by C. E. Murphy
I was accustomed to Looking at Seattle, which wasn’t an old city even by the U.S.’s standards. The Native American settlements there had been so thoroughly bulldozed over that they left depressingly little mark on the modern city. I probably could See them if I needed to, but so far I hadn’t had to.
Tara, despite the highway, despite its long-ago abandonment as a spiritual center, despite the tourists that tromped through it daily, roared with ancient power. Everything within the henge barrier shone brilliant, healing blue, with spikes of yellow that spoke of a warrior heritage. Where they blended, they became adamant green, a color I’d long since associated with the protective, stolid quality of buildings that knew their business as shelters for those within. My vision shifted and shimmered, trying to accommodate the changes Tara had seen. Changes that were still living within the sacred earth: what had gone on here left its mark, year after year, until years turned into centuries and centuries to millennia.
Only one thing remained the same. A white standing stone poked up impudently, barely altered by time. There was life within that stone, more life than the usual shaman-recognized spirit which infested all things. Everything had purpose, but most inanimate objects were rooted and calm and patient.
The standing stone screamed with impatience, a hair-raising shriek that echoed under my skin. I was used to the Sight showing me things beyond the ordinary. It had never before given me the ability to listen in on something that I was certain reached out of this world. I wondered if that was part of the upgrade to the shiny new Siobhán Walkingstick package, or if I’d simply never faced an inanimate object old enough to have a voice of its own.
“What is that?” I had the impression I was walking, an impression confirmed when Gary’s hand closed around my biceps and stopped me from going any farther.
“Hold up, doll. Don’t forget about me.”
“Right.” I turned away from the standing stone, though its voice still shrieked against the small bones in my ears.
Something uncomfortable happened in Gary’s expression as I faced him. His voice dropped half an octave on one syllable: “Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“You look…” He circled one hand, and stopped, still discomfited. I waited for further explanation, which was not forthcoming. After a few seconds my eyebrows went up and I shrugged one shoulder. There was hardly any point in being magically adept if I couldn’t use it to figure out what was bugging my friends, so I stepped out of my body to take a look at me.
Gary was right. I looked “…” and my noncorporeal self made a hand circle just like he had.
I would not have recognized me, eighteen months earlier. Not on the levels that mattered. The height, yes; the spiky short black hair, sure. The slightly too-generous nose with its scattering of freckles: those things remained the same. But my eyes, to hear me tell it, were hazel, while the woman I was looking at had eyes of blaze-gold. A thin scar cut across her right cheekbone, breaking a few of those freckles apart, and she wore cuff earrings—a stylized raven on one ear, a rattlesnake on the other—which I’d never done. Nor did the me of a year and a half ago wear a silver choker necklace or the copper bracelet that barely glinted under the new leather coat, though I would have at least recognized the bracelet. My father had given it to me when I left for college. The necklace had been a gift from my dying mother, barely two weeks before I became a shaman. I didn’t need to see the last of my talismans, a Purple Heart medal given to me by Gary, to know it was there: it lay over my own heart, pinned discreetly inside my shirt. I would probably die of embarrassment if Gary ever found that out.
I’d thought earlier I needed great sunglasses to really work that coat. Now I thought I needed them to hide my spooky eyes, which were the most visible change in me. Not everyone would be able to see the silver-blue psychic and physical shields wrapping around me so smoothly they looked like liquid silk, but those who could—people like my mentor, Coyote—would respect their strength. Actually, Coyote would just be astonished I’d finally gotten them so integrated that they were intact even though I wasn’t consciously thinking about them, and annoyed it had taken a werewolf bite to force me into that mental space. That wasn’t the point.
The point was, I looked confident. I had presence beyond what my height conferred. That, above all, was the element Joanie Walker, cop shop mechanic, wouldn’t have known what to do with if she’d seen her future self reflected in the mirror. And that, apparently, was what Gary saw, too.
I said, “Ah,” rather softly as I stepped back into my body. My Sight was still on full bore, and Gary’s aura was its usual deep solid mercury-silver, reminding me of the old V8 engine I’d initially thought of him as being. His unease glimmered around the edges, lighter shades of silver, but it was turning to something else: a brighter white, like pride was overtaking discomfort.
“Lookit you, Joanie,” he breathed. “All growed up.”
I grinned, stepping forward to put my hand on top of his head. “Let’s not be hasty. Stand on my feet.” Unlike anybody else I knew, Gary didn’t argue, ask why or prevaricate. He just stepped on my feet with his full weight, evidently unconcerned that he might crush my toes. Fortunately, I was wearing some of my favorite leather stompy boots which had lots of internal structure, and my toes were perfectly safe as I chanted, “This man I hold dear, let him See clear, let that vision hold sway til the end of the day.”
A poet I was not. Fortunately, I didn’t have to be Tennyson in order to trigger the power. The other times I’d done this, I’d felt nothing in particular, though Billy and Morrison had both reacted instantly and gratifyingly. This time, though, I was asking a whole lot more of the magic: it wasn’t supposed to become independent. The spell I’d read about only worked if the caster and the castee remained standing the way Gary and I were, which would be no use at all if we had to explore ancient Tara. But shamanism was based on the precept of change: in theory, if I could imagine it, I could do it. I wasn’t about to stop Italy from rotating while the rest of the world continued on, but in theory, I could.
