Книга - Silver’s Lure

Silver's Lure
Anne Kelleher


THROUGH THE SHADOWLANDS: Where the touch of silver was Protection, Power and Peril…THROUGH BATTLE, BLOOD AND SACRIFICE–ONLY THUS COULD THE WORLD BE SAVED…. Or so the bards sing. But at the dawning of the world, Catrione, a gifted Druid, knew only that the realms of Shadowland and Sidhe faced the gravest of danger from the goblin hordes and treacherous mortals. Now wary allies come together to wreak a spell to avert evil magicks, but the cost will be high.Much is needed to make the Silver Caul, and the songs don't speak of the price demanded. There will be duplicity and deceit, battle and blood and sacrifices–willing and unwilling.THROUGH DEATH WILL THE BALANCE OF LIFE BE PRESERVED. FOR NOW…









SELECTED PRAISE FOR

ANNE KELLEHER


“Anne Kelleher will not disappoint…[she] keeps you glued to the pages with anticipation and rewards your diligence with every word.”

—Writers Unlimited on Silver’s Bane

“Anne Kelleher has written a spellbinding work.”

—Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine on Silver’s Bane

“A stand-out fantasy/romance from this talented author.”

—FreshFiction.com on Silver’s Bane

“Silver’s Edge is a first-class fantasy.”

—In the Library Reviews

“Pure fantasy with a cutting edge.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub on Silver’s Edge

“This book has it all…. Set aside a few hours to read this one. You will not want to put it down.”

—Writers Unlimited on Silver’s Edge




SILVER’S LURE

ANNE KELLEHER








For Donny.




Glossary of People and Places


Meeve—High Queen of Brynhyvar, Queen of Mochmorna

Briecru—her Chief Cowherd

Morla—Meeve’s twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Deirdre’s twin sister

Bran—Meeve’s fifteen-year-old son

Lochlan—Meeve’s First Knight, head of the Fiachna

Connla—Meeve’s older sister and Arch Druid (Ard-Cailleach) of all Brynhyvar

Catrione—druid and daughter of Fengus, King of Allovale

Deirdre—Meeve’s other daughter, druid

Cwynn—Meeve’s son, raised by his grandfather

Auberon—King of Faerie

Finnavar—Auberon’s mother

Loriana—Auberon’s daughter

Tatiana—Loriana’s friend

Timias/Tiermuid—Auberon’s foster brother

Macha—the Goblin Queen

Brynhyvar—the Shadowlands, inhabited by mortals and trixies, call khouri-keen by themselves and gremlins by the sidhe

Ardagh—central point in Brynhyvar

Mochmorna, Allovale, Gar and Marraghmourn—four main provinces of Brynhyvar

Lacquilea—country to the south of Brynhyvar

Eaven Morna—Meeve’s principal residence

Eaven Avellach—Fengus’s principal residence

Dalraida, Pentland—territories lying within Mochmorna and Gar, respectively

Far Nearing—peninsula on the eastern shore of Brynhyvar

White Birch Grove—druidhouse where Catrione and Deirdre live

Faerie, TirNa’lugh or the Other World—otherworldly country bound to Brynhyvar, inhabited by sidhe and goblins




Contents


Before

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Afterward




BEFORE


Below

At the bottom of the World, the Hag crouched on the jagged stone lip of her fire pit. Her face was washed with an orange glow by the crackling flames. Her breath whistled between the gaps in her teeth as she chanted, “Now the fire’s nice and hot, now’s the time to stir the pot. Take the changeling, toss it in, stir it hard and watch it spin.” She cackled softly in anticipation. Her claws skittered across the surface of the milky moonstone globe she cradled in the crook of one arm like an infant. “Make the water into stew, season it with something new, hair and bone and blood and skin, once we put the changeling in, boil brew and fire burn and dark to light will then return…” Her voice trailed off, but her words continued to echo off the lichen-lit vault above her.

She was waiting for Herne to bring her the changeling whose birth had turned her from Mother into Hag. The birth of her first offspring, the goblins, had turned her from Maiden into Mother. Mortals and sidhe had followed, but it was the last birth that signaled a turning of the Wheel in the Worlds above. The mortals, bless them, would react like ants dispossessed of their hill, the sidhe—who alone would know what was happening—would shake their heads at the mortals’ antics and the khouri-keen would burrow deep into their dens beneath the surface, only emerging when all was renewed. But the goblins—they would see it as the opportunity it was.

“And why shouldn’t they?” she whispered as she worked. Of all her children, she had come to love them best. They were the easiest to satisfy.

She hawked and spat onto the moonstone, and images of the dark, dirt-lined cave swirled through its milky surface. In it, she saw Herne’s fire-lit face as he bent over her mountainous belly, and for a moment, she was Mother once again, back in the birth chamber, red skin flushed and wet with sweat, body wracked with birth pangs. They’d both known this infant would be their last in this particular incarnation of reality.

The memory of herself splayed like a spider, arms back, thighs thrown wide flashed through her, even as she saw its image reflected in the globe. Her belly contracted once more in a painful heave, doubling her over, causing her to nearly drop the moonstone. She clutched it close, closed her eyes, and saw against her eyelids her final impression of Herne as he caught the caul-covered infant as it slithered out, slick with blood. Through the translucent whiteness of the membrane, she glimpsed a squirming body covered in matted hair.

One blink, and she’d found herself here in her cavern, skin mottled blue-gray, teeth yellowed and jagged, her stick clenched between contorted fingers.

She set the stick aside and for a while, she was busy. The blood that rolled between her thighs and down her legs dried to a slow drip, then stopped and crusted, falling off in flakes that the thirsty stones absorbed. She filled the cauldron, sorted through the contents of the feathered bags made from the carcasses of the Marrighugh’s ravens, summoned up the fire sleeping at the bottom of the fire pit. Finally she turned to her globes that formed the supports on which her cauldron rested.

Besides the cauldron, which was as much a part of her as her own belly, they were her dearest possessions. She cherished and prized them above all else. Originally there had been four, one for each of the primal Elements that made up the Worlds. They had come to her, one by one, when the World was new, and she and Herne were young. With them, she and Herne had created all that was and would ever be.

Now there were only three, the fourth, her favorite, having shattered with such force that it generated a whole new race of beings, each of whom held a piece of the globe. She thought about collecting the pieces of the globe some day, and putting them back together, restoring the fourth globe to its proper place. But that would represent a bigger change than she felt prepared to deal with, and so, while the idea appealed to her, she ignored it for the moment. Some day, though. It amused her to think about it.

She dragged each of the remaining three to the lip of the phosphorescent sea, dipped them into the salty water, then rubbed them clean. When she was finished, she regarded them critically, trying to decide which of the three remaining she liked the best: the black obsidian smoldering with the memory of the fire that had forged it; the lustrous white pearl gleaming pink in the fire pit’s glow, or the moonstone, greenish in the reflection of the phosphorescent sea. She lifted the moonstone, regarding the shifting clouds within its depths. Its surface was as changeable as the Air for which it stood, and she thought this one could be her favorite for a while.

She set the moonstone in its place. It formed a triangular support for her cauldron over the pit along with the globes of moonstone and pearl. With the obsidian and the pearl, it formed a triangular support for the cauldron over the pit. With a great heave and a strength that completely belied her appearance, she set the cauldron in its position. She poked her crooked staff below the black kettle’s rounded bottom, into the center of the fire, and the flames leaped up. She stuck her stick into the brew and gave it an experimental stir. At once she frowned at the image that came swirling out of the depths. She bent her head to take a closer look, just as the gelatinous sea began to boil.

In the cauldron, the image swirled away as swiftly as it had risen. The Hag lifted her head, squinting across the rocky shore into the green glow that rose off the phosphorescent water, then licked her lips as the tips of Herne’s horns broke the surface at last. Water gushed off his broad forehead, cascaded through his black curls like a curtain as his enormous head and shoulders pushed up and out of the sea, revealing the chest and upper arms of a man atop the body of a bull. He strode slowly up the sloping lip, onto the jagged surface of the shore, the razor-sharp edges of the rocks smoothing themselves under his hooves as he approached. His wet tail flicked from side to side, his eyes gleamed red.

His arms were empty.

The Hag withdrew her stick and scurried to the other side of her cauldron. “Where’s the changeling? Where’ve you got it? My cauldron’s hungry and wants its head.”

Herne folded his arms and wouldn’t meet her eyes.

The Hag hissed. “What is it, Father? Where’s the changeling? The cauldron’s cold and must be fed.”

“It’ll have to wait a bit.”

She tried to catch his eye, but again, he wouldn’t look at her. Something dark and ugly uncoiled in her gut, and the Hag took another step closer. “What have you done now, Father?”

“You didn’t see him,” Herne whispered. “You didn’t see him as he was born.”

The end of her stick flared red and in disbelief, she watched tears trickle down his face. “Him? That thing is not a him—it’s not a child meant to live—it’s a changeling for the pot.”

“That pot’s all you ever care about,” Herne thundered. The ground shook, a rock tumbled down and splashed into the sea. In the depths, leviathan shapes shuddered and spun.

The Hag curled both hands tightly around her staff and stood her ground. “That’s what I’m supposed to care about—I’m the one who keeps it all turning. You knew what had to be done even before it was born—we both did. Now go and get it, and bring it here. You know what must be done.”

“It can wait.”

An emotion so foreign the Hag didn’t initially recognize it traced a cold finger down her spine, and she peered up at Herne. The only moment she could compare it to was the moment the pink crystal globe had shattered. It was a moment that was irretrievably different from the moment before it, one that separated time into now and then, before and after. “Wait?” she rasped. Pain lanced through her chest and a sea began to boil deep inside her lungs. “What did you do to the changeling?”

“The sidhe-king took him.”

“What?” A fit of coughing overtook her, and she felt a gush of rheumy mucous rise up from somewhere deep inside. She hawked and spat. The gob was flecked with streaks of blood. Now the fire’s nice and hot, now’s the time to stir the pot. The words danced through her mind and she stared up at Herne, wondering if he realized that the fire now burning in her lungs was his fault. “You let it happen, didn’t you—you gave it to the sidhe-king, didn’t you? Why? Why would you do such a foolish, careless thing? It’s not a child—it’s a changeling. It’s not meant to grow up—it’s meant to go in my stew.”

“He was so beautiful, Mother,” whispered Herne. “You were gone, the moment I pulled him from you. You didn’t see…You couldn’t see…how different he was…from all the others…all the other changelings…” His voice trailed off, he closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he looked down at his open hands, gazing with something like wonder on his face. “I never saw such a perfect child—his arms and legs so round, so pink. He was like a rose dipped in milk, and his eyes were green, then gray and his head was covered in curls soft as spider silk and black as—” He broke off and turned away, his hands clenching into fists.

“Black as the shit you’ve landed us in,” the Hag screeched. “Blacker than any midnight you’ve yet to see—have you forgotten Lyonesse?”

“He’ll come down to your cauldron sooner or later—everything does.” Herne reared back, narrowed eyes flaring red. His chest appeared to broaden and deepen, his head widened so that more than ever he resembled an enormous bull towering over the tiny woman.

The Hag didn’t flinch. Another burst of coughing overtook her and this time the phlegm landed next to Herne’s foremost hoof. “And how long do you expect me to wait, Father? What will feed my cauldron? What will keep it turning, while this beautiful changeling of yours slithers through the land?”

“I’ll bring him myself if he causes trouble.”

“He’s already caused trouble—I saw it in my cauldron. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but I do now. All Faerie’s in uproar—Father, what do you think you’ve started?”

“I was going to say his hair was black as yours was, Mother.” Herne dropped his shoulders and turned away, head bent. “Perhaps I should’ve brought him here, let you see. You’d understand.”

“Of course you should’ve brought it here. It doesn’t belong in the World. It belongs in the cauldron. That’s the way it goes—take the changeling, toss it in, stir it hard, watch it spin.”

“I couldn’t let you do that.”

“Bring it here at once.”

Herne shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“You have to do that.”

“It’s already too late—they gave him a name.”

A name. The first anchor of awareness into one’s own flesh for every being—no matter what sort of being it was—began with a name. A changeling never had a name. It wasn’t supposed to live long enough to need one. The disruption she’d glimpsed in the cauldron was a greater rift than she’d realized. “You have to fix this, Father.”

“Why can’t you just agree to wait a bit? You know he’ll end up here eventually like everything else.”

The weight of all existence fell upon her like an enormous rock, and for a moment she wondered if she would ever breathe again. Automatically, because it was the only thing she knew to do, the Hag tottered to the cauldron. She dipped her stick into the brew, and the cauldron rolled gently, settling into place onto the three globes. Tentatively, feeling as if the ground beneath her feet might open and swallow them all, she began to stir in a widening figure eight as she frowned into the broth. “This isn’t something easily undone, Father. This one’s got away from us—gotten itself a name, even. Oh, this is a clever one, indeed. Cauldron only knows what havoc this one will wreak.”

The weight was like a black cloak, settling over her as dense as the soupy water lapping against the rocks. It choked her throat, made the words hard to form and turned her voice into a guttural growl. “Round about the circle goes, dark to light and back it flows, now the fire starts to burn, and the brew begins to churn. Gently simmer in the pot, while the changeling-child rots—take it, break it, let it burn, that Hag to Maiden then return.” But even as she chanted, even as she bent her back and pulled the stick through the frantically bubbling brew, she knew it was already too late.




1

THEN


White Birch Druid Grove, Garda Vale

The trixies were restless and the butter wouldn’t churn. Meeve’s messenger, one of her elite corps of warriors called the Fiachna, and sorely afflicted with arrogance, had come and gone and Catrione had been glad to see him go. Since dawn, rain had been sluicing off the thatched roofs like water from an overturned bucket, and while at one time, the thought of his wet, uncomfortable journey might’ve quietly pleased her, this was the first quarter Catrione had ever served as Ard-Cailleach, the head sister of the Grove, and she was too caught up in the turmoil spiraling all around her to give him another thought.

She dodged the widest puddles as she hurried across the chilly yard toward the low stone still-house, but her feet were soon soaking wet, her hems sodden. The oldest cailleachs, on whom she might’ve relied for support and advice, had all left for the MidSummer rites at Ardagh, summoned there early to a special conclave by the ArchDruid, Connla. Catrione, being one of the younger sisters and head of the Grove for the quarter was left with the few druids either too old to travel or too young to be called. There were reports of blight spreading across the land, of increasing numbers of unnatural births—two-mouthed fish and six-legged calves—and rumors that goblins were stirring. The queen’s messenger didn’t say why Meeve wanted her daughter, Deirdre, home. He had not once looked directly at Catrione, nor any of the other druids, and after he left, the serving maid who’d warmed his bed spoke of trouble between the ArchDruid, Connla, and the Queen.

But nothing seemed to account for the fact that knots wouldn’t stay tied, fires wouldn’t stay lit, water wouldn’t boil and bread was slow to rise. Not to mention the trixies, who spilled and spat and quarreled and caused so much aggravation that that very afternoon, she’d banished them to their dens below the Tor shortly after discovering that an entire batch of starter had to be scrapped, leaving the entire Grove with no means of making bread unless the still-wives had more.

Catrione paused under the eave as a huge black raven shrieked at her, then rose and flapped off. Startled, she put her hand on the still-house latch as the old rhyme ran through her mind: One for sorrow. The door swung open, seemingly of its own accord. Catrione gasped as three anxious faces materialized out of the stillroom’s gloom the moment she put her foot across the threshold, and she wondered if they’d been watching for her.

“Catrione, you have to let us take the child.” Bride, the chief still-wife, broad-breasted as a turtledove but sharp-eyed as a hawk, closed one hand on Catrione’s wrist and pulled her inside. “Deirdre’s child—it’s gone too long past its time.”

“Sisters,” Catrione managed, feeling weak in the knees. Deirdre the High Queen’s daughter, once Catrione’s best friend among the sisters, had doubly disgraced herself and the Grove. Not only had she lain with a brother outside the sacred rituals, but a few months after he’d been banished, she’d admitted to carrying his child.

Druids lay with each other only as part of sacred ritual, and then only after preparation and precautions against the conception of a child, for such couplings produced dangerous rogues and other anomalies. This pregnancy had gone long beyond anything normal, and now, having resisted the sisters’ arguments that the child should be aborted, Deirdre was approaching three months, at least, past term. The child was still alive and squirming, and Deirdre refused to do anything more to hasten her labor than to drink the mildest of tonics.

Catrione felt as if her legs might give way beneath her, but Bride’s clasp seemed to communicate a subtle strength, allowing her to sink onto a long wooden bench.

“You know we must,” Bride was repeating. “You must allow it.”

Baeve, tall and thin as a wraith, spoke from over Bride’s shoulder, as Sora, youngest of the three, shut the door. “You know we’re right, Catrione. It’s not natural.”

Catrione knotted her fingers together over her stained linen apron. “But, sisters—”

“Think of Deirdre,” said Sora, all soft voice and hands that fluttered around Catrione’s shoulders like shy birds.

“Think of the Queen,” said Baeve as Catrione met her eyes.

“It’s not good for her,” Bride was saying. “And look what’s happening here. This is the kind of thing that’s happening all over Brynhyvar.”

Baeve’s expression made Catrione pause. The messenger had gone away, but his parting words were that both Meeve and her sister Connla, the ArchDruid of all Brynhyvar, would be stopping on their way to Ardagh. But even as one side of Catrione wondered why the ArchDruid wasn’t at Ardagh already, she recognized that for all their reasons, the women were right. And yet to order the child taken felt like betrayal.

The memory of Tiermuid’s words, his voice like sand-washed silk, whispered through her. Protect her.

