Heir to Sevenwaters (31 page)

A low chuckle emanated from the ferns, and a moment later out stepped a small figure in a hooded cloak of gray fur. I could not see its face, for it held a mask before its features, a dog mask made of shining silver, wrought with stunning detail down to each tooth in the gaping mouth, each hair on the shining pelt. The ears were pricked like those of a hunting hound on alert. The creature behind this concealment was child-sized. Its hand, holding the silver rod that supported the false face, was human in shape but covered in fur like the cloak. Maybe gloved; maybe not. Through holes in the mask I could see a hint of lustrous eyes. “A challenge!” The being’s voice was deep and strong; this was no child. “Friend or foe: I like that. Why are you traveling with
him
?” The creature jerked its head toward Cathal. “He smells wrong. Why did you bring him here? Best lose him as quick as you can.”

“What?” I was shocked. The fact that I had just been considering whether my companion was a traitor seemed irrelevant. “Why? And what concern is that of yours?” This small entity did not seem particularly threatening, but I must be careful. Whatever this dog-person was, it surely wasn’t one of the Fair Folk.

“Lose him!” the creature hissed. “Bad blood! Shadows and darkness!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cathal stir again. I did not turn my head. “Why should I listen to you?” I asked as calmly as I could, though the creature’s words had chilled me.

“You want a guide, don’t you? I can guide you. But I won’t take
him
anywhere. Go on with him and you’ll be on the sure path to heartbreak. You must lose him tomorrow. Walk one way, let him walk the other. While he stays with you, you’ll be beset by difficulties. You’ll be attacked, hurt, scarred, damaged. You think your beauty marred by those cuts. Believe me, there’ll be far worse to come if you keep him by your side. You don’t need him, Clodagh. You don’t want him. His kind are scum.”

“How do you know my name?” This was deeply unsettling.

“We know.
How
doesn’t matter. Get rid of him, quickly.”

“I’d never have got across the river without Cathal,” I said, keeping my voice quiet though I was becoming angry. “Without him, I’d never even have found it. Whatever he may have done in the human world, he’s here because he wants to help me. He said so and I believe him.”

The mask turned toward me. “You pity him.” The creature’s tone was flat. “As you pity the little scrap you have there on your knee.”

I laid a protective hand on Becan’s curled-up form, swathed in Cathal’s tunic. “Pity?” I said. “I don’t think so. I try to give folk the benefit of the doubt, that’s all. I try not to judge too quickly.”

“Ah, well,” Dog Mask said airily, “don’t say you didn’t get your chance of help.” Its squat form began to fade away before my eyes.

“Wait!” I cried. The creature halted, wavering in and out of visibility. “What are you? Why would you offer to help me?”

“That’s immaterial if you choose to keep
him
with you. Do that and you’ll be finding the way yourself.”

“He’s an Inis Eala man,” I said, wondering if I was being extremely foolhardy, but knowing I would not give in to threats. “He’ll find it for me.”

A peal of derisive laughter, a rustle in the ferns, and the creature was gone. All around the camp there was a shifting and a moving in the shadows, as if there had been not one small being here, but many. I had a sense of their folding back into the landscape, merging with the earth and the tree trunks and the bushes. Then, utter silence. I hugged Becan close. “Don’t tell me,” I murmured. “I probably imagined the whole thing. A bang on the head can do that.”

I tried to remember all the tales I’d heard about the various folk who lived in the Otherworld, the grand and powerful Tuatha De Danann and the other races with whom they shared that realm. These included a tribe commonly referred to as the Old Ones, known for their remarkable ability to blend into the landscape, assuming forms not unlike those of trees or stones or streams. Sometimes they were no more than shadowy voices. Sometimes they took creature shapes. They were no friends of the Fair Folk. Indeed, there was a bitter rivalry between the two peoples, dating back to ancient times when a great war had raged across Erin and the Old Ones had been driven back to their deep caves, their wells and their remote islands. I wished one of my druid uncles were here so I could ask about them. I seemed to remember that one of the original ancestors of Sevenwaters had wed a woman of the Old Ones. That meant there was a little of their blood in my veins.

