“I don’t remember you. My memories from earlier in my life are mostly gone,” I repeat. “Pulania…” she starts when I mention Pulania’s name. “Pulania, our mother, took my memories away to protect me.”
She’s definitely stiffened. Have I said the wrong thing?
“You’re not like other elementals, are you? You haven’t lost yourself.” I try again.
“No, I’m not lost. I remember everything.”
Oh shite, was there some accusation there? This isn’t going well. Maybe I should just shut up and let her lead the conversation.
“You didn’t follow. You stayed to help her. You said you would follow.”
“You mean, when we were babies? When you tore through Pulania’s womb and left?”
Her eyes go down and she’s shaking her head.
“You really don’t remember, do you?” she asks, and her voice has cracked.
I just shake my head.
She looks to her side, and her arm wipes away a tear. She turns, and walks away into the mist.
I’m a bit stunned. I don’t know what to think of this exchange. After a second I follow her, I can sense her presence, and can follow even though I can’t see for all the cloud around me. The mist is actually dispelling now anyway. After a few more seconds I can see her again, she’s in a hollow. She’s sensed that I was following but is trying to get away. I quicken my pace, and she breaks into a run, she’s so graceful, I almost stop to admire her movement. As I keep my eyes on her, her form melds and ripples into the loose clothing that she had been wearing, flesh forms into feathers, her arms spread into wings, and she flows from the ground to the air, having taken the form of a white swan.
I stand and watch as my sister flies away from me, far off into the distance, now clear and devoid of all the fog that had blanketed the area only a moment before.
Cool, she’s a character out of a Hans Christian Andersen story.
Chapter 32: Eppy
“She can shape shift,” I murmur in reply to Pulania’s question.
Pulania and the others have come up beside me now that the fog has cleared. They’d seen my sister from a distance, and Pulania had asked me what happened. Well, a lot, actually, but shape shifting was definitely a high light. There are only a very few creatures of power who have that ability.
“She probably gets that from her father, angels can shape shift. Though it might also be something that comes from her grandmother,” Pulania comments, her eyes on the horizon.
The silhouette of the swan is just a fleck against the early morning sky, and is slowly receding from our view.
“She seemed just like you or me. She’s not a lost soul, Pulania. She has a sense of self, in fact…” some of the details of our meeting are only just occurring to me, she was well dressed, her voice had a posh Irish accent, she sounded, educated. “… in fact, I think she lives a normal life when she’s dormant.”
Pulania’s head snaps around to me.
“I think I can find her. I mean, she can sense me, and now that we’ve met, I think I can also sense her. We should go to Dublin,” I tell her.
“Well,” Pulania replies, “the rest of the coven is meant to rendezvous there, but the Seelies aren’t going to be happy having a British dark coven land on their door step. We still have an Unseelie King to deal with, but he can wait.”
“Oh, there was a demon down in the tunnels when we were there, and some Unseelies, the creepy kind, not the Faerie kind.”
“Yuck. A demon, hey. Probably one of the ones we’re hoping the Unseelie King might lead us to,” Pulania says.
“He’s long gone now, I could feel him leaving with the other Fae when they fled,” I reply. “Dublin then?”
“Dublin it is. I’ll keep the coven under wraps and the Seelies calm, you find your sister, and… and just what will you say to her?”
I ignore that question, largely because I have no idea how to answer it. “Yeah, about that, does my sister happen to have a name? I mean, I know she sort of bolted before being born, but it would be nice if I had some way of actually addressing her. She knew my name.”
Pulania crosses her arms around her chest and looks to the ground. “You were Amura and Elspeth for years before you were born. She might call herself anything, really, but…”
“She might call herself Elspeth,” I finish for Pulania.
“Eppy, for short. The two of you must have heard things from the womb since you could speak when you were born. She might still call herself Eppy.”
