Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels) (12 page)

‘It’s a
ruin
, Dad.’

‘It’s a ruin
now.
I knew the man it belonged to. It’s an evil place.’

‘You should see it now. On the other side, I mean. Honest to God, it needs a bit of evil to set off the tartan.’

‘I’ve seen it.’ Seth bit back a smile. ‘No, it’s still evil. If you know where to look.’

‘You’re thinking of some place else, anyway,’ I put in. ‘That castle’s been unoccupied for hundreds of years. The last owner’s horribly dead.’

‘I’m not thinking of any place else. I’m sure he is deliciously, horribly and entertainingly dead, but I’d be happier if I’d seen his body.’

‘Ghoul.’

‘Takes one to know one. Now get this, Rory. I’m going to the watergate at Loch Sgillinn and I won’t be more than a few hours. You’d better be here when I get back,
okay?’

‘Yeah?’ I winked. ‘What if he’s not?’

Seth winked back. ‘There’ll be a full-scale war and many casualties.’ He slipped a bridle onto the roan’s head and buckled the throatlash, then gripped its withers and
hauled himself onto its bare back. ‘I might be bringing somebody back.
Try
and be civilised, will you?’ He leaned down to rumple Rory’s hair, like he was five or
something.

I half-closed one eye. That was the paternal expression I liked least on Seth, the one that made me most uncomfortable. Perhaps it was sheer jealousy, because there had never been anyone to look
at me like that; or maybe it was just that it didn’t look natural, like it was too recently learned to fit his hard face.

Beneath the weight of the sheathed sword on his back Seth stretched his shoulders as a stablehand led out a garron. Seth took its lead rein, then spoke to his horse and rode out of the dun with
the pony behind him.

I gave Rory a sidelong glance, and a wicked smirk.

‘And now,’ I said, ‘let’s misbehave.’

When I broke the surface, and my lungs filled with the right air for the first time in thirteen years, it tasted different instantly. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to hoot. All I
could do was stagger forward, undignified, into shallow water. With the weight of my backpack dragging me sideways, I only narrowly saved myself from floundering back for a proper soaking.

Behind me, there was a guttural mortified shriek as Faramach breached the water’s skin and vanished into the dull dazzle of sunlight. I pulled a limp strand of weed from my hair and
flicked it back into the loch. Watergates: always such a dignified way to travel. And of course, it was at exactly that moment I realised I wasn’t alone.

Seth’s impulsive smile disappeared as fast as mine. He rode forward from the bank till the blue roan was up to its hocks in the water, then left the reins loose on its neck and folded his
arms. The breeze that feathered the gull-wing loch lifted the black hair on his neck and stirred the roan’s mane; smelling the distant sea, it snuffed and blew and pawed the water. Beyond
them, on the bank, a thickset garron browsed the heather.

I hooked my thumbs into my backpack straps, wriggling my shoulders.

‘Glad that still works,’ I said, to the roan rather than to Seth. ‘Be embarrassing if they had to drag the loch for me.’

Seth didn’t smile. ‘You’ve been a while.’

‘Longer than I meant to, big cousin.’ I looked at the sky. ‘Where’s Faramach gone?’

‘That bird always hated watergates. He’ll be back when his dignity is, more’s the pity.’ He stared at me without a hint of a welcoming smile.

I pushed a wisp of hair out of my eyes. ‘Seth. What did I do this time?’

‘Nothing.’ He bit his lip. ‘Nothing, Finn. I’m only selfish. It’s kind of hard to change.’

‘Don’t, then.’ I let myself smile at him again as he rode a circle round me.

He didn’t look any different. I’d seen him now and again over the years, the last time a year ago, and he never looked any different. He still wore his hair long, and strands of it
still fell forward into his clear grey eyes. His face was just as sharp and beautiful as it always had been. He looked as he had when I’d left him on the beach more than a decade ago with a
toddler on his shoulders. Thirteen years: that was nothing for him. Nothing.

For me it was forever, that was all.

