Shapeshifter

SIXTEEN



Sive Remembers

Finn was farseeing, but he could not see everything. He did not see that I would never hold him, or admire his blue eyes, or sing him to sleep again.

When I understood how the Dark Man had tricked me, I was sure I would die of grief. I longed for it. But whatever all those tales of great love say, it is not so easy to die of a broken heart. The body betrays the heart and keeps it beating.

Then one day the baby squirmed and stretched in my belly, and I wished for a mother’s hands to soothe and cradle him. My mind, which had been doing its best to fade away altogether, jolted awake as I realized the dangers of the birth to come. I still had one thing to live for: my baby. Finn’s baby.

SIVE STOOD WITH hooves splayed, head down, as the contraction gripped her, clenched hard, and released. They were coming faster now. Time she was under cover.

Sive did not know what had prompted Far Doirche to agree to her desperate offer. Pressed against the far wall of the shed he had shut her in, ready to turn if he so much as waved a toe over the threshold of the doorway, she had bargained for her baby’s life. “Allow me to bear my child, and raise him to the age of fostering and send him to his father,” she had begged, “and then I will take my woman’s shape and submit to your rod, and go with you.”

“You are joking, I suppose,” he had said, and behind his smile the anger had been a white heat that licked at her like a flame. “Why should I not kill the child the day it is born?”

“Because then you will have no way to compel me, and I will be a deer to the end of my days before I bend to your will.” The words so brave, while she had to clasp her hands behind her back to hide their trembling. It was only her singer’s training keeping her voice from betraying her. “Besides,” she had added, letting go of the defiance and softening her tone, “what is seven years to a man such as yourself? It will pass in a few nights’ sleep, with long centuries ahead for you to savor all your victories.”

She had been sure he would see the weakness in her argument. But Far, who could work an illusion but hadn’t the fellow-feeling for true shapeshifting, knew nothing of its laws. And the law was this: she must have the baby in her true form, or he would be born a deer, and like the wolfhounds Bran and Sceolan, be doomed to remain a beast forever.

Another pain flared, bit deep and eased away. But she was close now. When the contraction ended, Sive turned off the little track and began to make her way through the trees to the shelter she had prepared.

It wasn’t much—just a hollow scraped under the splayed roots of a fallen tree, lined with bracken and screened with piled-up brush. A beast’s nest, it was, not nearly as comfortable as the cave Far had provided in this oddly spacious prison—a seemingly open woodland walled by such thickly woven spells that it might as well have been an island in the midst of a vast sea. Sive could not break through its invisible walls, nor had she ever seen so much as a moth pass through from the other side.

Sive was not about to give birth in that cave, whatever the Dark Man had promised. He would sense her change, and what promise in any world would stop him from preying on her weakness? No, she must be hidden. There was nowhere she could go in Far’s “garden,” as he called it, where he would not find her. She knew that. She hoped only to slow him down by making him search. To change at the last possible moment, bear her baby, and return to four legs before he arrived.

She sank onto her forelegs at the mouth of the shelter, then eased onto her side as a fierce pain radiated through her belly. She would stay and labor here, in the dappled sun—warmth for comfort, light for courage. When the time came, it wouldn’t take her a moment to scramble down into the scrape and pull a few branches across the opening.

SHE NAMED HIM OISIN—little deer—but to Sive’s great relief that was the only part of him that spoke of deerness. He was a big, strong, eager baby boy, with his father’s blond hair and open smile, and the deep, clear jewel-like eyes of her own people. He was her only joy and a constant lowgrade terror, for babies are ever in need of care that only a woman with soft hands and clever fingers and a soothing voice can give, and though she longed to lose herself in these tender encounters, she could not. Every moment spent in woman’s form left her open to the Dark Man, and she never changed without ensuring she had a clear view, or a solid wall, in every direction. She cleared the area all around the mouth of the cave and did her mothering deep inside, so he could not take her unawares.

At least she was adequately provisioned. The Dark Man did not intend for her to die in her captivity. There was little in the way of comfort, but there was fire and food and occasional fineries intended, she supposed, to tempt her away from the exile she had chosen. When the Dark Man came with these things, she would huddle against the back wall of the cave with Oisin and take her deer form, always keeping the baby behind her so that Far hardly got a look at him. Sometimes, when he came, he would speak softly to her, hold out a fine dress or a jeweled pin enticingly, but she would not respond. As time passed, his tone was more often threatening and angry than pleasant, but it was all the same to her. She cowered against the wall and prayed he would not harm Oisin.

She never slept in her own shape but always as a deer, curled protectively about her baby, so he was able to snuggle into her warm flank and find her milk easily.

And so Oisin survived and grew into a sturdy toddler with blond-white curls and a clear, piping voice that could already follow his mother’s tune.

