The Sword and the Song (19 page)

“I need to speak with you.” Aine averted her eyes from his half-dressed state.

“Just stay there. I’ll be
 
—just don’t go anywhere.”

She paced little circles in the corridor until the door opened again. Eoghan stepped out, now unarmed and stuffing his shirt into the waistband of his trousers, though like Aine he hadn’t bothered with shoes. “What is it, my lady? Is it Conor?”

“No, nothing like that.” She lowered her voice. “Keondric’s alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Keondric Mac Eirhinin, the man whose body Niall took. His soul. It’s still here. It’s still in his body.”

Eoghan stared at her as though she’d come unhinged. “That’s impossible.”

“Aye, impossible, but true. Don’t you see? If his soul is still there, that’s why Niall can use the runes. Keondric was
 
—is
 
—a Balian. He was gifted. He had abilities similar to the Fíréin.”

“But Balians can’t be possessed.”

Aine huffed in frustration. “I know that. But this is different
somehow. Don’t ask me how it happened. Keondric is still there, and he managed to take control long enough to contact me. More than once, I think. Maybe he’s getting stronger.”

“If he is, perhaps he could push the druid down.” Eoghan grabbed her shoulders, his face alight with excitement. “Do you have any idea what this means? If we
 
—you
 
—can get to him, we could end this completely. Let’s find Riordan and wake the others.”

“Wait.” She didn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm, but he hadn’t thought this through. “There’s another possibility. I don’t think the druid knows that Keondric is still present. I don’t think he realizes why he can use the runes or the extent of what he can do while he’s sharing the body with a Balian soul.”

A horrified look crossed Eoghan’s face. “What are you saying?”

“If he learns he can use the runes because of Keondric, he’ll realize he can take the shield rune without risking death. And there will be nothing stopping him from just walking into Ard Dhaimhin.”

“What you are saying shouldn’t be possible.” Riordan’s words were disbelieving, but they held more wonder than skepticism.

“I understand that. But I verified that it was him. He knew things that even Niall couldn’t know.” Aine looked around the table to see how the others were taking the news. For the second time in a handful of hours, she found herself surrounded by the entire Conclave, though this time she didn’t mind being the focus of attention.

“Surely this doesn’t change anything,” Fechin said. “He is still infected with the sorcery. That alone would keep him from crossing the city’s wards.”

“Except the presence of Keondric’s soul has already proven to be a buffer between sorcery and the runes. That’s why he’s been able to use them on others. Add the shield rune and he would be impervious to any magic, including the city’s wards.”

“Here’s what we know,” Eoghan said. “Niall has been experimenting with the shield rune on ensorcelled men to see if he could move them into Ard Dhaimhin, but they died in the process. He won’t be anxious to try it on himself. As long as he doesn’t know of Keondric’s presence, he won’t take the risk. But he can use the runes individually, which is why he’s attempting to collect them from the old fortresses.”

“So Keondric is the key,” Gradaigh said.

Eoghan nodded. “The way I see it, we can use this information in two ways. We can try to prevent him from getting the runes and assume he won’t attempt to enter the city. But that’s a temporary plan at best. Or we can have Aine contact Keondric and try to seize control of his body from Niall. But if he’s unsuccessful, we risk hastening the very scenario we are trying to prevent.”

“Realistically, what is the danger he could do if he himself could enter Ard Dhaimhin?” Dal asked.

“He was once the Ceannaire. He could conceivably still be able to open the Hall of Prophecies. And once he did, he would have access to everything, including the Oath-Binding Sword.” Eoghan dragged his hands through his hair, loosening strands from his braid without noticing. “Remember, the runic magic is dangerous enough that it’s been removed from our grasp twice in the last thousand years. What could a man with truly evil intent accomplish with that knowledge?”

They fell silent, mulling the possibilities. Each way involved its own risks, and not just to them. For the first time, Aine truly understood why Balus had said that the storm of darkness must
be stopped in Seare before it spread over the face of the earth. The runic magic was nearly limitless. Niall could become the emperor of the known world with a combination of magic, sorcery, and the sidhe to enforce his unholy will.

He could usher in a true age of darkness.

“There is one possibility we’re not considering,” Aine said. “Keondric should not still be here. He should have moved on to his eternal rest. Without his presence, the druid has nothing.”

“You’re suggesting we figure out how to get Keondric’s soul out of his body and give it completely over to Niall?” Gradaigh asked incredulously.

“No, I’m suggesting we let him know he can enter Ard Dhaimhin’s wards and
then
we help Keondric’s soul go to its eternal rest. And then let the wards do what the wards will do.”

