A Rising Moon

by Stephen Leigh

  “That would be my pleasure,” Magaidh told her. “This evening after supper I’ll come to your chambers, and we can talk then for as long as you like.” With that Magaidh rose. Her hand lingered on Orla’s shoulder for a breath, then she bowed to the two of them and walked back toward the temple.

  * * *

  “What can I tell you, Orla?”

  Orla managed to smile at the question. “Everything,” she answered. “Tell me everything.”

  Orla and Magaidh had retired to Orla’s chambers immediately after supper. Sorcha had brought in pastries for them, poured wine, then made her excuses and left them alone. Ceannàrd Mac Tsagairt was in counsel with Ceanndraoi Greum. Sorcha had found tapestries of Elia and Her minor deities in the temple and had hung them to adorn the whitewashed walls of Orla’s rooms. The gods stared with fabric eyes at Orla and Magaidh as they talked while their anamacha gleamed in the dimness of the corners.

  Magaidh laughed softly at Orla’s request, though her gaze remained serious. “Everything would make for a long, long tale, and if I’m to be honest, some of it I’d rather were left forgotten. Your mother was as good a friend to me as she could be, and I loved her for that. I’ll be grateful to have known her for as long as I live.”

  “‘As good a friend as she could be . . . ’” Orla repeated the phrase, her head cocked to one side in question. She reached for the mug of wine, inhaling its fragrance and waiting as Magaidh took a sip of her own.

  “You have to understand that it wasn’t easy for your mother being who she was, bearing the memories she had from Pencraig, and being chosen by the Moonshadow,” Magaidh said finally, placing the mug back on the table between them. Orla watched her gaze slide to the corner of the room behind her, where Orla’s anamacha waited. Orla didn’t dare to look there; she didn’t want to look at her anamacha at all.

  “Are you saying she was the Mad Ceanndraoi, as the Mundoa claim?”

  Magaidh waited a breath before replying. “No. Not mad, but troubled. Having to use the Moonshadow certainly affected her and her judgment, especially toward the end. It was a terrible burden for her to bear, and eventually it became too much for her.” A pause. “As it might be for you also, Orla.”

  Orla’s hand went to the twin oak leaves around her neck under her torc, her fingers scissoring them. “Greum expects me to fail,” she said, the words spilling out of her unbidden. “He wants me to fail. He doesn’t want me to have the Moonshadow.”

  Magaidh didn’t deny it. She sat back in her chair, folding her hands on her lap, her face placid. “That may be true. But that’s not his choice to make at the moment.”

  “He wants to go to war again.”

  Magaidh nodded. “I know. That’s why he and Comhnall are talking. That’s why he sent for the ceannàrd. But as I said, it’s not why I came.”

  “He wants the Moonshadow to go to war with him, but he doesn’t want me to be the draoi who wields them.”

  “That might also be true,” Magaidh said. “Were you thinking that Greum Red-Hand wanted me to take the Moonshadow after you failed? No, you don’t have to answer; I see it in your face. Even if it were possible that a draoi could voluntarily abandon the anamacha that has chosen her—and I don’t know that it is, though perhaps the Red-Hand does—Ceanndraoi Greum would not have wanted me to take the Moonshadow. He is ceanndraoi. He intends to remain ceanndraoi—and he’ll do whatever he needs to do to achieve that.”

  Orla drew her head back at the implication. “No . . .” she breathed.

  “Aye,” Magaidh told her, and Orla thought she heard her anamacha whispering the same word: “That’s why I intend to remain here in Onglse as long as you’re here. I swore to your mother that I would find you and look after you, and I’ll keep that oath to her. As I was a true companion to Ceanndraoi Voada, I’ll be the same for you, if you’ll have me.” Magaidh leaned over the table to put her hand on Orla’s. Her serious eyes searched Orla’s own. “You’ve no reason to trust me, Orla, and you shouldn’t. You don’t know me, and in your situation you’re wise to be suspicious of anyone who professes to be your friend and gives you advice. So I don’t want you to answer. Not now. In time, perhaps, when we’ve both come to know each other better.”

