Black Pool Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  Clare turned on her. “You’re just jealous that I got here first, and that the native spirits of this place embraced me instead of you. You think you’re so high and mighty with your little Cone of Silence spell, but the truth is you don’t have any real power. Not here. You’re just seething inside that the soul of Ireland rejected you and chose me instead. Admit it!”

  Sally frowned at Clare long and hard. She didn’t know if she should laugh or smack her roommate across the face.

  “Well?” Clare demanded.

  Sally lifted her hands in mock surrender. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Clare. I’m just here to help, not start some kind of metaphysical turf war.”

  “Now, this should be fairly easy to accomplish.” Niall hesitated at the edge of the grass. “It’s a simple matter of settling down what has been stirred up.” He closed his eyes and relaxed his shoulders. He stepped forward onto the lawn.

  Clare crossed her arms over her chest. “You might be hot stuff back in Portland,” she spat the word at Sally’s feet. “But this is where magick is real. This is where magick actually comes from. And you’re just small potatoes.”

  “Magick is real everywhere,” Niall said. He crouched low and ran his fingers over the thick grass. “It might just have a different flavor.”

  “Clare, take a breath, will you?” Sally said. “There’s honestly no competition going on between you and me.”

  Clare snorted. “You didn’t even know the real history of this place before I told you. You didn’t know about the Fir Bolg, or the Tuatha de Danann. You didn’t know anything about the supernatural battles, about The Morrigan and the Vikings—”

  Sally lifted a finger. “I do actually know something about the Vikings.”

  “Uh, Clare, please mind voicing such terms so casually,” Niall cautioned as he rose to his feet. “Spoken in anger, charged words and names have a bad habit of—”

  “But you didn’t know anything about faeries!” Clare shouted at Sally.

  “You’re the one who thinks we have a poltergeist in the apartment,” Sally hissed, trying to keep her voice down. “The ghost of some poor old murdered dean from the 1700s? Really? You have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Ladies,” Niall stepped between Sally and Clare. “Firstly, Edward Ford was a Fellow of the College, not a dean. Besides that, I really don’t think this is an auspicious place to be having this particular argument—“

  “No idea?” Clare pushed up her sleeves. “Why don’t we have a simple contest then? Your skill and power versus mine, right here and now. Just try to conjure up a pixie or a leprechaun, Sally. Whatever you want. I bet you can’t so much as turn over a shamrock. Meanwhile, I’ll call up the very soul of this place, and we’ll see who Ireland chooses!”

  Sally frowned. “Clare, that’s not how it works—”

  “Trying to back out already?” Clare turned and marched deeper onto the grass. She slipped off her shoes and socks and stood barefoot on the damp ground.

  “Clare, you’re going to make yourself sick,” Sally whispered as loudly as she dared. She glanced again at the surrounding buildings and hoped there was no one inside to witness this spectacle in the gardens. “Let’s just talk about this. Calmly.”

  “Let me try.” Niall walked across the grass toward Clare. He held his hands open to her. “Let’s not get carried away, shall we? There will be plenty of time for demonstrations of witchery once we’ve gotten the Black Pool settled. Can we agree to work together on this, the purpose of our visit?”

  Clare lifted her hands skyward. “First, you Draw Down the Moon. Do you even know what that means, Sally? Any real witch knows how to call in the Moon and the Earth simultaneously, just like this—”

  “Any real witch?” Sally clenched her teeth. “Fine. Go ahead then. Show me what you’ve got.”

  “Clare, don’t.” Niall was practically on top of her. “Please stop what you’re doing right now. We need only a few minutes in this place, and then we can go elsewhere—”

  Clare closed her eyes. She widened her stance and spread her arms over her head. “Sacred Mother! Sacred Goddess! I call on the spirit of this holy place, the deep cauldron at the heart of Dublin. I invoke thee! Slumbering Goddess of the Black Pool! I invoke thee! Sister of The Morrigan! Bad-buh, goddess of rebirth, I invoke thee! Bad-buh, goddess of the fallen, hear—!”

