Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  “We waited as long as we dared,” her husband told her, concern filling his voice as he took Sophia in his arms. “Then I was certain something had gone wrong. I went back to the hotel room but you were not there. So we hoped you had come this way. What happened?”

  “I lived. I escaped her, thanks to the medal of the Infant of Prague I had put on my necklace, next to my cross,” Sophia reassured them. “But if I hadn’t been able to touch it or then hang it around Elizabeth’s neck…” Sophia shuddered.

  “Tell us what happened,” Dmitri urged her. Sophia looked around her at the circle of concerned faces. She closed her eyes, then reported her encounter with Elizabeth.

  “Dmitri, you had just left and I was sitting near the window. Our room is not many floors up, so I could hear people on the street talking about the possibility of a flood. While I was listening, Elizabeth must have slipped into the room, because suddenly, she was there, answering the rhetorical questions I had been asking myself,” Sophia told them. She opened her eyes again. Swallowing and taking a deep breath, she continued to describe the conversation and events in the hotel room in as much detail as she could recall.

  “No! She didn’t!” interjected Victoria more than once. Theo made horrified sounds, as did Sean. Dmitri held Sophia’s hand as she spoke, lending his support for the recounting of her brush with death. Finally, the tale came to an end and Sophia focused on them all again.

  “It still is not quite real to me,” she summarized. “It feels like I was watching it all happen to someone else.”

  “Of course it does,” offered Theo. “You are right—the medal of the Infant of Prague was invaluable. I have the one you bought for me right here.” He pulled it from his pants pocket. “I hope everyone else brought theirs?” He looked around the small circle and was met with mumbled agreement as the others all produced the medals Sophia had given them.

  “It was horrible, horrible what happened to you,” agreed Sean. “But it has also given us invaluable information. We know more about the plans which George, Magdalena and Elizabeth have and what they have set in motion. We know why they have done it and we know what they hope to achieve. Surely this information must be worth something? Surely we can use this to our advantage?”

  “Yes, of course we can,” agreed Theo. “But it does not change what we must do here, now, most immediately. In fact, the attack on Sophia—and Alessandro’s apparent murder, since he should have been here by now if he was able to join us—underline how important it is that we continue with our efforts to revitalize the power of the Royal Road and awake all the magic that has been worked into the city for its protection.” He looked around at the comrades expectantly for a sign of their agreement.

  Sean was the first to speak. “I think you are quite right. Until the cairn is erected on her grave in Ireland, the salting of the Royal Road is our best—in fact, our only—hope to interfere with their plans.”

  Victoria quickly agreed. “We are here. We must do what we have come to do. We must use the salt and the chalice to undo as much of their spell as we can.” She paused and then went on.

  “But perhaps the Dearg-due or George may pursue us? They might suspect that Sophia will go for help, yes? We should not go along this main street to the Powder Tower. It has few places for us to hide along the way. We can turn this way and go another way to the Old Town Square and then the Powder Tower. The streets are much more crooked but can give many more hiding places.” She pointed at the road running along the river.

  “Good idea, Victoria!” Theo congratulated her. “We should also arm ourselves in case we are attacked.” He looked around the small group. “What do we have as weapons? Aside from the Infant of Prague medals?” He put his hand in his pocket.

  “The salt, obviously,” Sean pointed out, lifting one of the shopping bags he held and gesturing to the other in Victoria’s hands.

  “Of course!” Theo looked sheepish. He took the chalice from the cloth it was wrapped in and gave it to Sophia. Then, taking a canister of salt from one of the shopping bags Victoria carried, he filled the goblet with the precious white crystals.

  “There. Now at least we have something to defend ourselves with,” Theo announced. He turned to Victoria. “Lead the way, Victoria!”

  The small group hurried along the river and then turned into a warren of streets snaking through the Old Town.

  Wilcox sat in his room after dinner. He had been the one to suggest using salt to rejuvenate the protective powers of Prague, and now his friends were out in the night, using his idea to do just that.

