Elphame's Choice
Chapter Thirty-Two

On storm cloud-colored wings they glided down the ridge. Lochlan stood strong and naked, waiting for them to reach him. Though they could not literally read each others' minds, his people were intuitively linked through the heritage of their dark blood, and Lochlan knew that they must not detect the turbulence of his emotions. He pulled from within him the mantle of leadership that he wore so naturally, and cloaked his mind and his heart in silence. As they drew close, he could see their faces registering shock at his nakedness. Then they bowed their heads respectfully.
As was typical behavior for the headstrong half-Fomorian, Keir was the first to speak.
"What has happened to you, Lochlan?"
"You offer neither greeting, nor explanation as to why you are here, yet you believe you have the right to begin questioning me?" Lochlan ground the words through clenched teeth.
Keir's eyes flashed dangerously, but he could not hold Lochlan's gaze. He dipped his head.
"You are right to reprimand me," he said, but his voice held little apology. "Well met, Lochlan."
His three comrades bowed their heads and echoed his greeting.
"Not well met at all!" Lochlan snapped. "You should not be here."
Keir drew in a hissing breath, but before he could speak, the winged woman at his side stepped forward, curtseying deeply before Lochlan.
"You have been too long parted from us, Lochlan. We worried that some ill fate had befallen you."
Fallon's voice was sweet and for a moment the familiarity of it was a balm to his aching mind.
"Your instincts were not wrong, Fallon. Fate has not been kind."
"You did not find the hoofed goddess?" Keir said.
Lochlan's stare was ice. "I found her, but I have discovered that it is not of her that the Prophecy speaks."
The winged people moved restlessly, staring from Keir to Lochlan.
"How could you know that?"
"I know because she is not a goddess, she is simply a mutation of two races. She is no different than us!"
Lochlan snarled.
"It cannot be," Fallon said brokenly.
"Hope is not gone. I have a new plan." Lochlan raised his voice against the storm.
Lightning split the night again, and the rain intensified.
"Must we stand here? Is there not some shelter you can offer us?" Fallon said.
He wanted to scream at them that he had no shelter and force them to begin to retrace their path that very night, but he knew if he drove them away they would see the illogic of his actions - they would know he was hiding something from them. And they would not rest until they discovered his secret.
"Follow me, quickly and quietly. I will take you to my shelter." But as he turned, Fallon stayed him with a soft hand on his arm.
"Are you well, Lochlan? Why did we find you running naked with the storm?"
Lochlan looked from the gentle Fallon to her mate, and then to the other members of their party. They were watching him warily, as if they thought the time apart from them might have driven him into the madness that tugged at each of them. At that moment he didn't care what they thought - he only cared that the fabric of his world had been ripped asunder. The dream was over, and he did not think he could bear the light of day.
"Have none of you ever wanted to race the wildness of a storm?" he asked, showing his teeth to the group. Unfurling his wings he glided away from them, setting a pace that he knew they would have to struggle to match.
The cave he had been using as shelter was just large enough to accommodate all of them. Silently, Lochlan set about building a fire, something he rarely allowed himself the luxury of, but with the storm and the darkness of the night, there was little chance of his smoke leading anyone to discover their hiding place. He dressed and shared his meager provisions with his people, who were still eyeing him carefully.
He should have known when they entered Partholon; he should have felt their presence. It was a testament to how distracted he had become with Elphame that he had not realized that they approached.
Keir had chosen his companions well, Lochlan admitted to himself. Fallon, of course, would not have been parted from him. The twin brothers, Curran and Nevin, had always been completely loyal to one thing - the fulfillment of the Prophecy, at the expense of all else. Lochlan himself would have chosen them to accompany him on the quest Keir had planned.
And he knew beyond any doubt what it was that Keir had planned. Keir had come to be certain that Lochlan brought the hoofed goddess back to their people as a living sacrifice.
"Tell us about her, Lochlan," said Nevin.
"How can you be so certain that she is not the one?" As usual, Curran picked up the thread of his twin's thought and finished it.
