Heir to Sevenwaters (45 page)

A creature in a cat mask spoke, its voice invoking warm hearths and cozy corners in the sun. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you that old rhyme, Clodagh—
Stitch and darn, patch and mend, a woman’s
needle is her best friend
? Did you bring sewing things on this quest of yours?”

“No,” I said as foolish hope began to rise in my heart. “But I think Cathal did.” The owner of that cloak was not going to travel far without the means to maintain its cargo of lucky charms. Besides, a warrior of Inis Eala was always prepared. He did his own mending on the run, so to speak. When Johnny had lived among the Painted Men as an infant, they had cut down garments of their own to make clothing for him. It was a tale Aunt Liadan enjoyed telling.

Dog Mask hissed its disapproval. “Cathal!” it said. “As if we would accept the help of
his
kind.”

“If you had told me before why it was that you distrusted him so,” I pointed out, “it might have helped him stay out of his father’s clutches. Why didn’t you explain? Why does everything need to be hints and symbols and puzzles?”

“When you face a crisis at home, Clodagh,” said the hedgehog-dwarf, “what is it you need, weeping and wailing or good common sense? If you would make this right, waste no more time.”

“Small, frail, broken, forsaken,” murmured the watery being.

“Quick!” the stony one growled. “Act!”

Treat this as a practical exercise in household mending
, I told myself.
Don’t doubt yourself, just get on with it.

As I had suspected, Cathal’s pack contained bone needles and a twist of sturdy thread. I could have patched a pair of trousers or mended the fastening of a shirt with ease. But this was a task such as I had never attempted in my life. I found Cathal’s second set of clothing and spread the tunic out on the grass. I put Becan down on it wrapped in my shawl. He lay stiffly, not moving so much as a finger. It was a fragile hope indeed that he could be brought back. But I must try. I rose to my feet, clearing my throat.

One of the Old Ones was milking the goat, the stream of creamy liquid spurting into a little shiny bucket. Another was laying wood on the fire. A third was filling a pannikin with water from the pond. Others had stationed themselves near the gate, perhaps on sentry duty. A torch had been placed close by us, but it was night now and sewing by such fitful light would not be easy.

Dog Mask sat cross-legged with Finbar in its arms. The mask stayed in place even when its owner could not spare a hand to hold it there. Dark eyes were fixed on me through the holes.

“Will you watch Becan while I gather what I need?” I asked. “Please?”

The creature inclined its head gravely. A moment later the hedgehog-dwarf was by my side with torch in hand, ready to light my way.

I made a picture in my mind of Becan as he had been before Mac Dara, before the fire. I would not be able to remake him exactly; certain berries, certain leaves were not present in the safe area within the hedge of thorn. But there was plenty to gather: fresh foliage from the trees and bushes, bark strips that could be taken with care, not too much from any one plant lest I wound it badly; twigs from the ground beneath. For every gift the earth gave me I murmured a prayer of thanks.

When I had gathered enough, I returned to the fire with my materials in my skirt and settled beside Dog Mask. The watery being was pouring milk into a dish; there was a cloth ready for feeding my brother. The Old Ones seemed to know what they were doing.

And then I went about mending my little one. Stitch by stitch, leaf by leaf, twig by twig I remade him, and if I watered him with my tears as I went, none of my companions uttered a word of criticism. Where I could weave or knot his pieces together without using my needle I did so, thinking that more natural. Besides, I was in danger of using up Cathal’s stock of thread too quickly. Cathal . . . He was just down there, a short walk from me . . . I yearned to run back, to find him now, straightaway, to get him out and safely home this very night, for I had not forgotten the quirks of time in this place. I might come back and find a hundred years had passed. He might be an old man; his human blood meant he would not live as long as his father’s kind did. He might be gone far away. I might search until the day I died and never find him. My heart shrank at the prospect.

I straightened Becan’s remaining eye as best I could, stitching a patch of moss in beside it to hold it firm. I took the other pebble from my pouch and set it in place. He did not look quite as he should.

Dog Mask was feeding Finbar from the bowl of milk. Suddenly the eldritch voice cried out, and this time it sounded as if it was right outside the gate, screaming a sorrow from deep in the bone. The sound turned my blood to ice. “What
is
that?” I whispered.

