by Mark Henwick
I gasped. They were beautiful. And deadly. I hadn’t had much time to examine them before, while I was just about to die, so I took the opportunity now.
There were no handles to the blades, no obvious way they connected. Each blade was a thin, slightly oval shape and looked razor sharp. They were glossy, each tucked into the next one like a feather would be. I couldn’t decide on what color they were. It was like the inside of a seashell coated with mother-of-pearl. Lustrous. Pink? Violet? Iridescent. They seemed to change color depending on the angle I looked at them from.
Bryn pressed the collar against the edge of the right wing, and wiped upwards with her hand. The collar disappeared and fresh new blades appeared.
The wing shivered as if settling into place, and she extended and contracted it to check that the blades were sliding smoothly against each other.
I made a guess: “These were all weapons?” Cautiously, I put fingers out to touch the blades, alert and ready to hold back if it caused some kind of offense.
“Yes,” she said. “I collect weapons from battles. Usually from the dead.”
I wasn’t going to count, but that was a lot of battles or a lot of dead people. Not only was the paranormal stranger than people thought, even paranormal people, but it seemed it was bigger as well.
She didn’t seem offended by my touch on her wing, and the sensation was pleasant. The blades seemed to tingle beneath my fingers. They were firm, and it felt as if they were alive somehow. They were warm, very smooth. The sort of surface I wanted to stroke just for the feeling of running fingers over it.
“That’s crazy cool,” I said.
The corners of those blue eyes crinkled. Bryn was obviously very amused.
“What?”
“You are not to know of course, but caressing a valkrie’s wing blades is very sensual. A declaration of desire.”
Beside us, Gwen cleared her throat.
“If you’ve quite finished seducing my spirit guide, I’d like to get up,” she said.
“Finished?” I said. “I’ve barely started, but go ahead.”
The little demon that used to live in my throat and say inappropriate things at awkward times seemed to have returned with Tara. What a surprise.
Bryn smiled lazily at me as her blue eyes looked me up and down.
Her wings folded back with a snick, then she disappeared.
Gwen sat up, restored to her slinky self. “It was getting boring. Choice of looking up your nose, or staring at the roof,” she said, putting on her gloves. “You realize, you really need a shower. And a shirt.”
Chapter 75
Weaver’s werewolf defenders, including Celum, were slaughtered. It was as if there was a stench that attached to outcast wolves, and getting themselves together in a group had made it worse. The werewolves of the Southern League had no mercy on any of them.
Kaothos returned the Denver Adepts who’d survived, except they weren’t the Denver Adepts anymore. They were a group of humans who’d once been Adepts. Kaothos had absorbed their corrupted spirit guides, taken all their power.
The former Adepts were welcome to try and seek out new spirit guides, but there was only one community that would accept them, and that was now the Denver coven of the Northern Adept League, headed by the Hecate Gwendolyn Enkeliekki, former Hecate of the North, former leader of the Michigan and Ontario Adepts, who Flint and Kane still referred to, even in her hearing, as Wendy Witch.
I spoke to Kaothos at length when she returned to Haven with Tullah.
Power is power the dragon had said to me. The evil comes from the use of power. The two can be separated.
That helped.
The mine was destroyed by Kaothos, and the gold that Weaver had extracted was turned into funds that went towards education and hospitals in the Uintah Basin.
The rest of Tullah’s family and her boyfriend, Matt, were recovered from their desert hideaway down in Arizona, and for the moment, they were staying at Haven along with Gwen and Gabrielle.
Skylur received a long formal enquiry from the Empire of Heaven. Stripped of its diplomatic language and polite terms, it was essentially what the hell have you been doing in Utah?
The spirit world had been churned up in a way no one had ever seen before. The predatory substantiations of the spirit world had risen from the deeps and were circling like sharks. No one was dipping their toes into the waters just at the moment. Gabrielle had become a bit tight-lipped about Adept secrets, but she’d muttered something in my hearing about seeing a legendary and terrifying substantiation called the City of Lost Gods when she’d peeked into the turmoil.
Skylur’s reply to the Empire was possibly as great a masterpiece of diplomatic stonewall as existed in Tully’s archives. It boiled down to What? Us? We thought it was you carrying on with substantiations in our territory. Very dangerous, you know. Irresponsible even.
I hadn’t had a lot of time with Gwen and Bryn. Formally, they were in my House, and the Adepts in my House and I were part of Gwen’s coven, as Tara had said.
I’d need to test out exactly what that meant before it became an issue in a critical situation.
In the meantime Mykayla, Rita and Tove were back with me at Manassah. Mykayla was still pretending to be about to change into a werewolf, but her progress so far was that she’d developed a set of Athanate fangs and blooded them.
Taylor, Kath and Tamanny were settled in David’s house, and I had to call my mom soon and explain my reasoning.
In the meantime, I was having a delayed vacation until the next halfy ritual in Louisiana, intending to enjoy it with my House and my family as much as possible.
Except for one remaining task.
