Raven Calls

by C. E. Murphy

  I said, “Thrice, who says thrice,” under my breath and tried to count up the number of times I’d been through the life-and-near-death cycle in the past year or so. I stopped when I got to five, satisfied that Brigid didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I wondered if individual instances mattered or if it was a per-adventure count, in which case she might be on the money with three. There was the whole mess with Cernunnos and Herne that started all this, the dive into the cauldron and Saturday night’s exhaustive rebirthing scene. I didn’t think I’d been grievously injured the other thirty-seven or so times I’d figured I was about to die, so they probably didn’t add to the tally. “All right, okay, thrice. So what does that mean? Why does three times matter if you need my help?”

  “There’s power in threes.” It sounded as if she was having a hard time not adding “You idiot” to that statement, but after a moment she managed to go on without saying it. “Bran’s cauldron has left its mark on you.”

  “Less mark than I left on it,” I muttered.

  Brigid laughed. “And it’s that which makes me need your help. I can sense its history on you, gwyld. I can sense that for most of its existence it has done little harm.”

  I stared at her. “Little harm? Are you serious? That thing seduces the living. Invites them to crawl inside so it can suck their life out and turn them into zombies bidden to do the command of—” Bidden. Who says bidden? I turned my stare at the sky, as if answers or excuses for my word choices lay there. They didn’t.

  “How many…zombies…were within the cauldron, Joanne Walker?”

  “I don’t know, ten or so. Not very many.”

  “Ten men,” Brigid murmured, “including Bres, he who was once ard rí of this land and is now taken from time, have died for the Morrígan and her master.”

  My jaw flapped open. “Wait. Bres? He’s the guy who came undone? You remember him? How?”

  “The world cannot abide imbalance. When my sister became death’s warrior, a similar and opposite path was offered to me. We remember that which has been changed, and your presence here gives me hope that the cauldron might yet be bound.”

  “It can be. I mean, it was. Oh!” God, I was slow. “You’re the one who did it! Somebody broke the bindings, but not until just last year. I knew something powerful had set them—”

  Brigid’s face froze momentarily, offense taken at something rather than someone. She let it go, though, as I rattled on. “I’ve been dying to meet whoever did it. Not actually dying. I do enough of that. But it didn’t feel like human magic, and I was right!” I wanted to dance a jig, by gum, though doing so over the bodies of a dead man and an unconscious powermonger seemed ever so slightly inappropriate. “How did you do it? How will you do it?”

  “How did you destroy it?”

  The impulse to jig faded. An innocent soul had sacrificed herself to make sure the cauldron was destroyed. Much more subdued, I said, “With help.”

  “Then it is with help that I’ll bind it.”

  I genuinely didn’t get she meant me until she held out her hand in invitation.

  Chapter Seven

  “…is this why you threw me back to this end of time? I mean, you’ve been here before, right? You knew this was going to happen when you met us at Tara in the future. Seriously, couldn’t you have just said something back then? Future then?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “I meant what I said, Joanne Walker. I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the one unstuck in time, the one who passes through many points at once. I travel through time day by day, as most living creatures do. If you have met me again, it awaits me in my future even if it resides in your past.”

  I liked the idea of Brigid being responsible for our time traveling a lot more than I liked being responsible for it myself, so it took me a minute to get over that. Actually, it more like took me a moment to even approach it. Getting over it was still on the agenda. Gary, meantime, hissed, “That was her?”

  He’d picked up the sword I’d dropped and had taken to standing guard over the Morrígan, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. I gave a big sloppy frustrated shrug. “I think so. Or an avatar. Do you use avatars? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. How am I supposed to help? I don’t know any binding spells.”

  I gave that a mental once-over to make sure it was true, then startled. It wasn’t: I’d encountered a binding spell in my first hours as a shaman. It called on gods and elements and things, and it probably wasn’t a safe bet to rely on me to cast it. Wisdom being the better part of valor, I said nothing about it.

  Turned out it didn’t matter, as Brigid said, “The binding will be tied to you. Now that I know you have the power and the will to destroy it, the binding need only last until the cauldron comes into your presence.”