And so Catrione had, not because Deirdre was her dearest friend, the one among all the twenty or so sisters who really did feel like a sister, but because he’d asked it of her, Tiermuid, whose black hair fell around his shoulders, lustrous as a woman’s, his eyes so faint a blue they were nearly sidhe-green. She and Deirdre were not the only sisters who giggled and blushed when Tiermuid was around, and if Deirdre had been the one to fall completely under his spell, the fire he’d lighted in Catrione smoldered secretly still, tamped down only by long force of hard discipline. To order the child—his child—taken felt like an arrow in her heart.

“We know how much you love Deirdre. We know how hard this has been for you.” Bride’s face puckered like a dumpling. She pushed wayward wisps of gray hair under her coif and covered Catrione’s hands with her own, eyes steady and unwavering. “But we’ve no choice.”

“What will we tell the ArchDruid when she comes, otherwise?”

“What will we tell the Queen? Her knight said she’d stop here herself on her way to Ardagh, didn’t he?”

Catrione raised her eyes to the bunches of drying herbs hung along the rafters, the baskets of nuts and berries and seeds. Somewhere amidst all that profusion was the potent combination that would drive the child out at last. A tingle ran up her spine and down her arms. She could’ve left at Beltane, for her father Fengus, the chieftain-king of Allovale and nearly as powerful in his own right as the High Queen, had been left without a druid in his own house when the last one died. But Deirdre was here, and the child was due, and she’d stayed.

But that wasn’t the only reason, Catrione knew, if she was honest with herself as she was required to be at every Dark Moon ritual. Tiermuid might return. The term of his banishment from the Land of a year and a day was nearly completed. She closed her eyes and wished any of the older sisters present, even Eithne, whose tongue was as cutting as her eye was quick to find the least fault. She had maintained all along that the child should be aborted, while Catrione had been careful never to voice an opinion. No wonder they made me Ard-Cailleach, she reflected bitterly. It’s a kind of test.

“Please,” said Baeve.

Catrione rose, back straight, deliberately shutting at all thoughts of Tiermuid’s naked body, slim and white in the moonlight bending over Deirdre’s darker flesh. That way lies madness—look at what’s happened to Deirdre.

“We know you don’t want to,” Sora said, eyes liquid and large as a doe’s, skin nearly as pale and satiny as a sidhe’s.

“But we hope you see you must.” Bride sat back, folding her arms.

“We have to end this unnatural thing,” Baeve put in.

Catrione held up her hands as she heaved a deep sigh. She was druid, she had always been druid, and this desperate striving urgency building in her belly was a result of the Beltane to Solstice ritual abstention from any kind of coupling. The fire kindled at Beltane must be allowed to burn. That’s why she was feeling this growing need, every time she thought of Tiermuid. Druids did not love each other. Not the way you love Tiermuid. The wicked little whisper made her belly burn. MidSummer was coming, when the bonfires on the Tors would call out the sidhe, and the druids would couple their fill, infusing the land. But until then, the energy had to be suppressed. “Sisters, you’ve convinced me. What do you want me to do?”

“Go get her,” answered Baeve.

“Bring her here,” added Bride.

“What if she won’t come? What shall I do then?”

“If she won’t come, call the men,” said Baeve.

“What men?” Catrione blinked.

“The men who’ll be waiting outside the door as soon as we call for them,” replied Baeve.

Catrione stiffened. So this had been previously planned out. “Did Niona put you up to this?” Niona MaFee, just a few years older than Catrione, and the daughter of a poor shepherd somewhere far to the north, had been jealous of Catrione, the daughter of the chief of Allovale, from the moment Catrione had arrived at the White Birch Grove nearly fourteen years ago. Since Beltane, when Niona had not been among those chosen to accompany the older cailleachs to Ardagh, she’d grown even more resentful.

The women exchanged glances, and Bride said, “Everyone—even the neighboring chiefs—are talking. Why, just yesterday young Niall of the glen was here, telling us his sheep were sickening and to see if we had a remedy, and Niona happened to be here. Then she went with him while he spoke to Athair Emnoch about his trees—you were with the Queen’s messenger.”

Catrione’s cheeks grew warm. No one had even mentioned the young chief’s visit. Her jaw tightened. She balled her hands into fists, determined to keep control, and said, “You want me to do this now?”

“There’s a bit of time,” said Baeve with a glance at the other two. “We’ve got to get a few things ready—”

“And you look like you could use a rest,” said Sora.

“Why not lie down for a turn of a short glass,” said Bride. “I’ll send Sora with a cup of something with strength in it when all’s ready.”

Catrione nodded at each in turn, wondering if this was how her father felt before setting out on a cattle raid. She trudged across the courtyard, listening to the fading sounds of the flurry of activity that began the moment the door-latch clicked shut behind her. Her sandals slapped against the slates, the smell of roasting chicken wafting through the air made her nauseous. The rain had eased but the sky was as leaden as her mood. The low white-washed buildings with their beehives of thatch looked like giant children squatting under rough woven cloaks. The courtyard was deserted and she was glad. She picked up her skirts and ran as another downpour suddenly intensified. Once inside the long dormitory, she stopped before Deirdre’s door, fist raised.

She let out a long breath, considering whether to knock or not, whether to try to reason with her friend once again. But she’d had that conversation too many times, and the dull, dead feeling in her gut told her exactly how it would end—Deirdre would refuse, the men would have to be summoned and she, Catrione, would have to go down to the still-house, tired and unprepared. Don’t do that to yourself, she thought. Take the time you need to do it right.

Preparation was everything. If there was anything she’d learned in the last fourteen years it was never attempt anything—healing, ritual or oracle—without properly preparing oneself, one’s tools and one’s environment. But, oh, Great Goddess, why can’t this child just be born? The hollow echo of her footsteps was the only answer.

The long corridor stretched before her, the end shrouded in gloom, every closed door on either side a silent reproach. Most of the rooms were unoccupied. The sisterhouse had been built many years ago, and gradually, fewer and fewer sisters and brothers came to stay. All the Groves were far smaller than they used to be, and some had closed completely. Now that so many had gone to Ardagh, there were only a dozen left.

The deeper into the shadows she went, the more the walls around the doors seemed to shimmer and blur. A tingle went down her spine. It was not unheard of that the OtherWorld occasionally intersected with a corridor—any place that wasn’t one place or another, or was a conduit between two places, was a possible portal. She felt a shimmer in the air around her and out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a narrow pale face and heard the tinkle of a high-pitched laugh. It would do her good, she thought, to seek out the embrace of a sidhe, fleeting as it might be. It would relax her, help her think. Later, she promised herself. Later I’ll slip up on the Tor and find my way to TirNa’lugh. But not now.

The sense of overlap faded as another shiver, stronger, went down her back. She paused before her own door, hand just over the latch. It stood slightly ajar, and Catrione knew she was always careful to shut it firmly. She looked up and down, but there was no one about.

She pushed it open. Her dog, Bog, was stretched out beside the cold hearth, apparently asleep, and Catrione gasped to see Deirdre, mountainous belly spilling over the armrests, sitting in the chair. Deirdre turned to look at her, beady eyes unnaturally bright in her puffy face. Her cheeks were flushed, but in the gloom, her skin appeared mottled gray and white. A white coif covered her hair. “What’re you doing here?” Catrione faltered with a hand on the door.

“We know what they want you to do, Catrione.” Her voice was a low rasp.

“It’s not what they want me to do.” Catrione collected herself as quickly as she could. Deirdre’s unblinking stare unnerved her, and she was puzzled that Bog didn’t stir. “Deirdre, this can’t continue—the child will grow so large, it won’t be able to be born. Don’t you see—we’re all worried about you.”

“Why do you want to hurt us?” The final sound was an almost reptilian hiss.

Catrione knelt beside the chair and picked up Deirdre’s hand, swallowing revulsion. Deirdre’s fingers looked like five fat sausages, her slitted eyes like a pig’s. But Catrione forced herself to look into Deirdre’s eyes and say, as gently as she could, “No one wants to hurt you. We want to take care of you. We’re worried about you, Deirdre. Strange things have been happening lately—”

“My baby is not a strange thing!” Deirdre cried. She pulled her hand away, cradling her vast stomach with both arms. She shut her eyes and tilted her face so that her cheek nearly touched the rounded tops of her enormous breasts, as she murmured in a low horrible croon, “Leave us alone…leave us alone…Why can’t you all just leave us alone?”

Revulsion turned into resolve. The others were right. How could I have been so blind? she thought desperately, even as she said, “I have left you alone, Deirdre, and I see I was wrong. Please, don’t argue with me—the midwives won’t give you anything that hasn’t been given to hundreds—”

“What they want us to take will kill us—” Again, Deirdre’s voice trailed away into a soft hiss as her coif fell off, revealing lank strands of sweat-soaked hair and wide patches of blotchy scalp.

Only druid discipline kept Catrione from recoiling openly. “When did your hair start falling out?”

But Deirdre was on her feet and moving faster than Catrione could’ve imagined possible. “Leave us alone. Don’t bother sending for the men—” There was something in the way she said it that told Catrione she knew what the still-wives had planned. “We won’t go with them.”

“How did you know—?” whispered Catrione. Deirdre’s continued use of the word we was ghoulish for some reason.

“It’s amazing how delicate an expectant mother’s senses can be,” Deirdre snapped. She got to her feet, head lowered, ponderous and slow as a boulder slowly gathering momentum. “We know it was you, Catrione. Even he never guessed. But we know. And we know something else, too, something you don’t think anyone else does. We know who you want. We know who you need.” She leaned closer and the wet stench of her body enveloped Catrione in a sickening miasma that made her gag. “You’re so blind, Catrione. You don’t see, and because you can’t, you think no one else can, either. Well, you’re wrong.”

The silent, sudden words struck Catrione like stones pelting her chest. Her jaw dropped, and before Catrione could gather her wits, Deirdre was gone and out the door. She knows…she knows. The words pulsed through her brain. That can’t be possible. No one ever knew. Even when she taunted me…I never admitted anything.

Catrione put one hand on the nearest chair to steady herself, and Bog caught her eye. Forgetting Deirdre, she knelt beside him, one hand on his head. He didn’t stir at her touch, didn’t open his eyes, didn’t thump his great white plume of a tail, and in a moment of awful realization, she knew he was dead. He’d seemed fine all that day, she thought as disbelief descended on her. She tried to remember the last time she’d looked into his deep brown eyes, fondled his silky ears, tried to think what she’d been doing the last time she’d seen him. Her mind was a complete blank, filled with a raven’s screech. One for sorrow, was all she could think.

Deirdre. Find her. The unequivocal command yanked Catrione into the present, galvanizing her. With one last look at Bog’s poor limp body, she shut her door, and paused, looking both ways down the empty corridor. Find her.Catrione picked up her skirts and ran down the shadowy corridor toward the rain-shrouded dusk.

Hardhaven Landing, Far Nearing

Wind-driven rain slashed against the panes of yellowed horn, and the shutters rattled against the latch as the storm howled around the tower room. In the hearth, a log cracked and split in a shower of sparks, stinging Cwynn’s bare legs like a hundred bees, chasing him out of yet another dream of the woman with the honey-blonde hair. Her now-familiar features dispersed into a swirl of color as he came to himself with a start, just in time to wonder briefly who she could possibly be. The girls who caught his eye were usually dark-haired, like Ariene the midwife’s daughter, the mother of his sons. He knocked his head against the stone hearth and opened his eyes to see his grandfather, Cermmus, watching beady-eyed from his pillow. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“Hard day?”

“Thought it would never end.” Cwynn cleared his throat and shook himself awake. The storm had risen fast out of flat water and hazy sun, catching him off guard and farther away from the shore than a one-handed fisherman should be when the weather was bad. Until his feet had actually touched land, Cwynn’d believed it more likely than not he’d find himself feasting in the Summerlands. The sound of off-key singing, followed by loud laughter and catcalls filtered up from the hall, and he remembered there were three strangers in the keep tonight who wore odd-patterned plaids and supple leather doublets with high boots polished to a fine sheen. He’d had no chance to speak to them himself, for Cermmus had left word with every occupant of the house, apparently, that Cwynn was to come to him directly. A whoop from the floor below sounded like Shane, Cwynn’s uncle, who, at thirty-five, was only five years older than Cwynn. “I lost the whole day’s catch, and the nets—the mast—the boat’s going to need a lot of repairs.” He held up his hook. “I put a hole in the side.” He braced himself.

But to Cwynn’s disbelief, Cermmus only shifted under the sheet. “Forget the catch, never mind the boat. There’s—”

Cwynn stared. “Never mind?” Was his grandfather not aware there were two more mouths to feed this summer? Duir and Duirmuid, his twin boys, were weaned and hungry. And there were no men in the midwife’s house to provide for them. “We needed that catch, Gran-da—the fish aren’t running this year like they should. Why, Ruarch was saying—”

“Did you get a look at those strangers down there?”

“I saw them. I figured if there was something about them I needed to know, you’d tell me.”

“I was waiting for you to ask.”

“No sense wasting your breath, eh?”

The old man nodded, and what lately passed for a smile flickered across his face. Then his expression grew serious and he rose up on one elbow, fumbling beneath his pillow. “Come here, boy. I have something for you.” He began to cough, a hard, hacking cough that brought Cwynn to his side, his right hand extended to help him sit up, a clay cup of water awkwardly held in the curved iron hook that had served as his left ever since the accident.

“Drink this, Gran-da,” he said.

The old man waved him away. “Don’t fret about me, boy.” Cermmus cleared his throat, hawked and spit expertly into a metal pot on the other side of the bed. “Here.” He held out what looked like a piece of folded yellowed linen. “Take it. It’s yours. I should’ve given it to you before, but after Shane killed your father—”

It was much heavier than Cwynn expected. He unfolded the stiff, yellowed fabric, frowning as he unwrapped the round gold disk. It was about the size of his palm and nearly as thick. A border of intricate knotwork was etched around the edge. He turned it over. It was warm from his grandfather’s bed. The delicate spiral reminded him of a seashell, studded here and there with tiny crystals, spinning out from an enormous emerald in the center. “What is this thing?”

“The druids make them. We all had them—I sold mine off for food in the years the fish ran slow. Could have another made if I had the gold for it, which I don’t. But I didn’t think it wise to bring that one out.” Cermmus turned his head and spat into a clay ewer. “Pull that stool closer, boy. I don’t want to shout.”

“Are you saying this is mine?” Cwynn asked as he obeyed. The acrid scent of a sick man’s body blended with wet wool and damp dog and the heavy scent of fish that clung to everything beneath his grandfather’s thatched roof.

Cermmus coughed again, and this time he accepted the cup. “I couldn’t let your uncle know it was here—especially after…after, well, you know. I was afraid he’d steal it, sell it.” His mouth twisted down, and Cwynn knew he was remembering the terrible day ten years ago when his father, Ruadan, had accused Shane, his younger brother and Cwynn’s uncle, of lying with his Beltane-wife.

“And what if I did?” Shane had laughed. He was twenty-five then; dark-haired and tanned, strong and agile from a life spent outdoors on the water, much-liked by all the women, whereas Ruadan, more than twelve years Shane’s senior, was balding and beginning to wear his age.

Ruadan had lunged across the table, clearly intent on wrapping his hands around his younger brother’s throat. Quicker than Cwynn could blink, Shane was on his feet and his knife was buried to its hilt in Ruadan’s chest. Cwynn leaped at his uncle, and it had taken six men to pull him off. The druid court at Gar called it self-defense. Shane paid a blood-fine to Cwynn, which really amounted to no more than assigning him a portion of what he expected to inherit from Cermmus, which wasn’t much to begin with, and the matter was considered settled.

But Cwynn never trusted his uncle again, and Cermmus had never been quite the same since. The old man shook his hand, dragging Cwynn back to the present. “It’s yours. You keep it, now. You keep it safe. Don’t lose it.”

“So what’s this all mean?” He turned the disk over awkwardly, squinting at its markings in the candlelight. The druid script was impossible for anyone without their training to decipher, but he could see that the tiny gems scattered across it clearly had some meaning.

“It’s why those men are here,” Cermmus said. “It’s your birthright, it’s your heritage.”

“I don’t understand.” Cwynn squinted at the intricate workmanship.

“That’s your mother’s line, there. The ancestors from your mother.”

At that, Cwynn looked up. This disk clearly indicated the line of a clan rich and well-renowned. “So who’s my mother? Great Meeve herself?”

“Aye.”

Cwynn guffawed. “All right, Gran-da, why don’t you tell me the real story?”

The old man shrugged as a muffled burst of laughter rose from the hall. “That is the real story. The other you were told—well, I guess we told you that to save your father’s honor. It were something of a blow, you see—but you believe what you like. You find a druid to tell you what that says, and maybe you’ll believe that.”

“Meeve the High Queen is really my mother?” Cwynn turned the amulet this way and that, as if changing the direction could somehow snap its meaning into focus. He felt as if the floor beneath his feet had suddenly started to dip and roll like the deck this afternoon.

“She wasn’t the High Queen when she bore you—she was years from that, a thin slip of a girl, she was, with a head like flame. Her mother Margraed who was as fine a piece of flesh in her day as Meeve, was High Queen and she demanded such a high son-price it would’ve beggared us. Now Meeve was a pretty girl, and all that, but not worth every thing I had. So I told Margraed we’d take you instead, and that was one time her strategy backfired. You should’ve seen her face when I looked at her and said ‘no.’ See, she thought she was going to get her hands on Far Nearing that way—establish a foothold, so to speak. Fooled her good, we did. And when we told you your mother was a Beltane-bride, it wasn’t a lie, for that’s how it happened you were made.”

Just like my boys, Cwynn thought. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” Cwynn asked. But he thought he could guess the answer. His grandfather was proud like all the people clinging to a precarious existence on the windswept neck.

“Didn’t much like Meeve,” the old man said. “Didn’t much like her mother.”

