Eithne believes the worst

“I’ve seen to the horses,” Eithne ventured softly.

Dantalion grunted. He could not bring himself to tell her that the horses were not truly horses and did not need “seeing to”, but neither could he pretend they were and offer to perform that masculine labor himself. That would have been a lie.

“Were you wanting me to light a fire?” she asked.

The red light wavered, and he supposed she was pointing her torch at the wood he had brought in from the yard.

“If you are not too tired for magic, Eithne,” he said, as gently as he dared.

“It’s little magic I’m needing to light a fire with a torch,” she mumbled as she shuffled away.

With the collapse of the roof and floors, what was once the lower hall had become a bramble-​​grown inner court. He could only guess at the corridor to the kitchen by observing where the darkness of the wall suddenly deepened to the darkness of caves.

“The old kitchen is over there,” he announced to the briars. “We shall find our way to it through this thicket in the morning. There is a great stone hearth built into the wall, if it hasn’t fallen in.”

The cold clouds of the sky would be their only roof that night, and even they were thin enough in patches to let through the colder light of the stars. The wind blew through windows and gaping holes in one side of the castle and out the other. The ruin had become as invisible to wind as it was to men. They had had more shelter the night before in the loft of a barn.

When Nimea had freed him, Dantalion had thought himself forever done with being humiliated in this place. Now the place itself was a humiliation to him. It was all he had to offer her.

“And if it has collapsed, I shall dig it out again,” he declared. “I swear you shall have a proper fire tomorrow night! And a roof over your head!”

He shouted because he could no longer hear her. He was startled to find her standing at his side.

She had drawn her courage up so high it seemed to cast a shadow over her. “Are you meaning for us to stay here a while, Cian?” she asked. Then she bit her lip and sucked in her breath.

It was a true question at last, asked with a voice that rose cleanly at the end, and eyes that were firm. His pride was in such a battered state he heard it as an indignant demand.

“Aye, a while,” he snapped. “It’s the safest place for you now. I apologize if instead of giving you the little house of your dreams I can only be offering you the great castle of your nightmares.”

She looked past him at the wall, though she did not lower her eyes. As sweet as he had always found her shy, downcast glances, so sinister did he now find her blank, unseeing stares.

“It isn’t for my own self I was asking,” she said softly. “I was worried about Sweetdew.”

“Ach, Sweetdew,” he groaned.

“She’ll be having her wee kitties any day now. And I was fearing she would be having them while we traveled.”

“And that I would leave them behind?”

“Or drown them, or something,” she whispered.

“Drown them!”

He nervously tapped his fist against the wall, hoping it would ease his desire to smash it down. A week before, she would never have believed he could kill her beloved cat’s kittens. Of course, in his past he had done worse – far worse. The difference was that she now believed it.

“Never fear, Eithne,” he muttered. “It’s time enough she’ll have to bear and raise them before we’re moving on.”

Eithne nodded and sighed in relief, in spite of the reality of the rotting castle towering over her.

“Anyway,” he blurted, “I would never be harming your Sweetdew’s little – cute and – so forths…”

Now it was he who sucked in his breath in surprise at his unintended daring, though it was Eithne’s mouth that was quivering.

This time she did not bite her lip to stop it, and for a moment he had the wild thought that she was waiting for him to kiss it. For a moment he thought he might have found his way through to her again, with his foolishness.

Then he realized her shivering might have a more prosaic cause. “Are you cold?” he asked stiffly.

She seemed so startled by this question that she replied with another. “Are you hungry?” she gasped. “I was meaning to ask?”

“Ach, but you have not yet had your egg!” he cried.

They had stolen – or rather, they had taken and Eithne had insisted they leave a coin – a basket of eggs on the way, and Eithne had cooked them hard in their little pot, and Dantalion had been doling them out to her since, one for breakfast and one for supper. Sweetdew had once mentioned to him that expecting mothers ought to eat eggs, and though sly Sweetdew might have been speaking for her own benefit, Dantalion had leapt at this chance to provide properly for Eithne in at least one way.

Perhaps, he realized suddenly, her concern for Sweetdew was really for herself. Perhaps she had thought he might make her ride and ride until her belly was as bulging as the cat’s – that he might leave her newborn twins behind or even drown them like unwanted kittens. Perhaps she had been afraid for her own babies all along.

But Eithne cringed away from his eagerness and whimpered, “I wasn’t forgetting! I swear I was meaning to eat it!” – as if she thought he believed she might try to starve them.

Perhaps she had been told that a demon could read a girl’s thoughts. Perhaps it was her own babies she feared.