I found I couldn’t speak; not that there was nothing I wanted to say. There was so much of it, it was a logjam in my head. A year it was since I’d said goodbye to him last, since my
gaunt and frightened mother had gripped my arm at the door of Tornashee as if afraid he’d steal me away there and then. His eyes meeting hers over my shoulder, his understanding with her
complete, their deal unbroken. He’d walked away down the drive with his pack slung over his shoulder, and he hadn’t looked back. And I hadn’t run to him, I hadn’t shouted
after him, because if I’d done that he’d have turned back for me, I know he would. And my deal with her was intact, too. Back then it was.

I licked my lips, still trying to say something that mattered, but none of it would come. Instead I grabbed up the bulky extra pack at my feet and lugged it with me as I waded forward onto the
beach, dumping it in the sand.

‘We don’t ever get to travel light, do we? I hope that’s everything you wanted.’

He looked at the pack as if he didn’t much care, and he didn’t check the contents. ‘Thanks.’

Frowning, I slipped my own backpack from my shoulders with a grunt of relief, then sat down in the sand and tilted my face to the watery sun. I heard the dull echo of hooves on wet stones in
shallow water, then the soft thud of Seth dismounting. Opening one eye, I watched him sit down beside me, his stare focused on the loch and the low rolling hills beyond it.

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘She was brave. You’ve no idea.’

‘Yes I do. I knew her a long time. She was always brave.’

‘I didn’t know. She was so scared, but she was so brave. Seth.’ I bit my lip. ‘I spent my entire adolescence despising her and when I found out I loved her it was too
late.’

‘Finn. We all spend our adolescence despising our parents. It’s in the job description.’

I chucked a stone at the loch. ‘We’re not supposed to get that disease, are we? But once it got its claws into her, it wouldn’t let go. Why?’

He gave the roan a sharp whistle through his teeth, and it jerked its head round resentfully, striking the water hard with a hoof. It was doing nothing wrong that I could see.

‘You look bloody exhausted,’ he told me at last.

I didn’t want his pity; it made my throat hurt. ‘You try reminding a bunch of full-mortal doctors that they even have a patient.’

He looked at me at last and what I saw in his eyes wasn’t pity at all. ‘I’m glad it’s over.’

It should have been cruel but it wasn’t. ‘I am too. Seth. Answer me.’

He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘I don’t know, Finn. I don’t know why.’

Round my neck hung a crude claw pendant, a child’s practice piece. The stone from its setting had been removed long ago. I rolled it in my fingers and ran a sharp talon point under my
thumbnail.

I muttered, ‘Was it because she broke her oath?’

‘Your fault, you mean?’ He gave me one of his old glares. ‘Course not. You know what I think, Finn. Oaths, curses: put it out of your head. People believe in superstition and
shit, they shouldn’t swear oaths. Not if there’s a chance they won’t keep them.’

‘She meant to keep it.’ I fumbled for another stone and skimmed it clumsily; it sank as soon as it hit the surface. ‘But she came for me anyway, all those years ago. So how
could I leave her?’

With an edge of resentment he said, ‘If she’d come through, we could have helped her.’

‘No, you couldn’t.’

‘Not that way, no. To her end, I mean. Eili would have done that for her.’

‘She would never have come through. Never. What would have been the point? The greatest surrender of her life, and right at the end of it? She wouldn’t even contemplate going to the
Selkyr.’

‘No. Your mother was too damn brave and too damn proud. And when you feel guilty, Finn, try and remember that keeping you away from here was what kept her hanging on.’

‘You are a bastard.’
He’s the person he always was; get over it.
‘I couldn’t give her my word, so the least I could do was stay till it was over. She had a
good death. They don’t let you suffer.’

Seth said, ‘Nor do we.’

‘Seth. Please.’ I didn’t want to cry.

‘Sorry. Told you I was selfish.’ Reaching for my hand, he interlinked our fingers. ‘It gets better, Finn. At first you don’t think it will, you don’t even want it
to, but it does, like any wound. Then you know you’ve betrayed them, but it happens anyway. It might leave a dirty great scar but it scabs over, it heals. That’s how life works.
It’s the way it goes on.’

