by Natalie Grey
“What about the innocents, then?”
“Innocents always die when something like this happens.” He lifted his shoulders and held up a hand to stop me. “No, hear me out. Innocents always get caught in the middle, and how many more do you think will die if you let these abominations go free?”
“That’s not the point—”
“It’s exactly the point,” he snapped at me. “What was it you said earlier about yourself, that sometimes one person has to die for the world to be made whole? How can it apply to you and not Daiman, then, huh?”
I tried to shake my head, but I couldn’t move. This wasn’t happening, I told myself.
“You came here to run away from who you are,” Philip accused me.
“To change who I am!”
“You thought if you just ran far enough, you could stop wanting power!” he shouted back. “That’s not change, that’s cowardice. And in the process, you decided that politics can’t touch you here, that schemes for power weren’t yours to get involved with. Well, guess what? People like this change the world, for better or worse, and if you were the person you say you’re trying to be, you’d be working to stop them.”
I stared at him in silence.
“You’re wrong,” I said finally. “Daiman—”
“Yes,” Philip said. “Daiman. What do you think Daiman would tell you to do, Nicola?”
Chapter Twenty-One
I could hear my heart beating far too loudly in my ears.
“What did you say?”
“What would Daiman tell you to do?” He was staring at me intently.
“That isn’t fair!” The words burst out of me.
“Answer the question.”
I wanted to walk away, but even that would be an admission of sorts. I dropped my head into my hands and rubbed at my eyes.
“You know he’d tell me to run away from it all and not get involved,” I said miserably. “He’d want me to save myself and … leave him.”
Only that wasn’t quite right, and we both knew it.
“He’d want you to save yourself, yes.” Philip shook his head slightly. I prayed for him to stop talking, but he wouldn’t. “But I don’t think he would tell you to run away. Do you?”
“I … don’t know.” I looked away.
“Yes, you do.” There was almost pity in his eyes. “You know exactly what he would say.”
“How are you sure of the answer?” I shot back. I hated him more than anything right now.
He heaved a sigh. “Because they’re all the same,” he said. “All the ‘honorable’ people. They’re all the same. He’d sacrifice himself in a heartbeat if it meant taking out a monster like the one in there. He’d tell you to plunge a sword right into his chest, if that was what it took. He’d even climb up on the altar for you.”
I pressed my eyes shut, but the tears escaped anyway. This couldn’t be happening….
“Of course, he wouldn’t want you to have to be the one to do it,” Philip continued relentlessly. “You’re right, he’d want you to be safe, far away from all of this. But it really is you or no one right now, isn’t it? And you know how much he regards duty and honor and self-sacrifice and all those noble things. He’d tell you to do what you had to do.”
“It’s funny.” I shook my head. “I can’t tell anymore if you hate him or not.”
Philip heaved a sigh. “Of course I hate him. He’s obsessed with ideals I despise, and he took you from me.”
“And if he dies—”
“Yes. It’s the only way I have a chance of getting you back.” He was staring at me. “The thing is, it’s what he’d tell you to do, and you know it.”
He tried to hide his smile, but he couldn’t. He was too pleased by this turn of events.
“I never thought he’d be the one to do himself in and give me the opening,” he said, hardly bothering to hide the triumph in his voice.
It took everything I had, every ounce of self-control, every muscle held rigid, not to grab him out of that cage and slam my fist into his smug face. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to suck the life right out of his body, and I could do it if I just opened those bars.
And I couldn’t take that risk.
“I didn’t mean it,” Philip said quietly.
“Yes. You did.”
“For the love of God—do you think it’s easy to watch him have everything I wanted? You think I just wanted a figurehead, but I swear to you, Nicola, that’s not true.” There were tears in his eyes now. “I had over 600 years to mourn you and I still never came to terms with the fact that you were gone. We were rivals, I won’t deny it, but we were human, too. We knew what it was to love someone.”
I couldn’t go through this again. I couldn’t say the tired words that I had changed, because I wasn’t sure I had.
He was right. If Bronach was right about what was in that hall, it needed to be destroyed. I was able to see that easily enough. In any other circumstance, I’d be the one arguing for the hall to burn. If it weren’t Daiman in there, I wouldn’t even have hesitated.
I never got to say goodbye. I turned away and wiped angrily at the tears. I couldn’t bear for Philip to see this. I couldn’t say that to him.
“Do you know why I was willing to save him?” Philip asked.
“To get free.” I sniffed and stared out at the horizon. I didn’t turn around.
“Because I didn’t want to see your heart broken.”
I bowed my head. “Philip—”
“You’re saying goodbye to him right now,” he interrupted me. “And it’s breaking my heart to watch you. It’s why I kept telling you to walk away from him, I didn’t want to watch you live with being betrayed, or having to kill him. But … I never thought it would end like this.”
And it was. It was ending exactly like this.
I wrapped my arms around myself and bit my lip until I was sure it was going to break and bleed. I didn’t move even when I saw the dark-cloaked figure appear silently nearby.
