Timias only smiled and pinched his cheek. “So clever. You’re right. Let’s go.”
With a gentle tug on his hand, Loriana led him stumbling into the white-walled palace.
“I can’t believe you gave her that apple.” Catrione clutched Cwynn’s arm. The brew was burning in her eyes in earnest, but Catrione ignored the pain and the moisture seeping down her face. They were headed across the quiet compound toward the wet meadow that surrounded the Tor. “Do you still see the dog?” she asked as she tripped over something in the long grass.
“He’s just ahead,” Cwynn replied. “Looks like he’s headed around the Tor.”
“Which way? Against the sun, or with it?”
“To the right, it seems—against it, I suppose.”
“He’s taking us to TirNa’lugh,” Catrione muttered, satisfied. “Just go where he wants. But still I wish you hadn’t given her the apple.”
“Why not? It seemed like the right thing to do, and she was very grateful, she gave me back my disk. Catrione, are you all right?”
She felt the brush of his breath on the side of her face as he turned to look at her, but she kept her eyes tightly shut. “Whatever was in that cauldron burned my eyes,” she said.
“Then let’s turn back,” he said at once. “Come on—”
“No, we don’t dare,” she replied. “You don’t realize what Tiermuid stole. Those crystals aren’t just the key to our magic, they’re the whole foundation, the whole anchor, in this world. Without them—” She broke off, forced to wipe away a glob of jelly that had rolled down her cheek. She shut her eyes tightly, and more squeezed out. “Wait a minute.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
She ripped the hem off the bottom of her tunic and tied the strip of linen around her eyes. “There. Whatever got in them is making them weep so bad I can’t see. Let’s go.”
“Catrione—”
“We have to do this, Cwynn. There’s no telling what Tiermuid might do. He has the source of all our power, and with it—”
“Aren’t there others? Don’t you have more of these crystals?”
“Like attracts like,” she answered. “He’s got enough he could send them out to gather more. Don’t you see? He not only has the means to use our power, he has the reason to turn it against us. Do you still see the dog?”
“He’s waiting for us up ahead. What’s the apple got to do with it?”
“I hoped to use that apple to tempt the khouri-keen,” she said grimly. “But never mind now. Just follow Bog.”
It was curious, she thought, how acutely she could feel the border, how the edge felt sharp as a razor over her skin as if it had suddenly acquired a definition it had lacked before. Perhaps it was simply she was blindfolded, she told herself as Cwynn stopped short. “Where are we?” she asked. Abruptly, the pain in her eyes stopped. She untied the linen and looked around.
Angles and shadows and shifting forms of light greeted her eyes, and she blinked, but her vision didn’t change. Cwynn was standing next to her, a glowing white shape against a dark gray backdrop. “Catrione?”
“I can’t quite make anything out—”
“You can see?” He sounded dubious.
“Things are a little blurry, but I can make out forms and outlines and…” Something else, as well, something for which she didn’t know a word. But there wasn’t time to ponder it now. “My eyes don’t hurt, and that’s a good thing. Do you still see Bog?” Before Cwynn could answer, she saw him herself: a vaguely dog-shaped outline within a white-gold nimbus. “I see him!” she cried. “Look—there he is. Bog! Here I am!” She waved and without a doubt, she saw his feathery tail wag.
“Be careful,” Cwynn said. He took her arm by the elbow. “We’re in some kind of cave, and he’s leading us down a tunnel. It looks steep and very slippery.”
“Just follow Bog,” Catrione replied. From deep within the tunnel, she heard the khouri-keen screaming. At least, she thought it was the khouri-keen. The voices were high and shrill and piercing, and she couldn’t so much hear them as see them; bright sparkling ribbons of harsh sound that darted like fireflies on the periphery of her vision. “Come. I think I hear the khouri-keen.”
“We can do this by the time the sun sets today?” asked Loriana as she and Bran followed Timias into the keep.
