Firebrand (11 page)

‘I dunno. Lilith being so nurturing and all. Where did you get these?’ I nodded at the books.

‘The minister.’

‘The priest?’

‘I’ve told you, he’s not a priest, not any more. He’s a
minister
.’

Whatever he called himself, the priest was bearable. He was tall and thin, ascetic and often severe, but kind enough. And he had a pragmatism that appealed to me, since his religion seemed adaptable to his troubled times: even the full-mortals couldn’t decide what their god wanted of them. Priests who called themselves ministers were driving out priests who called themselves priests, and the priests who called themselves priests were either caving in (like this one) or running away. They were fighting over things I couldn’t understand, except that the new priests were keener on sexual continence and a lot less keen on dancing and drinking. As far as I was concerned the whole crowd of them could go to their hell in a handcart, where doubtless there’d be no dancing to bother anyone.

At least this one hadn’t grown fat on the tithes of
his flock, and I found his grey hair fascinating, when there was clearly so much life left in him. And when he remembered to notice Conal, he liked him. Anyone who liked my brother was fine with me, and the man never made the mistake of trying to evangelise me. If I came home to find him sharing a drink and his malleable philosophy with Conal, he would nod to me, and smile in his solemn way, but that was all. I would nod back, and occasionally smile, and get on with something useful. He thought I was brain-addled, but that didn’t bother me.

‘Did you tell him you were teaching me to read?’

‘No.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘I don’t tell anyone anything about you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. What does that say?’ I jabbed a finger at the curled hide cover of one volume, at embossed hieroglyphics I couldn’t interpret yet.

This time it was Conal’s expression that darkened.

‘
Demonologie
,’ he said, his voice cold. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he was angry at me. ‘That’s a book you should read, not one you’d want to. Same with this one:
Malleus Maleficarum
. Let’s not start with those.’

‘Fine.’ I shrugged.

He gave a huffing laugh, as if trying to cheer himself up, and pulled forward a third book. ‘Come on, then. You’ll be glad you did.’

And I was. In the end I was grateful he taught me to read and write. It’s come in more useful than I’d have liked to admit when I was fourteen and already knew
everything about everything. Disappointingly for me, Conal couldn’t leave it there. He tried to teach me politics, and philosophy; he tried to teach me about the modern world, and how the full-mortals had made it, and how and why the Sithe did things so differently.

So he had to teach me ancient history too: how the foremothers had been smart enough to see how things were going between us and the full-mortals; how they’d made the
Sgath
, the Veil, back when our race was strong and had magic, because we couldn’t live in the same world as the full-mortals any more. How we were just too different from them. How we stayed more and more in our own dimension, till they didn’t even know us any more.

And how, sometimes, some of us couldn’t resist going back.

That I didn’t understand. To go into exile when you had a choice in the matter? It was the kind of thing the Lammyr were said to do. The Sithe had cut off that sickly twisted branch of our family tree, so the Lammyr chose instead to wreak havoc on the full-mortals (and find their protégés among them). Constantly, doggedly, the Lammyr slipped between the worlds, till guards had to be placed on the watergates to stop them; and still they slipped through.

It did nothing for our reputation. They’re warped, the Lammyr. A piece is missing. It’s the way they’re built: they don’t love life, only death and pain. Who knows why the gods thought of them? Maybe they didn’t give them much thought at all. Perhaps they just happened, when the gods were looking the other way.

I had never seen one, and never wanted to. Even Conal hadn’t, because Griogair and the other dun captains had driven them away long before he was born. But we heard stories, and shuddered, and were glad they were gone. They’d never returned: I don’t think they feared Griogair’s blade or any other, but he’d spoiled their fun and they must have found a more promising playground in the lawlessness and poverty of the otherworld.

Oh, the poverty. Since my first exile I’ve seen many things, I’ve seen them all over the world. I’ve seen degradation and hunger that was worse, but it’s never shocked me to the bones the way that first experience did. The Sithe worked hard, and we fought hard, but we lived and loved and played hard too. The full-mortals were born with nothing but their dignity, and they died with less. Out of pity there were some I’d have helped from the world, but Conal wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t allowed, he said. They had different traditions, different rules. Their lives did not belong to them, but to their god and his priests.