“Still,” I murmured to Becan, “that doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy. I don’t want to do this on my own, little one. I don’t want to leave Cathal behind. That would feel wrong. Heartbreak, the creature said. Does that mean I won’t get Finbar back unless I go on alone? Or is this all some kind of trap?”

But Becan was asleep again, his odd little face peaceful within the folds of the tunic. I was cold. Cathal had been right, his cloak was the only item we had with the capacity to keep out the chill of this forest at night. Fleetingly, I allowed myself to imagine creeping under it and curling up next to him, our bodies warming each other. I felt my cheeks flush. Silly, really, that one might risk freezing to death rather than act improperly. If it grew any colder I would be sorely tempted. Still, I was supposed to be on watch. Sighing, I got up and checked my own cloak, still hanging by the fire. It was almost dry. I put it on and settled to wait until morning. How long it would take to come, there was no telling. Time passed differently here; the stories made that starkly evident. Our journey might seem to last only a few days, yet devour far more time in the human world. I did not think I would cope at all well if I returned triumphant, with Finbar in my arms, to find my family aged by twenty, thirty, forty years, my parents dead, Sibeal and Eilis middle-aged women, my home changed by the passage of a whole generation. More, perhaps: a hundred years, and everyone gone. I patted Becan’s sleeping form for reassurance. In the tales, some folk never came home.

By the time Cathal woke, I had almost persuaded myself not to tell him what had happened. The need to explain why I had refused an offer of help was especially awkward in view of the fact that he had made it clear he felt no friendship toward me, only a bizarre sense of obligation. I knew he wouldn’t explain what he had meant about the ills that had befallen my family somehow being his fault. He never explained anything. If I wanted to find out what that was all about, I would have to work much harder at earning his trust. And perhaps my nocturnal visitor had been right after all. Perhaps Cathal was the trickster I had first believed him to be, and I was marching into battle in company with an enemy. Perhaps I was letting my feelings get the better of me. Whatever they were. Not pity; the creature had certainly got that wrong. One couldn’t pity a person like Cathal. He intrigued me. I had never met anyone who was so much an outsider. It seemed to me he worked against himself, unable to fit in, therefore making a point of shifting himself still further beyond the rules of us ordinary folk. And yet there was a profound unhappiness in him. If being odd, eccentric and unpredictable was his choice, it wasn’t one he made gladly. I would swear that what he wanted above all was to fit in somewhere—to belong. Perhaps, at Inis Eala, he had found a place where that was possible. Johnny had done Cathal no favors by bringing him to Sevenwaters. No doubt the man wished he’d never clapped eyes on me.

In the end, I told him everything as we packed up our camp after a quick breakfast. A strange visitor, a cryptic warning, an offer of help if certain conditions were met.

“So I said no,” I told him. “I said I trusted you to find the way for me.”

Cathal had been silent for most of my lengthy recounting; he stayed silent now, concentrating on fastening the straps around his pack.

“Maybe that was foolish,” I said as I adjusted Becan’s position in the sling. It was day. The sun could not be seen, but a hazy light filled the forest around us and beyond the latticed branches of the tall trees the sky was golden. In my dry clothes, with my cloak over the top, I was comfortably warm at last. I could feel my courage coming back.

“You should have woken me,” Cathal said. “What if the creature had attacked you? That’s the point of my being here, to protect you.”

“You looked tired. I wanted you to get some sleep. And it didn’t attack me. As things turned out, if you’d been awake it probably wouldn’t have spoken to me. It tried to convince me you were a danger. Scum, I think that was the word used.”

“Ah, well,” Cathal said, “I’ve been called worse before. As for the way, we’ll find it together. Are you ready?” He reached out a hand to me, and I saw a rare expression on his face, a sweet, uncomplicated smile that was gone almost before it appeared.

“I’m ready,” I said, and we walked on together.

The forest was quiet, but it was not an empty stillness today. Under every great mossy tree, in every small depression of the land, around each rocky outcrop there was a sense of anticipation. I felt eyes on us from everywhere. They were waiting for us; they were watching us. I walked with my skin in goose bumps, reminding myself to keep my breathing steady. Cathal set the pace; I kept up. My legs began to hurt, but I did not complain.

