The Crow of Connemara

by Stephen Leigh

  “Niall, not now,” Maeve said warningly. “Especially not now.”

  She stood, drawing herself up. In the firelit dimness of the room, clad in her red cloak, she saw her shadow against the far wall, and it seemed almost spectral. Colin stared at her, then at the cloch in his hand. She smiled at him, reassuringly. Yeh will need to tell him all soon. There’s nah time to waste. Not now.

  “Maeve, it’s time,” Niall said, as if he’d read her thoughts. “We have to do what we need to do, and we need to do it quickly.” Maeve heard mutterings of agreement from the others in the room.

  “Yeh don’t tell me what I do or I don’t do,” Maeve answered. “Not any of yeh. I am the Morrígan. If yeh want me to open the path, then let me do it. If not . . .” Maeve shrugged. “Then go tell Keara to stop her chant, and let the leamh come here. Yeh can fight them, or yeh can just surrender to them. Either way, yeh will die. Which way do yeh want it?”

  Niall hadn’t moved; he glared at Maeve. “Yer not me mum, Maeve, so treat us like adults, not fecking children yeh can scold.”

  “Feckin’ act like an adult, and I might,” Maeve spat back. “Everything is delicate right now, and it all has to be done carefully. We can’t rush this or it will all fail, and as far as I know, I’m the only one who can open the path—except maybe Fionnbharr, and only the Ancient Ones know what he intends or who he would help. Am I wrong?” She flung an arm wide to encompass all those in the room. “Anyone here with the power, the knowledge, the skill, or the energy to create the gateway? Anyone want to take this task from me? I’ll be happy to step aside if one of yeh can.”

  Most of them stared at the floor, as if the worn planks there were somehow fascinating. Niall was shaking his head, but he wouldn’t make eye contact with her.

  “That’s what I thought,” Maeve finished. “Now—I need to talk to Colin, and I need privacy for that. Niall, go see Aiden and tell him that we have Colin and the cloch, and that Keara only has to hold on for a bit more. Liam, go down to the harbor and get your people ready. Dolan, I want you to go to the mound and tell Fionnbharr that I’ll be coming out to talk to him, and that I’m not pleased with his little joke. The rest of yeh, there’s work to be done; yeh know what ’tis, so go do it. Get yerselves ready to leave. G’wan now—the time’s nearly on us.”

  Niall pushed away from the hearth with cheeks ruddy with blood, looking as if he wanted to say more but pressing his mouth tightly shut. Slowly, with nods and murmured apologies, the others followed him from the house. When the last one had shut the door, Maeve give a sigh that even to her sounded more like a sob. Her shoulders drooped; she covered her face with her hands. “Maeve?” she heard Colin say. She felt his hand on her shoulder. She took a long breath, then let her hands drop. When she looked at him, there was a wavering, uncertain smile on his face.

  “I’ve missed yeh the last few days, Colin. More than I thought possible.” His smile morphed into a grin. “And part of me wishes desperately that yeh’d stayed away.” As she watched, the grin slowly faded.

  “Because of what might happen here?”

  “Aye. And other things as well. That stone yeh hold; how did yeh feel when yeh saw me holding it?” He seemed to be surprised at the harsh tone in her voice. His eyes widened at the sound.

  “I felt . . .” Colin shook his head. “I wanted it back. It was like part of me went missing all of a sudden.”

  “Now yeh have some understanding of how hard it was for me, when yer granddad took it away from me, and now yeh know why I didn’t take it from yeh when I showed yeh that glimpse of Talamh an Ghlas. I’ve known that pain yeh felt for a moment; I’ve borne it for a long time, since Rory took it from me.” She saw Colin clamp his mouth shut against what she was saying. His look hardened as he lifted his gaze from the cloch to her eyes. “Aye. Rory . . .” She breathed the name. She looked at his face, knowing the time for lies and half-truths was gone. She could not stop the smile that touched her lips. “So now yeh know. You reminded me so much of him when I first met you. I was Máire then, as I’m Maeve now, and I knew Rory. I knew him as I know yeh.”

  His mouth dropped open, as if he’d expected her to lie or evade. “Jesus, Maeve. Do you know how freaking weird this is? I mean, you and my goddamn grandfather . . .” He released an exasperated huff.