We have to do it by the time the sun sets today, Bran thought. His hands and arms felt as if they were made of parchment and he could feel his muscles trembling beneath his skin. Beads of sweat crept down his face, trickled down his back and the air felt very dry down his throat. It burned his lungs and made him breathless.
Loriana stood perfectly still just inside the door. In the very center of the room, a small column, about waist high, apparently of the same marble as the walls, held a perfectly round stone that gleamed a soft green in the gloom. Dusty light filtered down from high above, and Bran looked up. The tower was roofed with a window and the sun shone down, washing the entire interior in a soft white glow. “What’s that?”
“That’s part of the magic,” Timias replied. “Come. We have to go below.”
He led the way to the rear of the chamber, where a circular flight of steps curved down into an underground cavern. Bran swayed, dizzy, and fumbled for the wall. “I think I—” he tried. “I think I have to go home.”
“You can’t.” Loriana shook his hand so hard his shoulder felt as if it would come out of the socket and he saw that she was much stronger than she appeared to be. He stumbled a little and his vision blurred. “Please, just a little more.” She ran the tips of her fingers down his face, caressed the fine down on his cheek. “Please?” Her breath burned his earlobe as she stood on tiptoes, leaned against him. “Please, Bran of the soft brown beard. We’ll sing about you forever.”
“You will?” he whispered.
“Of course we will, Bran. Those who work magic great as this deserve to be remembered, don’t you think?”
The entire room seemed to pulsate with that green and glowing light, and Bran felt his knees shake. The room began to spin and the stairs began to sway. As darkness closed around him, he felt himself begin to fall.
As if from very far away, he heard Loriana say, “Can we still use him in this state?”
“Of course we can,” Timias answered as the world blinked out. “We only want his essence.”
The slippery, uneven rocks prevented them from going faster than a careful walk. “I don’t understand,” Cwynn muttered. “Isn’t there an easier path?”
“No,” Catrione replied grimly. “I’m sure this is the easiest, and the safest, and the fastest. Bog led you to that creature. I believe he’ll lead us to Tiermuid.”
“And then what?”
“And then we kill him.”
“How?”
“I’ll distract him—you use the shadow cloak, sneak up behind him and sink the silver into him. You won’t have to do more than touch him, I don’t think.” Unless he’s impervious to silver. But nothing of Faerie is, she reassured herself. After all, that’s how Seanta killed her monster, with her silver hand. It had to work.
She gripped Cwynn’s forearm with renewed determination just as the color of the khouri-keen’s cries changed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“They’re saying something—they aren’t just screaming,” she said. “Their voices are different here, shriller, harder to understand. I think they’re saying a name—or a phrase, over and over. Could it be—” she paused, listening carefully “—the Faerie-girl, the Faerie-girl?”
“I can’t hear a thing.”
“Most people can’t. They might see flickers of movement, but that’s usually all.”
“Why are these things so important?” he asked as they set off.
“The khouri-keen are earth elementals. Remember I said druid magic was elemental magic? Druid magic is based on the element of water. Water’s very powerful—unlike the other elements, for example, it exists in three forms
. But it’s fluid, and hard to shape. Like water, it has to be channeled or held in something in order to do anything. The khouri-keen are like the rock, under the soil. They’re the foundation for almost all that we do.”
“Almost all?”
“Except for the healing rites, the fertility rituals. Those we work by the sun, the stars, the moon and the trees. But tree magic is slow magic. The khouri-keen are—”
“Easier?”
“In some ways. They’re hard to control—but trees can’t be controlled at all so—” She broke off and raised her head and as if from very far away, she heard a dog bark. “Bog?”
The cries of the khouri-keen shifted once more, and this time, she heard another name called unmistakably. CONNLA…CONNLA…CONNLA. Connla’s dead, she thought. And the khouri-keen either didn’t know it, or maybe had just found out. But then why were they now screaming, BOY?
BOY…BOY…HE’S OURS…GIVE HIM TO KHOURI! The screaming was deafening. They struggled down the tunnel, Catrione slipping and sliding ahead of Cwynn. “Hey, don’t run off on me—”
“I think they have a human,” Catrione said through clenched teeth. Her heart was beginning to pound. “I think they have a mortal—someone Connla put a ward on.”
