Fireshaper's Doom (20 page)

How much farther to a border?
she wondered. Lugh’s enfields were getting closer now—too close. Fionna had never failed to underestimate how quickly they could move, in spite of the taloned front legs made more for grasping or tight infighting than for speed. Their catlike haunches did it, launching them over the ground in long, flat bounds, with their front limbs used mostly for stability and balance.

For herself, she trotted quick as a fox could go, which was almost not fast enough. She was tired, her mind still clouded from her labor, and she doubted she had Power for more than one more shape-change without a rest. That she would save until there was no other choice. Tir-Nan-Og had come alive after she had fled the stables, and men and beasts were everywhere—searching, she was certain, for a fox that was also a sorceress.

Even worse was the hot wind blowing behind her, approaching faster than even the enfields.

Another half league covered, and the beasts were nearer yet. She could hear their breathing now, the click of their talons against the occasional stone. Sometimes she could hear them whistling to each other in their odd, musical language.

The wind was closer too, and hotter—
much
hotter.

Suddenly she recognized it.

He would not dare! Not even Lugh would seal his borders. Does he truly fear my brother so?

A Track glittered in the distance and she turned toward it.

The wind ruffled her fur.

Faster, then, Fionna!

Behind her the doom-wind was gaining, rippling the waves of grass about her; and, as if fanned by that blast, the enfields too pressed forward.

Not two lengths behind her, they were of a sudden. And then, in the middle of a flying leap, a talon grazed a footpad.

Startled, she jerked reflexively, twisting sideways to land awkwardly, her stride broken.

The other one was beside her then. Its claws flashed out to slash across her flank. The pain dazed her, and she crumpled, panting. For a moment she thought she was dying—or would be as soon as the creatures found her throat. But the expected did not happen, for these were trained hunting beasts. They did not kill their quarry.

A wet nose nuzzled her haunch; another matched it opposite. That tiny touch of coolness was like a balm against air that was hotter than any she had felt in all the realms of Faerie.

The sealing comes!

She closed her inky eyes, felt deep within herself to see if any Power remained there.

There was—a tiny shard. She touched it, fanned it, brought it to life, spread its essence throughout her body. And called upon it.

Suddenly she was a sparrow.

The enfields sprang back, startled.

She flew, though her wounds ached. Grass tips brushed her feet, then fell below her as she gained altitude, barely out of her pursuers’ reach. She dared not falter.

But she could see the Track, thirty wing-beats distant.

Hot air crackled at her tail. She heard the enfields’ high-pitched howls of dismay as it caught them, passed them by, and laid a barrier before them that was an impassable wall of flame.

Gold on the ground, gold in the grasses; the Track was before her.

She collapsed gratefully to its surface, felt its Power tingling beneath her heart.

The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was flame racing toward the Track, lapping over it, around it, enfolding it, but—blessedly—not passing through to devour her.

Fionna lay exhausted within a tunnel of fire and thought about Lugh’s Power.

She thought about survival too, and eventually she thought about vengeance.

But before she was done, she was sleeping.

Chapter XVII: The Room Made of Fire

(The Burning Lands)

The room was made of Fire frozen in Time and carved by a Powersmith in Annwyn. The arts involved in its shaping were subtle—too subtle for even the crafty Sidhe to understand, much less the gloom-dulled Tylwyth-Teg. Morwyn herself barely commanded their intricacy, and she had been trained in that tradition of artist-mages to whom such wonders were in no wise the most remarkable.

It was an impressive piece of workmanship.

The arching ribs of the high-domed ceiling met four man-heights above the floor, and spanned curved walls ten times that measure wide. Yet by a certain application of the Fireshaper’s art, the room could be made to fit into the palm of a woman’s hand.

And it was beautiful, a marvel of design as much as engineering.

