What Fate Portends

by Clara Coulson

  The door to the captain’s cabin creaked open, and Saoirse emerged wearing a typical outfit of jeans, boots, and a creased leather jacket I’m pretty sure she owned seven years ago. She hoisted the messenger bag over her shoulder as she crossed the deck, eying the ledger that was still floating near Manannán’s head. “Can I have that back?”

  “Oh, certainly.” The notebook dropped into Manannán’s hand, and he tossed it Saoirse’s way.

  She caught it and tucked it into its space inside her bag. “Any news on our ride out of here?”

  “If you look up,” said the sea god with a touch of amusement, “you will see your ‘ride’ descending through the heavens to join us.”

  Saoirse and I peered up at the dark sky, gazes tracking the span of the horizon in search of the mysterious associate promised to ferry us to the slip point. At first, I didn’t notice anything new, even with my heightened vision scrutinizing each prominent feature in the celestial dome. But then I caught a flicker of light in my periphery, and I craned my neck to find a white streak breaking away from the diffuse glow of a distant cosmic body.

  It dove through the atmosphere above the sea, briefly flaring red as the friction nearly caught it on fire. Some thousands of feet above us, the object began to slow, and as it hurtled toward the boat, a recognizable form emerged from what had been an amorphous blur. It was a white horse with a long, silver mane, decked out in golden armor and hooked to an ornate wooden chariot lined with gold accents.

  Suddenly, that half-forgotten memory tickling Manannán’s taunt grew crystal clear.

  “Énbarr of the Flowing Mane,” I murmured aloud.

  “Bah!” Manannán spat. “You ruined my introduction. I was going to impress the lady with a rousing announcement in my suave, rumbling bass.”

  “I’m impressed enough already,” Saoirse said absently, staring in awe at the horse-drawn chariot falling through the sky. “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale.”

  Énbarr broke off from his sharp descent as he neared the ship and came in at a shallower angle, swooping around us four times before he finally slowed enough to trot to a graceful stop atop the water. The chariot’s wheels softly kissed the surface behind him. At the sight of the horse’s smooth landing, Manannán whistled again, a low note this time, and the power that was driving the ship through the sea immediately cut out, bringing us to a halt with the mainmast in line with the horse standing off to the starboard side. The sea god then marched over to the railing and shouted something in that same ancient language I didn’t know.

  Énbarr didn’t speak, but I swore he gave me a critical look with his big, black eyes after Manannán finished his clipped explanation of what he needed. The horse snorted and gestured with his head toward the chariot, urging his new passengers to climb on. Saoirse and I exchanged wary glances, her questioning whether riding a chariot pulled by a magic horse was a good idea, me questioning whether riding a chariot pulled by a magic horse that didn’t like me was a good idea.

  Manannán wasn’t offering us any other options, however, so I shrugged and motioned to the rope ladder we’d used earlier. Saoirse climbed down first. I waited on the deck, steadying the ladder, as she descended toward the surface of the ocean.

  As soon as Saoirse was out of earshot, Manannán, looming just behind me, said quietly, “You better make sure your courtly cohorts don’t catch wind of the fact the svartálfar have grown brazen enough to use iron against the fae.” He pointed a finger at the prominent iron burn on my arm, visible through my torn sleeves. “Some fool bringing Mab’s wrath down on a human city is one thing, but there’s been growing unrest on this side of the veil as well since the queens’ decision to invade Earth. Certain creatures with dark agendas encroaching on court lands, raiding villages, carrying out assassinations. Those left behind to manage the courts are on a hair trigger as a result. I do not recommend you feed that fire.”

  “You don’t care if the queens raze the Earth,” I retorted, “so why should I care if something nasty leaves a few scratches on Tír na nÓg?”

  Manannán sent me a chilly look. “Don’t act daft, boy. It doesn’t suit you. You know precisely why one is more important than the other.” He kept up the hard glare for a second longer, then let out a faint sigh. “Look, I understand why your loyalties lie where they do, why you prefer to live where you do, but spite is not a good reason to recklessly risk major damage to the stability of the faerie courts. And you know it. So act as if you know it, Vincent Whelan, if for no other reason than maintaining the ethics you lay claim to.”

