Fire Arrow

TWENTY-TWO

The Fire Arrow

Brie abruptly stood, then realized she could not see. Stuffing the arrow in her quiver and feeling for her bow, Brie called out softly, "Fara?"

She felt the furry body of the faol brush against her legs. "Guide me, Fara. I cannot see. I wish to find Ciaran, to watch Collun. And then I need to go to the stone beach."

Fara began to move forward and Brie kept near the faol by resting her hand on the animal's back. Fara had long since rid herself of the bandage on her neck and Brie could feel the puckered edges of the faol's wound.

"Brie?" It was Aelwyn's voice.

Brie stopped short, turning her face toward the voice.

"I could not sleep. How is Collun?"

"The same," Brie answered, keeping her voice casual. "Aelwyn, would you do me a favor and sit with him? I, uh, need to look for mallow, in the forest. It's for burn salve..." She trailed off weakly, hoping Aelwyn would not ask questions.

"Yes, of course. But..." There was curiosity in the wvll's voice.

"It should not take long. Thank you." Brie walked forward, her hand still on Fara's back, trying to move with the assurance of one who can see. "To the beach, Fara," Brie whispered.

Brie felt the branches of the trees around her as they entered the forest, but Fara guided her surely, and she did not stumble or fall.

She could tell the moment they emerged from the forest: the moonlight brightening the dimness of her sight, the air on her face, and the strong smell of the sea. They moved quickly across the battlefield, and as they were making their way through the ruins near the shore, Brie's sight began to return. By the time they stepped onto the white stone beach her vision had returned to normal. She could clearly see the moths that swarmed up with each step. There were more than she remembered, and she had to keep waving her hand in front of her face to keep them from lining her lips and closing her nostrils. Fara playfully swatted at a few, but because there were so many she soon tired of the game.

Suddenly unsure, Brie gazed around, still waving away the moths. The moon was so bright that except for the dun color of the sky it might have been day. Brie saw no sign of Balor.

She moved closer to the water and the number of moths began to diminish. Restlessly her eyes scanned the bluff, the glittering fortress, the battlefield, and then the beach and across the sea.

Squinting, she took several steps closer to the water, until it was lapping the tips of her boots. There was a long jagged line of darkness resting on the horizon, a deeper dark than the murky night sky, and Brie stared at it until her eyes hurt. The darkness stretched left and right almost as far as she could see. At first she was puzzled; then vague, uneasy fears began stirring in her.

She stood very still, her body rigid. Fara had seen the darkness, too, and let out a low sound. Together they watched as the darkness grew larger and moved closer.

Boats. Hundreds and hundreds of boats. The swollen moon shone on them as brightly as a sky full of torches. Brie could make out the arching long necks of the prows of long boats with bloodred sails billowing above. They looked like a fleet of winged sea serpents splitting the waves, bearing down on the coast of Dungal.

She had a sudden tingling sensation on the skin of her neck and arms. Someone was nearby. Almost involuntarily Brie looked up, and there, standing at the tip of the bluff above, was Balor. He gazed straight out to sea, at the approaching boats, and he wore golden armor, burnished, dazzling in the full moon. His head was covered by a resplendent war helmet with the guise of a bird of prey rising in radiant gold from his forehead. Because of the way he stood, Brie could see that across the torso of the golden mail was a black tunic. In the center of the tunic, woven of impossibly bright threads, was a goldenhawk.

He did not turn his face toward Brie, but he knew she was there.

Brie looked back at the boats. They had dropped their sails and were now being rowed. Each boat was crowded with morgs—there were more standing than sitting at the oars—a ghastly silent horde, some hooded, some baring their skeletal heads. She suddenly remembered that the morgs who attacked Collun at Cuillean's dun had come by boat.

Balor must have emptied the island kingdoms of Usna and Uneach, Brie thought as she stared, unbelieving, at the oncoming multitude. Hundreds of boats, perhaps even thousands, each one carrying a hundred morgs. Even if all of Dungal and Eirren combined stood against them, there would still be morgs to spare.

