Defiance: The Umbra Chronicles Book 2 Read online

  They recognised him, all right. Now that he’d drawn their attention to it, they recognised me, too. Marevas was looking at the ground in shame, but the others couldn’t take their eyes off me. Caradoc and Aine had both played their part in making my name and my face known in these parts. And I knew I looked like Aine. Twenty years ago, we’d been taken for twins.

  I’d been pretending to be Aoife then, arrogant and imperious ‒ the attitude came easier than I liked to admit. Why break a habit that had served me so well? I narrowed my eyes. Umbra dimmed. ‘Well?’ I snapped. ‘What are you expecting me to do? Break into song? Take me to my mother at once. I’m not here for a picnic.’

  That’s right. I’d become famous and beloved by all for being the biggest bitch west of Camaria and east of Meistria. As we went, I realised that Andras was right beside me. ‘So, there you are,’ he murmured. ‘I wondered who’d replaced you for a while there.’

  ‘Bastard,’ I muttered.

  I caught sight of a grin. ‘Pity we’re not here for a picnic,’ he replied. ‘That was a nice day. One of the last.’ The words caught me in a way I hadn’t expected. He was right. That day had been ‒ special. I didn’t know what to say in reply.

  Andras understood. He’d always understood that I wasn’t good at explaining my emotions. Understood, and cared enough to share a silence with me that spoke more than forcing a reply from me ever could.

  I don’t know what I’d expected, given that it was an army encampment, but I was a bit surprised to see that Aine was accommodated in a tent like everyone else, even if it was bigger. By the time we reached Aine’s tent, Andras was still riled. ‘Snap to!’ he shouted at the guards. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guards accompanying us stand up a little straighter, too. ‘I bring the Bach Chwaer to the Queen!’

  The guards hadn’t even had a chance to respond when the tent flap snapped open and a woman appeared in the space.

  ‘The Bach Chwaer?’ she asked, her voice curt. She scanned our faces. I moved out from behind Andras so she could see me clearly. ‘Emer,’ she whispered, her face draining of every sign of life as she faced me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was shocked, too. In my mind, Aine’s face was still the same face I saw in the mirror every day. I didn’t expect that she’d look identical to her sister, even though I knew they were both identical, as were all Umbra’s heirs. It was all I could do not to recoil.

  She recovered quickly, but not quickly enough.

  ‘Bring her in,’ she said, turning on her heel and disappearing into the tent, tossing over her shoulder a comment to Andras, ‘Take the rest of them away ‒ get them something to eat ‒ and a bath. You look like you’ve just walked through an abattoir.’ The guards stood back from me. I was free, but the only way was forward. I followed Aine.

  I’d been half afraid she might embrace me. I hoped she wouldn’t. That look on her face had been more intense than I was ready to deal with.

  She didn’t. She went to sit at a large table in the centre of the tent.

  ‘Emer, please sit down.’ She gestured to one of the benches around the table. There was a book on the table in front of her with a pen and ink. She busied herself with the ink for a moment, until she spilled it on the table.

  I sat. She stared at me. Cuchulainn had mastered the art of masking his emotions, but Aine hadn’t. She was trying, but joy and longing, grief and anger followed one another swiftly across her face.

  ‘You look just as I remember you,’ she said eventually. ‘How long has it been for you?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. A few months, perhaps.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s been kind of busy.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She took up the blotting rag and wiped the nib of the pen. She tried to wipe the spot of ink she’d spilled, but only succeeded in wiping it deeper into the grain of the wood. ‘Three weeks for you, eighteen years for me.’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ I corrected. She looked up at me and blinked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Twenty-one years since you last saw me. Cuchulainn said it had been twenty-one years since we last met.’

  I wasn’t ready for her smile. ‘No,’ she said. ‘How old are you, Emer?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  Aine nodded. ‘Then it’s eighteen years since I saw you last.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were ever close enough with Aoife that she would have shown you her baby. To be honest, since I first realised she was my mother, it made a lot more sense that Sparrow and I were raised by the creepyguardians. If Aoife was given care of a child. she’d probably eat it.’