“Those men brought this?” Cwynn peered at the gems. They were set at seemingly random intervals and he realized, in a flash of insight, that they represented places where the line diverged or crossed with another. The disk seemed to whisper to him, teasing him. Even the gold and the gems only seemed to imply that the information they encoded was even more valuable. He had to tear his attention away from it to listen to his grandfather.

“Oh, no, lad, that came with you. Shane was a child himself. He never knew about it, and I never had a reason to take it out before this. Meeve’s invited you to a family reunion of sorts, at MidSummer. In Ardagh.”

“I can’t be going off to Ardagh—MidSummer’s less than a fortnight away. The fish are just starting the summer run at last—”

The old man exploded into another coughing fit. A late spring cold had settled in his chest, and nothing the old women did eased it. The fact that he refused to allow Cwynn to ride to the mainland and find a druid didn’t help, either. “No, no, there’s more to it. Seems she’s got a girl in mind for you to wed.”

“What?” Cwynn leaned forward, then peered over his shoulder, as if expecting someone to materialize on the spot. “How—Who—What if I were already wed?”

“Well, boy, that’s why the men are here, so they say.” The old man hawked and spit again. “Throw another log on, boy. I can’t seem to get warm tonight. But Meeve wouldn’t much care, I can tell you that. She won’t see young Ariene as any impediment, believe—”

“I don’t know Ariene would see herself an impediment,” Cwynn said softly. The accident that had taken his hand had also taken both her brother and his rival for her affections, and Cwynn was always bothered by the feeling that Ariene believed he’d dispatched Sorley as coldly as Shane had his own brother.

“That’s for you to say. You should consider the one Meeve has in mind for you, though. I’m sure you could do a lot worse.” He cleared his throat, gesturing for the cup again. When he’d had another long drink, he said, “And it’s an interesting knot right there. She’s suggesting a match ’twixt you and the daughter of Fengus, chief of Allovale.”

Cwynn shrugged. The name meant nothing. “So?”

“If there’s anyone Meeve despises, it’s Fengus, mostly because he’s been hankering after the High King’s seat for as long as Meeve’s been on it. Ever since she made it clear she wouldn’t marry him, he’s been trying to drum up rebellion—even tried to drag me into it. Told him I wanted no part of it.”

“You don’t like Fengus much, either?”

“He’s one of those kind who doesn’t like no for an answer. He just keeps coming back, hoping to badger the answer he wants out of you. Never much cared for badgers.”

“No, you prefer fish, don’t you, grandfather?” A blast of wind and another deluge of rain shook the window frame and Cwynn reached over the bedstead and checked the latch as Cermmus pulled his shawl tighter around his shoulders. “So what do you think I should do? Go with them?”

“No, you’re meant to stay here until Meeve’s escort comes. She’s sending your sister and your brother after you. But you can’t wait. You have to get out of here.”

“Why?”

“Cat’s out of the bag. Shane knows who you are.”

“He didn’t, before?”

Cermmus could only shake his head. Cwynn reached for the basin, held it beneath his grandfather’s chin. “’Course not,” he answered when he could. “If I didn’t tell you, did you think I’d tell him? I don’t want you here, boy. It’s good Meeve’s acknowledged you. But it’s better you get out of here. Shane might get it in his head you’re worth more dead than alive.”

“What do you mean?” Cwynn frowned.

Cermmus met his eyes. “Something happens to you, now that it’s out you’re Great Meeve’s son—what do you suppose your head-price’s worth now?”

“What are you talking about?”

The old man leaned over and smacked his head. “Would you get the fog out of that skull and think, boy? Shane arranges to have you murdered—he kills you himself—some day, out on the ocean, say, when there’s no one else around to say it wasn’t a freak wave come out of nowhere and take you away with it, or mermaid swim out of the water and pull you down with her. You have two sons—Meeve’s grandsons—and you’re valuable here, aren’t you? With no proof of murder—or even any suspicion of one, who do you think will benefit from any head-price Meeve’s bound to pay?”

“You really think Shane would do something like that?”

“I know my son. I think Shane is very capable of arranging to have you killed, if he thinks there’s something in it for him. Even without a hand, you’re yet a queen’s son, and you do bring in quite a bit of fish, even so. He’d have no trouble finding three adults to swear to your worth.” Their eyes met and the memory of that terrible night rose up unspoken between them.

“So where do you expect me to go?”

Cermmus leaned forward, his voice a rough whisper. “Get yourself to Ardagh. Leave the house tonight—go sleep in the village, at Argael’s house if you will. As long as you have that disk, none’ll question who you are. And besides, you favor her about the chin.” The old man fell back against his pillow, and Cwynn noticed a grayish pallor around his mouth that even the firelight didn’t seem to redden. “She can make you a chief in your own right, give you land and cattle—you’ll never need to fish again.”

“I like to fish.”

“Ocean’s already taken your hand. How many chances will you give her to take the rest?” The old man rolled on his side. “The life Meeve can set you up in is a better one than this.”

“But—but what about this?” Cwynn raised his hook.

“What about it?”

“I thought one couldn’t be king—”

“Can’t be High King if you’re maimed, but you can be chief of finer fields than these.”

“But what about my boys? Ariene and her mother? Her aunt?” It was the death of the brother whose loss affected the family most keenly, for he’d been the one to keep his mother and sister and aunt all fed. It was a role Cwynn tried to take on, and though Argael, the mother, appreciated his efforts, it had little effect on Ariene.

Cermmus clutched his arm with surprising strength. “You do what I say, boy—Shane’s already gotten away with one murder. You think I’d let my own great-grandsons starve? You have to live long enough to reach Meeve. You do this for them, too, you know.” Cermmus gestured to the flagon beside the fire. “Pour me more.”

The cup shifted in his hook, and the liquid sloshed as Cwynn struggled to do as asked, a heavy feeling settling in his chest. “I don’t like leaving you, Gran-da. What if Shane—”

“I’m not worth as much dead as you are. I’ve already disinherited him.” Cermmus met Cwynn’s eyes. “You have to understand something, boy. This changes everything for you. This isn’t just about marrying some girl. Meeve’s about to hand you a big piece of something, because that’s how she does things. She’s constantly playing one off against another, and you, my boy, stand to benefit. It’s your destiny, after all—you better get yourself in a state to accept it and all it will entail.”

Cwynn handed Cermmus the full cup and when the old man had taken a long drink, he said, “What if I don’t want it? What if I don’t want any part of this destiny of mine, whatever it’s to be?”

“Then you’re a madman and I don’t want any part of you.” The old man hawked and spat. “What’re you crazy, boy? Spent too long in your boat? This is your chance to solve the problem of Shane for you forever. If Meeve’s planning on displaying you to Fengus, she’ll have to make sure you’ve a household of your own, and that includes warriors, real warriors, not these pirate-thugs. What’s wrong with you, boy? You mazed?”

Cwynn refilled the cup, set it on the rickety table beside the old man’s bed and met his eyes. “I guess I am, a bit. It’s not every day you’re told something like this, after all. Are you sure that’s what you want me to do?”

“You want to stay and wait for Shane to find a chance to kill you, that’s up to you. You want to go and claim what’s yours, I’ll tell them you’ve gone fishing.” With a long sigh, Cermmus settled back against his pillows. His face was wet with sweat in the gloom, but he pulled the blankets higher. “Just can’t seem to get warm tonight,” he muttered.

Cwynn tucked the amulet into the pouch he wore over his shoulder at his waist then rose to his feet. As he was about to lift the latch, Cermmus spoke again. “Take my plaid with you, boy. It doesn’t smell as much like fish as yours.”

He wants me to make a good impression. Cwynn’s throat thickened, and he had a hard time saying, “What will you tell Shane, if he asks where it is?”

“I’ll tell him you took it fishing.” Cwynn considered whether or not to hug the old man, but Cermmus cleared his throat again, then turned on his side, his back decisively to Cwynn. “Go on now, will you? By the time you dither, twill be dawn.” He punched the pillow. “Hope I can sleep.”

He wants to pretend this is just another night. Cwynn unhooked the plaid from its nail. He shut the door, folded the plaid carefully, and looked at the closed door. “I’ll make you proud, Gran-da,” he whispered softly.

“Proud doing what?”

Cwynn nearly hit his head on the low-beamed ceiling. Shane was leaning on the wall at the top of the steps, arms crossed over his chest, wearing the self-satisfied smirk he always wore when he was drunk. “Fishing was off today. Told me where I might look tomorrow.”

“Old man’s relentless, isn’t he? What makes him think you’ll be able to put a sail up, let alone fish?”

“Storm’s already passing,” Cwynn answered, feeling trapped.

Shane nodded, listened. The howling wind had quieted, and even the rain had eased. “So it has. Best get to bed then, nephew. First light comes early.” He stood aside to let Cwynn pass. Their eyes happened to meet. Shane’s lips curved up but the expression in his eyes didn’t change. The old man’s right, Cwynn thought with sudden certainty. Shane would kill him at the first opportunity. But if he left, would his boys be safe? Uneasiness raised the hackles at the back of his neck as he pulled the cloak around himself and slipped out of the keep.

Eaven Raida, Dalraida

From the watchtower of Eaven Raida, Morla bit her lip and squinted into the storm clouds scudding across the sky. Fly away south or west or east, anywhere but here. Just let the sun shine tomorrow—we’re dying for warmth, for light, she prayed. The damp wind whined as if in answer. She pulled her plaid closer around her thin shoulders, and the sound of the fabric flapping around her bony hips drowned out the dull growling of her stomach. It didn’t seem to matter that nearly ten months of famine had passed. Her belly still expected food come sundown. She swallowed reflexively, gazing to the south, willing a rider to come through the rocky pass with the news she longed to hear: Meeve, her mother, the great High Queen, had heard her pleas and was sending corn, pigs, men and druids.

But no matter how hard she prayed, how hard she worked, how many men she sent, no one and nothing came. What was happening, she wondered—why no answer of any kind? No help had come but for the regular payment of her dowry at Samhain and Imbolc. Nothing had come at Beltane. Now the Imbolc supplies were nearly gone, and they’d been forced to eat almost all the seed. If relief of some kind didn’t come soon, they’d be forced to eat the last precious grains. The months before the first harvest were always the hungriest time of any year, with last year’s stores depleted, the new still in the fields. But a cold damp summer last year had brought blight. Blighted harvest meant certain famine.

At least her son, seven-year-old Fionn, was safe at his fosterage on the Outermost Islands, in the same hall where she herself had been raised. Something had warned her to send him away last summer, a few months early. It was but a few days after he’d left that they’d seen the first signs of blight. It was not the first time Morla was glad her son was far away.

“My lady?”

The old steward, Colm, startled her. When Fionn, her husband, had died in the plague year, he had transferred his loyalties seamlessly. But she was surprised the old steward had made it to the top of the tower. Hunger hit the old ones hard, made them weak and susceptible and the damp weather kept them all huddled lethargically around the smoky fire.

“I don’t understand why we’ve not heard more from my mother,” she said, eyes combing the darkening hills, more from habit than out of any real expectation. “I just don’t understand—do you suppose our messengers never got through? Did we not send first word back before Samhain?” She was talking to herself, she realized and the old man was letting her ramble. She turned around to see him leaning against the doorframe, his cloak falling off his shoulders so that his beaked nose and stooped back made him resemble a big bird with broken wings.

“She’s always been prompt with your dowry, my lady.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t fret so.” He took a few steps toward her. “We’ll get through this—we always have. Our people are tough, you’ll see. They’re not used to looking for help from the southlanders.”

That’s not exactly true, she wanted to retort. A flock of crows wheeled around the blighted fields. At least they aren’t vultures. She’d seen those terrible harbingers of death far too often this past spring. Fear gnawed at her more steadily than a fox through a henhouse, with far more stealth, plaguing her with the vague sense that something terrible had descended on the land. She herself had no druid ability at all, but her twin, Deirdre, had been recognized druid practically in the cradle and every so often, Morla felt a twinge or two of what the cailleachs called a “true knowing.” A feeling that she was being suffocated had lately invaded her dreams, and more than anything, Morla wished her mother would send, if nothing else, a druid—a druid to couple with the land, to heal and reinvigorate it. But the last druid house had been deserted nearly two years ago and no others had ever come back. “Mochmorna lies more east than south.” She looked steadfastly at the road snaking through the hills and felt him come to stand beside her.

He turned his back deliberately to the battlement and looked at her. “My lady—” He broke off, and she saw his eyes were dark with care and hollow with hunger. He wore the expression that told her he had something to say he didn’t think she wanted to hear.

“Say what you will, Colm.” Lately, she’d seen a lot of that look.

“What if there’s no help anywhere, and we’re all that’s left?”

Morla stared out over the gray land. Gray land, gray sky, gray stone, gray skin. She didn’t want to think about that. Hardly anyone came this far north in winter, and the spring traffic had been slow, too.

“Dalraida’s on the edge of things, my lady.” He came forward slowly, shoulders hunched against the wind and the few cold drops of rain that stung his cheek. “Things come to us but slowly, they trickle through the passes and filter up from the south. I don’t mean to frighten you, or give you any more trouble. It’s just that—”

“You want me to understand what we might be facing.” Morla met his troubled gaze with a thin, brave smile. Since her husband’s death, she had come to love Dalraida and its people, for it was much like the windswept, rocky shores below her foster mother’s halls, and they were similar in nature to the hardy souls who clustered there. It had taken her longer to learn to love the sheep, but this winter she mourned as the cold winnowed all but the hardiest of the herds, and she keened with all the other women as the spring lambs sickened.

A flicker of movement on the far horizon caught her eye and she squinted harder. Was that a rider?

“—shadows of war, my lady.”

Morla jerked her head around. “What’re you talking about, Colm? No one’s at war—we’re all too weak to fight, and what’s there left to fight over?”

The old man clutched his cloak higher under his chin and shrugged. “The old wives say they see the shadows in the fire, in the water.” He glanced up. “Even we can see the clouds.”

Morla ignored him. It was very hard to see. The road disappeared through a copse of blighted trees and the twilight had nearly fallen. She leaned a little farther over the wall, and just as she was about to give up and return below, she saw a dark dot burst out from beneath the withered branches. The wind whipped the standard he carried, and she was able to glimpse the colors. She pointed into the storm, relief surging through every vein. Thank you, Great Mother, Morla thought as she blinked back tears and wondered for a moment who she meant—the goddess or her own mother. Not for nothing was her mother called Great Meeve. “Look there, Colm. See, coming down the hill—do you see the rider? He’s bearing my mother’s colors.”

The old man tottered forward, shoulders bent against the wind, but before he could speak, to Morla’s horror, she saw a gang of beggars emerge out of the brush. They bore down on the rider, makeshift weapons raised. “Oh, no,” she gasped. With a speed she hadn’t known she still possessed, she raced down the steps, voice raised in alarm.

On the road, Pentand

Watch the road ahead. The rumbled warnings of both Donal, chief of Pentwyr, and Eamus, the graybeard-druid, echoed through Lochlan’s mind, as impossible to ignore as the thickening scent of threatening rain. Ever since he left the house of Bran’s foster parents, the sky had grown increasingly sullen, and now the misty day was falling down to dusk behind the heavy-leaden clouds. Druid weather—a day not one thing nor yet another, neither foul nor fair, a day easy to get lost in fog or stumble into a nest of outlaws—or any petty chieftain with a grudge and a mind for ransom. Lochlan glanced at the boy on the roan gelding beside him. He was fourteen or maybe fifteen by now, Meeve’s youngest child, and he rode with the giddy impatience of a colt run wild.

Bran seemed to know this was something more than an ordinary visit. It was a year earlier than most left their fostering, and the boy appeared to think the druid, Athair Eamus, was responsible in some way. Bran made no secret he was impatient to know what his mother’s summons meant. But Lochlan didn’t think it his place to tell the boy his mother was dying.

The road disappeared into the looming shadows beneath an arching canopy of trees and the skin at the back of Lochlan’s neck began to crawl. He was the First Knight of Meeve’s Fiachna, and so far as he knew, the only person in all of Brynhyvar the Queen had trusted with that information. When Meeve announced she was gathering all her children together, he had volunteered to escort the young prince. Lochlan wanted to gauge for himself the temper of the land she was about to leave, and Bran’s fosterage was closer to the center of the country, south towards Ardagh. What he’d learned troubled him even more than Meeve’s impending death.

Watch the road ahead. The old chief, Donal, had gripped Lochlan’s upper arm with a strength that had surprised the younger knight. “You show Meeve what I gave you. Those Lacquileans I hear she’s so fond of aren’t to be trusted.” The day before Lochlan’s arrival, a shepherd had come down unexpectedly from the summer pastures, bringing troubling news. A cache of weapons had been discovered in a mountain cave, weapons that bore no resemblance to anything made, as far as Donal or Lochlan knew, in all of Brynhyvar. The shepherd brought a sword, a fletch of arrows and a bow, and it seemed everyone in the keep, from scullery maid to blacksmith, from stable hand to bard, had a thought as to who had hidden them.

But old Donal had no doubts. “It’s neither sidhe nor trixies—it’s those foreigners who’ve been paying Meeve such court. They’re carving out toe-holds in the wild places, hunkering down and planning to attack us before winter. You mark my words, there’ll be slaughter while we sleep.” He’d insisted Lochlan take the sword back to show Meeve. Now it was rolled in coarse canvas, tied on the back of Lochlan’s saddle. Watch the road ahead. An enormous raven alighted on a branch just ahead, cocked a beady eye and stared at both of them, piercing Lochlan’s reverie.

“Why’d Mam send for me, Lochlan?” Bran interrupted his thoughts with the same question for the tenth or twelfth time since setting out. “You think it’s because Athair Eamus sent word to Aunt Connla? Did Mam say she knows I’m druid? Is that why they want to see me?”