  I stared at her. Began to speak. Held up a finger to stop both myself and her from saying anything. Turned around. Walked away. Stared fiercely at the southern horizon. There was a tower there, about a mile away, just like in my time. I glared at the tower until I trusted myself not to shriek like a harpy, then gathered myself to face Brigid again.

  “I don’t know why you’d set a binding that can be broken when the damned cauldron enters my vicinity, like, my city, rather than my actual physical presence, but that’s what happens. People die because of that, Brigid. I get that closed time loops are tidy and all—” and, hoo boy, was I developing a hate-on for them “—but we’re talking about people’s lives here.”

  “I would not set such a spell,” she said both serenely and alliteratively, “but the years are long between now and then, are they not? Even the most powerful of magics may slip, over so much time. And how many would die, Siobhán Walkingstick, if I did not make the magic at all?”

  Using logic to derail my head of steam was a lousy trick. I muttered, “Well, at least promise to tighten up the wards every few centuries so the bindings can only be broken if I’m there. Or better yet, so only I can break them. Without murdering poor Jason Chen.” It didn’t work that way. I knew it didn’t, because it hadn’t. I doubted we’d get back to our time and discover history had retrofitted itself and that Jason had gotten to take his sisters trick-or-treating after all. For one intense, searing moment I wished like hell it did work that way, but time, life and Grandfather Sky were not that kind. If I ever got to meet the makers of the world I had a word or two I wanted to say to them.

  Brigid promised, “I’ll do my best,” and I nodded, knowing it wouldn’t be enough. Then I followed her gaze as it went to Lugh. She murmured, “My sister must take her sacrifice so we might find the cauldron to bind it,” apologetically.

  It wasn’t physically possible for my head to spin, but it tried. A headache sprang up for its efforts, and while I was struggling to find something politic to say, Gary growled, “You gotta be kidding, lady. All this and you don’t even know where the damned thing is?”

  Brigid stiffened. “It would be a great prize for my sister’s master. They would not leave it somewhere easy to find.”

  “It’s in the cave.” I sighed as Gary and Brigid both raised their eyebrows at me. “The one the werewolves came from. Somewhere to the west of here, near a…” I waved my hands. “Near another hill.”

  “Ireland,” Brigid said dryly, “is full of hills.”

  I glowered. “A built-up one. Somebody made a huge pile of rocks on top of a gigantic flat hill.”

  “Cnoc na rí,” Brigid said every bit as dryly as before. “We would call it a mountain, Joanne Walker. The mountain of kings. You speak of the cairns atop it.”

  “I don’t know what Knocknaree is,” I said, approximating her pronunciation as best I could, “but it’s a marker for the cave, and if you know where it is, we should probably haul ass that direction and bind the damned cauldron so Gary and I can go home.”

  Gary squeaked, “That might be a problem, doll,” and when I looked over, the Morrígan had my sword at his throat.

  I had shot somebody four mornin
gs ago. It was not something I was proud of and not something I wanted to repeat. Ever. Except I’d have dropped the Morrígan in a heartbeat, if I’d had my gun. I doubted it would change the whole history of the world. Someone else similar would just replace her. But I didn’t have my gun, and later I would probably think that was good, because digging modern-day shell casings out of a millennia-old Tara hillside would really throw archaeologists for a loop.

  Right now, though, my fingers clenched like I was squeezing a trigger, and the Morrígan gave me a tight, nasty smile. “Don’t think of it, gwyld. You may draw a blade from the air, but not while it resides in my hand.”

  She was right, too. I could almost feel the hilt in my hand, but there was a trembling resistance, too, like a magnet not quite strong enough to pull its counterpart toward it. But the Morrígan’s magic—or grip—was stronger, and the harder I tried calling it to me, the redder a scratch on Gary’s throat became.

