Warrior's Daughter (15 page)

I was cursed, and I would die. Seven days it takes, for the poet’s curse to bring its victim to death. My name would be tainted with their evil lies, Cuchulainn’s line ended in shame.

It was Fin roused me, though he half-deafened me in the doing. I saw a rabbit once, brought in by a hound, that was paralyzed with fear. You would have thought its spine was broken, but no. Yet it lay in the hunter’s hands, unmoving, while he wrung its neck.

I was that rabbit, until Fin put his beak into my ear and shrieked. It flung me off the ground, and I realized that if I could jump so violently at a loud noise, then I was not paralyzed after all. Feeling returned to my limbs. The pain in my cheek flared. Thought returned.

“They’ll have the whole of Emain Macha at the gate to witness my downfall,” I muttered. I got to my feet, shaky still with shock, and made my way back to the road.

It didn’t take me long to find what I sought. I had to crouch now to ease through the little door in the wall, but I did so in privacy, for no sentry was there to discover my plight. Once inside the embankment, I put my head down and ran, Fin’s heavy flight leading the way.

“Everybody out.”

One hand over my cut cheek, I barged into my room and sent the two startled waiting women hurrying toward the door.

“Find Roisin,” I called to their retreating backs. “Send her to me at once.”

It was not long before she strode into the room, as bracing as a stiff wind off the sea. I have no doubt Roisin saved my life that day, simply by being who she is. Poor old Tullia would have wept over me as one already in the grave and begun a tender deathwatch. But Roisin was all angry defiance. In her presence, the warrior within me began to stir.

“Skies on fire, what happened to you!” she demanded, thinking only of my cut cheek. She pulled my hand away, gave the wound a quick once-over. “I know Cathbad is away, but there must be another druid here wise in healing. I’ll find someone.”

She was almost gone before my mind caught up with her.

“Wait, Roisin.” Cathbad I would trust—not because I was entitled to his personal care as Conchobor’s wife, but because of the kindness he had shown me from childhood. But the others...Abhartach’s lies would have spread through Emain with the speed of all gossip. And the poets were, after all, akin to the druids, brothers on different branches of the same tree of knowledge.

“I don’t want anyone to know I am here,” I said.

Bless her heart, she didn’t miss a beat.

“I’ll get water and bandaging,” she said briskly, then she paused once more in the doorway. “Luaine, was anyone here besides Ana and Grian when you came?”

“No.”

“I think I’d best bring them back, don’t you? Their mouths run faster than your fathers’ horses.”

I don’t know what passed between Roisin and the other women, but when they returned with her, burdened with kettles of water and trays of food, they kept their lips pressed shut and their eyes averted. They put down their loads and with a single furtive glance at Roisin, scuttled away.

“I don’t think we need worry about them now, my lady. I put the very fear of the Morrigu into them!”

She turned her attention to my face then, lighting several lamps and fussing with their placement while I tried to put words
to the enormity of the disaster that had befallen me. The cut was the least of my worries. Roisin put a fingertip to my lips.

“First things first. Let me tend to this. Then you have a little something to boost your strength, and you can tell me the whole tale.”

The shard was still embedded in my cheek. Roisin ripped one of Conchobor’s good linen sheets into strips, and gave me a pad to press against my cheek and stem the bleeding as she removed it.

As it turned out, there was little bleeding to worry about.

“The cut is not deep,” she pronounced, relief escaping in a sigh. “The shard is quite small, after all.” She looked at the object in her hand. “Looks like a piece of crockery, or...” A frown creased her forehead as she moved the shard into the lamplight. “There’s something dark along the edge here. Not dried blood, I don’t think.”

A tendril of fear, the caress of a cold finger, brushed the pit of my stomach.

“Wrap it up, Roisin, and keep it for now. And wash the cut well, however shallow it is. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

To be truthful, the pain took me by surprise. How could a shallow cut, not much worse than I had given myself more than once with a kitchen knife, burn so ferociously? The first touch of water reawakened the sensation of hot stingers drilling into my flesh. I gritted my teeth and tried to keep silent, wanting to hide my suffering from Roisin.

Suffering, I called it. I hadn’t even scratched the surface of pain.

