Shapeshifter (17 page)

His men were converging now, and they covered the last distance together, scrambling and sliding into a seam sliced into the mountain’s side, shoving through the gorse-choked bottom and finally coming up, winded and sweat-streaked, behind the ring of hounds.

It was a sight he never expected to see: Bran and Sceolan faced off against their own fellows. Hackles up, lips drawn back from their great teeth, growls swelling from their throats like thunder—this was no play-fight or squabble over a bone. This was deadly menace.

It’s Sive.
The thought was instant and inescapable. What else would they be protecting? Finn’s heart, already pounding with exertion, thudded into a painful, lurching gallop, and he began hauling dogs back by their collars, flinging them one after another back to the men.

“Call them off!” he roared. “Tie them!”

He heard Caoilte’s voice behind him, repeating the order and urging the men to action. Bless the man. More than anyone, he knew the pain Finn had lived with these long years.

The dogs’ clamor faded back, and the wolfhounds quieted, ears softening, tails gently waving.

“What have you found?” Finn, with hardly spit in his mouth to speak, rasped the words out. He tried to see beyond the two dogs but could make out only a dark wall of rock.

They sidled apart to make way for him as he stepped forward. He observed, as if watching another, that his legs were shaky with tension. His heart drummed in his ears and broke his vision into sharp, shattered glimpses.

There was a recess in the cliff wall, a little scooped-out cavity in the rock. And yes, there was a figure inside its shadowed shelter. Finn lurched forward.

Not Sive. He knew before he could really make out the features that it was not Sive. No grown woman was ever that small.

Finn squatted down and peered in at the seated figure in wonder. A child looked back at him, a naked, crosslegged child with long blond hair and eyes that…oh, those eyes! As blue as his own, they were not Finn’s eyes, nor the eyes of any son of the Gael he had ever met. They shone like jewels and shimmered with the secret depths of a sun-kissed lake.

Finn’s head swam with questions, but he settled on one: “How did you get here, lad?”

The boy—he could not be more than six or seven summers old—searched Finn’s face without replying, and Finn began to wonder if he was simple or could not speak. Then the corners of his mouth twitched into a shy smile, and Finn’s hot skin puckered up in sudden gooseflesh. He knew that smile, had seen it the very first night he and Sive had met, and he had kissed its lovely corners more times than he could count. Then at last the child spoke.

“Find Finn.”

The boy had the high, fluty voice of a child still, but Finn could hear the music in it. Tears started into his eyes as he opened his arms wide.

“You’ve found him, lad. I’m Finn. You’re safe now. You’re with your father, and you’re safe.”

TWENTY-TWO

F
or six years Oisin had lived in near silence, with only the sounds of the woods and his mother’s voice. Apart from the occasional, dreaded appearance of the Dark Man, he had never seen another person.

Now he was plunged into the life of the Fianna, surrounded by loud, rough, boisterous men, many of whom had women to match. It’s not that he was treated unkindly; rather the opposite. He was their darling, with every man vying to teach him a skill, impart a wise lesson or make him laugh, and the women cosseting and petting him whenever they could pry him away from the men.

It was exciting and terrifying at once, and in those first months there were times when he felt he might be crushed by it all. Then he would run away and hide, and the longing that came over him for his mother and their quiet little world squeezed his heart so painfully that he didn’t see how he could go on. He wasn’t brave enough or strong enough. Sometimes he wished he could become a deer himself and spend his life alone in the forest.

But Finn—his father—helped him. If he found Oisin huddled behind a storehouse or crying in the woods, he would lift him up and just hold him without talking. Sometimes Finn would take Oisin into his own chamber, build up the fire and leave him with Bran and Sceolan. Oisin would press himself into the flanks of one or the other, and the quiet, steady presence of the great gray dogs, nearly the size of a deer themselves, comforted him in a place talking could not touch.

Finn saved the talking for the times when his son was not overwhelmed by his new home. He wanted to know all Oisin could tell him about how they had lived and what had happened to his mother, though the telling made Finn groan and beat his chest in helpless anger and sorrow, and reduced Oisin to tears. Yet it was a comfort, too, to know there was another in the world who cared about his mother’s fate.