  I stopped trying. The sword relaxed, giving Gary room to swallow. In fact, his whole big self relaxed. Sagged, some might even say. He had both hands on the Morrígan’s arm, classic knife-at-throat pose, but he wasn’t going to be able to pull her away without slitting his own gullet. His head fell forward, shoulders caved as best they could to protect his throat in a moment of defeat. His spirit animal’s presence was agitated, not something I’d ever imagined a tortoise could be. But even tortoises had vulnerable throats.

  I was trying to figure out what to do when Gary threw his head back and smashed the Morrígan’s nose.

  Roughly one million awful things happened at once.

  Cartilage crunched. The Morrígan bellowed with pain. She even dropped the sword, but blood was already pouring from Gary’s throat: he’d cut it himself with the sheer violence of his action.

  The Morrígan dropped him, too, and staggered back with both hands clapped to her nose. Blood ran down her forearms toward her elbows. Normally I would mock a warrior woman who couldn’t take the pain of a little broken nose, but Gary was bleeding, and besides, I’d broken my nose when I was a kid. It hurt like a motherfucker.

  Gary’s hands went to his throat, such a familiar cinematic response that it could have been funny if it wasn’t a real person a few seconds from bleeding to death. He dropped to the earth with lumbering grace as I charged forward, vision turning silver-blue with fear and fury.

  In the center of that brilliance, the Morrígan crouched over Lugh’s body. She glanced up, saw me coming and splayed one hand open with much the same gesture she’d used to ruin my coat. Power exploded out, black wrath laced with blue.

  Brigid, inexplicably, stood between me and the burst of power. Her shields flared, white and gold, but the blast of black magic still hit hard enough that her torso bowed with the impact. She fell gracefully, never in my way as I ran for Gary.

  An ugly sound of frustration erupted from the back of the Morrígan’s throat, but she didn’t try again. Her ravens came to her, one on each shoulder. She sneered at me, then dissipated in a whirl of blue mist.

  The sleeve of my coat turned to shredded leather again as she disappeared.

  I hit the bloodstained grass on my knees, both hands covering Gary’s at his throat. There was no careful visualization, no rebuilding of vessels, veins, muscle, tendons, skin one by very quick one. No delving into the garden of Gary’s soul to find the heart of him and the idea of how he thought he should be. I didn’t need to, for two reasons. One, I’d tried healing a cut throat once before. It hadn’t worked, but the concept was familiar.

  Two, and much more important, he and I both had total faith in my ability to heal him. That was all it took, really. A rush of magic and suddenly all the blood was on our hands, on our clothes, on the ground, without any more pumping free of his body.

  I sat back on my heels, my own heart pumping at about a zillion miles an hour. As far as I could tell, the entire incident, from the moment the Morrígan put the rapier to Gary’s throat all the way through to his healing, had taken about ten seconds. Ten very exciting, heavily punctuated seconds, but ten seconds.

  Gary, hands now exploring his throat to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, croaked, “What took you so long, doll?”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. It was high-pitched and hysterical, not amused, but I did laugh, and he gave me one of the sexy old coot grins that had all my friends convinced he was my sugar daddy. I waved a bloody hand, said, “Oh, you know, I could tell she hadn’t hit the jugular, I had all the time in the world,” then burst into tears and fell over on him. “What were you thinking?!”

  He put his arm around me, mouth on top of my head. “Figured I knew a girl who could fix me up in no time flat if I did somethin’ crazy to break the status quo. You were never gonna risk it.”

  “Of course I wasn’t! Jesus, Gary!” I wanted to punch him, but punching a guy who’d just had his throat cut seemed low. I sniffled into his shoulder instead.

  He chuckled against my hair, then drew a deep breath. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  I wrapped my arm over his ribs and hugged him as hard as I could. “I’d say ‘anytime,’ except if you ever do something like that again I’ll kill you myself.”

  “Nah, you wouldn’t. Who’d go on all these crazy adventures with you then?”

  “Billy. Morrison, the poor bastard. Random strangers getting swept up in my wake. Ha—” The last sound wasn’t a word, just an inhaled breath that Gary rumbled a laugh over.