The eyes behind the silver mask turned toward me. “His mother,” said my companion. “She grieves.”

“His
mother
?”

“She is powerless against Mac Dara’s magic,” Dog Mask said, squeezing milk from the cloth into Finbar’s mouth. “She has followed us, watching, listening, racked with sorrow. Help her.”

The thought of it filled me with horror. My own grief over Becan paled beside hers. To have her own child taken away, sent to the human world, perhaps forever, and then brought back to be sacrificed so a selfish, cruel nobleman could get what he wanted . . . It was unthinkable. And then, to see Becan burned, disfigured, lying here still and helpless . . . I swallowed hard and returned to the task, and this time I sang as I worked. Not a lullaby; that, I knew I could not manage without falling apart. I sang Cathal’s song, the ballad about a man wandering lost, and as I sang I took out from my bag the stocking in which I had wrapped the items from Cathal’s cloak, his tokens of love. Into the body of my little one I wove one black hair and one brown from the twist Cathal had kept, and a red one plucked from my own head. I put in a snippet from Fleet’s collar and a tiny patch from the shimmering cloth that had once been worn by Aidan’s mother.
I’ve been to the river, I’ve been to the well . . .
I added a thread or two from the woolen blanket that had been almost burned away; a blanket that my mother had crafted with her own hands for her longed-for baby boy.
I’ve run through the forest, I’ve climbed up the hill . . .
I was crying again. I saw Cathal lifting Becan’s scorched and broken form out of the fire, his hands gentle even in such an extreme. I heard him saying,
Beloved.

“It’s not enough,” I muttered.

They gathered around me then, all of them. A clawlike hand stretched toward me, holding a golden feather plucked from an exuberant, plumy cape. Another held out a chip of stone shaped like a heart, a third a sharp spine from its hedgehog coat. Each in turn made an offering, and each gift in turn I sewed or wove into Becan’s body, making him stronger and more beautiful. Dog Mask did not give me a token, but when the others were done it gestured toward Finbar, who had finished drinking and lay somnolent on the small creature’s knee. I used my little knife to snip a lock of my brother’s fine hair and twined it carefully in. The watery being reached out and dribbled a handful of liquid onto the changeling. “Grow, burgeon, bloom,” it murmured.

All was hushed. Nothing stirred in the darkness of the forest; nothing moved beyond the safe boundaries of the hedge of thorn. The Old Ones sat in a circle around me, waiting. The mending was done; Becan was whole again. Whole, but stiff and lifeless. Not breathing. And somewhere out there, his mother was watching me.

I stroked his leafy brow with my fingers, and then I put my lips to his and breathed for him, as I had once before. One, two. A pause. One, two again.
Live
, I willed him.
There are folk here who love you. Live. Live!
As I breathed, the Old Ones sang, their voices making an eerie music that filled the safe place with its throbbing, humming, gurgling beauty. It was a music old and mysterious, a music like the heartbeat of the earth, timeless and deep. I shivered to hear it, even as I kept breathing, breathing, holding onto the thread that still bound my baby to this life. A thread of story so old it stretched to the time of our first ancestors. A thread of love so strong that not even a prince of the Fair Folk could break it.
Live!

The song died down. I could not tell how long we had been there, I breathing, they singing, but I sensed, all of a sudden, that over at the other side of the enclosure, just beyond the gate, someone was standing in complete silence. When I lifted my head to look, Becan’s chest continued its slight rise and fall. He was breathing on his own.

“Ahhh,” said the Old Ones in chorus, and turned toward the gate. Dog Mask still held my brother in its arms.

The gate creaked open without challenge. She stood in the gap, a figure of about the same size and shape as myself, clad in a trailing garment of leaves and vines and flowers, with her hair cascading over it in dark, tangled tendrils. The torch nearest the gate flared. She shrank back before it, trembling, terrified. The flame illuminated wide, wary eyes in a face that was both sweet and strange, for she was no human woman, but a creature of woods and thickets, hedges and coppices, her body a lovely female shape built from all the wildest and most secret materials of the forest. To come so close to humankind must set a great fear in her. But then, I had her child. And now, so soon after I had brought him back from the brink of death, I must give him up again.