Sive Remembers

My Oisin. He comes to me in my dreams some nights, and I awaken in the rustling blackness before dawn with the imprint of his sturdy little body pressed against me, the feel of his mouth greedy on my breast, the heat and weight of his head and the sweet baby smell of him…And then comes the loss. The long, long years since I have seen his dear smile or heard the music of his laughter. Are you alive, my son, and running with the Fianna? Or did Far betray us and leave you, so young and helpless, to die?

Oh, on those mornings, if I woke to the music of the hounds, I think I would give myself to them, for it does not seem possible to go on. Instead I run. I lose myself in blind flight and run until my hide lathers and my flanks tremble, until the last drop of my strength is spent. I run until thought is replaced by simple animal need, and I forget.

THE YEARS DRIFTED PAST as they do in the Undying Lands, like leaves resting lightly on a river’s surface, seemingly still but soon carried out of sight by the strong invisible current. So it was for Oisin, who grew overnight, it seemed to Sive, into a lively boy who knew every ivied oak and rabbit run of their wooded pen. But Sive had never been so aware of time’s march, each fleeting year a step closer to the day the Dark Man would claim his due.

He tried when Oisin was five, sending Oran to the cave as messenger since she would not take her own form in Far’s presence. “He will come tomorrow at first light,” Oran reported. “He says you are to be in your proper form, ready to go with him.”

Oran, a boy no longer but a bony young man with wide brown eyes, did not try to disguise his sorrow as he recited his message. “I am sorry,” he told her. “I hoped you would escape him.”

As had she. Her bargain had been necessary to protect her son, a mother’s instinct that could not be denied, however disastrous the consequences. And those consequences had seemed so far away. Surely Far would be overcome before they could come to pass, would show his hand once too often and set the Old Ones finally against him.

Now Sive saw it would not happen. He was careful; he had kept his plans and his prize hidden from sight. But he would not have her yet.

Sive bristled at Oran, a show of defiance for his master’s benefit. “Your master has mistaken the age of weaning for that of fostering,” she declared, though Oisin had been weaned a year and more. “Since when do we send babies of five summers from their mothers? You may tell the Dark Man I will give him up in his seventh year and not before.”

Her bluff had worked—once. But the following spring Oran was back, with a more ominous message. “My master says some boys are fostered at six. And he will not wait longer. Be ready at dawn tomorrow.”

Sive refused again, and at dawn, when Far did not return, she breathed a sigh of relief. Another year gained, or so it seemed.

But the Dark Man had come. Hidden in the woods, wrapped in the shadow-spell that faded him to a dim hint of a man, he waited. He waited until Sive had cautiously released her golden-haired boy from her tight embrace. He waited through their morning meal, until Sive stopped peering fearfully into the woods at every snapping twig and rustling leaf. He waited until the sun’s wheel had carried it to the highest point of the sky, until Sive relaxed her guard and sent the boy for water. And as Oisin walked carefully back from the brook, both arms wrapped about a heavy earthenware pot, Far Doirche stepped out from behind the blackthorn and scooped the boy into his arms.

Oisin nearly got away. His mother had taught him well, and keeping hold of him was like trying to pick up a nest of weasels. He twisted, he bit, he kicked out viciously with a child’s version of his father’s thick-muscled thighs, and in the end Far held nothing but a fistful of blond hair which he did not doubt the boy would gladly tear from his own head if it meant escape. When he felt Far’s iron blade bite against his neck, though, he had the sense to grow still.

Sive had come flying from the cave at Oisin’s first screech and stood before them now, wild-eyed and agonized.

“There will be no more games.” Far snugged the blade closer and pressed, enough to make the boy wince and bite his lips. Eyes round and blue in a white, scared face. He gave Sive time to imagine the next steps and then continued calmly, “You will come to me now, or I will kill your child in front of you. Choose.”

Oisin Remembers

“You must send him to his father,” my mother begged. She was frantic, weeping, and I was numb with terror, though she had tried to prepare me for this day. She clawed at the Dark Man’s cloak in desperation. “You will send him? You promised me!” Her voice shrill with fear, the bleak knowledge before her that she had no power to hold him to anything at all.

“I have already said I would,” he said absently, like a husband half-listening to a scolding wife. His concentration was all on the words and gestures that wove his invisible web across the entrance to our cave. He had bound me carelessly and tossed me in the far corner of the cave, and I wrestled frantically with the knots, trying to free myself before he was finished.

And then he dragged her off.

The ropes fell away and I hurled myself into that barrier again and again, trying with all my might to follow. I howled and screamed and threw myself against the unseen wall until my voice was a husk and my face smeared with blood.

My mother kept twisting herself to see me, yet she did not fight to escape him. He had laid his hazel rod upon her, and she could not but obey him. But she cried out my name, screamed it as though it were ripped from her heart by a clawed hand, her beautiful face a mask of loss.

Soon she was gone from my sight, and the only sound in the woods my own hoarse cries. I battered myself against the Dark Man’s wall until exhaustion swallowed me up like an ocean wave. One minute I cried and fought; the next, darkness took me and I, too, was gone.





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