“There’re could be any number of reasons, Prince,” Lochlan answered, also for the tenth or twelfth time. He watched the bird take flight as they rode beneath its bough, then slid a sideways glance at the boy. He wondered if Meeve even intended to tell him the truth. Calculating as she was flamboyant, Meeve might well decide not to, unless and until the boy himself guessed. “Maybe your mother missed you.”

Fortunately Bran accepted that answer and subsided into silence. He reached into his leather pack, withdrew a withered apple and bit into it. “Want one?” he asked, munching hard. Lochlan shook his head, but the boy held out the bag. “I have a bunch in here—Apple Aeffie gave ’em to me.”

“Who’s Apple Aeffie?” asked Lochlan. Bran appeared ordinary enough—his nut-brown hair curled at the back of his neck and spilled over the none-too-clean collar of a soon-to-be-outgrown tunic, the edges of his sleeves ragged, his leather boots scuffed and crusted with mud. He had no look of a druid about him at all.

“Apple Aeffie’s what we call Athair Eamus’s cornwife. He used to jump the room with her each Lughnasa. She died last Imbole, but she comes to me in dreams. She tells me stories of who I was before. Do you ever wonder who you were, before?”

“Before what?”

“Before now.” Bran chomped on the chewy fruit.

“Before I was what I am? I was a lad much like you, of course. I wasn’t a chief’s son, but my family’s—”

“No, no.” Bran swallowed the entire apple, core and all. “I meant before you went to the Summerlands. In your last life—don’t you ever wonder?” He licked his fingers, looking at Lochlan expectantly.

Keep a close eye on the boy. He’s more than he seems. And watch the road ahead. Those were the druid’s parting words, spoken when they were already in the saddle. “No, boy, I can’t say as I ever have.” Lochlan wished there’d been more time to ask the old druid what he meant, but the boy’s next words startled him.

“Do you suppose Athair-Da is dying? I know he misses Apple Aeffie.”

“Dying?” Lochlan looked more closely at the young prince. The old druid had seemed in fine enough health to him. Athair Eamus wasn’t a young man, by any means, but he certainly didn’t appear as if the Hag was ready to send him to the Summerlands, either. “What makes you think he’s dying?”

The boy shrugged, gazed moodily into the distance. “I don’t know—the thought just came to me. You think maybe Mam’s planning on sending me to Deirdre’s Grove-house? Deirdre’s been there a long time. She used to send me things. I’d like to go there. Think Mam means to give me leave to start my training early?”

A flicker of movement out of the corner of Lochlan’s eye made him glance in the opposite direction, and when he turned back, he saw that Bran was staring in the same direction.

“Did you see that trixie, too?” he asked.

“What trixie?”

“The one that went darting across that branch and down that trunk—I know you saw it, too—you turned to look at it.”

“It was a squirrel, boy.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Bran insisted. “It was a trixie.”

Only druids could see the earth elementals, and only druids could control them. Lochlan regarded Bran more closely. Deirdre, one of Bran’s older twin sisters, had been born druid, though not much good it had done her. Her disgrace was one reason Meeve wanted nothing to do with druids, Lochlan knew, even though the great queen would not admit it. But Bran himself, as far as Lochlan could tell, lacked all signs of any druid ability. He hair was neither pure white nor shot through with tell-tale silver, his eyes were neither bright blue nor impenetrable brown-black, nor lacked all pigment. He was not, so far as Lochlan had heard, particularly gifted in music-making, nor singing, nor recitation, which were all considered certain signs of druid ability and critical druid skills.

Even his seat on the horse, his hands on the reins, didn’t mark him as anything but an adequate horseman. Except for the fact he was Meeve’s son, he seemed as ordinary as an old boot. It would certainly be better for the boy if he were, Lochlan thought, listening with only half his attention as Bran chattered on. The druids as a group did not number among Meeve’s favorites right now, despite the fact that Meeve’s own sister was ArchDruid, or Ard-Cailleach, of all Brynhyvar. As far as Lochlan could discern, Meeve at times appeared deliberately determined to antagonize them.

He’s more than he seems. The old druid’s warning repeated unbidden in his mind. There was something odd about Bran, something difficult to define perhaps, but definitely there. Lochlan tried to remember what Deirdre was like, but he’d not seen her much when she was young.

“Will Deirdre be there? And what about Morla?”

Lochlan stiffened and raised one brow. Druids read thoughts, but only after long training and never without permission. Was it possible this boy could read thoughts without the training? Maybe it was only logical the boy would inquire about his sisters. After all, as far as Lochlan knew, Bran hadn’t seen either of his twin sisters since he was a very young child. And neither had Lochlan, for Deirdre stayed at her druid-house, except for a holiday or two at Ardagh, and Morla, the other twin—Morla was long married. Her husband died a year back, a voice reminded him, and he tried unsuccessfully to push all thoughts of Morla out of his mind. He remembered she came home from her fostering a young woman of sixteen, moody and quiet, dark and ripe as the brambleberries that grew along the beach she loved to wander. He might have married her himself if Meeve hadn’t tapped his shoulder the Beltane after Morla came home. Fleetingly he remembered the stricken look on the girl’s face as her mother had led him out of the hot, smoky hall. She’d been about to pick me. The pang of regret that accompanied that realization was unexpectedly deep. “I don’t know,” was all he said. “They may have work of their own—after all, Morla’s married—”

“She’s not married anymore,” Bran said. “Her husband’s gone to the Summerlands.”

Startled, Lochlan looked at him harder. “How did you know that?” Dalraida comprised the remote northwestern tip of Brynhyvar. Lochlan found it hard to believe that Morla spent much time sending messages back and forth to Bran. In ten years, she’d never come back once to Meeve’s court.

“He came to me last Samhain.”

“Fionn? Her husband?”

Bran stared off down the road, as if he could see the shade rising before him. “Said I’d be seeing her soon and asked me to give her a message from him. It was an answer to her question.”

“What was the question?”

“Oh, I don’t know that. But you see, I’ve been sort of expecting to see Morla since MidWinter.”

Lochlan looked more closely at the boy in the greenish shadows. Meeve had first mentioned bringing Bran home nearly nine full moons ago, just after Samhain. Before he could stop himself, he said, “So what was the answer?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“‘No’ is all the answer he gave me,” said Bran. “He told me to tell her that the answer to her question is ‘no’ and then he vanished.”

There was a queer light burning in the boy’s eyes, reminding Lochlan of the druid fires flickering around the standing stones up on the Tors while they worked their magic within the stone circles. It was not uncommon for the dead to come uninvoked to the living at Samhain, when the veil to the Summerlands was thinnest. But not common, either, and how could Bran know that Meeve had first mentioned bringing both Bran and Morla home shortly after Samhain, right before MidWinter? The road ahead looked very dark. A chill went down his arms. The druids said the trees were aware, and looking down the road, he could believe it. The trees stood on either side, so evenly spaced, it was hard to imagine how random chance gave rise to such order.

Lochlan glanced at Bran’s eager face. It was hard to imagine such an ordinary boy could possess any kind of extraordinary talent at all. He’s not what he appears. Lochlan shifted in his saddle and flapped the reins. Maybe it wasn’t his place to tell the boy his mother was dying, but maybe he should tell the boy the druids weren’t high on his mother’s list of favored people right now, and that he doubted that any plans she had for Bran included druid training. He cleared his throat. “That’s quite an amazing thing, all right.”

The boy narrowed his eyes, his expression an exact replica of Meeve’s when crossed. “You sound like you don’t believe me.”

“It’s not that I believe or don’t believe you, boy. It’s not for me to say.” Thank the Great Mother, he added silently. “But as for the druids—well, there’s something I think you should know. Your mother’s been at odds with her sister, your aunt, for months now, and she’s not at all happy with her. Nor any druids.”

“Because of the blight?”

Lochlan shrugged. Blight was not yet a problem in Eaven Morna. “Blight, goblins, silver—whatever it is, boy, you don’t want to be in the middle of it. So, when you meet her, wait to see what she says to you, before you go telling her you feel you’re a druid. All right?”

Bran frowned, opened his mouth, then shut it.

“Just remember, she’s not just your mother. She’s the Queen of all Brynhyvar, the beloved of the land. You listen, and speak when she asks you, not before.”

Bran made a face, but said nothing.

Night was falling quickly behind the lowering clouds, far faster than Lochlan had anticipated. He wanted all his wits about him, and the road was getting dark. His shoulders ached from a bad night’s sleep. “I say we stop at the next house we come to.”

“All right,” replied Bran. “That suits me—I’m starved.” He caught the reins up in one hand and kicked his heels hard into the horse’s flanks. “Let’s go,” he cried. “I’ll race you!” He took off down the road as the old druid’s warning echoed once more through Lochlan’s mind.

Watch the road ahead. “Hold up, boy,” cried Lochlan as he touched his own heels to his horse’s sides. Keep a close eye on him. With an inward groan, he galloped after Bran who charged heedlessly down the darkening road like a stone tumbling down a mountain. “Wait!” he shouted and plunged headlong into the dark green twilight.

The air was oppressive and very wet and the road appeared to curve up the hill, away from the lake. He heard loud trickling and looked up. A run-off brook wound its way down the mountain and across the road. He’d have to cross the water to continue after Bran, who’d rounded the curve, and now was nowhere to be seen. But instinct—or maybe the old druid’s words—made Lochlan hesitate. You’ve faced Humbrian pirates, the wild men of the Marraghmourns and the outlaws of Gar and now you’re afraid to cross a stream? The doubt that taunted every warrior whispered through his mind. It wasn’t even a stream, really, just a channel that rainwater carved into the hillside. But it was at just such a place that one was most likely to fall into the OtherWorld of TirNa’lugh, where both sidhe and goblins roamed, dangerous to mortals in very different ways, but equal in peril.

He’s more than he appears. “Bran?” he called. “Bran, wait for me.” Cursing Bran beneath his breath, Lochlan spurred his horse forward, and the animal didn’t even seem to notice the water crossing the road. Inexplicably, the light began to fade, the shadows deepened. The road took another turn, pitched sharply up a hill. “Bran?” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. “You wait for me!”

The high-pitched yelp that came in answer galvanized Lochlan. He sped around the turn and pulled up straight.

Bran stood spellbound in the center of the road, staring straight ahead at a naked girl bathing on a riverbank that shouldn’t have been there. A young moon had already risen in the purple sky, spilling silvery light across the sidhe-girl’s shoulders, reflecting off her copper-colored hair with a pale gold glow. Almost black in the shadows, her waist-length hair fell fine as spider silk across her naked breasts and her nipples were pink as quartz and pebbled from the chill of the gurgling brook. She turned this way and that beneath the bending willows, splashing the water all over herself. Droplets gleamed like opals on her shimmering naked flanks, fell like diamonds from her fingertips. A high laugh floated through the trees and Lochlan looked up to see more eyes, more pointed faces and tiptilted breasts peeking through the trees.

“Look, it’s mortals.” The whisper floated down from somewhere up above, and Lochlan saw the red-haired sidhe turn to Bran, arm extended, smiling as she strode up through the water to the bank. To Lochlan’s horror, Bran smiled back and leaned forward, hand outstretched.

“No,” Lochlan bellowed. If this was what the old druid had meant, he should’ve spelled it out for him, not warned him in a riddle so dense it sounded like nothing more than good advice to any traveler. How could they have blundered into TirNa’lugh? Only a druid could take you there, and more important, only a druid could lead you out. There were stories though, of warriors on the brink between life and death, who’d fallen into the OtherWorld, and stayed held captive there by the sidhe. He dug his heels so hard into his horse’s side the animal reared and screamed his displeasure, so that Lochlan had to struggle to bring him under control. Bran didn’t even appear to notice as his own horse began to dance skittishly beneath him. His eyes remained fastened on the sidhe.

The other sidhe were creeping down the trees now, luminous as fireflies, green eyes glowing in their narrow pointed faces. They were all beautiful, all naked, all with long limbs and flowing hair. He could feel warmth emanating off their skin, even as their unearthly fragrance twined around him like tendrils. He forced himself to concentrate on the feeling of the horse, solid and scratchy and real between his thighs, on the weight of the weapons strapped to his back and his waist, on the feeling of the hair prickling on the back of his neck and not on the aching pressure rising in his groin. “Bran,” he said again, this time with even more urgency. He reached over and cuffed the boy’s head. “We’re not meant to be here, remember? We’re on our way back to Eaven Morna, remember? Throw them your apples and they’ll let us go. I’m taking you back to your mother, Bran. Remember? Your mother, Meeve. Your mother wants you home. We’re going home, Bran—home to Eaven Morna. Home to your mother and Eaven Morna.”

“Mother,” Bran repeated, his cheeks pale, his eyes wide, beads of sweat rolling down his face. The sidhe were singing now, something soft and low and nearly indistinguishable from the gurgling brook and the whispering of the leaves, but Lochlan could feel it; tempting and wooing and sweet, twining in his hair, trailing down his back like the long slender fingers that even now were reaching down and out of the branches. If they touch me, I shall be lost, he thought. But he had to save the boy.

“Give them the apples, Bran, now. Now!” Lochlan cried. He swatted Bran across the shoulder. He helped Bran toss the bag to the sidhe and shook the boy’s shoulder. “Home—home to Eaven Morna!”

Drops of sweat big as pearls glimmered on Bran’s upper lip as he stared, mesmerized by the naked sidhe. Lochlan felt his own resolve weaken. He leaned over, wrapped the reins around Bran’s wrists, slapped the horse on the rump. The gelding leaped forward. They fled down the road and across the border, back into a wind and rainswept dusk where, impossibly, the watchtowers of Eaven Morna twinkled on the horizon.




2


Faerie

“Auberon?” Melisande’s soft voice broke the stillness of the summer twilight, taking the King of the sidhe entirely by surprise, penetrating the soft pink fog of dream-weed smoke. His queen seldom attempted the winding climb to his bower at the top of the highest ash of the Forest House because she, unlike almost every other sidhe, was terrified of heights. It was one reason he’d chosen her among all the others to be his Queen. Now she perched in the archway of the bower, quivering only slightly. Her long fair hair, fine as swan’s down, feathered around her shoulders, down her back and chest. In the orange glow of the setting sun, it gave the illusion she was covered in white feathers.

She’s begun the change, he realized, and looked down at his own furred flanks. When the change in both of them was complete, it would be time for their daughter, Loriana, to assume her place as Queen of the sidhe and all the creatures of the Deep Forest. Presuming, of course, that all Faerie wasn’t turned into some foul wasteland overrun by goblins. It was beginning to seem like a distinct possibility.

He extended a hand, but she didn’t reach for it. Instead she looked at him, not with fear, but suspicion and he realized she was trembling, not with terror, but outrage. “What’s wrong, my dear? You look upset.”

“Is what your mother told me true?”

Anger flashed through him, but he controlled himself enough to smile tightly and beckon. Finnavar was an interfering old crow who belonged, like the rest of the sidhe who completed the change, in the Deep Forest. “I can’t imagine what sort of mischief she’s making now. Come sit, my dear. Tell me all about it.”

Melisande raised her chin. “Should we call it mischief when it’s our daughter’s choice that’s being bargained away? And if we do, I don’t think she’s the one making it.”

Auberon clenched his teeth. In the midst of everything else, his mother couldn’t resist causing trouble. She stubbornly refused to leave the Court, creating an embarrassing situation. It was as if she didn’t quite trust him to rule. Despite all his directives to ignore her no one really did. Her instincts both for causing trouble and ferreting out information remained intact. “Let’s talk.”

“You admit it.”

“Beloved, I—”

“Oh, enough. I’m not your beloved.” She stalked into the room, anger making her sure-footed. “Is it true you promised Timias that you would ask Loriana to consider choosing him to be her Consort?”

“My dear, you’re shaking—there’s no need for unpleasantness—”

“Unpleasantness? Auberon, our daughter is not a prize to be awarded or a—a possession to be handed over. How could you listen, let alone agree—He was raised beside you in the nest—If you were mortal, you’d be brothers and such a thing not even considered.”

“Melisande.” He picked up his pipe. “Don’t you understand it’s not important? I don’t think he’s coming back—I never expected he’d be back, to tell you the truth.”

“You didn’t?”

“Of course not. It was as absurd an idea as I’ve ever heard—learn druid magic and bring it here to Faerie.” He picked up her hands and brought one, then the other to his lips. “Sweet darling queen, it was a way to find something for him to do.”

“So what exactly did you agree to?”

Auberon shrugged, picked up his pipe and tapped dried flowers into the bowl. “He asked me if I’d approach Loriana and ask her to consider his suit. It seemed a small enough thing—considering I didn’t think I’d ever have to do it. Where was the harm, after all? It made him feel useful, gave him a purpose.”

“And what if he does? What if he comes back?”

“You have been talking to my mother, haven’t you?”

“Loriana is of an age to consider such things. Look at us, Auberon—you and I are clearly entering our change. When your mother tells me you’ve made some kind of bargain involving our daughter—”

“Enough, Melisande. There’s no bargain involving Loriana or anyone else. Timias has not been seen in—I’ve forgotten how long exactly. Maybe you should ask yourself why my mother sees the need to bring it up now?”

“She’s concerned. The Wheel’s turning—we have to prepare ourselves and everyone else.”

The dream-weed hit his head just as she spoke. It elongated her words, separated out the subtle shades of tone and melody, turned the light around her face ethereal and fey. He was captivated by the glints of pale yellow and tender gray in her hair and in her eyes. In all the time he’d known her, he’d never noticed these before. A vein beneath her ear beat a steady tattoo in her throat, in time to that which pulsed up through his feet. The firs stood straight and tall, black against the indigo sky, the drooping branches of the enormous willows all silver by their sides. The first stars had already appeared. A low pounding throbbed through the trees, and the leaves rustled as the branches swayed in time.

A horn rose in the distance, its note pure and piercing as a shaft of morning sun. It stabbed into his awareness, made his ears ring and his head ache.