The men’s faces showed their doubt, but Riordan and Eoghan wore expressions of admiration. Eoghan began to smile. “It’s bold, Lady Aine, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s a last resort,” she said. “But one we can’t afford to ignore.”

“Conor won’t be happy with the idea of Aine’s putting herself at risk,” Riordan said.

Aine shook her head. “Conor can’t know
 
—at least not yet. I won’t have him distracted from his other tasks when we aren’t even certain it’s necessary or possible.”

“Aine’s right,” Eoghan said. “I’d like to know if she can get through to Keondric at all. If Niall becomes aware of what she’s doing, then we move on to . . . the desperate options.”

“You realize that if we fail, if the druid wins, we all die.” Fechin looked around the table seriously. “Seare will be gone and a good portion of the world with us.”

“That’s always been the case,” Eoghan murmured. “But now we finally have a plan to stop it.”

Eoghan remained behind, staring into the shadowy recesses of Carraigmór’s great hall, after the others returned to their chambers. As many times as he was awakened or surprised from sleep, he should simply make his bed in the hall and save himself some time. Not that he’d be sleeping anytime soon. The new revelations, problems, and challenges pouring in every day ensured that every minute of his sleep was plagued with concern or guilt.

They’d thought the fact Niall was mounting an army was the worst part, but the collection of the runes was far more dangerous. The fact he’d slaughtered dozens of his own men experimenting with the runes only highlighted how brutal and ruthless he would be were he ever to get the opportunity to rule. And Eoghan was asking the people he loved most in the world to face this man, while he stayed safe and protected inside. He had no family, no one to miss him if he died. It should be him out there risking his life.

Do you see My plan so clearly that you can make that statement? Do you presume to be the Creator so that you can decide who should live or die?

Why is it terrible to want to save my friends from harm? Is it not Lord Balus’s teaching to risk one’s life for one’s friends?

You act not out of love but out of pride. You would sacrifice to be seen sacrificing. You wish to be the savior. But sometimes to lead is to sacrifice glory.

Comdiu was rarely so blunt with him. He bowed his head and took the weight of the correction.
What do I do, then?

Obey. Act when you must act, and wait when you must wait.
Comdiu’s tone softened.
Have faith that you were chosen for this task at this moment for a purpose.

Eoghan propped his head in his hands. Comdiu could not
have been any clearer. Eoghan was to rule, whether that meant coordinating mundane tasks or making decisions about the lives of his men.

Except he knew what else needed to be done, and he didn’t want to do it.

He pushed himself away from the table and walked to the Rune Throne, cast in shadow in the dim light. Even now, he had a hard time focusing on all the runes at once. They swam together, joining and separating in his vision. Here and there he could pick out the ones he knew: the three-spoked wheel, the symbol of Comdiu; the sword, which translated to “protection”; the softening rune, which could crumble rock and yet somehow did not affect the Rune Throne. Clearly, there was much they didn’t understand about this magic. There was so much out there, littered across Seare, that had the potential to cause harm.

There was no question what had to be done. And as much as Aine would hate him for the decision, there was no question who had to do it.

Sleep did not come.
Or rather, Conor fled from it each time his eyes closed and the memories crowded back in. Instead, he spent the night pacing, working sword forms, examining every item in the room. He thought perhaps he could learn something about Somhairle from his possessions, but they were straightforward and nonspecific. Seareann-style clothing. A straight razor and shaving bowl with a tiny brass mirror. A leather saddlebag. In fact, the only thing of interest was the poison.

Conor spent a fair amount of time turning the vial over in his hands, wondering what it meant. It had been locked away, which meant that it was not meant to be a swift end in the event of a capture. If he’d planned to use it for himself, which Conor suspected he had, that meant he was afraid, and for good reason. Somhairle had seen an entire fortress annihilated by the druid’s experiments, yet he survived. What about him had caused Niall to leave him alone?

Conor dropped the vial back into his belt pouch, shrugged on his sword, and strode out of the chamber. He didn’t stop when he hit the great hall but instead proceeded to the dungeons.

The smell hit him immediately, bad enough in small doses as it drifted throughout the upper floors of the keep, but so strong up close it made him gag. He went to the last tiny cell
 
—the one in which Meallachán had been kept
 
—and squatted down beside the bars.

Somhairle didn’t open his eyes, but he obviously sensed Conor’s presence. “Are you going to threaten me again?”

“Not this time. What I want to know has no strategic importance.”

