The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (43 page)

It was then that the floor dropped out from under him.

For Rhiann lay against the pillow, her face white and mottled with green bruises along her jaw, slashed by the scarlet of her swollen, cut mouth. Her lustrous hair was limp from sweat, and tangled around her shoulders.

Fola stifled a noise when she saw Eremon, and went to rise, but Rhiann’s hand shot out and clamped on her wrist, holding her there. The ends of her fingers were bandaged. ‘No,’ Rhiann whispered to Fola, staring at her friend with a dazed desperation that tore Eremon’s heart. With an uncertain glance at him, Fola sank back on the stool.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Eremon approached the bed. ‘I have come,
a stór
,’ he murmured and groped for her hand. Yet she jerked it away with a soft cry and buried her face in the bedsheets. ‘Rhiann, speak to me,’ Eremon begged. ‘I am here with you; I have come—’

‘No!’ Rhiann’s voice was muffled. Fola met Eremon’s gaze, and there was great pity in her dark eyes, even as she shook her head with gentle warning.

Rhiann’s shoulders had begun to tremble now, and she pressed her face deeper into the bed. ‘No soft words for me, no more, never!’

Eremon stared down at her, burning with a sudden terror as great as his grief. ‘Rhiann … did Maelchon hurt …’ But there he broke off, for Rhiann’s whole body clenched at Maelchon’s name, and Eremon realized he had struck unthinkingly, and wished to yank the words back as they flew from his lips.

‘Get him away from me!’ Rhiann cried brokenly, whether about the man in her nightmare or her own husband, Eremon could not tell. Yet instinctively he fell back a step.
You are a man
, Linnet had said. And him being here was causing Rhiann pain.

Eremon had never faced such raw grief before, and he stood helplessly, as Rhiann’s hand crept out to clasp Fola’s fingers. Then he suddenly became aware again of the chanting women, as Linnet appeared silently by the bedscreen. He didn’t belong here, that was clear.

‘I will come back later, love.’ Unconsciously, Eremon’s hand reached out to stroke Rhiann’s hair, but he let it fall before touching her.

As he slowly took the path from the house, Fola came behind, calling him to stop.

‘Prince,’ she said nervously, when he turned back, ‘she is still in deep shock; she doesn’t know what she says.’

Eremon stared at Fola, eyes tight with pain, at last biting out what frightened him most. ‘Has she gone mad?’

Fola shook her head sadly. Eremon remembered her face as being plain, round and solid, yet alive with humour. He didn’t recognize that memory in the drawn features of the young woman before him, sunken with grief. ‘She is the strongest woman I know,’ Fola whispered, ‘yet what happened has broken even her. I think if it had not been for the first raid she would perhaps not have gone so far …’

‘Gone?’

‘You may know little of healing, prince.’ Fola twisted her fingers in her blue robe, the edge of her wide mouth trembling. ‘Sometimes when the soul has been badly hurt, it doesn’t want to come back to the body. That’s what shock is – the soul doesn’t wish to stay in Thisworld; it wishes to flee. Usually it is only temporary, until the mind is strong enough to endure the knowledge of what has happened. The Lady Linnet has told me that she nursed Rhiann through such shock four years ago, when her family was killed. But the blow is that much greater now, for it is the loss of the Sisterhood …’ Her voice faltered, and she covered her mouth with a shaking hand.

‘Are you telling me she won’t come back?’ Eremon spoke more harshly than he intended, for he couldn’t breathe properly.

Again Fola shook her head, before glancing down. ‘I think she has more to come back for, now,’ she murmured hoarsely. ‘This is important for healing, so take heart.’

Yet Eremon could accept little comfort from that, as he took his leave of Fola and strode blindly towards the King’s Hall. For the young priestess’s words had summoned the fear that perhaps Rhiann’s love for him was not enough to call her back from the shadowlands. After all, what could he offer her but more blood and slaughter?

Outside the Hall, he paced fiercely in the churned mud, trying to take his emotions in a stern hand. A few servants crept by, but he ignored them, until Cù himself came bounding out, tail thumping against Eremon’s shins. It was only when Eremon gave him no more than a cursory pat, his eyes fixed unseeing on the great oak doors, that the hound sensed his distress and sat down with a single whine.

It was then that Eremon took a breath, and went inside to seek Nectan.