This time I did not hesitate. Her great eyes, fixed on me in terror and wonderment, filled with bright tears as I approached with her baby held against my breast. I could feel him breathing now; I could sense the life returning to his body with every step I took. His mother gave a cry, not an eerie shriek of pain this time, but a low, yearning call from deep inside her.

And Becan answered. He opened his mouth and let out the hungry, uncomplicated squall of a healthy child who has had a fright and now wants his supper. My own eyes brimming, I took my last step forward and laid him in his mother’s reaching arms.

“I’m so sorry I let him be hurt,” I said. “But he’s better now. He just needs feeding.” The lump in my throat made further words impossible.

She held him before her, examining him as closely as I had Finbar, back in Mac Dara’s hall when I had still believed the Lord of the Oak capable of making an honest bargain. She looked into Becan’s pebble eyes, inspected his gaping, squalling mouth, smiled with wonder at the scrap of iridescent fabric and the bright feather, the strands of hair and the soft shawl in which her son was wrapped. She bowed to me, courteous despite the fear that shook her body like a birch in an autumn wind. Then she pressed her child to her and kissed his odd little head, and her tears poured down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “He’s a fine baby, sweet and good. He didn’t deserve this, and neither did you. I looked after him as well as I could.” And I thought of that young nursemaid in Mac Dara’s hall and her false assurances.

The forest woman made no sound. She only nodded, then turned with Becan in her arms and moved away on silent feet. Before she reached the first rank of oaks she was lost in the shadows. For a little I could still hear Becan crying, but soon enough that, too, had faded to nothing.

“Here,” said Dog Mask into the quiet, and reached up to put Finbar in my arms. “You have room for him now. Take him home; leave this place forever. Your quest is done.”

The rocky being rumbled as if clearing its throat. “Wait,” it cautioned, its patchy lichen eyes fixed on me. “Ask. Seek.”

“Soothe poor skin,” hooted the owl-masked being.

“Smoothing, salving, healing,” rippled the watery one.

“By
ask
and
seek
,” said the hedgehog-dwarf, making an abrupt turn toward the fire and coming perilously close to spiking Dog Mask with its luxuriant prickles, “my friend here means now would be the time for you to request explanations if you need them. Advice, too, if you believe we can help you. And you need rest. Time enough to go on in the morning.”

Dog Mask shrugged, evidently outvoted, and we returned to the fireside. Finbar felt heavy in my arms; he was almost asleep. I would have to get used to the weight, the substance, the realness of my brother. Looking down into his unusual eyes, I felt I owed him an apology.
I don’t think I can love you as I did Becan,
I told him silently.
But there’s more than enough love waiting for you back home.

I sat down and let the Old Ones tend to my burned hands. The watery one put on some kind of salve, its insubstantial fingers cool and light on my skin. The angry throbbing of the burns was immediately gone. The cat-masked one dabbed the same curative material on my face with soft paws, following the lines of my cuts. My heart could barely contain my sadness as I remembered the gentle touch of Cathal’s fingers.

“How long will it take us to reach a portal back to my world?” I made myself ask, though the moment I had sat down a weariness had come over me that made it difficult to think straight. All I wanted to do was wrap myself up in the blankets, with Finbar tucked in next to me, and sleep. “If we start at dawn, when will I reach Sevenwaters? Finbar is so little, and—”

“You will be there soon enough,” said Dog Mask. “We will provide milk for the journey home.” The owl-masked creature was already filling a squat earthenware jug. “It will not be difficult. I do not believe Mac Dara will pursue you. Likely he has already forgotten you.”

“But I must—” I began.

“Once you are among your own people, you and the child will be safe and cared for. You can put this misadventure behind you.”

“But I won’t be staying—”

“Sleep,” said the hedgehog-dwarf, spreading a blanket beside the fire. Its prickles glinted fiery red in the light. Its hands were just like small human ones, save for the nails, which were long, strong and sharp, as if designed for digging. “No ill dreams tonight, only rest.”

“I need to explain something first.” My head was fuzzy with tiredness, but there was one thing that must be said. “After I take Finbar home, I’ll be coming back here straightaway. I have to rescue Cathal.”