Beneath the Forsaken City Read online

  Aye. I chose to break the law. I will take my punishment.

  He could probably avoid that punishment if he just told Master Liam the truth, but that was impossible. For one thing, he would have to admit he had hidden his unusual gift from the Fíréin his entire life. For another, he wasn’t sure the Ceannaire wouldn’t think him insane as the parents who’d abandoned him had. Most Balians believed their Creator guided their steps, but there were precious few to whom Comdiu spoke directly.

  Eoghan climbed the hundreds of stairs automatically, his footing sure on their slick surface. The traditional tales of Carraigmór, the home of the first and only Seareann High King, spoke of a keep on a cliff. In reality, the dwelling had been carved from the cliff, its chambers burrowed deep underground with only the glass windows and narrow terraces on the sheer face hinting at what lay beneath.

  When he reached the top and entered the balcony, a glint of surprise crossed the guard’s face. “Brother Eoghan. The Ceannaire wishes to see you.”

  No doubt the guard was one of those who supposed he’d fled with Conor. Eoghan simply nodded and let himself through the heavy, iron-bound door into the fortress.

  The great hall was more of a cavern than a room, a dome-shaped space lit with torches and candles and lined with the high-backed chairs used by the Conclave. Beyond them stood the Rune Throne, an ancient tangle of polished roots cradling an etched marble seat. Eoghan turned down a corridor and followed the tunnel to where it ended in a door atop a short flight of steps. He rapped and then entered.

  Master Liam sat at a large table, making notations on a sheet of birch-bark paper beside a pile of wax tablets. He didn’t look up. “Are they away from Seare?”

  Of course Liam already knew. What information his sight didn’t provide, his vast network of sentries and informants did. “Aye, sir. They’re safely aboard a ship to Aron. I submit myself to your judgment.”

  “You could have gone with them.”

  “I could have.” Eoghan’s palms prickled with sweat. “But I took an oath, and even if I hadn’t, the others who helped me would be punished.”

  “You know I am within my rights to order your execution.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Liam sighed and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Yet I cannot bring myself to destroy my own apprentice, my successor, for following his conscience. Tell me, why didn’t you give me the courtesy of a request?”

  “I couldn’t be sure you would agree, sir. If I left without permission, I broke only the brotherhood’s laws. If I left after you forbade it, I would have disobeyed a direct order.”

  “Aine is my mother’s daughter, and Conor is one of us, even if he chose to leave the brotherhood. I might have looked sympathetically on your task, had you seen fit to ask.”

  Eoghan studied the wall behind Liam’s head. Given the Ceannaire’s refusal to become involved in the kingdoms’ wars, he’d been so certain Liam would withold aid. “I’m sorry, sir. I did what I thought best.”

  “I understand that. But you broke both our laws and your oath. I cannot ignore that, even for my own successor. I must sentence you to twenty-five lashes before the brotherhood, to be carried out at dawn tomorrow.”

  Eoghan jerked his head up. “What?”

  “Do you disagree with my punishment? Would you prefer death?”

  “No, sir. I accept your judgment.”

  “Good. You may go.” Liam waited until Eoghan reached the door before calling out, “Eoghan, one question. How did you know Conor needed your help when the first report reached Ard Dhaimhin only the day after you left?”

  “I wish I were able to give you a reasonable explanation,” Eoghan said, avoiding Liam’s eyes. Then, despite the fact that he was already in enough trouble, he let himself out before the Ceannaire could ask any more questions.

  Word spread quickly after the morning horns, and the assembled brotherhood moved en masse to the amphitheater used for devotions. Eoghan didn’t need to ask about the procedure for his punishment. In his lifetime at Ard Dhaimhin, he had seen a handful of floggings, and the memories were enough to twist his stomach into knots.

