by C. E. Murphy
Right up until she snarled, “Less than if I lose the sacrifice,” and with another twitch of her fingers, broke the bird’s neck.
Don’t ever try to tell me animals don’t mourn. The remaining ravens made god-awful sounds, noises that I would call shrieks of horror in humans, and renewed their attack. On me, not on the damned Morrígan, even though she was the actual criminal here. I dropped the dead raven and swung wide with my rapier, cutting an errant feather as it fell. For half a breath I was impressed with the sword’s sharpness, and then I was back to facing three opponents as the Morrígan took the fight to me again.
Rattler’s power surged through me, lending me the speed to meet hers. I already had the strength, thanks to having spent most of a lifetime working on cars. I did not, however, have a duo of infuriated ravens on my side, and the birds were rapidly tipping the odds in her favor. I blurted, “Raven?” out loud and a pleased kak kak KAK! ricocheted through my mind as Raven exploded from the back of my head.
That’s what it felt like, anyway, and from the Morrígan’s expression that might have been what it looked like. Unlike Rattler, Raven wasn’t worn to a nub. Just the opposite, in fact. He hadn’t scraped me off a highway after I’d been hit by a truck, but he had partaken in the following spirit dance. It had brought Rattler and me from exhausted to functioning, and had taken the already-lively spirit bird from functioning to exuberant. This was his first chance since then to burn off some of that energy. He came swinging around my head in a sparkling display of brilliance and smacked the nearest normal raven with his wing.
Nominally normal, anyway. I wasn’t sure how normal any bird that helped fly a full-grown woman through the sky was, but it was black and glossy and looked like it belonged to the real world, whereas my Raven was made of fireworks. My Raven was also about two and a half feet long with a nearly five-foot wingspan, which made him gigantic in raven terms. The Morrígan’s were merely ordinary in comparison.
And they were totally unprepared to be buffeted by those great long wings. He’d hit me with them any number of times. It hurt. Apparently the Morrígan’s raven thought so, too, because it squawked in outrage and left off whacking me to claw at Raven. He did a lovely wing-tip pivot practically on top of my head and crashed into the other raven, then shot skyward with two black streaks of cawing anger chasing him. I said, “Thank you!” and got down to the serious business of having my ass handed to me.
I mean, really. I had strength, I had speed, but not in a hundred years would I have skill like the Morrígan’s. Hell, she even looked tougher than me, though I had a brief vision of how Gary probably saw us—her decked out in blue robes with long flying black hair, me with my short-cropped ’do and flowing white leather coat—and I decided we probably both looked pretty badass. Her more than me, though, because she was obviously the one taking her opponent apart bit by bit with her swordplay.
I parried like hell and tried every trick Phoebe’d taught me, plus a few I’d made up myself. I ducked. I jumped. I threw grass in her face. I kicked and almost got my foot cut off for my troubles. My left forearm throbbed worse with every passing moment, and the Morrígan smiled every time I fumbled on that side, like she knew exactly where my weakness was and only had to wait for me to give in.
Well, I was nothing if not stubborn. I might be bleeding, cursed with a dark mark and about to turn into a werewolf, but I wasn’t going to give the beautiful bitch the satisfaction of my failure. I retreated until I had the Stone of Destiny against my spine. Lugh and Gary weren’t there anymore, which I hoped was good.
What I really wanted was a minute to stop and think. What I got was a merry chase around the Stone, which was small enough to hug and therefore not really much use as an object to hide behind. Still, I ran around it, the Morrígan on my heels, while I tried to put it all together. It was obvious Lugh was fundamentally wrong about his Ireland being a place of balance and peace if the Morrígan recognized a werewolf bite as her master’s mark. I’d watched the werewolves being birthed from the mouth of a black hellhole. I knew their master, at least in passing. He was not one of the good guys.
In fact, he’d been trying to kill me since before I was born. My mother had thwarted him and sent me to America to keep me safe, but I’d regained his attention when my shamanic powers reawakened last year. If the Morrígan, mistress of death and war and doom, was under his command, then—
Then I tripped on the toes of my stompy boots, which were not meant for running circles in, and did a nosedive into the soft earth of ancient Tara.
