Brighid's Quest. P.C. Cast

had been wise to worry. It was obvious that the Cuchulainn his sister knew and loved was disappearing under the weight of grief and guilt. Brighid could only imagine how much the sight would wound her Chieftain. Brighid hated seeing what Brenna’s death had done to him, and he was just her friend.

      She smiled sadly at the warrior’s back. Theirs had been an unlikely friendship. Cuchulainn had known too well the segregationist beliefs of her family concerning humans and centaurs and he had been leery to trust Brighid. And, quite frankly, the Huntress had thought Cuchulainn an arrogant womanizer. At first they had snapped at and circled one another like restless beasts protecting territory. But as the Huntress had watched the rakish young warrior fall in love with the Clan’s newly appointed Healer, she had seen the real Cuchulainn—the compassionate, loyal man who lived within the skin of the dashing warrior. And she had won his trust in turn. First, by helping him track Elphame after she had taken a nasty fall, and finally, regrettably, by fighting at his side when they captured the hybrid Fomorian Fallon after she murdered Brenna.

      “Brenna’s death is a heavy burden to bear,” Brighid said solemnly.

      Cuchulainn’s head was bowed in concentration as he finished securing the cords, and she could see his back stiffen. He stood slowly and met the Huntress’s sharp gaze.

      “Yes.” He bit out the word.

      Brighid didn’t flinch from the anger in his voice. She knew from her own experience that anger was part of grief’s healing process.

      “Your sister planted those blue wildflowers Brenna liked so much all around her grave. The Clan talks about how beautiful the tomb is, and how much Brenna is missed.”

      “Stop,” Cuchulainn said between clenched teeth.

      “As long as we remember her, she is not completely gone, Cu.”

      “Not completely gone!” Cuchulainn laughed humorlessly. He threw the cords he had been holding to the ground and spread his arms, palms up, looking around them. “Then show her to me. I don’t see her. I don’t hear her. I can’t touch her. To me, Huntress, she is completely gone.”

      “Brenna would hate to see you like this, Cuchulainn.”

      “Brenna is not here!”

      “Cu—” the Huntress began, but the warrior’s gruff voice cut her off.

      “Leave it be, Brighid.”

      She met his gaze squarely. “I will leave it be for now, but you cannot continue like this. Not forever.”

      “You are right about that. Nothing continues forever, Huntress.” Abruptly he bent and retrieved the leather cords. Handing one to her he wrapped the other over his shoulder. “This way.” He pointed his chin back the way he had come. “We need to hurry. Night will fall soon.”

      Mimicking Cuchulainn’s motions, Brighid placed the cord over her shoulder and together they dragged the sheep’s body. As the Huntress glanced at Cu’s haggard profile she thought grief had already caused night to fall within Cuchulainn’s wounded soul. Could anything, even his Goddess-touched sister’s love, ever bring the light of happiness to his life again?

      They spoke little as they traveled steadily in the direction of the waning sun. Together they had quickly dressed the sheep and folded it into the leather carrier Cuchulainn strapped over the big gelding’s hindquarters. There were several questions Brighid wanted to ask, but the warrior’s manner was so withdrawn, his few words so brusque, that she had learned little more than that he’d easily found the hybrid Fomorian settlement, that there were almost one hundred of them, and that they were eager to return to Partholon. When she asked him what they were like he’d said only, “They’re just people,” and withdrawn again into silence. Brighid had decided that conversing with him was like cuddling a porcupine. Not worth the trouble. She was a Huntress. She would observe the hybrids for herself as she would any other creature of the Wastelands and then form her own opinion.

      And she would always keep in mind that they had been fathered by a race of demons.

      “Do you like children?”

      Brighid raised her brows at the strange question, not sure she had heard Cuchulainn correctly. “Children?”

      He grunted and nodded.

      “I don’t know. I don’t particularly like or dislike them. They don’t usually figure into the life of a Huntress, unless you count that I have to consider them as extra mouths to feed. Why do you ask?”

      “We are almost to the settlement. There are—” he paused and glanced sideways at her “—children there.”

      “I expect children. Lochlan told all of us about them back at the castle. You know that. You were there.”

      “Lochlan didn’t exactly tell us everything,” Cuchulainn said cryptically.

      “That’s no surprise to me.” Brighid snorted.

      The warrior gave her a lidded look. “You don’t sound like you trust Lochlan.”

      “Do you?”

      “He saved my sister’s life,” Cuchulainn said simply.

      Brighid nodded slowly. “Yes, he did. But it was Lochlan’s coming to Partholon that placed her life in jeopardy in the first place.”

      Cuchulainn said nothing. He’d already thought over and over again about how Lochlan’s presence had changed all of their lives. But he found it hard to blame his sister’s lifemate, which did not mean he was willing to fully embrace the winged man. It only meant that Cuchulainn was most willing to blame himself for the events that had culminated in his sister’s sacrifice and Brenna’s death. He should have known. He would have known had he listened to the warnings from the spirit realm. But Cuchulainn had always turned from the use of spirits and magic and the mysterious power of the Goddess, even though it was obvious from an early age that he had inherited his Shaman father’s spirit gifts. Cu was a warrior. It was all he’d ever wanted to be. His affinity with the sword was the only gift he desired.

      His stubbornness had sealed his lover’s doom.

      “I thought you said we were almost at the camp. I see nothing ahead except more of this empty, dismal land.”

      Cuchulainn dragged his dark thoughts back to the silvercoated centaur who trotted by his side.

      “Look more closely, Huntress,” he said.

      Brighid glowered at him. Friends they may have become, but the warrior still had a knack for getting under her skin.

      Cuchulainn almost smiled. “Don’t feel bad. I didn’t see it at first, either. If I hadn’t been with Curran and Nevin I would have probably toppled blindly over the edge.”

      “I don’t…” At first the landscape appeared to be a snowpatched, treeless plain. Red shale, the same color as the great boulders that flanked the Trier Mountains, littered the ground. But then her vision caught an almost imperceptible change. “It’s a gorge. By the Goddess! The land is so bleak and similar that one side matches the other almost perfectly.”

      “It’s an optical illusion, one the human mothers of the New Fomorians thought to use to their advantage more than one hundred years ago when they were desperate to find a safe place to build their settlement.”

      “New Fomorians?”

      “That’s what they call themselves,” Cuchulainn said.

      Brighid snorted.

      “The path winds down from there.”

      He pointed at Fand’s disappearing hind end and clucked his gelding into a gentle canter, pulling him up just before the land dropped away beneath them. Brighid moved to stand beside him and drew in breath sharply at the sight below. The gorge opened as if a giant had taken an ax and hewed an enormous wedge from the cold, rocky earth. The wall on which they stood was taller than the opposite side of the canyon.