***
We leave Bríghe and Kathleen to guard the ordinance at the Hermitage until it can be moved. It’s unlikely that any of our enemy will return, for a while at least, but it wouldn’t do to leave it without someone watching over it.
We come out of the Faerie path near the Irish girls’ pub, I start to walk toward it, but Pulania holds me back.
“Wait a minute, Jimmy will be here shortly.” True to Pulania’s word Jimmy appears within a few seconds of our standing there, he simply appears from around a corner as though he’d been waiting there all along, though I know he must have cast a shite full of watch spells around Dublin so that he’d know whenever we’re in town.
“Lassies! Ye’ve come to visit me, have you now? Welcome back to Dublin.”
“We’ve a bit of a situation, Jimmy.” Ooo, there’s ice in Pulania’s tone. “Our coven has retreated from our hold on the Borderlands to Dublin. We’ve come in tow.”
Jimmy freezes. “Your black coven, you mean, lassie?”
“Aye, Jimmy. The darkest coven to ever practise in the sister isles of Hibernia and Britannia is here now.” There’s definitely a bit of a gloat in Pulania’s voice. Jimmy is effectively discomfited.
“Now, that wouldn’t be a good thing, lass, remember your promise to Áine.”
“This is nothing to do with us, Jimmy. The coven goes where it will, it’s not at our beck and call. They’re not bound by our promise.”
“It still isn’t a good thing. The Elemental has stirred again. Your coven will bring her down upon us,” he replies to Pulania.
“I don’t think so.” I break into the conversation, and Jimmy’s head turns to me, there’s curiosity in his look.
“A truth for a truth, Jimmy.” Pulania drags his head back to her. “I’ll tell you about my daughter if you tell me about yours.”
Jimmy looks back to me. “Amura and I have already met, as it happens.”
Pulania hits Jimmy on the shoulder. “Not that daughter, my other daughter.”
Jimmy stares at Pulania for some seconds. I can’t read the expression on his face, is he in shock?
“Deal.”
“You start,” Pulania prompts.
Jimmy shrugs. “Well, it not be much to tell, Shania was born in the mid-1800s after the famines. Her mother was a Fae witch, a solitaire. She were exceedingly beautiful, but she did not survive the birthing of the bern. Shania were brought up in the Seelie court for a time, but when she grew older she grieved for her own kind, so now she lives in Dublin, protected by what charms I can place around her.”
“Huh, that seems pretty straight forward. So you knew Shania’s mother well before you met Pulania,” Gil comments, and I think there was a bit of softening of Pulania’s features when she heard that. Hmm, okay so Pulania’s big green monster has been slain. Good to know.
We all turn expectantly toward Pulania. “Your turn,” I prompt her.
“Oh, oh yes, well, Amura is a twin. Her sister broke through my womb a few weeks early, went rogue, and turned into the strongest Elemental seen for millennia, that’s the one you’ve been having problems with here. Apparently she’s still compos mentis though, so not like your modern day Elemental, more like your ‘spawned by Gaea’ Elemental. Amura is going to go and have a chat with her while you and I keep the coven from rampaging through Dublin. I think we’ll just keep the alcohol flowing until they’re all too drunk to move. What do you think?”
“A child broke t
hrough your womb?”
“Tore it right open, then turned herself into a winter storm and whisked herself away. It was terribly dramatic at the time. Almost died from that, worse pain I’ve ever experienced. Turned me right off child birth, I can tell you. Of course that was more than a millennium ago now.”
I don’t think poor Jimmy knows how to react.
“Gil and I will just be on our way. You guys keep the coven under wraps. Are there taxis around here?”
“Aye, just around the corner down there, there’s a hotel, they’ll call one for you.” Jimmy points down the road, but he barely seems to be with the flow.
“Come on, Jimmy, I’ll need someone who can hold their booze for this job.” Pulania takes Jimmy’s arm and drags him toward the pub. “The girls can look after their part of things, we get the fun part.”