“Fine.” I didn’t look at Bronach. I didn’t look at anyone or anything. My voice cracked. “You win.”
She didn’t react to that at all, and I whipped my head around to look at her, practically snarling.
“Anything to say to that?”
She only looked at me.
“You prove it to me,” I told her. My voice was trembling. “You prove that what’s in there is an abomination, and I’ll help you. No matter what it costs, I’ll help you. I was supposed to learn to….” My voice trailed off, too high, and it took a moment to steady myself. “I was supposed to learn how to make the world whole,” I whispered. “And that’s what he’d want me to do. That’s what he’d tell me to choose.”
Bronach looked away, at the expanse of the Burren.
“This is what it costs,” she said inconsequentially. “This is what it means to be a druid. They don’t tell you that. As the years pass and the ages turn, you have to choose between being a druid … and your humanity. You have to break your heart a thousand times over. If you choose to be a druid, you will be something beyond human comprehension, you will walk the line between the worlds and see eternity, and you will learn to heal the heart of the world. If you choose to be human, with this power, it will fester. It will corrupt everything it touches.”
She looked over to where I was staring at her, somewhere beyond tears now.
“No one told you what it would really cost,” she said quietly. “Not everyone can see it. It doesn’t happen in five hundred years, or a thousand. It takes much longer. But you and Daiman would have faced trials greater than this, in the end.”
A cold sense of inevitability descended over me. For a moment, I glimpsed something greater, a pattern too wide for consciousness to encompass, and I saw the lonely road I had been meant to walk.
“Should I not have come?” I looked at her.
“You had to come,” she countered. “They did not want you here, with your sorcery. They thought it tainted
you. They wanted to be humans, with their petty bickering and their squabbling. They wanted to grab at magic like it was true power. In the end, though, you will remain and they will be gone. You were made to be a druid, beyond anything they could comprehend. You were made to see eternity.”
She held out her hand.
“Come.” Her voice was implacable and distant. “Bring him, and come with me. You will need more than you have, if you are to walk within time.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I looked over my shoulder at Philip. He was trying very hard to hide his sudden leap of hope, but he wasn’t doing very well at it.
“Releasing him could be a bad idea,” I said cautiously.
“You will need him,” Bronach told me simply.
As if that solved all my problems.
“Why?” I pressed. “I’m the one who’s destined to be a druid, yes? Why do we need him, too?”
Philip managed not to sigh, but I could see him fairly vibrating with tension in his cage. He wanted out. He wanted out so very, very badly.
I didn’t like this at all.
“You are one druid with the tiniest part of her training,” Bronach said in a very long-suffering tone. “I, as much as I might like to do more, can only guide you. While you attempt to work with one of the greatest spells druidic magic has ever produced, both of us will be vulnerable. We will need someone capable to stand guard.”
I groaned. “Oh, I do not like this.”
“Is that relevant?” Bronach asked. One red eyebrow arched.
“I don’t like you, either,” I muttered, but I went to the cage. Philip’s smile only made all of this more galling.
When the door swung open, I saw how much effort it took for him not to lash out at me and run. I saw it all in the flash of his eyes: the long days pacing around the cage, the fear that he would never be released, the anger that festered into hatred.
He controlled himself with an effort and stepped through the door with admirable dignity.
“Thank you,” he said precisely. “You know, Nicola—”
“We don’t have time for that,” Bronach interrupted.
I tried to hide a smile. Maybe she had her good qualities, after all.
“You.” Bronach gestured imperiously to Philip. “Walk with me, and tell me of yourself.”
I trailed along after them as she strode across the rock. Wind swirled around the two of them, Philip’s bright head bent to Bronach’s even brighter one, and I was shut out of their discussion entirely.
Philip, whatever he was saying, was too caught up in it to notice as we slipped out of the world we were in and into the heart of the domhan fior.
I, however, tried to feel it as we went. Over time, I had come to find the domhan fior the way one would find a note while singing. Stepping out of the world I was in, was its own skill, a sort of letting-go that required one to stop seeing the world with the basic senses. Finding another world, however … that was different.
The heart of the domhan fior had an entirely different resonance: the pulse I had noticed the last time. It felt like my own pulse was only an echo of this greater, larger heartbeat. That was how I would find it in the future, I decided, as I tried to make my way between the worlds. I would listen for that deep heartbeat and hopefully it would lead me to this place.
I looked around myself at the flickering trees and noticed something strange: as soon as I stopped expecting them to be anything in particular, they stopped changing their form so often. I remembered Daiman telling me that they weren’t really trees and grass at all, simply the projections of a human mind used to a certain reality, and my head started hurting.
The trees also started shifting, worriedly, as if trying to find some sort of form that was more accurate to their true reality.
“You don’t need to do that,” I murmured, squeezing my eyes shut to block out the bizarre flicker of images, and promptly tripping over a fallen tree branch.
