CHAPTER 17
CATHBAD’S SON

Someone was groaning, a terrible sound, the voice thin like a child’s and jagged with despair. It frightened me, and I wished Roisin would see to whoever it was and quiet them.

“Luaine, wake up.”

I started, saw a monstrous outline before me, and realized at the same time that it was myself making that fearful noise. I clamped my teeth down hard, and the voice died in my throat.

“Who is it?”

The lamps flared up, and I saw it was no monster but a tall man who stood before me—a man with a raven on his shoulder.

“Cathbad?”

“No.” He eased his long legs down beside my low bed so I could see him better. A young man with fair hair pulled straight back rather than hanging down, a pleasant, bright face free of beard or mustache and eyes that seemed to look right into my soul. “I am Geanann, Cathbad’s son. He is unable to come to you, but has sent me in his stead. I am not so powerful a druid as he, of course,” and here he smiled, almost apologetically, “but my healing arts are stronger. I have come to see what might be done for you.” He leaned over me, and with one smooth gesture eased me onto my side so that my cheek lay exposed to his sight. I tensed—I could not bear, now, the least touch upon it—buthe did not try. For a long moment he just looked, not seeming to notice the smell of rot that must have assailed him.

When he sighed and sat back on his heels, I dared a question. “What could you possibly do? I have been cursed.”

“Cursed?” The snort that escaped him would have been a laugh, if it had not been so full of anger and derision. “If those two knew anything about real curses, they would not bandy them about so freely. Put curses out of your mind.” He rose to his feet and began to pace about the little room, suddenly agitated. “You have been poisoned. No ordinary wound could go septic and spread so quickly. If I knew what Abhartach used...”

I heard a hiss of indrawn breath, and Roisin stepped forward, fumbling in her pouch. She pulled out a wrapped piece of linen and thrust it at Geanann. “I pulled that from her cheek. Could there be poison still on it?”

Geanann unwrapped it gingerly, eyed the little shard of crockery under the lamplight, sniffed at it. He scratched at it with his blade. Then he wiped it on the linen, dripped a bit of water on it and examined the result closely. To my alarm, he once licked it—a quick touch of the tongue that I thought I must have imagined until I heard Roisin’s involuntary gasp.

He stood then as if lost in thought, and as the minutes dragged on, the pain roared back into my face in a fierce wave and licked against the inside of my skull, and I fought to hold back that mewing groan that spoke to me of death.

The choice he finally put to me was clear enough. He could, just possibly, save my life, but the pain of it would be greater than anything I would experience in the course of merely dying.Or, if I chose not to endure such an ordeal, his draughts could ease my passing to the next world, which would take place in a matter of days.

“How much greater?” I asked, dreading his reply, but he shook his head.

“It is not given us to measure the degrees of pain as we can measure the shadow’s length,” he said. “I will have to cut away the dead flesh and then cauterize the edges. After that, you will have a long slow battle as the poison drains and the wound heals. And at the end, a wide scar that will disfigure the left side of your face.”

The revulsion and fear I felt as I tried to picture the surgery was paralyzing. The skin of my cheek was now so stretched with swelling it felt near to splitting open, and so exquisitely tender that even the accidental brush of cloth against it made me cry out. Marshaling any other thought was almost more than I could manage—yet deep in my fevered brain an uneasy question was fighting its way to the surface.

I raised my hot eyes to his and saw that he was waiting.

“Why do you offer me a choice?” I demanded. “If life is indeed within my grasp, however difficult the pathway, why should I choose death?”

There was a silence while he studied me and seemed to search for words.

“My father said you would need the whole truth, ill though you be. He says you have a mind that seeks understanding.”

Suddenly the real question was plain to me.

“Geanann, why has Conchobor not come? If he knows I kept faith with him, why does he not come to me?”

He told it as gently as he could, but there are some truths that cannot really be softened.

“When the king married you, Luaine, it was not your welfare he was thinking of, nor even your beauty, whatever he may have said.”

I lay in my bed and closed my eyes against his kind face as he laid out what Cathbad had discovered. I understood now how it was possible to die of shame.

The king did not want me.

He had never wanted me, only my lands and the strength of my father’s men and our herds and riches. And there was none of Cuchulainn’s family left but myself to stand in the king’s way. He had hired Abhartach and his brother to get rid of me, and was even now riding in a supposed rage to their house to kill them, thus ensuring they would never be tempted to let slip his secret.

“So you see,” Geanann concluded, “if it is life that you choose, it is not clear what life awaits you. The king expects that you will succumb to the ‘curse,’ and there is no telling how it will be if, instead, you recover and return to Emain Macha.”

“I will never return to him,” I gritted. Tears welled up under my lids and scalded their way down to my pillow. I hadn’t the strength left to feel anger at Conchobor’s betrayal, but despair feeds on weakness and it washed over me now like the surf breaking over a rock. All I had to do was to let go, and let it take me...

“Luaine.” Geanann’s hand rested on mine, long fingers wrapping about my wrist, the pressure of them calling me back to him. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and was grateful to see in his neither pity nor contempt, but only compassion.

“I cannot choose for you. But I will say that if it is life you decide to follow, Cathbad and I will help you to find a new path.”

“Cathbad serves the king,” I said bitterly.

“Cathbad serves Ulster,” he corrected. “And Conchobor’s king-ship, whatever his personal faults, has been strong. Ulster cannot afford to lose him now, Luaine. Not with your father gone. But neither will Cathbad leave you unaided.”

I could not force my brain to work. The rack and chill of fever, the deep bite of my wound, the debilitating sense of shame—they pushed me toward the easy course. To let go and be at ease. But Geanann had offered me a different road, a harder road, and I owed it to him to at least consider it well.

“I need Fintan and some time alone,” I said. I did not think Fin had anything new to show me, but I thought his white feather might help me find the thread of my thought.

And so it did. The white feather blazed out in the dim room against deepest black. And my thoughts did indeed find something to grip onto there, a focus that gave me some distance from the pain. I fixed my eyes on Fintan’s white feather, and there swelled out of its small bright beacon a wheeling dance of memories.

They were random, at first, fleeting scraps of my childhood. My father’s apple feat. My mother singing. Sunrise over the sea, the Cooley Hills still blue with night’s shadow. The time my father sneezed with a mouthful of ale and it shot out his nose, and I could not finish my meal for laughing. The little white asters that nestle into the grass around our house like fallen stars.

But the memories all ended in death. I saw my brother, the eager young flame of his life stamped out in the service of another’s vengefulness. My mother, throwing herself into the grave without a thought for what was left behind. And then it was Deirdriu swimming out of Fin’s white light. Her sorrowful violet eyes glowed like jewels before me, charging me with some burden or message. And then they vanished in a rising tide of blood, and I remembered how when she lay there, her head shattered and her soul finally free, Conchobor was not grieved but only angered. Cheated of his prize.

And then at last the anger blazed within me, for Deirdriu and for myself too. Was I worth so little, then, that my life should be tossed aside for a man whose greed had swelled beyond bounds? My father had not been king of a great province, but he had shone brighter than Conchobor ever could, nor was he one to betray the memory of a friend.

“Call them in, Fin. Geanann and Roisin both.”

And when they had entered, and Geanann had knelt by my bed to hear me speak, I forced my words to rise above the pain they caused me and sound clear in the little room.

“Cuchulainn’s line will not die out from Conchobor’s treachery. I swear by the gods we honor, I will defy him, king though he be. I will live.”