Brie sank to her knees. Fara huddled against her. No wonder the gabha battle had been irrelevant to Balor. This was his true army.

Only when she felt a searing on her already burnt hand did Brie realize she was holding the fire arrow. She must have reached for it, unknowing. Hot tears of desolation and loss stung her eyelids. She. found herself thinking of the hero Amergin and how he beat the sea back with his fists. And of Fionna, who had emptied herself to keep the sea from overwhelming her people.

But these were morgs in boats, not the sea, and Brie had no drapicht. The fire arrow did, but she could hardly slash and burn her way through such a horde.

She gazed up again at Balor. The moon gleamed on his golden armor like a beacon. He stood unmoving, triumphant. He must have removed his eye-patch, for Brie could see his white eye under the golden beak of his war helmet.

Numbly she rose from her knees, feeling for her bow. She held the arrow a last time. And then, fingers trembling, she nocked it to the bowstring.

She pointed the arrow at Balor, at the goldenhawk on his chest. For my father, she thought.

She pulled the string back. But then, with a sob that tore out of her gut, she swung the bow away and, thinking irrelevantly of the god Nuadha and his magic teka, she fixed her sights on the nearest longboat of morgs, though it lay well beyond the range of an arrow shot. She focused all that was in her, all of her strength, her will, her passion, and her stubbornness, into that banded, mysterious arrow, until she did not know where she began and the arrow ended ... and she was the arrow. Before letting the arrow fly, Brie suddenly remembered the nightmare she had had in Ardara, of flames instead of eyes. She felt the heat of the arrow along her jawbone, and it seared against her first and second fingers as she held the nock in place on the string. She had never felt the arrow so hot, hot enough to burn through the bowstring; her muscles contracted and terror threatened to dissolve her will to shoot.

But with a courage she did not know she possessed, her already kindling eyes fixed on the nearest longboat, she re-leased the arrow. As she watched it soar, an unwavering line of brightness against the dun-colored sky, Brie thought to herself what a farcical, ridiculous gesture it had been, to shoot a single arrow at a war host as vast as the sea itself. Her bow collapsed in fragments in her hands, the string burnt through. But the arrow flew higher and higher, soaring over the sea waves, arcing, then gracefully descending, and soundlessly cleaved the surface of the water, leagues short of the longboats. Brie crumpled to the ground, her eyes on fire.

As she pressed her fingers in agony against her eyelids, Brie felt a great stillness around her, almost as if all sound had been sucked down under the surface of the sea with the arrow. She could not see with her burning eyes, but pictures, vivid and clear, were forming behind the heat. She saw the arrow cleaving the water, then piercing rock and sand and sticking there in the seabed, upright. A fish was swimming by, a yellow parrot fish (one of Sago's favorites, Brie thought foolishly), and, as the arrow came to rest, the fish suddenly startled, darting away in a great hurry. And Brie saw why; the water surrounding the arrow began to move in an unnatural way. It was as if an invisible giant finger had dipped into the water and was spinning it in circles around the fire arrow. The water began to foam, and the churning grew so intense Brie could no longer see the arrow.

And then the pictures behind her eyelids were taking her up above the water and she saw how quickly the underwater upheaval had spread, for the moonlit sea stretching before her was being whipped into a frenzy, like a violent northeastern storm, yet there was not a breath of wind.

The burning in Brie's eye sockets was close to unbearable, and the pictures began to flicker, filming over from the heat and pain.

But she could hear the churning and the groaning of the sea. Sprays of water hit her body. The waves were growing larger, and blindly she backed away from the shoreline.

Then through the flickering she could dimly make out one giant wave beginning to form. It gathered itself together and rose, monstrous and impossible, into the night sky, blotting out the moon. And defying all reason, the giant spume of water exploded west, away from the beach. It slammed into the Western Sea with a thunderous roaring blast, as if the earth itself had cracked open.

