Ashe caught part of the hilt of the sword, and was so spared the indignity and vulnerability of fishing for it in the knee-deep water. He also stood and said, “No, m’lord.” Then he carefully wiped the blade on the upper part of his cloak and sheathed it.
“We have come for nothing like that. We have come because we need to find Michael. We need to stop him and rescue someone he’s taken. We know only that he landed near here, but we cannot track him—
“And you can’t kill him if you happen to find him. You don’t know how to kill him as he deserves to be killed, as he needs to be killed, if he’s going to stay dead.” MacQuieth finished Ashe’s statement, and at last looked at him without the lens of combat in his eyes. “Are you Merithyn’s heir as well as Gwylliam’s?”
“Yes, sir. And yours.”
The ancient warrior scowled. “Nonesuch. None of my line would ever blend their blood with the spawn of that cur.”
“Cynron ap Talthea did. She was my mother. Many generations removed from you, but undeniably of your line.”
“How disappointing for both of us. And on whose authority have you come to hunt this creature, and disturb me?”
“Our own,” Achmed said. “Few others know he is here.”
As he stood in the receding current, Achmed thought that it looked as if the tide were taking out MacQuieth. He looked more drawn with every breath, more reduced or distant from the rush of battle and grip of the sword.
MacQuieth fixed his gaze directly at the Firbolg king, but addressed the Lord Cymrian.
“You know you travel with the Brother, the great assassin who, in his time and way, was more terrible than the one you seek?”
“Yes,” Ashe said, “but a world away from his former self.”
MacQuieth turned back up to the shore, apparently tired of the tide, tired of questions.
“A world away? No. The world follows us in our travels. We’re there, no matter how far we’ve run; trust me.” He trudged slowly toward the shore, with the two younger men sloshing out of the waves behind him, then turned and glared at them again.
“What do you want?”
With no time to confer, neither of the sovereigns said anything for a minute. Then Achmed motioned to Ashe to speak.
“Michael landed near this beach. He has been up and down the coast, burning villages mostly. We wish to get ahead of him, trap him somewhere.”
“Stop. Who are you?”
“Didn’t you just tell me who my ancestors were?” Ashe asked, growing desperate, not knowing what to say to answer the man’s questions without angering him, then giving up, realizing it would be impossible to know.
“I can smell your blood,” MacQuieth said with a glower. “The sword has tasted it. Him, the sea knows, and I can tell by the way he moves who trained him. I have no idea what the world looks like now; most often I don’t care. Once a man passes his millionth day, they mercifully run together. But to find the bone in the soup, the oasis in the desert, the island, the killer, I have to know what the wind looks like, how many years have passed, whether this is a new road or an old wall. When my senses were young and on fire I could track a porpoise, a hawk.” He gestured at Achmed. “I was ready to track him before he was said to have died. Tell me what I really need to know.”
Ashe straightened his shoulders, feeling the wisdom in his blood course through him.
“I am Gwydion ap Llauron ap Gwylliam, tuatha d’Anwynan o Manosse.” he said simply. “Lord Cymrian by election. And long before the real onset of the Seren War in which yr Island, before all that, a young girl came to you asked if you had seen me. You had not, and yo’ Now, if she is still among the living, she may of Death, the anti-Kinsman, he who would use element of air to destroy armies, murder soldiers, rather than to aid them in their time of need. He is a host of a demon-spirit, though a strange permutation of the normal parasite relationship; apparently his loathsome personality was so strong, so evil, that it did not succumb to the monster’s will, was not subsumed by it, but rather coexists with it in the same body. So whatever murderous tendencies, whatever depravity lived within his mind when you fought him, still remain, only more powerful now.”
“I did not fight him,” the elderly soldier said, turning away and walking up the beach toward the rockwalls of the cliffs. “I fought Tsoltan, his master. Michael ran. Had he been man enough to stay and fight, you would not be seeking him now.”
The wind howled as the two sovereigns followed him around rocky out-croppings and hummocks of driftwood.
“What were you drawing in the sand?” Ashe asked, hurrying to keep up with the old man.
MacQuieth shrugged. “Whatever the sea tells me,” he said, and nothing more.
On the north side of a large formation of boulders at die cliff face they saw what they realized after a moment was a small hut that never saw visitors. In front there was a battered shield that had been converted into a distiller for water and little else.
The ancient hero disappeared into the rocky enclosure, reappearing a moment later with a wedding ring encrusted with diamonds in his hand, which he slipped onto his smallest finger.
“Do you have horses?” he asked, examining the ring on his hand.
“Yes,” Achmed said. “On the bluff.”
Without a word MacQuieth walked away, heading to the path that led up to the top of the pass.
Ashe glanced westward over his shoulder at the red sun hovering just at the edge of the horizon, ready to plunge into the rolling gray sea.
“Did you wish to sing your vespers, Grandfather, the requiem for the sun?” he asked respectfully in the Lirin tongue.
MacQuieth stopped abruptly.
“No,” he said, then started up the path to town again. “I no longer remember how.”
49
On the top of the hill, at the outskirts of the village, four horses were waiting, three saddled, one packed with provisions.
The healthy tinge MacQuieth’s skin gained when he held the sword in the sea had begun to recede. The farther he moved from both water and weapon, the grayer he grew, first in hair, then in face, and finally in eye. By the time they had reached the horses he had begun to look somewhat frail again.
His will, however, seemed not to have diminished at all. He studied the horses for a moment, speaking in a strange tongue to each of them, then summarily chose the one onto which Ashe had already begun to bind his gear, dumping it unceremoniously onto the ground.
“Barney’s packed the wrong animal for dray,” he said, the wind whipping through his hair and the horse’s mane in time. “That horse is smarter than the one in the lead. The leader’s a stupid animal. He would lead better with his arse than his head.” He mounted the horse he had chosen with the fluidity and grace of a young man. “Must be a Cymrian horse. Think I’ll call him ‘Gwylliam.’”
The two sovereigns smiled wearily.
“Just the back end of him,” Achmed said.
Those were the last words the ancient hero uttered that day. He turned his head to the wind, listening as if for die Kinsman call, then clicked to the horse and rode off to the north along the coastal road, seemingly unconcerned as to whether the others were following him or not.
Achmed watched the process of the hunt with interest. Unlike his method of tracking heartbeats, the singular concentration on one specific trail MacQuieth seemed instead to be looking for what was not there, searching in between the pockets of air to find a man-spirit that was using the element to wrap around himself, shielding him from normal sight and even his own extraordinary abilities and Ashe’s.
They all but flew over the ground, Ashe and Achmed frequently looking a each other in surprise—surprise at their companion’s age, surprise at the tol the years had taken, surprise that he could still ride as well as his legends said he did. The greatest source of their surprise, without question, was that the had even found him at all.