“Auberon?” Melisande shook his arm. “Did you hear that? That’s the alarm. The goblins are rising.”

There was a screech in the doorway. Finnavar stood there, looking like an enormous raven cloaked in black feathers, her nose and chin fused into a long shiny beak, her arms folded back. “Where’s Loriana?” she croaked. Her beady eyes darted right and left, her feathers gleamed blue in the purplish shadows. “Have you seen her? I’ve looked everywhere.”

What little color there was in Melisande’s face drained away. “She’s been told not to leave her bower at dusk.”

“She’s not there now,” the old sidhe screeched.

“She has to be,” cried Melisande as the dull vibration grew stronger, and from somewhere far away, they heard a faint roaring, growing ever louder as the wind carried it closer.

“She isn’t,” answered Finnavar. “Follow me.” She flapped awkwardly off without another word.

Melisande pulled away from Auberon and rushed out the door, nearly colliding with Ozymandian, the captain of the guard. He scrambled past her, brandishing his spear. “My lord.” He sketched a salute, then said, “My lord, you must come. Something’s roused the goblins—all of them, apparently—and it seems they’re headed this way.”



Red steam rose from fire pits of glowing molten rock, seeped from crevices in the floor and hissed from fissures high within the cavernous chambers and passageways that were the realm of Macha, the Goblin Queen. The floors were slick in some places and sticky in others, and the smell of excrement was everywhere. Timias shrank behind an enormous boulder. The air was thick with the steady throb of drums, a sound so constant he sometimes thought it must be coming from inside his own skull. He cocked his head and listened to the squeals and screams and bellows echoing from the chamber, trying to decide if he dared to take the only direct route he knew that led to the surface of Faerie. The druid spell of banishing had finally worn off. He could feel the tattered remnants shredding off him like an old cloak, one thread at a time. He had never expected it to be as effective as it was, for it not only kept him from Shadow—anywhere at allin Shadow—but it prevented him from returning to Faerie, as well. For a mortal year and a day, he’d been trapped in the strange nether places of the World. He was impatient to return, and he risked a slow death by searching for another way to the Forest House. The effects of the banishment still lingered, preventing him from directly returning to the Forest House.

He’d counted on Macha’s halls being silent, the goblins curled up fast asleep, thin and gray as the ghosts of the mortal dead whose flesh they consumed. But something must’ve happened, he mused, in the time he’d been banished. Somehow they’d gotten a taste of living flesh.

It was possible he might find another way to the surface, but he could just as easily encounter lairs filled with starving hatchlings. If the goblins were this lively, they were certainly copulating. The cloak of shadows, woven with a mortal druid on a Faerie loom, might not fool the goblins. Like a river of velvety water, the cloak flowed out of his hands, vaporous as fog, dense and wet as the Shadowlands themselves, its one edge jagged where Deirdre had ripped it in half. He wrapped it around himself, careful to tuck it well over his face and around his hands. He was more afraid of how he’d smell than anything else. But he had to risk that a wafting scent of Shadow, while alluring, would not be as riveting as the sight of a sidhe scurrying along the perimeter of the cavern.

With a last check to make certain he was completely covered, Timias edged down the widening passageway, careful to keep to the sides where the shadows were thickest and his cloak provided the best cover. But he had not counted on the stench.

The closer he got to the central hall, the stronger it was. It pervaded his nostrils, crept into his skin, insinuated itself into the crevices around his nose, his fingers. It filled his mouth and made him gag. Dizzy, eyes burning, Timias crept along the Hall, trying not to breathe too deeply. It was worse than the foulest cesspit, the fullest charnel pit in Shadow.

Behind him, a noise made him flatten himself against the jagged outcroppings along the wall, and as he watched in horror, he realized the source of the wet trail of slime. It was blood—mortal blood, gelling as it dried. It dripped from the squirming, screaming, struggling bodies of the mortals the goblin raiding party was now dragging along or had slung over their backs. Some struggled and kicked more than others, but one thing was very clear to Timias: They were all still very much alive.

The coppery scent of the blood, the acrid tang of urine and the fetid aroma of feces, bowels opened and bladders spilled filled Timias’s senses. Timias waited until the tramp of goblin feet had faded. His eyes were finally adjusting to the reddish light, and he crept, one hand clamped around his nose and mouth.

Macha, the enormous queen, crouched at the peak of her throne, her beady eyes bright in the nightmarish light. She uncoiled and coiled her tail, reflexively, surveying the scene before her. The goblins were all over the hapless humans, tearing them apart in a frenzy of showering blood and ripping flesh. The ragged end of a leg was tossed up toward the queen; she snarled, reached for it and crammed it into her mouth. Red drool spooled down her chest as she chewed and swallowed and grinned. Timias could not look away.

With the same casual ferocity with which she crunched the bones and swallowed them, Macha reached for the nearest male, threw him on the ledge and proceeded to raise and lower her massive body over his, ramming him nearly flat with the force of her thrusts. She bared her fangs and howled, which sent up a chorus of answering screeches. The smoke and the smells and leaping goblin hordes were making Timias dizzy. He pushed himself hard up against the wall, trying to hold on to his bearings as a wave of nausea swept over and through him, nearly dragging him to his knees. He felt his legs begin to buckle and he clutched the cloak hard around himself, even as he tried to lean back. He tried to back up and realized he was prevented by a tail.

His tail.

The cloak floated off his shoulders as he swung around, staring at the shadow that stood in stark outline against the rocks. His shadow. For a moment, Timias wondered if this was some trick of the light, some result of the druids’ curse of banishment. But no, he’d been himself in the passageway. He was sure of it. Of course he was. He remembered looking down and being grateful he was wearing boots. Boots. He looked down at his feet, and saw clawed toes bursting through the tips.

Behind him, he heard a hiss and a cackle that was taken up and turned into hoots and shrieks. Timias turned to see the goblins—every one of them, including the queen—looking back at him. And they were laughing. Or what passed as laughter. They were pointing at him, slapping each other on backs and rumps, rolling between the fire pits in unrestrained glee. What was it, he wondered. What’s wrong with me? Why are they all staring? What’s so funny?

And then he looked down at himself and realized that he not only appeared to be a goblin, he alone was wearing clothes. Am I mad? he wondered in an instant. But he didn’t have time to consider how this transformation had taken place, or why, because the other goblins—no, he told himself firmly. Not other goblins at all. The goblins. The goblins were creeping closer. Inspiration born of desperation gave him an idea and he knew what he had to do. With a bound, he decided to play the best of it he could. He swaggered out, into the center, gesturing and posturing. He held his maw shut, then bent over and pretended to break wind. Then he began to pull the clothes off, one at a time, throwing them into the assembly. The goblins shrieked and capered and he looked up, into the eyes of the queen.

“I don’t know you,” she said. Her black forked tongue flicked out and she sniffed, as if teasing out his smell from among all the other odors swirling through the cavern.

He felt as if her eyes were boring into the center of him, seeing him for what he really was, and he felt himself quail. Don’t collapse now, fool, he told himself. She was intent on looking for weakness, sniffing it out, determining which of all her many subjects she would allow to live. The weak she would kill. He forced himself to stand straighter, even as he noticed how her egg sacs bulged beneath her tail, how clear fluid spilled down the insides of her thighs, pooling around her feet.

Saliva spilled from the corners of his mouth, oozed down his chin. He was alarmed to realize he found the odor as appealing as honey, and he shuddered, appalled by his body’s own response.

“Name?” she said, watching him closely enough to kill him in an instant.

Did he have a goblin name, he wondered? The name he’d used among the mortals had simply risen to his lips the first time he was asked. What was he supposed to call himself?

“Name?” she repeated. She took a step closer and the nearest goblins stopped eating or copulating and turned to watch.

What was he expected to say, he wondered? Timias? Tiermuid? He opened his mouth and a bleat came out. The court laughed.

The queen narrowed her eyes and the corners of her maw lifted. He wasn’t sure if she was smiling or if she was merely opening her jaws wide enough to bite off his head. “Name?”

“T-T-Tetzu.” He heard himself say the word as his goblin tongue tried to form the syllables of his name, either of them.

“Gift?”

“Gift?” Timias repeated, trying to look as if he didn’t understand the meaning of the word. What could she possibly want from him?

“Macha likes gifts,” she said. She coiled her tail under herself almost daintily and to his surprise, his own nearly naked body responded to the invitation it portended. She leaned closer, sniffing the air around his neck, and he felt his ruff rise.

“Xerruk bring Macha gifts,” snarled a voice behind the queen. He handed her a head, the lips still moving, the eyes still aware.

Timias saw his chance. With a speed born of complete and utter hopelessness, he bolted around the nearest fire pit, racing to the opposite passageway.

But the queen’s interest, once roused, was not so easily dissuaded. As he reached the opening, she took off after him and the entire Court followed. Timias pelted up the passage, praying and hoping the sun was out, that the hot light of day would drive the goblins back into their lairs.

Dank air seared his lungs. He imagined he could feel her vicious claws tearing him to shreds, ripping out his throat, and he pumped his arms and legs as fast as he could run. He burst out, into the trees. A few stars twinkled overhead in a pale purple sky. If it was dawn, he had a chance. He raced through the trees, the goblins pursuing him in full force after their queen, howling and shrieking.

The farther he ran, the darker it got, and Timias realized that far from being dawn, which was the worst time of day for the goblins, it was dusk, the best.

The darkness was giving him some advantage, however, for he was able to blend in with the trees. He ducked around the trunk of one enormous oak and slumped against it. He felt his flesh shrivel as it touched the rough-ribbed surface, felt his frame collapse into itself. His tail curled up and under his buttocks and disappeared, his goblin skin softened and gave way to smooth pale skin. Somehow, he wasn’t goblin anymore. I am sidhe. Not mortal, not goblin. Sidhe. He didn’t understand what had happened, but he knew he could never tell anyone. Fooling mortals was one thing, becoming a goblin quite another. Not away from the scent of the others. He sank down, and the horde surged past.

A blast of horns filtered through the trees, and Timias realized the sidhe had been alerted. He wondered if Auberon and his Court realized how close Macha’s lair really was. Light flashed above the treetops, limning the sky with brief glimpses of green and blue and gold, fleeting as summer lightning. The sidhe were riding out to confront their foe, armed with their spears and swords of light and their high, piercing horns. A shiver of anticipation ran down his spine as he got to his feet and crept through the trees, careful not to make any sounds. He heard the trickling of a brook and knew he must be close to the river that ran through Faerie. The Forest House was built of the great trees that grew on either side of it. If he followed the river, he would come to it, sooner or later. The trees were like grim silent sentries as he made his way between them, slipping like a shadow from one to the other. He passed a pool and beside it, saw a piece of shimmering fabric. He bent and touched it, rubbing it between his fingers. It was woven of spider-silk and it was sticky with a sidhe’s pale blood.

He stood up, listening. The goblin rampage had met the warriors of the sidhe and the battle had joined somewhere not far enough away. But nearby, someone was trying very hard not to breathe. He looked up and realized that, of course, any sidhe would’ve sought refuge in a tree. He’d been in Shadow too long, and then banished from both worlds, he thought bitterly, to have forgotten so much. He hoisted himself into the branches, then paused, squinting into the green darkness. Nothing in the trees could be as dangerous as what was roaming on the ground, he thought as he saw a pair of eyes gleaming back. “Who’s that?” he whispered. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”

There was a soft gasp and then another, and a pale face peered out from between the boughs. “Who’re you?” she whispered.

“I’m Timias,” he answered. “Who’re you?”

The girl’s mouth dropped open and for a blink, he was afraid her reaction was to his name. She raised her hand and pointed over his shoulder. He turned to see Macha storming out of the trees.



“Did you see that one? That young one?”

“What about the other one? Did you see the other one? I know that one—I’ve been with him before.”

The voices of her companions blended into a harmonious chorus as they raced here and there to catch the mortal apples. Loriana, the sidhe-king’s daughter, eased herself up and out of the water, heart racing. There was something about the young mortal who’d come crashing so abruptly across the border. He was unlike any other mortal, druid or not, she’d ever met. He was obviously one of the druid-born, of that she had no doubt, for every one of his senses had fully engaged hers. But he smelled so fresh and young, like the first pale shoots of new spring leaves. She shook her damp hair out so that it spread around her shoulders like a silken cloak, while she tried to listen beneath Tatiana and Chrysaliss’s chatter.

There was a lambent energy surging through the air like a barely audible hum. The sound of horns was fading but the scent of Shadow lingered and she wondered what brought her father out to hunt. The sidhe didn’t hunt at night. It was far too dangerous, for at night, the goblins crept out of their lairs below the Forest. They themselves were disobeying by leaving their bowers at night.

She sniffed, delicately sorting through all the competing scents twining through the Forest. There he was, she thought, catching the barest whiff of the boy, ripe as a sun-warmed acorn. She closed her eyes and inhaled, pulling as much of his essence, of his scent, as far and as deep into herself as she could, until she was certain she could find him again. He made her palms tingle and her toes curl.

“Let’s go after them—” Tatiana’s hot breath in her ear made Loriana jump. They pressed against her, their bodies damp and cool, and Loriana could feel the need the mortals had roused.

“There was something strange about him,” said Chrysaliss as she wrapped an arm around Loriana’s waist and combed her fingers through Loriana’s wet hair, twining the silky strands around her fingers into long curls. “Don’t you think he smelled strange?”

“He didn’t smell strange. He smelled young,” Loriana whispered. It was already too late to follow, for she could read his essence fading even now, as the breeze dispersed what was left of him in Faerie into the wind.

“Young…” Tatiana drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, leaning her head back into Loriana’s shoulder, wearing a wide smile as she savored the last of the boy’s scent.

“I’d prefer the other,” said Chrysaliss. “The other one—didn’t you see him? The one who told the young one to ride?” In the fading dusk, her teeth were very white as she smiled and her eyes were very green. “Do you know who he is? I’ve seen him on this side of the border more than once or twice—he’s the first I’d pick at night, too.” The two collapsed on each other in gales of giggles.

Loriana looked up and frowned. The leaves on the trees were quivering and the throb in the air was more palpable. Beneath the branches, the dark pools of shadows began to grow around the trunks. Their bath had been fun, but now it was spoiled somehow and she felt not the slightest desire to get back into the water. “I think we should go home.”

“Why?” Tatiana waded out into the center of the water and peered down into the shallow depths. “You know, if the moon would just rise a bit, I think we could—”

“Tatiana, come back.” Loriana grabbed Chrysaliss by the wrist, as if to prevent her from doing the same. “Come, let’s get out of the water. I think we should go now.”

“But why?” Tatiana flung a few drops of water at them both and grinned. “This stream cuts straight through Shadow. We can follow him, we can find him—and the other one, too. Come, what’s the harm?”

Beneath Loriana’s feet, the ground gave a palpable throb. “What’s that?” asked Chrysaliss, looking down. The throb was growing stronger.

Loriana looked up. The leaves shook visibly and the subtle throb had turned into an audible pulse. “It’s drums,” she whispered. “Goblin drums and they’re not just getting louder, they’re getting closer.”

As if she’d given a signal, a hideous cacophony erupted from somewhere far too close. Chrysaliss wrapped her arms around Loriana, and Tatiana, galvanized, came running out of the water.

The pounding was growing louder. Loriana grabbed for Tatiana’s hand and the three clung to each other. “Which way are they coming?” breathed Tatiana, as they backed up close to the largest of the nearest trees.

The sound was all around them now, shuddering through the ground, rending the air, and Loriana pressed her back against the tree. Up. The word filled her mind with urgency and Loriana looked up. The branches above their heads were bending down. “We have to go up,” Loriana answered as the ground began to quake beneath their feet.

“They’re coming this way,” Loriana said. She reached up, into the welcome of the tree, felt the branch twist itself beneath her hands. The other girls scrambled beside her just as the leading edge of the horde ran across the stream.

The screeches and the screams, the trills and the yelps were all part of some discordant language, she realized, but the drums, so wild and so loud, were disorienting as they filled the air.

“Wait—I’m fall—” cried Tatiana, and she did, slipping off the branch and tumbling to the ground below. She landed with a thump, and as Loriana gazed down in horror, Tatiana was caught up by the goblins. With shrieks of glee at their unexpected prize, they dragged her into their midst, tossing her from one to the other as they ran through the trees.

Her screams faded as the horde swept by. “What should we do?” Chrysaliss whispered.

“Stay here,” Loriana whispered back. The goblins were galloping under the trees now, scrambling like drunken mortals, heady with the noise and the scents. “We’re just going to stay here. And hope they go away.”

“Or that someone finds us.” As if in reassurance, Loriana heard faint, frantic blasts of the horns. “Hear that? Father’s coming.” She squeezed Chrysaliss tight, and the two clung to each other and the trunk of the tree. Loriana pressed her cheek against the papery bark of the ancient birch. But the goblins weren’t going away. They roamed back and forth beneath the trees, pausing every now and then to sniff and peer.

“What’re they doing?” muttered Chrysaliss. “Why don’t they go away?”

“It’s like they’re…like they’re looking for something,” Loriana breathed back. The horns sounded louder, and in the far depths of the wood, Loriana thought she saw distant flashes of the sidhe’s lych-spears. “Or someone.”

“What if they look up?” Chrysaliss whispered. “We should go higher.”

Loriana froze. Like her mother, she despised heights. Beside the squat old birch, its boughs interlaced, a graceful ash soared high.

“Come on,” Chrysaliss was tugging at her, pulling her off the birch and onto the ash. “Come, we have to get higher—higher where they won’t see us—” A clawed hand snaked around her ankle and yanked her down. She disappeared below with a high-pitched scream.

