by Megan Chance
He lay on the forest floor, on a carpet of leaves that smelled of a dry autumn, dirt and browning grass. Fallen acorns poked into his back, and he shifted in discomfort and stared up at the cage of intertwined, bare branches festooned with mistletoe. He fingered the golden sickle in his hand as he waited for night to fall. It was the sixth day of the moon, the time to harvest mistletoe. His legs were bare beneath his white robes—the air was cold and growing colder. He wished he had not taken on this task; there were others who could have done it. But he’d felt there was something to discover here, something he should know, a vision that might come to him beneath this sacred tree.
Bile, father of the gods, tell me where she is.
There was nothing, as there had been nothing. No matter what potions he drank or how long he inhaled oracle smoke, he found no answers. The veleda was gone; there was no Seer who could find her, no divination. All anyone saw was danger.
The sky darkened. Not night—it was too dark and too fast. A Druid storm.
His skin prickled; his hair stood on end.
A bolt of bloodred lightning split the branches. He rolled away just before it struck the dirt—just to the left of where he’d been. The air smelled of burning. Thunder filled his ears. He scrambled to his feet. Red lightning, Druid lightning, but from where?
“Where are you?” he shouted. “Who are you?”
The world went dark.
Patrick woke with a start, bathed in cold sweat, his heart racing, and the smell of electricity in his nose. He leaped out of bed, huddling against the wall, waiting for the lightning to strike. Whoever cast it wanted him gone.
Suddenly he realized he was in his bedroom, cowering half-naked in a corner. The lightning wasn’t real; it was only another dream.
He straightened, raking his hair with a trembling hand. His worries over Grace and her brother intruded even in his sleep. The river pirates. Sidhe. Time passing differently . . . Wearily, he went to the washbasin and splashed his face until he felt himself again. The air still felt heavy and ominous. That red Druid lightning . . . He’d seen Aidan throw purple bolts, and Tethra, the Fomori god of the sea, shoot blue, but the red was somehow even more terrifying.
Just your imagination. Patrick glanced in the mirror. He looked tired and pale. Like Mrs. Knox, who was so ashen she was like a red-headed ghost haunting his hallways, offering samples of wedding invitations for his approval, or menus for a wedding supper that changed every day. “I’ve decided against the salmon, Patrick. Do you mind? I’d thought duck instead. . . .”
Plans for a wedding that seemed less likely every hour, given that the bride was compelled to love another and destined to die if he didn’t find another spell. Though of course he couldn’t say that. Mrs. Knox knew the stories, but she didn’t believe them, and he had no stomach for forcing her to see the truth.
What was worse was Grace’s grandmother. Her coma had deepened. They could no longer get her to swallow anything. “I think it’s time to let her die, Mr. Devlin,” the nurse had told him, and Mama had said the same. “It would be a mercy, Patrick. I’m certain Maeve will come to see it too. And Grace, when she returns.”
But he couldn’t agree. He had to keep Grace’s mother well and her grandmother alive until Grace came home. If she comes home.
He pushed the thought aside and dressed. He was halfway down the stairs when the old tapestries on the walls shivered and grew bright—no longer threadbare relics. He smelled smoke; from the courtyard came the clanging of swords. Patrick gripped the railing hard, lightheaded, waiting for the hallucination to pass. Instead, he saw Aidan at the bottom of the stairs, as ghostly as his mother—no, more so. Truly an apparition. A summons, Patrick realized. From where? How?
I hate this.
Patrick hurried down the stairs to the back door, weaving through the busy servants and surprised cook in the kitchen out into the garden.
“I need some air,” he said to the Fomori guard. Patrick pushed aside the trailing, thorned vines of the climbing rose twining over the trellis gate, which hid the park from view. He crossed the square to the gazebo.
There, just as he’d expected, was Aidan.
Patrick stepped into the gazebo. “You can’t just send a note like other people?”
“This is easier.”
“Why are you here?”
Aidan leaned back against the bench. “Two reasons. Well, actually three. We got your message about keeping Grace away from the city. I want to know why you sent it. Is there something new?”
