog
and occasionally a welkin wind would buffet through the cobwebs of vap
our and snake around his neck.
This welkin wind spoke of worry and strife and he knew he had time only to meet his brother before he must go.

He listened to Gallivant’s lively banter, praying
for it to release his tension.
They began to climb the Barrow Hill closest to Jasper’s home and from where they could wait for the oncoming assemblage, little Bottom trotting bravely up an incline that would have the large
r horses snorting with effort.
Finnian lagged behind, needing time to adjust to the thought that a brother, unknown for so long, was about to enter his life.

‘Finnian.’
Lalit
a turned her horse toward him.
‘Finnian, before they
arrive I must speak with you.’
Intensity coloured her skin and a ghost of a smile tremb
led on the corner of her lips.
Without waiting for a reaction she launched into a speech that was like salt on Finnia
n’s already raw sensibilities.
‘It seems I o
we you gratitude for my life.’ She gave a little laugh.
‘Aga
in.
I tell you, I think I shall have to employ you as my bodyguard.’

He sighe
d as he gathered up the reins.
‘And I tell
you
Lalita, I could save your life a hundred times and you’d s
till thank me like an ingrate. It’s of no significance.
I did what I
had to.’
He touched his horse with his heels and tried to pass her but she held the upper side of the hill with her own mount.

‘Finnian, please, I’m…
’

‘I can h
ear them but I can’t see them!
S
omething’s wrong!’
Gallivant’s voice shrilled down the hill towards the two laggards and they could see his hand waving a ke
rchief like a flag in the air.
Bottom’s wheezing bellow joined in the fracas and Finnian drove his horse into a canter, Lalita following behind.

‘Phelim, here! Look here!’
Gallivant shouted as he shook his kerchief with effort and looked to Jasper as they watch the mists roil and tumble, the weathe
r dark and distressing behind.
‘Help them, Jasper!’

Thunder rumbled behind the protective fog and a moaning wind dragged its finger down spines. From the crest of the hill, they could see cruel shapes dipping and diving.

‘I have done all I can do.
’ Jasper had to shout above the moaning wind, his horse’s mane flying in the teeth of a gust from nowhere. ‘
The mists are as strong as I can ma
ke them.  ‘Phelim’, he yelled.
‘Come
on
!
’

The sounds of horses’ hooves pounded and the bray of an ass, voices shouting, a man’s and then a woman’s and a babe’s thin cry.

Finnian
heard Lalita’s breath suck in.
‘No, oh no,’ she kicked her horse and tried to move down the hill toward whomever came on but Finnian reached and grabbed her reins.

‘Stay,’ he ordered. ‘Don’t move.
You go through the mist, you are dead.’

Her eyes rested on him, wide and frightened.

‘Look,’ he added.

She turned back as a posse burst through the soupy fog as if
Hurle’s Rade were behind them.
The baby cried as the horses pelted up the hill, dragging to a
snorting stop
, skidding on the damp grass.

Finnian, a grown man who had confronted suffering on any number of levels, could not believe a heart could beat so powerfully within a chest without bursting as he examined th
e disparate group of arrivals.
Vaguely he heard Jasper say, ‘It’s alrigh
t, you’re safe for the moment.
We have time. Did you see anything?’

A woman’s voice replied, ‘No, but it suffocates and drags you down and it feels like Death.’

He wondered what the woman had
felt in a past life to be so sure that Death
stalked like his grandmother.
Beside him, he saw a blur as Lalita leaped off her horse and when he looked she had crouched down and held her arms open to a tear-stained little being who toddled, fell, picked herself up and toddled again into the waiting clasp and was swung a
round and smothered in kisses.
He lifted his eyes and searched the party.

A woman of astonishing madonna-like beauty stared back at him, breathing hard, her fingers pressed to her lips, her fiery hair flowing aro
und her in ripples and tumbles.
An elderly woman whose hair was concealed under a coif of bleached linen dismounted from her side-saddled jenny with the aid of Gallivant, staring at Finnian as she did so.

His gaze traveled, seeking, as his desire to turn away
from rejection grew stronger.
Then he saw him.

They dismounted together and stood an arm-span from each other, a silence loaded with a lifetime of longed-for f
eelings bridging the gap as a kinder
welkin wind whispere
d and hissed around them both.

Then
Phelim’s hand clasped his arm. ‘Finnian’, he said.

The timbre of the voice w
as like a master key.
Finnian, damaged and dark as he was, could not help the warmth that reached every part of his body, a sign of relief at the welc
ome to a family so longed for.
Neither said another word to each other but the silence between them was not uncomfortable.

‘Adelina,’ Phelim drew the russet woman of sunrises and sunsets to his side and p
laced an arm around her waist. ‘This is Finnian, my brother.
Liam’s brother.’

My brother.
I want you to say it again and again as I can’t believe you speak of me.