Oisin had never slept in a bed, never seen a sword, never eaten meat (there was no deer meat for months at Almhuin, on Finn’s orders). But he learned quickly, and by Samhain he had lost his shyness and dogged the footsteps of the Fianna as if he had been born among them.

It was a fine, brisk autumn day when the anger came over him. A day for a young boy to roam the countryside and be glad for the life rushing through him, it was, and Oisin had been doing just that. With Bran and Sceolan at his side, there was little harm could come to him, and Finn was happy to see him venture out on his own.

But something swept over him—perhaps guilt at his own happiness, or a sudden glimpse of what life could have been had his mother stayed safe within the walls— and before he knew it he was scrambling up through Finn’s wooded hill, bursting through the gates with fire in his eyes and his small chest heaving with rage.

Finn was enjoying the weather too, propped against the wall of his house with his legs in the sun and his head in the shade of the thatch, “chewing his cud” as he called it after a hefty midday meal. Oisin rushed over, drew back his foot and kicked his father under the ribs with all his strength, then fell upon him with a flurry of fists.

Later he would realize he was lucky that Finn, startled out of sleep, hadn’t thrown him across the yard or stuck him with his hunting knife. Instead the great man had lumbered to his feet, shucking him off like a stable fly, and held him at bay by the shoulders.

“Hold, lad, hold!” Finn peered at the red-faced, tearstained fury of a boy, arms still windmilling the air between them. “What’s this all about?”

“Why didn’t you save her?” Oisin shrieked. “Why didn’t you find her? She came to you for protection, you told me so, and you let him steal her!”

Finn’s ruddy face darkened almost to purple and he abruptly let Oisin go, turning away with his own great hands fisted into clubs. Oisin’s rage drained out of him as quickly as it had come, and he looked with sudden fear at his father. He had gone too far, insulting the man who had saved his life and called him son. He looked up at the angry tower of Finn’s rigid body and back down at the fists clenched at his sides. It was too late for apology. Finn’s punishment would fall on him at any moment.

But Finn did not raise his fists, or even his voice, to him. When he spoke, his voice was husky and cracked, and Oisin realized with shock that it was tears, not anger, that his father was choking back.

“Do you not think I tried, lad? Do you not think I would spend my life, and gladly, for even the least glimmering hope of saving her?”

Oisin could not speak. He was confused, shamed by his own actions. Of course he knew Finn had tried to find Sive. Nearly everyone at Almhuin had told him so at one time or another. But he had
failed.
You could not blame a man for trying and failing, but he did. If his father had not failed, his mother would be with him now.

Finn turned back to face his son and sagged wearily against the wall. The blue eyes that looked at Oisin were naked—sorrow and anger and shame unguarded.

“Every spring and cave, every mound and standing stone, anywhere there has ever been the least rumor of a passage to Tir na nOg, I went there. I went to Tara and spent long nights on the Mound of Hostages, thinking if I was taken captive I would at least be through the veil. I got an audience with the High King’s Chief Druid and followed every scrap of advice he could give me.”

Finn ran a hand slowly down his face, like a man who has stood vigil through the night. He looked about that tired too, thought Oisin. His father shook his head.

“The way is closed to me, son. I don’t know how the Dark Man did it, but he has barred my road. I cannot get in.”

“But I can,” blurted Oisin. He was surprised at his own words. He did not know where they came from, but he was sure they were true.

Finn gazed at him thoughtfully and then smiled.

“You may be right, lad. You are more of that land than this, after all.”

“Then what do I do?” Oisin was strung taught with urgency and crippled with sudden doubt. What
could
he do? He remembered struggling against the invisible door the Dark Man had used to close him into the cave. He had been useless, too weak to pose any threat at all. His thin shoulders slumped.

“You wait patiently, my son.” The Finn Oisin knew was back, a man bursting with life and confidence. “You wait, and you hold on to your hope, and you train. I myself will teach you, and all the Fianna, and whatever other teachers you need we will find for you. And when you are a grown man and armed with all the skill and strength and knowledge you can master…then,
then
you will go to your mother’s land and conquer the Dark Man and free her.”