Giving Gary the Sight until sundown was, by comparison, small potatoes. He already believed in not only the arcane in general, but specifically in my talent, so there was no resistance as the coil of magic within me built up and spilled out in a distinct, feel-able wave. My brighter silver-blue coated his mercury, then faded inside it, wriggling and adjusting to a different set of eyes. It left behind a sheen of blue on his aura, and only as that faded did Gary let out a long, slow whistle. “God almighty, Jo.”
“Just Jo.” I released him slowly, feeling the magic linking us stretch, then settle comfortably. “How’s that?”
“Incredible.” His voice softened with awe. “You can see like this and you don’t all the time?”
“It’s too much.” I turned back to Tara, cold swimming over me as the stone screamed again. “I’m afraid if I always look at this world, I’ll lose sight of the real one. I’ve been afraid of that since the beginning.”
“I think there ain’t much more real than this.”
I smiled at him, then did a double take. Gary’s eyes, usually gray, were as solid silver as his aura. I chortled and hugged him, inordinately pleased. He grunted, a sound intended to mask his own pleasure, and made a question with his eyebrows that I answered cheerfully: “Your eyes are silver. You’re the only one who’s ever held his own when I set this spell on him. Everybody else’s have gone gold, like mine.”
“Old dog’s got a lot of tricks, darlin’.” Gary did not look old, not one little bit at all. Not to my normal sight, and not to the Sight. Part of it was his totem spirit, a tortoise whose steady ways had gotten us out of major trouble at least once. I could See it now, surrounding him comfortably, always there if its strength needed to be drawn on.
But mostly it was his joie de vivre. Nobody who loved life and new experiences that much was ever going to get old, not really. Wiser and eventually dead, maybe, but not old. This time I said what I’d
so often thought: “You’re my hero, you know that, Gary? I want to grow up into somebody like you.”
Color stained his cheeks, which I hadn’t thought possible. “You’re doin’ just fine, doll. C’mon. We better go see what there is to see.” He offered his hand. I slipped mine into it, and we walked together into the Hall of Kings.
The stone’s cry went mute as the Hall’s ephemeral walls surrounded us. I slowed, straining to hear it, and Gary stuck a finger in his ear. “What was that? I didn’t even hear it until it quit.”
“I don’t really kn… Do you hear that?” Whispers rattled around the hall, bouncing off my skin. Drowning out the stone, maybe, except they were whispers and the stone had screamed. There was probably some old adage about a whisper being louder than a scream, but I couldn’t come up with it off the top of my head.
Gary swallowed audibly. “What’s weird is I can understand ’em, doll. Pretty sure that ain’t English they’re speaking.”
“It’s not.” My mother had spoken in Irish a few times in the months we’d walked side by side without ever getting to know one another. It had sounded more or less like the whispers did, but somewhere in my mind the words twisted from a language I didn’t know into one I did. “It’s like with Cernunnos. Remember how you only understood him when he wanted you to? There’s magic afoot.”
The half-spooked expression faded from Gary’s face. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I grinned. “That’s why I said it. All right, let me listen.” Why I thought me listening would do any more good than Gary listening, I didn’t know. Of course, if he was quiet then we could both listen, which was probably twice as good as just me listening. Which I couldn’t do when I was running on at the brain, again. In the past, my brain babbling at such length had meant there was something it either didn’t want to think about—which things numbered in the dozens right now—or it was working out some extreme cleverness that would at any moment leap out and surprise me.
Much to my dismay, nothing leapt out. The whispers, though, became clearer: men, all of them men, which in a hall called of Kings probably made sense. Some were bitter, claiming unrighteous loss of kingship; others were pure and joyful with their duties. Hints of decay spread through all of them like a warning that their histories and legends, that those stories were being lost to time.
Less lost than some, though. At least Tara remained and was recognized as an important site. There were so many places in the world completely lost, or barely rediscovered, that for a moment, standing in the heart of memory broke my heart.
Ice touched the back of my neck and I turned without thinking. A tall and slender man, almond-eyed and pale-skinned, stood behind me. He wore leather and wool and metal, and a crown of silver over fair hair, and there was nothing even remotely human about him.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that. He had none of the telltale marks that non-human people in legend had: his ears were round, his eyes, while not Western-European-shaped, were hardly so tilted as to be inhuman, and his build was no more slender than that of a slim mortal man. But he wasn’t human, and with my usual flair, I said, “What are you?” only realizing afterward that that was probably unforgivably rude.
“The ard rí,” he said in a tone which suggested I’d been unforgivably rude. “What are you?”
“Gwyld.” I was a bit startled the word came out of my mouth, but Cernunnos—and a woman who had died hours after I’d met her—had both used the word for me. It was, as best I could tell, an old Irish word for shaman or magic-maker, and it apparently meant something to this high king, because surprise filtered through his gaze.
“I thought I knew all the connected at Tara.”
