Shapeshifter (16 page)

He was pleased, she could tell. And hungry. He was halfway through his bowl before he came up for air.

“I haven’t forgotten last night,” he said. “The only new thing I’ve thought of is that there are sometimes holes in his commands.”

“Holes?”

Oran’s brow furrowed as he tried to explain. “We are bound to follow his words exactly, but not necessarily his intention. Sometimes that leaves an opening he didn’t see.”

Sive went over the commands he had given her so far. She didn’t see any openings. She didn’t even really understand what Oran meant. “I can’t…was there a time it happened to you?”

Oran nodded. “That’s how I was able to tell your father about Finn mac Cumhail. Far Doirche told me to inform him if Daireann said where you were. He didn’t tell me to inform him if she said where you
might go
, and so I was able to hide that from him. Not that it did much good, in the end.”

He went back to his bowl, scraping the last drops from the bottom, and then pushed himself up from the table. “I’m sorry, Sive, it’s not much. I’ll keep thinking.”

The door was almost closed behind him when he thrust it open again and poked his head back inside.

“How exactly did he say it?”

“Say what?” Far had said many things, she thought impatiently, and then regretted it. Oran had no need to help her at all.

“When he forbade you to turn to a deer. What were his exact words?”

Sive thought back. It had been her first day in this accursed house. She was exhausted, muddy, thrumming with fear for Oisin. And the Dark Man had paid her no more mind than a sack of potatoes, except to throw his commands over his shoulder as he left.

“You will not kill yourself. And you will remain in your woman’s body at all times.”
She repeated the words back to Oran, who nodded thoughtfully.

“In your woman’s body.”

“Oran, what?” He had hold of something, she could tell.

He cocked his head to one side. “Is the head necessarily included with the body, I wonder? And if not, could you turn just your head, and leave your body as it is?”

Sive Remembers

All afternoon I tried. To change one part only—it is impossibly hard. And the Dark Man’s prohibition was clamped over my body, hard as tree bark. My muscles trembled with the strain, the sweat ran down my brow and arms and between my breasts, my mind strained to escape the bonds of his spell. But I could not find the division between body and head.

Last light found me slumped with exhaustion and despair, too tired even for tears. It was Oran who coaxed me to eat a bit and shooed me into bed. “You look near to collapse,” he said bluntly. “You must rest.”

“But if he returns—,” I protested.

“If he returns, you will try again after he leaves,” said Oran. “Or”—he hesitated—“is it his spell that prevents you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. My head does feel different. I just can’t do it.”

“So, it is a difficult feat. Yet you try to achieve it when you are half-dead from exhaustion.” He laid a hand on my shoulder gingerly, as if he feared overstepping himself, and spoke gently. “If it is possible to do this thing, you will need all your strength for it. Sleep now.”

I woke in the waiting dark before dawn with a dream, or a dreamed memory, so vividly upon me I felt it in my very bones. I had dreamed of the time my father came to me and made me turn back my change to keep me hidden from Far Doirche. I had felt again the jarring pain of it, how the smooth flow became fragmented, each part at odds with the other, as the streaming transformation slowed and reversed.

I lay quiet for a while, reliving every step of that memory. I knew now that different parts of my body could be affected separately from the others, and I remembered how it felt.

I held on to that feeling as I prepared myself. This time, I knew I would succeed.

TWENTY

I
t was a glorious early summer afternoon. Far didn’t usually pay much heed to the weather, but it was hard to ignore a day matched so perfectly to his mood. The warmth that quickened the blood, the rain-washed luster of the leaves, the heady smell of growth. It was a day full of the promise of a new year. His year.

For he stood at the very brink of his dream. All the study, the craft, the long seasons of patience and scheming had borne fruit at last. Not that he would lose patience now. No, stealth and care were in his nature. No fear that he would throw away the prize in a rash grab for power. Bit by bit at first, nibbling away quietly at the lesser chieftains and remote sidhes, until there was a secret army, his for the summoning.

And then quickly, before there was time to organize resistance, the big festivals. Sive would sing, and they would all fall—all but the few great ones who were too strong for such tricks. Those, he would make peace with…for now.

