The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (48 page)

She forced a smile, bracing her shoulders. The women still looked askance at her, but that did not matter when she ached for him like this, in her marrow. ‘
Content
is a fine sentiment, but really …’ She glanced over his shoulder to a stern-faced Ruarc directing Mellan and Ardal to store their swords and shields.

Cahir smiled, tired but completely sure of himself. ‘I suppose it isn’t a time to feel happy.’ He kissed her ear, murmuring, ‘But if I could take you to my bed for a moon, that might do it.’

When she looked up his eyes were burning, intense beneath his black brows, and she knew her own matched them. They had been consumed in the forest, but the miracle was there was no end to that fire; it came alive again each day, and each night when they exhausted themselves among the bed-furs. She could not stop the heat in her face, and he laughed. ‘My little wildcat,’ he whispered, his full mouth brimming with a tangible excitement.

‘I couldn’t keep you there for a moon,’ she said hoarsely, stepping back. ‘There’s nothing you want more than to ride to battle; I can see it in your face.’

He merely grinned, and she was almost suffocated by a rush of desire, for with love came the panicked urge to keep him close. She opened her mouth to tell him about her own task, and then changed her mind when she remembered Darine’s whisper in the salty darkness of her hut.
Saor is very dangerous
. That was not what he needed to hear.

She closed her eyes, tasted his mouth one last time and pushed him away with a light, playful hand. ‘Go now, so you can come back to me sooner.’

With a new determination, Minna headed straight for Brónach’s house. The old healer was avoiding her so assiduously she made no appearance for Beltaine, but the time for that had ended.

When there was no answer to her soft query, she lifted the hide and stepped inside. Brónach was there, rigidly staring into the coals of the fire, a blanket around her shoulders. ‘This is my house,’ she said clearly, without turning her grey head. ‘It is still my domain.’

Now she saw her properly, Minna was appalled. In the nearly two moons they had been travelling, Brónach had become bowed and bony, her flesh almost eaten away, desiccated. Her hands on the chair arms were like claws, stained green, brown and purple in the creases of her wrists and fingers and around her long nails.

‘Lady Brónach.’ She had to clear her throat. ‘I regret to intrude, but I must speak with you.’

‘Speak with me?’ Brónach’s voice was toneless, her eyes on the fire. ‘Since when did you wish to speak with me?’

Minna sat on the hearth-bench, for once picking her words carefully. ‘I can understand if you are disconcerted by all the change that has occurred.’ That received a bitter snort. ‘However, I value your insights, and hope I can learn from you.’

Brónach winced as she rested her head on the chair, gazing up at the roof. Her eyes were feverish, the whites red-veined. ‘You think yourself so wise, girl – as all the young do. Yet you still don’t know what you have done.’

‘I never sought to disrespect you.’

An explosion of mirth led to a fit of coughing. The cough was loose and full of phlegm, and, with a swift glance, Minna saw how the old woman’s hands shook. ‘I am not here to supplant you,’ she said, praying for patience. ‘You have the age and wisdom I do not – you are a princess of Dalriada.’ She knew better than to reveal what she had discovered of her own ancestry on the mountain. ‘Our skills combined make us better able to serve these people. Surely you must see that.’

The opening wavered there, a chance for surrender and grace. Brónach’s lip merely curled. ‘These are pretty words that mean little. As little as my years of pain and effort mean to the gods!’

‘You are a good healer,’ Minna persisted.

‘Am I?’ Brónach raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘When I cannot even look children in the eye, while you call forth their adoration?’

Minna sighed inside and rested her chin on her hands. ‘Lady Brónach, in the north a wise-woman told me of a preparation called
saor
.’

Something flickered over the old woman’s face and was gone.

‘It is an old concoction of six herbs. The woman said the
saor
loosens the bindings of the body to enable a spirit to travel into the Otherworld.’ Brónach had gone still, her eyes masked. ‘I know most of the ingredients, but not all.’

‘You seem to glean what you need from the very air.’

‘Sometimes,’ Minna agreed carefully. ‘But I think … when I want something for myself it is harder.’ She sat straight, forcing strength into her voice. ‘If you help me, perhaps we can find it again.’