Winter was more merciful than the priests: it killed off many of the old and sick, though it had a tendency to take the very young as well. Those dark months were hard, so hard. I experienced cold like I’d never known before, cold with no respite; and I knew real hunger for the first time in my life.

There were compensations to exile, though. Even the otherworld’s open air was better than Kate’s skyless halls, and the spring that followed our first winter was a lovely one, as if to make up for the months of relentless
hardship. It brought a new snow, one of gean blossom and hawthorn, and a dazzle of yellow whin heaped on every verge and hillside.

By the time spring came I could appreciate that some of the girls were good-looking, too. Not with the delicate fierce loveliness of Sithe girls, but they had a blunt charm and an earthy outlook on life that appealed to me.

I was downright offended that none of them took the least notice of me.

When I’d come out of my furious sulk at Kate—I was far more indignant on Conal’s behalf than he was himself—I tried to settle down and enjoy the otherworld. That didn’t seem possible without the company and friendship of women. Unfortunately, none of the women seemed to require mine.

I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t a troll, I looked like Conal. Conal was considered beautiful even among the Sithe—but then the full-mortal girls took no more interest in him than in me. Once or twice I saw a girl in the stinking clachan take a second look, and smile and edge towards him, but if her friends or her mother called out to her she’d be easily distracted and you could see that he’d drifted quickly out of her consciousness.

It didn’t bother him. He seemed amused, and it was much the same with his work. Among the Sithe Conal wasn’t regarded as much of a smith, but he could fashion basic weapons and tools, and he was clever and inventive when it came to mending things. Nor was he a true-born healer, but he knew as much about herbs
and roots and the setting of bones as any of us, and so one way or another his services were in regular demand.

But none of his customers struck up a friendship. If we saw, say, a farmer in the inn of an evening, he’d never acknowledge Conal, even though he’d sung his praises earlier in the day for a cured horse or a soothed infant or a mended plough blade. You’d think Conal had simply slipped from memory, just as he did with the girls. Even the priest would arch his winged brows in surprise when Conal struck up a conversation with him.

My brother at last took pity, and broke the truth to me one frustrating day when I’d finally managed to catch the eye of a girl in the clachan. Some of them, washing plaids with their bare feet in the burn, had been laughing in their raucous way and flirting with the boys. My favourite was the quietest one, a girl with a long black braid and solemn green eyes and a slight sceptical smile. I’d noticed her before, and thought I could like her. Now here she was, courted by boys who were ruddy-faced and crude-boned and fatuous, and I couldn’t bear the wound to my vanity. Sidling into the group, I grinned at my black-haired girl and dragged her sodden plaid from the water. Skirts still hitched up, slim bare legs red with cold, she rewarded me with her half-amused smile, and I felt a jolt of lust.

‘Well, hello!’ said one of the others. ‘And aren’t you the handsome one? Where did you spring from?’

A red-haired boy gave me a filthy look.

‘Ach, you ken him,’ said another girl. ‘He’s aye up
at the smith’s.’

‘Oh aye, I do.’ Critically the first girl examined me. ‘The smith’s brother.’

‘The quiet one. You know what they say about quiet ones!’

I was still most interested in the cool black-haired girl, but I was enjoying the unaccustomed attention from all of them. ‘So tell me what they say?’

‘Seth.’ Conal’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘A word.’ Smiling at the girls, he tapped his finger lightly against his temple in a clear insult either to my sanity or to my intelligence.

He drew me away, and as I glanced back over my shoulder I saw that not one of them was watching us go. Their attention was back on the skinny red-haired lad and his short ugly sidekick. I lingered resentfully, but Conal pulled me on.

‘They’ve forgotten you, and just as well. Drink?’

I was livid. ‘I was getting somewhere with her, Cù Chaorach. What are we, monks?’

‘Chaster than monks,’ he grinned. ‘If you know what’s good for you.’

‘The first girls who take any notice of me,’ I said bitterly, ‘and you drag me off them. It’s not easy, you know. They’ve strange tastes. They like their men like the back end of a horse.’