Delighted, I chewed on connected as a new term for magic users. I liked it more than adepts, and wondered why it had fallen out of use. Then again, maybe it hadn’t in Ireland. It wasn’t like I’d grilled my mother on the subject.
While I chewed, the high king looked me over, his expression growing incrementally more dour. “What,” he finally asked, “are you wearing, gwyld?”
I said, “The fashion of my century,” then kicked myself in the ankle for setting up a question that had to be answered.
Except instead of looking like he needed answers, his shoulders relaxed and he let out a soft sigh. “And which of us is displaced? The Tara I see before me wavers and trembles in my sight. Have you called me forward, gwyld, or have I called you back?”
I scrunched my face. “Joanne. My name’s Joanne, not ‘gwyld.’ And I think I’m the one displaced. Who…when…are you?”
“My name is Lugh,” he said, “and today is the day I die.”
Chapter Four
“Gosh,” I said brightly, “good thing I didn’t show up tomorrow.” Then I wanted to kick myself, but I’d done that once already during this conversation. I didn’t want Lugh to think I had a nervous twitch.
Much better he should think I was an unbelievable idiot with a terrible sense of humor and no manners instead. I puffed my cheeks and stared at the wavering walls a moment before trying for a more human and humane response. “I mean, how awful, are you sure?”
Judging from his expression, I had not much improved my original comment. “The dark of winter is upon us, gwyld. My wife and mistress must be assuaged to bring back the light.”
“Has anybody suggested marriage counseling?” There was something wrong with me. I was usually mouthy, but not this much of a jackass. I took a moment for introspection and determined the cause of my behavior was probably the unmitigated terror sluicing through my veins. I’d meant to give Gary the Sight, not throw myself back through time. I had no clue how I’d done it or, more important, how to get home again. Lugh was attractive, but not worth staying displaced in time for. Especially since he was going to die soon. I held up a finger, asking for his patience, and knelt to curl myself up in a little ball, forehead against the grass.
Grass and stone: once upon a time there’d been a floor in this hall. In my time it was gone, but whenever we were now, it was present, but had modern-day grass growing up through it. That suggested I was still tethered in some fashion to my own era, which was reassuring. Some of the impulse to lash out faded, and I took a deep cleansing breath of green-scented air.
My leather coat creaked as I sat back on my heels. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to step out of time and it’s making me act like a jerk. I’m not usually quite this bad.”
“The connected are often unusual.” The way he said the last word implied he really meant “unforgivable assholes,” but he was offering rope to hang myself with.
I took it, though I stayed kneeling. One knelt before royalty, after all. Also, equilibrium restoring itself or not, my legs felt shaky and I didn’t want to test them. “Who’s your wife? I thought stories about druids doing human sacrifices were just that. Stories. Also, dark of winter? Really? It’s the spring equinox when I am. Or just past. Close enough, anyway.”
He opened his mouth to answer two times while I rambled on, then stood there with a moderately patient glare until I fell silent. “I am wed to the Morrígan, and dark of winter or a balance of light, the quartered sun days are powerful. They do not have to be the same to draw us together. How is it that I, only a king, knows what a gwyld does not?”
“My training’s been spotty.” I got to my feet, feeling no need to add that the spottiness was entirely my own doing. “Wait, the Morrígan? The death goddess? That Morrígan?”
“The one and same,” Gary said at my elbow.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, having sort of forgotten about him. Lugh, though, exhaled unmistakable relief, and nodded to the big guy standing behind me. “I see from your garb you are with the gwyld. Her teacher, perhaps?”
Gary said “No” and I said “Yes” at the same time, leaving the high king to look as though he’d rather be having teeth pulled than this conversation. I said, “You are, too,” over my shoulder, and pleasure ran through Gary’s aura.
His was all wrong. Not like a human aura and not much like the blaze of light and power that was a god, either. He was more connected to the earth than that, his aura reflecting the health of the land around him. That was what had triggered the assumption he wasn’t human. At the moment his aura lay sallow against his skin, dark of winter indeed. I could See the same quietness, even exhaustion, spreading through Tara to the countryside beyond. “Does this happen every year? I mean, no offense, but she must go through a lot of high kings this way.”
“She comes and goes as the years call her,” Lugh said patiently. “We kings rule in her name and with her blessing until the land hungers for us, and then she returns to claim us for it. Gwyld, why have you come here?”
My mouth, as it all too often did, skipped over consulting with my brain and blurted, “Maybe to save your life.”
Hope flashed across Lugh’s face and died again so quickly that I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. There was certainly no trace of it in his voice as he said, “A generous proposal, but not one I think you can manage. Not unless a high king called Lugh still reigns over Eire in your time, gwyld.”
Dismay crashed through me, but Gary stepped in. “Hard to say. Legend says all your kind went underground thousands of years ago. Could be anybody on the throne. Lugh’s part of the mythology here, though. Sun god, I think, so maybe not. What?” he demanded when I gaped at him. “Look, it ain’t native knowledge, doll. I been reading up the past year, just like you have. Guess we’ve been covering different territory. Anyway, aincha ever heard of fairy mounds? ’Swhere the fair folk go to ground. Everybody knows that.”