The father must not hear of her. In fact, Far would be wise to dispose of the father as soon as possible.

But first he would play with his new toy one more time. His target was perfect—a proper sidhe this time, not some little hole like Donal’s, but so swallowed up by dreary bogland that few outsiders could be persuaded to visit. Funny how even Manannan’s enchantment had done little to beautify the bog, Far mulled. He chuckled to himself. Doubtless it would seem lovelier when it was his.

He kicked his horse to a trot, anxious to get home and get on with his plans. It was a bone-jarring, unpleasant gait, but nothing could mar his good spirits today.

THE DAY WAS OLD when Far returned, though with the Solstice so close the sky was still bright and blue.

“Oran!” he yelled as he banged open the door and strode in.

Far swatted at his leggings, raising dust and the smell of horse and travel sweat. Sive’s nostrils flared at the acrid scent.

“Oran, a bath! And a decent dinner!”

The back door creaked, and Oran scurried up, panting.

“Just in time, Oran,” Far said smoothly. “I almost had to punish your inattentiveness.”

“I’m sorry, master.” Oran kept his eyes on the floor, waiting to be released to his duties.

“A nice haunch of something tonight, yes? And a very deep, very hot…” Far stopped. He took a long, silent look at Oran. Oran did not move, but Sive could smell the fear rising from him. The tension in the room grew dense as fog.

“OR-an?”

“Master?” The boy risked a single, nervous glance.

“What have you been up to?”

Oran swallowed. “I’ve been doing the chores you left, master.” A truthful answer, but not the one Far sought.

“Look at me, Oran.”

And she was discovered. Just before Oran’s reluctant eyes met Far’s, they darted, helplessly, to the dark corner where Sive huddled under the eaves. Fleeting as thought, but Far caught it.

He whirled on his heel and stared at the monstrous thing that was Sive, and it seemed to her that his eyes blazed into green flame when he saw what she had done.

THE DARK MAN’S rage was like molten fire, burning everything in its path. He screamed at Sive like a warrior taken by the battle rage. She was terrified he would kill Oran. He swung his fist into the side of Oran’s head and dropped him like a stone. Then he set in to kicking him: stomach, back, face, anywhere. Sive closed her eyes against the anguish of it. How could she stand by while her friend suffered? She was so close to giving in, so close. But then the Dark Man stopped and turned from Oran as though he didn’t even exist and narrowed his eyes at the fantastic creature before him. He was calm again, summoning his power.

“Change back to your woman’s head,” he commanded.

But he could not command her head. He could not hold her deer eyes with his own green ones. Sive was already receding from his grasp. She had been a deer for so many years that, once changed, it did not take her long to distance herself from her own mind. She retreated into deerness, further and further away from the place where he could touch her.

“We’ll see,” he said then. “We’ll see how long you will defy me.” And he put a rope around her neck and dragged her out into a drafty shed and shut her up.

For days she was alone in the dark, starving, thirsting. She didn’t care. She was ready to die. And with each day her woman’s mind grew weaker, and the deer’s stronger, until by the time he dragged open the slatted door and let the sunlight flood over her, she hardly understood his words.

On that day he bludgeoned Sive for long hours, with his magic, with his whip, and at the last with a branding iron. And when at last he understood that he could succeed only at making her bawl and writhe with pain, he snatched up his hot iron again and hurled it into the trees. And then he turned to Sive, very slowly, and she trembled for she was sure her death was at hand.

But he would not let her die. He extended his one finger toward her. Drew up one leg like a stork and closed one eye. The position of the curse-hurler.

“You wish to remain a deer,” he said. “I grant your wish. Become a deer, and remain a deer, and live as a brute beast to the end of your days. I wish both men and wolves joy of the hunt.”

Sive Remembers

So many feelings I have had about being a deer, since the day I first mastered the shapeshifter’s skill.

At first I was in love with it, as delighted and glowing as though it were my first man. I loved the rush of triumph as my form streamed into another’s, the wonder of a world discovered through scent and sound and obscure, unnamed instincts. The sheer pleasure in my own speed and power.