Somhairle turned his head and looked him in the eye. Conor expected malice, but all he saw was a cold, deep emptiness.

“Couldn’t sleep, could you?”

Conor lowered himself to the ground beside the cell and leaned against the stone wall. “No.”

“This place does that to a man. The screaming.” He gave Conor a chilling smile. “Even when it’s silent, it’s there. In the stones. Waiting.”

“You supervised the experiments.”

“Some of them.”

“Why?”

“The most capable man is the last to die.”

Conor’s skin prickled. There was something unearthly about the conversation
 
—a lack of emotion in words that should be fraught with it. Somhairle could feel emotion, Conor knew, because he had seen fear. He fished out the vial and held it up. “What is this?”

Conor was sure he wouldn’t answer, but he only smiled. “Hemlock.”

“For yourself?”

“For myself. For others. Poison does not differentiate. It’s fair. Unlike the human heart and mind.”

“The most capable man may be the last to die, but he still dies. So why are you here?”

Somhairle didn’t answer. He just stared at the ceiling of the cell. “The funny thing about torture is that it can make a man admit to anything, say up is down and believe it. You said that, didn’t you? But it’s purifying, those thoughts that come right before death. The things men say when they want pain to stop, they’re telling. They appeal to your humanity, your compassion, all the things they still want to believe exist in the world, as if that’s their last chance to prove it.” He turned his head. “Pain is a mirror.”

“What did you see, then? What do you want to believe still exists in the world?”

“Self-interest. I don’t need to believe. I know.” Somhairle sent him a knowing smile. “Your kind doesn’t believe in torture. It’s your weakness. It always has been. Expedience, aye, but in duty to the greater good.”

“Then why did you tell me what I wanted to know?”

Somhairle’s grin widened to show a row of crooked teeth. “I already told you. Because you wanted revenge for what was done to you. Information was just an excuse.” The smile turned feral. “Sometimes the mirror goes both ways, doesn’t it?”

Conor stood abruptly and dropped the vial back into his pouch. He wanted to believe that the man was mad, but in reality he was simply amoral. He’d said it himself. He did what he needed to do to save his own skin, to achieve his own ends.

That wasn’t what Conor had done. Not at all. The information he gained from him was vital, but there was only so far he would have taken things.

He tried to shut out Somhairle’s laughter, but it followed him all the way up the stairs.

As soon as day broke, Conor gathered the men together in the great hall, twenty-two warriors who looked only slightly more rested than he felt.

“Our goal today is to clear the chamber of the bodies before they can cause disease.”

“Or permanently foul the fortress with the stench,” Ailill muttered, looking less than pleased by the job.

“Indeed. Ailill, you can be in charge of finding the handcarts to transport them. Our best bet is to wheel them down the tunnels and burn the bodies in the canyon. Best to confine any potential . . . mess . . . to the lower levels.”

The looks passed around showed exactly how the men felt about those prospects. Larkin spoke up. “If we’re going back into the pass, won’t we be vulnerable to the sidhe again?”

“I have an idea for that. In the meantime, I need six men on watch, and the rest in teams of five to clear the chamber.”

Conor sorted them out quickly
 
—those on watch far more pleased than the others
 
—and then retreated to his chamber. Larkin’s question highlighted the bigger concern he’d been mulling. If his men had been susceptible to the sidhe in the passes, the reinforcements from Ard Dhaimhin would be in even more danger now that the spirits had been deprived of their victims.

Conor took the stairs to the upper floor two at a time and staggered as the corridor swayed around him, the effects of little food and no sleep. Once they cleaned the storerooms, they could assess their supplies. He was counting on the hope that the fortress had stored up food for the cold seasons.

Up in his borrowed chamber, he retrieved his harp case and then returned to the hall, where he pulled up a chair.
Let this work
, he thought, partly a plea to Comdiu and partly a reminder
to him to focus through his exhaustion. He sat, adjusted the strings that had already gotten out of tune again, and then closed his eyes to visualize the passes that connected the High City and Ard Bealach.

Blue fire danced along his skin, searing but not consuming.

Conor jolted upright with a gasp. It had taken that little, just closing his eyes, to doze off and be drawn back into the nightmare. He wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and laid his hands against the strings. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t be drawn back in. He would be of no use here, and there was far too much for him to do to crumble.

The pass. The long stretch of road that connected the edge of Ard Dhaimhin’s domain to the downward slope of the mountain range. What they needed was a corridor, a tunnel of magic. When the notes rang from the harp, they took similar form to the song he had played before, now so natural that he didn’t think about anything but his need. In his mind’s eye, he used the notes to bend the magic through space, sending it rolling like a flood through the canyon to where it met the edge of Ard Dhaimhin’s domain. It felt like a sigh when the edges of the ward met and melded together into one large, misshapen carpet of golden light. He opened his eyes, satisfied. It was done. And even more surprising, it had been easy.

