Firebrand (25 page)

‘Sorry,’ I said, not very sincerely. ‘Don’t look like a scared rabbit, for gods’ sake.’

I could see her pulse beating in her throat, and she was still eyeing me like a coney eyeing a stoat. I rolled my eyes.

‘You want to go and take care of him. How else was I meant to find out?’

She swallowed, uneasy, and nodded once.

‘So why didn’t you…well. Obviously you wouldn’t say so.’ Sighing, I got to my feet. ‘Don’t try getting past those twats in the corridor. They’ll never let you through. Come on, I’ll take you to Grian.’

* * *

The healer Grian was perfectly happy to have a dogsbody, and I was relieved not to have Catriona dogging my every step. It was nice not to have to worry about her, either. My moment inside her mind had been something of a shock. I’d discovered she was still in pain (you’d think I might have guessed), that she was still very afraid, but despite our instant of coexistence I
still knew little about what had happened to her. Much of it she had stuffed behind a block that would grace the mind of a Sithe. She needed a distraction, I reckoned, and I knew nothing could suit her better than looking after her hero. Grian found her helpful, and he liked her, and he was good at healing minds and bodies even when a patient didn’t notice she was a patient. He and Catriona were good for each other, and I was pleased with myself for thinking of the pairing.

‘She’s a strong one.’ A couple of days later Grian said exactly the same as Sionnach. ‘Works hard. Dotes on your brother. Doesn’t speak but Conal likes having her around.’ He guffawed. ‘Not sure Eili does.’

My grin was gleeful.

It dawned on me with excruciating slowness that only half the people in the dun thought I had been saved from a terrible obligation by the MacLeod’s intervention at Conal’s burning. The other half thought I had been thwarted.

It started with a nagging suspicion and a few gazes that refused to meet mine. It ended with a brawl in the great hall, and I could have happily taken on the three of them myself—it wouldn’t have been the first time, since they’d had it in for me since I was eight—but Sionnach joined in with a cheerful heart. Eili looked on with rolling eyes and many pointed sighs, but when she eventually pitched in too, they finally yielded. My knee was on the throat of one of them, and it did occur to me simply to leave it there, to crush his windpipe for the benefit of anyone else who harboured the same poisonous idea. But it wasn’t worth it. If they wanted to think badly of me they would, and hell mend them. Besides, my brother, when he recovered, would have killed me.

Catriona watched the bloody fight with her eyes wide, her face horrified. Leonora looked on, smiling slightly, taking no sides.

Orach, of course, would no sooner think badly of me than she would of Conal. She returned to the dun a week after Conal and Catriona and I did, from patrolling the dun lands and collecting our payments in grain
and meat. (The tolls were a great deal more reasonable than the payments Conal and I had had to make to the MacLeod, but I no longer resented the man even for hungry winters.) Orach, popular with the captains as much for her easygoing nature as for her shooting skills, had been escorting a cart laden with grain sacks, but she abandoned it half a mile out, ignoring the sharp shouts of her captain, and galloped into the dun gates. She threw herself off her horse and onto me, and I laughed and birled her in huge circles.

‘I heard the story,’ she said to me a little later. ‘I want to hear everything, all the details. Not just now, later. How’s Conal?’

‘He’s getting there,’ I said. ‘They used a knife to prick him; he lost a lot of blood. And they beat him and it damaged him where you can’t see, and that’s hard for the healers. You know there was a Lammyr?’

‘I heard.’ She shuddered. ‘How long did it have him?’

I shrugged. ‘A week.’

‘Gods. How’s he alive?’

‘Luck,’ I said grimly. ‘And the L…the Lammyr was enjoying itself too much to ki…’

‘I’m sorry.’ Stopping, she squeezed my hand, and I stared at the corner where the stable met the armoury wall, where there was no-one to see my tears of rage. ‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘I shouldn’t ask, not just now. What about the…good gods, is
that
the full-mortal girl?’

I glanced round, glad of a change of subject. Catriona had come down from Conal’s rooms and was standing in the courtyard breathing the open air. Still too shy to
go near human beings, she’d spotted a chestnut horse tethered by the stable, and wandered across to stroke its nose and rub its cheeks and ears. Whickering with adoration, it rubbed its face on her stubbly scalp. She was good with horses.