After what felt like a full morning’s walking, the spaces between the trees became gradually wider, the trees themselves more slender, younger, the light brighter. Still that haze was over everything, a golden shimmer that made it hard to see far ahead. We emerged from the forest onto a grassy hillside that sloped away down, the ground vanishing into the brightness. Nothing could be seen of the landscape; there was only the shining uncertainty of the haze.

We paused, side by side, peering ahead into the obscurity.

“I wonder if it will clear, as a mist might,” Cathal murmured. “We’d best stop here and see if the conditions change. I’m not happy about heading on into that. Maybe there’s another way.”

The thought of going back into the forest to search for a different path was daunting. I had been happy to step out of its dim expanses, relieved to lose the weight of those unseen eyes following us as we passed. “All right,” I said, since there really was no choice.

We sat in silence a while, passing Cathal’s water-skin between us. Our eyes met as the vessel changed hands, acknowledging that by the end of today it would be empty. Eventually I thought that in one area the misty shroud before us was a little less dense. White stones were appearing in the grass, arranged in threes and fives and sevens: a pathway. I could see perhaps twelve paces ahead. “I think we can go on,” I said. “It looks as though someone has left markers for us.”

We moved down the hillside into the brightness, following the narrow pathway. It was becoming quite clear that if we were to advance further into this realm, it would be done according to someone else’s rules. The dazzling veil retreated just far enough for us to keep going, but not to see what lay around us. It had been much the same crossing the river, when the way ahead had been revealed while the bank behind us was curtained. I didn’t like it, and I could see Cathal felt the same way. There was a tightness about his jaw that told me he would far rather be finding his own path. Very possibly we were being led straight into some kind of trap. In the sling, Becan slumbered peacefully. His profound trust filled me with unease.

The ground leveled. Around our feet, now, plants grew between the stones, low, green-gray, aromatic. The place smelled like an herb garden. The scent brought a vivid memory of myself as a young girl, in the kitchen at Sevenwaters with Mother, learning the best way to make vegetable broth: Mother’s cloud of red hair shining in a ray of sun from the window; well-scoured pots and pans gleaming on their hooks; my eyes watering as I chopped onions. Bunches of dried herbs were hanging overhead, rosemary, lavender, thyme, and a selection of fresh leaves lay on the chopping block before me.
Good, Clodagh
, said my mother, and my heart warmed.
You have a real flair for this.

I stumbled on a rock, blinking back tears. The haze had dimmed slightly and Cathal had picked up his pace, striding along ahead of me. He forgot how much shorter my legs were than his. I scurried after him, one arm curved around Becan.

The smell grew stronger. It filled my nostrils, my throat, my lungs. My head began to swim. I was falling behind again. My legs felt suddenly weak; my body demanded rest. Every part of me protested:
too far, too fast, too long . . . Sit down . . . Lie down . . . Sleep . . .

Up ahead, Cathal staggered. He took two more paces, then dropped to one knee, a hand to his brow. His cloak dragged on the ground, brushing the low plants and releasing a still more powerful wave of that soporific aroma. I heard his voice as if in a dream.

“Clodagh? Clodagh, where are you?”

It seemed an immense effort to answer him. “Here,” I called, but my voice came out as a murmur, for I could not fill my lungs with air. Something weighed me down. Something pressed on my eyelids; I could not keep them open. Becan was so heavy . . . If I untied the sling I could put him down for a while. I must rest . . .

I crouched to do it, noting idly that here the white stones were set in a little spiral with a tiny plant in the middle, a variety of thyme perhaps, with gray-green leaves and miniature bunches of delicate pink flowerets. It was so warm here . . . Maybe I would take off my cloak, spread it out and lie down awhile . . . In such a lovely place, surely I would have good dreams.

“Clodagh!” A hand on my arm, gripping so hard it made me wince. Cathal was kneeling beside me. I looked up. His cloaked form wavered before my eyes, now that of a man, now that of some other creature, one that was surely more foe than friend.

“Clodagh, get up! Come on!” He gave me a shake. When I did not respond he slapped me across the cheek, hard.

On top of yesterday’s cuts, it was cruel. I whimpered, crouching low and trying to shield the baby.