‘I’ve betrayed her just coming here.’ He was right: the guilt was a racking thing, all the more so because it had never crossed my mind to respect Stella’s wishes. I had
waited only for my mother’s death before doing what Stella had so desperately wanted me not to do.

Seth was watching me, I could feel it, but he sounded surprisingly kind. ‘You’ve no obligation to the dead, Finn. Our lives would never be our own.’

‘Speaking of which. Eili’s wound? Has that healed?’

Seth was silent for a long moment. ‘Eili’s grief is all poisoned with rage. That’s my fault. That doesn’t heal so well.’ He shut his eyes, smiling.
‘She’ll kill me, of course.’

‘She’ll have to get through me,’ I said.

He raised his eyebrows, amused. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Tightening his fingers around my hand, he lifted it to study the puckered white weals on my palm. ‘She’d
have mended that properly, if you’d asked.’

‘I didn’t want her to. It doesn’t hurt. Does yours?’

‘Sometimes. If Eili’s in a very bad mood.’ His laugh was a little forced.

‘It hurts all the time, doesn’t it?’ I frowned, suspicion scratching at my gut.

‘Well. Why did you keep your scars?’

‘That’s different. I told you, they don’t hurt.’

‘You kept them to remind you. Eili keeps mine alive to remind me.’ He squeezed my fingers. ‘It’s because of you and Jed it’s only the crossbow scars. I get sick
when I think how it would be if she’d had access to the… to…’

He still found it hard to say it, I realised. ‘The whipping scars,’ I finished for him.

‘They healed by themselves. You did right to keep the healers away. Especially
her.’
He tried to release me, but I tightened my fingers on his. I was not going to let him
withdraw and shrink into himself in that maddening way of his.

‘You never explained that one,’ I said lightly, touching a deep crude scar on his palm.

‘Jings, Dorsal, this is like
Jaws
.’ He laughed, and I smiled, pleased I’d pulled him back from his dark place. ‘That’s nothing sinister.’ Mildly
embarrassed, he mumbled, ‘Blood brother cut.’

‘
Murlainn!
How teenage!’ I examined it, still not letting him pull away. It was no mere nick. It had once been a savage slash, and it ran from the lowest joint of his little
finger to the base of his thumb. ‘Were you after a complete blood transfusion?’ I flicked it disapprovingly with a fingertip. ‘I hope the other guy looks this bad.’

Seth grinned. ‘Oh, he does.’

‘So who? Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I never told you ’cause you wouldn’t believe it.’ He pulled me to my feet.

‘Okay, be mysterious.’ I nodded at the blue roan. ‘What kind of mood is he in?’

‘Doesn’t matter. You’re not riding him.’ Seth lifted the pack of hardware supplies and tied it onto the garron’s saddle, making it sag to the side and earning a
reproving glare from the pony.

‘You’re strapping me onto the pack horse or what?’

He jiggled his eyebrows. ‘Don’t put ideas in my head.’

‘Okay, pal, I’ll walk. And the whisky I brought you, I’ll drink it myself.’

‘Ha! Still a little madam. I wish your Uncle Conal could hear you. You’re not walking, Dorsal, and I’ll be deprived of the sight of you slung across a pack horse. I’ve
got something for you.’ He untied a fabric bundle from the garron’s saddle, then unrolled it with care, and when he turned he was dangling a bridle from his fingers. It was black
leather, but the cheekpiece and noseband were chased with delicate silverwork.

I stared at it, unable to swallow. ‘That was lost.’

‘Yes.’ He ran a finger across the inlay. ‘That was my intention, but it washed up in the dunes after a storm last month.’

I took it, fingertips trembling. ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’

‘Call him, that’s all. You know how, if you don’t think about it too hard.’ Mounting the roan he swung its head towards the north and west, and the garron fell in
behind.

‘Yeah?’ I shouted. ‘And what if he kills me when he gets here?’

‘You have his bridle. He wants you.’ Seth gave me a grin over his shoulder. ‘Call him. I dare you.’

And so – that being the one challenge I couldn’t resist – I called him.

I’m sure the clann were happier to see Conal’s horse back than they were to see me, but that was fair enough. We hadn’t exactly parted on good terms all those
years ago. They held as much against me as I did against them.