Heir to Sevenwaters (32 page)

“Clodagh, in the name of the gods, get up, will you? There’s some kind of charm over this place. We must move on!”

“No,” I moaned, squeezing my eyes shut. My limbs were leaden. Almost within reach were fair dreams, dreams of warmth and love and happiness. It was unfair of him to take it away, so unfair . . . That creature in the woods had been right, Cathal was not a friend at all, he wanted to spoil everything . . .

I found myself grabbed by both arms, hauled to my feet and slung bodily over my companion’s shoulder. Caught in the middle of it all, Becan began to scream. “Stop it!” I yelled, suddenly and painfully awake. “You’ll crush him! Put me down, I can walk! Cathal, please!”

He ignored me, striding on into the obscurity of the haze at a pace much too fast for safety.

“Cathal, I can walk! What are you doing?”

“Stop fighting me, Clodagh.” He didn’t even sound out of breath. “Once we’re out of this cursed place you can walk all you want.” He had adjusted his grip to allow Becan more room, but the baby was terrified now. His shrieks filled my ears and set my stomach churning. There was no way to reassure him; I was upside down, my head dangling, and it was as much as I could do to make sure he did not fall right out of the sling. I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth. My cheek stung. My nose was blocked with tears.

Cathal did not stop walking until the herbal carpet underfoot gave way to stony ground and the path began to climb. The smell receded. My head cleared, though being conveyed like a sack of vegetables had started up a throbbing ache in my temples. When Cathal finally put me down my legs gave way under me and I collapsed in a heap. He squatted beside me, dropping the two bags. I had not thought, until then, how much of a load he had carried.

I burst into tears. It was a woeful performance, entirely unworthy of a girl who was supposed to be performing a quest, but I couldn’t help it.

Cathal unfastened his bag and got out a square of clean linen, a little pot of salve and his water-skin. He dampened the cloth. After I had sniffed myself to a sodden, heaving stop, he said, “Take a few deep breaths and then keep still for me.” He proceeded to dab at the wounds on my face. The cloth moved along the lines of yesterday’s cuts. It touched the corners of my eyes, the welt on my brow. When everything was clean, he salved the injuries, his fingers gentle against my skin. His eyes were deep and solemn, his lips pressed together in concentration. He didn’t say a single thing more. I found that I was holding my breath. In the sling, Becan had fallen quiet, though his little chest still heaved with outrage.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how inadequate that was. “I kept seeing images of home, home the way it was before, when things were good. And I wanted to sleep, oh, so badly . . .”

“Me, too,” Cathal said, sitting back on his heels and examining my face critically.

“I saw you half fall,” I told him. “But then everything blurred and I couldn’t . . . I really am sorry, Cathal. How did you manage to do that, to keep awake and get us out safely?”

He grimaced, packing away his materials. “Who knows?” he said lightly. “The training, I suppose. We learn how to withstand various assaults, including those aimed at the mind. I think we should move on straightaway, Clodagh. Can you manage?”

“Of course,” I said, lifting my chin.

“What about him?” Cathal was packed up now, ready to move on. He nodded toward Becan. “I’m sorry if I hurt him. I did what seemed necessary at the time.”

“He’s all right, I think.” I got to my feet. My knees still felt unreliable. I wanted to be brave and strong; I had thought I could be. It was a matter of profound shame that I seemed all too ready to melt into tears at the slightest reversal.

Cathal was hitching his pack onto his back and picking up mine. “You’re not a warrior,” he said diffidently. “You’re doing your best. Nobody can do more than that.”

I said nothing. There was a certain comfort in his words, for I knew he was not the kind of man to speak thus solely out of a wish to make me feel better. All the same, my best was falling far short of what I had expected.

He murmured something else, his back to me.

“What was that?”

“I didn’t particularly want to hit you,” Cathal said.

“I’ll try to stay awake from now on so you won’t have to do it again,” I told him grimly. “On we go, then.”