  When he arrived, two massive posts had been set into deep holes, ropes hanging from rings set into their tops. Eoghan slowly descended the stairs to where Master Liam and the nine Conclave members awaited him, glad he had skipped the morning meal. Surely even battle could not be as nerve-wracking as the realization he would soon be completely at another’s mercy. When he approached, the men stepped back into a line before him, and the hum of voices in the amphitheater hushed.

  Master Liam moved forward. “Brother Eoghan, you have admitted to breaking the laws of the Fíréin brotherhood by leaving the city without permission. You have been sentenced to twenty-five lashes with the whip. Do you wish to say anything in your defense?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well, then.” Master Liam withdrew a handful of straws and leveled them in his fist. “The Conclave will draw to determine who will carry out the sentence.”

  One by one, the nine members drew straws. When Brother Daigh, the oldest of the Conclave, drew the shortest one, Eoghan’s heart sank. Daigh was not the strongest of the men, but he was the sternest. He would not let pity stay his hand.

  Liam glanced at the lanky, blond-haired warrior beside him. “Brother Riordan, restrain Brother Eoghan.”

  Regret crossed the man’s face. After Liam, this brother had played the biggest role in Eoghan’s upbringing. He also happened to be Conor’s father, a fact of which few knew and even fewer spoke.

  “Remove your shirt,” Riordan said.

  Eoghan pulled off the linen tunic and tossed it aside, keeping his expression blank.

  Riordan buckled leather straps around Eoghan’s wrists and then threaded the ropes through the ring on each.

  “I tried to speak with Master Liam,” he murmured.

  “I knew what I was doing. Your son is safe. And by now, I would think you have a daughter as well.”

  Relief and pleasure mingled with pain in the older man’s face. He placed a green willow rod between Eoghan’s teeth. “Comdiu protect you.”

  The ropes pulled through the rings, stretching Eoghan’s arms out in a vee above his head, rendering him powerless, vulnerable. A frisson of fear scurried through him as Brother Daigh approached with a five-tailed cord whip in hand. At least it wasn’t leather like those they used on brothers who purposely harmed one another. This whip was meant to inflict pain, not to maim.

  Eoghan steeled himself for the first lash, but even so, it stole his breath. Fiery pain seared across his back and rippled through his nerve endings. He clenched the willow rod between his teeth.

  It was worse than he had imagined. But he would be silent. He would not show weakness. He braced himself for the second lash while the moments ticked by, each one an agony of anticipation. Only when the sting had faded to a manageable level did the whip crack again and pain seared him once more.

  It took Daigh nearly twenty minutes to deliver the requisite twenty-five strokes, pausing between each to let the pain abate before he started again. Eoghan’s determination to remain silent disintegrated somewhere around number six, when he could no longer stifle his cries. By the end, his body was slicked with sweat or blood, and he sagged in his restraints until his arms felt as though they would be pulled from their sockets.

  At last, two brothers lowered the ropes. Eoghan lay facedown on the ground, his muscles cramped and his throat raw, while calloused hands unbuckled the straps around his wrists.

  “On behalf of my son,” Riordan’s voice whispered, “thank you.”

  Eoghan managed to lift his head. “It is my privilege to serve Comdiu.” Then he collapsed on the hard ground.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thirst, powerful and insistent, broke through the haze of Conor’s unconsciousness, followed by an ache that seemed to come from everywhere at once. A distant roar sent his head into a furious hammering that squelched all thoughts of moveme
nt. He lay still and gritted his teeth against the pain until it passed.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes to the source of the roaring, which was actually just the lap of low tide. He was sprawled on a sandy beach, sand in every last crevice: eyes, nose, mouth. It hurt to move or even blink, and it took every last bit of strength to push himself to a sitting position.

  A level swath of shoreline stretched in either direction, long grasses marking dunes along the gentle slope. Not Seare. Amanta perhaps. But how had he gotten here?

  Memories flooded back. The storm that stalked them from Seare, biding its time like a living thing. The massive waves. Aine struggling in the churning sea.

  His heart nearly burst from his chest with its sudden pounding. He scrambled to his feet and scanned the beach. He’d almost had her. Their fingers had touched just before something had knocked him unconscious.

