by C. E. Murphy
Halfway across the river, a screeching witch in her arms, she wished she could do that wink with a passenger, but a single attempt sent bone-shattering shudders through her, and dropped them a dozen feet closer to the water's rushing surface. Fúamnach's shrieks intensified, each one deeper and more dreadful than the one before. Grace whispered a curse under her breath, and when they came staggering to the river's far shore, dropped to her knees and let the witch go in a rustling thump. Fúamnach clawed her fingers into the earth, breaking her nails as she pulled herself away from the river's edge, then lay gasping on the greenery. Grace's shudders stopped, but Fúamnach's continued, wracking her body while Tony stood above them both making helpless gestures with his hands. Grace waved him off, croaking, "I'll be fine," as she pulled her clothes on.
He crouched by her. "You don't sound fine."
"Mortal creatures aren't meant to be dragged through the…" Grace had no word for it, the insubstantial place she lingered. It wasn't the same space djinn moved through when they became incorporeal, for she'd ghosted a time or two when they were nearby, just to see if she could see or sense their presence. She couldn't, nor they hers. "And a witch is born of humanity, no matter how long her years might be or how hard her death is to achieve."
"Are all witches women?"
Grace, dressed now, sat on her butt to put her boots on. "All the ones I've met have been, and all their children, too."
"Mothers are what matter." Fúamnach spoke, her voice rawer than Grace's. "Any man could be a father, but a mother is always known. Mothers and daughters: therein lies the power. The sons…pfaugh!" She spat, then hauled herself to sitting, which seemed as far as she could go.
"And phaugh on some of the daughters as well," Grace murmured, but Fúamnach's hate-filled glare silenced her.
"On all of them, and on more than you think. Where is my blood?"
"Where is my Tear?" Grace rose, dusting dirt off her pants.
Fúamnach's lips curled, revealing snarling teeth. "I cannot call for it without my blood. Five thousand moons in running water, Ní Mháille. No witch can work magic after such torment. Not without all she has lost to breath and bone returned to her."
"You're screwed, then," Tony said thought-fully. "Máire was your blood too, wasn't she?"
Loathing filled Fúamnach's gaze. "That faithless creature is long since a creature of her own. The blood spent there is no longer mine to call on. But the blood I swore an oath with…" She turned her eyes back to Grace and lifted a hand, fingers scrabbling greedily at the air.
Grace sighed and lifted her chin at Tony. "Go on, then."
"Are you sure?"
"As sure as I can be."
Tony shifted his shoulders as if to say it's your funeral, and dipped a hand into his coat pocket to withdraw a stoppered vial with rusty flakes dusting its sides. Fúamnach squealed with greed, reaching for it, but Tony folded the vial in his hand, stepping back and looking to Grace. She nodded and he repeated the shrug, then took a lighter from the opposite pocket and opened the vial to flick the flame inside it. The ancient blood vaporized. Fúamnach shuddered and moaned, a disturbing sound of ecstasy, and though the tiny bit of blood could hardly be enough to revitalize her, color returned to her cheeks. She threw her head back, power coursing through her almost visibly, as if she had been a dry riverbed now flushed with water. Rags and grime fell away and her hair came clean. The earth itself clothed her, greenery and soil becoming a gown. Within a heartbeat she had taken on the guise of a queen, if a queen was one with the very world around her.
Tony exhaled, sharp and surprised, and Grace, who remembered Fúamnach's beauty from centuries past, barely stopped herself from doing the same. She took a breath to ask why, though: Fúamnach's beauty had been incidental, on the shores of Clew Bay; now she clearly reveled in it, eager to share it with the world. But before the question left Grace's lips, she thought she had an answer: left powerless and isolated on an island, she, too, would reach for the best of herself in the first moments of freedom.