  She blinked heavily again and cocked her head to the side like an idiot. ‘Emer, Aoife isn’t your mother,’ she said. She put the rag down very deliberately.

  ‘How else do you suppose we look so alike?’ I asked. ‘Surely you must have thought about it at some point in the last twenty years. I’m not your long-lost triplet. I’m your niece.’

  She leaned forward. ‘Emer, you’re not my niece, you’re my daughter.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How would you know? It’s not like I have a birthmark shaped like a crown.’

  Aine chuckled. ‘No, but you have Umbra.’

  I waited, but if she laughed at me again, she was going to get Umbra in the face.

  ‘I was married-’

  ‘Ruairi?’

  ‘No.’ She ignored my raised eyebrows. The Aine of twenty years ago couldn’t have stood the least opposition. Twenty years had made their mark on her. She relented enough to add some more information. ‘I never saw him again. Nor my Rhiannon. I married a prince from the Southern Isles. They had the best navy. Thanks to the Geravar’s navy we were finally winning the war. We had driven the Meistri all the way to the gates of Rheged. Geravar travelled to Cairastel to discuss terms of surrender with my sister.’

  Her eyes never left mine, but they glazed over for a moment. ‘He was supposed to return in three days. It was three weeks before Aoife sent me his head in a jar with a message saying she was pregnant to him. The Southern Isles withdrew their support. The tide of the war turned. I found out I was pregnant in an army encampment. I gave birth to twins in the mountains, on the night of the Winter Solstice, in a cave with the remnants of my army while a blizzard raged outside. We were thankful for the blizzard. If not for that, Aoife would have attacked and she would have killed us all.’

  ‘We still didn’t know who our babies were. I thought ‒ this has to be Emer. I just knew it, like I knew my own name. I was the one who named you Emer. I know that you have had many names, but Emer is the name your mother gave you at your birth.

  ‘I know your Guardians changed your names every year to keep you safe. I asked them to do it. I wanted you to be so well hidden that even I couldn’t find you. But I was the one who named you at your birth and I named you Emer and I named your sister Umbra, with hopes for the whole world resting on you both.’

  ‘How did you know for sure it was me?’

  A muscle worked in Aine’s jaw and she suddenly looked every inch the stern Dark Queen. ‘Aoife herself sent me the message and it was confirmed by my spies at Cairastel. She also bore twins.’ She was pale and I suddenly felt sick. If there had once been four of us, why were we now only three: only me, Umbra and Elisabeth? There was literally nothing I would put past Aoife but what I was reading in Aine’s face was too disgusting for words.

  ‘She tried to kill both the babies. The babies had enormously powerful magic and Aoife wanted to harvest them. One of my spies managed to save one baby, but not both.’ I had only known Aine to be soft and gentle, but there was no softness or gentleness in her face now. ‘She was angry that one baby was stolen from her, but she wasted no time in sending me a message gloating that she’d killed my husband’s child and would come for my babies next. The spy brought the surviving baby to me.’

  ‘So why didn’t Elisabeth and I ‒ and Umbra, come to think of it ‒ grow up in Camaria?’ I thought of the last day I�
�d spent there, the sunlight and green grass, Aine’s father’s kindness, Gwydion’s smile, even Andras’ rueful laughter. That was how children should grow up, in sunlight with loving family who smile and laugh. That was the most pleasant day of my entire life. No one would ever know how hard it was for me to fly away from that sunshine to the darkness and death that awaited me in Rheged. The only reason I’d gone was so I could return to Elisabeth ‒ and to Caradoc. And much good it had done me.

  All this flashed through my mind in an instant and I realised that Aine ‒ my friend ‒ was directly responsible for every grief I ever suffered. She had put me into the care of the creepyguardians. She had put me into Maldwyn’s hands and let him hide me ‒ hide me and hide all the hideous things he did to me.

  ‘How could you?’ I whispered. I felt the magic rise to my skin and it was all I could do to suppress it. I wanted to kill her. She had been my friend; she was my mother and I wished her dead. I stood up, knocking the bench over deliberately. She flinched but didn’t reply. ‘How could you?’ I shouted.

