by Jodi McIsaac
Jane grabbed her hands and said, “You’re going to find her, Cedar. I saw what Eden can do, and she’s one smart kid. All she needs is a chance and a door, and she’ll be back here with you. Right?”
Cedar nodded mutely.
“How’s your mum holding up?” Jane asked.
“You know, I really have no idea,” Cedar said, frowning. She tried to remember the last time she had talked to Maeve. “I spoke with her yesterday morning, I guess. But she wouldn’t tell me where she was, or what she was doing. We tried to call her tonight, but she’s not answering her phone.”
Jane wrinkled her nose. “That’s weird. I mean, as if you don’t have enough to worry about.”
Cedar tried to remember her recent conversations with her mother, but they seemed hazy to her. She wondered if they had spoken about Eden, and that’s why she couldn’t remember them clearly. “I just know that she’s always hated Finn,” she told Jane. “She’s angry that I’m letting him and his parents help me.”
“Seriously?” Jane said, her face the perfect picture of indignation. “You’re her daughter. She should be helping you, no matter who else is. Jeez. She should at least be here with you. Although if I had someone who looked like Finn in my apartment, I wouldn’t want my mother around either.”
Cedar smiled despite her exhaustion.
“No offense, but you look like the walking dead,” Jane said. “When was the last time you slept? Do you want me to stay here with you, or to come back after Finn leaves?” She looked at Cedar knowingly. “If he leaves?”
“No, no, I’m good,” Cedar said, shaking her head. “Really, thank you, but I’ll be fine. I’m just going to go to bed.”
“Mmm hmm,” Jane said, unconvinced. “Well, I’m going to call you tomorrow, and answer the damn phone this time, will you? I love you. Now go to bed.” Jane gave Cedar a tight hug and let herself out.
Cedar leaned against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. Her head was swimming, but she couldn’t give in to her exhaustion yet. There were still too many mysteries, too many unanswered questions. She thought about her mother. She’s hiding something, something big, but do I even want to know? Can I handle any more revelations? She shook her head to snap herself out of it. Yes, she could handle it. She was determined to find out the truth—all of it.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Finn’s reappearance. He lifted her up by her arms and stood her on her feet, saying, “You need some sleep.”
She frowned. “I don’t want to sleep. I want to figure this out. Can we go back into the girl’s room? I think I was starting to remember something before Jane showed up.”
They stood together in the center of the pink room, and Cedar tried to recall the image of the girl. Nothing happened. She picked up a copy of Little House on the Prairie from the dresser, examining the cover. “I loved this book as a child.”
When she looked up, she was surprised to see that Finn was grinning.
“Do you remember meeting when we were kids?” he asked.
Cedar stared at him, shocked. “We met when we were kids? When?”
He grinned at her. “You were ten years old, and scrawny as a barn cat. Not that I was much better. Remember how Nevan told you we escaped from the war in Tír na nÓg? The escape route we found was a sidh that happened to be in the cellar of Maeve’s house, the house where you grew up. That’s how she first got wrapped up with all of us. We weren’t properly introduced, of course, but I saw you there when we first arrived.”
“What? There was a sidh in our cellar? Did my mum know about it?” Cedar searched her memory, trying to remember a group of strangers emerging from the cellar, but nothing came to her. How could she have forgotten something like that?
Finn opened his mouth to respond, but it looked like he was struggling to form words. He closed his lips and frowned, then tried again. Finally he said, “She did, but you wouldn’t have noticed it. The sidh can be hidden. The way Eden opens them, with an actual door—it’s not the way it was done before.”
“Done before. By the High King, you mean,” Cedar said.
“There were many sidhe once, all over the place,” Finn said. He looked ill, as if he were trying not to throw up. Then he seemed to recover and said, “You should know the truth about why I left.”
Cedar felt the familiar pang in her stomach and looked at her feet. “I know why you left,” she said. “You’re a god, or some kind of superbeing, anyway. I’m only human. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said forcefully. “It’s not simple. Listen to me.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she turned around, still looking at the floor.