“What?” Cwynn staggered after her. “What are you talking about?”
“The sidhe are dangerous to mortals, Cwynn.” She tried to think of how easiest to explain to someone who’d clearly been raised in near total ignorance. “We druids have as little to do with them as possible, and never by ourselves. Why do you think I wanted you to come with me? I can’t do this alone. I might not get back.”
“What happens if you don’t get back?”
“You stay here, and this world—Faerie—milks you dry, if the goblins don’t find you and the sidhe don’t take your essence.”
“What’s an essence? A man’s seed?”
“No, its something even more intimately a part of you than that. A man’s seed is meant to go out of him, meant to create new life. The essence of a mortal is something deeper and richer, something that’s in your bones, in your blood, in your mind. And the sidhe will take it if you let them, gorge themselves on it like the goblins on flesh. We druids give it to them in small doses, so it doesn’t madden them, doesn’t overwhelm them.”
“But why have anything to do with them at all?”
“The sidhe have great magic, too. They breathe the magic in…they breathe the magic out. But they’re even more dangerous than goblins, and believe me, twice as tricksie as any trixie.”
“So they’ve got a boy?”
“A boy Connla the ArchDruid clearly didn’t want them to have.” Catrione slipped and slid and she felt Cwynn’s arm go around her, steadying her. As she leaned into his strength, her mind began to spin. Connla was coming from Eaven Morna…A boy from Eaven Morna…A boy Connla didn’t want the sidhe to have…A boy from Eaven Morna. What boy was there at Eaven Morna that the ArchDruid of all Brynhyvar would ward with trixies?
She gripped Cwynn’s arm as the name came to her. Deirdre’s little brother. Deirdre’s little brother. “Bran,” she whispered as she stopped short, nearly causing Cwynn to slide. “Great Mother, in all this time, I forgot about Bran.”
“Who is Bran?”
“Bran’s your brother.” She stared ahead, where the dog had likewise stopped to scratch its ear. As she stared at Bog’s familiar outline, she remembered the knight that had come from Eaven Morna, the day all this had started. “We had a message from Meeve, too, you see—I just wasn’t connecting them.”
“Catrione, what are you talking about?” He sounded anxious and impatient.
“I’ll have to explain this as briefly as I can. The essence of druid magic isn’t really in the khouri-keen—that’s where the anchor is, the foundation. But the essence is in each druid. It’s the same essence that the sidhe love in any mortal—but there’s the power to do magic in a druid’s. That’s how Deirdre spun the cloak, that’s how we make the silver-water that heals—”
“In other words, to work druid magic, you need a druid. Makes sense, I suppose.”
“The way magic works—the way the Worlds are—there’s echoes and reflections, images and shadows of people and things and places. TirNa’lugh’s is our Shadowland, just as our World is theirs. Do you understand that?”
“Hmm. I’ll have to think on that one.”
“One of the things it means is that opposites have great power, as well as doubles. So twins, for example—most likely one will be druid and one won’t. You have a sister, you know. Deirdre’s twin. She’s not druid at all. But Meeve had four children—two boys and two girls. The girls are twins—one’s druid, one’s not. The boys aren’t, but they’re the oldest and the youngest. One isn’t a druid—”
“So Bran’s a druid?”
“He’s not a trained druid, of course. But Connla must’ve suspected something about him to have put a ward on him—every khouri here is screaming his name. So you see, not only does Tiermuid have the crystals and the khouri-keen, he’s got a mortal—a powerful mortal. He’s building up to a very great working indeed.”
“How do you know that? How can you know that?”
“If you know how it all works, it falls into place. He’s got all four Elements, an intention, a goal and I’ll wager a medium, as well—those are easy to find. Mediums are anything through which energy can be directed, focused or held. So anything—a piece of wood, certain metals, anything that would absorb energy—” She broke off as through the ground, she felt a single throb rise and fall. “Did you feel that?” The throb came again.
