by C. E. Murphy
Cernunnos’s other eyebrow rose to match the first. “Would I? Perhaps in the past I remember best he came not to Tara with you. Of all mortals, you should realize that there are paths not taken. Nothing is immutable, Joanne. Not even for a god.”
That was not the answer I wanted, especially after future-Brigid hadn’t particularly seemed to know who Gary was. It lent credence to Cernunnos’s argument. I made throttling motions with my fingers, envisioning the horned god’s neck between them. “Okay, okay, all right, fine, but you just said you needed a force for life—”
“He may not heal,” Cernunnos said, “but Master Muldoon is as bright a force of life as I have seen, and I have seen many. More, he carries with him the spirit of tenacity, a creature of great age and soul. He—”
“That’s his spirit animal!” I howled. “I helped him find that!”
“All the better. It binds him to you and adds some note of your strength to his.”
Gary looked triumphant. I stomped my foot, afraid I’d already lost the battle. “I said no! God, just because I got you into this doesn’t mean you have to go gallivanting off across time and space to—”
“Save the world?” Gary planted himself in front of me. He made a big wall of a man, especially when he folded his arms across his chest and puffed up a little. “I’ve told you a hundred times you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years, Joanie. You got me all tangled up in this crazy fantastic world of yours and brought me back to life after Annie died. I’ve watched you fling yourself into things you got no idea what’s coming, and you do it all because you’re trying to make the world a better place. You keep saying you want to grow up to be like me. Kid, I wish I’d been young like you. Now listen to me. You’re my girl, and I’m doing this thing because it’s what you would do if you could. ’Sides,” he added, gray eyes bright, “this might be my one chance to kick death in the balls. Can’t let an old guy miss that dance.”
I laughed. I didn’t want to, but I laughed. Then I hugged him, muttering, “If you don’t come back,” which I repeated when I let go of him, except this time I said it to Cernunnos, with a threatening finger added to the phrase.
He inclined his ashy head, temple bones visibly distorted in the fading light. “You have my word, Siobhán Walkingstick, and that is not a thing I give lightly.”
“All right. Here.” I thrust my rapier into Gary’s hands. “You can use this, right? I mean, hell, you can do everything else.”
He took it, but not gingerly. “I’m better with a saxophone, doll, but I’ll make do. You sure? You might need it.”
“I’m not the one proposing to go face down the man himself. You need it more than I do. Gary, are you sure? Because this is nuts.”
The big man’s voice gentled. “You can’t do it, Jo. It’s time you learn we’ll go into battle for you, even if you ain’t there.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Good generals don’t.” Gary stuck the rapier point down into the ground, took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you on the other side, darlin’.”
“Of time. Just the other side of time, okay? No stupid heroics, Gary. Not when I’m not there to save you.”
“I promise.” Gary let me go, took up the rapier again and turned to Cernunnos. “Mind if I share your ride?”
Cernunnos looked pained and gestured to the boy who rode beside him. “Share his. The mare is well used to a mortal rider.”
The mare was the boy Rider’s human mother, transformed. A whole pile of unfortunate things, mostly involving crude comments about riders, immortal and mortal alike, rose to and were compressed behind my lips. I could be dumb, but not that dumb. Gary took the kid’s hand and swung up onto the mare behind him, then gave me a jaunty salute. “Go get ’em, Jo.”
And then my best friend rode off into the sunset.
Nuada remained silent until Gary and Cernunnos vanished into misty golden skies, which was just as well. I didn’t like Gary going off on his own, and had the sneaking suspicion hypocrisy was my middle name. After a while I said, “So you can’t marry her,” at the same time he said, “I think I have no choice but to wed the Morrígan.”
I was tired of saying “What?” so I just looked at him. He exhaled slowly. I half expected to see silver stream on his breath, but it was just a puff of air like anyone else’s. On it, he said, “Because as we are bound to her, she is bound to us. I may be able to temper her actions if I become her groom.”
“Or you might end up skewered on the Lia Fáil.”
Nuada’s eyebrows quirked. “Not if I have yet to make that sword and that necklace. Did you not say the sword comes from many centuries hence?”
Everybody was smarter than me. I clicked my jaw shot, looked for an argument and didn’t find one. Or not much of one, anyway: “What if Cernunnos came back in time to have you make it?”
“Then I still live some little ways into the future, for that has yet to happen. She is a goddess, Siobhán. How would you have me escape her?”