“If I had stayed with you, they would have killed you,” he said.
This made her look up. “Who would have killed me?”
“My people. Nuala, specifically.”
“Because you’re not supposed to be mixing with humans?”
“It’s complicated, but yes. We couldn’t risk exposure. If we got close to humans, they might begin to suspect, or we might be tempted to tell them the truth. But we’re social beings, to put it mildly, so we were bound to slip up occasionally. That’s where Nuala came in. She would be dispatched to make the human forget about whichever one of us had broken the rule. Sometimes it worked well. Even if the human began to suspect something was up, they often didn’t want to believe what their mind was telling them, so it was easy to convince them they had imagined everything, including their friendship or encounter with one of us. But other times…” He trailed off, looking at Cedar with worry.
“If she couldn’t make them forget, she would just kill them,” she finished for him.
He nodded. “We don’t have any proof, and Rohan never endorsed it, not outright, but neither did he explicitly forbid it. We just never talked about it. Sometimes humans would just go missing, and if we asked her about it, she would shrug and say, ‘They’re not a problem anymore.’ Her attitude toward humans was the fewer of them, the better. It’s inexcusable, I know. I can’t imagine what you must think of us.”
Cedar pressed her lips together, saying nothing.
“I didn’t want that to happen to you,” he said, his eyes full of pleading. “It’s my fault, I know. I knew the risk I was taking the first day we met; when we met again as adults, that is. I didn’t think it would go anywhere. I didn’t think it was possible I could love you so much. And I tried to be careful. I changed shape every time I left your place so they wouldn’t see me coming and going. I had as little to do with my people as I could so I wouldn’t have to lie to them so much. But then Nuala saw us together once, at the busker festival, and she could see your heart even if she couldn’t see mine.” He looked away, sorrowful lines marring his beautiful face. “She could see how much you loved me, how happy you were, and she hated you for it. Everyone thought she and I were meant to be together, but I didn’t love her. I didn’t even like her. When she found out, I knew she wouldn’t settle for just erasing your memories. She wouldn’t be able to handle the insult that I had chosen a human over her. She would want you dead.”
Cedar picked at a loose thread on her shirt, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “So why am I still alive?” she asked.
“Only because of my father’s position within our community,” he answered, “and my mother’s compassion, I suppose. I begged them to forbid Nuala to go near you. Finally, they agreed, but in return I had to swear an oath that I would leave you, that I would never contact you in any way or leave any trace of where you could find me. The break had to be absolute.”
“It was absolute,” Cedar agreed. She rubbed her temples, remembering the excruciating pain of those first few weeks, and the numbness that had followed.
And yet she could feel the anger she had been holding onto slip away, withdrawing like a slow tide. It was being replaced with a swirl of new emotions—horror that Nuala had dispatched other humans so cavalierly, relief that her own life had been spared, guilt over the way s
he had been treating Finn, when he had just been trying to protect her, and something else—a small shoot of hope that was breaking through the hard soil of her heart.
“I thought about you every single day,” he said. His voice was quiet but strained, as if he longed to pack as much meaning as he could into each word. “Each day, I wondered where you were and what you were doing, if you were married, if you had a family. But I was forbidden to contact you, or even to watch you from afar. They thought that if enough time went by, I would forget about you; I would get you out of my system, come back and marry Nuala, and start producing offspring to further my race. But my people have long memories, and after seven years my feelings for you are as strong as they were on the day I last saw you.”
Cedar could feel the tiny shoot of hope in her stirring, reaching. But she was afraid—afraid to give it air or room to grow.
“It doesn’t change anything, does it?” she asked. “The rules still apply. You’re still Tuatha Dé Danann, and I’m still human.”