  But Aine couldn’t swim. The chances she had survived . . .

  “Aine!” The shout cracked his salt-parched throat. “Aine, can you hear me?”

  He stumbled up the beach, straining his eyes in the filtered light that shone through the clouds overhead.

  She was dead. She couldn’t have survived that storm, not when she couldn’t swim.

  No. Conor shut his eyes to clear those dark thoughts. He hadn’t been able to swim when he was unconscious. If he had washed up on the beach, perhaps she had as well.

  He trudged along the shoreline, hope battling logic in his foggy brain. The southern coast of Amanta was sparsely settled. He might walk for miles without seeing another living soul. But even as he called Aine’s name, he knew it was futile. If she had survived, she could be anywhere. The chances against both of them surviving and then washing up together on the shore were astronomical.

  She’s dead, Conor.

  I thought that before.

  That was a dream; this is real.

  But she can’t be dead.

  That’s only your own wishful thinking.

  Movement in the grasses caught his eye, so fleeting that he thought it was just his imagination tormenting him. But, no, there it was again. Hope swelled. Could she have wandered inland and, now that she heard him calling, come back to find him? He took a step toward the grassy dune.

  Then the heads of three men crested the rise, followed by bulky, muscular bodies. Bleached hair fell around the shoulders of their brightly dyed cloaks, beneath which were knee-length tunics and close-fitting trousers. Their movements as much as their weapons marked them as warriors, but he knew immediately that they weren’t Gwynn or Aronan. In Amanta, that left only one other possibility.

  A sharp, humorless laugh slipped from him. He had escaped certain death in Seare, only to be captured by the Sofarende who plagued Gwydden’s southern coast.

  Conor’s amusement was fleeting. A fighting man caught on foreign shores was too dangerous to keep as a captive and useless as a hostage. That left only one probable alternative.

  If he were going to die, he would die on his own terms, not at the hands of some barbarian executioner. He reached over his shoulder for his sword and remembered he had left it hanging in the Resolute’s cabin.

  He still had his dagger, though, secured on his belt. He would never get close enough to use it if he gave them any reason to see him as a threat. Deception was his only chance.

  He waited for their approach, his hands open by his side, and put on a terrified expression. If he could just draw them in and convince them he wouldn’t fight, he might have a chance. When they were within speaking distance, Conor threw up his hands. “Please! I surrender! Don’t hurt me!”

  The one in the middle said something, and the others laughed. He caught the word coward in Norin. Then the leader said clearly to him, “Turn around.”

  Conor didn’t move. No need to show he understood their language. The man motioned impatiently to him, and Conor turned, his hands still by his ears.

  One of the other men strode toward him with a length of rope, and Conor realized he was to be bound. The man in the middle, who seemed to be the leader, warned them that Conor might be an Aronan spy. A second man approached from the other side.

  In a split second, Conor’s course of action flashed before him. He freed his dagger and plunged it into the side of the man next to him, a killing blow to the heart. Before the others could react, he swiveled and sliced across the second man’s thigh. The warrior fell to the ground with a howl of pain. His hand clamped the wound to no avail—he would bleed out in minutes. That left only the third man. Blood pulsed through Conor’s veins, fueling his exhausted body with a surge of energy. He yanked the sword free of the dead man’s sheath. But even as Conor lifted the weapon to block the last man’s sword, he knew he was too slow.

  That single moment, that last breath, stretched into an eternity as he waited for the strike of the blade, that instant of pain followed by blackness. Faces, names, regrets all flashed through his mind.

  Riordan. Eoghan. Liam. Aine. If he died, he failed them all.

  Forgive me, Comdiu.

  He sensed the breeze as the sword cleaved the air toward his neck, flinched before the bite of steel that would end it all. It never came. His eyes snapped open and looked straight into a pair of watery blue ones that appeared as shocked as he felt.

  “Blessed Askr,” the warrior cried, looking down at the sword in his straining hands.