Strong hands helped me up, and for a good few moments, Philip was far too close for comfort. The ozone smell of his magic mixed with the smell of skin and hair and the heat of him, and I wanted him to wrap his arms around me and tell me that it would be all right.
I wanted anyone to do that, I corrected myself. Philip wasn’t special, he was just here, and familiar.
I took my hand away with a pained smile, and gave a snort of laughter when Philip finally noticed his surroundings.
“What the hell is this place?”
“Young man,” Bronach said tartly, “get ahold of yourself.”
“What is that thing?” He pointed at a tree.
I looked. It just looked like a tree to me, but Heaven alone knew what he was seeing.
“It’s a growing thing,” I said succinctly.
He stared at me mutely.
“I dunno, it looks like a maple to me.” I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s not, though. It’s a growing-thing. You can’t try to be too specific with it.” I took great pleasure in brushing past him to catch up with Bronach. “So, where to next?”
She was smiling slightly. “To the pool, of course.” She picked up her skirts as she walked, a more human gesture than any I had seen so far. “Come along, Philip Allaire.”
Philip, still muttering about worlds where everything was what it was without needing to move around all the time, followed us with his shoulders hunched.
“You know, if you’d grown up here, you’d probably be able to see everything just fine,” I told him. “And then everything in our world would look like funny versions of whatever this all really is.”
I snuck a glance at Bronach to see what she thought about this. She gave a small shrug. This seemed close enough to accurate for her.
“Druids and their worlds,” Philip said, with feeling.
“Yes, well, quiet down, both of you.” Bronach led us into the clearing by the pool, and beckoned me forward to kneel with her beside the almost-water.
Her hand pulled mine forward, her touch cool and as not-quite-there as her face, and our joined hands hovered over the surface of the pool for a moment. Beside us, Philip waited uneasily.
“You must see without being drawn in,” she told me seriously. “The curse on me cut me off from druidic power, and if the same happens to you, we’ll only have another of us trapped. You must see through my eyes into the past, see the spell I built, see the curse that holds me—but you must not be drawn in.”
I nodded warily.
And then she plunged my hand down into the water and I didn’t have much of a chance to do anything at all.
Images passed before my eyes, too quick for me to do anything but sink into them. I was in another body, ancient but strong. Through Bronach’s eyes I could see the world as it truly was—or at least, more nearly as it was. Time eddied in little currents around us, the life force of animals flared nearby, and then….
And then I felt the spell.
My magic came from inside me, save for the one time I had been able to call down the light of the sun and forge it into a blade for myself. This magic was a call to the world itself, and it required a greater view than anything I had ever seen.
I cried out, and Bronach’s hand held mine firmly under the surface of the pool.
“Watch,” she told me, but she didn’t need to worry. I couldn’t look away.
I was trying, and I couldn’t.
To capture time, one had to see time, and to see time was terrifying. It spun away from me in circles and orbs and shapes that had no name, that were far beyond any sort of form bounded by dimensions.
If it were up to me, I would never have walked this path. I would be terrified that I would never find my way back to the world and the self I knew. To become a druid, to embrace the full power of what that meant … one had to walk those paths, and accept the possibility that there might be no way back.
And walking it now wasn’t my choice, but Bronach’s. This was a memory.
I wasn’t sure if I was still
screaming. I could feel her hand, but only faintly. I was in more places than just this pool, and more times. Perhaps I was time. The thought didn’t seem so unlikely right about now.
“I can’t.” The words, made to form human concepts in a mortal world that encompassed only a sliver of time, were jarring. They described such little things. I almost didn’t know what they meant.
But it was my voice saying them.
I was hauled up, and there were arms around me, carrying me away. Bronach and Philip were speaking over the top of my head, Philip’s arm around one side of me, hers around the other. They were arguing, but I couldn’t make the words out.
I didn’t come to, not properly, until I was dumped onto the ground in the world I’d grown up in. I stared up at sky-that-really-was-sky, and the two faces of my compatriots, and felt myself sink back into my bones.
“Are you ready?” Bronach asked me.
Of course I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I had just seen, and yet I was somehow supposed to work with it. I said something, muzzily, and from the look on Philip’s face, he had no idea what the sounds meant.
Bronach, on the other hand, nodded. “Time itself was what I needed you to see. I would have taken more time with it, but….” She looked over her shoulder. “They know we’re coming. How, I’m not sure. I think….”
“What?” Philip snapped.
“I think they felt her moving in time,” Bronach murmured. “She can see the spells and the curse—and that’s like a fly on a spider’s web. They know we’re here, they know we’ve seen what they did.” She pulled me up to sit. “Are you ready?” she asked me. “First the serpent, then the rest.”
I focused on her face, and then—when I remembered her face wasn’t real—I focused beyond her, to the hall. The serpent wasn’t visible, but I could feel it. I knew it was there.
I pushed myself up. I was definitely coming back into my body. To my surprise, it felt rather more confining than I had expected. I had expected it to feel like a relief to be in this reality once more.