Chapter 33: A house in the country
In the end, we just steal the taxi driver’s car. I mean, who needs the middle man, and it was way too hard to explain where I wanted to go. We’re not actually going to a place like a particular street or such, I’m following a feeling, and that means lots of backtracking to new streets, and lots of checking by Gil of the GPS on her phone.
“I think we need to go more that way.” I point toward a row of houses, meaning the general direction beyond them.
“If you take the next left, there’s a road that leads off from there in that direction. We can follow it for a while,” Gil answers.
I signal to take the car out from the curve and follow the direction Gil gives me. I had just parked off to the side for a second or two to try and figure out which way to head. We have been travelling like this for a good three hours now. We’d slowly been making our way to the edge of the suburbs. Following the new roads that Gil has found we head out into the countryside. Thank Gaea we have the GPS, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to find our way back otherwise.
“Well, this is nice and green,” Gil comments.
“Yeah, Dublin’s suburbs are a bit dreary as cities go. The countryside is nice though, it lives up to the Emerald Isle troupe that they use for tourists.”
“That’s so cynical. By the way, do you have any idea where we are?”
“I think we’re headed north toward County Mead, but she’s closer than that, I can feel her. We’re not that far away now,” I answer.
The roads have thinned out, I take a turn onto a country lane with high hedges bordering the roadway. There’s only room for one vehicle, really, but there’s enough room to pull over and let someone pass if I need to. Another turn, and there, ahead of us, is a driveway leading to a gate house.
“This is it.”
I pull the taxi over in front of the gatehouse. Gil and I get out and stare at the gate, it’s a pretty substantial obstacle made of wrought iron and sandstone, and it’s locked. What’s more, there are charms protecting the front from magiks, I can see them with my true seeing.
“I think I can pick the lock on this gate,” I tell Gil.
“Please don’t. I don’t want to have to pay for a new one.” A disembodied voice squeaks out from a loudspeaker near where I was examining the gate lock. There’s a click, and the gate unlocks itself. Huh, an electronic lock, pretty high tech considering that this gate house is Georgian. I somehow expected something… old school? Like two big burly guys or something.
“Just come in, you can follow the road to the house.”
The gate that’s opened isn’t the larger car gate, this one is only for people. We abandon the stolen taxi and begin the walk up a cobblestone driveway. There are manicured lawns and sculpted gardens. The walk is quite a long one with a row of trees on either side of the twisted drive. After a couple of hundred metres the trees stop and the vista opens toward an old Georgian mansion with tan sandstone that matches the gate house.
“Impressive,” Gil comments.
“Yes, impressive,” I agree.
A short stroll farther and we come to a heavy wood door, but it’s been left ajar for us to pass. This is the type of old country house that once would have had a dozen or more servants, but there’s no sign of any now. We enter into an ornate entrance hall, with Victorian décor in the cluttered style of the time. Hmm, not really to my taste, but I can appreciate the ornate nature of what is on display.
I can feel my sister a little further on, waiting for us in a room to the upper right of the entrance, but there is a strange sensation coming from another room, just to our left. There’s something there that is a little unsettling. I move toward the entrance to that room. Turning the door handle, I move into a chamber filled with antique pictures. There is such sadness here, the room almost has its own emotion. It’s an old sitting room, complete with a grand piano, well-padded chairs, a few tea tables, but everywhere there are pictures. Portrait photographs, some painted miniatures, mostly of children.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“They’re all my children, the children I’ve had over many hundreds of years. Some of them lived to old age, many had children of their own, and then their children had children, and theirs. There are several generations of my descendants in the towns hereabouts, but this is the room of my children.” Her voice is soft, pitched so we can just hear her. She didn’t startle me, I could feel her approach when we veered in here.
“I can feel the remorse here.”
“Yes, come away, close the door. I try not to come in here often, and I usually only come in alone.” She leads us back to the entrance hall.
