“’Tis easy for the queen to say, ain’t it, when it ain’t her life that’s at stake.”
His words stung her as sharply as if he’d slapped her across the cheek. Maeve took a backward step. “If ’tis what you think, then yeh really don’t know me a’tall.” She felt anger dispel the sympathetic tears that had filled her eyes while talking to Keara and Aiden. “Go and dry your arse, Niall, until yeh know what yer jabberin’ about.”
She saw Niall press his lips together, looking off across the island toward the fog-hidden harbor. She watched his shoulders slowly relax. “Sorry, Maeve,” he grunted. “Yer right. ’Tis just . . .” He waved a hand, and tendrils of the mist moved with him. “I don’t mind dyin’ meself, if that’s what it must come to. There are others feel the same. Watchin’ Keara wasting away while I’m just doing nothing—’tis the hardest thing of all. I understand what you’re saying, and yer right: if that fool of a leamh bard would come back so we could use him, that’s what would be best. But yeh don’t know that he will. Yeh ca’nah know that.”
“I can, and I do,” Maeve answered, tightly. “An’ he’s no fool, Niall, no matter what you believe. Colin’s no fool a’tall. You’ll see.”
Niall shrugged. “Then I hope you’re right.” He paused, his gaze finally finding her eyes. “I am sorry, Maeve. Truly.”
She nodded. “’Tis fine,” she told him. “I know it was yer heart speakin’, and that’s all I can ask of anyone. Now, if yeh’ll let me go, I need to talk to Fionnbharr. ’Tis time to push things forward, and he can do that, if I can convince him.”
As soon as she crossed the line of stones that marked the hill of the hawthorn tree, Fionnbharr appeared, leaning against the trunk as if he’d expected her. The mound of the hawthorn stood in an airy pocket free of Keara’s fog, as if someone had poked a hole in the mist. Sunshine poured down on Fionnbharr, the tree, and the heather, although a circular gray wall of dense fog surrounded them, boiling and twisting as if angry at being held back.
“’Tis a lovely day,” Fionnbharr remarked. “At least locally.” He gestured to indicate the mound and the fog-free air about them.
“And if it weren’t for Keara’s fog charm, that lovely day would consist of Naval Services ships in the harbor and the invasion of Inishcorr. People would be dying, both theirs and ours.”
Fionnbharr grinned at her. “Och! Such a stop-the-clock grouch the Morrígan is. And are the Tuatha de Danann supposed to be afraid of leamh in uniforms? Are they going to find the path under the tree when I have it all warded and hidden?” He gestured back to the trunk behind him. “I’m not worried about leamh soldiers.”
Maeve gave him a round of mock applause, her handclaps dead in the still air. “Such a grand lord is the great Fionnbharr and such a warrior. Perhaps yeh can hide from the leamh, but the rest of us don’t have such a refuge, and if we did, I’m tired of hiding away and waiting for the end to come—because the end is coming for all of us if we don’t take the path to Talamh an Ghlas. Consider this: I would’nah be surprised if after the leamh took those of us in the village away, that the leamh would also knock down the stones and cut down the tree, and then where will yeh and yers be, trapped under the ground forever? We all have a stake in this, and yeh know it. Don’t act like yeh and the rest of the sí have no cares a’tall.”
Fionnbharr sniffed. His booted foot stomped on the ground, and the earth shook underneath Maeve.
“Your little lamb hasn’t come in for the slaughter yet, nor has he brought yeh back the stone that holds the light. I’ve heard the others complaining about the foolishness of yeh letting the man go, and the worse foolishness of letting him keep the cloch when we need it. So, were they right?”
“No,” Maeve answered immediately, her chin lifting. “I did what I needed to do, and he hasn’t betrayed us. He’s nearly here. I can feel him and the cloch across the channel, over on the Head.”
Fionnbharr nodded. He seemed to sniff the air to the east. “I’ll give yeh that; I feel him also. Which tells me why yer here, Morrígan: yer magic can’t reach out to him through the spell of Keara’s fog, the leamh won’t let him return here, and yeh want me to do the work for yeh.”
“Ultimately we’re on the same side, Fionnbharr, are we not?”