The angry flush that had appeared on Roisin’s cheeks at the first mention of the “boon” the brothers demanded of me spread as
I talked, so that by the end of my tale she was red as a turkey wattle.

“It all happened so fast,” I concluded, my throat suddenly thick with tears. “I don’t know what I did wrong.” If I had only been more experienced, more clever, surely I would have found a way to turn aside their wrath.

“What
you
did wrong!” Roisin fair exploded. “The answer to that is easily told: Not one single thing!” The force of her indignation lifted her onto her feet where she stood, fists clenched, black eyes snapping. “It is those vicious, ill-begotten wolves who have done wrong, and not you!”

Slowly the truth of Roisin’s words sank into my heart. I might be cursed, but I did not have to accept the blame for it.

“The real question,” I said slowly, “is what to do now.” I felt like a trapped badger, shut into my room with all of Emain waiting to watch the show.

The fire in her eyes faded to warm concern. “How do you feel now, Luaine? Are you well?”

I considered. My cheek hurt unceasingly, but it grumbled rather than screamed now that the dressing was done. I did not feel ill or even particularly weak. On the heels of that realization came an image that filled me with longing: a long crescent of beach, a rolling green plain, a house that looked out over both. And I knew Roisin was seeing the same place.

“Let’s go home.”

We arrived near dusk under an overcast sky that promised rain after all. My cheek hurt fiercely—each thud of the horse’s hooves bringing a jolt of fresh pain—but I wasn’t thinking of that now.
I was looking at Dun Dealgan—at what was left of Dun Dealgan—and wondering if it was even habitable.

It had been torched. The whole south side was burned away, leaving a yawning hole and blackened timbers. Close to half the thatch had gone up. No doubt the house had been looted before they set the fire. Who had been caught there, I wondered, and fallen to Maeve’s men?

We soon discovered that at least some remained, and that while the house had been abandoned, Dun Dealgan itself had not. We were in my room, in fact, relieved to find that the north of the house, though redolent with smoke, was undamaged, when a hesitant voice called out.

“Lady Luaine?” It was the stableboy, who had recognized my horse in the yard and come looking for me. His awed manner made it plain the king’s message about our wedding had arrived. “I’ll see to your horses and fetch someone for you,” he blurted out and promptly disappeared.

Roisin was busy making up my bed. The place had indeed been looted but apparently in a hurry, for they had taken only the jewelry chests and small valuables and not bothered with linens or clothing. “Well, at least we will eat tonight,” she said, shaking out the blankets with brisk precision. “But tomorrow, Luaine, we should go to my father’s home. My family will welcome you, and small though it is, it is cheerier than this place.”

I did not say it, but I couldn’t see what need I had for cheer. I had, after all, come home to die. As if to remind me of that fact, my cheek flared once more, and I suddenly felt ill and shivery. It has started, I thought, and my hand flew to my face,
searching for the first signs of the blemishes. It found none, but I discovered then that my skin radiated heat.

By the time Berach hurried in, I had crawled under the covers and was content to let Roisin speak with him. And from him we learned a thing that both grieved and moved me.

“Cuchulainn made it clear that we were to save the people, not the house,” he apologized. “It angered me to let them in while we had any men standing, but fighting to the last would not have changed the outcome. As it is, we were able to get almost everyone out and safely into the countryside.” All but two: Eirnin, who had died only the day before, worn out at last from illness and old age, and Tullia, who would not leave even at the point of a sword and had finally been carried bodily, cursing and struggling, from the grounds. “She snuck away that night and made her way back,” marveled Berach. “The next day Maeve’s army reached Dun Dealgan. We were putting up what resistance we could when I saw Tullia come flying out from the back kitchen, screaming like a madwoman, with a joint cleaver in each hand. And by my head she made a brave end, sinking one into the chest of a fellow who was like to twice her height before they cut her down.”

Old Tullia. What had made her do such a thing, and her a slave?

I had not been sure how to explain our sudden arrival. Berach seemed to assume I had simply come to check on my holdings, but could not fathom that we had traveled alone. “Where is the Lady Luaine’s retinue?” he asked Roisin. “Surely the Queen travels with an honor guard?” I made a sudden decision and sat up in the bed to reveal my hurt cheek. Berach’s eyes widened, but he said nothing.