Then Fúamnach took a sauntering step or two toward Tony, a smile curling her mouth, and Grace nearly laughed at her own naïveté. She nearly stepped forward herself, about to block Fúamnach's approach, but held herself still at the last moment, waiting and watching. The witch moved into Tony's space, placing her fingertips against his chest. Tony, looking bemused, wrapped his hand around hers and moved her hand away before letting her go. "Friend of mine reminded me a while back not to go around touching people without their permission. You should probably learn that lesson, ma'am."
Fúamnach shot Grace a look as if she couldn't believe she'd properly understood the word ma'am. Grace burst out laughing and spoke in the Irish she'd used, without realizing it until now, on the island. "You heard him right, love. You can take it to mean you're too old for him." She laughed again as Fúamnach snatched her hand back from Tony and spun haughtily, dismissing him as unworthy. Tony, eyebrows arched and a quizzical smile playing at his mouth, glanced at Grace, who said, "You got your point across," in English. His smile turned to a grin, and Grace laughed aloud a third time before challenging Fúamnach with her gaze. "The Tear, Fúamnach."
A cunning look narrowed Fúamnach's eyes. "I've given it to safekeeping in another's hands. From me you have it freely, but from him…"
"I will kill you, witch. I will bind you with iron and stake you with wood, drown you in water and bury you in the earth itself." The words rose up from within Grace as if she spoke with someone else's knowledge, and she thought: thank you, to the Serpent at the heart of the sea.
Fúamnach laughed, sharp and shrill. "There's a recipe for capture indeed, but not for the likes of me."
"Are you sure?" Grace spat. "Has anyone tried it? I will put you back on that island, witch, and leave you to rot.
"You ought to have left well enough alone to begin with," snarled another voice, and Máire, once of the Clan O'Malley, rose up from the river a witch.
Part III
There could be no doubt she was a witch: the power poured off her just as the river water did, sluicing and cascading like a thing with a will and a mind of its own. She carried a staff wrought of reeds in her crippled hand, and the river itself shaped a limb for the leg Fúamnach had so long ago supped on as her own. She stepped free of the river's current, fury contorting features grown more mature and experienced since Grace had last seen them, but whatever words she might have said were lost beneath Grace's astonished protest. "You drowned!"
If Máire had an ounce of gentleness in her, it was nowhere to be seen: the look she bestowed on Grace was as scathing, as loathing, as the one she had for the mother of her body. "I did."
"I searched for you." The strength left Grace's voice as swiftly as it had come, ancient distress rising in her breast. "I went into the waters myself, swam as deep as I could, as far as I could. You drowned, Máire. You were lost to me. How—?"
"I thought witches couldn't cross water," Tony said in a quieter, but equally mystified voice. "How can you be in it?"
Máire's blazing anger snapped between the two of them. "The answer's one and the same. Know you how a witch's daughter comes to be free of her mother, mortal?"
Though the title—or insult—could be aimed at no one else, Tony glanced between Grace and Fúamnach before answering. "She was trying to eat you to get her magic back, so…by dying?"
"Not just dying." Fúamnach stood in a hunch, her hands clawed against her chest and fury raging in the stance. "Had she been struck with a knife, her magic would have fled back to me and made me whole again. But the filthy salty sea took her, and in so doing, broke the bond that held her to me."
"But a witch can't survive the open water," Grace said, bewildered. "It's what kept you from her to begin with."
"A witch cannot," Máire snarled. "But a witch's daughter might, especially when that daughter is the foster child of one beloved to the Serpent."
"Beloved?" Grace's voice cracked with disbelieving laughter.
"I'd never say so, but if it's the thread that draws you back to life, I'll take it, child of my heart."
"How dare you make such a claim, when you yourself have freed the one who tormented me?"
"I didn't bloody know you were alive, did I! What happened, Máire, how—?"