  “No!” Niall held a hand over Clare’s mouth and tackled her to the ground. Clare shrieked and struggled against him as they rolled in the grass.

  “Idiot!” Clare shouted at Niall as she tried to get free of him. She elbowed him in the ribs and kicked at his knees, but he held fast. “Will you let go? You’re ruining everything!”

  “Who’s the idiot, Clare? You don’t even know how to pronounce your goddess’s name.” Sally stepped onto the grass with a smug smile. “Bad-buh? Really? It’s Bave, which you would have known if—”

  “Sally!” Niall shouted.

  Sally clapped a hand over her own mouth. She had done precisely what Niall had warned her against. She stared, horrified, as a thick cloud of mist rose from the damp ground and snaked into a slow-moving, multi-tendriled spiral.

  A human form began to take shape at the center of the fog, a few yards from where Niall and Clare sat in the grass. A female figure made of mist and moonlight wavered before them.

  “See?!” Clare pointed at the featureless woman. The figure grew more solid, drawing in the swirling wall of mist for material.

  “I told you I was a real witch,” Clare crowed. “I can call up sprites, elementals—”

  “That’s no elemental.” Niall jumped to his feet and yanked Clare up with him. “We need to get out of here. Right now.”

  Sally stepped backward off the grass. She felt sick to her stomach.

  “Wait!” Clare protested as Niall dragged her across the grass. “You can’t just call up a goddess and then leave her all alone. Real witches have ethics.”

  “Do you even know what you’re saying?” Niall shouted into Clare’s face. “I’ve had it with all this real witch nonsense.” He glanced at Sally. “No offense.”

  Sally barely heard him. She was rooted to the bricks as she watched the shadowy figure on the grass. It grew more solid by the second. Sally shivered as a new wave of mist rose from the ground.

  “This is real magick!” Clare protested. “It’s not my fault if you don’t understand it. But I can’t just walk away. This is too cool!”

  Niall tugged at Clare and forced her across the lawn. “You don’t want to stick around for this. Trust me.”

  Sally fell in at Niall’s side as he dragged Clare away from the gardens and back down the long driveway toward the Ship Street gate.

  “I didn’t mean to say her name!” Sally gestured back toward the grass circle. The entire garden was shrouded in thick fog. “How big a problem is this?”

  Niall didn’t look back. “I don’t imagine it’s a positive development.”

  Sally grabbed his arm. “But can’t we still fix it?”

  Niall faced her and pointed toward the mists. “Not that, we can’t. We shouldn’t have come. I didn’t realize how close she was and how thin the veil had become. It was foolish and reckless of me to believe we could remedy this.”

  He pushed forward again. They hurried through the gate and turned up Ship Street back toward Trinity College.

  “Everything’s fine, really.” Clare tried to extricate herself from Niall’s grasp, without success. “This whole thing is only temporary. Magick is like that. It’s there, and then it goes away. Right, Sally?”

  Sally gritted her teeth.

  “Badbh.”

  The single syllable of her own name echoed from the walls of her underground cauldron. Had she been sleeping again?

  She stood up in the darkness but her eyes remained closed. Her dreams had been teasing her of late, sending her images of green grass and dark skies. That dream of the spark of light had been nearly lucid, but she’d c
onvinced herself it wasn’t real. How could it have been? The wandering light had drifted toward her out of a haze of acrid smoke, discordant noise, and the choking stench of far too many human beings.

  And the light had tasted of the Æsir.

  So it had been a nightmare after all.

  But this . . . The air stirred around her, shifting the gossamer gown beneath her dark robes. She lifted her chin and slowly moved her hands. There was an unpleasant creak in her taloned fingers after centuries of stillness, and her teeth felt loose in her mouth.

  Something was pulling at her. It was reaching down from the surface.

  Still, she kept her eyes closed. She remembered the dream of sending out her sentinels. Yes. Her scouts had traveled into the world outside to find the source of the disturbance, but she’d had no news. There was magick afoot. She could feel it. But she remained underground. It must, then, be a dream.

