by Tom Deitz
Darrell cleared his throat. “Well, my mom works in the hospital, see. Twice a week as a volunteer. You knew that, right? . . . Well, when your uncle was sick last year, she had to check on him every hour or so, and found him really ranting and raving a couple of times.”
“You should have told me!” David exploded.
“What—and given you something else to worry about?”
David took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “So what’s he supposed to have said?”
“Talked about a boy in white, mostly. That really put the wind up her, ’cause she thought he was having one of those out-of-body experiences, or something. Only he wasn’t.”
“And how do you know? Those things might be for real.”
“ ’Cause she asked him what he was seeing, asshole, and he kept saying something about the blond boy in the woods. First she thought it was you, but when she asked him if it was, he said no, it was the boy in the funny white clothes with the bow.”
Gary took up the attack again: “And there’s that friggin’ ring you’re so damned particular about. You can’t tell me there’s not something strange about that! Hell, man, I’ve looked at the friggin’ thing close up and personal, and it gives me the willies, let me tell you. Handmade out of solid silver or I’m a virgin. Older’n shit, or may I never get laid again.”
“What do you mean you’ve looked at it?”
Gary puffed his cheeks and stared at the ground. “Oh, hell—remember that time you spent the night at my house last winter? When my folks were gone and we raided my dad’s bar and sat up ’til four drinking and talking, until you passed out?”
David bit his upper lip, nodding slowly.
“Well, once you were, like, out of it, I just pulled that mother out of its chain and took a look at it in the light. I mean, I know you’d let me see it before, but always kinda quick and uneasy-like. Well, I wanted me a good long look, and I took one.”
“Asshole!”
“No, man. Just curious. Curious as to why one of my best friends had just spent six months acting like the cat that swallowed the canary, and the canary that had been swallowed by the cat, all at the same time.”
“More like nine months,” Darrell amended. “He’s still doing it. An honest man’d level with his buddies.”
“Right-o, Runnerman. I mean, hell, guy’ll go swimming stark naked at the drop of a hat, admits to jacking off and God knows what all else. But ask him about a silver ring and an attitude that evidently goes with it, and he clams up tight as a nun’s you-know-what. Oughta kick him out of the M-gang, just for not playing straight with us.”
David had stood about as much interrogation as he could. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you . . .”
“Oh yeah?” Gary cried. “Then why don’t you?”
David glanced over his shoulder to see Alec looking confused and ineffectual and unhappy. There’d be no help from that quarter, nor could there be. Alec couldn’t tell them any more than he could.
“Okay, Sullivan, start talking.”
“About what?”
Gary almost hit him. “Anything—everything! What’ve we been talking about for the last ten minutes?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“That crap again. Talk, boy, or I’ll have Darrell diddle your balls with the fire poker.”
David’s heart sank. He would not be able to tell them anything, though his life depended on it. It was the Ban of Lugh, the goddamn, wretched magic ban Lugh had placed on him and Alec and Liz not to discuss what they knew of Faerie with anyone except themselves. He wanted to be honest with his friends, truly he did. But he knew that he could not. It was physically impossible: his tongue would cease to function as soon as he started.
“Sullivan?” Gary warned.
“Ask him about this Nuada cat,” Darrell suggested.
“Yeah, Sullivan, how ’bout it?”
Shit! David thought. May as well try, I reckon. “He’s one of the S—” His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, just as he had expected. “One of the F—He’s from—”
Gary’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “What is this, Sullivan? Don’t play games with me.”
“What do you mean, Hudson? I don’t do that kind of crap. I’d tell you if I could, I swear it. But I can’t—I honestly, physically can’t.”
Gary stared at him incredulously. Something he saw in David’s face, something of disappointment and failed effort and despair told him the truth of it. He relaxed. “God, man, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
David swallowed hard and smiled weakly. “Not your fault, guy. Truly I’d tell you if I could.”
Darrell’s gaze shifted toward Alec.