Finn put his arms around her. She stayed there, perfectly still. “Everything has changed, Cedar. Everything,” he said. “The rules don’t apply anymore. You already know about us, you know the truth about me. We have a child together, and we can have a life together. I never stopped loving you. But I need to know that you forgive me. Please forgive me for leaving you.”
She reached up and rested her hand on his cheek. He leaned into it and closed his eyes. She had held onto her pain for so long, first as a way to hang on to him, and then as a way to protect herself from being rejected again. She saw herself clearly for the first time in years. She didn’t want to be like that anymore, running from what she felt, trying to shut down the best parts of herself because they reminded her of him. She wanted to be whole again and happy and free. She wanted to believe him, to trust him—but first she had to trust herself, and let go.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I forgive you.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, his lips were on hers, one hand tangling in her hair and the other wrapping around her, pulling her close. She closed her eyes and felt the hurt of the last seven years dissolve away under the gentle pressure of his lips. Her body relaxed, and he tightened his grip on her, as if he were afraid she, too, would dissolve into nothingness. She remembered how it had been to kiss him, how it had seemed like nothing else in the world existed. She heard music in her head, erupting like fireworks.
And then other memories started rushing in, crashing into her like rolling waves. The smell of a newborn baby, an olive-skinned toddler chasing seagulls around the harbor, a pink backpack bobbing behind a little girl on the first day of school. An argument over a man one wanted to know and the other wanted to forget. The midnight glow of pyramids in the Egyptian desert. A frightened child screaming for her mother on a pile of rocks in the Atlantic Ocean.
Gasping, Cedar pulled away from Finn and looked at him, her eyes burning.
“I remember her,” she said. “I remember everything.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It took Nuala a moment to realize her eyes were open. A dark mist swirled around her, thick and pungent with an unfamiliar smell. She peered ahead, trying to focus on her memories of Tír na nÓg. She pictured the fields of flowers that reached out to caress those who walked past, waterfalls of crystal nectar, trees that sang and danced and hung heavy with fruit, one bite of which would fill a person with energy for days. She strained her eyes and thought she could see vague outlines and forms in front of her. She moved a hand through the air and found that the dark mist clung to her skin. It was sticky, like cobwebs. She let go of Eden’s hand to wipe it away, and Eden took a step forward.
“Wait,” said Nuala. “Something isn’t right. I don’t know why it’s not clear.”
“I do.”
The voice came from Eden, who turned around to face her. But it wasn’t a small, frightened child who approached her now, moving through the fog as if it were the crystal air of a spring morning. She was taller, and her hair fell down her back in thick waves. She was wearing a dress of black gossamer lace that looked as if it had been woven from the same material as the mist that surrounded them. The gown clung to curves that did not belong to a six-year-old body. When Eden stopped in front of her, Nuala realized they were the same height now, staring eye to eye. The eyes that bored into hers were not wide with innocent wonder, but deep and old and fierce. Nuala looked away, and noticed for the first time that she herself was dressed in mottled gray rags.
“It is not clear because there are things you do not wish me to see,” Eden said in a low, throaty voice. “But it does not matter. We are in my dream now.”
“No,” whispered Nuala, closing her eyes and trying to wrest control of the dream, focusing all her powers of concentration on one singular image, the glade where she had spent countless hours, no, years, listening to the water nymphs singing and bathing in the nearby stream. After several long moments she opened her eyes, fully expecting to see the sunlight dancing off the golden leaves, but instead she was looking into a pair of golden eyes that were now rimmed with mirth.
“While we’re here,” Eden said, “we might as well have a look around.” She took Nuala by the hand and started pulling her along, fragments of the gossamer gown drifting off her body as she moved, only to be replaced by new wisps of the surrounding mist.