  “I know it’s strange to yeh,” Maeve told him. “But out there in your world . . .” She gestured eastward, toward Ceomhar Head and the mainland. “I’ve known many people’s grandparents and great-grandparents, or as many ‘greats’ as yeh wish to add. I’ve been a lover to some, a friend to others, enemy to as many others. I’ve been around a long, long time, Colin, and so have some of the others here. Aye, I knew yer grandfather and I loved Rory, I did—but to me, that’s not strange; ’tis just the way things be, and it doesn’t change a whit the way I feel about yeh. When I told yeh I loved yeh, I spoke no lie. I did and still do, and that’s nah weird or strange either; it just is—for this moment and for this time.”

  “For this moment and time,” Colin repeated. “And maybe you’ll be around for one of my grandsons, too.”

  She shook her head. “Nah. If we succeed here, I won’t. And if we don’t, then it’s also nah, I’m thinking. I will’nah survive long enough for that.” She reached out to stroke his cheek again; he started to draw his head back, then relented. He trapped her hand between his head and shoulder.

  “Damn it, Maeve,” he said. She saw him start to reach for the cloch again, then slowly pull his hand back.

  She leaned in to kiss him. “I know,” she answered. “Yeh are yerself only, my love, and that’s what makes yeh precious to me. Yer not Rory, and yeh’ve made a choice that he wasn’t willing to make. Yeh wouldn’t have fled from me as he did, and when yeh had to leave, yeh came back.”

  He lifted his head, releasing her hand. She smoothed his damp hair back, but there was still pain in his eyes.

  “Yeh read his diary, so yeh know. And now yeh know how much his leaving with the cloch hurt me, because I saw the same pain in yer eyes, only a few minutes ago, and yeh had lost the cloch only for a minute. Yeh still don’t know all the power it holds or why the cloch allowed itself to be found. Neither did Rory. Neither did I, really.” She allowed herself a bitter laugh. “Possessing the cloch, holding it, is an addiction that becomes part of yeh. Even for the few days I had it meself, I knew that. When I held it t’other day to show you Talamh an Ghlas, when I took it from your pocket just now, I could feel the pull of it again, and when I put it back in yer hand, I thought I might scream with the loss of it again as I had back then. But the cloch’s not for me. Yer the one it wants, as it wanted Rory, as it made him take it from me all those decades ago.”

  “The stone made him take it? You make it sound like it’s alive.”

  She laughed again. “I think ’tis. Do’nah yeh find yerself wanting to touch it and hold it? Don’t yeh find it comforting?” She could see the answer in his face. “Aye. Yeh know. But what yeh do’nah know is what the cloch is meant to do, what it will do, along with the power of that voice of yers.”

  As she watched, he clutched the jewel on its chain. He stroked the emerald facets of the stone. “A few minutes ago,” he said, “you said you wish I’d stayed away. Why?”

  She turned her head, watching the flames lick away at the underside of the turves in the hearth. “Fionnbharr once told me that yeh were the one meant to open the gateway, not yer grandfather,” she said, not looking back to him but at the fire. “Well, I believe he was right. Yer grandfather wasn’t the bard yeh are. The cloch knew it as well, and made Rory leave so that it could be given to yeh years and years later. Yeh and the cloch together are the key we need to open the door, along with the spell I’ll cast at the same time. I showed yeh the place before: Talamh an Ghlas, the Green Land. That’s where those of my kind will’nah die, but can thrive instead.”

  “You told me once that you
couldn’t leave Ireland. You said that wasn’t possible.”

  “’Tis not, but Talamh an Ghlas is Ireland—or what this land could be, somewhere else in another time. Colin . . .” She closed her eyes against the sudden burn of salt, her breath shallow. When she opened her eyes again, she turned to him. “We—those like me—are part of this land. What’s always kept us alive is that the leamh, the mortal people, maintained their belief in us. We’re the shadows of yer myths. We’re what yeh made to explain how things came to be. We’re what yeh believe in, deep in the core of yeh. We’re the memory of ancient days, captured in the soil and stones, yes, but also in the mortals who live here. The pull of this land kept us alive, stone and bone. But that belief has faded over time, more and more in the last few centuries, and it’s killed some of us and put others into a sleep that might as well be death.” She lifted her hands and let them fall again. “Even those of us who aren’t sleeping have been changed, slowly, over the centuries. I am the Morrígan, yes, but I’m not the same as I once was.”