“I was worried, but now I think I may have been mistaken.”
“Mistaken about what?”
“The riot—that boy who tried to kill you?”
Aidan frowned. “What about it?”
“I’d ordered the Fomori to leave you unharmed, and I thought they were betraying me. But I was wrong. That is, it was the Fomori, but only Miogach, who thought he was protecting me.”
“I see,” said Aidan slowly.
“I didn’t want Grace in the city until I’d figured things out. But I’ve changed my mind. I feel . . . danger. I’m worried. So please . . . bring her back.”
“We can’t. Grace has disappeared.”
Patrick realized he’d known it already. This was what his dream had been telling him. “How?”
“Derry left her—safe, he thought—so he could help rescue Oscar. But when he went back for her, she was gone. He thinks she was taken, because she wouldn’t have left him.”
“Grace has a mind of her own.”
Aidan said gently, “He’s used the lovespot, Patrick.”
Patrick had known this too. Oscar had already said it, and there was no reason not to believe it true. None but a foolish hope.
But the spell would fade. Patrick thought of his sister, Lucy, whom Diarmid had also bespelled as a way to get close to Patrick. Her love was turning to anger—slowly, but it was turning.
“I hope it doesn’t change how you feel about Grace—”
“It doesn’t. I love her. I know she loves me too. What she feels for Diarmid is a lie, and she will return to me.” Patrick had to believe it, or he would go mad.
“I’m glad to hear that. Because you’re right, she’s in danger. We’ve been . . . connected. Strange, I know, but until recently, I’ve been able to hear her. I feel her.”
Another thing that didn’t surprise him. “Until recently?”
“I can’t feel her anymore. It’s nothing but confusion in my head usually. My grandmother’s visions and my own and all these things I can’t possibly know—God, it’s a nightmare most of the time. But Grace was clear. Until she wasn’t.”
Again, Patrick felt the niggling sense of wrongness: Aidan had more power than he should, and Grace had less. But . . . there was the Fianna’s conviction, and Simon’s: goddess power. “Simon MacRonan thinks as the Fianna do about Grace’s power. But he saw something else too. The Otherworld. Not death, though.”
“No, it isn’t death,” Aidan agreed. “I felt it too. Whatever it means, it’s where she is. I felt her fear, and then she was just . . . gone. We need to find her quickly. Derry thinks the sidhe have something to do with her disappearance.”
Patrick said, “The Fomori believe she’s lost in time. A sidhe glamour, perhaps.”
“That makes sense. She made a bargain with the river pirate queen. No one knows what it was.”
The strongest fairy the Fomori had felt in centuries, Patrick remembered. “But Grace knows what the sidhe can do to her.”
“You know Grace. Once she’s set on something . . .” Aidan shrugged.
Unfortunately true. It made his job so much harder, and had for years. His job? Years? Patrick pushed away his confusion. He paused before he said, “Aidan, your grandmother’s worse. I don’t know how much longer we can keep her alive. And your mother . . . her worry over you and Grace is eating her alive.”
Aidan’s expression shuttered. “Mama’s stronger than you think.”
“She’
s barely eating—”
“She’s stronger than you think,” Aidan repeated. He glanced toward a man walking his dog at the edge of the square. People were beginning to appear on the paths. “There’s one more reason I’m here. Grace and Derry found an ogham stick with a prophecy that echoes my grandmother’s words. You’re the expert in ogham and Celtic relics.”
“Was it on wood or stone or bark?”
“Wood.”
“What did it say?”
“‘The sea is the knife. Great stones crack and split. Storms will tell and the world is changed. The rivers guard treasures with no worth. To harm and to protect become as one, and all things will only be known in pieces.’”
To harm and to protect become as one.
Those words sounded familiar . . . or no, they felt familiar. As if he should know them. But he’d never heard them before, had he?
Aidan said, “I don’t know what any of it means, but it’s important. I’ve been trying to figure it out. Before Grace disappeared, she understood at least part of it. Does it make any sense to you?”
