Elphame's Choice (16 page)

“Call to me, my heart. I will answer.”

Then he glided silently into the forest, disappearing quickly from sight.

“CUCHULAINN! HERE!”
Brighid’s voice carried over the whine of the wind. The centaur Huntress galloped to the spot where Elphame lay and slid to a halt, Cuchulainn close behind her. He leaped from his horse before it could stop and fell to his knees beside his sister. Then Elphame was ringed in blazing torchlight as the night exploded with horses, riders and centaurs.

“El! Oh, no! Please, no!” He took her hand in his. It was cool, like carved marble. Blood—she seemed to be covered with blood. Her face was ghostly white, and if she hadn’t blinked and whispered his name, he would have believed that she was dead.

Elphame thought he sounded very young, and she wanted to reassure him, but she was so cold again. It felt like with Lochlan, all of her strength had fled, too, and talking took such a great effort.

“Cuchulainn, move aside.” Brenna’s voice was calm and
firm and held none of the shy hesitancy with which she usually spoke to him.

He looked blankly up at her.

“Cuchulainn, now! I must see to your sister.” Brenna’s tone of command was so sharp that the warrior in Cuchulainn obeyed without thinking.

Brenna knelt beside Elphame. “Bring that torch over here,” she ordered. “And bring something to cover her.”

The light made Elphame squint painfully, but it was a relief to feel the concealing weight of several cloaks that were hastily thrown over her near nakedness. Strange that she hadn’t thought about how little she was wearing when Lochlan had been there.

“Elphame, who am I?” the Healer asked, bending close and using the light from a torch to carefully study her eyes.

“Brenna,” she whispered.

“And where are you?”

“Forest…” she managed to say. “The ravine, I fell.” She tried to point, but the pain in her shoulder caused her to bite off a moan instead.

Brighid followed Elphame’s half gesture. Holding her own torch high, the Huntress disappeared over the side of the ravine.

Brenna’s sure, gentle hands traveled quickly over Elphame’s injured shoulder, up to her head, and finally down to the moss-covered wound on her side.

“You did well to pack this. You’ve lost far too much blood as it is.”

“I didn’t…” Elphame started to say, but the Healer stopped her.

“Don’t speak. You need to save your strength for the return trip. Drink this.” Gently, the Healer helped Elphame lift her head while she pressed a wineskin to Elphame’s lips.

Elphame sputtered, and then drank thirstily. The herbed wine was sweet and cold, and as its energy filled her she felt revived enough so that she was able to smile faintly at her brother.

“I’m fine, Cu,” she said, wishing her voice didn’t sound so weak.

“No,” Brenna said sharply. “You are not fine, not yet. Cuchulainn, I need a strip of material to bind her shoulder and another to wrap around the wound on her side.”

Relieved to have been given something constructive to do, Cu pulled off his shirt and began ripping the fine linen into long strips.

“He just wants to show off his chest.” Elphame’s voice shook, but she managed to make it carry. The men and centaurs surrounding her laughed, as did Brenna. Cuchulainn tried to frown at her, but he succeeded only in looking ridiculously happy, and El was afraid for a moment that he might actually cry.

“You have just relieved my mind greatly about the severity of your head wound,” the Healer said.

Her brother’s smile widened.

“There is a dead boar at the bottom of the ravine.” Brighid had rejoined the ring around Elphame. “I believe this is yours.” She handed the throwing dagger to Cuchulainn, but her eyes were studying Elphame with a curiously guarded expression.

“By the Goddess, El! A wild boar?” Cuchulainn’s face, which had regained some of it color, paled again.

Brenna began carefully tying the linen strips around her waist, saving Elphame from having to respond to her brother. She closed her eyes and set her teeth against the pain—and tried to concentrate. Lochlan. He hadn’t been an apparition; she’d seen him kill the boar, the same boar Brighid had found. He’d carried her up the ravine, dressed her wound, and covered
her with his warmth. Shouldn’t she tell them that he had saved her?

He said his father had been a Fomorian.