  Nah. That Morrígan wouldn’t be talking to Colin at all. That Morrígan would never have let him leave when Dunn came. That Morrígan would have already done what needs to be done, without all this yammering and hesitation. That Morrígan had no room in her for affection and love, nor for doubt.

  “Yeh wouldn’t have liked me then,” she told Colin. “The land changes and therefore the people who live here change, and we will continue to change and dwindle and become less until no one any longer believes in us and we fade entirely. But in Talamh an Ghlas . . . those beliefs never died for the mortals there. There, we will live again as we once did.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She smiled. She put her hand over his on top of the pendant. “I felt it in the cloch. A cloch na thintri; a stone of lightning, ’tis called. I still feel it, even with yeh holding it,” she told him. “In Talamh an Ghlas, our kind are normal and yer kind”—she saw him wince at the implication—“are no better or numerous than any other. There, what yeh consider myths and folk tales are real. They live. We can live.”

  “So you can live,” Colin said. “But I’m not one of you. What about me? You’ll live forever. I’ll die.”

  “Yeh will. All mortals do,” she agreed, softly. She lifted her hand, looking at the cloch through his possessive fingers, watching how his eyes seemed to want to devour it. “But we can die the real death as well. The magic we have to do to open the doorway is very difficult; the power that it requires is daunting. Some of my kind have tried it before and have lost their very existence in the attempt. This is blood magic. To be successful, the spell requires a sacrifice.” She saw the question in his face though he said nothing. “Aye,” she told him, wishing he’d understood, but he hadn’t. Not quite.

  He blinked as he pushed his glasses up his nose. “Blood magic? What do you . . .” he started to say. Then, almost a breath: “Oh.”

  “That’s why I said I wished yeh’d stayed away, because now that yer here, they all expect me to start the preparations and for us to cast the spell: if we still have time, if the others can hold off the Naval Services and the NPWS long enough.” She gave a disgusted grunt. “Feck!”

  He’d let the blanket fall from his shoulders. “So none of this was real: you coming to Regan’s to hear me play, talking to me, bringing me out here, our making love . . .”

  Yeh are a demigod, Morrígan. Yer above mortal things. He’s just a leamh; he doesn’t deserve the truth yer giving him, and yeh can’t let him make the decision. Lie to him. Lie to him until it’s too late for him to stop yeh. She could hear the clamoring inside her, the war-crow’s voice, the voices of the sisters she’d subsumed and who were part of her, the voices of the women whose mortal bodies she’d taken as her own, the voices of those who had possessed the cloch before and were now trapped inside, the voices of legend and half-lost history and almost-forgotten memories.

  “No, it wasn’t real at first,” she told him, the words slow and careful. “Yeh were . . .” She stopped, began again. “The spell needs a particular type of person. There aren’t many leamh who fit. Yer grandfather was one, the first I’d met in a long time; yeh are, too. Yeh want to believe in the Old Ways and the ancient people; yeh were actively trying to understand us, through yer music. And yeh were marked from birth with the caul, as was Rory. But the spell also requires that the person has to be willing, even if what he believes is a lie.”

  “The sacrificial lamb,” Colin said.

  “That’s mixing mythologies,” Maeve told him, “but aye. A finding spell told me long ago where Rory and the cloch were, but I couldn’t leave the soil here to go to him, and he never returned on his own. I think he knew I’d find him if he did, an’ he was afraid of that. So I watched, and I knew yer father was born, but he didn’t have the caul nor the ability Rory had, so I waited even longer, and yeh came. When it was time . . . well, yeh know that. Yeh saw me; yeh saw the green land, yeh heard my call, and yeh answered. Aye, I went to Regan’s deliberately to see yeh, and aye, the flirting that night was deliberate, too.”

  “And you used another spell to make me infatuated with you also.” Colin was scowling, looking down at the floor. “Like you did with my grandfather.”