Lugh, the goddamned fool, came up out of nowhere and took the blow that would have ended my life.
Chapter Six
Blood spattered me, the Stone, the green grass, everything, but I couldn’t even cry out. My voice was lodged in my throat, held there by horror. The Morrígan howled a mixture of delight and anger. She’d gotten her sacrifice, if not her target. Lugh slid off her sword and dropped to the earth. For an instant even the ravens ceased fighting and we all stared at the king’s prone form.
Then he dragged a shallow, shuddering breath, and hope seared me. I jammed my rapier upward, scoring the first blood I’d actually taken from the Morrígan, but not doing enough damage to take her down for the count. She shrieked and whirled, sword lifted to impale me.
Gary, hero of the revolution, bashed her on the back of the head with a rock.
There was something about watching the mighty fall ignominiously. Goddesses weren’t supposed to be taken down with a stone any more than Goliaths were. It lacked respect, and if I’d learned anything, it was that power demanded respect.
With that in mind, I bellowed, “Hot damn, you go, Gary!��� dropped my sword and scrambled across the Morrígan’s unconscious body to get at Lugh.
Blood bubbled at his lips, a fine deadly froth. I was pretty sure that meant she’d gotten him in the lung. That should bode ill for him, but I’d healed myself from a punctured lung once. Healing somebody else couldn’t be that hard, especially since he knew of and accepted the power shamans wielded. Nothing like a willing victim to ease things along. I reached for the healing magic within me, flexing it for the first time since I’d arrived in Lugh’s era.
The Stone of Destiny stopped screaming.
It had gotten to where I didn’t notice it anymore, so the cessation was very loud. My head jerked up and I scanned for danger, but the Morrígan was still out and there was no one else at Tara but me, Gary and the ghosts of sacrifices past.
One of which went pop! like a soap bubble. Disappeared like he’d been erased entirely, and a glimmer of brilliant emerald-green power filled the space his voice had been in.
Familiar power. The power of a teenage demigod, granddaughter to the Wild Hunt. Suzanne Quinley, who had, at Halloween, unraveled a thread of history, and wiped a man from existence.
A man who had been birthed from a legendary cauldron that raised the dead as zombies, bound to do the bidding of the living. The Master had made it. Somebody had bound it so it could do relatively little evil. And I had—with some help—destroyed it.
If an ancient king of Tara had been one of the unfortunates caught within the cauldron’s magic, there was more than a little bad magic going on here. It was like the entire history of the world was corrupt, although as soon as I thought it I didn’t know why I was surprised. Corruption was kind of civilization’s story of humanity, from Adam and Eve all the way down the line.
That didn’t mean I had to like it. It certainly didn’t mean that in the here and now, thousands of years before my own time, I had to sit back and let him have his way. There was no point in having great power if I didn’t sling it around a little bit. Lugh, ard rí of the aos sí—I bet that sounded much cooler if I said it all in Irish instead of pidgining it together—did not have to die today. Determined, I pulled my magic into line and turned it on the dying king.
And slammed headlong into Suzanne’s power, lush and green and implacable. My own silver-blue talent sh
orted out in a fizzle of sparks, gathered itself again and buzzed against Suzanne’s, searching for a way in.
I hit reverberations instead, shockwaves that came from the none-too-distant past. No matter how I tried to slither by, they caught me in their wake and tossed me back to the beginning. I had mad skills, but they didn’t add up to godlike power. Despite this accidental traipse into the past, I also didn’t make a habit of jumping around through time, and the more I pushed for a way through, the more I had the impression I was simply on the wrong side of time to change anything in the here and now. To heal Lugh, I needed to step even further back, back to before Suzy’s rewrite, and work my way forward. Too much had already changed. The old needed to be fixed before the new could be altered.
Not very hopefully, I said, “Rattler? Raven?” but while my guides were still awake within me, they gave no clarifying power surge in response. Shapeshifting, dealing with the dead: they could handle those things. Time travel was evidently a whole ’nother kettle of fish.