Lochlan spoke carefully, cognizant of the fact that his words could either save or condemn Elphame.
"I have spent much time watching her. She is not a goddess. She is simply a young woman whose body, for whatever reason, carries the mark of her human mother, as well as her centaur father. She does not lead her people in the rites of Epona. She is only Clan Chieftain, not a goddess. She does not carry the power of the Goddess within her."
"You couldn't possibly know that." Keir kept his voice low, and nonconfrontational, but his eyes were narrow and slitted.
"I know it without any doubt. I read it in her blood."
"How?"
"Why?"
"What right had you?"
Lochlan raised his hand to still their shouting. Like a caged animal, he paced back and forth across the mouth of the narrow cave.
"I found her at the bottom of a ravine. She had fallen and was badly injured. A wild boar was attacking her. I killed the boar, and then I carried her to safety. Her blood ran freely that night, and in it I read the truth of her humanity. She is not a goddess - she is only an aberration, nothing more than a mutated human."
"You revealed yourself to her?" Fallen stared at him with stunned disbelief.
"She was unconscious and then delirious. She remembers me only as a dream that could not possibly be true." Lochlan almost choked on the bitter truth his words held.
"If she is not the one to fulfill the Prophecy, why have you dreamed of her for all the years of her life?"
Keir's words sliced the air.
But Lochlan had readied himself for the question, and his answer came easily.
"The dreams were visions sent by my dark blood to taunt me, meant to drive me mad when I followed their trail and found that they were no more than a folly that I had chased for a quarter of a century."
"You said you had a plan. What must we do now?" Fallon asked.
Lochlan approached the beautiful winged woman who had been his playmate in their youth and his friend in their adulthood. Her white-blond hair had dried and it glistened in the firelight as it fell to her waist in a thick, straight curtain. Her features were delicate and fey. Her eyes were a blue that was so light that they seemed sometimes colorless. He hated to lie to her; he hated to lie to all of them. But he could not betray his wife.
"While I was watching the hoofed woman, I overheard many things. Often the humans spoke of the Temple of the Muse."
Curran and Nevin nodded. "Our mother was trained there."
"As was mine," Lochlan said. "As were many of our mothers. Remember what they taught us of it? The Temple of the Muse is a place of higher learning, where the teachers are all Incarnate Goddesses, each a living, earth-bound representative of one of the nine Muses."
"You believe one of them might be able to fulfill the Prophecy," Keir said slowly.
Lochlan stared into his eyes. "I believe any of them could fulfill the Prophecy. Think about it! The answer is simple. I would have realized it years ago if I hadn't been plagued with taunting dreams for so long, which is why my dark blood played such games with me - to keep my mind from recognizing the obvious. The Prophecy does not say that we will be saved from the blood of a hoofed dying goddess. It says the blood of a goddess will save us. Any goddess."
"So we will go to the Temple of the Muse," Nevin said.
"And capture a goddess," Curran completed for him.
Lochlan shook his head in disgust. "And how do you plan to do that? How can you possibly believe that all of us could make our way there without being discovered?"
"Perhaps it is time we were discovered!" Keir spat. "Perhaps it is past time!"
"You intend to attack Partholon?" Lochlan's voice was sharp and dangerous.
"Not attack! I want only to take our rightful place within Partholon."
"And you believe that rightful place," Lochlan sneered, "is at the head of an army of winged demons?"
"We are not demons!" Fallon cried.
"If we come into Partholon as an invading force and steal one of their goddesses for a blood sacrifice, what else could they possibly see us as?" Lochlan said. When none of them answered him, he shook his head in disgust. "If we think only with the anger of our fathers' blood, we will fare no better then they did, and, for all of our struggles against their dark legacy, we will be no more human than they were."
"What is it you suggest?" Keir asked bitterly.