  I wasn’t going to use magic against her. What good would it do if she were to die? No, I wanted her to live with the pain and anger I lived with because ‒ if I knew Aine at all ‒ I knew the knowledge of what she’d done would destroy her.

  I’ve said it before. I’m not the nice one.

  ‘You think you know so much?’ I asked, lowering my voice so the guards outside wouldn’t hear the terrible things I was going to say. ‘I’m sure you remember your wedding night to Sir Cai, Aine.’ If anything, she went even paler. ‘I agreed to ride out with you, with you and the despicable man you’d been sold to. We escaped from him, but we were already in disputed territory. We were caught by a party of soldiers. Six of them, and each one of them had a go at us. You were raped six times that night, and so was I.’

  ‘As if I would forget?’ she spat. ‘I’ve apologised for asking for you to come with me that night. If you hadn’t come with me, I wouldn’t have had to worry about those soldiers either. Sir Cai would have harvested my spirit and turned me into a tree like all the others he’d harvested before me. You chose to help me because you can’t resist being a hero, Emer. It’s in your bones, Bach Chwaer.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you for what they did,’ I snapped. ‘I know I chose to help you and I know I’m a soft touch when I see someone who needs my help. I may not be nice, but at least I’m not hard.’ Again, a look fleeted across her face that didn’t belong on the face of the Aine I knew. But I had begun my terrible work ‒ I was going to wound her all the way to her bones.

  ‘You gave me into the care of the cree ‒ the Librarians, didn’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you remember the boy who was Sir Cai’s squire? Maldwyn? He tried to help his master subdue us. There was evil already in his heart. When I went back to Rheged, I told the Empress what he did and she sentenced him to an execution that was never carried out. When you gave me to the Librarians, they took me into secrecy and it’s in secrets that horrors hide. Maldwyn grew up. He was already about thirteen or fourteen when I was born and by the time I was thirteen he was old enough to be a fully-fledged, trusted and respected Guardian.

  ‘And he hated me. I’d defeated his master and I told a tribunal what he’d done. He swore to get revenge. He waited. Finally, he won the lot and became the Guardian of me and Elisabeth when we were thirteen. I don’t know what kind of vengeance he’d considered carrying out on me when I was younger but by the time I was thirteen I-’ my breath caught, because this was part of the horror and it should have been part of a beautiful promise. ‘I was already menstruating.’ So help me, I could barely force the words past my lips. ‘I was ‒ developing.’ My voice cracked. No little girl should ever have to be ashamed and afraid of her changing body. For years, I’d thought it was my fault.

  ‘Oh, Emer, no,’ Aine whispered. Her shoulders shook and it was a moment before I realised it was the shape of a sob suppressed. ‘No, no.’

  ‘You can say no,’ I replied. ‘I did ‒ it didn’t help, but I said it. Screamed it, when I knew what I was in for, after the first time. I think he enjoyed making me scream, letting me know that I was powerless. After that I tried very hard not to scream, although I wasn’t always successful.’

  ‘Oh, God, Emer, oh no.’ I’d thought she might put her head into her hands or rest her arms on the table before her and put her face into them to cry. It’s what I would have done.

  But Aine was always very different from me. She was the one with a heart. Her heart might have taken a beating in the last twenty years, but it was still there. She leaped up from her chair and headed for me, both her arms extended to embrace me. And she, apparently didn’t know me at all because when I dodged away from her, she looked even more hurt. Finally, she stopped, in the centre of the tent while I cowered with more bravado than I felt, by the wall. Finally, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

  I wasn’t nice, but I wasn’t nasty enough to tell her the rest. She didn’t need to know that she had a five-year-old grandson by her nineteen year old daughter. Looking at her there, white as a sheet, her whole body shaking with sobs, she didn’t need to know. I relented.

  I left my place by the wall and went over to her. We were the same height. I put my arms around her shoulders and she clung to me and kept sobbing.

  Finally, the sobbing resolved into words, as her halting breath rushed past my ear and her hand cradled the back of my head, like I was still the baby she had held to her breast. Words like, ‘Sorry,’ and ‘I never knew.’