For the first time since I’d gotten a handle on my shamanic powers, I let the magic go without having healed someone I genuinely wanted to see live. Lugh dragged another blood-bubbly breath and my face crumpled. Failure sucked. “I’m sorry. Something’s already happened here, Lugh. Time’s been changed, and I can’t change it again to heal you. Do you…”
Of course he wouldn’t remember. I didn’t even really have to ask. Suzanne had wiped out Lugh’s predecessor so thoroughly that he’d never existed at all. Someone else had played his role instead, a thought which dropped through me like a lead balloon.
Time had been rewritten. The Morrígan had accepted the Master as, well, her master. I was willing to put money on that not being a coincidence. “Lugh, ah, God, I’m sorry, but how long have the sacrifices been going on? How long have the high kings been marrying the Morrígan?”
“Al…ways. Since…Haw-hee…was slain…by the Morrígan.”
That was about as useful to me as a hole in the head, since I had not a clue what a Hawhee was, but this was not a good time to go into it. I nodded and clutched Lugh’s hand, feeling once more like the useless ingénue. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry, Lugh. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
He smiled, faint bloody expression. “It was supposed to happen…exactly…this way.”
Great. I’d just gotten an I told you so from a dying king. I was trying to figure out how to respond to that when his hand spasmed around mine and determined fear came into his eyes. He surged up half an inch, which under the circumstances was a heroic effort, and whispered, “Warn…Nooda…!”
I had no more idea what a Nooda was than a Hawhee, but I nodded a vigorous, wordless promise, and Lugh, reassured, collapsed silently into death.
Gary stopped to pick up the Morrígan’s sword and throw it several yards away, then came to kneel by me. We sat together silently for what seemed like a long time, but eventually I said, “Who’s Hawhee?” with no expectation of an answer.
“I’m guessin’ a king,” Gary said, which was equal parts obvious and helpful. “Nuada’s one. They called him Nuada of the Silver Hand ’cause his got— Ah, hell, that’s who Hawhee was. It ain’t spelled like it sounds. It’s spelled…” He frowned, clearly calling the name up in memory, then rattled off, “E-o-c-h-a-i-d-h, Eochaidh, yeah. He’s the guy who cut off Nuada’s hand.”
I’d heard of Nuada. He’d made my necklace. It was just, “I thought it was pronounced New-AH-da.”
“Yeah, well, I thought Eochaidh was pronounced Ee-ock-chaye-d-hhh.” He aspirated the last sound like an old wheezing dog and I coughed on his behalf. Gary closed Lugh’s eyes, then cautiously asked, “What happened, Jo? I kinda saw you start to do your thing and then bounce right off a green granite cliff face.”
I blinked up from the dead king in surprise. “You saw that? I mean, you Saw it? Wow. That was…” I trailed off and stared at Lugh again. “That was repercussions. That was Suzanne Quinley, Gary. That was her in the zombie fight. You know the one she obliterated? He came from here. Not quite now, but somewhen around now. Time had to be rewritten around the space he wasn’t anymore.” The language was not well suited to referring to events that had been made to not-happen. I wet my lips and kept going as best I could. “Maybe he was supposed to be Eochaidh’s successor. Maybe he was meant to defeat the Morrígan, or to really marry her, but maybe instead the Master slipped in where he was supposed to be and made her a goddess instead.”
We both looked over at where she still lay sprawled across the grass, a bit of blood leaking through her hair. I said, “Only she isn’t, you know. She’s more than Lugh was, but she’s not like Cernunnos. She’s just very, very powerful.”
“So’re you.”
Somehow that made me feel a little better. I said, “Anyway,” more softly. “Anyway, so this whole era, which I guess means the whole timeline going forward, is all screwed up because of Suzy wiping that zombie out. I couldn’t heal Lugh because there was already too much interference. Something big already got changed. It wouldn’t let me change even more.”