  With that she leaned back again, leaving Orla’s hands cold after her warm touch. Magaidh picked up her mug again and drank. “Now,” she said, “let me tell you how I first met your mother . . .”

  9

  Avoiding the Shadow

  WHEN GREUM CAME TO Orla’s chambers the following day to continue her lessons, Orla asked Sorcha to tell the man she wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be able to go with him today. From her bedchamber, Orla listened as Greum insisted and Sorcha held firm that Orla was ill and she simply wasn’t going to allow Greum to disturb Orla in her bed. Greum sounded extremely unhappy at being rebuffed by someone he obviously considered only a servant, but he finally acquiesced with little good grace, declaiming loudly enough that Orla understood she was intended to hear the statement, “Tell Orla that a draoi who has any hope of being as strong as her mother should be able to ignore her moon-time when she’s asked.”

  She heard Sorcha shut the door behind the ceanndraoi. A few moments later, Sorcha came into the bedchamber, her cheeks still painted with an angry flush. Orla was sitting on the bed fully dressed. “The man’s absolutely intolerable and has no respect for anyone. I can see why your mother abandoned him as soon as she could. And to just assume that you’re having your moon-time . . . Let him deal with moon-times and see how easily he can ignore them.” She loosed an exasperated huff of air, then nodded toward the outer chamber. “I went down to the kitchens earlier and brought our breakfast back here. Go make yourself comfortable, and I’ll get it on the table.”

  “Thank you, Sorcha,” Orla told her. “And thank you even more for putting off Ceanndraoi Greum. I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him today.”

  “No need to thank me; I can understand perfectly,” Sorcha answered. “You must be hungry. I know I am, but we can’t have you going to the dining hall when you’re bleeding too heavily to work with the ceanndraoi.” Sorcha grinned, and Orla had to smile back at her.

  They were finishing the meal of bread, cheese, and a dish of sea buckthorn berries and bilberries drizzled in honey and milk when there was a knock on the door. Sorcha looked at Orla, who shrugged. Sorcha went to the door and opened it a crack.

  “Draoi Magaidh,” she said and glanced over to Orla, who nodded. Sorcha opened the door wider. “Come in.”

  Magaidh and her anamacha entered as Sorcha closed the door behind her. The woman smiled toward Orla. Her torc, the knobbed ends polished from her fingers, gleamed in the sunlight pouring through the open window of the room. “You don’t look nearly as bad as the ceanndraoi had me believing.”

  “I just—” Orla began, but Magaidh laughed and held up her hand.

  “I don’t care whether you’re really sick or whether it’s actually your moon-time or not,” she said. “Let poor Greum believe whatever he wants.” Orla saw her gaze slide over to the Moonshadow’s anamacha behind Orla’s chair. “Have you used your anamacha since you touched your mam and felt the Moonshadow inside?”

  Orla shook her head as Sorcha brought a chair over to the table for Magaidh, then took her own seat again.

  “And why not?” Magaidh asked as she sat and reached for the bread.

  “That’s not your concern,” Sorcha retorted before Orla could answer.

  “Sorcha!” Orla said, but Magaidh was already turning to the woman.

  “You’re right to try to protect her, Sorcha,” Magaidh answered, not unkindly. “She needs friends she can trust, now and in the coming days. But Orla and the Moonshadow are my concern, especially since the Moonshadow now contains my own friend Voada, and because I know better than anyone here just how dangerous the Moonshadow can be.” Her regard
returned to Orla, though she continued to address Sorcha. “I know that better than Orla does herself, but I suspect she now senses the peril. And that’s why she’s here in her room now and not with Ceanndraoi Greum,” she finished quietly.

  “Aye,” Orla said, nodding. “I admit it—that’s the reason I haven’t used the anamacha and why I told Ceanndraoi Greum that I was sick. Talking to my mother, meeting the Moonshadow . . . I told Greum that I wasn’t afraid of either of them, but that was a lie. The more I think about having to enter their world again, having to listen to all their voices . . .” She shivered as if spiders were running over her skin under her léine.