Laughing, Conal shoved me towards the inn. ‘It isn’t that. It’s not your fault. You’re a smouldering ball of sex and good looks, all right? Now shut up and have a drink and forget your precious extremities.’

I laughed too, I couldn’t help it. ‘You’re buying.’

‘Course I am. Listen, I mean it. They can’t see you, Seth. Not really
see
you.’

I gave him a dark look.

‘It’s true. It’s because of the Veil.’ He held up his hands mockingly.

‘That’s nothing but a skin between the worlds,’ I said.

‘It’s that, but it’s also your protection. On this side of it…well, the Veil doesn’t hide us, but it’s camouflage. We’re easy to forget. We slip from their minds like a fistful of water.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘They know we’re there, but they won’t take an interest.’

‘I see.’ I thought for a moment. ‘That would explain a lot.’

The inn was dark and woodsmoky, like every other hut in the clachan. It was there, theoretically, for the drovers of the north, stopping for the night on their way further south. They drank and they passed on news; they rested their ponies and their cattle, whether honestly traded or thieved; and they moved on the next day to more promising markets. But the locals haunted the inn too, trading in gossip, and dreich fiddle tunes, and a few hours’ respite from grim lives. A woman from the lowlands rented the place, and made some kind of business of it: who knew how she’d ended up here with wild Highlanders? They gathered here to buy or barter good ale, and bad whisky, and forgetfulness. The place stank of alcohol and exhausted hopes.

‘Listen, Murlainn.’ Setting a flask of whisky on the rough table, Conal dug me in the ribs. ‘Don’t get the
wrong idea about the Veil. Don’t go thinking you can get away with murder. You’re inconspicuous, not invisible. Right?’

‘You might have told me this earlier.’

‘You found out, didn’t you?’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t think you’d like it.’

‘I’ll live. So what am I supposed to do? Lie back and think of Orach?’

He smiled. ‘You could do worse. We won’t be here forever.’

I wished now I hadn’t made the remark. It felt like a deception of Conal, and a betrayal of Orach. To change the subject I said, ‘Couldn’t we just…’

‘What?’

I glanced around at peasants who were no better than slaves to their clan chief. There were worse lairds; I’m sure there were better. In the dimness of the inn, men sat and stared into their filthy cups, beaten down by work, and work, and more work, for no reward that I could see but survival. And their women worked harder, for less pleasure.

I loathed them and pitied them. Where was their wild-hearted music and their dancing and their joy in breathing the world’s air?

‘We could make it better for them,’ I said. ‘We could improve them. We could…we could change their minds.’

Conal took his time filling our dirty tumblers with whisky. At last he took a mouthful, and cuffed my cheek gently.

‘That’s beneath you, Murlainn.’

‘Nothing is beneath me.’ I regretted that too, as soon as it was out. He’d stuck a thorn in my pride, but I’d let myself be provoked, and my words reeked of self-pity.

‘They have free will just like we do. Why shouldn’t they keep it?’

‘Much good it does them.’ I snorted.

‘Look, how strong do you think your mind would have to be? You can influence one or two, if you’re clever. Twist a perception, adjust a memory. Whether you should or not…’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t think so.’

‘Why not? When we’re better than they are?’

I saw the temper flash in his eyes. ‘Sometimes I despair of you. Better, you call yourself? Go ahead and fight people with your mind, if they can fight back. If they know what you’re doing, why not? Otherwise it’s as honourable as taking your sword to an unarmed man. You want to be like Kate, or your mother?’ He nodded at the surly-mouthed drinkers. ‘Kate wants to manipulate their minds. She wants to rule them, to own the otherworld.’

‘Why doesn’t she, then?’ I muttered, ‘Gets her own way with everything else.’

‘Can’t.’ He grinned again, I was relieved to see. ‘That’s why she wants rid of the Veil. She’s got the strength in her head to control a mob, even a nation. But not if they can’t see her.’

‘And she’s no more conspicuous than the rest of us?’ I said.

‘Quite. She wants to be seen, she’d love to be loved by them, but she doesn’t know how to destroy the
Veil. That’s beyond even her, thank the gods.’

I communed with the gods as little as I could. ‘Why?’