He and the little dark Caereni chief had not seen each other in a year, and though there was much news to exchange, Eremon was interested in only one thing: the completion of the tale that Linnet had left unfinished in her haste.

Nectan had brought twenty men with him, sprawled about the hearth eating mutton porridge, but at Eremon’s appearance Nectan gently steered him away to the quiet, dark reaches of the Hall, and there sat him on a stool.

After pressing a cup of ale into his hands, Nectan began to speak in a soft tone that somehow managed to reach around Eremon’s heart. Nectan’s eyes, as dark and fathomless as those of a seal, never wavered from Eremon’s face, and without touching him his steady presence soothed Eremon enough to enable him to concentrate.

A week after Rhiann left for the Sacred Isle, Nectan said, Linnet’s fears had grown to an unbearable pitch. She undertook another seeing in the sacred pool, this time with the help of
saor
, and what she saw there confirmed her worst forebodings: Rhiann was in real danger.

With Eremon far to the east, she despatched the swiftest trading ship she could find to Nectan’s settlement, begging him to gather his men and make all speed for the Stones and the Sisters. His boats came upon the coast of the island when the smoke was already rising into the sky.

‘We saw no trace of any Roman ship,’ Nectan said, chewing on a birch twig with a deliberate pressure that spoke of his pain. ‘The red invaders seemed to have only one target – the priestesses themselves. Yet Maelchon’s boats were still at the broch, plundering the village.’ He paused, furrowing his sun-browned forehead. ‘My orders were to seek out the Sisters, though it was too late, even though we rowed with no break. Then, as we landed, some of Maelchon’s band were returning from over the hills, and your lady was running to the shore. She would have been trapped there against the water.’

Eremon’s eyes briefly closed. ‘And then?’

‘It was too dangerous to engage them all, though by the Goddess, I wished to. We took your lady and pushed off, but the Orcadians did not stay long once their work was done. When we judged it safe we found a new landing and sought the other Sisters the Lady Rhiann had left in the hills.’

Eremon raised his cup, let the ale run slowly down his throat. ‘What of Maelchon?’

Nectan’s head dropped. ‘I glimpsed him among his men. There was much blood on his face, and he roared like a bear and pressed forwards. But our arrows drove him back.’ His breath quickened, as anger deepened the web of lines around his eyes. ‘There was blood on your lady’s hands and face and arms, and her fingers were cut. Yet beyond that, I do not know what happened to her. The Roman died defending her, and she held him, so some of the blood was certainly his.’

Eremon nodded, then his hand came out slowly to clasp Nectan’s wrist, and he met that dark gaze. ‘I owe you my life, my friend, for if she had died, it would be as if my own heart ceased beating. This is what you have done for us.’

Nectan nodded gravely when Eremon released him, for his own people spoke with such words. ‘I wish, by the Mother, we had come soon enough for them all.’ Fury sparked in his eyes, and he fingered the broken point of the stick as if it was one of his arrows. ‘They committed sacrilege, and for that, they will pay. The Mother will make them pay.’

Every morning for a week, Eremon went faithfully to Rhiann’s house, only for Linnet to report that the shock still had not lifted, and that she feared his presence might unbalance Rhiann further. He agreed, for although he was desperate to see his wife, he did not think he could bear either that blank, distant stare or the way she flinched from him.

Just what had that black Orcadian bastard done to her? Eremon shied away from completing that thought, yet continued to pace outside Rhiann’s house, scoring a furrow in the ground. Eventually Linnet came out, sensing with one look exactly what tormented him so thoroughly, and immediately dealt with it. There were bruises on Rhiann’s upper arms, she told him brutally, but nowhere else. Fola had been the first to tend her, and she believed, as did Linnet, that no outrage had been committed on Rhiann’s body beyond the blows on her face. It would be well to seek some rest, she added, for he was upsetting the other girls.

Chastened, Eremon transferred his pacing to the outcrop of rock outside the Horse Gate, yet the relief about what Rhiann had escaped was soon eclipsed by his knowledge of what she had not escaped. Rape or no, Maelchon had terrorized Rhiann to the point that she would flinch away from her own husband, who had only ever treated her with tenderness.

Maelchon had driven this wedge between them.

It was this realization that forced Eremon’s outward rage to settle into a simmering in his gut that he knew would never leave him. One day he would take his revenge, and Maelchon’s death would not be quick or painless.