  The moment stretched as they both stared at the Sofarende’s blade, fixed in place as if the air had turned to mortar. Before Conor could regain his wits enough to strike, the warrior knocked the sword from his numb fingers. A booted foot crashed first into his chest and then into his head. Conor struggled to hang on to consciousness while blood poured into his eyes, but the light was like the slipping of the tide, receding by inches until only dark remained.

  “You should have killed him.”

  “We can’t kill him. Haldor will want to question him.”

  “He killed two of our own. Do you want to tell Haldor why we let him live after that?”

  The sharp argument just at the edge of Conor’s hearing was the first indication that he wasn’t dead, though at the moment, he very much wished to be. If he had thought he felt bad waking up on the shore, it was nothing compared with the pain he felt now. He lay still, waiting for the pain and nausea to pass, and then pried his eyes open. Blurry images shifted and overlapped, angling over each other like the facets of a prism.

  “Enough. He’s awake. Get him up.”

  It took Conor a few moments to recognize the addition of a third voice, even longer to comprehend they were speaking Norin. If he still understood another language, he couldn’t be too badly injured, could he?

  Hands pulled him up from where he lay on the hard ground and sat him on something even harder, a bench perhaps. He could smell burning pitch, the close odor of sweat, and the metallic tang of his own blood. No air currents. He must be indoors. He wrenched his eyes open again and made out the blurry shapes of men around him. Just that small action taxed him so much that his eyes drooped closed again and his head lolled forward on his chest.

  A fist yanked his head up by the hair, and a hand slapped him hard across the face. The low throb in Conor’s skull escalated to the pounding of skin drums.

  “Ask him his name,” the commanding speaker said.

  An accented voice asked in the common tongue, “What’s your name?”

  Conor opened his swollen eyes long enough to take in the new speaker’s rough-spun tunic and clean-shaven head. A slave. Through his split, swollen lips, he rasped, “Conor.”

  “Your clan name?”

  Conor considered, his thoughts coming slowly through the pain. “I have none.”

  “He’s lying,” the Sofarende murmured in his own language. “He’s no commoner. Prompt him.”

  A fist collided with Conor’s cheekbone, bringing another explosion of pain. Something told him he shouldn’t identify himself as a Mac Nir. He gasped out his answer. “No clan name. Fíréin.”r />
  Silence settled over the room. Quietly, the slave said, “The Brotherhood of the Faithful. Warrior priests. Like your Wolfskins, just better educated.”

  “Who sent him?” the Sofarende asked.

  Fading in and out of consciousness, Conor mumbled an answer before the question could be translated. “No one sent me. Shipwrecked.”

  The slave interpreted his answer, and snorts of derision rang out around him.

  Conor sensed someone bend down, his face right in front of his. The Sofarende’s tone was low and dangerous. “You speak our language?”

  “Aye,” Conor whispered.

  “Who sent you? Olaf? Ingvarr?”

  He gurgled a laugh, pain and despair making him reckless. “If you think I’m a spy, reports of your intelligence are greatly overrated.”

  The blow did not come in the form of a fist to his face this time but rather some sort of object to his ribs. A cry sprang from his lips, and he panted through the waves of agony. He reached for the trick he’d learned long ago to distance his mind from his body until the pain slackened its grip. When he had himself mostly under control, he forced open his heavy eyelids.

  The warrior leaned close to him. “You stopped my blade. How did you do that?”

  Conor’s pulse sped, setting off another round of throbbing in his head. He licked his cracked lips. The answer to this question would determine whether he lived or died. What had happened? One moment, he’d realized he’d never be able to stop the arc of the sword in time. The next, he was staring into the eyes of his enemy, who looked at him as if he were a spirit—or a god.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Perhaps the favor of Comdiu was upon me.”

  Silence fell over the gathering, only the quiet rustle of clothing betraying movement. The air around him grew thick with consideration.

  “Kill him,” the warrior said finally. “In the square.”