Edith Pattou - Fire Arrow

He did not turn his face toward Brie, but he knew she was there.

Brie looked back at the boats. They had dropped their sails and were now being rowed. Each boat was crowded with morgs—there were more standing than sitting at the oars—a ghastly silent horde, some hooded, some baring their skeletal heads. She suddenly remembered that the morgs who attacked Collun at Cuillean's dun had come by boat.

Balor must have emptied the island kingdoms of Usna and Uneach, Brie thought as she stared, unbelieving, at the oncoming multitude. Hundreds of boats, perhaps even thousands, each one carrying a hundred morgs. Even if all of Dungal and Eirren combined stood against them, there would still be morgs to spare.

Brie sank to her knees. Fara huddled against her. No wonder the gabha battle had been irrelevant to Balor. This was his true army.

Only when she felt a searing on her already burnt hand did Brie realize she was holding the fire arrow. She must have reached for it, unknowing. Hot tears of desolation and loss stung her eyelids. She. found herself thinking of the hero Amergin and how he beat the sea back with his fists. And of Fionna, who had emptied herself to keep the sea from overwhelming her people.

But these were morgs in boats, not the sea, and Brie had no drapicht. The fire arrow did, but she could hardly slash and burn her way through such a horde.

She gazed up again at Balor. The moon gleamed on his golden armor like a beacon. He stood unmoving, triumphant. He must have removed his eye-patch, for Brie could see his white eye under the golden beak of his war helmet.

Numbly she rose from her knees, feeling for her bow. She held the arrow a last time. And then, fingers trembling, she nocked it to the bowstring.

She pointed the arrow at Balor, at the goldenhawk on his chest. For my father, she thought.

She pulled the string back. But then, with a sob that tore out of her gut, she swung the bow away and, thinking irrelevantly of the god Nuadha and his magic teka, she fixed her sights on the nearest longboat of morgs, though it lay well beyond the range of an arrow shot. She focused all that was in her, all of her strength, her will, her passion, and her stubbornness, into that banded, mysterious arrow, until she did not know where she began and the arrow ended ... and she was the arrow. Before letting the arrow fly, Brie suddenly remembered the nightmare she had had in Ardara, of flames instead of eyes. She felt the heat of the arrow along her jawbone, and it seared against her first and second fingers as she held the nock in place on the string. She had never felt the arrow so hot, hot enough to burn through the bowstring; her muscles contracted and terror threatened to dissolve her will to shoot.

But with a courage she did not know she possessed, her already kindling eyes fixed on the nearest longboat, she re-leased the arrow. As she watched it soar, an unwavering line of brightness against the dun-colored sky, Brie thought to herself what a farcical, ridiculous gesture it had been, to shoot a single arrow at a war host as vast as the sea itself. Her bow collapsed in fragments in her hands, the string burnt through. But the arrow flew higher and higher, soaring over the sea waves, arcing, then gracefully descending, and soundlessly cleaved the surface of the water, leagues short of the longboats. Brie crumpled to the ground, her eyes on fire.

As she pressed her fingers in agony against her eyelids, Brie felt a great stillness around her, almost as if all sound had been sucked down under the surface of the sea with the arrow. She could not see with her burning eyes, but pictures, vivid and clear, were forming behind the heat. She saw the arrow cleaving the water, then piercing rock and sand and sticking there in the seabed, upright. A fish was swimming by, a yellow parrot fish (one of Sago's favorites, Brie thought foolishly), and, as the arrow came to rest, the fish suddenly startled, darting away in a great hurry. And Brie saw why; the water surrounding the arrow began to move in an unnatural way. It was as if an invisible giant finger had dipped into the water and was spinning it in circles around the fire arrow. The water began to foam, and the churning grew so intense Brie could no longer see the arrow.

And then the pictures behind her eyelids were taking her up above the water and she saw how quickly the underwater upheaval had spread, for the moonlit sea stretching before her was being whipped into a frenzy, like a violent northeastern storm, yet there was not a breath of wind.

The burning in Brie's eye sockets was close to unbearable, and the pictures began to flicker, filming over from the heat and pain.

But she could hear the churning and the groaning of the sea. Sprays of water hit her body. The waves were growing larger, and blindly she backed away from the shoreline.

Then through the flickering she could dimly make out one giant wave beginning to form. It gathered itself together and rose, monstrous and impossible, into the night sky, blotting out the moon. And defying all reason, the giant spume of water exploded west, away from the beach. It slammed into the Western Sea with a thunderous roaring blast, as if the earth itself had cracked open.

Then the picture flicked off suddenly, leaving only blackness behind Brie's pain-seared eyes. And she heard another sound, cacophonous and enormous: a blend of hissing and screaming from thousands of morg throats. It lasted only a moment; then came silence, save for the sound of the ocean, restless and ever moving, as it settled back into its familiar rhythms.

Brie realized she was drenched with water, as she lay huddled on the beach of stones. The burning in her eyes had lessened somewhat, though she still kept her hands pressed against them, but her body felt broken and lifeless. And, when she removed her hands and opened her eyelids, she could not see. It was a darkness that frightened her; not just a blurred gray, as had happened before, but a complete and utter black.

She was so weak she did not think she had the strength to sit up, but then she felt Fara's wet fur beside her. When she had pulled herself up, Fara climbed into her lap, filling it. Brie laid her face on the animal's haunch, glad for the warmth.

Then she heard a cracking sound, so loud, as of something very large beginning to splinter. A familiar sound, Brie thought. Oh yes, the bell tower. And she knew, without being able to see it, that the sound came from Sedd Wydyr, and that the crystal castle was shattering.

As splinters of glass and rubble began to tumble down onto the bluff and beach, Brie crawled on her hands and knees to get farther away, Fara close beside her. Moths, some with damp wings, fluttered into her face, but she did not stop to brush them away. Somewhere in the dull recesses of her mind, she thought that Balor wasn't going to be pleased. This was the second of his buildings she had somehow managed to wreck.

Then her battered body began to shake. It was not only Balor's buildings she had destroyed.

He was somewhere nearby. She could feel it and had a sudden insane urge to throw herself into the sea, thinking it would be better to get it all over with quickly. But she did not; she just held Fara tightly as she lay curled up on her side, trembling.

And soon the footsteps came, as she had known they would, and she felt Fara being lifted from her arms and flung aside. She heard the faol hit the stones and then she heard no movement at all, except for the whooshing of moths.

Brie sat up, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees.

"It cannot have happened, and yet it has," came Balor's golden voice, thick with rage and incredulity. "I had not thought the old woman's draoicht adequate, and yet her prophecy was true."

"Old woman?" Brie croaked. Somehow she pulled herself to her feet, weak and blind as a newborn kitten still wet from afterbirth.