  “Aye, I did that for Rory,” Maeve told him. “’Twas necessary, but it di’nah last long enough, did it? But for yeh I cast no glamour at all. With yeh, ’twas genuine.”

  “Because I’m a sap and a fool.”

  “Yer neither. I couldn’t love yeh if yeh were that. And I do love yeh, Colin. ’Tis the truth, and I wish I could make yeh believe that. I hope yeh feel it, even now.” She watched him as he took in that statement. He sniffed, his fingers still prowling over the cloch as if the answers were written there. She thought his expression was snagged between hope and skepticism. The voices inside her howled in derision.

  “I can’t tell when you’re lying and when you’re telling the truth,” he told her.

  “I understand, and I’m sorry for it. Colin, if I’d wanted, I could have stopped yeh from ever leaving the first time yeh came to the island. ’Tis a fact, and Niall wanted me to do exactly that. A spell, a minor glamour; that’s all it would have taken; yeh were infatuated with me, and just a nudge would have changed yer mind and kept yeh here—and if I had, Dunn and the NPWS wouldn’t have had time to act as they have. But I waited, because . . .” Her thoughts swarmed with things she couldn’t say, that she was afraid to say because she knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t, believe her. Heroes have changed, she could have told him. In the past, it only mattered how well you fought, how many men yeh could slay and how strong yeh were. Now, courage is measured in other ways. It’s in what yeh believe, and whether yer willing to stand firm in that belief and follow it, no matter what others tell yeh. I’ve seen yeh do that. “ . . . because as much as is possible for the Morrígan, who has lived too long and known and lost too many lovers and watched too many grand heroes die in my name, I also loved yeh, and I wasn’t willing to do what I was supposed to do. Believe that, Colin. Please believe it.”

  Colin had started to speak, and she lifted a hand to stop him. “Nah, let me finish, now that I’ve started. Part of me was pleased when Dunn took yeh, because I thought he might also take the decision from my hands and send yeh home where I couldn’nah bring yeh back. I wanted the decision taken from me entirely.”

  “You didn’t hesitate to send the aos sí after me when you found out I was still there, did you? I’m just something for you to use. A tool.”

  “No,” she told him. She stretched her hands out to him, wanting him to take them, but he only stared at them, as if their touch might burn him, and his fingers wouldn’t leave the stone. “Have yeh been listening to me? I care for yeh, Colin. ’Tis truth.”

  “You told Niall and the others to start getting ready to leave. How are you going to do that if I’m not willing to be your sacrifice?”

 
“I ca’nah do it,” she told him. “I lied to them because . . .” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. The cloak felt impossibly heavy on her body, as if she were but a specter of herself, a wisp as insubstantial as Keara’s fog. She inhaled the scent of peat: an odor as old as herself. There has to be an answer. There still has to be a way to do this. “Come with me to see Fionnbharr. I need to talk to him, or it all falls apart whether yeh help or nah.”

  30

  Let Sleeping Gods Lie

  COLIN WALKED WITH MAEVE through the dense, cold fog up the path from her house to where the land lifted under their feet. Suddenly, the fog vanished as if they’d walked through a wall, and overhead he could see the brightening sky of dawn and the mound of Fionnbharr rising at the lip of the island: Cnoc Deireadh. “Promise me this much,” Maeve said to Colin as they approached the mound. It was the first words she’d spoken since they left the house. “Just pretend that yeh agree with me, even if yeh don’t. Would yeh do that much? I want Fionnbharr to think that we’re a unified front, or we lose his cooperation when we need it more than ever.”

  “The asshole dropped me in the goddamn ocean,” Colin said, glaring at the mound, standing now in quiet moonlight despite the fog that wrapped the rest of the island. “He nearly drowned me.”

  “I know. But the Lord of the Sidhe isn’t mortal, and he doesn’t think like one.”

  “And you do?” he asked, and Maeve stopped. She caught his gaze with her eyes; he found that he couldn’t look away.

  “No, I don’t either, and ’tis good yeh understand that. But . . . When I gave meself to you, Colin, there was no lie at all in me. I wanted yeh as any mortal woman might want the man she desires. I still want that, no matter how yeh feel about me now. That hasn’t changed.”