“Don’t ask me,” Alec responded quickly. “I don’t know any more than he does.”
Gary was staring at the ring that once more glistened on David’s bare chest. He reached out to touch it.
A pulse of light flared between them, startling David as much as Gary.
“Shit!” Gary shrieked, jerking his hand away and sticking it for an instant in his mouth. “Damn thing burned me!”
David’s heart flip-flopped. The ring was burning. It could only mean—He looked around frantically. Where was it? Was it friend or foe? Finally he saw it, perched right above them on the striped awning beside the van: an immense and very self-satisfied-looking raven, every pristine feather of which was white as snow.
Gary followed his gaze, saw the bird bob its head and fly away. “If it’s that big a deal, I won’t press you on it. But God, your ring just scared the ever-loving bejesus out of me.” He gave David’s shoulders a brotherly squeeze.
David looked at him and smiled. “Scared the crap out of me too. Maybe I’ll be able to tell you about it someday.”
Gary’s puzzled stare spoke volumes.
“Damn,” Darrell muttered, looking up at the overcast sky. “I think I just heard some thunder.”
Chapter IV: Katie
(Murphy Village, South Carolina—Friday, June 21)
Lightning struck again, closer this time, fracturing the world into stark planes of black and white. Katie held her breath, waiting for the thunder. One, two . . . It came, crashing as though a fist had smashed the heavens. The pale, cheap paneling of her tiny mobile home rattled. A framed picture of Our Lord slipped from the wall and shattered. A cold breeze sailed through the darkened trailer. And then the rain returned, hammering the ceiling.
“Mother of God!” she whispered, as her gnarled old fingers sought her rosary. “Such storms we do not have in Ireland!”
She pushed aside her knitted comforter (warmth against the unseasonable chill) and reached for her knobby cane. It took her a moment to twist herself upright, a moment more to reach her kitchen.
Lightning again, blasting away at the tops of the pines. A glance outside confirmed earlier fears: a tree had split near the trailer so that one of its heavy splinters now hung dangerously close to the roof of Mrs. Sherlock’s place next door. Another flash and she could see further into the night, down the semicircle of trailers nearly to the sign at the highway that identified the Traders’ home place.
She filled her ancient copper kettle and turned up the flame in the stove’s smallest burner. “No sleep for you tonight, Katie, me girl,” she muttered. “Might as well make ye another spot o’ tea and wait its passin’. Eighty years of wind and weather, yer old eyes have witnessed, so what difference makes another?”
Four flashes, then, in quick succession. The thunder tripped over itself in the wind. The trailer seemed to lift upon its skirting.
Katie hobbled back to her place on the vinyl sofa.
More thunder, more lightning—this time not as close, though the rain had not abated.
Maybe it’s passin’ already, she thought hopefully.
Another rumble—
A crash of lightning right outside: the whole world turned to light. She closed her eyes, her hand at her heart.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God—”
she began.
Thunder rolled again.
And then there was another sound: footsteps on her porch, it sounded like.
Katie’s breath caught.
A knock shook the flimsy doorframe.
She hesitated—should she open it? This was not Ireland, but America, and not by all accounts a safe place for an old woman left alone while her sons and grandsons were traveling. But still, she was who she was, and Katie McNally had never let anyone stand wet in a storm when they had sought her shelter.
“Comin’!” she called, and reached once more for her cane.
The knocking came again, sharper, more insistent.
“Comin’!”
She opened the door, squinting rheumy eyes into the gloom.
A tall man stood there, with two others crowding close behind him, slick shadows against the rain. The man’s head nearly brushed the top of the doorway; his shoulders were almost as wide. He was wrapped in something dark, a heavy coat, maybe, or—possibly—a cloak. There was a strangeness about the way the garment fitted him, though, and it took Katie a moment to figure it out. The man had no right arm.