  A dense fog swirled and wrapped her in a misty cocoon. It lifted her off her feet and conveyed her upward. She felt the earth give way as the mist pushed through and carried her with it. Stone and soil fell aside to make way.

  “Badbh.” She heard her name spoken again, or was it the echo still resounding below?

  Her lungs filled with cool air as the mist broke the surface and settled her onto the grass. Damp blades of green slid between her naked toes. The wind kicked up, and her black and silver hair shook out centuries of dust as it shivered around her wilted body.

  “Badbh.” The shadow of her name continued to reverberate below, thrumming on the polished sides of her cauldron again and again until the ground beneath her feet picked up the vibration of it.

  She coughed on the pollution and the unfamiliar smells. It was all she could do to keep from covering her ears to shut out the unhappy racket of these strange surroundings. She clenched her fingers into bony fists and willed herself back into the comfort of the ground, but she remained on the surface. This was a living nightmare, and she wanted no part of it.

  But the land sang to her: “Badbh.” It came at her from all sides. Her name had been spoken by true power. She had been summoned.

  Badbh opened her eyes.

  7

  Freya drifted through space. The blackness was cold, damp. She stood at the bottom of an enormous bowl, formed of her homeland’s bedrock.

  “I know this place,” Freya spoke to the darkness with confidence. Any sign of fear would be a grave error.

  “You are coming home, young one,” a craggy voice spoke from the shadows. “It has been too long.”

  Freya rolled her shoulders back and lifted her chin. She pulled the power of her people up through the soles of her bare feet. “I didn’t expect to return.”

  A stooped figure stirred at the edge of the darkness. “You should never have been taken from us.”

  An old woman stepped close enough for Freya to see her face. It was familiar, even in the distortion of long shadows. “Neither you nor your brother should have been so easily brokered away.”

  Freya looked up and was surprised to see a dense field of stars instead of a solid ceiling of earth. “There was nothing easy about it.”

  The old woman shuffled closer. “The stars look different here, yes? There is nothing in this world, nor in any of the realms beyond, that can rival the power of home.”

  Freya looked again at the woman. “You should not be calling us. Your stirring is threatening the peace between our peoples—”

  “Peace?” The old woman threw her head back and cackled. Freya was momentarily deafened by the dark laughter echoing off the curved stone walls, but she stood her ground and kept her eyes on the withered woman before her.

  The black-and-silver-haired hag nudged Freya’s elbow with a fist gnarled by age. “And what is this talk of our peoples? There are us—you, me, your brother, those of our kind.” She fixed Freya with a hard stare. “And there are them. Have you been so corrupted by the Æsir barbarians that the spirit of your homeland no longer sings in your blood?”

  “It’s not that simple. Of course I remember the old ways, B—”

  The ancient name tickled her tongue, begging to be spoken. The old woman leaned forward, dark eyes glittering with expectation. Freya balled her hands into fists, then released the tension from her body in a loud exhale.

  “You will not trick me.” Freya stared at her with a cool expression. “You speak to me of kinship and then try to manipulate me.”

  The old woman’s shoulders sank. “You cannot blame an old goddess for trying.”

  “I certainly can.” Freya narrowed her eyes. “Return to your slumber. Don’t try to meddle in this world’s affairs and then call on my blood-bond when you find yourself out of your depth.”

  The woman chuckled and stepped closer. She met Freya’s hard gaze. Freya willed herself not to shiver at the longing she saw in the black abyss of her kinswoman’s eyes.

  “Out of my depth?” The woman’s voice gained a hard edge. “Quite the contrary, child. You and your brother will soon find yourselves on the brink if you continue with this broken alliance.”

  “Broken?”

  “Can you not taste it?” the woman demanded. “Éireann stinks of Æsir magick. But the Tuatha de Danann are rising, young one. Will you stand against your own kind? Will you keep their rightful king from them?”

  Freya gritted her teeth. “You will not threaten my brother. If any harm comes to him—”

  She stopped herself from saying more, but it was too late.