Gasping, Loriana bolted. Across the limbs, light as a wisp, she darted, dashing from branch to branch, following the line of the river that carried her, against all instinct, away from the Forest House. But the horns were louder now, the goblin drums less insistent. She paused to catch her breath in a hollow of a bending willow. The goblin roars were louder, if possible, but she heard the battle trills of the warriors, saw the flashes of light zigzag across the sky like summer lightning. They were fighting somewhere very close, she thought. She curled up as tightly as she could within the hollow, her arms wrapped around her knees, her face tucked down. The sound of her friends’ screaming echoed over and over, and she trembled, bit her lip and tried to stop shaking.

But the smell of burning and wafting smoke choked her and, peering cautiously out, she looked around in all directions. Another noise was rising on the wind, a noise only the sidhe and the trees could hear. It was the screaming of a living tree on fire. Loriana’s gut twisted and nausea rose in the back of her throat. She staggered, clinging to the trunk of the nearest tree, and felt the pain resonate underneath her hand. They all shared it to some degree; they all felt it. And then someone stepped around a tree, a tall figure, pale as a goblin in the sun, carrying what appeared to be something limp and dead.

At first she thought the figure was her father. But it can’t be Father, she thought. But the figure had his walk, his stance, his set of shoulders. Not his hair, for Auberon’s was as copper as her own, and this man’s feathered around his face in coal-black waves, reflecting blue glints in the moonlight. He was mostly naked, but for a pair of torn boots and ragged trews of the kind the mortals wore, and she wondered why he didn’t come up into the trees out of harm’s way like any reasonable sidhe. Intrigued, she watched him as he passed beneath the willow. Swift as a cat she uncurled herself and crept silently just behind him.

He paused, looked up, and seemed to sense her presence. She darted around the trunk as he hoisted himself into the tree. He turned one way, then another, and their eyes met. In the dark, she saw the green gleam of his. “Who’re you?” she whispered.

“I’m Timias,” he replied, and the name made her eyes widen.

This is Timias? Raised by her grandfather, King Allemande, beside her father Auberon, after his own family was slaughtered, Timias was hardly mentioned by anyone at Court, he’d been gone so long. She’d been still a child when he left. He looked like a pale imitation of her father in the starlight.

“Who’re you?”

She opened her mouth to answer, when violent movement in the trees behind him caught her eye. She gasped and pointed over his shoulder as the biggest goblin she had ever seen burst through the trees, running, it seemed, directly at them both.

Timias grabbed her wrist and pulled her up higher into the tree, but not before the goblin spotted them. As the goblin leaped for them both, Loriana saw her mother and a dozen or more mounted sidhe come riding into the clearing. As the sidhe raised their weapons, Loriana clung to Timias’s hand. “What is that thing?”

“That’s Macha, their queen,” he answered. “The sidhe have a king—the goblins have a queen.”

The enormous queen reared up and around, dwarfing the warriors on their dainty white horses.

“And that’s my mother,” Loriana said. She tried to see past him but he wouldn’t let her.

“We have to run,” he said. “Now!”

He dragged Loriana stumbling and weeping through the trees. At last he paused. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“That was my mother,” she whispered, wiping her face. “Leading the warriors, that was my mother.”

She heard the soft intake of his breath. For a long moment, they sat in silence in the dark. Then he said, “You’re Auberon’s daughter, aren’t you?”

She raised her eyes to his. He was staring at her almost the way a goblin would and for a moment she felt a prickle of fear. Don’t be silly, she told herself. He saved your life. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Loriana.”

She expected him to say something, but he ducked his head and said, “We can go lower now, I think.”

Instinctively, she clung to his hand. The palm was wet, the skin was fleshy, but he held her strongly, firmly and she was comforted enough to let him lead her. She could see the lights, hear the shouts of the Court.

“What were you doing out there?” Timias was asking her.

Her lower lip trembled as she looked up at him. “We were bathing,” she said.

“Did no one warn you to stay out of the wood?”

“Of course they did,” said Loriana. “The wood, not the bathing pool by the river.”

He took her by the elbow and pointed. “Look—we cross that stream, we’re there.”

She took a deep breath, forcing herself to follow his voice, to cling to his hand. Her grandmother had nothing good to say of Timias, her father spoke of him seldom if at all. But he’d come back just at the right moment. She thought of her mother and her friends and the other warriors and tears filled her eyes. She followed him blindly, and stumbled against him, not realizing that he’d stopped, for no apparent reason, in the middle of the path.

“What is it—” she began as she peered around him, but the words stopped in her throat. She gulped, blinked, and blinked again, as if she could clear away the nightmarish scene spread before her. The banks of the little stream were pocked with blackened grass, and on it, creatures that oozed whitish substances flopped miserably about. She looked up at the holly tree beside her, wondering why she felt nothing at all from the tree, and realized the tree, and all the others around it, was dead, the berries dull and black amidst the waxy gray leaves. “What did this?” she whispered. “Do you know what happened here?”

To her surprise, Timias nodded, his mouth a straight grim line. “This is what happens when silver falls into Faerie.”




3


White Birch Druid Grove

“Deirdre?” Catrione called. She barged into the courtyard, heedless of the rain sluicing off the edges of the roofs in solid sheets. She glanced frantically around in all directions. How was it possible Deirdre could’ve vanished so fast? She looked back down the corridor but saw nothing. She decided to check each room once more when she heard her title called.

“Cailleach!” She looked up to see Sora scampering across the puddles, skirts kilted high. When she caught sight of Catrione, she paused beneath a dripping overhang and beckoned frantically. “Catrione—a troop of warriors has just come, with a message for you.”

“From the Queen?”

“From your father.”

Now what? she wondered with a sinking heart. She beckoned to Sora. “My father can wait. I need you to help me look for Deirdre.” Tersely, she explained what had happened. “Deirdre ran right past me, but I was behind her—she couldn’t have made it down the corridor in her state. So you take that side and I’ll take this one and we’ll look in every room. She must be hiding in one.”

But a search yielded nothing. Sora twisted her hands in her apron and looked down the corridor to the end, where the door swung open in the wind. “You should go talk to the men, Catrione.”

Catrione bit her lip, calculating the chances of Deirdre climbing out a window in her condition. It was exactly the sort of thing the other girl was capable of doing…before. But now, bloated and swollen and clumsy as Deirdre was, surely such a feat was impossible. Then out of the corner of her eye, Catrione thought she saw a flicker of movement near the door. She bolted down the dormitory corridor, but by the time she stuck her head out, the entire yard appeared deserted. Catrione cocked her head, listening carefully before she answered as softly as she could, “She’s been eavesdropping, apparently. She somehow knew exactly what we’re about.” Not to mention, she scarcely looked human. Catrione suppressed that thought with a shudder and took Sora’s arm. “You go back to Bride and tell her what happened and I’ll go see what this message is from my father.”

Sora nodded and Catrione hurried away. She was halfway there when she realized that in addition to her soaking sandals and bedraggled hem, she’d not stopped to wash her face or comb her hair or change into a fresh coif and clean apron. There was no help for it, she reckoned as she turned the corner into the outer courtyard where she was startled to see, in the light of the brightly burning torches, six or seven horses milling among unfamiliar men who nonetheless were wearing a very familiar plaid. Now what, indeed.

“Lady Cat?”

In the hall, she recognized at once the grizzled warrior who respectfully touched her forearm as she lingered on the threshold, her eyes adjusting to the smoky gloom. “Tully?” Catrione clasped her hand over his and turned her cheek up for a swift kiss. Tulluagh, her father’s weapons-master, was his dearest, most trusted friend. Fengus-Da never let Tully out of his sight for long. As the men crowded around the central hearth, shaking off their wet plaids, holding out their hands to the flames, Catrione glanced around, more confused than ever. There were too many for just a message, she thought. “What’re you doing here? Is something wrong?”

Tully shuffled his feet, frowning down at her with furrowed eyes the color of the watery sky. “Fengus-Da sent me to fetch you home, my lady.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” Catrione stared up at the old warrior.

Tully sighed heavily. He turned his back on the others and glanced over his shoulder. “May I have a word in private with you, Callie Cat?”

“Is it my grandmother? Is she sick?”

Tully put a hand under her elbow and drew her to a shadowy corner, out of the way of the servants scurrying to wait upon the newcomers. “It’s your grandmother, aye, but she’s not sick—well, not in the manner of dying-sick, anyway.”

“How sick, then, Tully?” Catrione stared up at him. “What’s this about?” She spoke softly but with enough of a hint of druid-skill that her words seemed to resonate in the air around him.

The old man’s eyes were steady as he stared back. “Don’t try those druid-tricks on me, Callie Cat. It’s like this. Since the season turned, your grandmother’s been plaguing him. First she started barging into his council meetings, into his practices, his games, even into his hunts. Then she started begging, tearing her clothes, pulling her hair out, moaning and groaning all the day—”

“About what?” Catrione stared up at the old man. Maybe the world really was turning upside down.

“He thinks she’s gone mad, Callie Cat, because all she’ll say is you’re not safe, and then she gibbers and howls and no one can get through to her until the fit passes. We can have you there before MidSummer if we leave by day after tomorrow.”

“Tully, I can’t leave.” Her Sight revealed gray mist, indicating hidden information. Immediately she was wary. “I’m Ard-Cailleach of the Grove this quarter. When I decided not to go home at Beltane, the charge was handed on to me. So till Lughnasa, Tully, I can’t leave, and certainly not now. Things are—unsettled.”

“Unsettled, you say? You don’t know the half.” Tully glanced over his shoulder, then stooped and spoke almost directly into her ear. “I don’t want to scare you. To tell you the truth, I was hoping I’d come and find you gone to Ardagh. Then I could’ve gone home and told him you were out of harm’s way.”

“What are you talking about, Tully? No place is safer than a druid-grove.”

“Callie Cat, do you think I’d be here for just an old woman’s ravings?”

Catrione narrowed her eyes. This sounded more like it. “So now what’s that trouble-making father of mine—”

“Your father’s not the one starting trouble.”

“Then who is?”

“There’ve been sightings of strangers in the high, remote places, and things found—weapons, clothes, equipment—all of foreign make. He thinks it’s the Lacquileans that Meeve’s so fond of, coming over the Marraghmourns a few at a time, hiding out, waiting for some signal, putting out rumors of goblins to keep people afraid.”

“The ArchDruid’s called a convening—”

“Maybe she should consider the possibility that there are no goblins but someone who wants everyone to think so. Your father’s worried about you here. He thinks the deep forests provide too much cover, and these woods could be riddled with them even now. He’s afraid they’ll have no respect for druids, Callie Cat.”

Catrione took a deep breath. “This is all news to me, Tully. We’ve heard rumors of goblins in the southern mountains. In Allovale, now the druids are gone, are the charnel pits emptying? Are the goblins being fed?”

“Aye, as far as I know. The old woman tend such matters now. But, Callie Cat, this isn’t about goblins, it’s about war.”

“I think what you’re really saying is Fengus-Da is going to war, and he wants me out of it. Isn’t that it?”

“No. He means to confront Meeve at MidSummer and raise the issue with the chiefs, but he’s not intending to go to war. He says you and all the sisters, all the brothers here are welcome at Eaven Avellach.”

Catrione blinked, her mind racing rapidly. From no druids, to an entire groveful—not as many as Meeve could muster out of Eaven Morna, of course, but impressive enough if they all crowded into the audience hall at Eaven Avellach. Outward show was everything. So was Tully’s visit motivated by real concern, or simply her father’s attempt to co-opt the White Birch Grove’s support, whether they meant to give it or not? “Maybe he’s right, Tully.” This wasn’t something she could decide in a blink. “But in the meanwhile, I can’t go anywhere, because among everything else that’s happened today, one of our sisters is—”

“Is definitely missing.”

Catrione jumped. Tall, stern, as composed as Catrione felt frazzled, Niona stood at her elbow, as unsmiling and unwelcome as Marrighugh, the bloodthirsty battle-goddess of war, who was already, apparently, awake and marching across the land. Niona had come in with the servers who were now passing trays of oat cakes and tall flagons of light mead, and despite all the frustrations of the day, she somehow managed to look as cool and calm as a cailleach was supposed to look, her apron spotlessly white, her coif perfectly arranged over her smooth hair. Beside her, Catrione felt like a small girl caught masquerading in her mother’s robes. “A word with you, if you will, Cailleach?” Niona nodded a quick smile to Tully, but the expression in her eyes was grim.

“Please, Sir Tully, eat and drink,” Catrione said. “We’ll speak more when you’re refreshed.” With a tug of his forelock, Tully seized the nearest flagon, and as he tilted his head back, she followed Niona a few lengths away, her wet soles squeaking audibly. “Have they found her?”

Niona shook her head. “Not yet. I’ve taken the liberty of calling up the brothers and we’re starting a systematic search—it’s everyone’s guess she’s hiding somewhere inside these walls. We’ll find her—sooner or later she’ll get hungry.”

“Catrione, dear?” Baeve approached and met Catrione’s eyes with uncharacteristic softness.

“What is it, Baeve?” asked Niona.

“Yes?” Catrione replied, controlling her urge to elbow Niona aside.

But Baeve ignored Niona entirely. “My dear.” She looked directly at Catrione. “About Bog.”

“Bog.” She’d nearly forgotten him. She bit her lip to keep the sob that rose in her throat from escaping as she remembered his limp body lying on the hearth rug.

“You told Sora that Deirdre was waiting for you?” When Catrione nodded, Baeve continued, “She’d time, then—”

“Time to do what,” interrupted Niona.

But again Baeve ignored her and spoke softly, gently, to Catrione. “It seems his neck was broken, child. Someone killed him.”

Niona made a horrified sound, and Catrione covered her face with both hands. “Are you saying Deirdre killed him?” Niona asked.

Catrione’s mind reeled. “We…we don’t know for sure Deirdre killed Bog,” she heard herself say weakly.

At that Niona rounded on her. “Come now, Catrione. We all know you love Deirdre, but you have to face facts. Who else was in your room? Who else would have reason to do such a thing?”

The possibility that Deirdre, once her best friend and confidante, was capable of killing an animal that would never have harmed her sickened Catrione. But Deirdre never showed any compunction about killing anything if it needed to be done. She was as capable of squashing a moth in the woolens as she was wringing a hen’s neck for dinner. Catrione saw Deirdre’s strong hands wrapped around a squawking chicken’s throat and deliberately squelched the memory. Even if she were capable, that doesn’t mean she did it.

“I don’t think it was Deirdre who killed Bog,” Baeve said softly.

“Then who do you think it was?” Niona cocked her head.

“I think that thing inside her has some kind of hold,” Baeve answered.

Niona’s brows shot up. “You mean you think it’s the child?” She made a little noise of derision, but Baeve wouldn’t be cowed.

“I’ve been catching babies here for over forty years, Sister Niona, and this is the most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen in all my time. I’ve had babies go past their dates—oh, long past, a month or more. But they die, they don’t survive. And their mothers are sickened, but they don’t start to look anything like that thing that Deirdre’s become.” She looked at Catrione. “I asked Sora to check the Mem’brances—”

“Those old barks are half crumbled to pieces—” began Niona.

Catrione cut her off. “Sister, make sure there’s someone in the kitchen at all times. There are lots of places to hide.”

Niona shut her mouth with an audible snap and marched away, back straight, shoulders rigid.

“Have patience,” murmured Baeve, then jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the men. “What’s this about?”

“They’re from my father—he wants all of us to leave the Grove and go to Eaven Avellach.”

“Well, now. We can hardly do that, until we find Deirdre.” She patted Catrione’s arm.

“What do you think Sora will find in the Mem’brances? Anything of use?”

Baeve shrugged. “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. With our luck today, I’m half-afraid we’ll find the very one we need long crumbled into dust. But anything is worth a try, isn’t it?”

“It’s worth a try if it helps us find Deirdre.”

“We’ll find her. You’ll see.”

And what if we don’t? a cautionary voice whispered in a corner of Catrione’s mind, sending a shiver of fear through her. Don’t be ridiculous, Catrione told herself immediately. Of course we’ll find her. We have to find her. She can’t possibly have gone very far.

Hardhaven village, Far Nearing

Cwynn paused before Argael’s door, hand raised to knock. The rain had eased, but the wind was still blowing hard off the ocean. The windows were shuttered, the door was firmly closed. White smoke belched in fitful drifts from the chimney. He imagined everyone inside was sleeping by this time, for this was the kind of weather that even in summer, drove most to bed. His children, Duir and Duirmuid, were surely sleeping by now. At least, he supposed they’d be asleep. In the two years since their birth, he’d never shared a roof with them at night.

He drew a deep breath and was about to turn away when the door opened abruptly. Argael herself stepped through the door, buckets in hand, an apron tied around her waist, a shawl wrapped over her shoulders. She gasped and stifled a cry as she nearly collided with him. “Cwynn daRuadan. Great Mother, is that you?”

“I-I’m sorry, Argael.” Cwynn stepped back awkwardly, into Eoch. The mare whickered and stamped her displeasure.

“What’re you doing here?” Argael was a broad-boned woman, her face pale in the grayish light. Wisps of the iron gray hair that had once been as dark as her daughter’s, peeked out from under her linen nightcap. “Is everything all right up at the keep? Is your grandfather—?”

“He’s fine.” Cwynn hesitated. “It’s me. I’m off—Leaving, me and Eoch—”

“Where’re you going?” Argael set her buckets down and raised her chin. She was nearly as tall as Cwynn and she’d never lost that aura of being bigger than he was despite his greater size.

He glanced over his shoulder. He should’ve slept in his boat, then left without saying anything, for he couldn’t tell Argael anything but the truth. “I’m going to Ardagh.”

“And you’re leaving in the middle of the night?” For a moment she looked at him as if she didn’t believe him, and then she jerked her head toward the door. “Come inside.” When he’d followed her into the small house, she kicked the door shut and set the buckets on the floor, then regarded him with crossed arms and narrowed eyes. “Now. Tell me what this is all about?”