  “I cannot possibly risk being seen as part of such a project!” he told himself again. The thought that someone, anyone might see him was mortifying. “What if someone from the conferences is coming out of a bar or wandering about lost or something?” Not only were his friends running the chance of being seen and ridiculed, they were risking being seen by other academics who could ruin their careers if word spread of their attempt to work magic. “Me take a chance like that? Never!”

  He had promised, however, to sit in his room and think supportive thoughts, as Sophia had asked him. He had attempted a meditative practice in the past, suggested as a way to deal with anxiety and stress by a physician friend, but he had felt foolish every time he sat down to meditate. The practice had not lasted long. Now he found himself sitting in his chair again, feeling very foolish again.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He was conscious of his hands folded in his lap, of his heart beating in his chest, of his feet flat on the floor. A second breath filled his lungs and he held it there a moment before slowly releasing it through his pursed lips. He took another breath and was conscious of how silly he must look. His eyes popped open.

  “There must be some way to do this,” he realized. “I have to do something to help the rest of them stop George. I cannot simply sit here and do nothing!” He wiggled in the chair and struggled to close his eyes again. He took a breath and held it. “How do I think a supportive thought?” he asked himself. “I support Theo, Victoria and Sean. I support Dmitri and Sophia and Alessandro.” He pictured each of them in turn. He could imagine them in the darkness, sprinkling salt from the chalice onto the street. “I support all of you.” Should he imagine them wrapped in a cloud of protective light or something?

  “They certainly do look silly enough,” he chuckled, eyes still closed, imagining them walking along the streets of the Old Town and sprinkling salt from the chalice onto the ground. He took another deep breath. What should he do next? Repeat his mantra, “I support you”? He felt his cheeks blush with embarrassment. All right, he could imagine them wrapped in a protective mantle of camaraderie if not a protective light. They were out in the night, doing something they were struggling to believe in but which they knew was right. Something they knew was necessary.

  All at once, Wilcox felt profoundly alone. Not just alone, by himself in his room. Alone. Lonely. His best friend, Peter, had mysteriously vanished, reportedly changed into a toad by Elizabeth. For the first time, Wilcox allowed himself to feel the pain of that loss. Sudden, excruciating sobs racked his body. He buried his face in his hands as tears streamed down his face and his wails filled the room. How long he sat there, he could not tell, but eventually the tears slowed and the heaving groans eased. The sorrow was still there, but the first, most intense wave of it had passed. He raised his head and wiped the back of his hands across his red eyes.

  “Peter took objective, concrete action against that evil trio George, Elizabeth and Magdalena and he paid the ultimate price,” Wilcox muttered. “He did what was necessary despite any fears for his own safety. Now I’m sitting alone in my room and afraid that someone might see me sprinkling salt on a street?” He wiped his eyes again.

  “Bah!” he snarled. “If Peter could do that, then so can I! What if someone does see me? I have tenure, after all! Who would believe such a crazy story, in any case? No one who knows me would believe someone w
ho said they had seen me shaking salt onto the streets! Peter deserves this much!”

  Wilcox pushed himself up and out of the chair. He rushed out of his room before he could change his mind and hurried to meet the others on the streets of the Old Town.

  Seamus and his girlfriend, Mary Claire, peered through the great wrought-iron gate that blocked the entrance of the driveway onto an estate outside Waterford.

  “How are we supposed to be getting into this place again?” she asked. “It’s the weekend, it’s the middle of the night and we don’t even know these people and neither does your thesis advisor. But he wants you to come ring the bell and ask them to let you onto their property?”

  “Professor Sean did ask me to get onto the property but I’m sure he did not expect me to arrive at the front gate in the middle of a Sunday night,” Seamus confessed to his girlfriend. “Professor Sean knew that I’d come back home to Kilkenny to collect more oral histories for my folklore project and so he e-mailed me to come down here to Waterford and Castle Annaghs. I just didn’t read the e-mail until after I got home from interviewing those farmers. And I want to thank you for comin’ down here with me to the castle in the middle of the night,” he added in the exaggerated accent he sometimes used to make her laugh, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  She laughed in spite of the irritation she’d shown. “I still don’t understand why it was so important to your advisor that we come do this in the middle of the night. Why couldn’t it wait? At least until tomorrow morning, after we’d had a chance to have a bit of a lay-in?”