Both walls and ceiling—and what little floor gleamed forth beneath the fine-wrought carpets—bore the ever-changing tinctures of coals within a furnace: now copper green, now amber; sometimes a blue that shaded close to violet. But red predominated, the fickle, bloody crimson that lay at the heart of fire.

And red, in its many shades, was everywhere.

The heavy-folded hangings on the walls were scarlet silk couched with golden thread in shapes of salamanders and other beasts evocative of fire. The thick-piled rugs were wrought of wine-dark wool and strewn with the crimson pelts of manticores and cushions of carmine satin.

Panels carved in high relief enhanced the ruddy walls between the hangings. Scenes they showed of Ailill’s people, the Tuatha de Dan-aan of Erenn, and depicted that race’s history from their coming out of the High Air until the Second Battle of Mag Tuired.

Lower down, encircling the room at waist level, were smaller panels that concealed drawers and cupboards, shelves and small receptacles. These bore interlaced designs of birds and beasts, men and monsters, all wrought in silver and copper, bronze and golden wire.

A few were shaped of rare, hard-to-work aluminum stolen from the Lands of Men.

Floor-to-ceiling screens of wood and fire-pierced stone split the chamber into sections, one of which included a shallow pool for bathing. In another an eternal hearth provided cooking flame. What furniture there was hinged forth from walls or floor upon demand.

Except, in the precise center of the room, the bed—in which David Sullivan was fast awakening.

His fingers gripped fine sheets of vermilion silk. His eyes, when he dared crack them, beheld a dome of brilliant red brocade.

The world whirled.

No!
He snapped his lids shut again, squeezing them desperately, first against the pervasive color, and then, with greater force, against the fierce ache that was exploding in his head.

He had almost drowned.

Sleep, he decided. That was what he needed: more sleep.

Not wine. Not the heady, aromatic liquid that someone had set against his mouth, the same someone who was holding him half upright, he noted, though he could not recall when that had been accomplished.

“Sleep,” he muttered. “Dream. Liz.”

“I fear not, my pretty boy.” A woman’s voice thrummed against his ears.

Somehow David swallowed. Wine burned into his throat, cool and tart, setting sparks to shimmering through his blood. His nose twitched as tortured sinuses were soothed. The pain in his chest receded. The throbbing behind his eyes became more distant. He began to feel a tiny bit more human.

He lifted a hesitant eyelid. It was as he’d feared: the red room was no dream. Which meant the rest was no dream: the capture, the motionless journey through cold, wet darkness…

The woman before him was certainly no dream—though perhaps she deserved to be:

She was beautiful, with hair the color of spun copper wire laced with gold which fell past her shoulders. Her high-boned face was pale as porcelain, her lips red as the wine he had just been offered—from a massive two-handled chalice, he discovered, held in a slender hand. He blinked a refocus, looked higher, into eyes the green of bottle glass raised before a candle.

Her dress was ruby velvet sewn with tawny gold. Long sleeves trailed off the side of the bed; the neckline plunged in a deep vee, showing more than a little of the full swell of her breasts. David’s gaze lingered there until he realized she was watching him, then he looked hastily away, blushing furiously.

The woman’s eyes caught his and held them in a stare that was both frank and sensual. One part of him became alarmed, even as another part assessed the situation rationally: This wasn’t right. He shouldn’t be here.
Couldn’t
be here. He’d been swimming, hadn’t he? With Liz. They’d been naked. He’d given her something…but what? He couldn’t remember.

Damn!
Where memory should have been was only darkness. His past was a haze, a cloud. A cold murkiness through which he could not pass. He tried, but the pain returned.

“The present is master of the past, boy—and a thousand times more pleasant,” the cat-voice purred again. “It could be very pleasant indeed, if you were to ply your talents properly.”

A hand touched his forehead. Two rings sparkled there, one with interlaced dragons of silver and gold, their heads side by side. The sharp-pointed nails were lacquered the color of garnets.