“Gran-da gave me this.” He pulled the disc from beneath his shirt, where it nestled warmly against his skin. He lifted the heavy leather cord over his head and let it dangle before her, standing silent while she examined it.

“This is yours?”

“That’s what Gran-da said.”

Argael raised her eyebrows and regarded him with a penetrating look in her faded blue eyes. “Your mother’s line?” When he nodded, she sighed. “That explains a lot, I suppose.” She handed it back to him.

“Like what?”

She shrugged. “Like why Ariene can’t keep her hands off you come Beltane every year. Some part of her recognizes something in you even if you don’t see it in yourself. You’re a prince of the land, Cwynn. Your roots are in people who married the land itself. There’s a lot of druid blood in your line.” She fell silent, as if thinking, and then said, “But why’re you leaving now? It looks to storm all night.”

“Gran-da didn’t think it was safe for me to stay.” He hesitated, then said, “Shane, you know.”

“Ah.” She drew a deep breath, then wiped her hands on her apron. “The boys are sleeping in the loft. You’re welcome to join them as long as you take the edge.” Her face softened. “I never much cared for Shane, either.” She nodded to the dark passageway that led to the back of the house. “I’ll be back in a trice—I just want water for the night.” She nodded at the barrels set out to catch the rain, then looked at him appraisingly. “Have you had your supper yet?”

It surprised him to realize the answer was no. He shook his head and she snorted softly.

“No wonder you’re forever drifting off—it’s that druid blood that’s all through your mother’s side.” She picked up her buckets. “Go on back and have a seat. Ariene got a mess of clams this morning—there’s chowder in the pot.”

He went, feeling as if there was something else he wanted to say. He passed through the shadowy kitchen, startling Argael’s sister, Asgre, who was bending over the fire, covering up the coals. If her face was thin and gray and sour as week-old milk, her voice was as sharp as new cheese. “Argael,” she shrieked, brandishing her poker over her head. “Ariene! Sound the alarm—we’re being attacked!”

“Callie Asgre, it’s only me.” Cwynn held up his hand. “I-I came to see the boys.”

“Strange time to come calling, don’t you think?” she snorted as Ariene, in a homespun nightgown and a bright red shawl slipped in behind Cwynn.

“A very strange time, indeed,” Ariene said. “What’s wrong?”

“Asgre, it’s all right,” Argael said from the doorway. She handed a bucket to Ariene and set the other down on the chest beside the door. “She won’t believe me when I say she’s going blind. Asgre, this is Cwynn. He’s but come to spend the night with his lads before he takes off on a journey. I’ve told you for weeks now you can’t see, you silly hen. Put that poker down.”

“Where’re you going?” Ariene cocked her head.

“Go put the bucket down before you spill it,” her mother said. “Here, Cwynn, sit. The man’s hungry. He’s not had his supper. Let him eat.”

“They don’t feed you anymore up at the keep, then?” murmured Ariene as she strolled out of the room. Her eyes met Cwynn’s, her lips curled up in a half smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She blamed him for the loss of her brother and Sorley, Cwynn’s rival for her affections, but her grief didn’t stop her from choosing him again last Beltane, though afterward, she claimed to be under the influence of the goddess and not entirely in her own mind.

“I’d no time to eat.”

“Why?” she asked at once, her dark eyes shifting from Cwynn to her mother. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

“He’s a guest, Ariene,” Asgre said sharply, surprising Cwynn. “He’s to eat before he answers.”

“I’ll explain,” Cwynn mumbled as he was hustled to the place beside the fire. A dish of clams in milky broth, on top of a hunk of brown bread, was placed on his lap and a spoon thrust into his hand. Before he could dip the spoon in, however, the dish was momentarily whisked off his lap and a square of homespun linen laid across his knees.

“There you are,” said Argael, smiling. She handed him back the dish. “Eat, now.”

“Quickly,” said Ariene.

Aware of the scrutiny, Cwynn gulped the food in between telling his story once more. Finally he handed his plate to Argael and waved it away when she would’ve filled it again. “That was plenty. Good, too,” he added.

“Come see your sons,” said Ariene. She got up off the backless stool, her nightshift blousing around her body like a sail. She led him through a low doorway on the opposite side of the kitchen, into a storeroom. “Be careful, now, they’re up in the loft.” She pointed to a ladder.

Cwynn fumbled his way between the baskets piled with provisions, the bunches of hanging herbs, the sacks of meal and barrels of ale. He felt for the rickety ladder and tested his weight, then carefully climbed up just high enough to see two dark downy heads nestled together on one pillow in the evening twilight, their little faces round and tan on the sunbleached linen. A pang went through him. There was no doubt they were his, conceived on one of those wild Beltane nights he’d shared with Ariene, in the bower he’d made in a cave underneath the cliffs. Beltane was the source of all the trouble, he thought. He’d left Ariene alone, once she’d made it clear she preferred Sorley. But why then, did she keep choosing him each Beltane?

One of the twins sighed and turned on his side, hand beneath his cheek, and the other followed, their little bodies cupped together beneath the woolen blanket and patched quilt. He tucked the quilts higher beneath the little chins, and realized he had no idea which one was Duir and which Duirmuid. He touched the top of each head in turn, fingered identical black curls. “Stay safe,” he whispered. “Grow strong.” He leaned over to kiss each one in turn, and as he did so, the nearest twin awoke. His eyes widened, his mouth gaped and he started to scream, high-pitched, piercing wails that immediately woke the other twin.

“Hush now, hush, hush,” cried Cwynn as the children screamed. The women rushed in from the kitchen. One twin cowered, while the other launched himself straight at Cwynn, small fists flailing. “Hey, now! No, stop that!” Cwynn was forced to throw up both arms to defend himself. Already rickety, the rung he was standing on cracked beneath his boots, and he fell into a pile a whirling skirts and swirling night-shawls. Somehow, Argael got them all untangled. She pushed Cwynn in the direction of the door, called, “It’s all right, boys, auntie’s coming up first,” as she boosted Asgre up the ladder.

Ariene was standing by the fire in the kitchen, arms crossed over her breasts. Cwynn entered, feeling even more foolish and out of place than before. It was a mistake to come here, he thought. I should’ve gone down to sleep in the boat. He made as if to pick up his pack, but she stopped him with a swift touch on his arm. “It’s all right, Cwynn, that wasn’t your fault—I should’ve gone up first, woken them for you. I’m sorry.” She nodded at his pack. “Where’re you going?”

He nodded at the door. “I’ll go sleep in the boat—it’ll be easier in the morning—”

“To do what? Catch your death?”

“Ariene, I shouldn’t have come.” He tried to think of something else to say, for the tension was palpable between them. It tied his tongue and stopped anything but the truth from running through his head. I wanted so badly to love you. He spread his hands helplessly, for those words didn’t seem to make much sense.

“Of course, you should’ve come, Cwynn. You’ve every right to know the boys—soon they’ll be old enough to fish with you. They should know their father.”

He narrowed his eyes. She sounded conciliatory, even friendly.

She nodded at the door that led down to the beach. “Will you walk with me? The rain’s stopped.”

“All right,” he said. From the loft, he could hear Argael crooning to the children. He wished either she or even Asgre would come in and break this awkwardness he felt filling the room.

Ariene held the door open. He hesitated, then followed her down to the beach. The sand was wet and the rocks were slippery, but she didn’t stop until she reached the water’s edge. She let the ocean lap at her toes, her shawl flapping around her in the wind. The wind lifted her hair, blowing it in little tendrils around her pale face.

“Are you sure you want to be out here?”

“I wanted to talk to you.” She glanced out to sea, then turned to look up at him. He was shocked to see tears like tiny pearls limning the edges of her dark eyes. “There’s part of me that’s telling me to keep my mouth shut. And then there’s part of me that needs to say it anyway.”

“If it’s your truth you should speak it.” Cwynn shuffled his boots in the sand. From here, the keep looked like a giant mound of boulders, topped with thatch, a bigger version of the cottages clinging to the shore. The windows all glowed brightly, though, and he hoped it meant that Shane intended to drink long into the night. Thunder rumbled and a bolt of jagged lightning forked across the horizon from sky to sea. “But speak it quick—the storm’s not over yet. This is just a lull.”

“The boys are getting older now—they’re lads now, not babies, anymore—soon they’ll be men at the rate they’re growing.”

“Ariene.” He touched her shoulder. “You didn’t bring me down to the water in the middle of a storm to tell me the boys are growing, did you?”

She gave a short little laugh. “No.” She shook her head. “No, of course not.” She pressed her lips together, took a deep breath, then said, “I wanted to tell you I’ve been thinking. That the boys need a man, they need their father. The sea took Sorley, and it’s not giving him back. My boys and I—we’re a burden on my mother, though she’ll never say—”

“Ariene, my Gran-da will keep you fed, you know that. Since when has any suffered in this village more than any other?”

Ariene shook her head and looked down at the waves rushing to cover her toes with white foam. “I don’t know how to say this, Cwynn. It’s coming out all wrong—”

“What is?” he asked gently. The wind was picking up again, the waves were swelling as he watched.

“I heard what you came to tell us, and I realized—” Again she broke off, her eyes fixed on the storm clouds massing on the horizon.

“What?” He touched a finger under her chin and was stunned to see that she was crying. “What’s wrong, Ariene? What is it?”

“After I heard your story, I realized I can’t say what I decided, what I’ve been thinking, what I wanted to tell you. Because now, no matter what I say, you won’t believe me. You’ll think it has to do with that you’re a queen’s son—the High Queen’s son, at that, and even if you can’t be High King, well—you’ll still be a great chief. And you’ll always wonder if what I had to say was because of what you told us tonight.”

“What did you want to tell me?”

She actually blushed. “I wanted to tell you I’ve been thinking—the boys need a father, and—”

“Sorley’s not coming back.” He took a deep breath. Part of him did want to take her in his arms and part of him remembered every year on the morning after Beltane when she’d run away, sometimes before he himself was awake. “But I will.” He wrapped his arms around himself against the wind as sporadic raindrops stung his face. “I will come back.” He touched her arm. “We should go back inside. I can’t lie to you, Ariene, there’s part of me that—you were so mean when all I wanted—” He broke off. What was the point of telling her this? She was still the mother of his sons, no matter what else happened. And whatever else was to happen between the two of them had to wait while he took this unexpected turn.

“Ah, look, Ariene. Maybe you won’t like me as a chief,” he said, trying to lighten her mood. “Maybe you’d rather I smelled of fish than horse or cow.” She eyed him, like a mare about to bolt. “But we used to be friends, you and I, before Sorley came between us. Maybe when I come back, we could go back to being friends. And see what happens next Beltane.”

“Ariene! Ariene!” Argael called from the back door. “Come inside, the two of you—don’t you see those clouds?”

As if on cue, the rain dropped out of the sky in a sudden sheet of water, drenching them to the skin almost instantaneously. For a moment, they stared at each other. Want, pure as the water and raging as the sea jolted through him. He stared at the outlines of her ample breasts thrusting through the sodden clinging fabric, topped by hard peaks. He could think of nothing but ripping the nightgown off her shoulders and suckling till they were both satisfied. Instead, he raised his cloak over both their heads and they ran together back to the house, where Argael handed both of them dry linen towels, clucking and fussing like a hen. Ariene strode purposefully through the kitchen, pausing only long enough to take a towel from her mother’s hands, then disappeared through the doorway into the dark front room.

Argael gave him a questioning look, but he only shrugged. He understood Ariene’s dilemma. Part of him wanted to believe her, that she, too, had finally sensed the connection he had always felt with her. But so much more of him was wary, hurt, suspicious that he was merely being used, especially now she knew what he stood to gain.

So he covered his head with the towel and dripped onto the mat in front of the door while Argael said, “I’ll get you a tunic and trews that were Aedwyr’s, Cwynn. There’s some in the chest in the storeroom. They may be a bit tight, but they’ll be dry.”

“And you take my bed,” Ariene said, strolling back. She had changed into another, drier tunic, this one with long sleeves, tied high at the throat with a blue ribbon. Even her feet were encased in thick socks. She dragged a bone comb through her damp curls, deliberately avoiding his eyes. “I’ll sleep in the loft with the boys.”

“I can stay on the hearth, Argael,” said Cwynn. “I don’t mind—”

“Ah, but I do. That’s my place.” The midwife smiled and pointed him to the front of the house. “There’s something about storms and midnight that seems to bring babies. A night like this, I’m almost sure to be called. Just go up the steps off the front room. She’s got a little nook fixed under the eave, right opposite Asgre.”

“I wanted to talk to you, Argael—about Shane—that’s why I came here, you see. It wasn’t just the boys or a place to sleep—”

She stopped him with a quick pat on his cheek. “We’ll talk in the morning.” She held his eyes in a long look. “You rest now. You have a long ride ahead.”

The front of the house was dank and chill and very dark and Cwynn stumbled more than once in the unfamiliar room. He managed to find his way up the steps and saw it was more of a nest than a bed. Ariene had a mattress and a couple of old quilts and a pillow that smelled like her. He lay down, listening to the rain pelting so hard on the roof, it sounded as if it wished it could pound its way through. The window beside it rattled in the wind, and now and then, a rain drop spat in his face. With a sigh, he turned on his side, pulled up a quilt and burrowed his face in her scent.

It occurred to him that Ariene might come to him in the night, and he wondered what he would do if she did. Pride said reject her. But I’m not sure I could, he thought as he inhaled a great breath of her musky odor that immediately conjured the dark circles of her nipples jutting against the rain-soaked linen. She’d always made it clear she preferred Sorley. And now…he thought about what his grandfather said, about what Meeve could give him. You’ll be a chief in your own right, boy, of far grander fields than these.

Then there was the woman with the honey-blonde hair, who’d been coming to him in dreams, both day and night now, since the turning of the year. Was she part of this new future that now stretched out before him? But already, it seemed, this future had raised a barrier between him and everything he thought of as home, including the mother of his sons.

Eaven Raida, Dalraida

The knight died at midnight without ever waking up. That he was a knight of Meeve’s Fiachna was obvious by the raven feathers he wore in his hair, in the tattoos twining his forearms and chest, in the pattern of his plaid and the crests on his sword. But he carried no written message. Morla rocked back on her heels beside the cooling corpse, her mind turning rapidly as she watched the old women begin to prepare the body for the charnel pits.

There was on him no hint as to what news he might’ve been bringing. If they’d had a druid, they might’ve been able to follow his spirit into the Summerlands, where it most likely lingered still, on the edges. But they had no druid, and the time of year wasn’t conducive to contacting the dead, either. So she was left to guess.

She paced the room as the old women worked, watching them peel off the rest of the knight’s clothing. The man’s big body was heavily muscled, without an ounce of excess flesh. But he looked well fed, thought Morla, as she moved in for a closer look. She crossed her arms over her own bony chest and surveyed the dead knight stretched out before her as if she were assessing a side of beef. She looked at the corded, muscled forearms, the now-flaccid chest. He looked very well fed. On a whim, she opened his mouth and probed his teeth. They were white and strong and they didn’t move against her finger, like hers did against her tongue.

He was very well fed, indeed.

She backed away, splashed water from a ewer into a basin and washed her hands. She looked up to see Colm watching her from the door. “This man doesn’t look like he’s starving.”

One of the old women cackled beside the bed. “This one doesn’t look like he missed a meal a day in his life. Would you look at the length of his legs?”

“That’s not his legs you’re pointing at, Moira. Have some respect for the dead, will you?”

The women snickered. Sickened, Morla pushed past Colm into the corridor that led to the main hall, where the rest of the household huddled. She paused on the threshold and gazed over the lumpy shapes stretched out around the smoldering hearths. Most were already asleep. The rain had started up again, and the fires hissed and steamed. Somewhere a child called out and a woman hastened to hush him. A surge of pity swept through her for this dwindling flock of souls who depended on her. She heard Colm’s sandals tapping an uneven tattoo across the stones as he hurried to her side. “My lady, the sergeant—”

“There’s only one thing to do, Colm,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken.

“What’s that, my lady?”

“The knight’s horse—it was unharmed?” In the orange rushlight, Colm’s face was very thin, the cheekbones prominent, skin stretched tight across his forehead. She felt as old and as tired as he looked.

“The sergeant of the guard wishes to speak to you, my lady. I think you should hear what he has to say. This thing you’re thinking to do—it’s dangerous out there, my lady. You saw those brigands—”

“Those weren’t brigands, Colm. They were starving people. They won’t bother me. I’ll take an escort—I’ll ride under a white flag and Mother’s colors—”

“Ride where?”

“Where else? To Mother, wherever she is. I suspect that’s either Ardagh or Eaven Morna. I suppose I’ll find out.”

“And how do you expect to find her? Get on the knight’s horse and tell him?”

In spite of the situation, Morla had to grin. “That’s exactly what I intend to do. The horses of the Fiachna are trained to find their way home. Wherever he came from, they’ll give me a fresh ride, and tell me if Mother’s at Eaven Morna or somewhere else.”

“But, my lady—”

“It’s the only way, Colm. Clearly that knight was from my mother. What else is there to do?”

“The roads aren’t safe, my lady. You saw that yourself.”

“Then I’ll take guards with me.” She shook her head and shrugged. “If I set out at dawn, and ride straight through, I should be at Eaven Morna in four, maybe five days.” Morla wrapped her arms around herself, ignoring the maelstrom of emotion that name raised deep within. “It’s been ten years since I’ve been back.”

“Do you think that’s why Meeve’s forgot us, lady?”

Despite the lateness of the hour, the leaden weight of hunger in her belly and of fatigue in her head, Morla choked back a laugh. “Oh no, Colm, you’ve never met my mother, have you? Believe me, I don’t think she’s noticed I’ve been gone.”