  A blush crept up my neck, but I beat it back with a deep glower, which I cast Manannán’s way. “I didn’t ask to play a pivotal role in this game.”

  “No one does.” He made a sweeping motion, dismissing me from his boat. “That’s why so many pieces on the board get broken.”

  Unease grew like a sinkhole in my stomach. Because Manannán’s face had now morphed into that of a true god, the knowledge of ages, a heavy, bloody burden, pooling in the depths of his dark green eyes, his gaze so intense that it physically hurt, almost like it was flaying my skin, one paper-thin layer at a time.

  I swung over the railing and climbed down the ladder as quickly as I could without slipping and falling on my ass, to the amusement of Saoirse and the goddamn horse. Still, Manannán’s disconcerting eyes followed me with laser-like precision, boring into the back of my head, setting off goose bumps across my skin. Until I clambered onto the chariot next to Saoirse, and Énbarr, without waiting for a signal, shot off with the two of us in tow across the Endless Sea.

  Is it just my imagination, I wondered as I clung to the chariot for dear life, or am I missing a bigger picture here?

  Chapter Fifteen

  I was barely able to babble the coordinates to Énbarr over the rushing wind before the fabric of reality split before us. The chariot hurtled away from the Endless Sea and onto rolling hills of golden grass that suddenly spun into view from nowhere. We landed with nary a bump, the chariot imbued with magic that had made it a comfortable vehicle for many an ancient god and other powerful people of myth and legend. The wheels glided along through the tall grass, almost as if it wasn’t touching the ground, and once I got a grip on the rim, I was able to heave myself into a half-crouch and observe the luscious landscape passing by.

  Saoirse remained on her knees, clutching the top of the chariot, face pressed against a front panel, until I nudged her with my foot. She gave me a nervous look when I tilted my chin up, urging her to stand along with me. But she complied nonetheless, the rusty but deep-rooted trust between us quelling her fears. When she finally peeked over the rim at the new world around us, she gasped, and her gaze darted every direction, drinking in the strange, unearthly sights of Tír na nÓg, land of the faeries.

  The golden, rolling hills stretched for miles in all directions, intersected by dense woodland populated with trees taller than any Sequoia. The trunks of these enormous wooden beasts were twisted in ways that some would call gnarled, gargantuan branches hanging both low and high, broad and long enough to build upon. There were structures in some of them, tree houses of a sort humans could never construct, built not from wood or plastic or stone, but from the smaller offshoots of the branches themselves, grown into shapes, the gaps filled with leaves and moss, and the roofs made of tightly woven vines.

  Beyond these structures, in the deeps of the woodland, bound in shadow, were intermittently flashing lights of all colors. Some were mere flickers, tiny as bugs, while others illuminated the outlines of hulking creatures that prowled the land in search of needs like food and drink and worthy adversaries. Farther in still were things you couldn’t see, but feel, eyes as old as time cutting through the black to watch everything that passed through the golden fields beyond. Even Saoirse could feel these creatures watching her, human as she was. Their hawk-like stares tickled that primal fear that existed in the genetic memories of all things.

  “My god,” Saoirse said, her words nea
rly lost to the wind. “Did I fall asleep?”

  “The better question is,” I replied, “could you dream up something so fantastical?”

  She shook her head, a wry smile tugging at her lips. “Good point. I’m not this creative.”

  “This is where they live, the faeries.” I leaned closer to her ear so she could hear me better. “We’re currently in the domain of the Seelie Court, the Land of Eternal Summer and Bloom, ruled by you-know-who.”

  Saoirse nibbled on her lip. “The queen whose name starts with a T? I assume she can hear us when we say her name too?”

  “See? You’re learning.” I winked at her in a far less flirty way than Manannán had. “The coordinates for the slip point are here somewhere, so we won’t have to go through Unseelie territory, thank goodness.”

  “Unseelie are the winter faeries, yeah?” Saoirse asked. “And your mother is one?”