We climbed, and the light changed. The golden haze faded; with infinite slowness the landscape around us emerged from the veil: bizarre outcrops of rock, narrow pebbly pathways mazing in and out, stunted trees clinging tenaciously between the great stones. In the distance, rugged hills, deep, secret valleys. A cloak of trees over the lower reaches, obscuring details. Bare fells above, their slopes rising to crags resembling grotesque fortresses, from which I expected any moment to see swarms of giant bats or predatory birds wing outward on a mission of attack. The sky was leaden gray. The last of the warm light was gone. There was something oppressive about that sky. I felt again the sensation of weight, as if the whole of this realm existed somehow underground. And yet, last night there had been moonlight.

“What are we looking for?” asked Cathal, shading his eyes against an invisible sun as he stared across the wooded valleys below us. “A settlement? A fortification? Where do these folk live?”

Stories tumbled through my mind. “Under lakes,” I said. “In hollow hills. In caverns. In deep forests. I don’t think there will be any settlements. The tales usually talk about halls, palaces, that kind of thing. Or folk that just . . . float about in the woods.”

“What about hilltops?” Cathal was casting his glance up toward the unusual crag that had caught my attention, the one that resembled a fortification. “There’s something moving around up there, and it’s not trees in the wind. Perhaps we should take cover, just until we work out what it is. Down here.”

We crouched behind the rocks. “What did you see?” I whispered.

“Maybe only young eagles in a nest.” It didn’t sound convincing.

“Or?”

“Or a sentry post of some kind, though it would be difficult to get up and down. Do these people have wings?”

“I don’t think so.” It was the smaller ones that flew about, masquerading as birds or insects. The Fair Folk, as far as I knew, resembled human beings, save that they were taller, more beautiful, altogether more remarkable.

“Get lower down, here.” There was a sort of shelf, a level space well sheltered between big boulders but partly open to the hillside below. Cathal set the two bags down there. “I’m going to climb higher and see if I can get a better view. Don’t put your head up above these rocks unless I say it’s safe.”

For a little, all was quiet. I spread out my cloak and tended to the child, my mind on last night’s odd visitor. In view of the difficulties we’d faced today, I’d been stupid to refuse the creature’s offer of guidance. If I’d handled things more cleverly I could probably have persuaded it to take both me and Cathal onward. I hadn’t even asked if it knew where Finbar was. My brother . . . His image was fading in my mind, the soft infant features, the fuzz of dark hair becoming no more than a vague memory, a blend of all the human babies I had seen. The child in my arms, with his sharply angular limbs and his fragile body of twisted withies and leaves, was far more real now. When Cathal had heaved me onto his shoulder and Becan had been caught between us for a moment, I had felt a gut-twisting anguish at the thought that he might be crushed. “I won’t let anyone hurt you,” I murmured. “Nobody. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

I’m not sure which I heard first, Cathal’s shout or the deep, rumbling sound of shifting stones. It happened in an eye blink. One moment I was sitting cross-legged with the child in my arms, watching him drink; the next, the boulders that surrounded our small haven were moving inexorably toward me, trundling forward of their own accord as if to roll right onto me. I sprang to my feet, dropping rag and water-skin to clutch Becan against my chest. “Cathal!” I screamed, and backed away as the wall of stones bore down on me. Frantic, I looked for a way around, under, over, but with the child in my arms there was no getting back to the path. The only way I could go was down the hill. The slope was not too steep to negotiate, but it was uneven, studded with smaller rocks and patched with slippery-looking mosses. A moderate distance below me, bushes formed a screen. There was no telling what lay beyond them.

The rocks grumbled, grinding against one another. “Cathal!” I screamed again, then fled down the hill, supplies abandoned. I snatched one look over my shoulder as the boulders reached the edge of the shelf and teetered there, rolling up to the lip then falling back as if to tease me. If they came over I had no chance at all of dodging them. Becan and I would be obliterated.

“Clodagh!”

Somewhere up there beyond the outcrop, Cathal had heard me. I glanced back again but could see nothing of him. I scrambled sideways, trying to keep my purchase on the tricky slope.

A boulder tipped over the edge. With a crunching, splitting noise it toppled down the hillside, not following a logical path, but hurtling straight toward me with apparent intent, as if an invisible giant were playing skittles. I froze, unable to make myself move either way. The missile passed a hairbreadth from me. A warning. Not left. Not right. Straight down.

Heart hammering, I ran down the hillside as Becan began a belated protest over the interrupted meal and the headlong, jostling movement.