Eaven Morna, Mochmorna

“Please tell me what I’ve just heard isn’t true.” Connla, ArchDruid of all Brynhyvar raised her chin and squared her shoulders as she stared up at Meeve across the food-laden board. Thunder rumbled in the distance and a flash of lightning flickered through the hall. She clenched her oak staff of office in her left fist and held her right arm against her side, trying to quell the palsy that shook it whenever she was in the grip of strong emotion. She wasn’t quite sure she could believe that she finally had proof of her suspicions: Meeve was stealing sacred silver. It should never have been able to happen, thought Connla. The earth elementals, the khouri-keen, should never have allowed such a thing, but she knew in her bones that somehow, it had.

The hall was crowded with Meeve’s warriors and neighboring chiefs. No one was ever turned away from Meeve’s table, no matter how high or low, rich or poor. Her bounty was part of her power. The humid air reeked of sweaty men and greasy meat, but Connla ignored everything, even as she was jostled nearly off her feet by a servant scurrying by with a basket piled high with rounds of cheese. The bard’s voice rose in a mournful wail, and Connla silenced him with one ferocious stare. “Well? Do you mean to answer me, sister? Or must I wait by the gatehouse, like a beggar after crusts of news?”

Meeve lowered her jeweled goblet, tossed back her fabled, though slightly faded, red mane beneath her thin circlet of braided gold and copper, and licked her fingers. “Depends on what you’ve heard. I’m having a hard time believing what I’ve just heard, I know that much.”

Pain shot up and down Connla’s arm, from her shoulder to her wrist, but Meeve’s blatant insolence only fueled her resolve not to show weakness. “Is it true your knights have taken the silver from Hawthorn Grove at Garn?”

“They haven’t stolen it, you old crow. That druid-house was abandoned to blight so long ago the roof was caving it. Would you have preferred they’d left it there?” Meeve held out her goblet to her cup-bearer and nodded at the end of the table. “We’ve all had news today, it seems. I had a few messages myself, thanks to Ronalbain and Fahrwyr.” She raised her brimming goblet again in the direction of two mud-splattered men who crouched over the long board, hunks of stringy meat clutched in both hands. There was a look on Meeve’s face Connla couldn’t quite read as she stared harder at her sister, deliberately opening her druid Sight. A gray veil of mist appeared between them, and Connla realized Meeve was hiding something.

Connla glanced around the table at the reddened, grease-stained faces, and spoke beneath the raucous laughter that followed some half-witted remark. “May I speak to you alone?”

Meeve only belched and waved an airy hand. “Why don’t you come eat? Come, sit…you, Turnoch, and you, Dougal, move aside, make room for Callie Connla.” Even before the sentence was completely out of her mouth, the men began to shift, benches began to scrape across the wooden planks of the raised dais. Meeve nodded. “There you are—go sit. Let’s eat and drink like civilized people, and then we’ll talk.”

“You’ll be too drunk to talk soon.” The silver chalice and blade of her office clanked against Connla’s thigh as she hoisted her robes above her knees and hauled herself onto the dais, waving away hands that would’ve helped her. She leaned as far over the board as the piled platters would permit and stared directly into her younger sister’s eyes. Another peal of thunder rolled through the room, echoing in the high rafters. The storm was moving closer. “I need to talk to you now. Alone.”

“Now?”

Connla glanced at the warriors leaning on either side of Meeve, at the guards lined up along the wall. Sweat began to gather under her armpits as a sense of spiraling disaster, of something very dangerous coming closer, almost riding on the edge of the storm, began to grow. She shoved the feeling away and concentrated on Meeve. “Yes, now. Unless you’d like to discuss this in front of everyone?”

Meeve belched again. “You’re not the only one with something to say, sister. If I were you, I’d take the time to fortify myself first.”

“Am I to understand that as a threat?” Connla narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re doing, sister. You don’t know what balances you’re upsetting—no one would dare to touch that silver but those Lacquilean robbers you’ve let loose upon the land.”

“Well, now, sister. That’s hardly diplomatic of you, considering I’m expecting a delegation from this person or persons who call themselves the Voice of the city, whatever that means. I thought to do you a favor—”

“A favor? You take our silver to appease foreigners, bargain it away and call it a favor?”

“Is silver all you’re worried about, Connla?” Meeve put her goblet down with a thump and leaned forward with a clink of twisted gold and copper bracelets.

“Of course silver isn’t all I’m worried about. That silver was guarded by the khouri-keen—your knights should not have been able to find that silver, let alone take it away. There’s far more at stake—”

“Then I should think you’d better be off to Ardagh, don’t you? If there is some sort of problem with those creatures, the silver’s safer with the Fiachna than it was in that burned-out grove.”

“Will it be here when I return? Or will robbers have somehow snatched it away from the Fiachna, or will pirates have managed to sail all the way into Lake Killcarrick and raid the druid-house at Killcairn?”

“You still blame me for that?” Meeve hiccupped softly, her golden brown eyes hollow in the torchlight. Lightning flashed, accompanied by a sharp crackle and a sudden blast of cold wet air. Torches whipped out in long plumes of white smoke, casting shadows on Meeve’s face. Buffeted on all sides as warriors and servants scattered to bolt the shutters against the rising winds, Connla could only stare in disbelief at the undeniable ring of tiny white flames wreathing Meeve’s face.

“What’re you about, Meeve—” Connla began, but her question faltered and died on her lips as rain splattered on the roof, then settled into a fast, steady drumming. So that’s what Meeve doesn’t want us to see, she thought. That’s what Meeve doesn’t want me to know. “Why didn’t you tell me you were dying?”

Meeve knocked over her goblet, spilling purple wine across her white linen and cloth of gold. With a curse coarse enough for the stable, Meeve pushed back her chair and rose. “You come with me. Sister.” The last word was a snarl that sounded anything but sisterly.

Perhaps it was the hard pounding of the rain that contributed to Connla’s sense of ripping through some layer of reality as she followed Meeve across the crowded floor, eyes riveted on Meeve’s rigid back as if she were the only other person in the room. The only person who mattered, Connla thought, and out of the corner of her eye, against the kaleidoscopic background, Briecru, Meeve’s chief Cowherd, stood out, his rich gold chains and red mustaches vivid against the shifting shadows forming around him like a cloak, so that it seemed he stood in a pool of black. The idea that Briecru could betray Meeve bolted through her mind, just as Meeve pulled her into the small antechamber to one side of the hall, her fingers clamped like a vise around Connla’s upper arm.

Meeve slammed the door, then wiped her hand ostentatiously on the thigh of her trews and made a face. “Faugh, Connla, must you wear all that wool? You not only sound like a crow, you reek like a dead one.”

“Better like a dead crow than a living thrall.” Connla met the wall of Meeve’s anger. She was still partially in that hazy state between the two worlds where she could see the flames flickering around Meeve’s face, but she was too angry not to retaliate. “Is that what you need my silver for, sister? For the perfume you’ve taken to wearing?”

“I should slap you for that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were dying, Meeve?”

Meeve snorted and shook her head. “You druids tell us we’re all dying, some of us sooner than others is all. I don’t want your pity, Connla, and I don’t want your help.” Black anger surged around Meeve like a cloak, cutting off Connla’s Sight.

Stung, Connla could only blink. “But I—I don’t understand. Surely, sister, there’s something that can be done—”

“Oh, spare me.” Meeve sank down in the wide chair on one side of the fire and leaned back against the linen-covered cushions, then held out a scroll. “It’s what killed Mother. I’ve all the same symptoms—the rashes that come and go, the aches, the sweats, the flesh falling off my bones. There was nothing to be done for her and I know there’s nothing to be done for me. If you were really concerned, you’d mind your own affairs so I wouldn’t have to. Do you have any idea who sent the message Ronalbain brought? He’s the one who brought the most distressing news, I think.”

“And what’s that?” Connla raised her chin. Meeve’s words pelted her like windblown acorns.

“He brought me a message from Deirdre, who—though I find it hard to believe—is yet still with child. Can you explain that, as well as why my daughter’s begging me to rescue her?”

“Rescue her? From what?” Connla faltered a little and tightened her hand on her staff. Deirdre, one of Meeve’s twin daughters, was a gifted druid who had been under Connla’s guardianship since her arrival at the White Birch Grove at the age of seven.

“Maybe if you’d paid more attention to your duty, this disgraceful situation would never have occurred. But when it did, I told you to take care of it. Now it seems that not only did you not address it when it could’ve been easily eliminated, Deirdre’s now in such a state she thinks her sisters are trying to kill her. Are they?”

Connla tried to breathe through the grip of the palsy that shook her arm. “No one would kill Deirdre.”

“What about the child?”

“The child’s an unnatural—”

“Then it should’ve been taken care of long ago,” Meeve replied. She tapped her finger on the arm of her chair. “I had a message from Morla. They need a druid desperately there, for it seems there’s blight in Dalraida and no druids.”

“I sent a druid last Lughnas—”

“One? You sent one, out of all who crowd us to the roof here, Connla?”

Connla watched the spectral death lights dance around Meeve’s face. She had lost weight, Connla realized, her skin was jaundiced. She looks just like Mother, in the months before she died. Even the uisce-argoid, the silver-charged water the druids distilled as their most potent remedy, could only slow the disease’s inevitable progress, not cure it. “That’s not fair, Meeve,” Connla said, appalled. “The brothers and sisters are not mine to command—Dalraida’s sent no druids to the mother-groves…there’re few who’re willing to go that far. I had nothing—”

“You have everything to do with it—you’re the Ard-Cailleach, the ArchDruid of all Brynhyvar, are you not? If you’ve nothing to do with it, all those titles mean nothing, too.” With a contemptuous glance over her shoulder, Meeve rose and swept to the window, where the rain spattered on the horn pane. “I won’t leave this land anything less than settled and at peace.”

Feeling slapped, Connla opened her mouth, then shut it. She knew what Meeve implied. One’s status in the Summerlands was dependent upon how well one was regarded by those left behind, and Connla had no doubt Meeve intended to be remembered as the greatest queen who’d ever reigned. Meeve’s strategy had always been simple: she perceived every man in Brynhyvar as a suitor, every warrior a potential knight. No other queen in all of Brynhyvar had ever so identified herself as the love, as the wife, of the Land, and no other in all its history had ever roused such passions, inspired such loyalties and spawned such rivalries.

Great Meeve, she was called, even by her enemies; Red Meeve, for the color of her hair; Glad Meeve, for the bounty of her thighs she spread so willingly; Gold Meeve, for the treasure she dispensed with a generous hand. But Connla had sometimes wondered what would happen when youth and vigor inevitably decayed. “You can’t buy your peace or your place in the Summerlands with druid silver, Meeve.” The dancing lights were back now as Meeve paced to the fire and stood over it, warming her bone-thin hands. Meeve’s face had a ghastly pallor, the color of a day-old corpse. She’s dying quickly, Connla realized. And Meeve was right about Deirdre, who was more than two months overdue. How could whoever was Ard-Cailleach of the grove not have taken matters in hand? Connla had been so concentrated on Meeve and her machinations she’d forgotten her responsibility to her own sisters, her own blood.

An implacable sense of an impending presence filled her, but she shook it off, sure it was merely the sense of Meeve’s approaching death. Meeve would be dead by Imbolc—the energy she usually emanated had diminished alarmingly now that Connla had seen beyond Meeve’s own carefully constructed pretense. There was no point in continuing to antagonize her. She drew a deep breath. “I believe you want to leave the land at peace.”

“Then go do your work, Connla. And leave me to finish mine.”

At the door, Connla paused. There’d been no resolution about the silver. “I’ll expect the inventory of the Hawthorn Grove to match the inventory of that silver in the rolls at Ardagh.”

Meeve cocked her head and pursed her lips. “You know, Connla, one might think you care more about your silver than you do for Deirdre or anything else. I’m starting to think that what people say is true.”

Stung, Connla stiffened and tightened her grip on her staff until her knuckles turned white. “And what do they say, the people? And which people, exactly, do you mean?”

“You need look for them no farther than these wards and halls, sister. They say that the druids care only for their dreams, for the pleasures of the sidhe, that they dally on the Tors while the Land grows cold and the trees die. They say the druids are losing their power. They say the druids are dying out, and as they go, the land dies with it.” Meeve shrugged and arched one brow. “And given that you’ve preferred to stay here and make trouble while there’s reports of blight and rumors of goblins and now my daughter—your own niece—believes her life to be in danger, I wonder if what they say might be true.”

Connla bit back the hard retort that sprang to her lips. Have mercy, she told herself. Have mercy. Meeve’s dying and there’s more at stake than what anyone thinks of druidry. “All right, Meeve. I’ll do as you suggest. Doubtless your dying has had some affect upon the land. You should’ve told me sooner.” She turned to leave and then remembered the other piece of news she’d had that day. “I’ll plan on stopping to see Bran on my way through Pent—”

“Don’t bother—I’ve already sent for him.”

“He’s on his way here?”

“As we speak.” Meeve narrowed her eyes. “I sent Lochlan after him two nights ago. What’s this sudden interest in Bran? He’s none of your concern—he’s not druid.”

“He very well could be. I had a message from Athair Eamus.”

“Oh, come. He’s never shown even the least sign—”

“According to Athair Eamus, Bran appears to be a very strong rogue.”

Meeve stared at Connla, then snorted. “You expect me to believe that?”

“Why should you not believe it?”

“Because Bran was duller than Morla as a baby, if that’s possible. He was happy with his rocks and shells for hours, lining them all up in row after row. He didn’t even start to talk until well after he was weaned. No one’s ever—”

“According to Athair Eamus, he’s showing signs. He’ll be here soon? I’ll wait.”

“Oh, no, you won’t. Let me be clear.” Meeve advanced on her, bright eyes fixed in her flushed face. “I don’t want you here, Connla. I don’t want any of you here. I want you to pack up—all of you—and take yourselves off to Ardagh or TirNa’lugh or wherever you will. The blight, the goblins—these are your province. If you’d do something to ease my passing, you settle this land before I die.”

Connla stared at Meeve, anger surging through her, blinding all vestiges of her druid-sight. Her whole arm twitched a frantic tattoo against her side, and she gritted her teeth, striving for control. “Watch your back, sister,” she blurted before she could stop herself. “Briecru—”

“Oh, enough,” Meeve waved her hand in dismissal, a look of disgust on her face, and before Connla could continue, the door opened and a young page peered in.

“Great Queen? Lord Lochlan’s been spotted on the causeway—at least, we think it’s Lord Lochlan—in this rain it’s hard to see.”

“Lochlan?” said Meeve. “How could that be? Is he alone?” She glanced over her shoulder at Connla. “He must’ve turned back—”

“He’s got someone with him—someone riding one of your own roans.”

Connla limped forward. “Pentland’s a full three days’ ride from here, Meeve—even if he got there by now, they could only have just left. You think it’s only coincidence they arrived here on the edge of a storm?”

For a long moment Meeve stared at her, then turned to the page and said, “Set the watch for my son—Open the gates—have mead and blankets waiting. Tell them to draw hot baths and set fresh clothes warming. Go on now.” When the page had gone, she looked at Connla. “And you, too. I’ll order horses saddled and waiting. As soon as the weather breaks, I want you all on your way.”

In disbelief Connla gripped Meeve’s arm. “I don’t think you understand what you could be dealing with, Meeve. This is all beyond your ken—it’s beyond mine, if that really is Lochlan and Bran. How’d they get here in less than half the time it should’ve taken?”

Meeve stalked past her, and for a moment, Connla thought she might simply walk out of the room without replying. But with her hand on the latch, she said, “I’ll watch him and if he shows signs, as you say, I’ll send word.”

Connla put a hand on Meeve’s shoulder and was struck by how thin it felt beneath the sumptuous silk tunic. “You send me the boy, Meeve. Promise me, or I won’t leave. That boy shows any sign at all of being druid, and you send him to me. To Ardagh, at once.”

Meeve looked pointedly at Connla’s hand, then said, “Fine. Now allow me to go greet my son.”

“I’ll see you at MidSummer, Meeve, and I’ll expect a full accounting of every dram of silver,” she managed to finish as Meeve shut the door with a hollow slam that reverberated through every one of Connla’s aching bones.

She couldn’t just depart the castle, she thought. She couldn’t just leave Bran here, unguarded, untended. What to do, what to do, she wondered, gnawing on her lower lip, rubbing her right arm. Then she thought of the trixies in their hive under the Tor. She’d set them to mind him, she thought. That should divert their attention, and as long as he was here, they’d ground his magic so that he’d not slip into the OtherWorld by accident and be lost. Whether or not he’d be able to cope with them—well, they didn’t call them trixies for nothing. She’d set it as sort of a test for him, she thought as she limped out of the room, her old bones aching from the damp. If he wasn’t druid, he wouldn’t see them, wouldn’t be aware of them and, at best, would find their attentions a source of puzzlement and perplexity. On the other hand, a small voice cautioned, if he is druid, they can make his life a living torment. But that, she decided, was a risk she would have to take.




4


Faerie

“So you see, Auberon, if we bring the crystals here, we won’t need the druids—we won’t even need mortals. Faerie will belong to us in a way it never did before. We’ll be able to make it everything—anything—we want it to be.” Timias sat back and noticed that the sky above the Forest House was slowly turning pink. He watched Auberon’s face, searching for some sign the stricken king had understood, or even heard what he’d said, for he asked no questions, made no response at all.

Timias waited and wondered what the king would do or say if he knew that Timias was indirectly responsible for not only the queen’s death, but all the others, as well. A furrow had appeared between Auberon’s brows, his shoulders drooped, and he looked more like a stag than ever. The change was on him—soon Loriana would be Queen. Timias leaned forward and decided to try again. “I know it all sounds unexpected. But ask me anything, I can explain. We can use the khouri-keen, Auberon, just the way the druids do.”





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