Then the picture flicked off suddenly, leaving only blackness behind Brie's pain-seared eyes. And she heard another sound, cacophonous and enormous: a blend of hissing and screaming from thousands of morg throats. It lasted only a moment; then came silence, save for the sound of the ocean, restless and ever moving, as it settled back into its familiar rhythms.

Brie realized she was drenched with water, as she lay huddled on the beach of stones. The burning in her eyes had lessened somewhat, though she still kept her hands pressed against them, but her body felt broken and lifeless. And, when she removed her hands and opened her eyelids, she could not see. It was a darkness that frightened her; not just a blurred gray, as had happened before, but a complete and utter black.

She was so weak she did not think she had the strength to sit up, but then she felt Fara's wet fur beside her. When she had pulled herself up, Fara climbed into her lap, filling it. Brie laid her face on the animal's haunch, glad for the warmth.

Then she heard a cracking sound, so loud, as of something very large beginning to splinter. A familiar sound, Brie thought. Oh yes, the bell tower. And she knew, without being able to see it, that the sound came from Sedd Wydyr, and that the crystal castle was shattering.

As splinters of glass and rubble began to tumble down onto the bluff and beach, Brie crawled on her hands and knees to get farther away, Fara close beside her. Moths, some with damp wings, fluttered into her face, but she did not stop to brush them away. Somewhere in the dull recesses of her mind, she thought that Balor wasn't going to be pleased. This was the second of his buildings she had somehow managed to wreck.

Then her battered body began to shake. It was not only Balor's buildings she had destroyed.

He was somewhere nearby. She could feel it and had a sudden insane urge to throw herself into the sea, thinking it would be better to get it all over with quickly. But she did not; she just held Fara tightly as she lay curled up on her side, trembling.

And soon the footsteps came, as she had known they would, and she felt Fara being lifted from her arms and flung aside. She heard the faol hit the stones and then she heard no movement at all, except for the whooshing of moths.

Brie sat up, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees.

"It cannot have happened, and yet it has," came Balor's golden voice, thick with rage and incredulity. "I had not thought the old woman's draoicht adequate, and yet her prophecy was true."

"Old woman?" Brie croaked. Somehow she pulled herself to her feet, weak and blind as a newborn kitten still wet from afterbirth.

"A wyll, a hideous crone, misshapen, offensive to the eye. Before I left Dungal and came to Dun Slieve, this wyll told me that a cousin with an arrow of power would destroy me one day. I disbelieved her, but when I came to your father's dun and saw the unkindled skill in you with bow and arrow, I decided it was as well to be cautious. So I made the serving woman of Dun Slieve talk in her sleep and learned of the arrow.

"I tried to take it from you once"—he laughed his rich golden laugh—"but you had it not. Not yet."

And Brie remembered. One rain-soaked night in late spring, she was in her room at Dun Slieve, woken suddenly from sleep with a horrible pain and fear. Her breath had stopped, and a yellow bird was plunging down at her. Balor's tunic. Even then the goldenhawk had been his emblem. So evil, terrifying had it been that she had hidden the memory until it began to come on its own, unbidden, on a rainy night in Cuillean's dun. Or perhaps Balor himself had hidden the memory from her. "'Cross my heart and then to die/Stick an arrow in my eye.'"

"I almost disposed of you then, and, of course, I should have. But there was an interruption and I did not wish to be discovered, not until I found the arrow." Masha had opened the door, worrying about rain leaking from the ceiling. "It was a mistake, for as it turned out, the arrow concealed itself from me well. It did so again, did it not, in the bell tower?"

Brie nodded, as if in a trance.

"I could have done much with that arrow," Balor said, regret mingling with his rage. She could hear him take several strides away. He must have been looking up at the ruins of Sedd Wydyr, for he said, "That was to be our fortress, you know: rulers of a golden kingdom, Balor and consort." The rage broke over his words like a cresting wave, but his voice did not waver.

"'Cross my heart and then to die...' " The words echoed in Brie's ears, and she saw the plummeting goldenhawk, suffocating, hurting her.