The rage carried Eremon for many more days, and kept him from despair.

CHAPTER 41

T
he fog around Rhiann was beginning to thin, though she tried to draw its dank folds closer, hiding her away. All she remembered was a dim glimpse of sun on sea, and the sound of voices, followed by a dark house and Fola’s face looming over her while girls sang. Then came nothing but a soft, muffling haze, and the instinct that she did not ever want to face what lay beyond it.

Over time, though, the singing began to grow louder and more distinct, and the pressure of hands bathing her brow grew gradually more clear. Then came the time Rhiann knew she had eyelids, and they were pressed tight against her cheeks; and she had fingers, and they dug into what felt like sheets, trying to stop the spinning of the bed around her.

Smells slipped in then: herbs and roots; earth clinging to shoes and digging sticks; the mingled Rhiann-smell of wild mint, soap and honey; beeswax, onion dye and smoke-tanned skins.

She was in her house, and suddenly, terrifyingly, she was awake.

For one moment, she hung suspended in time long enough to sense the heat of damp sheets against her skin, and the dryness of her mouth. But then, in the act of swallowing, her tongue slid across the sweet-salt cut on her lip, and with that she was pinned to the bed, for she could hide no longer. The memories rushed at her, vague and formless, bathed in nameless terror. And behind them a black wave of emotion reared, attached to the memories and yet separate. Then she knew she had nowhere to run.

Snatches of vision and sound and smells swirled around her, glimpses of the Sisters, Maelchon and Didius, and the vileness stopped her tongue in her throat and her heart from beating, and she wished she need never breathe again. Yet the black wave was still behind, coming on, and though Rhiann closed her eyes and stilled her chest, it rushed on, and finally broke over her in a maelstrom of regret, shame and guilt that would outlast memory, always.

They died because of me, because I called them there, because I drew the dark king
.

Endlessly, the wave wept from her eyes, pouring through her with such force that she was taken down into darkness again.
I am not worth the love they bore me
.

Eremon and Nectan were breaking their fast on a bench outside the King’s Hall when the Caereni chief suddenly straightened, his eyes fixed on the arch of the Horse Gate. Eremon laid down his platter of cheese and bread, and pulled his aching legs under him to rise.

It was a young messenger who appeared, muddy from his riding boots all the way up his thighs, with red-rimmed eyes and stubbled cheeks that signalled hard travel and no rest. Eremon decided he must be Caledonii, since he did not recognize the youth, and Nectan made no move to claim him as his.

The boy looked as if he would drop in his tracks, so Eremon hastened to draw him to the bench and thrust a flask of ale in his hands. ‘Drink,’ he ordered, and the youth did as he was bid, staring up at Eremon with trepidation as he swallowed.

‘My lord,’ he gasped at last, wiping his thin moustache and leaving a wet streak across his dirty cheek. ‘I come from my king, Calgacus the Sword.’

‘So I assume. What then?’

The boy seemed uncomfortable delivering his message while he sat and Eremon stood, so he rose shakily to his feet, grasping at the wall above the bench. ‘My lord bid me tell you the Romans have assembled an enormous force, bigger than any we have ever seen. We have information that it is making ready to leave the Forth, to go north. My king fears this army will seek for the Dun of the Waves, and any other duns in its way.’

Eremon’s chest was gripped by the first coldness in days to penetrate his rage. ‘How long did it take you to get here?’

‘Four days and no sleep,’ the boy announced, with a glimmer of exhausted pride. ‘But my king is not planning to attack the Roman column. He will wait until they have committed themselves far enough to be beyond reinforcements; until they have stretched their supply lines. He is waiting for you, lord.’

Eremon rubbed his chin. ‘So it begins in earnest then, friend,’ he said to Nectan, even as his gaze slid in the direction of Rhiann’s house.

‘If a man’s heart is full of rage,’ Nectan murmured, ‘he should take it to battle.’ Thoughtfully, he fingered the shell collar across his breast. ‘So he tames the beast within. So he sees then with a clearer mind – and a clearer heart.’

Eremon summoned a pained smile. ‘You are right, as ever.’ He glanced back at the messenger. ‘You have done well, yet your ride is over now, as mine is about to begin. Stay here and rest: I will go on alone.’