  “You won’t have a choice, and Ceanndraoi Greum knows that as well as I do,” Magaidh told her. “I’m sorry, but the anamacha won’t wait forever for you. They have their own desires, their own needs, and they’ll bring you into Magh da Chèo without your consent if you continue to ignore them much longer—and that’ll be neither pleasant nor safe.”

  “Let them go find someone else,” Orla said.

  “Stop it!” Magaidh said sharply enough that both Orla and Sorcha straightened their spines against the backs of their chairs. “You may want to believe that will happen, Orla, but listen to your true heart. If the Moonshadow abandoned you, if your mother abandoned you, how would you feel? Close your eyes and think. Grow up, child.”

  Orla’s head snapped back at the insult. “I’m not a child, Draoi Magaidh,” she spat. Her fingers curled into tight fists on the table as she glared at the woman.

  “No?” Magaidh stroked the brass knobs of her torc with her fingers. “That’s good to hear, because that’s what Ceanndraoi Greum thinks you are, and that’s why he believes you’ll fail as a draoi. It’s what my husband thinks of you, too, since he listens to the ceanndraoi far too much. They talk of taking the Moonshadow to war again, but you’re not the draoi they expect to be holding that anamacha when that moment comes. For that task, Greum looks to his favorite potential draoi among Menach Moire and Draoi Ceiteag’s acolytes. So prove us all wrong. Show us that you have the strength, the will, and the maturity your mother had, that she thought you would have as well.” Her voice gentled then, soothing and imploring at once. “Let me help you, Orla.”

  “You can’t,” Orla answered. Her gaze was on the table, on the remnants of their breakfast.

  “I can’t help you control your anamacha, no,” Magaidh persisted, “but I can help you learn how to do that. I can be the teacher you need rather than Ceanndraoi Greum.”

  Orla’s gaze lifted from the table to Magaidh. “The ceanndraoi will allow that?” Orla allowed a trace of hope to enter her voice.

  Magaidh sniffed. “He won’t like it, and he’ll rail and complain and fuss, but he won’t be able to stop us. My husband, Comhnall, is ceannàrd, and for what he did with Ceannàrd Iosa and your mother against the Mundoa, Comhnall has the respect of the àrds of the clans. And though I’m not ceanndraoi, everyone knows that I was First Draoi among Voada’s draoi and your mother’s friend. If Greum wants to gather the warriors of the clans against the Mundoa, then he needs Comhnall, and he needs me. He can’t risk offending the Mac Tsagairt clan, because then he offends too many of the northern clans who are allied with us. Ultimately he has to look the other way and let me guide you. But he’ll only do that if you insist it’s what you want.”

  Orla looked from Magaidh to Sorcha, who gave her a small nod. Her anamacha had glided closer to her as they spoke; she could feel the cold of its presence at her back.

  “All right,” Orla said. “When do we begin?”

  * * *

  Later that day, Magaidh and Orla walked well outside the ring of standing stones that marked the inner circle of Bàn Cill on Onglse. When they reached a gorse-laden hollow between two hills, Magaidh stopped, glancing around. “This will do,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  Orla shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “No,” Magaidh told her, shaking her head. “You can’t have any hesitation or doubt. You must be certain you’re ready to do this, and I need to hear it in your voice and see it in your body, or we’ll go back to Bàn Cill.”

  Orla gathered herself. She nodded firmly. “I’m ready.” She hoped her voice sounded convincing.

  Magaidh stared at her for a few breaths. “All right, then,” she said. “Call your anamacha to you. Go ahead and enter. I’ll be with you. Listen to my voice.”

  Orla opened her arms, and the anamacha holding her mother and the Moonshadow slid toward her, invisible in the sunlight. There was a moment of cold and disorientation, then the storm-wracked, terrifying world of Magh da Chèo enveloped her, as did the flowing presences of the ghosts her anamacha held, all of them whirling around her, surrounding her, calling to her with their cold voices. Amidst the cacophony, she thought she heard her mother’s voice as well.

  And there was another voice as well: Magaidh, calling out against the thunder and the wail of the taibhse. “I’m here, Orla.”