"The storm snatched me, as it will. My mother's ancient enemy, the sea, confining her to the green isle. I thought as the waters closed over my head that at least she would never have me now, that a death by drowning was better than living to be eaten some day when my foster mother was no more and could no longer protect me. So I let the water take me, waiting for it to drown me, and instead I felt more alive than I had ever been. It was as though the very blood left my body and took the salt sea in instead, freeing the last bonds that tied me to the daughter of the barrows. And once emptied of what she had been, I filled again with magic, a witch in my own regard. But even that wouldn't have been enough to save me, had the Serpent not lifted me from the drifting currents and cast me on land once again."
"Why didn't you come to me?" Grace whispered. "It would have gladdened my heart to see you again, and you must know I would have believed your tale."
"You would have, and perhaps the clan would have too. And then where would I have been, or you? No one would welcome a witch save perhaps yourself, and if you did, you would lose the clan."
"I lost it anyway. I lost it all, just as the witch of the west cursed me to."
Fúamnach spat a sound of pleasure. Grace caught her arm, a threat in the gesture. "I can bring you back to that island, witch." Her gaze snapped to Máire. "You put her there?"
"It took so long." Máire sounded like the child she'd been centuries ago, something akin to a whine in the agreement. "I had to coax the waters away and leave the island dry, and bait it with a thing she wanted more than life itself."
"The Tear?" Tony sounded uncertain.
Máire spat as well. "Me. Me my own self, seeming weak as a kitten and dripping with power that she might have for herself, if only she could eat me up. I lured her, and when she finally came—"
"She left me there," Fúamnach snarled. "The river rose and she fled across it, laughing on the shore as my power died. And there I've lain ever since, dying without death, weak and waiting for the day of my release."
Anger crackled in the air, power coalescing around both witches; Máire's had a heavy feeling to it, like the weight of water, and Fúamnach's felt dark, as if it came up from the earth itself. Tony touched Grace's elbow, his voice low. "Maybe we should get out of here before they throw down."
"Not without the Tear, love." Grace stepped between the witches, hairs standing on her arms as their power washed over her. "I'm sorry to have disturbed your revenge, Máire. Had I known…" She shrugged. "But I didn't, and then again, if I had, perhaps I'd have chosen this path anyway. I need the Tear back, Máire."
"And why is that? Have you a use for it?"
"Not as such, but I know now what it does. And it's having it in her power that keeps me a ghost." Grace reached for Máire's reed staff, slipping her fingers through it rather than grasping it. For a heartbeat, Máire was the girl Grace remembered, pale with uncertainty that bordered on fear. Then the memory was gone, replaced by the older, wiser mask. She favored her long-dead father, perhaps; the lines of her face weren't Fúamnach's fine-boned beauty, but something rawer and more wild. Her hair was still loose and brown, waving like ripples on the water, and her pale gaze remained forthright. The magic in her lent her presence, but even without it, she seemed a woman to be reckoned with.
For once in her long life, Grace had no particular urge to face that reckoning, and yet it stood before her, expecting action. "I'm only half in this world, love. I want to be all in, or—"
Behind her, Tony caught his breath, and the words she might have spoken went unsaid. They weren't true anyway; she wanted to be all in, not all gone, and if in the end her choice came down to her half-life or a quick death, she would hold on to ghostliness for as long as she could. "Do you know where the Tear is?"
"She gave it to a dragon to keep, but the dragons have all been sleeping a hundred years and more."
Grace threw her head back and groaned. Tony said, "Not all of them," and stepped forward to face Máire. "It has to have been an Irish dragon, right? Because she wouldn't be able to draw on the Tear's power if it was across the water—"
"She's been in the midst of running water all these years," Grace said, "Would that not have broken her connection to the Tear, if it could be broken? And yet I'm a ghost."
"Any other item and it might have," Máire conceded grudgingly. "But the Tear is of the Serpent himself, and water is his element."
"Will you do nothing but talk?" Fúamnach demanded. "I have five thousand moons of torment to settle upon—"
A tremendous fist of water rose from the river and seized the older witch, dragged her screaming to the island, and dropped her there as Grace and Tony startled, having all but forgotten Fúamnach's presence at all. Máire spat after her blood mother, whose rage rose and echoed against the water, impotent as her magic. Grace gazed out at her, then turned a shrug on Tony. "I suppose I didn't say she'd be kept on dry land."