Patrick felt as if things were rushing past him, things he should be grasping. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”
Aidan rose, glancing about. “I’ve got to go. Let me know if you discover anything.”
“How am I to do that?”
“There’s a telegraph pole on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Leave a message there. Just pin it up. Someone will get me word.”
The telegraph poles were always covered with broadsheets and advertisements. No one would notice another.
Aidan started down the steps. “Take care, Patrick.”
“Wait. Do you know anyone who casts red lightning?”
“Red?” Aidan shook his head. “No, why?”
“Nothing. Just a dream I had.”
But Patrick’s mind was spinning as Aidan left. His dream. Danger and confusion. The lovespot. Grace’s connection with her brother. Triune power and his own doubts.
Patrick hurried to his study and stared down at the amulets and bowls and statuettes in the glass cases. Many of these things his father had collected. Some of them had been in his family for generations. A Druid egg—a crystal the size of an apple, clear as spring water. Amulets of quartz in blues and greens. A silver torc and bronze shield, a silver goblet. He was more aware than ever of what was missing: the ogham stick that helped the Brotherhood call the Fomori. Diarmid had stolen it, and Patrick had not seen it since, and though he had no more need of it, the collection felt incomplete without it.
Acting on a whim, Patrick opened the first case and passed his hand over each of the items inside. He couldn’t say what he was searching for. He went to the second case and did the same thing. By the time he got to the third, he was feeling foolish. There was nothing in that amulet or that statuette. Not in that plate or that bowl—
He stopped as a vision flashed before his eyes. A bowl like this one, steaming in a room filled with smoke. Delicate hands holding it out to him.
The bowl wasn’t particularly beautiful. It was small and of bronze, cast with wrens. He couldn’t remember its story, nor if it even had one. It was very early Celtic and probably once belonged to a Druid who used it to drink potions that brought visions. Patrick reached for it. The moment he touched it, it stung him—only static electricity—but when he curled his fingers around the bowl, it seemed to hum in his hand. He had to be imagining this, but it felt so familiar. He knew every line, every dent in the bronze, though his father had done the cataloging for this piece. Patrick couldn’t remember ever touching it before.
As he stood there, bemused and marveling, his dream returned and settled deep, the branches like a cage above his head, mistletoe dangling, and red lightning scorching the air.
The first morning (sidhe time)
Grace
You know who I am,” I said to Iobhar. “And so you must know what I have to do.”
He waved my words away. “Prophecies are tiresome. ’Tis as if you Druids meant to torment the whole world.”
“The oldest magic is that of blood and sacrifice,” said Roddy, pulling a chair from a pile without seeming to dislodge anything else, like a massive game of pick-up sticks. He sat. “We Druids did not invent it. We only use it.”
“So you’ve said, but it matters little. ’Tis the problem with mortals, your insistence on absolutes.” Iobhar fingered the bells around his neck.
Their music crept into my head; when I looked at him, he smiled as if he knew its temptation.
“Who is more worthy? The Fianna or the Fomori? I can think of nothing less important than a question of worth. Arrogance and pride sometimes bring the best of changes, and good intentions often bring the worst.” Iobhar gestured to the animals. “Take my friends here—all of them lead a better existence now, though my intentions in changing them were anything but”—Iobhar gave me a wicked smile—“good.”
“You changed them? You mean—?”
Iobhar pointed to the dog. “Cuan was a man who tried to cheat me. He’s become quite loyal. As for the stag . . . ah, let me think . . . oh yes, Stag was a sailor. Very drunk and unwilling to listen to reason. But he was a handsome enough lad that it seemed a pity to make him something less noble.”
In horror, I asked, “And the boar?”
“The boar was . . . well, a bore. A thief I did some fencing for who didn’t know when to be quiet. Still a fault, isn’t it, Torcan?” Iobhar shrugged. “There were others. I had some stuffed when they died, because I grew to like them. They’re around here and there. Perhaps you’ve seen them?”
The cats and the lizards and the birds on the staircase. Those creepy eyes. I shuddered. “What makes you think they like this existence better?”
“They eat, don’t they? And I’d allow no one to hurt them.”
