S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

The Mackenzies all joined in the chorus; evidently this was an old favorite with them. Then:

“As the world turned black, I lighted the log,

With Yule burning bright and piercing the fog.

I lay with my Lady in the dark of the year,

And I’ll be reborn when Beltane draws near!”

Rudi Mackenzie leapt down from the rock as the song ended, and the dancers crowded around him. There was a whoop and they tossed him high and set him on his feet again.

Kill.

Panic seized Cole. Something was talking to him. Something was talking him , and he was watching it like a play.

Kill.

Emotion came with it, a cold malevolent hate, a rancid disgust at. . everything. Himself included; himself especially. He was alone in a prison of rotting meat, he had to get out, get out into the dark warm rightness .

His hand stripped the knife out of a belt and he lunged up. The tall man’s laughing face loomed before him, a brightness that made an intolerable twisting at the heart of things. He moved, fluid and sure even as part of him struggled to open his fingers and halt his arm-

Crack.

There was an instant when they were looking at each other eye to eye. His arm quivered, the muscle knotting, and sweat ran down his face. The grip around his right wrist was intolerable, but the pain as the bones ground together had no bearing on what he was doing, what whatever it was was doing.

Cole Salander was a passenger in his own head, like a rich man riding the mail-coach except that he was beating at the windows and trying to smash his way out and getting absolutely nowhere, but that distant part of him had time to feel professional admiration. He’d never seen a control-counter done that fast, and despite the awkward cross-body position the strength that held him was unbelievable. Cole knew he was exerting ten-tenths of his body’s capacities, almost enough that the hard muscles tore loose from their anchors on his sturdy bones, but he might as well have been pushing at something carved out of seasoned maple-wood.

“No! Don’t kill him!”

Rudi Mackenzie’s voice rang out, the tone flat and even though the point of the dirk was a half inch from his belly. He snapped:

“Hale and alive, Edain!”

Something hit Cole across the backs of his lower thighs with savage force. The pain alone wouldn’t have made any difference, but simple mechanical leverage made the joints of his knees buckle and pitched him backward. Hands seized him in half a dozen places and began to bend his arms behind him. A guttural sound escaped his throat, as if he was trying to pronounce something that hurt because it wasn’t meant to be said.

Vision began to strobe, the firelit night interspersed with somewhere else, somewhere that was black in a way that negated the possibility of anything else.

He twisted against the strength that pulled him away from what he must do. Flashes, a man’s square face, a blond woman’s locked in a rictus of effort.

“Fáfnir’s bones he’s strong!” a soprano voice gasped.

Hands and arms gripped him, half a dozen strong warriors just enough to contain the quivering violence that locked them all into a dynamic stasis. It took two to get the knife out of his hand.

“I. . see. . you,”rasped through his throat.

“And I you,” the High King said grimly.

To the others: “Hold him fast, now.”

His right hand stripped the Sword out of the sheath at that hip, leaving it pommel-upright in his grasp. The world froze in a blaze that was light and darkness, a smile that was and wasn’t his mother, a feeling of completion . Nothing more was necessary, but something that was/wasn’t him shrieked. In the same movement Rudi pressed the antler-cradled crystal to Cole’s forehead.

Click.

There was something like steel wire around his brain, straining and then snapping .

He didn’t black out, but everything became irrelevant. The sudden rag-doll limpness of his body almost tore it out of the hands gripping it, where the previous instant’s unnatural strength had been checkmated. They carried him back and plunked him down sitting on top of a barrel full of something heavy and solid, a posture that kept his feet off the ground and made it impossible for him to move even if he felt like it, which he didn’t.

When his eyes fluttered open again he felt almost normal, except that he had no desire to do anything whatsoever except sit and there was a film of something like flexible glass between him and the world. Hands rested heavy on his shoulders and a Mackenzie short sword was close enough to his throat to make the little hairs crinkle a bit, but that was nothing he could care about.

“No.”

The High King’s voice, facing off against Bow-Captain Luag’s anger and meeting it with a slight smile.

“He’s foresworn!”

“That he is not, Luag. He had no more choice in the matter than a man hit on the head with a sledgehammer can choose not to fall.”

A hand fell almost caressingly on the hilt of the Sword. “I’ve met the like before. They must have foreseen that the line of his fate would be tangled with mine, so. And I can tell you with a great and certain certainty that it won’t happen again. Not with this one. He’s guarded against such now, for all his life to come.”

“It would be just as certain if he were dead, but you’re the High King,” Luag said, but it was a grumble now and not hot rage.

“Indeed I am.”

The bow-captain sheathed his own weapon and stepped back.

Cole felt enough life return to smile slightly at the shocked, uncertain faces of Alyssa and Talyn and Caillech. Rudi held out his hand.

“A bit of a pick-me-up, Edain.”

The square-faced young man Cole remembered stepped forward, a flat silver flask in one hand. The other held an unstrung bowstave of impressive thickness.

That part of Cole’s brain that handled logic was starting to work again, as were his nerves, and he suspected that was the thing that had whacked him across the backs of his knees in a way that was going to make him limp for days. All things considered, he didn’t mind much.

“Waste of good brandy, sure and it’s a crime, Chief,” the archer said, but handed it over.

“Drink.”

Cole did as the flask was held to his lips. The sweet fire coursed down his throat; he gasped, and things stuttered to life within him. For a moment he had a crazy sensation of being a grape, and feeling utter completion as he was picked and fermented and distilled, then it spun away and the world began to break through the film around his being.

“What-” his voice began to rise.

The High King stooped a little, one hand braced on his knee, which put their eyes on a level.

“Look at me, man.” Cole did. “Now, you’ve met a High Seeker of the Church Universal and Triumphant at some time, have you not, the misfortune of the world?”

“I. . yeah, of course, I-”

A gust of panic suddenly squeezed his throat shut. He knew he had, a red-robe priest of the weird cult that ruled beyond the Rockies. One had shown up to be chaplain, and. . but he couldn’t remember it.

“I. . I can remember remembering that I did, but-”

“Easy, easy. Drink again. My guard-captain can refill his flask later.”

Cole did, gulping and coughing. The light changeable eyes were steady on his in the firelight, but their presence was like a burning limelight, like looking into the sun for a moment.

“How can I remember remembering but not remember?”

“The Sword of the Lady healed your mind,” Rudi-Artos-said. “A compulsion was laid upon you, like a seed. . or a spring trap set for game. The Sword removed it, but that means a scar upon your memory. Count yourself lucky; the compulsion was subtle, and meant to be hidden. If it hadn’t been, more of you would have been lost when the tainted part was burned away.”