The finger continued downward, tracing a fine line along the slightly concave ridge of his nose, across the soft fuzz on his upper lip, tickling the lower one, dropping then beneath the outthrust angle of his chin to pause at the hollow of his throat. Then down again, across his bare breastbone—

Jesus!
David realized, in his first truly lucid moment.
I’m naked!

“And very nicely so.” The woman smiled.

“Stop that!” David cried, aghast.

The finger poised at his solar plexus, inscribing small circles there. “Don’t you like it?”

“I…
No!
Not
that!
Stay out of my mind! Who are you anyway?”

The woman’s mouth tensed ever so slightly as she drew herself away, but the finger never wavered. “As to
who
I am, or what I am, that is long in telling. I know
your
name, however. All in Faerie know your name,
David Kevin Sullivan.
Windmaster’s Bane, they call you. But I have another word for you, pretty boy, and the word I have is…
murderer.
”

The woman’s eyes blazed then, the fingernail stabbed down into his flesh.

David gasped; his hand shot out in reflex to imprison the fragile wrist.

“No, lady. It wasn’t murder” came his desperate reply, “if you’re talking about Fionchadd. I
spared
him the Death of Iron. Ailill killed him!”

“
With iron!
With a common iron kitchen knife lashed to an ashwood staff—which would not have been within his reach had you not brought it into Faerie!”

David released the arm and sat up, scrambling backward until his shoulders thumped hard against a padded headboard. He glanced down, snatched a strip of ruby velvet coverlet across his lower body.

The woman smiled, her anger fading quick as a summer shower. She laid a hand on David’s upper thigh, stroked the tanned flesh absently.

David tensed, but did not move.
Dared
not move.

Abruptly, the woman withdrew the hand and reached toward a low, cast-metal table that stood beside the bed. A golden wine ewer gleamed there, from which she filled two of the double-handled chalices. One she offered to David, which he accepted with some reluctance.

“I would drink a toast to you, boy.”

“A
…a toast?” David replied uncertainly as he took the proffered wine.

The woman paused with her lips upon the rim. Beads of condensation had formed on the metal surface.

“A toast,” she repeated, “to murder.”

David felt his breath catch; he swallowed hard. “To murder,” he managed to croak, as he raised his drink in turn.

The woman took a sip, her eyes never leaving his. “No,
not
to murder,” she amended. “Let us rather say to
death.
”

“To death,” David whispered hopelessly.

Her brows lifted ever so slightly.

“The death of Ailill!”

David’s throat locked and he nearly spit out his wine, but clamped his jaws, curling his lips inward even as his cheeks puffed out. A thin stream of crimson nevertheless trickled from the corner of his mouth and slithered down his chin.

The woman intercepted its flow with a corner of her sleeve.

“Ailill! Christ, who
are
you?” David choked out in a strangled voice, then coughed in truth as a bit of wine burned into his lungs.

The woman’s face hardened abruptly, became cold and dispassionate. “My name is Morwyn, boy, since you seem determined to know it; Morwyn verch Morgan ap Gwyddion.”

David frowned. “Sounds Welsh, not Irish. I thought—”

The woman’s brow wrinkled. “Wales—yes, that is what men call Bran’s Country now. Annwyn is my home—most lately. That place where I was born, the place my father came from. But my mother’s land has no true name in any tongue you have heard of.”

David stared incredulously. “You mean you’re not from Faerie?”

“Oh, aye. Or at least in part I am. My father was from that realm, but not my mother.
She
is a
—Powersmith
is perhaps the best term for it.”

“Then you’re not Sidhe?”

The woman shrugged. “Nor wholly Tylwyth-Teg. But do not change the subject. There are other names I would speak of: Ailill mac Bobh, for one, King’s brother to Finvarra of Erenn. Once That One’s Ambassador to Annwyn. Of late his Voice in Tir-Nan-Og. Stormshaper, Windmaster—all these names they call him. But to those I would add another: Kinslayer. And that an abomination!”