"Go home. See to the welfare of our people. I will travel alone to the Temple of the Muse, and when I return to the Wastelands it will be in the presence of a goddess. When her blood has washed the dark madness from our blood, we will peaceably enter Partholon. No Partholonian will ever know that the price of our salvation was the blood of one of their own."
"There is - " Curran began.
" - A certain logic to it," Nevin finished.
Lochlan turned his back on them and stared out into the rain. They seemed to accept his fabrications and half-truths, but he would not allow himself to feel relief until he knew that the four of them had returned to the Wastelands - until he was certain Elphame was safe.
Keir scowled and settled himself against the back wall of the cave. Fallon's eyes followed her mate before she joined Lochlan at the mouth of the cave.
"Do you still love her, my friend?" she asked him softly.
"No." Lochlan tasted the bilelike foulness of the lie. "I never loved her. It was all an illusion."
"It is better this way. Now you can finally choose a mate from your own people."
Lochlan managed a tight nod.
"You seem different, Lochlan." Fallon's eyes were clouded with concern.
"You were right. I have been too long away from my people." He forced himself to smile at her. "Now, you should rest. You must begin your return journey tomorrow. The castle is very near, and it is filled with human and centaur workers. It is not safe for any of you to remain here."
"As you say, Lochlan." Fallon inclined her head respectfully to him before drifting back to her mate.
Behind him, Lochlan could hear the four of them settling in for the night. His own weariness pulled at him, but he knew he would not sleep.' If he slept, he would dream. He would dream of her. Tonight, he could not bear that. Silently, he slipped out of the cave. The thunder and the lightning had passed, but the rain still fell steadily. He climbed the ridge above the hidden cave and sat on the rocky mound of ground and gazed out at the land that he had begun to believe could be his home.
The MacCallan land had called to him, but it was a call he could never again answer. No matter what his heart or his blood told him, no matter that Elphame would believe that he had betrayed and abandoned her, he must leave this place.
He would travel to the Temple of the Muse. He knew it was a futile trip. The idea that an Incarnate Goddess had the ability to fulfill the Prophecy was not a new one to him. He and his mother had discussed it often. It hadn't felt right to either of them. His mother had always been adamant that the key to the Prophecy would be revealed to him when Epona sent a woman touched by the Goddess to fulfill it.
That his mother had been right was of little consolation to him now.
And what of the unsuspecting Incarnate Goddess of the Muse? Could he steal an innocent young woman and carry her away to her death? Wouldn't that just serve to feed the darkness within him and draw him farther from his grasp on humanity? He clenched his jaw. No matter. He would do it - if it meant saving Elphame, there was little he would not do. He could even leave her.
His shoulders slumped. But it would not save Elphame, not permanently. His people would discover that the Incarnate Goddess's death did not fulfill the Prophecy. For twenty-five years they had believed that the hoofed goddess who haunted his dreams was the answer to their encroaching madness. Like a never-ending circle, they would inevitably revolve back to that belief.
Would he then have to battle his own people for her life?
Lochlan put his face in his hands and did something he had not done since the death of his mother. He wept.
Fallon nestled against Keir's body. He covered her with his wings, cocooning her in warmth. He pressed his lips against her ear.
"Your friend lies," he whispered.
She pulled back just enough to read his eyes. "What do you mean, Keir?"
"Even through the rain and his sweat I could smell her on him. He was rank with her blood as well as her sex," Keir hissed.
Fallon looked deeply into his eyes. She hadn't scented anything odd on Lochlan's body, but Keir's sense of smell was keener than her own; there had even been a few notable times when he had bested Lochlan's amazing ability to track through scent.
"All you need do is to think about what you have seen within his eyes, and you will know that I speak the truth. The hoofed goddess is The One, but Lochlan is choosing to keep her to himself."
Fallon closed her eyes and rested her head against her mate's chest. She thought about what she had seen reflected in Lochlan's eyes that night. The answer came too easily. She had seen agony and heartbreak - all the things the noble Lochlan would feel if he had chosen the lover of his dreams over the salvation of his people. Keir was right. Fallon felt the anger within her stir.