BY HIS SEVENTH year with Finn, Oisin had already mastered many of the feats of the Fianna. He could outrun the lot of them through the forest without snapping a twig, for he had the speed and grace of his mother’s people. In time he would have Finn’s strength and height as well, but for now he still had a boy’s thin arms and narrow chest.

Not that he was about to admit it. “I am ready now,” he insisted. The Fianna were sailing to Alba, and Oisin was determined to join them. “I can fight. Let me come and prove it.”

“No, lad. Pass me the oil, so.” Finn poured oil into a clay dish, dipped in his fingers, and began carefully oiling every inch of exposed leather on his war-harness. “You can oil my boots, if you are so eager to help.”

Oisin’s face darkened with anger. His father had dismissed his case without a second’s thought, as if he were nothing but a baby. But a baby’s tantrum would get him nowhere, so he mastered his temper, stuck out his chest and tried again.

“But why? I am well-trained, by the best, as you said. And I am nearly as tall as you!”

“And half as big around,” retorted Finn. With a sigh, he put down his harness and met Oisin’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, lad. It’s not a joking matter, and your big heart does you credit. And you are right—there is little left to teach you, at least, not until you get your strength. But you must wait for it. If you rush off to battle now, you will be killed. You have it in you to be one of the great heroes of the Fianna, only you must stay alive until you have the might to match your skill.”

Oisin scowled. “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Stand around counting the days?”

Finn smiled. “I have been thinking on that. And I am thinking that warfare is not your only talent.”

Oisin felt his interest quicken in spite of himself. Finn could only be talking about his music. His father seemed proud of how Oisin had picked up some skill on the harp from the bards who stayed sometimes at Almhuin, and clearly enjoyed hearing him sing. But the Fianna were warriors. Oisin had not thought his training could be anything different. Then his father surprised him again.

“I had my own raising with a poet, for some years.” Finn laughed at Oisin’s look. “I know, you would not think it from looking at me. But I have made some passable poems in my day. And it’s how I came to be eating the Salmon of Knowledge, because of my time with him. He thought the fish was destined for himself, but when I was fetching it out of the pan to serve to him, my thumb slipped onto the flesh and got burned, so I popped it into my mouth!” Finn laughed heartily, and Oisin could not help but join in.

“Wasn’t he mad, but?”

“I should think. But he was a gracious man, and hid it nicely. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Here I misunderstood the prophecy. These seven years I was after thinking the salmon was for me, because of my name, Finnegas, the white. But really, it was for you, Finn, named for your white-blond hair.’ ”

Finn grew serious. “You have more poetry and song in your smallest toe than I have in my whole body, Oisin. You have come as far as you can in battle skill for now, but it is time you learned your mother’s gifts. I am sending you to Cruachan, to study with old Tanai. He took service with me for a time, when he was younger, and he is a man to trust. He will teach you the sweetest music there is to be found in Eire or in Alba. And then you will not only be a Warrior of the Fianna but our Bard as well.”

Oisin did not need persuading. He had been entirely focused on becoming one of the Fianna, but now he realized that there was a yearning inside him that could not be satisfied with picking out a few tunes on a harp or singing a marching song.

“When will I go?”

“So eager to leave me, then?”

Oisin shook his head, confused by his own mixed feelings. He
was
eager for something—the learning, the adventure, to test his own wings. But now he saw it would be hard to leave his father, even though Finn himself had been coming and going through his whole childhood.

“It’s all right, boy. I am surprised myself at how hard it is to let you go.” Finn’s big arm wrapped around Oisin and drew him into a hard, quick hug. “We’ll make the journey together, once I’m back from this skirmish. And you will keep up your battle practice every day that you are away from us, or I will give each man of the Fianna leave to wallop you into the mud!”

OISIN WAS FORGETTING his mother. At first it upset him, the way she receded from his memory year by year, and he made songs to cement her in his mind and told himself her story in bed at night. But still their time in the cave began to seem like some fantastic dream rather than a memory, and her face faded and dimmed until he could no longer see her at all.