“She’s only a, a, a small god. An avatar. You, aos sí, you’re more connected to the earth than humans are. You run way down deep, but the Morrígan’s lain down with the devil, which gives her bonus points in the mojo department.” I’d used the word mojo plenty of times in the past. It had never triggered the mojojojo thing until Gary’d started snickering. I was going to smack him as soon as he got back from galumphing across time and space. “But somebody saddled up with Brigid, too, and it looks like you hang around for centuries making priceless magical artifacts, so stop putting so much stock in gods and…”
He waited a moment while I stared at the earth, dumbstruck by a slowly forming thought. “And forge this necklace,” I mumbled eventually. “Close the time loop. Give it to her as a wedding gift. I don’t know if the necklace has any power itself.” Except it did, because in my personal arsenal it represented shielding my mind. My soul. My garden. However I wanted to look at it, the necklace was definitely invested with some power. I swallowed and kept going. “But it makes it down through the centuries from her all the way to me. That’s got to count for something. Maybe I’m not supposed to go up against her back now at all. Maybe this is all just preparation for a throw-down in my era.”
In much the same tone Brigid had used, Nuada wondered, “Is this how it is with you, gwyld? The connected I have known are not so…”
“Connected?”
He nodded, looking as though he felt a bit foolish. I shook my head, dismissing his embarrassment. “They’re probably not. I’m apparently a special case, which is less fun than you might think.”
His mouth pursed, almost a smile. “I might remind you that I came to be crowned ard rí, and instead have learned I walked to my doom. I may understand “less fun than expected” better than you think I do.”
I was too weak to resist. Given the opening, I seized it and nodded toward his silver hand. “You probably do. Gary said one of the other high kings chopped that off. What, um. How did…?”
“The magic that gives it life is beyond any I could command. The horned god invested it with warmth and motion in exchange for the sword I made him.” His eyebrows quirked again. “The first sword. I wonder what gift he offers for the second.”
“Probably not taking the magic hand away. Really? Cernunnos can do that?” An entire world lived and breathed with Cernunnos’s life force. It probably wasn’t all that difficult for him to lend a little life to a hunk of metal. I just didn’t know why he’d want to.
“He had to, or I could not forge the sword for him.”
“Oh.” I wondered briefly if Cernunnos lived linearly and remembered anti-linearly, but that was too much for my brain to handle. I put it away for another time, and asked, “Can you make the necklace? I don’t know what the timeline is here. Are you supposed to get married this afternoon?”
“You stand out of time already,” Nuada said. “Can you not step a day or two away and bid me make it then?”
“If I had the foggiest idea how, maybe, but I obviously haven’t because you hadn’t seen it until just now. Tara’s huge,” I said with a wave of my hand, trying to encompass it. “Isn’t there a forge around here somewhere?” Not that I remembered a Forge of the Kings on the tourist maps. That could be an oversight, but I was pretty sure forges left enough residue that somebody would’ve noticed and pointed it out.
Nuada looked bemused. “You know little of metal forging. It takes time to build the heat, to—”
“C’mon, it’s not like making steel.” Incomprehension made Nuada’s eyes more silvery still. I dropped my chin to my chest. “Steel. It’s a metal from the future. It takes a lot more heat than precious metals do. Maybe I could…” A couple times I’d worked up enough heat for self-immolation, once almost literally. I studied my hands, remembering the burn of a cut across one palm healing, and reached for my magic, hoping I could create fire through my will alone.
Fire rose up, all right, but it was the fire of pain, not actual flames. An itch erupted in the bite, like using my magic excited the cells there, and I hissed at the brief, compelling idea that life would be easier if I was a wolf. I said, “Forget it,” as much to the impulse as Nuada, then, more to the silver king, “We’ll need a real forge.”
“Then the Morrígan shall wait another year for her king.” Nuada sounded both resigned and calm. “She should have come by now, as it is. Perhaps your friend holds her attention so we might do our work.”
A fist knotted in my gut. “I hate that idea.”
“All the more reason to work swiftly and well. Come. The towers will have forges. Does one speak to you?”
Dismay rumbled through me. “I don’t want to leave Tara. I’m already in the wrong time. I don’t know what happens if I leave this location. If we’ve got time, why not build a forge?” Aside from the fact no evidence of one remained in my time, that was.