  I suppose I ought to have felt some kind of tender emotion, being held by my mother for the first time in my life, but I didn’t. I was uncomfortable and resentful and I wished she would stop crying and let me go. I’d had my moment of vengeance and it was deeply unsatisfactory. Even at forty years of age, Aine still looked like my Sparrow. I had made someone who looked like Sparrow cry.

  Eventually, I managed to peel her off me. She probably would have tried to hug me again, except there was a clamour at the door of the tent. She turned, distracted finally from her emotional outburst.

  ‘What is it?’ she snapped. At last, she was the fearsome Dark Queen again and I was so much more comfortable with that aspect of her that it frightened me. What did that say about me, that I could cope with the fearsome Dark Queen, but not a loving mother?

  It was the same soldier Andras had reprimanded earlier. His face was pale, but his cheeks were so flushed he looked like he had a fever. ‘It’s the White Queen, my Lady!’ he cried. ‘Our scouts report that she comes in force with many troops and three score dragons! She comes to seek her prisoner, the Bach Chwaer. She claims that the Bach Chwaer is rightfully her own!’

  Aine surprised me with a huff of laughter. ‘She can make any claim she pleases, whether to the Bach Chwaer or to the throne of Meistria. It changes nothing.’ She barked a series of orders at him that meant nothing to me and he left.

  ‘Well, Emer, it looks like we will have a most… interesting night,’ she drawled. ‘This should please you. This might finally be your opportunity to kill my sister.’

  We walked out of the tent into chaos. I’d been so intent on avoiding Aine’s embraces that I hadn’t even noticed the commotion going on around us.

  Kiaran was hurrying past us. I grabbed his arm. ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. ‘Where are you going in such a hurry? We had a deal!’

  ‘Let go of me, woman. The deal is off. You’re nothing but poison.’

  I knew the moment Aine saw us together. She’d been talking to a soldier and suddenly her voice cut off. ‘Get away from her!’ she shouted. She stepped forward before either of us had time to respond. She grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand away from his arm. ‘Don’t you trust this… this snake!’ she cried. ‘He will do nothing but betray you! Guards!’ And to think I’d forgotten about the guards. ‘Guards, lock him up where he can’t do any damage.’

  ‘Listen, lady,’ Kiaran began but A
ine interrupted him.

  ‘And gag him. I don’t want to hear a word out of his mouth.’

  Kiaran tried to protest, but the guards were good at their job. They dragged him away and the look in his eyes burned me all the way through.

  I turned to Aine. ‘What did you do that for?’ I cried. ‘He was my friend!’ I was aware that Kiaran was my friend only under the very loosest definition of the word.

  ‘Your friend?’ she shouted back. She wasn’t confirming what I’d said. She was making a mockery of it. ‘That piece of filth? I doubt it. You don’t know what he is, if you think he’s your friend.’

  ‘I know what he is. He’s half wild and half damned but the half that’s damned belongs to me. I had a purpose for him. Set him free.’

  ‘No! I will not. He dies tomorrow. I’d do it myself, tonight, except I want it to be public. I want it to be something every mage in Meistri will whisper to their young on the Night of the Dead as a cautionary tale. They will never forget what I do to him.’

  ‘What did he do that was so bad?’ I asked, well aware that Kiaran could be guilty of just about anything. If he’d been willing to tie up a person, force them to submit to him through coercion and outright physical abuse, I doubted there was much he wouldn’t do.

  I had to look away because even though I’m not the nice one, I’m still not a great liar. Still, I said, ‘He’s a good guy.’ Amoral. ‘He helped me.’ Once I threatened to kill him and destroy all he held dear ‒ which meant his ambition, because he didn’t have a heart to hold anything dear with. ‘He helped me.’ He helped himself when I convinced him that our aims aligned. I couldn’t go on, not because I was overcome by emotion but because I wasn’t sure I was convincing anyone. I settled for more solid ground. ‘We could use him in this fight.’

  ‘You think that because the thought came to your own mind or because he suggested it to you?’ She saw the answer in my face. ‘Of course you did. That snake could suggest anything to anyone and they’d do it.’