Katie had to twist her neck into an awkward angle to look into his face. His eyes met hers, burning out of the darkness: beautiful eyes. She had seen eyes like those before—once. Once too she had seen a face as fair.
“Woman, do you know what I am?” the man asked.
“Aye,” she replied solemnly. “Ye be one of Those. I thought I’d left yer kind across the ocean. What do ye want of an agin’ woman?”
“I would have the peace of your roof, Lady; for myself and two companions,” the man said quietly. “I would study the ways of men.”
Katie closed her bad left eye and screwed the better right one into a squint of challenge. “Be ye Christian, then?”
A ghost of sadness seemed to cross the man’s sharp-chiseled features. “I walked this World a thousand years before That One’s coming; how could I be such a thing?”
“Stay there,” Katie warned. “I’d have me own proof o’ ye.”
The man inclined his head ever so slightly.
Kate’s fingers twitched through her rosary, found the silver crucifix at the bottom end. With trembling hands she brought it to her lips and kissed it, then raised it almost above her head and set it against the man’s chin.
She left it there for a full minute, but nothing happened, save that the man’s lips curved in a smile full of infinite sadness.
“You have nothing to fear, Katie McNally.”
“Well,” came Katie’s pert reply, “if ye be not of God, neither be ye of the devil. Come in and have my welcome.”
PART II – SPARKS
Chapter V: Trysting
(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)
The horse was black like thunderclouds beneath a moonless sky, and its gallop across the grassland was as swift and silent as a hawk at dive.
The rider bent close upon its neck and felt the wind whip through his long black hair, singing in his ears a song of joy and youth and freedom.
Lugh’s palace was far behind him, an eruption of towers, walls and gardens atop a cone-shaped mountain. Somewhat closer were the forests that wrapped its lower flanks. And all about him now were flickering leagues of red-striped tiger grass.
Ahead was another wood—the one where he would meet the lady. She had promised, the lady had, to lie with him this morning. “Not until I see you tall and handsome on Lugh’s black stallion will I sleep with you,” she had told him.
“It is forbidden to ride that horse” had been his answer. “Only Caitlin’s son is allowed in that one’s saddle, and only then when calming spells are worked upon him—spells with which I may not tamper, except for young Ciarri.”
The lady’s eyes had sparkled with amusement. “I have heard that no man can master that horse without Lugh’s intervention . . . yet a man who cannot master a horse will never be my master!”
There had been glamour in her voice, but he did not know it, for the lady was far more powerful than he, and had applied her skill with greatest subtlety. No one else among the Sidhe in Tir-Nan-Og had seen her, and he did not know that either, for she had not let herself be seen. Nor had he spoken about her, though he had intended to. Somehow he had never quite remembered.
Still, he had been entrusted with the means to master the four metal and four magic locks that barred the way to the black horse’s stall. That was part of his duty as chief groom to Caitlin, daughter of High King Lugh. There was one thing he did not know, however, and that was how to command the four degrees of interlocking spells that kept another sort of binding on the stallion, for that binding itself was unknown to him. No single person knew all those spells, in fact, for it took Caitlin to prime them, the Morrigu to shape them, Nuada to fix them tighter, and Lugh himself to seal them closed.
And up ahead was the wood. Red-trunked trees twenty times a man’s height tall, leaves small and lacy, almost, as fern fronds. A gray-green twilight drowsed within it.
And the lady, straight ahead, standing tall and fair in the center of the pathway. Her dress was very white, her hair exceedingly black. Her lips were red and smiling. Without a sound they shaped his name: Froech.
Froech grinned and dismounted. He flung the reins over a low-hanging limb and knotted them loosely. “See, lady,” he laughed, “I have mastered Lugh’s black horse, and now, it would seem, you have no choice but to let me do the same to you!”
He reached for her then, one hand already tugging at the laces of his tunic.
She smiled and stepped forward. Her white silk dress shimmered to the ground as she raised her arms to embrace him. She kissed him hungrily, ran her hands across his hard-muscled shoulders, up the cords of his neck to tickle his earlobes.
