The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (29 page)

I would never betray him.
Minna tasted that shocking rush of feeling, kneeling up on the covers. The exhaustion and aches were gone, washed from her by tears, and in their place her blood sang. ‘No one told me anything, I swear. I was an eagle in the dream and I flew over Alba, and then the eagle cried those words to the sky.’

His fists clenched. ‘If this is a joke, death is its price – even for you.’

Curiously, Minna was utterly unafraid, seized by the absurd urge to reach out and smooth that pain from his brow. ‘I would accept death if I dishonoured you,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘but I have not, whatever this means.’

After a long moment, Cahir groped blindly for the bench and sank to it. ‘So it has come. The call was a whisper, now it is a roar.’ His shoulders rose and fell in a great sigh of surrender. ‘The sign of the prophecy has come, and I cannot hide from it any longer.
All the gods help me
.’

Chapter 26

M
inna drew the blanket around her and knelt by Cahir’s side. He was surprised at her boldness, but then saw that her bones had somehow shifted in the firelight, her eyes holding the shimmer of the pool. She looked older, as if something dark and pained had been bled from her and had changed her.

Her gaze was forceful. ‘My lord, what is this … prophecy, you called it?’ When he hesitated, she rushed on, ‘This is about me as well.’

So he told her. It was passed from Rhiann to her nephew King Gabran, and thence gifted from king to king’s son. Only his father knew it, and he only told Cahir. But Cahir’s throat closed up at the rest, and he could not explain the tangle of emotion that surrounded these lines of old poetry.

How his father had scorned them, and the boy Cahir followed his lead even though he felt inexplicably ashamed. How as he grew his rational mind argued it was just a story, while his heart continued to wonder and yearn. And then when the dreams came he pushed them aside, thought himself mad, while longing and fearing for it all to be true.

And now, at last, the promised sign had come.

For the prophecy
itself
was the sign it foretold, issuing from the throat of a stranger who could not know it; drawn out by the waters of a sacred pool. It was undeniable.

He made Minna tell him exactly what she saw, and when she’d finished he could not sit still any longer. ‘
They
sent this dream, these words, as they sent all others – my ancestors Eremon, Conaire, Rhiann. They cry out to me: I, their son, who have been so wilfully deaf and blind!’

She pulled the blanket closer about her shoulders. Draughts made the fire flicker, reflecting in her eyes. ‘But I don’t understand who the red-crests are.’

Pacing, Cahir placed a hand on the shelf by the door, staring into nothing. ‘The red-crests are the Romans, Minna, named because long ago they wore scarlet crests on their helmets, though no more. After they defeated Eremon they withdrew for a time, but they always came back to Alba: back and forth, always hungry for our land, our blood. Then my grandfather gave them land for their outposts, and my father awarded them passage through our seas, signing the treaties that have become my shackles.’ He sighed heavily. ‘The Roman-kind used to march north with armies: now they creep with taxes, meting out secret deaths to those who resist. So the Empire still rolls closer, only in a different guise.’

‘But my brother said there have been attacks on the Wall.’

He turned, his smile bitter. ‘Others strike at them: the Picts, even some Erin kings. But I have not.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘These have been tied, and I have done nothing.’

What Minna said next stopped him in his tracks. ‘But what
is
the prophecy asking?’

Cahir could only stare at her.

The druids said that when a door opened on the Otherworld, mortals were touched with the light that spilled through. And so this girl’s water eyes revealed not innocence, or even a slave’s fear, but pools of
sight
shining amid her black hair, filled with a transcendence he had rarely seen even in a druid’s face. His last reservations disintegrated, and he entirely forgot who she was.

‘The prophecy foretold that our line would free Alba of Rome. It was not accomplished at the Hill of a Thousand Spears – the story was not complete because it is
my
fate to fulfil it.’ The words sounded like someone else’s, as if Cahir were waking from a dream. It could not be true.
It was true.

‘No!’

‘No? But a summons has come I cannot ignore.
Raise the boar above you.
The war banner.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Ruarc was right after all, damn him.’

Minna was hardly listening now, as if caught by something in the shadows. When her eyes glazed over a superstitious shiver ran up his neck. ‘You must follow the flight of the eagle,’ she said quietly.

The shiver turned to a thrill. Of course! He came back to the fire. ‘From what I can make out, that path leads far north and east – into Pictish lands.’ He gazed about the firelit walls, as if he could penetrate them with a clear gaze. ‘And why there?’ he murmured feverishly. There must be something … he dared to hope … could it be that there, at last, he would find an escape from shame, from bitterness? In answer his heart gave a bound. Eremon was bold as well as wise, old Finn had said. Cahir must be even bolder.

‘The Picts …’ Her cheeks paled, as if she were only now waking. ‘But it’s dangerous!’

‘And what have I got to lose?’

‘Well … your life!’

He shook his head bleakly. ‘No, Minna, it isn’t a life.’ He squatted down. ‘The druids train us to recognize signs. I am a king, and I’ve been called by the king of birds to a valley with a rowan tree, in the east. So
some
answer must lie there for me.’
And my atonement, my release
, he added fervently to himself, with a pang of terrible yearning. If that were so, nothing would hold him back.

Minna’s mind ran swiftly ahead. ‘Then I must go, too.’