“The king is in Tara, Berach, and I have learned that I have enemies in Emain. I came here seeking protection, until...” Until Conchobor returns, I implied, but I did not imagine even the king could help me now. I blessed the stars that had put Berach in charge of Dun Dealgan. If there was loyalty to be had among my father’s men, it would be here.

The arms master’s face grew grim and cold. If he had questions, he kept them to himself.

“You will be safe here, my lady. I pledge my life on it.” The task before him now clear, Berach strode from the room without another word.

I would not be safe. There was no place now that was safe for me. But I would at least be undisturbed.

The night and then the day passed and still there were no blemishes. However, the cut on my cheek, far from improving, had become a swollen fiery torment, and the fever that gripped me was impossible to hide from Roisin. Nor could she hide her dismay from me.

“I don’t understand,” she said. The wet cloth she laid on my head eased the pounding in my temples, but even that light pressure, where it lay on the swelling by my left eye, heightened the throb in my cheek. “A cut this size should not cause such pain.”

I had come to my own conclusion about that. “I think this must be the curse, Roisin. Not three blemishes—only this one.”

She rose to her feet. “Curse or not, you need better tending than I can give you. There must be someone here wise in healing. I’ll ask Berach.”

It was Tullia who had treated my childhood scrapes and illnesses.
But Roisin was right; there must be others. I didn’t give a wise woman’s herbals any odds at all against a poet’s curse, but Roisin felt she had to try, and it would do no harm.

In fact it helped, a little. At least the willow tea brought the fever down a bit and helped me sleep. But the old woman’s poultice, which Roisin changed religiously three times that night, didn’t touch the infection that had taken hold. By morning I could smell that it had gone bad, and the tears that welled up in Roisin’s dark eyes as she held up the lamp to look only confirmed what I already knew.

“Take the lamp away; it hurts my eyes,” I said. “There’s nothing more to be done, or said.” I closed my eyes, trying to ride out the pain that stabbed deep in my face when I spoke or moved my head. I drifted. I was beginning to be resigned to the thought of death, to see it, in fact, as a welcome relief from this waking nightmare. If death was inevitable, I thought, then let it come swiftly.

“I only wish the king could know the truth about me, Roisin. That my good name could be protected.”

“Will he be back yet, Luaine?” she asked.

I tried to count the days. Fever and pain make it hard to think.

“No, I don’t think so. But would he believe...” My eyes flew open.

“Fintan. Roisin, get Fintan. He saw everything. He will find Cathbad and tell him the true tale.”

I had tried to leave Fin at Emain Macha, knowing I would not be fit to care for him. But he would not stay, flapping his black wings all the way to Dun Dealgan beside us. Now he was off
again, bearing my message, and I had only to endure until the end. I thought with envy now of my mother’s quick death and guessed it would not be long before I sought out the kindness of the knife myself.

Someone was groaning, a terrible sound, the voice thin like a child’s and jagged with despair. It frightened me, and I wished Roisin would see to whoever it was and quiet them.

“Luaine, wake up.”

I started, saw a monstrous outline before me, and realized at the same time that it was myself making that fearful noise. I clamped my teeth down hard, and the voice died in my throat.

“Who is it?”

The lamps flared up, and I saw it was no monster but a tall man who stood before me—a man with a raven on his shoulder.

“Cathbad?”

“No.” He eased his long legs down beside my low bed so I could see him better. A young man with fair hair pulled straight back rather than hanging down, a pleasant, bright face free of beard or mustache and eyes that seemed to look right into my soul. “I am Geanann, Cathbad’s son. He is unable to come to you, but has sent me in his stead. I am not so powerful a druid as he, of course,” and here he smiled, almost apologetically, “but my healing arts are stronger. I have come to see what might be done for you.” He leaned over me, and with one smooth gesture eased me onto my side so that my cheek lay exposed to his sight. I tensed—I could not bear, now, the least touch upon it—but
he did not try. For a long moment he just looked, not seeming to notice the smell of rot that must have assailed him.