“They would see only a Fomorian, and not a man.”

Lochlan’s words echoed through her troubled mind. It shouldn’t have been possible. The Fomorians had been defeated and driven from Partholon more than a century ago. The different races of Partholon had joined together to insure that the demon horde had been extinguished—that it would never threaten the peoples of Partholon, in particular the Partholonian women, again. Her pain-fogged mind shied away from remembrances of the historic record of rape and destruction. The being who had just saved her life couldn’t be a Fomorian. It didn’t make sense.

Yet she had seen his wings. They had covered her with their warmth. Clearly, the impossible had happened.

“You meet your destiny at MacCallan Castle…that destiny is tied up in your lifemate
…The words rustled through Elphame’s throbbing head. She tried to wrap her mind around the thought, but it was simply too bizarre. Her concentration fragmented. She couldn’t think clearly about it now, and she wouldn’t talk about it until she’d had time to sort it through in her mind.

“There,” Brenna said, knotting the makeshift sling that held Elphame’s arm securely against her chest. As she finished, the first drops of rain sprinkled through the canopy of pines. “That is all I can do here. We must get her back to the castle.”

“El.”

She opened her eyes to see her brother crouched beside her. His hair was already damp. He’d wrapped a fold of his kilt over his bare chest. Elphame thought he looked very dashing, like the ancient warrior for whom he’d been named. She smiled at him, wanting to ease the worry in his eyes.

“El,” he repeated, spreading his hands over her head in an
attempt to shield her from some of the rain. “I know it’s going to be hard for you, but you’re going to have to ride back to the castle.”

Brighid moved to Cuchulainn’s side. “I will carry her.”

“She can’t ride by herself,” Cu said. “She’ll have to ride with me.”

“Then I will carry you, too. You’ll be too busy holding her to guide that empty-headed gelding of yours anyway,” Brighid said. “And you can be sure that I won’t misstep and cause her unnecessary pain.”

Cuchulainn looked up at the Huntress. “You’d carry both of us?”

“Easily.”

The sky boomed and the patter of rain came more insistently through the trees.

“I want her out of here. Now,” Brenna told Cuchulainn. “And she should not sleep. Talk to her, Cuchulainn.”

He nodded tightly in response to the Healer, then began shouting orders, “Angus, Brendan, lift her up to me.” He stood and vaulted onto the Huntress’s back. “Carefully!” He snapped when his sister moaned in pain as the two men began lifting her.

Elphame tried to help the men, but her vision had grayed again and each time she moved the wound in her side burned almost unbearably. She felt Cuchulainn’s strong arms around her as she straddled the Huntress’s smooth back.

“Ready?” Brighid looked over her shoulder at Cuchulainn.

“Yes.” Cuchulainn tightened his grip on his sister and the Huntress moved easily into a smooth, ground-eating canter.

In some part of her mind, Elphame acknowledged that she would have liked to have been able to enjoy the novelty of a centaur ride. Instead she was plummeted into an unrelenting nightmare. Every stride the centaur took jolted through her body. Her head pulsed and her stomach heaved. She could feel
warm wetness washing down her side and she knew her wound was bleeding through the moss. Soon she could not hold herself upright, and as they emerged from the forest to retrace her path along the rocky side of the cliff, she slumped against her brother, depending completely upon him to keep her from falling.

“It won’t be much longer…. I’ve got you….” Cuchulainn kept up a litany of encouragement in his sister’s ear. “Talk to me, El. Tell me about how beautiful MacCallan Castle will be when it’s finally restored.”

His sister’s responses to his constant questioning were jumbled—sometimes she described rooms that he recognized very well as rooms they had grown up in, and sometimes what she said made no sense at all, like when she rambled about a bed of pine needles canopied by wings—but he did keep her talking, even though he could feel her growing weaker as she leaned more heavily against him. Then the sky opened and rain came down on them in heavy ropes. The torches the riders held sputtered and went out. Cuchulainn was almost thankful for the brilliant flashes of lightning that helped to illuminate their way. Brighid’s decision to carry them had been a wise one. If he had been riding his gelding he wouldn’t have been able to steer the horse through the stormy darkness and support his sister, too.