When he frowned, she burst out, ‘Don’t deny me this, I beg you! I also need to find a reason. The reason … for all this. Some peace, from the dreams.
Please
.’

Cahir sat on the floor beside her, crooking his arms around his knees. For a moment by the fire they were just two young people seeking answers to the restlessness inside them. ‘You have been ill,’ he said slowly. ‘As a king I owe you my protection – and my heart tells me there is no peace on this absurd journey, only danger. But I am unsure of finding my way without you, since you saw the eagle’s flight.’ He sighed, raising a brow. ‘It is too great a risk for you.’

‘I don’t care.’ Her voice was bleak. ‘I have no life here. I am a slave.’

He was shocked to glimpse the same despair in her he felt in his own heart, every day. An unconscious sense of kinship overcame him in a rush. ‘We are both slaves in our own ways, perhaps; I to my dead father, you to my wife.’

And if I break my shackles,
he found himself thinking, surprised at his own mind,
can I deny you the breaking of yours
?

The room seemed to hold its breath, the flames steady, the wind dying away. At last Cahir nodded. ‘So be it.’ The light in her eyes flared, penetrating him. ‘I cannot refuse anyone the absolution I myself need.’

He got up, his blood already beginning to race. It was all going to change, at last. ‘Minna,’ he said hoarsely, after a moment. ‘Do you know what my name means?’

She hesitated. ‘How could I?’

‘Cahir means battle-lord. Lately I’ve wondered if my father named me that in jest, for he wanted peace with the Romans at any price.’ He turned to her, the fire warm on his cheek, and spoke softly. ‘So it seems I’m supposed to wake up.’

Her fine jaw was outlined by the flames, and her eyes were glowing. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I think I am to wake up, too.’

Chapter 27

C
ahir, King of Dalriada watched dawn from the hill, drawing the prickling cold air deep into his throat. The sheltered hollows of the slopes were covered with green shoots, and catkins swung on the hazel trees. Pockets of snow still clung to the far mountains to the north, turning rose in the rising sun.

He filled his lungs again, exhilarated. His soul was already stretching its wings like a bird taking flight, following those who called to him across the sky. He did not know what revelation waited for him: after all, the cold facts of too few warriors and too many enemies were still the same. But he would be released from indecision and inaction, at least. He laughed to himself exultantly, like a boy. How his father would frown at such folly.

But Cahir could not stop this now even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to. He longed to be free. He needed to glimpse a life where he was not the failed king and lackey of the Romans.

He would be something more. He would be himself.

When he came back to the hut Minna was standing at his stallion’s shoulder, tentatively stroking his arched neck. In the breeze her unbound hair mingled with his black mane, the colours indistinguishable, and her fearful posture had straightened into a grace Cahir sensed with his flesh, rather than his mind. She looked as if she belonged here beneath the spreading oak tree.

Cahir was taken by another stab of desire in his groin, that odd pull towards her, and he sternly curbed it. There were gulfs between them: he was a king and if she wasn’t a slave then she was an enigma, an intrigue, a … he did not know what she was. But he would not make her afraid for something passing, as all desire was. He needed her to get what he wanted. That sounded cooler, better.

She turned when his foot cracked a twig, blood rushing her cheeks. He did not know how he could have once thought her face bony. In the spring sunlight the lines seemed pure and fine now amid her streaming hair, the shape a heart.

‘I want to set off in two days.’ Cahir forced a smile, his pulse throbbing. ‘If I’m going to be damned I should get started as soon as possible.’

She was unsure of him again. They had shared something impossible in the dark, the flames leaping amid the shadows, painting dreams on the walls. But now day had come. ‘So you mean to go north,’ she said quietly. ‘My lord.’ She added the last as an afterthought, but it had disappeared naturally from their conversation the night before, and Cahir was jolted by its return.

‘Of course. I will gather a few men and pick a trail into the mountains.’

She gazed fixedly at the ground. ‘And you will do this because of what I said?’

‘Because of all of it, not just you. Now I see the entire pattern – my pattern.’

Her face changed. ‘And is it not … mine as well?’ The words were deferential, but her eyes flashed fire from under her lashes.

‘Yours as well,’ Cahir said faintly. He wondered if she could see inside him, too; glimpse all his ugliness and guilt. That was not a good thought. ‘Now I’m going back to Dunadd, and I want you to stay here. You should rest two more nights before being out in the cold. I will bring the men back tomorrow. There is enough food.’ He reached to tie his scabbard on the side of his saddle, moving so suddenly that when she tried to step away they bumped against each other. Minna leaped back as if he’d burned her.

Cahir resolutely tightened the thongs. ‘If I gather you firewood and you bar the door, you will not be afraid here on your own?’

Thoughts raced across her pale face. ‘No, I won’t be afraid,’ she said, her voice still hoarse from her fever.

‘And … I trust you will be here when I return.’

She glanced towards the pool, the wind still whispering secrets across it among the overhanging trees. ‘I will have no peace until I find that valley, just as you will not.’ She looked back, spoke formally as if she had caught herself again. ‘My lord, could you ask Keeva to look after the girls as if they were her own and …’ she coloured again, ‘tell them I am sorry to leave them but will be back for them … when I can.’

‘I will tell them,’ he said warmly.

After Cahir rode away Minna was still for a long moment. Then her arms came out and she turned a circle under the oak tree, its branches furred by buds.