  The old woman smiled. “The stakes have been set.” She glided swiftly backward across the soft curve of the cauldron and disappeared into the shadows.

  Freya awoke with a start. Her hands gripped the metal buckle of her safety belt, still fastened snuggly against her body. Sitting next to her, Freyr watched in mild alarm as she glanced around the airplane in bleary disorientation.

  “It was a dream,” he said over the roar of the engines.

  Freya turned to the window and pushed up the blind. It was just before dawn. They had a full day of flying behind them, traveling first cross-country and now completing their transatlantic flight overnight. No time to turn back.

  “She’s spoken to you again.”

  Freya turned to her brother. Across the aisle, Heimdall punched at the buttons on his armrest trying to find an acceptable television channel, while Thor rifled through the SkyMall catalog. He accidentally ripped out three pages, then balled them up and stuffed them into the seat pocket. Catching Freya watching him, he shrugged and went back to the catalog—and promptly tore out another handful of pages.

  “We have to tell them,” Freya said to her brother.

  Freyr took a long drink from his water bottle, then glanced at Thor. The god of thunder had given up on the catalog and had started in on Heimdall’s copy of the in-flight magazine.

  “I’d like to strap on some body armor first, if you don’t mind,” Freyr said.

  Freya smiled. “I’ve been thinking. When we land in Dublin, maybe you should just get on a plane back to Portland. You can keep the dojo open and help out at the Lodge while we figure out what’s happening. I’m not sure it makes sense for both of us to be on this expedition. Surely, one of us will be enough.”

  Freyr’s expression turned grim. “Why are you trying to get me out of the way?”

  “I have a really bad feeling about this.” She glanced out the window again at the day’s first sunlight beginning to brighten the cloud cover. That she was keeping something from her twin was enough to rattle her; that even opening her mouth might seal his fate made it worse.

  “I’d feel better if I knew you were safe,” she said.

  “Safe?!” Freyr laughed. Thor grumbled at him from across the aisle, stuffed what was left of the magazine into his seat pocket and started tearing through a borrowed newspaper.

  “When in our long years has either of us ever been safe from anything?” Freyr asked. “Æsir or Vanir, it doesn’t matter. We’re creatures of legend, and I�
��m afraid danger and discomfort are occupational hazards.”

  He squirmed in his seat. “Case in point: my backside’s in agony after three flights across thousands of miles. All in the name of glorious adventure.”

  Freya knew he was trying to cheer her up; he always turned on his boyish charm in tense moments. But he hadn’t just had a vision of Badbh’s cauldron. The corners of Freya’s mouth fell.

  Freyr rested a hand on her shoulder. “What’s got you so spooked?”

  She turned and looked out the window.

  Thor watched the twins out of the corner of his eye. They’d been arguing in hushed tones and casting furtive glances in his direction. Something was definitely wrong.

  Heimdall took out his earbuds and nudged his brother with his elbow. “Hand me your SkyMall, will you?”

  “Hmm?”

  Heimdall gestured toward the tight pocket sewn into the upholstery of the seat in front of Thor. “Your SkyMall catalog. My seat doesn’t have one.”

  Thor dug into his seat pocket and pulled out several glossy balls of torn pages. He deposited them in Heimdall’s lap.

  “Anything else?” Thor asked.

  Heimdall swept the detritus to the floor. “I need to get something for Maggie. See if Freyr has one?”

  Thor glanced across the aisle at the nature god and his sister. They had stopped their whispered conversation and were now staring out the window at the lightening sky. Thor leaned across the aisle and filched Freyr’s SkyMall.

  He settled back into his seat and handed the catalog to his brother. “You going to tell me what’s going on between you and Maggie?”

  Heimdall opened the catalog and studied its varied offerings of penguin snow globes, robotic litter boxes, and inflatable pillows emblazoned with the logos of professional basketball teams. “It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, it’s complicated, I see.” Thor leaned forward and wrestled with his carry-on bag underneath the seat as he tried to dislodge his water bottle. “So complicated that your doofus brother couldn’t possibly understand.”