  I got an awful metallic taste in my mouth just from hearing the word “mother,” but I threw on a smile and nodded anyway because Saoirse didn’t mean anything by the question. She didn’t know about my early childhood. No one on Earth did except my father, and he was dead.

  “The Unseelie are aligned with winter, yes,” I replied, “like the Seelie are with summer, but the dichotomies are a bit more nuanced than a seasonal contrast. Different types of faeries are allied with each court, due to inherent differences in their natures. It’s like…a bunch of complicated spiritual mumbo jumbo. Don’t worry too much about it.”

  Énbarr took a sharp turn that somehow didn’t phase the chariot—because who cared about the laws of physics in the Otherworld, right?—and carried us onto a narrow cobblestone road that curved around the hills and the borders of the hulking woods. One such curve took us within thirty feet of the clear-cut edge of a small orchard tucked into the valley between two tall hills. In this orchard, a thousand-strong swarm of tiny pixies were viciously tearing into each other in an attempt to steal the most oblong blue fruits from whatever trees were growing there. The ground below the trees was littered with itty-bitty dismembered body parts. And splattered with blood. Lots of blood.

  “Uh…” Saoirse said. “Is that normal?”

  “I regret to inform you that absolutely nothing in this realm will strike you as normal.”

  “Still”—the wariness was creeping back into her voice—“the gore kind of ruins the scenery.”

  We sailed around the base of a hill, which blocked the orchard from view.

  “There,” I said, “scenery restored.”

  Saoirse gave me a skeptical look.

  “Or not.”

  Énbarr carried us along the cobblestone road for the better part of an hour before he veered off to the right and cut through a wide field of mixed gold and green grass nearly five feet tall. In the center of this field, the grass had been sheared to the earth with either a scythe or a spell in a circle roughly forty feet in diameter. Within the circle stood several rings of dense bushes with prickly leaves, dotted with lush red berries I was pretty sure were poisonous.

  The horse jumped the outer ring of the bushes, carrying the chariot over them in a sharp arc, and landed inside the circle, then took us around the perimeter until we reached the spot that must’ve corresponded to the coordinates I’d given him. He brought the chariot to a halt, turned his head toward the second ring of bushes a few feet to the left, and snorted to indicate a particular bush. I assumed that meant we should stand close to that bush in order to access the desired slip point.

  Saoirse was stumbling out of the chariot before I could offer her any help, a little wobbly from the wild ride and the strange sights. I hopped off after her and skirted around the chariot, coming to stand between Énbarr and the designated bush. “Thanks for the ride,” I said to him. “That’s all we needed, so you can fly away home now. Or back to whatever realm you were in before.” Énbarr was associated with numerous figures from myth, so he could’ve been accompanying any of them for various tasks. Or maybe he’d simply been on vacation in some realm with lots of fields where magical horses and unicorns like to frolic. Who knew?

  Énbarr jerked his head to toss a loose piece of his silvery mane away from his eye, and proceeded to shoot me the most annoyed expression a horse could possibly produce. As if I’d totally ruined his day by requesting a lift. He let out one final dismissive snort before he loped off over the outer ring of bushes, nearly whacking me in the face with one of the chariot wheels in the process. And then he was gone, barreling off across the hills so fast he was nothing but a white blur glinting with flecks of gold under the bright light of the Seelie Court’s eternal day.

  “And you thought I had an attitude,” I said to Saoirse.

  “You do have an attitude,” she replied. “The horse just has a worse one.”

  I feigned offense.

  She laughed. “Okay, back to reality—or fairyland. Where exactly are we?”

  “No clue. Probably a sacred garden that belongs to a short-tempered faerie with a big club who’ll kill us if they see us standing among the holy fruit.”

  “Please tell me that’s a joke,” Saoirse sputtered.

  “It is and it isn’t,” I replied like a cryptic asshat. “No worries though. We won’t be here long enough for our trespassing to matter either way.” I indicated the bush. “We need to stand there. I’ll open the slip portal, we’ll slide on through, and we should end up somewhere in the vicinity of the house at the ledger address.”

  “What if we end up in the house?” she asked, trudging over to the bush.