“They can’t talk—”
“Thankfully.”
“Or . . . or leave—”
“They can leave if they like. But why would they? Stag wouldn’t last a day on the streets. Torcan either. Perhaps the dog would do better—people here seem not to eat dog meat.”
I felt sick.
Iobhar went on, “Two of them would have been hanged by now; ’twas their nature and unlikely to change. The sailor—perhaps shanghaied. Or buried at sea. Or dead of drunkenness or disease in a foreign port.”
“It would be their choice at least. You’ve taken away their free will.”
“Free will is important to you?” he asked.
“Of course. It is to anyone.”
The feathers on Iobhar’s shoulders ruffled as if in a breeze. I smelled that Druid perfume. Again, he fingered those bells around his neck. I took two steps toward him before I realized what I was doing.
He said, “What free will have you? Your pretty little life was only a prison. Bound by what others told you must be done. By oughts and shoulds. And then, the moment you escape it, what do you do? You bind yourself with love and lies and promises. You think so small, veleda, like any mortal. You disappoint me.”
I felt the truth of his accusations. “But I’ve come here to learn. To be trained. To change my fate.”
The sound of rushing footsteps. Sarnat raced into the room, a pile of books tumbling to the floor in her wake. “Veleda! You’re all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Where have you been?”
“Trying to find my way through this confusion.” Her light eyes blazed. She pointed at Iobhar. “You will let us go at once.”
Iobhar leaned against the counter and said to Roddy, “You see now why I prefer to live away from my own kind?”
“I thought ’twas out of fear of competition,” said Roddy.
“Sheathe your claws, little girl,” Iobhar said languidly. “She’s chosen to stay.”
Sarnat looked at me, and I nodded. “For now. He’s the archdruid.”
“Archdruid? He’s nothing of the kind. He’s fooled you, milady. We’ve heard tales of strange things happening here,
but we’ve never sensed any power at all.”
“You can’t sense it because it’s in me,” Iobhar explained. “And I’m one of you.”
Sarnat advanced on him. “I don’t know what you’ve told her, or what glamour—”
A jagged fork of red lightning shot from his hand, cracking at her feet, raising smoke and sparks. Sarnat jumped back with a gasp.
“She’s said she wants to stay,” Iobhar said. “But you can go.”
“I’m to stay with her.”
“Unless you want her incinerated, veleda, I suggest you ask her to keep her distance,” Iobhar said.
“Leave him be, Sarnat,” I said.
“Very well. For now. But if I see he means to hurt you—”
“Such devotion you inspire, veleda,” Iobhar said. “What a force you would have been once. Armies dashing toward death for you. Fianna raising spears and swords.”
“That isn’t what I want,” I said.
“Perhaps you should want it. The things I could teach you . . .” He fingered those bells. The music chimed seductively in my head. “An archdruid and a veleda. Think of it. We could rule the world, you and I.”
I saw armies charging, spears raised, the Morrigan’s three aspects—Macha, Nemain, and Badb—inciting frenzy and hatred, ravens screaming, and the clash of swords. As in my dreams, lightning flashing purple and red. Cyclone winds and thunder so loud it was as if the earth roared. I saw myself standing in a giant hall, clad in red, Patrick beside me in a white tunic, and Diarmid bowing as he laid his bloodied spear at my feet, while Iobhar smiled from the throne we shared.
And then . . . the vision wavered. Again, I heard the bells, that lovely temptation, but now there was a discordant note within it, a minor key, singing gloom and sorrow. The vision melted away. The dream was the past, and the past must stay the past.
I met Iobhar’s challenging gaze. “Tell me how I can change my fate. Tell me how to change the prophecy and the geis.”
Iobhar tilted his head as if in thought. My hope rose, stark and painful. Whatever he said next would change everything. My whole future—everything I wanted.
“The prophecy is already in motion, as is the geis. There is no changing it. The veleda must die, and Diarmid Ua Duibhne must kill her or die himself and send the Fianna into the void. There is no other way. This will be done. This is the word that was spoken.”