The old woman looked up to the sprigs of herbs on her rafters. ‘
Saor
,’ she repeated, and her voice wavered. ‘I could never find it. There are too many plants …’

Minna did not betray surprise. ‘It might be that one herb-woman cannot discover its secrets alone, that for some reason we must work together.’

Brónach smoothed her sparse brows with her fingers, thinking. ‘You dangle this …
saor
… to placate me.’

‘No.’ Minna held her eyes. ‘I don’t. Work with me, and see how it can be.’

‘And if I say no? What if I set myself against you?’

Brónach was testing her, but she had been tested by many these past months. She stood as proudly as she could manage, making the old woman look up. ‘Lady, I am sure you’ve heard I am the king’s
lennan
now. I share his heart, his bed and his confidence. He will pursue this course against the Romans, and he has his warriors’ backing. It might not be wise to set yourself against us.’ She couldn’t believe how calmly she spoke, but she felt strong here in this place of healing, and suddenly she knew. Rhiann once lived here, on this very spot. She sensed it in the vibration of the air, like a low heartbeat, coming up through the earth.

Their eyes locked, and it was not Minna’s that at last fell. ‘You leave me little choice, Roman girl. But at any rate I am intrigued by this
saor
.’

You want it
, Minna thought fiercely.
You could never walk away without knowing what it is.

‘Why do you do this?’ Brónach suddenly cocked her head. ‘I took you from your sickbed and forced you to look into the pool. Why don’t you hate me for it?’

Minna considered that. ‘I understand you were not in your right mind. And I saw in that pool what I desperately needed to see. That vision brought me to love, and gave Cahir the alliance with the Picts.’ She smiled calmly. ‘Perhaps I should be thanking you.’

Brónach said nothing for a moment, then snorted, her mouth a grim curve. ‘You have learned more of king-craft than I thought. And because of that, I will help you. Too much sunny temper would only irritate me – if you’ve gained some bite we might get along.’

Minna smiled to herself, opening a pouch at her waist and unrolling the withered leaves she had taken from Darine.

Brónach only had one of Darine’s three plants in her stores, for they were badly depleted after the long dark. From speaking to the grandmothers crouched by their fires – those few crones in the dun much older than Brónach – they found a possible fourth, once used for toothaches and flavouring old meat. When Minna crushed the leaves and smelled them something chimed in her, and her eyes met Brónach’s over the hearth-fire. The old healer nodded and folded the plant into her pouch.

For the remaining plants, they had to roam outside the dun to the sheltered slopes and hidden glens where the rarer herbs were sprouting undisturbed from the cold earth. The people left them alone. Being seen in serious conversation with the king’s aunt only enriched Minna’s sudden elevation, and the awe and discomfort in people’s eyes was now turning to respect.

Brónach’s manner to Minna remained brisk – but in relation to the task itself she revealed a brutal hunger. She pushed her wasted legs up hills and deep into the woods, and hunched over the drying and grinding late in the night.

Once they had narrowed their choice to eight possible plants, they began brewing decoctions of seeds, roots and leaves in differing combinations, while Minna made notes of their trials in Latin.

They tried drying, fermenting, boiling swiftly, steeping slowly, and different parts of the plants mixed with sap, vinegar, wine or honey to release their pungency. Sometimes, sitting quietly in the steam, Minna felt a strong instinct that something was right, and sometimes she did not.

‘We’ll have to test this,’ she said one day, of a dubious-looking brown liquid. ‘It should be me – I am the youngest and have the stronger body.’

‘It should be me,’ Brónach snapped. She was exhausted and drawn, grey-faced. ‘I am old, and will die soon anyway.’

‘You have been dosing yourself for years with different things,’ Minna protested. ‘They will have less effect on you.’ In the end they were too tired to argue, so both tried it.

The testing consisted of small amounts of each herb before bed. Minna thought that if she received a vivid dream of any kind, then the herb was doing something to the bond between her spirit and body. Brónach, who despite Minna’s protests hardly slept, insisted they both try it during the day. ‘It should make you feel as if the world has shifted: a little sleepy, slow and light-headed, as though the outline of your body is blurred.’

As the days unfolded, they discarded some combinations and refined others. They inflicted upon themselves nausea, retching, headaches, blurred vision, racing pulses, sleepiness and dry tongue. Nothing was severe, but it was taxing, and Minna saw how it was leaching the last dregs of Brónach’s health. However, the old woman would not let her bear the brunt of the testing. With that feverish light in her eyes, she only drove herself harder.