“I felt it and I heard it. Do you have any idea what it is?”
“Goblin drums,” Catrione said. “It was dawn, though, when we left…How could it possibly—”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“The goblins won’t come out in the sun.”
“We’re in TirNa’lugh, right? Maybe here it’s different.” He looked up. “Are they over us?”
“I can’t really tell,” Catrione said. “Come, let’s go.” They struggled on, and finally Cwynn halted. “Why’re we stopping?” A cool wind stirred Catrione’s hair, and she felt a sticky film coating her face.
“The dog stopped. I think we’re there.”
Light filtered down from the opening above, and in it, she saw Tiermuid standing in the center, before a rock, his form bent over a black cauldron that appeared to be made of feathers. On the back wall, a beautiful young sidhe dragged a limp mortal up a shallow set of winding steps. His arms were draped around her shoulders, and from one hand dangled what looked like something that exploded in a lacy shimmer of rainbow colors.
That’s the medium, Catrione realized. That’s what holds the magic of this working. And it’s not quite finished yet. “If I can get that thing away from the boy,” she breathed, assessing her chances of crossing the space without Tiermuid—Tiermuid-Timias-Tetzu—seeing her. But it was already too late. Not only had he seen her, he had recognized her. He was smiling.
Below her feet, she felt the earth rumble. Run, run, the goblins come. There’s not much time, she thought. “Cwynn,” she whispered. “Do you see the boy? And what he’s holding? I’ve got to get up those steps and stop whatever they’re doing. That’s Bran. So you sneak up on Timias while he’s distracted looking at me. I’ll try to get as close to the steps as I can. And when you see me run—”
“Jump on him.”
“Exactly.” The sidhe was about halfway from the top and the boy looked as if he were practically dead weight. But they needed him, she realized. They needed him to hold the silver.
“He looks pretty far gone anyway, Catrione. I’m not saying we leave him, but he’s so pale and white—”
“If he dies here, he doesn’t go to the Summerlands,” she hissed. “He goes to dance in Herne’s Hunt. Would you want that for your brother?”
“No, I’d not want that for anyone,” he said at once with a contrit
eness that made her like him. She felt him peck a quick kiss on her face. “Let’s be quick. He doesn’t look like he’s got much time.”
“Catrione, what happened to your eyes?”
From across the floor, Timias saw her react to his question. She wasn’t expecting his recognition, and he smiled.
“I know,” she said with a laugh, head high. She spoke in that imperious tone he hated, the tone that told him she had been born the daughter of a chieftain and a queen, recognized druid from birth, honored and pampered and cherished by all. The only one he’d hated more than Catrione had been Deirdre. Catrione sidled around the edge of the rocks and something about the way she moved reminded him of himself in Macha’s hall. He saw her turn her head fleetingly at the steps.
She’s trying to get up there, he thought. She’ll stop Loriana and Bran if she can. He sidestepped as she continued. “There’s something different about my eyes, isn’t there? I think the Hag changed them so I could see you for what you really are. Which is nothing, isn’t that right? Tiermuid, Timias, Tetzu—which one are you really? You’re none of them, are you? You’re none of them and nothing. You’re nothing but a changeling who trades one mask for another. You can’t show your true face because you don’t have one.”
Enraged, he leaped. She ran. In mid-air, he felt a hand come down upon his shoulder, and he realized he’d been right all along. Someone had been there, and was wearing the cloak of shadows. Catrione’s taunts had enraged him, and now he was face to face with this oaf of a mortal, who swung what looked like a silver-coated garden rake lashed to a primitive harness on the end of a blunted forearm. “I know you,” cried Timias as they grappled back and forth at the bottom of the steps. He heard Loriana screaming, heard Catrione calling out for Bran. “Put it on the globe, Loriana,” Timias screamed as the mortal swung his clumsy contrivance. Don’t fail me now, he thought. Don’t fail me now, my queen. Just a few more heartbeats, and the power of both silver and gremlins would be locked into Faerie, bound by fire, air and water, anchored in stone.
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