The strip of cloth Collun had used to bind her burnt hand had come loose again and, unthinking, Brie began unwinding it, her blind eyes fixed on the place where Balor's voice had been. She stood sightless before this sorcerer and his staggering rage, with nothing to protect herself. Her pockets were empty, except for the moon shell Sago had given her.

Why does he not move? Brie wondered.

"And now..." Balor's voice was suddenly impatient. The rage could be contained no more.

"What of Bricriu?" The words tumbled out in a feeble effort to distract.

"Bricriu? I saw him scuttling off toward the mountains, toward Medb. The last time he came groveling at Rathcroghan she broke him. I do not care much for his chances with her now." Brie could hear the shrug of indifference in his voice.

Unlike yourself, Brie thought, for she knew, as he knew, he would have little trouble finding favor in Medb's eyes again, with his golden vanity and his seductive power. She slipped her fingers into the pocket that held the moon shell and pulled it out slowly, almost unmindfully. She heard an odd clanking sound, as though Balor were taking off some part of his golden armor.

"Will not Bricriu tell Medb you intended to betray her?" Brie wondered if Balor still had his eye-patch off.

"Who do you think Queen Medb will believe?" he replied contemptuously.

You, thought Brie.

"Now..." He moved toward her.

Brie quickly slid the moon shell into the piece of cloth from her hand and, abruptly lifting it above her head as she would a slingshot, she snapped the shell toward where she guessed Balor's head to be.

He screamed: a high-pitched foul noise infused with outrage and disbelief; a rending, piercing scream. And then something heavy knocked against her. She lost her footing and fell to the stones.

Something was lying across Brie's legs. She reached a tentative hand out and found a face, Balor's face. There was a sticky wetness on his cheek and her hand recoiled, but not before feeling the moon shell, which was lodged in his right eye, the white eye.

Quickly, fighting down a violent hysteria, she pulled her legs free of Balor's lifeless body. Half fainting, she tried to crawl away, but her burnt hand stung fiercely and would not bear her weight. She tried crawling on her elbows, but lost all sense of direction. She did not even know she was heading toward the sea until a large wave came up and slammed into her face. Coughing, she started crawling backward, but her arm brushed against something. She reached for it. It was an arrow.

The fire arrow.

She knew what it was from the shape of the arrowhead and the placement of the damp fietching feathers, but there was no humming in her fingers when she held it. Its draoicht was gone.

She knew that she should feel something, that in another lifetime she would have grieved, but her body was too battered, her senses too numb. She just stuck the arrow into the back of her belt and kept crawling.

"Fara," she whispered, but there came no response, just the sound of the waves and the occasional whooshing of moths.

Brie blindly crawled back and forth over the beach until finally she touched a heap of damp fur and moths flew up in her face in a great rush.

"Fara," she whispered, feeling for a heartbeat. The faol was alive, but unconscious. Brie lay next to her, stroking the fur along her back until she, too, lost consciousness.

***

Above, the summer sun shimmered and before her spread a dappled rainbow of brilliant colors. Collun stood beside her, proud, his hand resting lightly on her arm. "See the dahlias," he said, pointing. "Like gold."

"I've never seen larkspur that tall," Brie said in wonder.

"Come see the cosmos, and the harebell..."

Brie followed Collun through the magnificent garden, the colors and the sun blinding her. "Wait for me," she called after him. He was too far ahead; she lost sight of him in the riot of greens and reds and yellows and blues. "Collun!" she cried.

***

Then Brie woke. She was lying across Ciaran's back, moving through the forest. But she still could not see.

"Ciaran? Where is Fara?"

Beside us, came the Ellyl horse's voice, inside Brie's head. Her leg is broken, but she came and found me. Brought me to you.

"How...?"

She dragged you onto my back by the collar. Ciaran gave a brief whinny-laugh.

"I can't see, Ciaran."

I know.

There was silence for several minutes, then, Brie.

"Yes?"

Collun is awake.

Brie's heart contracted. "Is he...?"

He is as he was.

A great exhausted happiness filled Brie, and her sightless eyes pricked with tears of joy.