Nuala moved behind her, partly because she didn’t want the girl-woman to get away, and partly because she had no choice—Eden’s grasp was as strong as if someone had poured molten lead on their hands, sealing them together. As they moved through the darkness, Nuala heard a sound that made her skin crawl. She listened more closely. It was the sound of a small child crying. It echoed as if the child were alone in an empty, cavernous room. Nuala strained her eyes but could see nothing. They kept moving, and the child’s crying faded, only to be replaced by a new sound. This, too, was of a child, who was calling out, “Mummy? Mummy!” The voice had the same echoing timbre as the one before it. She could hear footsteps, soft at first, then loud and fast, the sound of bare feet pounding against wood. The cries rose in pitch and volume until the child was screaming hysterically, “MUMMY! WHERE ARE YOU?”
Then it was quiet.
“Who—” Nuala began, but Eden turned and silenced her with glance.
“Listen,” she said. Then the chanting began. It sounded like many voices; a dozen or a thousand, Nuala could not tell. They chanted in unison in the same dull, deadened tone. She could not see them, but she could sense that the chanters were rocking back and forth, back and forth, keeping rhythm with the words as they swayed through the air. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you…”
“Eden, stop,” Nuala said, her voice swallowed up by the growing number of voices around her. “Stop!” she shouted. “Tell me what this is!”
Eden broke her viselike grip on Nuala’s hand and spun to face her. They were only an inch apart, and Nuala gasped when Eden bared her teeth, pointed like a row of tiny daggers, and made a growling sound deep in the back of her throat.
“This is me,” she hissed, raising her arms into the air in a sudden, swooping curve and thrusting her palms outward. As if a sudden wind had swept in, the mist blew away, rolling back like the morning fog off the ocean. Nuala looked around and gasped. They were standing in Tír na nÓg, just as she remembered it. Immediately, her body relaxed, and she could feel herself filling with the power freely given by the earth beneath her feet. The peal of a water nymph’s laughter erased all memory of the ghostly children. A light breeze lifted her hair off her shoulders and caressed her body as if to welcome her home. Even so, she could tell this was Eden’s dream, and not her own.
“How do you know?” she snapped. Eden’s gossamer gown was now white, and she was idly weaving a chain of flowers the color of sunrise into her hair. “How do you know what this place is like? Have you known all this time?” She stepped in front of Eden, fury pumping through her veins. If this was the
girl’s dream, and she knew Tír na nÓg so intimately, then she had been lying to her all along. Nuala felt suddenly and unexpectedly betrayed.
Eden looked up, as if she were surprised to see Nuala standing there. Then she looked around. “This place? Mmm, it is lovely, isn’t it? But it’s not what you are looking for.”
“This is exactly what I’m looking for, you lying wench,” Nuala snarled. “I know exactly where we are, and you must too, or else you wouldn’t have been able to re-create this place. Tell me how!”
Eden appeared unfazed by Nuala’s growing rancor and gazed around curiously.
“I don’t believe I’ve been here before,” she said. Her voice, which had been low and husky, was now light and airy. She reached up to a blooming tree and pulled down a bough heavily laden with purple blossoms, burying her nose in them and then laughing with delight.
Nuala stared at her.
“Oh, yes, I have seen this place before,” Eden said, as if just remembering. “It came from you, from your memories.”
Nuala’s eyebrows shot up, and then relaxed. “Then the dream-sharing did work,” she said. “Now we just need to wake up.”
“Mmm, I don’t think so,” Eden said in singsong voice.
“What do you mean?” Nuala snapped.
“This is how you remember Tír na nÓg, not how it is.”
“What are you talking about? This is exactly how Tír na nÓg is! This is my home!”
Eden released the tree bough and watched it bounce gently back into place. She moved slowly toward Nuala, shaking her head sadly.
“No,” she said. “If this is how Tír na nÓg truly is, then dear Brighid’s painting would have been enough for me to open the sidh.” She spun around, waving her arms through the air. “This is Tír na nÓg as it was, and as it should be.” Then she stopped and looked at the ground. “But now…well, I do not know what it looks like now, but it does not look like this anymore. The land has been poisoned. Some fear it is beyond repair. And you…you wish to help him who would utterly destroy it.” Eden’s shoulders slumped.