He laughed again, his feet tapping the ground so it shook underneath Maeve as if a hundred horses were galloping below. “We’re on the same side for the moment, not to put too delicate a point on things. That may quite likely change once this gateway is opened and we’re through. My people never worshiped you, Morrígan, and we were here first. If we go to Talamh an Ghlas, everything changes. We don’t know what will happen there or how we’ll be looked at by those who live there. Ultimately, we’re not on the same side a’things.”
“I’m not asking for worship. I’m asking for yer help while we have a common enemy.”
“Does it taste like ashes in yer mouth to come begging like this?” he asked her, then shrugged. “No matter,” he said before she could answer. “What ’tis it yeh need, Morrígan, seeing as we be temporary allies? What are yeh thinkin’?”
“It’s been a long time since the aos sí rode across the water to the Head. Maybe it’s time now.”
“That’ll stir up the residents. Was’nah it yeh who told me over the last several years not to let the host ride, just to keep the leamh quiet? If we do this, they’ll be howlin’ for the Naval Services to take out the island, fog or nah. Maybe just bomb the village to rubble from above. This could cause yer war to come quicker, before yer ready for ’em.”
“It’s a risk I’ll take. It may also serve as a warning to them that we’re not powerless and they’re best leaving us be.”
He laughed. “And if we happen to pick up a certain stray mortal during our ride?”
“Then I’d certainly appreciate it if yeh also happen to bring him here.”
“Yer a devious one, Morrígan.”
Now it was Maeve who laughed, a sharp, abrupt sound as she showed her teeth. “’Tis a fact,” she said. “And more.”
28
The Night Ride
“HEY, JEN,” Colin said as soon as he heard the click of her cell accepting his call. “How’re things?”
“Colin!” His sister’s near-shout rattled the speaker of his cell phone, temporarily overriding the loud conversation in Regan’s Pub and the sound of Lucas’ band tuning up before their set. “That’s what I should be asking you. We haven’t heard from you in days now, and Mom was about ready to call the gardai there to roust you. I think she’d half-convinced Tommy that he needed to get hold of someone in the State Department to notify the embassy in Ireland.”
He could hear the relief in her voice. Colin tried to chuckle and mostly succeeded. With his free hand, he cupped the pint glass in front of him, dark with a half-finished Guinness. “You can tell her that she doesn’t need to do that. I’m alive and still here. I was out on Maeve’s island, and there’s no cell phone reception out there. In fact, there’s no phones at all, of any sort, or electricity. I just . . . well, I’m back on the mainland right now.”
“Colin, what’s wrong? You can’t hide anything from me; I can hear it in your voice. What’s the problem? Did you and Maeve already split up?”
Colin sighed, not knowing where to start or even whether he should try. “No. It’s more complicated than that. A lot more complicated. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of it you wouldn’t believe at all.”
“Try me.”
Colin did laugh at that. “Not yet,” he said. “But here’s the part you’ll understand, in a nutshell. Maeve and her people, they took over an abandoned island, and now the state wants it back and they don’t want to leave. The gardai came, and there was a bit of confrontation.” He heard her gasp at that, and he hurried to add: “No one was hurt. But they pulled me off the island because they didn’t want a foreigner caught up in it. Now the N
aval Service has blockaded the island and I can’t get back.”
“Oh.” Colin couldn’t decipher the emotions behind Jen’s single word. He waited. Lucas’ fiddle skirled a bit of a tune. “I’m sorry to hear that, but honestly I’m glad you’re out of the way, Colin. Mom will be, too. Maybe . . .” Another pause. “Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe you and Maeve just weren’t meant to be together.”
“That sounds like Mom talking.”
“Thanks,” Jen answered with heavy irony. “That makes me feel so loved.” Static hissed in Colin’s ear and he missed the opening of her next sentence. “. . . what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he told her. “I really don’t, at this point. I’d go back out there, but that doesn’t look possible.”
“I’m just as glad—if you don’t mind me sounding like Mom again. But you wanting to . . . that I can understand, I guess. If it were Aaron stuck on the island, I’d be trying to do the same thing.”
“Thanks, Jen. I appreciate you saying that.”