  “It is vital that I do this as soon as I read the e-mail,” Seamus told her again. “Professor Sean asked me and… and I just had to do it.”

  Mary Claire shook her head. “I will never understand you folklore scholars! No one of us in the chemistry department would ever have to come running out to old castles in the middle of the night on a weekend!”

  “No,” Seamus agreed. “You chemists would go running to your lab to check on an experiment. Or have you forgotten how I came with you two Saturday nights ago, later than this, to check on that reaction you had going in that mad scientist lair you’ve got?”

  Mary Claire grumbled.

  Seamus walked from one brick gatepost to the other, examining them in the light of his car headlights, the thrum of the engine quiet but steady. Gravel crunched beneath his feet. On the second gatepost, he found the buzzer he had been looking for and pressed it. After what seemed like endless minutes of no reaction within the confines of the estate, he pressed it again. Long and hard. There was still no reaction.

  “Maybe you should ring it again,” Mary Claire suggested, leaning against the car’s hood and crossing her ankles. “Third time’s the charm, they say.”

  Seamus muttered something that might have been agreement. He had raised his finger to the buzzer when there was a screech and a whine as the gate shuddered and slowly swung open with an occasional jerk. He and Mary Claire climbed back into the car, which he drove quietly onto the driveway beyond. The continued crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels was the only sound the car made. The gate lurched shut behind them.

  The driveway forked ahead of them, the gravel continuing to the left around a tall hedge of evergreens. To the right, a blacktop drive curved over the slight hill and out of sight. Seamus eased the car over the rise of the hill. Bright beams from the headlights cut through the rural darkness of the estate. There were no lights to illuminate the private drive of the estate, so he was forced to rely on the headlights to insure that he was not driving onto the farmland on either side of the road.

  As the car made its way slowly down the hill and across the estate, Seamus could make out the silhouettes of large, ancient trees that dotted the farmland and lined the side of the road. Some stood in groves but most were scattered individually. In the distance, off to their right, were the occasional headlights of a car on the local highway making its way into the Irish countryside, away from Waterford.

  Seamus pulled the car up to a large, bushy hedge of boxwood and brought the car to a halt.

  A shadow stepped from the boxwood and knocked on Mary Claire’s window. She jerked in shock and shrieked, “Jaysis!”, then slammed the lock on the door.

  “Nah, he’s nothing to be afraid of,” Seamus reassured her. “That’s jus’ me friend Oisin.”

  “Just your friend?” cried Mary Claire, breathless with fury. “Why didn’t you mention this friend before now? I almost died of a heart attack here!”

  “Sorry,” muttered Seamus, feeling his face blushing in the dark. He flipped on the light inside the car and flicked a switch on his armrest, unlocking all the doors. The shadow that was his friend Oisin slid into the back seat and clapped Seamus on the shoulder. He extended a large hand to Mary Claire, who sat in her seat, sullen and staring straight ahead through the windshield.

  Oisin’s hand hovered near her elbow for a moment and then he burst into great guffaws, his thick red beard stretched across his broad and happy face. Seamus glanced shamefacedly at his friend in the back seat and a sly, conspiratorial smile spread across his face. “He didn’t say anything to you about meeting me here, did he?” Oisin managed to ask Mary Claire in his hilarity, jerking a thick and callused thumb at Seamus.

  “No. No, he did not,” Mary Claire finally found her voice.

  “Jus’ like him, isn’t it?” Oisin asked, bursting into renewed laughter. Seamus rolled his eyes.