Minna lay in bed at night too agitated to sleep, stroking her fingers through Orla and Finola’s hair as they curled into her side, staring at the roof. She asked for something to guide her, but would only wake unbearably thirsty, a lump of loneliness in her throat.

By the seventh night they had six different draughts ready, one of each herb. Minna sat before Brónach’s fire with a line of glass flasks that were in turn lurid green, straw-hued, murky, or red-tinged. Behind her, Brónach was slumped on cushions against the bench, coughing. They had both reached the limits of their energy. The old woman’s skin was papery and white, every breath laboured. Her grey hair had fallen from its braids, and her robes were stained by plant juice and dirt.

‘I feel these are them,’ Minna murmured, rubbing the small of her back.

The effect on Brónach was instant. ‘How do you know?’

Minna couldn’t explain. When she passed her palms over a bottle it was like a string plucked on a harp, vibrating her hand, and together the six flasks sent a perfect, harmonic chord into her heart. ‘It just feels right,’ she said defensively. Their tempers were strung out now, along with their bodies.

‘I have no more ideas, anyway,’ Brónach whispered, her gaze boring into the vials. ‘That is all I have ever heard about.’

‘Well, I am sure of it.’

‘Then let us try it now.’ Brónach’s hand reached out, shaking with tremors.

Minna instinctively blocked her. ‘No, we are both exhausted; we’re not thinking straight.’

‘We don’t need to think—’

‘Yes, we do! The wise-woman Darine told me that it wasn’t just about finding the
saor
. The taking of it is dangerous.’ She spread her hands. ‘I feel … inside … that we have to take the time to prepare. Sit quietly, breathe, call upon the goddesses.’ Her eye strayed to the line of little figurines. ‘Surely
you
must see that. We have to be calm and aware, open, ready—’

‘I am ready! And you will make
me
wait?’ Brónach dragged herself up by the hearth-bench, wheezing. She pointed a long, bony finger at Minna. ‘Do you have any idea,’ she hissed, ‘how hard I worked for all that you have gained so easily? The nights I fasted and went without sleep, dosing myself with any plant to try and see in the sacred pool, as my ancestresses did.’ She lifted her hands, twisted talons. ‘I brought this age on myself by pushing so hard. I nearly died from cold and lack of food, because I wanted to discover all the secrets of the old ways. I have spent my whole life searching for them, and all I get is fragments, glimpses!’ She swung to her workbench, raking fingers through her grey hair. ‘I nearly made it through the veil so many times. I was so close … I heard them … saw their faces.’ She stopped, sucked in a grating breath. ‘I need to see more now.
I must
.’

‘And you will, but not like this.’ Minna staggered to her feet. ‘It is too dangerous.’

She heard the indrawn breath, and saw Brónach tense. Then the old woman whirled around and Minna was stunned to see, after all these careful days, every mask stripped from her wasted face. ‘What right do you have to command me? You, a foreigner, an ignorant, naïve nothing of a girl who gains visions without even trying, who
senses
the healing ways that I fought for years to unravel?’ She strode to Minna and gripped her chin. ‘And now you will keep me from what I have sought?’

Bitterness flooded into Minna from her hand: the pain of a shrivelled womb; the trap of an austere life, offering neither escape nor belonging; the desperation to seek another way, though by then it was too late, for the bitterness had formed a dank prison too thick for vision to penetrate.

‘I’m not trying to keep you from anything except death!’ She twisted herself free and rubbed her aching jaw.

‘You are, you are!’ The last sense slipped from Brónach’s eyes, and they became wild and glazed. ‘You are trying to steal what is mine, my glory, my triumph, as you have stolen everything!’

‘This is not about glory; it’s about helping people—’

‘
I will not let you take this from me as well
!’

The hatred almost flung Minna back against the wall. Had she been too preoccupied to see this unravelling before her very eyes?

Brónach stiffened at her expression. ‘Oh Goddess … you
pity
me now?
You?
’ A bowl came to hand and, without warning, she threw it across the room so it shattered on the hearth, sending shards flying up. ‘I will not allow this! Get out of my house! Get out!’