“Just . . . just promise me that you’ll be careful, little brother. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you, and I will.” Lucas counted off “Connolly’s Jig,” and the band launched into the tune. Colin raised his voice into the phone. “Listen, Jen, I’ll give you a call tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to listen to some music and drink a pint or three. Love ya. Tell Mom and Tommy the same, and give Aaron my best, too.”
“I’ll do that. Why don’t you call Mom? She wants to hear your voice.”
“All right,” he told her. “I will.” It was a promise he wasn’t certain he would keep, but he knew it was what she wanted to hear. “Talk to you later.”
“Bye, Colin. Love ya.” He heard the phone disconnect. He sighed and slid his phone in his jeans pocket. He picked up the glass on the table in front of him and drained it.
Sliding out of the booth, he went to the bar to order another pint. As he passed the band, he nodded to Lucas.
Lucas either didn’t see him or pretended not to. Colin shook his head and continued on to the bar.
A thick tendril of mist snaked away from the greater cloud around Inishcorr.
In the moonlight, from an airplane flying over the area, it might have appeared to be a twisting rope of silver-white smoke, curling and slithering over the surface of a preternaturally calm and flat ocean. Leading Seaman Kieran Martin, on midnight watch on the offshore patrol vessel LÉ Aisling, saw the foggy arm detach from the bank covering the island, moving impossibly against the wind and heading directly toward the ship. Kieran unclipped the mic from his uniform, calling the rating who was manning the ship’s radar scan. “Sean, are yeh seeing anything out by that island right now?”
“Neh. All quiet. What ’tis it yeh think yeh have?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe nothing.”
Kieran stared out over the bow rail, blinking his eyes as he lifted binoculars to his face and tried to focus the lenses, not certain what it was he was seeing. He pondered whether to alert the ensign in charge of the watch, when the foggy limb flexed and advanced suddenly and rapidly, growing in size until it was nearly level with the Aisling’s deck, the single coil splitting in two as it rushed toward the ship, as if a hurricane were whipping it into motion.
Kieran fumbled with the mic on his lapel, starting to call an alarm and backing away from the rail and the strange mist. The smoky murk was riddled with strange twinkling lights like torches glimpsed on a foggy night, and it was full of noise as well: thin voices shouting in ancient Gaelic, the sound of pounding horses’ hooves, and the blare of shrill trumpets and pipes. The apparition flanked the ship before Kieran could find his voice, a cold wind like the air from a grave flowing outward from it. The mist surrounded the ship, and voices called to him from within the sparkling gray. A hand seemed to whip from the cloud with a laugh, pulling the cap from Kieran’s head and flinging it past the cannon mounted on the foredeck. More hands plucked at him, knocking him to the deck, tearing away his uniform jacket and tossing it after the cap. Other hands grabbed him as voices whispered around him. “Come with us! Join us, mortal!” they called as they pulled at him, trying to drag him over the rail. He felt his body scraping over the deck plates. He clutched at a stanchion as the spectral hands pulled harder. The frigid white fog roared past him; streaks of blurred light from torches flaring within. As it engulfed him, he thought he glimpsed armored warriors riding horses with men and women running impossibly alongside.
“No!” Kieran cried, holding hard. “Leave me be!” The voices laughed, but the hands released him as the eerie fog swept past, moving beyond the Aisling toward the mainland, the twin strands recombining into one once more as they passed the ship’s stern. As the last bit of the fog passed, the ship canted over before righting itself sluggishly, as if a giant swell had struck it from the side. From the rail, Kieran watched the mist dwindle, the clamor of it fading as alarms rang over the ship and spotlights flared wildly and belatedly.
“Kieran!” his earpiece rattled. “What the bloody hell is going on out there, man?”
Kieran shook his head. “’Tis nothing of this world, I’m thinkin’,” he said.