  Mary Claire fumed a few more seconds before relenting. “Yes. Yes, it is,” she agreed. “Just like him.” She turned around awkwardly. “Nice to meet you, Oisin. I’m Mary Claire. Or did my boyfriend think to at least tell you to expect that I might be here?” She goodnaturedly boxed Seamus’ ear and then shook Oisin’s hand.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Oisin answered, shaking her hand heartily. “But, yes. I was told to expect that I would be finally making your acquaintance here this evening,” he confessed. Mary Claire glared at Seamus and then shook her head, laughing.

  “Sorry,” Seamus muttered again, lifting his shoulder to protect his ear from another threatened box. But then all three relaxed into smiles and gentle laughter. Seamus turned off the light inside the car and pulled ahead, the car slowly making its way down the lane again.

  “So how is it that you are a friend of Seamus? You’ll give me more information than dear old Seamus himself here will, that I have no doubt of,” Mary Claire said to Oisin.

  “Oisin and I grew up together. We were also undergraduates together up at UCD,” Seamus answered before Oisin could. “See?” He glanced at Mary Claire. “I’m not trying to hide anything.” He smirked.

  “No, it just never occurs to you that you have to say a thought out loud for anyone else to know about it,” Oisin teased him. Mary Claire nodded her head vigorously in agreement.

  Oisin picked up the tale of his friendship with Seamus. “But after our undergraduate days, Seamus here went right into the folklore graduate program and I… I felt a need to get me hands dirty for a while with the feel of Mother Earth before going back up into that ivory tower. I traveled around awhile and wound up back here in Waterford, and what with my experience helping out on the farm as a boy, I got myself a job with the dairy farm here on the Castle Annaghs estate. One of the managers I’ve managed to become, so I have.” He winked at Mary Claire in the rear view mirror. “But someday I’ll probably find my way back to academia and Irish folklore, just like dear ol’ Seamus.” He clapped Seamus on the shoulder again before settling back into the car’s small back seat, which he filled amply with his large frame.

  “You’re a chemist,” Oisin went on. “Organic, I think ol’ Seamus mentioned.”

  “Yes. I am.” Mary Claire spoke to Oisin’s reflection in the mirror. “Too bad he didn’t think to tell me half as much about you!” She winked and they all laughed at Seamus’ foibles again.

  “So, I’m guessing that you let us in through the gate,” Mary Claire went on, the car continuing to make it
s slow way through the fields and trees.

  Oisin nodded. “’Twas me all right! When Seamus called me up tonight to explain what it was that he—you both, that is—would be comin’ after, how was it that I could say no?”

  “Quite a bit of luck, that,” Seamus interjected. “If you hadn’t ended up a manager here, this expedition for my uncle would’ve been well near impossible to pull off, so it would.”

  “What is it, exactly, that we are coming after?” Mary Claire demanded to know, causing Oisin to explode into great whoops of laughter again.

  “So, more secrets here, Mr. Seamus?” Oisin finally gasped out, wiping tears from his eyes.

  Seamus shrugged his shoulders. “Well, maybe. Just a bit,” he admitted to his childhood friend. The swathe of light from the car’s headlights swept past a large house to their right and then revealed a series of wooden railings and fenceposts that barricaded the driveway from the fields.

  “Pull up right over there, by that fence.” Oisin became serious as he gave specific instructions. “Pull up there and park and we can go through a gate here to cross the field.” Seamus parked as instructed and all three of them got out of the car. Oisin stretched his legs and pulled a flashlight out of a pocket. He turned it on and gestured toward the fence.

  “Hang on, hang on,” Seamus urged. “I got this on loan from old Mr. Kilshane, our neighbor, before driving over here. Thought it might come in useful.” He walked around to the rear of the car and opened the trunk. He pulled out a large industrial flashlight with a battery case and slammed the trunk down with a thud. One click, and an incredibly bright beam of light sprang from Seamus’ hands.

  “Good thinking,” Oisin admitted. “Maybe you should think of dairy farming yourself, Seamus, if you ever get tired of this academic research!” Both men laughed, shining their lights into each other’s faces even as they held up their other hands to shield their eyes. Mary Claire giggled at the grown men playing like boys.