  “Yeah yeah yeah. Look, I hate to break our quality time up, Jo, but wasn’t there a bad guy here a minute ago?”

  We both pushed up on our elbows. The Morrígan’s disappearing act had left no trace of where she’d gone. Brigid, though, sat against the bloodstained Lia Fáil, one hand pressed to her chest. I whispered, “Shit,” and scrambled to her on hands and knees, then stopped with my hands hovering above her, half-afraid to touch her, totally afraid to try healing her after the disaster with Lugh. “Jesus, are you okay?”

  “Well enough.” Her voice was faint, and her overflowing aura weak. I bit my lower lip, waking healing power, but she shook her head. “Not in this time and place, I fear. My sister’s strength is the greater here. Do not expose yourself to her any more than you must.”

  “You look like you could use some must.”

  She smiled, but it faded. “Do not concern yourself with me. Concern yourself instead with my sister. I had meant to follow her to her master’s lair, to the cauldron’s seat—”

  “But instead you took one for the team. Um, thanks for that. I think you might have saved my life there. That was a lot of power she threw at me.”

  “Yes. Her success would have been unparalleled, had she taken your life so far out of your time. I could not allow that, even—” She sighed and I finished for her:

  “Even if it meant losing her and the cauldron? I dunno, Bridge. Magic’s damned hard to track. Unless you’re better at it than I am.”

  Brigid shook her head. I nodded and glanced at the sky. Raven had been up there somewhere, fighting with the Morrígan’s ravens. “I don’t suppose you know where they all went, do you?” I asked him, and he flew down out of the sunlight to whack me on the head with a wing. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t think so. Next time I’ll try not to lose the bad guy. You did a good job kicking her ravens’ asses, though. Shiny food in your future.”

  Raven cawed with pleasure and faded away. Gary came to crouch beside me looking big-eyed and happy as a kid in a candy store. “I saw him, Jo. Your raven. I saw him.”

  I smiled, then leaned over to hug him again, hard. “Welcome to having the Sight, Mr. Muldoon. All right, let’s head for Knocknaree so we can kill that bitch. Look what she did to my coat.”

  Gary grinned a little. “You’re gonna kill her over a coat, Jo?”

  For some reason it wasn’t as funny as it should be. I shook my head. “I’m going to kill her for cutting your throat. The coat was just petty.”

  “Good to know I’m loved.”

  �
��You are,” I said, still solemn. “You are.” Then in a rush of delight, I smacked his shoulder. “Dude! Dude, you totally busted her nose, you know that, right? How many people get to say they head-butted a goddess?”

  Gary chortled, then tried to disguise his pleasure by saying, “Thought you said she wasn’t a goddess.”

  “Oh, ffssht. Close enough for government work. Okay, Knockna…” We were several thousand years in the past. There were no itty bitty Irish cars to drive on the itty bitty Irish roads. In fact, I bet there weren’t even many itty bitty roads to drive on. “…just where is this Knocknaree place?”

  “In the West.” Brigid sounded like Galadriel, except I was pretty sure she only meant the west of Ireland, not some far-off land of everlasting peace and calm.

  From our perspective, however, the difference was negligible. Ireland wasn’t a big island, but a couple hundred miles was a long way when you were traveling on foot. I exhaled noisily. “I don’t suppose we can go home, drive over and meet you there in a few thousand years, huh? You oughta be able to make it there by then.”

  “I think not,” a brand-new voice said, and Brigid faded away.

  Chapter Eight

  I refused to flinch. It took every last bit of willpower, but I refused to flinch. Instead, with all the panache at my command—which wasn’t much—I said, “I’m getting tired of mysterious voices and people disappearing,” to Gary before I allowed myself to look around.

  The air had changed quality: mist sparkled more, like bits of ice rode on it, and my breath steamed as another of the annoyingly beautiful, slightly inhuman aos sí came up on us. This one looked like he’d been dipped in silver from his hair to his boots. I’d never seen genuinely silver hair before; even Cernunnos’s was really brown and ashy. This guy’s actually shone like the metal. My gaze fell to his left hand.