"You've a lot to answer for yet," Máire said darkly. "Freeing Fúamnach—"
"Broken record," Tony said. Máire stared at him and he shrugged. "We can go around on this forever, but it's a broken record. Grace took Fúamnach off the island, found out—sort of—where the Tear is, and you put her back. It's over. Let's get the Tear. Did she give it to an Irish dragon or not?"
Máire, sullenly, said, "There are no serpents in Ireland," and Grace laughed aloud.
"Surely even good Saint Patrick couldn't have driven a dragon away, daughter. But if not an Irish dragon, then who? In four hundred years I've met two, and only know of one other who still walks the waking world."
"He was a great red péist who came at Fúamnach's call, though he was no more bound by her spell than one might bind the storm. Curiosity drove him, and he carried the Tear away in a great and terrible paw, promising to keep it safe."
Grace exchanged a glance with Tony, who shook his head. "Can't be. Can it?"
"I know two red dragons, love, and only one of them was alive centuries ago. But he fled New York after the fire."
"What, don't you have his cell phone number?" Tony asked, ruefully exasperated.
Grace sighed. "No. But Margrit does."
"I'll call he—" Tony broke off, patting his pockets. "Or I would call her if the phone wasn't in the car, a hundred miles away!"
"That," Máire said, "I can help you with, for a price."
#
The waterways of Ireland took them back to the car more quickly than even Grace had imagined, though the journey wasn't a direct one, and there were stretches that even a witch had to traverse on foot. Grace herself might not have needed to, but ghosting a man and a witch both together seemed likely to wear her out, especially after the struggle with Fúamnach at the river. Still, they were no more than half a day going, and while Tony hiked the last piece of road to get the car and the phone, Grace sat at a stream's edge with Máire at her side, watching ripples in the water. "So you had magic in you after all. Has it treated you well?"
"It gave me vengeance." Away from the witch Fúamnach, Máire's anger had fled, and she threw pebbles into the stream like any child might. "I haven't asked much more of it. I've never known what to ask. A life of my own, away from my mother, was more than I dreamed possible, and you granted me that before the magic found me. You shouldn't have traded the Tear, though. I wasn't worth that."
"But you were." Grace smiled. "Perhaps if I'd had something else that appealed, or if I'd known the worth of the Tear, I might have tried another bargain, but in the end I would have made the trade. It's only a rock, Máire. A magic rock, to be sure, but still, only a rock, and you're a human being."
"Am I?"
"A person, at least," Grace amended. "No rock is worth more tha
n someone's life."
Máire cast her an amused look. "I expected you to protest my humanity."
"Grace knows a lot of people who aren't human, these days," she said dryly. "I'm finding it doesn't matter so much. You're my daughter still. That's what I care about."
"Me and that man," Máire said, teasing.
Grace glanced toward where Tony had gone, and nodded. "I'd not have started down this path at all without him. I'd still think myself a cursed ghost, not gifted with a shaky grasp of immortality. It's not using the Tear that's important. It's having it back and not fighting to keep myself attached to this world. What do you want, Máire? What's your price, for taking us halfway across the island?"
"I want to go with you." Máire lifted her chin, gazing at an unseeable horizon. "I've never left Ireland, and it's time I did. Fúamnach is imprisoned and will stay that way or won't, but I've had enough of being her jailer. I've seen all there is to see here, and watched it change through the centuries. It's no more the land of my childhood than it is of yours, and I might be best off breaking all ties with it."
Grace breathed a laugh. "I think you'll find that's impossible, my sweet. Even now, coming back after so long, with it so changed…it sings to me. It says it's my land, where I come from and perhaps where I'll someday rest. But most ties," she agreed with a nod. "Most ties are long since gone, and it would do you no harm to see more of the world. Why did you never go, if the water couldn't stop you?"