The Huntress soon outdistanced the rest of the group—even the male centaurs who had volunteered to join them on the search. Her determination and stamina were impressive. He had misjudged Brighid, Cuchulainn admitted to himself. When he had announced that he was going to search for his sister, she and the little Healer had been the first to join him. Without her assistance he could never have tracked and found Elphame as quickly.

If only he had reacted as quickly when he had had his
first premonition that something was wrong with El! Instead he had ignored the growing Feeling because it had come from the spirit realm—that area of his life that he tried his best to repress and ignore. Well, this time the spirit realm had refused to be ignored. The knowledge left the acidic taste in his mouth that he recognized as part self-loathing and part fear.

Cuchulainn clutched his sister more tightly within his arms. Now he knew what had been bothering him since they had begun their journey to MacCallan Castle. The nameless threat that he had felt hanging over his sister hadn’t been a hurtful lover or an ancient curse. It had been something totally mundane—an accident, and he’d been too busy imagining faceless phantoms to foresee it.

Faceless phantoms? If he hadn’t been so wet and miserable he would have laughed aloud in self-mockery. Apparently, some of them had faces all well as voices and attitudes.

Brighid slowed and Cuchulainn was relieved to see the dark walls of the castle materialize before them.

“Take her to the kitchen. It’s where they’ve done the most work,” Cu yelled over the storm.

Brighid nodded and trotted through the gap in the outer walls, then entered the inner courtyard. Rain poured through the empty roof, and, as they passed the fountain, lightning forked across the sky, suddenly outlining the stone girl like a ghost in the night. Cuchulainn eyed the statue uneasily—glancing suspiciously at the area around it.

Brighid’s hooves clattered into the Great Hall, where she finally halted. She twisted at the waist and said quickly, “The kitchen will be dark as a tomb. You and Elphame wait here where there is some light. I’ll get flint and torches from the wagons.”

Brighid helped him as he lifted Elphame’s unresisting body from the Huntress’s back to the floor, where Cuchulainn sat
leaning against the wall cradling his sister’s head carefully in his lap.

“I won’t be long,” Brighid said, giving Elphame one last worried look before she hurried from the room.

“It feels good to be still,” Elphame said faintly into the darkness.

“Brenna will be here soon,” Cu assured her.

He wanted to fuss over Elphame, to do something that would make her feel better. He felt helpless and useless. He unwrapped the fold of his kilt that he’d thrown over his shoulder and used the end of it to gently wipe some of the rain from her face and arms. Talking…he had to keep her talking, but before he could ask another inane question about castle decorations she surprised him with a question of her own.

“How did you know to come after me, Cu?”

He looked down at his sister. In the dimness only the vague outline of her face was visible. Occasional flashes of light stole into the Great Hall from the open courtyard, and Cu could see the bright reflection of her eyes as she stared up at him.

“I was uneasy about you.”

Elphame smiled weakly. “You’ve been uneasy about me since we arrived here. What made you come after me?”

“I wasn’t going to; I told myself that I was imagining things. Then the storm began moving in. I was restless, so I thought I’d come back here and keep a lookout for you.” He paused and brushed a wet strand of hair off of her face. “I thought I’d challenge you to race my gelding to Loth Tor, and since you’d already been for a long run, he might have a chance at beating you.”

He saw her teeth flash, and he grinned back at her.

“So, I was waiting by the main entrance when I heard a noise coming from inside the castle. Unlike my restless unease about you, the noise was impossible to ignore.”

“Why?” Elphame asked.

“Because it was the sound of someone bellowing my name.” Cu shook his head, remembering the massive voice booming his name from within the empty castle and the terrible feeling caused from hearing an all too real spirit demanding his attention. Cu’s voice was tight with anxiety. “El, I have to tell you that the rumors about your castle were at least half-true. It might not be cursed, but I can promise you that it is haunted.”