She can have children, as a creature of darkness I have given that possibility away for extended life, but my twin sister has very different magiks compared to me. She may even be an immortal, given that she is an Elemental and a granddaughter of Gaea. The only reason I’m pregnant is because of Master, his being an angel created a little miracle, otherwise the joys of motherhood would never be known to me.
I wonder how many children she’s had?
“A hundred and three,” she answers my thought, and then as she does so she turns to face me. “You didn’t say that, did you? I mean, I heard you ask the question, but you only thought it, you didn’t say it?”
I roll my eyes. “Another one. Why does everyone else get to read my mind?”
“There are others?” she asks.
“Yes, Gil here…”
“Your familiar?”
“Yes, that’s right. Gil, Pulania, on occasion Susan, Master, but he’s an angel, so he doesn’t count. The list goes on, it seems my mind is an open book.”
Eppy leads us into a drawing room. She has tea ready for us. I guess she could feel us coming, just like I could feel where she was.
Gil and I take a seat across from my sister.
“It is Eppy? Is it? Pulania thought it might be.”
“Yes, Elspeth. Eppy for short.” She’s not looking at us, she’s concentrating on pouring us some tea. “Do you take milk, sugar?”
“Both for me,” Gil answers.
“Just milk for me,” I answer.
“I’ve never had any children of my own. Do you have any now, Eppy?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “No, it’s too hard, watching them grow old and die, I haven’t had any children for, oh, almost a hundred years now. But why haven’t you had any before? You’re with child now.”
“Yes, but I’m a dark witch, Eppy. I shouldn’t have any children. I’m only having this one because the father is an angel.”
The cup she was raising to her lips shakes, and she brings it back down to its saucer.
“Our father was an angel.”
“Yes. He is. Your magik must be very light to be able to have children.”
“Your child may be like us. It may not age and die so quickly.”
“Yes,” I answer. “That may be right.” She still hasn’t looked me in the eye.
“Do you mind me calling you Eppy?” She shakes her head. “Where did you go so long ago, Eppy?” I put my hand on her knee. “Pulania says we f
ought, that we fought in her womb. I’m a dark witch, you’re much lighter. Did I do something? I might have, If I did I don’t remember, but I could have.”
Her eyes swing up to mine, and I start back a bit. For the briefest of moments there was spite there.
“I’ll take the child if you don’t want it, Amura. I’ll look after it like it was my own.”
I can read her thoughts too. Something happened, all those years ago, something that she hasn’t forgiven me for. But the child, she’s desperate for the child. She’ll do anything to have my child, another semi-mortal… like us.
I stand up, sending china cups clattering to the ground. “You want to take her from me.”
Eppy stands too. “I would love her like my own. Love her forever.”
“I’ll love her, too.”
“You can’t love, Amura. You’re dark, too dark, you could never love her like I could.”
I have to get out of here. This little chat with my sister isn’t going anywhere near how I thought it would.
“We’re outta here, Gil.”
Chapter 34: The birthing of twins
The taxi ride back was a lot quicker than it took to get there. Well, instead of relying on my feeling of where Eppy was, we had the address of the pub, so the GPS was a lot more effective in finding our way back, duh. It only took us about three quarters of an hour, helped by the fact that it was outside of peak hour. Gil drove back, I was too upset. Behind us, the whole way, black-green clouds broiled with malevolent intent, but I know they won’t come into the city, because that’s where I am, and Eppy wants the baby I’m carrying.
We ditch the taxi pretty close to where we’d stolen it. The poor cab driver was just sitting there near the curb, his whole world having collapsed, until Gil threw the keys back in his lap.
“You need petrol,” I murmur, but I doubt if he heard me, he was too surprised by the reappearance of his keys and cab to worry about us.
Jimmy is there waiting inside the door of the pub, watching the lightning storm that has erupted behind us. He gives me an accusing look when Gil and I enter.
The Dark Witch and the Elemental Page 12