Her fingers caressed his temples—and then she called upon the Power.
Froech’s eyes blanked, confused. His body felt very heavy of a sudden; his legs seemed ten leagues distant from his torso. Clumsy hands slid numbly from the woman’s waist. His head pulled his neck forward as his joints folded upon themselves. A touch of Power softened the force of his fall.
Fionna picked up the pile of snowy silk and wiped her hands, then turned toward the horse. The beast whickered, danced aside a nervous half step. She frowned. “Well, brother,” she said, “it does not seem you are glad to see me. I cannot say that you look well, but I will say that you make a very acceptable horse. Now come.”
Her gray eyes locked with the horse’s. She raised a hand toward the hopeful nose it extended. Four locks, she noted. Lugh was ever a cautious one. But I am this one’s sister, and against the Power of blood, the Power of mind alone can never stand.
Sister? The question was hesitant, weak, but that it had reached her at all surprised her.
Brother! You are very far away. You have worn this shape a long time, have you not? Too long, for this form almost recalls no other. What do they do, brother? Do they make you a man again for as long as it takes to return your senses? Do they drug you then? Keep you drunk? Do you sleep away your manhood and arise again a stallion?
A . . . stallion? The mind-words whispered confusion.
She answered the thought aloud. “We must be quick. Now that I have touched your soul, the bond of blood between us will allow me to take this spell upon myself and set your own shape upon you; unfortunately it is too strong to dispose of otherwise. I have left clothes for you in the root-hollow of yonder maple. It is not far from the Track. You will hide there, regain your man’s Power and your man’s strength until I return for you. I will awaken the boy, and he will recall nothing of the woman who came to meet him. He will return me to Lugh’s palace as though nothing had happened. But the locks that bound you will not hold me. Tonight I will join you here, and we will go to a place of waiting—for I will not rest until I have had my vengeance. And you, dear brother, I have no doubt, will find that almost as sweet a morsel as will I.”
She closed her eyes, felt out the limits of the spell
s, began to turn them onto herself, one layer at a time. Skin, first, as black hair grew out upon her creamy flesh, her ears lengthened, eyes darkened.
And before her the horse’s skin grew pale and smooth. It lost its mane; the ears shortened but retained their points.
Second layer: muscle and bone. Fionna’s nose stretched. Fingers and toes merged into one. A tail sprouted at the base of her spine. She bent awkwardly onto all fours, even as Ailill stood upright.
Some pain, now, as the workings became more intricate.
Third layer: blood and nerves and brain. More pain.
Fourth layer: consciousness. Fionna felt her own thought drown in the thoughts of the other shape, as she sensed her brother’s Power waken. She fought this final spell, kept it thin and diffuse, assimilating it an aspect at a time, careful to leave a gap through which her essence could withdraw when she had finished.
Fionna was a horse—a black stallion, and wasn’t that interesting, she noted—and before her was a naked man. White-bodied, long-limbed, black-haired. Good to look upon. Good enough for her bed, had they not been such close relation. He raised his head toward her, eyes glazed, confused.
Brother, go now. Wait. I will return.
Ailill nodded and began to wobble uneasily toward the place his sister had shown him with her sending. A moment later he was gone.
She extended her thought toward the boy.
—And found another Power coiling there, prowling about her spell like a scavenger around a carcass.
No! Fionna’s outrage shook the Overworld. The horse snorted; flames sparked from its nostrils.
The intruder gained a mind-voice. Yes! Ailill mac Bobh is mine! You will not stay me from my vengeance!
Who are you?
Do you not recognize me?
An image flickered across Fionna’s memory: a fair woman of Annwyn. Ailill had made much of her, had gotten a child on her once. Morwyn: the Annwyn bitch.
Well, there is some truth in that, I suppose. For though I am but partly of Annwyn, yet it is for hounds that I have come here.
The Horn!
You know of it?