She looked terrible, though. She was spending too much time in Conal’s sickroom now, watching Grian mend his broken and brutalised body, when her own had so recently been broken too. She’d had enough, I thought. She needed the sky above her and an empty mind and the north wind slicing into her skin. She needed the sun to take that dungeon pallor off her. It wasn’t her fault she looked the way she did.

I opened my mouth to defend her, but I didn’t get a chance to say a word.

‘What the hell are you all thinking of?’ said Orach indignantly.

Never having been snapped at by Orach in my life, I could hardly move my gaping jaw.

‘Hasn’t anyone thought to give the girl some proper clothes?’

I stared at Orach, and then at Catriona. Sure enough the girl was still in the thin grey shift she’d worn to her cancelled execution. She must have been washing it out each night, because it looked clean enough. That was all you could say for it. Shame washed over me in a hot tide.

‘You crowd of thoughtless idiots,’ said Orach, and marched across towards Catriona.

She was halfway to the girl when I remembered to shout, ‘She doesn’t talk.’ Then Orach had caught the
shocked girl by the arm, and was hauling her off in the direction of her own rooms, murmuring in her ear.

* * *

‘Doesn’t talk.’ Orach was contemptuous. ‘Doesn’t talk, indeed. You don’t listen, more like.’

‘When did you get that attitude?’ I laced my fingers hungrily into her hair and pulled her face down to kiss her. ‘You used to be so quiet.’

She propped her hands on my chest and pushed herself up, making me grunt. ‘Arrogant sod. I wasn’t that quiet. It’s just I couldn’t get a word in edgeways.’

The sky was blue enough to hurt your eyes. Beneath me the seagrass was scratchy against my naked back and the blown sand got everywhere, but I didn’t care. A breeze rustled the clumps of pink thrift, tangled her pale unbound hair. I could smell the sea, and the machair, and Orach’s sun-warmed skin. I blinked against the brilliance of the sun, trying to focus on her intent face.

‘How’s Feorag?’ I asked.

‘Feorag’s fine.’ Straddling me, she gazed down, expressionless.

Laying my palms on her thighs, I raised an eyebrow. ‘I take it you’re not bound to him.’

‘How astute. I’m no more bound to him than I am to you.’

I gave her the very slow grin that always broke her down, and sure enough she gave an exclamation of disgust and slapped my ribcage.

‘Ouch,’ I said.

‘I never said I’d wait around for you, Seth.’

‘I never asked you to.’

‘Even if you had, I wouldn’t have.’

‘That’s why I never asked. You break my heart, woman.’

‘Liar.’ She slapped me again.

‘I love you, I’m telling you.’

‘I’m sure you do.’ Her eyes softened and she flopped down beside me into the dry salty grass. She stroked my cheek. ‘But I’ll never be enough for you.’

‘Right. Of course.’ I rolled to face her. ‘And I’ll never be enough for you.’

Her fingers drifted across my lips, making me shiver.

‘If you say so, Murlainn.’

I curled an arm round her body and kissed her forehead, suddenly sad. Which wasn’t how I wanted to feel. I changed the subject as always.

‘Did she speak to you? Catriona?’

Orach gave me a long look. It made me uncomfortable.

‘Well, did she?’ I prompted.

‘No, but she can and she will.’ Orach glanced aside. ‘It only takes someone to listen.’

‘I listen,’ I said, miffed.

‘Aye. Only to your own echo.’

We lay in silence for a while, my arm around her, hers lying lightly across my chest. The unseen sea moved, whispering and rushing, beyond the close horizon of our dune. When I closed my eyes, I saw red veins behind my eyelids, and I felt her kiss my skin.

‘What will Kate do?’ she murmured.

I opened my eyes again to the dazzle of sky. ‘I don’t know.’

‘She must know you’re back.’

‘Yes. She’ll wait till he’s recovered. Politics.’

‘Strictly you’re still exiles,’ she said, and there was a tremor of anxiety in her voice.

‘I’ll tell you something.’ My fingers tightened unintentionally on her arm. ‘I am never going back to the otherworld. Never, and neither is Conal, and I don’t care what that witch says.’

Which was bravado, and pissing in the wind, and conclusive proof that telepathy is not the same thing as foresight.

* * *

Orach left the dun again two days later, having volunteered for another week of patrolling the borders. I could hardly believe it. I’d been gone for two years, damn it.