“Clodagh!” yelled Cathal, sounding closer this time, but now I could not look, for other stones were coming, to left, to right, leaving me no choice at all but to take a middle path. I pelted directly toward those bushes. Something passed in the air above me, something on wings, dark and heavy. I ducked, shielding the baby as best I could, then ran on. Ahead of me, the stones crashed through the line of greenery and disappeared beyond. The creature circled and returned, swooping low over my head with a cry, driving me on. With the child pressed close, I ran between the bushes and fell headlong into nothingness.

In a heartbeat of time everyone I cared about flashed through my mind: my sisters, my parents, Johnny, Aidan . . . Becan, who would die with me; Cathal, whose story I would never learn now. Finbar, lost forever in the Otherworld . . . Down, down I fell, the air ripping at my hair and snatching at my clothing as I clutched the baby close, trying to curl around him in a futile attempt to cushion his landing. My guts turned to water; my heart was too terrified to beat . . .

We landed, not in a welter of smashed flesh and splintered bones, but with a springy thump that did no more than drive the air temporarily out of my chest. My eyes were squeezed shut. Every muscle in my body was screwed up tight. Now I felt something under me, holding me up, a pliant surface like a net. The voices of birds were all around me. A cool breeze was blowing my hair over my face. Becan was squalling. I opened my eyes.

We were in a tree, perhaps a stunted form of willow. It grew from a tiny pocket of soil lodged in a crack of the cliff face down which we’d plummeted. Its roots must have delved deep to hold it in so tenuous a spot. Its tangle of branches, stretched out over the void, had caught us. Spring’s new growth had cushioned our landing. We were safe. We were alive.

A moment’s elation; a moment’s recognition that this was an amazing gift. Then I looked around me and my heart sank. There was no way out. We were trapped. The roots of the tree had found a purchase on the cliff. For human feet there was no space at all. I could see no shelf or ledge to which I might scramble, even supposing I could traverse the horizontal trunk while holding the baby in my arms. Try that and I would fall, taking Becan with me. Peering downward through the foliage, I saw the canopy of the forest below us, and a silver ribbon that might be quite a large river. A cold hand of terror clawed at my belly. Birds circled down there, pale dots against the deep blue-green of the distant trees. We had fallen perhaps halfway down the cliff. Above us the rock face reared high, its surface steep, sheer and devoid of any chink wide enough to accommodate so much as a clurichaun.

I fought back panic, scrambling for solutions. Cathal, at the top . . . I had heard him shouting before. Perhaps he was lying crushed and broken up there, victim to those sinister rolling boulders. If even the stones had minds of their own in this place, what chance did we have?
Stop it, Clodagh. Make a plan.
I did not think this had been an accident. Someone had set things up so I would fall. Perhaps it was a test. If the Fair Folk intended me to undertake this journey and to rescue my brother, there must be some way I could get out of this situation. Cathal was a good climber; he’d been nimble as a squirrel the day he’d rescued Coll from that massive oak. I eyed the cliff face again, with its sheer surface and complete lack of useful ledges. The most agile climber in the world could not do it.
Stop shivering, Clodagh. Show some backbone.
It was hard with the baby’s frightened screams assaulting my ears and that endless drop below me, only one false move away.

“Make a list,” I muttered to myself. Back home that trick had helped me stay calm in a number of panicky situations. I made an inventory of what I had on my side. I was unhurt, apart from the scratches and bumps I had borne before this particular disaster. Becan was distressed but seemed unharmed. I had a small knife in my belt. The list of what I didn’t have was longer: no bag, no food, no water. No rope. No Cathal. Even if he was all right, he might not be able to see or hear me from up there. And what could he do anyway?

If this had been an old tale, friendly birds might have come and borne us to the foot of the cliff, or a magical doorway might have opened by the roots of the willow. It wasn’t going to happen here. When I had refused the only offer of aid that had come my way in this realm, I’d probably doomed myself to die in this tree. Worse, I’d have to watch Becan die first, the child I had brought all this way in a futile attempt to do the right thing. He would look at me with that expression of utter trust and I wouldn’t even be able to give him water. “A pox on it,” I muttered. “I won’t give up. There must be a way out.”