The mist would have laughed with the comment. The line of wild fog continued to rush eastward, far faster than any speed the Aisling was capable of matching. As it neared Ceomhar Head, the fog flowed over a low island hugging the rugged coastline. A farmhouse stood there; the misty river of the wild ride flowed around and past it, trumpets blaring and riders howling. The sheep bleated in terror, the cows lowed in alarm. When the family within the farmhouse emerged, the turmoil having rousted them from their sleep, the riders were already gone, leaving behind ocean fish flopping open-mouthed in the pasture, in the yard, and on their windowsills. Their best milk cow perched precariously on the roof of the barn. Their tractor had been plucked from the barn and was buried nose-first in the hayfield, its two huge rear tires still spinning slowly. Several of the sheep had strips of their thick wool sheared from them so closely their pink skin showed, and they would find two ewes and a ram missing entirely.
The husband and wife shivered, clutching each other and looking toward the headland where a line of glowing, rushing nothingness flowed along the Beach Road toward Ballemór.
In the office of the marina along Beach Road, a security guard sat snoring in a chair with his feet up on the desk. The first indication that something might be amiss was the rattling of windows in the office, a tidal rolling of the marina dock and the slamming of boat hulls against their fenders. The harsh report of snapping nylon dock lines—sounding like automatic pistol shots—was finally enough to rouse the guard from his sleep. Bleary-eyed and frightened, wondering if the marina were somehow under attack, he ran to the door and opened it. He was immediately confronted by cold fog and wind, the marina lights cocooned and haloed in a white cotton blanket. Strange sounds assaulted his ears: not just the sounds of the restless boats, but muffled trumpets and strange, hoarse shouts. Hands from the fog fondled him as voices laughed. His hat was taken from his head and flung into the breeze; the long, hefty weight of his torch left his belt as the flashlight’s beam seared his eyes, then it, too, was gone. More hands were at his belt buckle and his pants went down to his ankles as high voices giggled. Someone pushed at him from behind as he bent to bring his pants back up, and suddenly he was flailing in cold water with a forest of hazy pilings around him. His feet could just touch the rocky bottom, and he sputtered, coughing up oily saltwater. He could hear the boats striking into each other along the marina pier, and saw one of the black-hulled hookers sailing past with ghostly figures clinging to the rigging of the red sails.
The fog whipped by him, loud with hidden creatures, then was gone. As he climbed a rope ladder back onto the docks, the moonlight revealed a tangled mess of boats and lines around the marina, and—most strangely—what appeared to be a startled ram staggering ou
t of the office door on unsteady hooves, its wool dyed a bilious and garish pink.
The guard cursed aloud, shaking his fist at the departing mist, which was moving rapidly down the Beach Road, and only mocking laughter answered him.
The mist advanced toward Ballemór proper. It being a Friday midnight, the main square there was still crowded, and those out on the streets turned in alarm as the wall of fog advanced on them without warning, with its blaring of ethereal trumpets, hooves, and voices and glimpses of strange, martial figures inside. The fog overran the moon and blurred the streetlamps, filling the main square before squatting stolid, heavy, and unmoving there. The residents of Ballemór ran aimlessly about, shouting their alarm and confusion: as the trumpets blared once, then stopped; as the clamor of hooves on the road faded to the breathy whinnying and stamping of horses reined in after a long gallop; as the sound of clinking armor rose around them; as mocking voices and unseen hands assailed the people from seemingly every side. The residents fled in any direction they could. They thought they glimpsed a squadron of ghostly, ancient warriors marching down the road through the mist, moving purposefully and steadily, the rapping of their spears on the ground terrible and frightening.
The squadron sang an old tune as they marched: “Come away with me . . .” Their massed voices were like a gale wind whistling through bending trees.
They headed for Regan’s Pub with a mission.
Colin paid the bartender for the pint and went into a shadowed corner of the bar to sulk and think.
The phone call to Jen and the way Lucas was steadfastly ignoring him left a taste in his mouth more bitter than the Guinness. He’d come to Regan’s both to listen to Lucas’ group and think over the paths he could take. Despite Superintendent Dunn’s admonitions, he was still considering ways to get to Inishcorr. Perhaps he could bribe a local fishing boat to take him out, but it was even more probable that any attempt to do that would result in the locals sending word to the authorities about this American trying to reach Inishcorr, and that could only be a disaster, leading to questions, possibly arrest, and even revocation of his visa and deportation—not to mention that even if some boat captain would do that, they would be as blind as the patrol vessels in the fog around the island.
The Crow of Connemara Page 30