~
No promises
, she told me, kissing me goodbye. ~
That’s what you say
.

~
I know
, I said, ~
but I’ll miss you
.

~
I missed you for two years. Know what? It’s difficult, you being back
.

~
Why?

She slanted her gaze at me, rueful. ~
Because of the way you look at her
.

~
That’s over. There’s nothing between Eili and me and there never was. I’ve
…

~
Sometimes you are just the stupidest man I know
. She turned to her horse. ~
I’m not talking about Eili. I’m talking about the full-mortal girl
.

She might as well have hit me in the face with a fish. I was speechless as she gathered her reins into one hand. Reaching out, I gripped her blonde braid, not wanting to let her get on her horse. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. Listen. I can’t bind.’

‘You mean you won’t bind.’

‘True. Are you dumping me, Orach?’

‘No.’ She kissed me again. ‘Let go. We’re leaving. I need to go.’

‘You’ll be back, though.’

‘Oh, yes.’ She gave me a droll smile. ~
That’s the trouble with you and me. I’ll always come back and you know it
.

And that’s why I love you, I thought, but I was scowling and in a bad mood by then and I didn’t feel like telling her.

* * *

I’d have liked Orach back the next morning so I could give her a piece of my mind. Poor Catriona looked mortified to be wearing proper trews and boots and a decent linen shirt. All Orach’s, of course, as was the leather jerkin that she’d fastened tightly almost to her neck. She kept tugging down the hem of it, as if there was a hope of it covering her scrawny hips, and she kept her face focused on the ground and her arms folded across her chest. I’d never imagined Orach’s clothes could look big on anyone. With her patchy crop of
hair, barely more than a stubble of regrowth, you could have mistaken Catriona for a boy. I almost told her so, partly to reassure her and partly to stop her acting so damn silly. She was hardly about to be ravished.

I was offended on behalf of our own women. What was wrong with the way they dressed? They didn’t like to trip on skirts. They wouldn’t swathe their bodies in dingy fabric out of some bizarre sense of modesty. So what? Sithe men had self-control, even if full-mortal men didn’t. Catriona’s attitude was an insult to Orach and every other Sithe woman—not to mention us men—and I was so indignant I ignored her even when she cast me a nervous glance of supplication. If she wanted my support she could stop acting like a self-conscious child.

She couldn’t even hole herself up in Conal’s room, because Grian had kicked her out of it. Not because he was fed up with her, but because he thought the same as me: she was spending far too much time there. She was trying to hide, now. She needed some air, and some colour in her thin-stretched flesh. So he sent her out on errands, to take this message or fetch that herb.

I was about to go hunting with Sionnach and Feorag that morning—these days Eili was wholly absorbed in learning weapons-smithing from Raineach—when Catriona darted out of the doorway like a terrified mouse. We watched her scuttle across the courtyard, ducking her face away from us and hunching her shoulders. Sionnach and Feorag must have been as stunned as I was by her transformation, because they didn’t come up
with any immediate smart remarks. When I’d got over my own shock, I hissed in exasperation and flicked my reins to turn the roan. He was far better company, and I’d been smitten by him all over again when he answered my first call and came to me. I wanted to spend time getting to know him, letting him know me. The last thing I needed was the full-mortal girl attaching herself to me again.

‘Tell her to come hunting with us,’ suggested Sionnach.

‘Get lost,’ I spat. ‘She’d be a pain in the backside.’

Feorag whistled through his teeth, and his hunting bitch stopped sniffing at Branndair’s rear end and came to him. Branndair gave a low lustful growl, and when I called his name and caught his golden eyes, I swear he almost grinned at me.

‘Ach, your wolf’s as bad as you are,’ said Feorag cheerfully. ‘Tell him Breagh won’t be in heat for a month. As for you, the gods alone know when
she’ll
be in heat.’ He jerked his head towards the corner where Catriona had disappeared. ‘If ever.’

‘The hell you…’ I ran out of words to express my scorn. ‘Don’t you start as well. What would I want with her? Look at her!’

‘What, like you do?’ Critically he gazed after her. ‘Might do. One of these days.’

I can’t say why I wanted to smack that thoughtful smirk off his face. All I could do was stare silently at him while I rearranged my thoughts, and after a while he felt my stare and met it.