He returned the harp to its case and the case to his chamber, looking longingly at the bed before he returned to the catacombs where the men continued to work. They had almost completely finished relocating the bodies outside, where they would incinerate them upon the pyre. It would be like a smoke signal to anyone in the area, but there was nothing to be done about that. The craggy topography made digging a mass grave difficult, not to mention the manpower it would consume from their limited resources.

When he encountered Larkin returning with an empty handcart, the man stared at him with a slight air of awe. “You did something again. I felt it.”

“Aye. The men coming to join us should have nothing to fear from the sidhe.”

“That easy?”

“That easy.”

Larkin seemed to be thinking, debating. “Why haven’t you done this elsewhere? Gone around the towns and played wards around them?”

It was a legitimate question. It wasn’t as if the idea hadn’t occurred to Conor, but the risks had as well. “I’m the only one left who can play the wards, especially now that Meallachán is dead. The only reason I dare do it here is because we’re secure behind walls and the druid can’t pass through our defenses. Out in the open, though, it would take only a well-paid assassin to kill me
 
—or a well-aimed arrow.”

Larkin nodded slowly. “You’re too valuable to our efforts to lose. It’s a shame we can’t protect the entire island.”

It was. Niggling guilt started to creep in, but Conor shut it out. Leadership may bring the privilege of delegating the most unpleasant tasks, but it also brought the necessity of making hard decisions. It made no sense for him to risk everything to help individuals when his larger responsibility was to end the threat all of them faced. Wasn’t it?

By the end of the day, the unpleasant task had been completed: the bodies burned on a great pyre, the putrescence scrubbed from the chamber with lye and water. The faint smell of corruption lingered, but it was at least bearable on the lower level again. In the root cellar, they even managed to find vegetables and salted meat, which two brothers turned into a nourishing stew for supper. They ate in shifts with the change of the
watch, Conor offering what encouragement he could muster. Then he retreated to his chamber once more.

When Conor called out to Aine, she was waiting for him.
Conor. Thank Comdiu. It’s late. What’s wrong?

Nothing’s wrong. The fortress is secured, bodies disposed of.
He struggled to form the words in his head. The weariness was too deep, his sorrow over all that had happened too great. He was swiftly sliding into numbness and exhaustion.

Conor, try to rest. I know it’s not pleasant
 
—

Pleasant? Try torturous.
Literally. He gave a harsh laugh. The fact that the dreams weren’t real
 
—that the torture had never been real
 
—made it no less vivid in his mind.

They have selected Nuada to command the fortress. He commanded a céad of archers here at Ard Dhaimhin.

I know him. He’s capable.

Aye. He and another fifty men will be there in a fortnight, and then you can come home.

Right. Home. He rubbed his temples with his fingers and flopped back on the bed.
They shouldn’t have the problems that we had on the way.
He filled her in on what he had done with the harp earlier that day. It felt so distant and unimportant now.

That’s incredible! We will be able to move freely. Do you think you could do it
 
—

In other places? No. I’ve tried before. Aine, I’m exhausted. Can we just speak tomorrow?

A long pause. He felt her hurt even though she tried to keep her reply cheerful.
Aye, we can do this tomorrow. You might like to know, though . . . the baby is kicking. I can feel it from the outside now. Riordan felt his grandson move today.

That’s wonderful.
He said the words in his head, but there was no real enthusiasm attached to it. He couldn’t generate the emotion.
I’ll be home soon to feel it myself.

You will. Conor?

Aye?

Please, just . . . don’t do anything drastic. I know you think you’re being rational right now, but you’ve seen and experienced things no man should have to. At some point, you’re going to have to talk
 
—

At some point I will, just not now. There is a job to be done. Tomorrow, Aine.
He slammed the door shut on his mind as she had taught him, though he suspected she could still find a way in if she tried. What had she seen that prompted the lecture? Was she just sensing his despair and weariness? Or had she seen the thing that he had kept hidden but unforgotten?

He took the vial from his pouch and set it on the stool beside the bed. Tiny. Innocuous. Dangerous. Yet it somehow made him feel better having it there while he rested. His body was too exhausted to pace the floor for another night, but his mind quailed at the idea of closing his eyes. He would just stretch out and ease his muscles for a bit before he found other occupations for the night.