Brighid’s Quest

“Bre

Cuchulai

“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 Bre

“Stop,” Cuchulai

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

“Not completely gone!” Cuchulai

“Bre

“Bre

“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 ca

“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 Cuchulai

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 Cuchulai

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 Cuchulai

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,” Cuchulai

“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,” Cuchulai

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

Cuchulai

His stubbor

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

Cuchulai

“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.

Cuchulai

“I don’t…” At first the landscape appeared to be a snow-patched, 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,” Cuchulai

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. The sheer drop must have been at least two hundred feet. A small river ran through the middle of the valley. And nestled against the gentler northern wall of the canyon was a cluster of round buildings. Brighid could make out distant figures, and she strained to see wings as the self-proclaimed New Fomorians moved between circular-shaped houses and corrals and low, squat structures she thought might be animal shelters.

She could feel Cuchulai

“The human women chose wisely. There’s shelter in the walls of the canyon and a ready water supply. I can even see a few things that might be masquerading as trees,” she said. “If I had been with them, this would have been the site I would have recommended.” In actuality if Brighid had been with them, she would have recommended they slit their monstrous infants’ throats and return to Partholon where the women belonged. But that was a thought the Huntress decided was best kept to herself.

“It’s an unforgiving land. I have been surprised at how well they have survived. I expected…” Cuchulai

Brighid was looking at him with open curiosity.

Cu cleared his throat and pointed the gelding’s head down the steep trail. “Watch where you step. The shale is slick.”

Brighid followed Cuchulai