  “Then someone’s going to have uninvited dinner guests.” I tugged on her bag strap. “Might want to have your gun locked and loaded. Just in case.”

  “What about you?” She took her position in front of the bush as she dug her gun out from the bottom of the bag.

  “What about me?” I sauntered up next to her. “I don’t carry a gun anymore.”

  “I was referring to the weapon you do use. Your magic? You looked a little bushed at the tail end of that fight with the dark elves.”

  “Oh, that.” I absently tugged at my torn sleeve. “My magic got overexcited because I pushed it too hard, and it’s a struggle to restrain it.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean by ‘overexcited’?”

  I almost tried to dismiss the question, but this was Saoirse. If I tried to hold too many things back from her, particularly when she knew something was amiss, she’d dig up the skeletons whether I gave her a shovel or not. “Faerie magic, particularly Unseelie magic, is wild and pernicious, so much so that it almost seems to have a mind of its own. By using glamours, I suppress its nature, but when I access a significant amount of power and utilize it for combat, that nature begins to fight the suppression, urging me to strip my glamours away entirely and apply its full strength. It gets extremely agitated if I get hurt by iron, and extremely aggressive if I injure or kill someone.”

  Saoirse’s mouth dropped open, releasing a soundless, “Oh.”

  “Anyway,” I continued in a blatant attempt to steer us out of awkward territory, “my magic has calmed since the fight with the elves ended. Plus, being in Tír na nÓg, even on the Seelie side, is soothing like a balm. Feels like home.”

  “Got it. So you’re good if we get into another brawl?”

  “Until they break out the iron, yeah.” I cringed. “Let’s hope this house doesn’t have a fireplace.”

  “Or security bars on the windows.”

  “That too.” I held up my arms. “Same deal as last time. Hang on tight.”

  Saoirse stepped closer and wrapped her arms around my waist. “Out of remote—and probably ill-fated—curiosity, what happens if I let go while we’re flying through that big abyss?”

  “Um, well…to be honest, I’m not entirely sure. Some people say you get spit out in a random realm. Some people say you get lost in the void forever. I’ve never been inclined to test which outcome is the true one.”

  “They both sound awful, so I
’m not sure it matters.” She pressed herself harder against my chest, arms locked across my back. “Okay, ready as I’ll ever be to travel in the most embarrassing manner in the multiverse.”

  I chuckled. “It’s only embarrassing because you can’t make a portal yourself. But if you ever find yourself wanting to travel solo to this land of milk and honey and heinous creatures that have a taste for human flesh, get thee to a witch or wizard and buy a portal talisman.”

  “They sell those?”

  “Absolutely. Before the collapse, certain magicless humans ‘in the know’ would occasionally travel to the Otherworld for various reasons. Not as common now because of the ill will between the humans and…everyone else, but I’m sure some of the practitioners in Kinsale still have a few talismans in stock. If you’d like to have one, for emergencies, and not for sightseeing.” I mocked a chastising expression, eyebrows furrowed to the point of silliness. “The Otherworld is not for day trips and picnics, you know, Lieutenant. Unless you fancy becoming the food.”

  She pinched my back with her short but surprisingly sharp nails. “Oh, shut up. You knowing more than me about the paranormal doesn’t make you my teacher. It makes you a confidential informant.”

  I let out a loud, dramatic gasp. “Is that all I am to you now? I’m hurt.”

  “Suck it up, buttercup, and let’s get on the ball. We’ve got an asshole with a harp to stop.”

  I snickered. “Boy, this policing thing sure has gotten weird in recent years.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I wrapped one of my arms around Saoirse and summoned up the memory of the spell for a slip portal, forming another frosty circle on the ground beneath us. This one wasn’t nearly as large or complex as the directed portal circle I’d used in Kinsale, which hopefully meant its presence wouldn’t anger whoever’s grass I was currently killing with subzero temperatures. Whispering out the syllables of the invocation in quick succession, I felt the veil between realms fluttering with a light resistance, as it always did from the Otherworld side. The barrier found it “distasteful” that one would seek to move from a realm of epic power to a mundane place of minimal magic like Earth.