And then it became a prison. In the first years of my exile, I longed to escape, trapped in a life driven by hunger and fear and without the smallest comfort. I came to hate my rough pelt, my bony legs, the long outthrust snout that blocked all song or speech in my throat. There was nothing I wanted but to return to myself and to the light and warmth of my own kind.

No more. He thinks he has punished me? He has given me refuge. I allowed Sive to sink beneath these layers of hair and sinew and muscle and vanish into their depths. I buried my sorrows and regrets and strangled hopes. I set my only aim to be survival, my only desire a full stomach. I forgot my own name.

PART III
OISIN

TWENTY-ONE

T
he boy is naked, curled against the cold dawn wind that sweeps across the mountain’s flat top. He shivers in his sleep, and his fingers grope against the ground as if searching for a lost blanket or companion. They close briefly around a tuft of wiry grass before tucking back in against his chest.

He is only young, small but sturdy, with long golden hair. When he awakens in the first slanting light of the rising sun, he sits slowly, as one still in a dream. His eyes— beautiful eyes, clear as deep water and blue as the spring bluebell—are unfocused and confused. As he takes in his surroundings, his chin begins to tremble. He has no idea where he is.

A sound, musical and savage, rises through the mist that hides the mountain’s feet. He knows that sound. Hounds, on the hunt.

Oisin Remembers

I may be one of the mighty men of the Fianna now, and Finn mac Cumhail’s son, but for all that I still have nightmares about the day I woke up on the great slouching mountain men call Ben Bulben. I thought the Dark Man had sent me to the desolate ends of the earth, a world empty of everything but cutting wind and seeping mist and a monstrous upheaval of rock. I was only six summers old and had never been out of my mother’s sight. No army or battle since has matched the terror of that morning.

THE MOUNTAIN WAS a great looming ledge. Its head thrust up from the land, bare sides scored as though by a giant bear claw. The long tail sloped back more gently, though it was hardly the smooth grassland it appeared from a distance. Crisscrossed with deep ravines and unclimbable overhangs, Ben Bulben was tough-going from any point. Finn was, in fact, growing tired of hauling himself up and down its flanks.

Yet there was something about this hulk of a mountain, and not just the wild boar that hid in its cracks and gullies, that called to him. Two days ago he had perplexed his men by hiking right to the summit and walking the length of Ben Bulben’s flat, wind-scoured top. Had it been lopped off by the Dagda’s war club in a fit of rage, as some believed? Finn had his doubts. He had met some of the Sidhe—killed one, for that matter—and seen their magic too. He didn’t think there were many with a swing
that
vast, magic club or no.

Now Finn shook the clouds from his head and concentrated on the chase. Boar hunts his men understood; it was the nearest hunting came to military training, an exercise in discipline and trust as well as skill. When a big boar broke cover, you needed to count on the comrades at your side.

Boar was Finn’s quarry of choice for personal reasons too. He had finally, reluctantly, after earnest counseling from Caoilte and Lughaid and other wise friends, stopped searching for Sive. How many times had he quartered the island? In how many places and ways, when he had at last concluded she was not to be found in his own land, had he tried to get into hers? Yet despite his wisdom, his learning, his far-seeing, despite his kinship with Lugh and his bag of power which had once been Manannan’s, he had not found a way.

He had given up that hunt. But he would never again in his lifetime join a deer hunt without fear that it would be Sive that was found and killed before he could intervene. Foolish, that fear. His men knew well to spare all spotted does. If Sive were hunted to her death, it would not be by the Fianna.

The hounds’ steady baying shattered into a frenzy of barking. They had something. Finn heard an excited shout from one of the men, hollered back and forced his legs to climb the steep slope faster.

The dogs were in view, a ring of lunging, eager back ends on the far side of a shallow gorge. A deep bass growl rumbled beneath the chorus of barks. Only Finn’s two wolfhounds, his Bran and Sceolan, had such voices, growls that throbbed deep in your chest and carried beyond the racket of lesser dogs. He quickened his pace, picturing his beloved companions cornered and in danger.