Epilogue
It’d been a grand soft day in the words of the tourist agencies, which meant fog, and a rain so fine you needed gills to breathe.
And it had been a grand soft night earlier. But now the fog was shredding like streamers and the moon was up, cold and merciless, which only made the midnight shadows darker. The fog chilled my face and left it damp. It smelled of the Atlantic.
Each place has its own quality of silence, and there was a hush in this isolated Irish coastal village like a breath held too long.
I’d come down off the trail along the peninsula’s ridge, past the brooding Stone Age circle, through a small patch of woods to emerge at the top of the waiting village.
No lights. Not a single window, streetlamp or porchlight.
I followed the winding path which merged into a dirt road. I passed long, low houses hunched in the darkness to either side, surrounded by hedges and gray stone walls, wrapped in tatters of fog and shrouded in silence.
There were watchers, of course. A dozen eyes or more followed my silent progress. I could feel their presence, the weight of their regard. My skin crawled.
No voice called out. No hail. No challenge.
No welcome for a daughter come home.
At the shadowed heart, where all the village’s wandering roads met, the vision that had haunted my dreams emerged from the mists, and became real.
The village had built the small church, many years ago, within the arms of their sacred circle. No spire: instead a strange, circular tower with a conical top. Tall slot windows were cut into the front of the church. They were too narrow and they reminded me of wounds. The front door was almost hidden between wide buttresses which stamped down into the damp earth. The church’s walls and the roof over the nave formed an arch, like an upturned boat. All built in thin, gray stone, except the corners of the walls, which were large, paler rocks, rough dressed. Every stone was crusted with moss and lichens.
And the sacred circle itself: the trees.
Rowan. Beloved of Brigid whispered a voice in my ear. She offers protection from magic.
Alder. Faith above all. She summons the spirits of the air.
Hazel. Healing and knowledge.
Oak, and in its branches, mistletoe. Nobility, and sacred sight.
Th
e trees ringed the churchyard like sentinels.
All but one: the towering ash tree in the center of the graveyard.
“Hello, Ash,” I said, standing by the lychgate, messenger bag over my shoulder. Tree of dreams, tree of life, soultree of the Threefold Spiral Coven.
Hello, Amber.
My skin prickled.
I passed through the gate and into the cemetery. The older graves were on the right. Less uniform, to the point there was an unruliness about them. Celtic crosses. Plain, pale slabs. Black marble. A cherub. A weeping angel. The crucifixion.
I turned there. My fingers ran across images and letters on gravestones, reading in the darkness like Tolly. Reading the words and names, and feeling beneath. Images floated up out of the deep. Sounds. All unformed, blurred by the years, like the carvings on the standing stones of the circle on the ridge above the village.
And among the tangled, dangling lines of a thousand untold stories...
Ó Fearghail.
Children of valor. Farrell, in the modern spelling.
Two, side by side. Alone. I caressed the dates.
I’d found great-grandfather Padraig’s parents. The last of their line in the village. The only ones buried with stone markers in this cemetery.
All my other Irish ancestors in this rich earth would have been buried wrapped in linen, with the grave unmarked, its place known only to those that held them in their hearts; their memories to fade away softly and silently, their bodies to nourish the sacred circle.
But it wasn’t my family’s graves I’d come to find.
Across the path, there were new graves. Three of them, in front of the ranks of death.
The gravestones were smooth granite. The words few, eloquent in their grief. No images.
My fingers raced across the letters. All three had the family name in the old form: Ó Súileabháin. Children of the dark-eyed one. Sullivan. My fingers ran on.
Mac: Son.
Iníon: Daughter. Two of the gravestones.
I closed my eyes, rested my head against the unyielding stone. Two daughters and a son had died.
They didn’t just die, the shadows hissed. You killed them.
“Yes, I did,” I said, and the shadows moved, split into seven separate shapes standing in a semicircle about twenty yards from me. The Adept elders of the Threefold Spiral Coven.
I stood slowly.
“I killed them, and even though I’m sorry, I’d kill them again in the same circumstances.”
The cold wind off the Atlantic whispered through the trees, and carried away the last strands of fog.
I opened the messenger bag and carefully took out a wreath I’d made for these graves. It was round, like a normal wreath, but I’d woven the base from green splints—woven them in and out and around each other to form a twisting Celtic knot with no beginning and no end.
“There’s willow, and hazel, and aspen,” I murmured, as I knelt again in front of the middle grave.
For sorrow, whispered one shadow and floated forward a step or two.
I put the wreath down gently.
“Daylily,” I said, and touched the three flowers in the center.
To forget, whispered another.
No, whispered the others. We will remember.
“And a crest of cattail rushes bound by olive twigs.”
Peace. The first shadow came closer, still floating, but swaying like an old woman walking.
“For peace,” I said.
Padraig Ó Fearghail, he—
“I don’t care what he did,” I said, and rose again.
An oath was made—
Handfasted—
A word was broken—
It is our bond, or we are nothing.
It is what makes us.
“It’s not what makes you,” I said. “It’s what you’ve made yourselves.”