Gary’s gray eyes were big as a lemur’s. “Are you gonna rewrite the whole history of the world, darlin’?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” I sounded very sure of myself, but I had, to a much smaller degree, already been there and done that. “Time tidies things up. The best I can do is close the loop, but I have to do it from our end of time. I can’t set the fix in motion back here.”
“But you can if we get home?”
“I can try.”
“Damn,” Gary said in a low voice. “I mean, damn, Jo.”
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Yeah, well, don’t get too impressed. I haven’t pulled it off yet. And I still don’t even know how we ended up here, much less how to get us home, never mind how to find Nuada, and I can’t go home without trying to warn him.”
Gary’s expression went funny and he nodded over my shoulder. “We could ask her.”
Alarm crashed into the pit of my stomach and I tried scrabbling for my sword and leaping to my feet at the same time. Neither was wildly successful. I ended up lurching in a half circle with fingertips full of grass.
Fortunately, the woman coming up behind us was unarmed except by radiant beauty. I stole a glance at the unconscious Morrígan and the dead king. They were both still inhumanly attractive. I knew plenty of good-looking people, but these guys made the best of them look like ugly stepsisters. I glanced at the new arrival again, then shot a look at Gary, whose eyebrows had risen. He nodded, and we both gaped at the woman.
She was youthful now when she hadn’t been minutes ago, in the future. She wore a robe identical to the Morrígan’s, only hers was white bound with gold rather than blue with black. She, too, had tattoos banding her upper arms, but in red, not blue. Her hair was coppery and her eyes green, and she had the same kind of gently overflowing aura that had helped tip me off to Lugh’s alienness. Like the Morrígan, she exuded power. Also like the Morrígan, it wasn’t honest-to-God deity-level power. I knew who she was before she spoke.
“Welcome to Tara, Siobhán Walkingstick. I am Brigid.”
Score one for me. With my usual politeness, I said, “Couldn’t you have told me all this from the other end of time?” instead of “Hello.”
Surprised amusement shot her eyebrows toward her hairline. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know what you mean.”
I squinted. “Yeah, I’m sure not.” Well, maybe she didn’t. Not right now, anyway. I was going to have a talking-to with her, though, when we got back home. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Hello, Brigid. Nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Have you, now.” She kept sounding amused, which was better than the Morrígan’s snide superiority. “And what is it you’ve heard?”
“That you’re her opposite,” I said with a thumb-jerk toward the Morrígan, “and…” Okay, maybe I hadn’t heard all that much about her after all. I knew who she was. That was rea
lly about it, but for me, that was a lot. “And you’re one of the good guys?”
Brigid’s eyes grew more serious. “Death is not an aspect of evil, little sh—”
“Joanne.” I really hated being called “little shaman.” It was bad enough from Cernunnos, a certified god. I was not going to take it from people who were somewhere between human and sublime on the divinity scale.
Her eyebrow quirked. “Siobhán.”
“For God’s sake, what is this, a haggle? My name’s Joanne. Use it or don’t, but lay off with the insulting diminutives. And I know death isn’t inherently evil, but I’m not so sure there’s not something fundamentally wrong about war, ’cause, you know, basic rule of thumb: killing people is bad. So don’t try to tell me she’s one of the good guys—” I did the thumb-jerk again “—or that you don’t represent basically everything she’s not. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” That was probably an unforgivably American way of phrasing it, but it got the point across.
Brigid made a face that indicated I had won a free pass for this round. I let out an explosive breath, tried to reel my temper back in and snapped, “So what do you want from me?”
So much for reeled-in tempers. Brigid smiled indulgently, like I was an ill-mannered five-year-old she wouldn’t have to deal with for very long. Probably that should’ve chastised me, but it only irritated me all the more. I turned to Gary and made a series of exasperated faces, trying to work myself into a better mood as Brigid said, “It’s your help I’m needing, gwyld. There’s a thing that’s been made in the near-distant past, and I can sense its touch on you.”
I clutched my left forearm, then bit back a hiss. Gnashy dog bites were not meant to be seized. It hurt. While I waited for the pain to fade, Brigid said, “Not that mark. This is the touch of death and life reborn, visited upon you thrice.”