Adelina reached for his hand and held it, covering it with the other palm, staring at him as if to carv
e his likeness into her memory. ‘Aine but you are identical. Except for the hair.
He had a red tint,
titian, a wine-coloured shade.
But for that, you could be him.’

It was all Finnian needed to hear.

Finnian and Phelim walked to the edge of the orchard later in the evening and the moon tried valiantly to shine amongst the threads of dampn
ess still winding round about. ‘The mist serves.
But our grandmother’s wrath builds,’ said Finnian.

‘Our grandmother.’
Phelim’s deep tones grou
nd the words beneath his heel.
‘We shall deal with her but not at this moment.’

I
will deal with her, brother. She is mine.
‘I feel our family is cursed.’
Finn
ian leaned on a drystone wall.
‘Even as a child I felt I was cursed and that my twin was equally doomed.

‘You knew you had a twin?’
Phelim hoisted himself onto the wall and sat, indicating his brother do the same.

‘Not directly until later in my life. But I felt it, felt everything,’ he said as he hefted himself up by his brother’s side, noticing with naïve satisfaction
that they were an even height.
‘His life was as damned as mine almost to the end.’

‘I don’t know that our family is any more cursed
than any other.
I think it’s just the dark vein that runs through any of Færan blood.’

‘Which you successfully rejected.’

‘Indeed, but it wasn’t easy.
I did things
of which I’m not at all proud.
I hate the savage presumption of Færan, the arrogant ignorance of oth
er people’s sensitivities…
it’s more than I could ever rec
oncile nor would ever want to.
When you have something like
that
to remind you of Færan,’ he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder past the fog to the savage skies, ‘it makes my decision even more sensible.’

‘Indeed.
But surely it is impossible to quell that which comes naturally – the mesmer
for one, or the invisibility.
And as you say, the confounded arrogance that seems part of the air we breathe.’

‘Difficult but not i
mpossible.
How long was it before
you
made use of inherent traits.’

Finnian smiled wryly.
‘Not completely until I escaped from Isolde.’

‘Exactly.
I only became truly fami
liar after I left Ebba’s care.
In your case, Isolde dominated your skills by ove
rpowering your will.
For me, Ebba’s life and her love for me ac
ted as a very powerful filter.
And eventually it was
that
which I wanted to recapture and for a certainty I didn’t beli
eve Færan would give it to me. Curse you say?
In the end what is a curse but someone’s deliberate effort to control and bully another?’

Control and bully.
Nothing changes.

‘What you did was a good thing, Finnian,’ Phelim continued.

‘What do you mean?’
Does he know of the attempt to murder Isolde?
That the size of her wrath outside of Jasper’s protective walls is due almost entirely to me denying her?

‘I mean the paperweights.
But I dar
e say you think I mean Isolde. And we should talk of her.
She
will hold the world to ransom.

Finnian shifted uneasily.
Not if I have my way, brother.
‘Jasper can’t destroy the charms – the old ma
n is inept.
Better Lalita and I had run to the Goti Range and found some endless and secret abyss.’

Phelim
punched him gently on the arm.
‘Y
ou should show Jasper respect.
He’s a wise man and cautious
, but as fallible as you or I.
Fate represents a force to b
e reckoned with, he would say.
He complains the enigma of the charms is like trying to shift mists aside to find an answer.’

Something prickled… that elusive feeling as if a fingernail traced itself round Finnian’s neck
.
Shifting mists.
‘Well, he would know of mists,’ he derided.

Phelim laughed softly.

‘Phelim, do you know of the Lake of Mists?’

‘Of course. It’s a sacred place close by.
Our b
rother’s body was taken there.
The Isle of the Dead is th
ere, the place where souls go.
Even Ana, a mortal, may be there for all I know, and for myself I hope so as our brother loved her.’

Urgency
made Finnian’s heartbeat race.
‘Have you seen it, this island, this place?’

‘For a few se
conds and only from the shore.
It was unearthly and quite magnificent.’

The brothers lapsed into silence and Finnian thought how alike he, Phelim and Liam really must be and what a night it would have been if t
he three could stand together. He searched the shadows
, as
if a shape might approach. He grasped Phelim’s arm. ‘Do you feel anything
?’

‘Yes,’ Pheli
m whispered.
The sound of an owl filled the night as the creatur
e beat the air with its wings. ‘Liam?’
He called out into the perfumed shadows and Finnian wished it didn’t see
m ridiculous and out of place.
Predictably the two received no response and became quiet, their thoughts wistful.

The lake filled Finnian’s mind – a
puzzle that wouldn’t go away.
He reached into his breeches pocket and drew out the paperweight he had stolen from Curiosa, observing in the weak evening light how the folds of night drifted inside the glass and how the moon hung suspended with its guardian stars.

‘An unusual piece,’ Phelim
reached for it and turned it.
‘Where did you get it?’

‘I stole it,’ Finnian gave his brother a dark grin, ‘from the antiquarian thief who had the
others. I thought to give it to…
’