A woman in the middle of the arc threw back her cowl.
“You’re arrogant, to come into our place of power and challenge us,” she said. “Farrells were always so.”
“Foolish child,” a second joined in.
“I’ve already challenged you, and won,” I said, and gestured at the graves as the wind stirred the tall ash’s branches. “You left these to guard your soultree, but I had a need, and when I called, the soultree came to me. I did not will their deaths, but knowing it, I would do the same again. Your curse has returned to you.”
I felt them try again to pull the threads of their soultree away from me, but their hearts weren’t in it. They knew the truth of it. I could call on their own power to defeat them.
“Because of something my great-grandfather did or didn’t do, this coven wove a curse. A working that killed firstborn children of the Farrell family. You weep over these graves and you won’t shed a tear for the unnamed babies who never saw the light of day.”
“You lived.” It was the old Adept who’d come closest who spoke. “The curse has burned itself out.”
“No.”
Tara manifested as a wolf, clothed in flames, and there were no longer any shadows to hide in.
They cringed.
“I lived because my twin died for me. And now her spirit has merged with my wolf guide, and your curse has returned to its origin to seek its threefold price.”
The old woman fell to her knees.
“I’m eldest,” she said. “Let it fall on me.”
“An old woman in exchange for all those children?”
One by one, the other elders took stumbling steps forward and knelt.
And I knew it was because there were other children, all Sullivan blood, all children of the dark-eyed one, hidden in the village, hearts beating in terror, ears straining to hear their fate. Innocents, all bound into this obscene working. All targets for the returning curse to burn itself out. And just as an Athanate Mistress might offer her death as korheny, a sacrifice to save the others of her House, the elders knelt in front of me to plead for their children.
But if there was no coven, there was no curse left; it wasn’t my fault they’d bound the entire family into their working.
No coven would mean every person in the village with a drop of the Sullivan blood.
No curse would mean life for Kath’s unborn child.
I took a painful lungful of Atlantic air and my breath plumed in the night.
This was Tara’s call. They’d killed her.
“It was the way,” said the Adept who’d shown her face. “We were raised into the coven. We swore two oaths of entry: loyalty to the coven and the curse.”
Around me, a blur of memories rose from the ground like mists. Year after year. The midnight before the ancient feastdays. Young men and women, shivering in the darkness. Hands held out. The swift cut of a knife. Blood on the ash tree. Solemn vows.
...and death to the firstborn of Ó Fearghail.
“You could have set it down at any time,” I shouted. “One person to stand up and argue.”
But I knew it wouldn’t have been that easy.
“It defines us,” the eldest said.
She was right. Something done or said out of habit became part of what you are. A habit became a tradition. A tradition became a rule. And the rule defined you.
Until the greatest of them saw the glimmer of hope and took a step.
Their own soultree wanted to be free, even at the expense of the coven that gave it being.
I stood over their leader and took a grip on her hair, forcing her head back.
“I will define you,” I said and my fangs manifested in the shimmering light cast by Tara’s flames. “Accept my decision or die.”
A sob from the end of the circle.
I ignored it.
The woman closed her eyes.
“I accept,” she said, and her lips moved silently to words in the old tongue, greeting death.
I sank my fangs into her throat and let my eukori leap from Adept to Adept, out of the graveyard, down the silent streets, through the darkened house
s like summer lightning, gathering them all, old and young, into one awestruck Carpathian communion.
And when I held them all, I let Ash in, and let the soultree gather what I wanted from the coven: the fuel for the curse.
I had a place to hold all that anger and hate. I had a use for it, better than theirs. Fed by Ash, I took and took.
When there was no more left to take, I let my fangs slip from her throat. But I wasn’t finished.
“I bind you.” I called out the words Alice had given me. “I bind you, all here and all to come, to a new purpose, with an oath on the heads of all your children, all of them: the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.”
The chill Atlantic air stirred. Fog began to creep into the village again.
We hear, the shadows whispered.
“There’s an Athanate House called Ó Ruairc.”
“We know them,” whispered the oldest. “The Healing House.”
“They have children there, brought up as blood slaves by Basilikos, their minds twisted and tortured so that Ó Ruairc can do nothing with them. That is what will define you from this moment forward: that there will never be a soul you cannot heal, if you die trying. You will swear this.”
“We swear,” said the kneeling elders, and the shadows echoed.
“You will never speak to outsiders of this.”
“We swear.”
And then I dismantled the Carpathian communion, gently pushing Ash back.
I took the last offerings from the messenger bag and laid them down in front of the new graves.
“There’s seedlings of birch,” I said.
Alice had told me that it was the month of the birch in the old Celtic calendar.
“For new beginnings,” murmured the eldest.
“And yew,” I said, remembering the words of Felix’s sister, Martha, in the quiet cemetery behind the ranch house at Coykuti. “A friend once said to me that the yew tree lives off itself, makes itself new from all it has ever been. In the same way, you’ll always be all the things you’ve ever done, but that means you’ll be all the things you ever will do, too.”
Then I turned and walked away.