So now a wagon came, lumbering from distance to nearness, and when it had come near enough, Domhnull came down and stood leaning on his stick while the wagon came through the gates. A farmwife drove it; a girl was on the seat beside her.
"Where from?" he asked, hoping for news from the borders.
"Raghallach's Steading," the farmwife said. "The boys be all at the border, and that cloud—yon's ugly, an't it?"
Domhnull cast an involuntary glance upward, shrugged, leaning on his stick and grinned. "Sun's fair, goodwife."
For a moment the stout face looked bothered, grayed hair sticking with the sweat, lips clamped. Then a spark came to dark eyes and a grin showed gapped teeth. She clapped the girl on the shoulder, smoothed her tangled hair and nodded. "Oh, aye, 'tis."
"Stay in hold," Domhnull said, "if you like."
"Brought the stores, I did, all's to spare. Left my mark on t'door so's my folk won't worry. It's my granddarter, see—" She looked down at the small face, and up again. "There be trouble about the steading. I be a fair shot wi' my man's old bow, but them things comes at nightfall, run off the cow, they did, and got the sheep, e'en Sobhrach's lamb, poor thing."
"Nothing here," said Domhnull, "to trouble you—Cein," he said, the man being among others who had come up. "Take them through."
So he let them pass and turned away, thinking most on his own kin and glad that his mother had already come in and stayed. Beorc was on the border still. He found himself, but for Branwyn and Siodhachan, chiefest in the hold now, a thing he had never looked for. He had become Sir Domhnull and respected; but it seemed to him that all it meant was standing still and not doing the things he would do: like riding with the searchers, like going where he knew how to look, like seeing for himself and not relying on messages days old.
Thunder muttered. He glanced up at the clouds and saw no dark ened source of thunder. About him in the hold no others seemed to have heard it. Folk were going about their business. That strange deafness disturbed him, the more as the thunder grew and no one noticed. He strode for the walls, his limp pronounced, his stick for gotten in his hand. Behind in the yard was the squeal of the oxcart wheels on pavings. Children played. A rooster crowed, long and loud, fit to break the morning.
Then thunder clapped, deafening, and horses whinnied and cattle lowed. There was a pause in voices, a sudden exclamation.
Lightning blazed in Domhnull's path, just within the gates, a thunder-rumbling, the shape of horse and rider burning like the sun and dimming then.
"Lord," Domhnull whispered. It was himself.
"Domhnull. Help." It was the ghost of a voice, and the shape reached out to him. He went, flinging his stick aside, offering his hands, and Ciaran came down to him, sliding into his arms. For a moment there was no weight, and then there was, as the white horse of the Sidhe retreated. He could not bear it and sank to the pavings on his knees, shielding his lord's head and shoulders at least. Ciaran's face was waxen-pale, his flesh seeming to glow inside with light beyond what fell on it, and the bones standing out. Arrows had pierced him, three in the chest and ribs, broken stubs of shafts that moved with his breathing, and yet there was no bleeding.
"Gods," Domhnull said, feeling tears damned up in him. "O gods." He trembled. He brushed dirt from Ciaran's cheek and the closed lids flickered. He stared about him, stunned, realizing he could not lift him, that he knelt in a ring of people in the gateway. "For the gods' sake do something. Help him. Arafel!"
"No," Ciaran whispered. His eyes opened and there was a mur mur from the folk. He moved. It was incredible that any man could breathe, his body so pierced, but breaths continued. His hand sought the pavement and pressed to raise himself. The stone glowed upon his breast, like a moon by daylight. "Don't call, don't use that name."
"Lord," Domhnull said, and then another arrived running, Branwyn racing breathless through the crowd. She stopped. One might have expected a cry, a wail—something. She only came quietly and knelt and took her lord's hand and brought it to her lips, bloody that it was.
"I have had dreams," she said. "The children saw you coming home—o Ciaran, Ciaran!"
"He is sleeping," Domhnull said when he came out to the chil dren, there waiting in the hall; he had rather face enemies than this, these young faces, these hearts hanging on every turn of word for hope or something hidden from them. They stood there like two waxen images, with vast bruised eyes, and so, so lost, not knowing how much folk lied at such times, or how much a man might want to tell two children, or what horror might have been up there, while the door was closed. They waited. He opened his arms to them both. They came and he hugged them tight, like comrades, like something more than the children they were treated, and felt his senses aswim with panic and with loss. Perhaps it was the talismans they wore. For a moment he could not get his own breath, and felt somewhere lost, in mist, as if they stood in some space without boundaries or safety, naked to evil and to good. "O gods," he murmured, "but he will heal. I did. And she loves him more."
They looked up at him then, two pairs of eyes staring into him; but it was only the hall about them, solid stone, and the light came from torches in this unwindowed room.
"Iron," said Ceallach, half-whispered, "Domhnull, they shot him with iron."
" 'Tis gone now. We drew it." The image was vivid in him, the waxen skin, Siodhachan's knives, but only a little loss of blood—He saw the young faces, their pale, pale faces, as if they were drained of tears as their father was of blood. They could not know such things, must not be privy to them, with the cloudwall building over them, their father so unnaturally pale and still beyond the door.
"Can we see him now?" Meadhbh asked.
They were not to do so. Their mother had forbidden it. But Branwyn had not seen their faces, heard their voices, so calm and reasoned they broke his heart. "Yes," he said, "but from the door. You would not want to wake him. Listen to me. From such great hurts—well, sleep is best."
He took them then to the door which Muirne was leaving. He took it from her hand, and cracked it wider, so that they could see where Ciaran lay abed, Branwyn kneeling at his side. His face was calm.
So was Branwyn's now. She gazed at him and them and motioned to them, laying a finger to her lips to sign them quiet, and noiselessly they came to their father's bedside.
Forgive me, Domhnull sent with his eyes, but Branwyn hugged her children, Meadhbh and then Ceallach, wiped with her thumb the tears that spilled silently down composed, pale faces. So silently she urged them to go after they had seen their father. Domhnull held out his hand again, not without a look at his lord lying there so still.
Ciaran's eyes had opened. "Hush," said Branwyn, "go back to sleep."
The faintest of smiles touched his face, the smile of a man looking on what he loved, and then it faded and his eyes closed. Sweat broke out upon his brow, and his face had again that waxen light, his brows and nostrils and the edges of his mouth so drawn that it seemed another man, the lines of age smoothed by pain into an illusion of youth and fierceness.
Like a King, Domhnull recalled the vision. Or the Sidhe.
"Father," Meadhbh whispered. "Father—"
"Go," Branwyn said distractedly, her arm about the pillow on which Ciaran's head rested. "Let him sleep."
Meadhbh fled. Ceallach hesitated a moment, his face anguished, and Domhnull took his hand and led him.
They wept afterward, like children. Muirne came and brought them sweet cakes and a bit of ale and this at last tempted them; Domhnull won smiles from them, the sort without laughter or happi ness, but brave, their father's kind of smile when he had looked on them. There was the smell of rain in the air, reminding them of clouds, even in this room, and sometimes thunder muttered.