  Orla tried to find Magaidh in the lightning-punctuated darkness and the shrieking of the wind and the ghosts. “I can’t see you.”

  “Don’t worry. I can see you. I’m here, close to you. Listen to my voice. Concentrate on that—it’s what your mother told me the first time I used my own anamacha.”

  “I’ll try,” Orla said. The taibhse within her anamacha continued to dance and flutter around her like autumn leaves caught in a gale.

  “Good. Now, it was Iomhar whom your mother used as her conduit most of the time. Have you called Iomhar before?”

  “The ceanndraoi told me to use him, and I have.”

  “Then go ahead and call him to you. If any other draoi within your anamacha approach, even your mother, push them away. Force them to stay back.”

  Orla shook her head. She could feel her mother as well as the shrouded presence of the Moonshadow, both of them near her. She thought she could see their forms in the storm, could see their faces resolving on the swaying ghosts about her. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can,” Magaidh’s voice insisted. “Go on and call him to you. I’m watching, and I’ll pull you out of Magh da Chèo if I need to.”

  Orla took a long breath. she thought into the storm. She saw the shade that she thought of as Iomhar separate from the others, but she also saw her mother’s taibhse start to approach. Worse was the sense of a powerful presence coming closer as well: the Moonshadow, like a mountain lurking behind a screen of smaller hills, all of them ready to move aside if she came closer.

  she shouted in her mind to both her mother and the Moonshadow.

  Her mother’s voice wailed in distress, but Orla shook her head, refusing to even look at her. The Moonshadow’s presence still loomed, but it was no longer approaching though she could feel it waiting among the other spirits inside the anamacha. She thought she heard a woman’s deep voice laughing.

 

  Orla answered.

  More laughter answered, but the Moonshadow receded in her mind, sliding back into the darkness of the Otherworld. Iomhar’s shade was near Orla, and she opened herself to him, letting his presence touch her.

  “Good,” Orla heard Magaidh say. “Now use him. Create a spell—it doesn’t matter what—and weave the spell cage to hold it. Go on. Release the energy once it’s full, then step away and leave the anamacha. You’re doing fine, Orla, but I’ll stay with you.”

  Orla’s hands began to move of their own accord, weaving th
e knots of a spell cage in the air before her as Iomhar pulled the threads of energy from the storms around them. She could feel their fire burning against her skin. Create a spell, Magaidh had said, but she had nothing in mind. a voice from the anamacha called to her—her mam’s voice—and suddenly Orla’s mind filled with the image of the temple she’d known as a child on the top of the bluff in Pencraig. She’d helped her mother clean the temple many times, the two of them talking in hushed tones about when it had been the temple of Elia, before the Mundoa had arrived and placed the horrid bust of Emperor Pashtuk in Elia’s place on the altar. Orla remembered the temple, and the gilded sun-paths made of tiles, and the four windows marking the sunrises and sunsets of the solstices, and how she had seen her mother guide her father’s lost soul, his taibhse, to the sun-path toward Tirnanog. She remembered standing next to her mother, and both of them seeing the Moonshadow’s anamacha gliding through the temple’s shadows, and neither of them realizing what it was or what it would come to mean for them.

  Orla realized with a start that the spell cage was full and could hold no more of the power Iomhar was feeding her. The fury of it was already straining the knots she had created. With a cry of “Cuimhnich!”—Remember!—Orla opened her hands and released the power. At the same time, Orla heard someone shout angrily behind her in the real world, “Who said you could do this?” It was a deep male voice: Ceanndraoi Greum’s.

  The spell went careening away as Orla took a step backward, releasing the anamacha entirely. Her shoulders sagged, and her knees nearly collapsed under her from the strain of casting the spell, but she forced herself to remain standing.

  Orla turned her head to see the ceanndraoi standing there behind Magaidh, who had also left her anamacha. “Draoi Magaidh? Draoi Orla? I demand an answer!” His face was flushed, but Magaidh was staring at something behind and above Orla. Greum looked to the same spot, and Orla saw the anger drain from his cheeks, replaced by a look that seemed more shock than anger. “By Elia . . . what have you done, girl?” he said.