Osh wakes

Osh’s eyes and mouth were dry and sticky with sleep, and his head was dizzy, as if he had whirled and whirled himself around as little boys liked to do. It seemed the Duke had again talked him into drinking too much of that wretched wine-​​drink.

His back ached, too, like a back twice its age, and gradually he realized he had been sleeping sitting up in a chair. The chairs of men were deceitful things, like their wine, seeming very pleasant and cozy at first, but leaving one creaky and muddled in the morning.

But Osh’s delicate sense of the hues of light told him that it was not yet morning.

Moreover, Flann was leaning over the arm of his chair, and her every third or fourth breath was a frail sob or a sniffle, like a little baby who had cried so long she had stopped crying on her own – and he had not even heard.

“Flann!” he gasped.

Her head snapped up in surprise, but she was not merely startled. On her face was the blank despair of love lost to death. She wailed “Osh!” and the keen anguish of her voice tore through his last rags of sleep like a blade.

“Liadan!”

For an instant he saw nothing but the cradle – not even Flann. He drew his legs up beneath her overhanging face until he stood on the cushion, and then he simply leapt over her head in his hurry.

But the baby appeared perfectly well: she was pink and fat-​​bellied, as if she had just nursed, and she merely smiled and sighed drowsily when Osh’s head appeared over her cradle, too contented even to ask to be lifted up.

But if Liadan was well…

Flann was on her feet by now and staggering towards him, with wobbling legs and arms wide and reaching. “You’re awake!” she croaked.

Then he remembered everything.

“You’re awake!” he cried, and he caught her halfway across the room.

He swept her up and spun her around to make her lose her balance entirely, merely for the delight of feeling her young limbs struggle to regain it and then surrender to his strength. She had been limp as a corpse all evening – her body alive and breathing, but lacking even the slight, elastic resistance of living ligament and muscle.

And now she was awake! and clinging to him! and pressing her sharp little chin so tightly against his shoulder that her every word seemed intended to chip down through his collarbone and ribs to his heart!

She was only gibbering at him in her Gaelic, and he could only moan, “What did you do? What did you do?” – in his own language, perhaps, for all he knew and for all it mattered.

They had searched her room and all her affairs for hints of the poison she must have taken, since she was too well-​​guarded now to slip away to drown. They had found nothing, neither poison nor antidote. She had simply saved herself, as she always did, to his shame and self-​​loathing. He never failed to fail her when she needed him, for the simple, stupid, selfish reason of sleep.

He kissed her chin and he kissed her cheeks, but finally he tried to kiss her lips – to stop the jumble of words and replace them with something that would mean more–

But then amongst the Gaelic came a name he knew. It polluted the very air she used to speak it, and he snorted loudly to clear it away from his face.

“What about Sebastien?” he whispered.

For answer she only moaned like a gravely wounded woman who was suffering to death.

Osh relaxed his arms around her until he was merely holding her and not squeezing her, and he cuddled her tear-​​streaked face in the hollow between his arm and his head.

It was always so with this woman and that man. His longing to beat and tear and slash the man made him all the more gentle with the woman. His blooming love for the woman merely fed his hatred for the man.

“What has he done to you, my darling?”

She lifted her head and murmured with a child’s trembling bravery, “I have a terrible secret, Osh.”

In an instant he had imagined several terrible secrets, and several fitting punishments for the man who might have forced them on her.

“And I can’t keep it!” she sobbed.

He shushed her and clucked at her as he did at the baby when she cried. “Shh, shh, my darling, never worry.” He kissed her cheek and kissed her precious rounded ear beneath her hair. “You shall tell me, and I shall keep it for you.”

She sniffled and nodded, and she even squeezed him in gratitude with one arm, while she stroked the back of his neck with the fingertips of the other, as she knew he liked her to do. More than anything those cool fingers told him she was aware of him and cared for him, and not merely clinging to him as the only support available to her in the sleeping house.

“I saw Eithne’s Cian tonight,” she mumbled. “Osh…” She looked away from him, but she lifted her hand and passed it down over his nose and lips and chin, so to keep her sense of his face all the same. “He’s a demon, Osh, a demon,” she whispered. “The demon Eight. The demon Dre.”

Osh had been slowly inhaling as she began this announcement, preparing to calm her in some way – for were not demons the invention of the Christians, like their god? He merely had to find a gentle way to tell it.

But Dre was real. Paul had seen him, and Vash had suffered at his hands. He had given the kisór such magic that they were safe and unreachable in their underground lair.

And as always when he tried to convince himself that Christians were fools and their priests were deceivers, he would stub up against his own awe and gratitude at what one of their number had done for his blinded son.

Flann’s eyes brightened as she saw she was believed. “Aye! It’s a fine-​​looking, high-​​headed man he is now, and no points on his ears is he having, and a grand Gaelic does he speak besides! But he wears the mark on his face! And he brought a monster into the room to show us what he could do!”

“Dre was here?” Osh whispered. He glanced again at Liadan and ran his hands down Flann’s sides to be certain they were both still intact.

“And my poor, sweet, simple-​​hearted sister!” she wailed. “He has her believing he’s an angel of God!”

She paused, but her mouth hung open; her lips quivered and her tongue twitched behind them as if she had not done speaking.

Osh longed to lift a hand to her chin, close her mouth, and kiss her lips, ending the secret there. It was still something he could handle: Eithne’s danger and even her doom were not Flann’s own.

But her pleading, terrified eyes made him fear she had scarcely told even the start of the secret.

“And I almost believed it, too,” she whispered. “Sebastien…”

Osh snorted again, breathing heavily now to calm his growing anger.

“He tried to tell me he was an angel, too.”

She whispered so softly she scarcely breathed. Osh leaned his face closer to hers to breathe what breath of hers he could, so that not a particle of her dearness would be wasted on the uncaring air.

“What did he tell you?” he asked softly.

“He tried to tell me he was Brude come back to me, with the gray eyes of him, like unto Liadan’s.” She shook her head sadly. “But Brude was only a man, Osh, and he’s dead and gone.”

She was trying to make her quavering voice firm, as if she were explaining a terrible truth to a child. Osh kissed her forehead gently. He knew the child she was attempting to convince was herself.

She took a deep breath and began again. “And Sebastien is a demon, too. And he took poor Brude’s gray eyes, to fool me. And he said it was so he could be marrying me – as he married my sweet sister to his brother! He wants me, and he wants my sweet baby, Osh! Because I sinned!”

“Hush, my darling. He shall never have you.”

“And he took Eithne away with him, and not telling where! And only her cloak and her cat would he let her take, and not even a kiss from Connie to say goodbye! And he made you sleep, so you could not be stopping him!”

Osh’s fury seethed up again, this time without its overflow of gentleness. “Made me sleep?”

“With his magic – but he said you would not wake until the dawning and now – here you are!” She sobbed and laughed and hugged him all at once.

“Made me sleep?” he hissed.

“But you’re awake now!” she whispered. “For you knew I felt so alone!”

“Has he come before?”

“I don’t know,” she mumbled, and then she began to struggle in his arms in a growing panic until he let her go, for fear that in his rage he would injure her.

“Ach, Osh! In the house! With the baby! And once – I swear! I swear! – I couldn’t wake you! Are you remembering?”

Osh remembered nothing. All those nights that must have seemed endless torment for her had passed for him as if they had not been. He had not even dreamt. He had only slept, and slept, and slept.

He was awake now.