Nuada gave me a patient look. “I will return you safely to Tara. Now. Does one speak to you?”
I sighed and pointed southwest. “That one. It’s still there in my time. Or a tower is, anyway. I like the consistency.”
“At Troim. They will have what we need.”
They did. They also had a village full of curious people—humans, not the aos sí—which made me and my short hair and my formerly awesome white leather coat feel considerably more awkward than I had standing more or less alone on a hill in the middle of a sacred circle. Worse, nobody spoke to me. They just watched us, wide-eyed and silent, as if we were wraiths passing unwelcome through time.
Which was unfortunately accurate. Nuada was a dead man walking and I didn’t belong there at all. The blacksmith, though, nodded to me when Nuada explained what we needed. That made me feel better until he backed rapidly as soon as he’d shown Nuada where the tools lay. I had a bunch of friends at home who had started reacting the same way after my abrupt shamanic awakening: nominally polite, but eager to get out of my presence. Apparently living sometime in the indeterminable past, alongside elves and small gods, did not make most people any happier or more comfortable with magic being done around them.
“They fear me,” Nuada murmured as the blacksmith backed off. I startled, having been so busy taking all the discomfort on myself it hadn’t occurred to me he might be a problem, too. He worked as he spoke, bringing the forge’s fires up higher and selecting the finest and most delicate tools the blacksmith had to offer. “We live side by side in this place, your people and mine, but we are not friends. We share this site of worship, but never ritual or passion. To them, we are the whispers in the wind and the lightning in the sky. To us, they are the brutal and dangerous things in the night.”
“The Fir Bolg,” I said, dragging up the name from some bit of reading I’d done. “Weren’t they the enemies of the aos sí?”
“So they are. Dark men, tied to the earth with their short and ugly lives.” He glanced at me, and clarified, “Humans,” just in case I hadn’t gotten it.
“What a charming sentiment. No wonder you get along so well. Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”
He gave me a look that said volumes about my intellect, which was fair enough, because what he was doing was extremely obvious: he’d stuck his silver hand in the flame and was melting his fingers off. Liquid metal dripped into an iron trough while I watched with horrified fascination. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Metal feels no pain.”
“But—but—!”
“Where did you think the metal for your necklace came from? For the swords? They would be nothing if they were not made of the living silver. Anyone might forge a sword. This is my blood, gwyld. My essence. My very life, made metal.”
“That’s the most awful thing I’ve seen.” I couldn’t stop watching. It was like a magical train wreck. Creepy crawlies ran down my spine, up my arms, all over, but I couldn’t look away. “It just keeps…bleeding?”
“Melting,” he said dourly. “Yes. It has no end, or none I’ve found. Gift of the god, Siobhán.”
I muttered, “Joanne,” without any real hope. Siobhán obviously sounded more like a name to him, and having heard it from Cernunnos’s lips, Nuada wasn’t about to let it go. I felt at my hip, not that I ever carried my sword there anyway, and didn’t find it. “It really is a magic sword.” I hoped like hell that was doing Gary some good.
“And a magic torc. What power will it have?”
“The power to bind. That’s what we’re doing with the cauldron. Binding the Morrígan to me, so she can do no harm until she faces me again.” That sounded pretty good. Some aspect of it would no doubt go terribly wrong, but I was doing my best.
Nuada nodded once. The smell of hot silver baked in my nostrils and the color burned my eyes. Nuada could make the necklace at my request, out of his own very essence, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Not to bind the Morrígan to me, not to render her impotent across the centuries. Something else had to lock the time loop in place, and all of a sudden I knew what it was.
Quickly, before my confidence evaporated, I picked up a piece of edged metal from the forge, slashed my palm and let my blood fall into the sizzling metal.
Chapter Ten
Silver turned red for the space of a breath. I was certain that with ordinary silver that wouldn’t happen, but this wasn’t ordinary. Then it all blackened, like the silver had aged a hundred years in an instant. Nuada, unconcerned, worked the metal with a small hammer until black was beaten away and thin sheets of silver remained. He moved quickly, certainly, until I was half hypnotized with the steady flow of his actions and the atonal music of the forge.
He might have worked for an hour or forever, for all I could tell, but suddenly he was finished, stepping back from his work with a critical eye. I hardly dared move, afraid he’d find some flaw, but after long minutes of examination he grunted—not a sound I expected from an elf king—and moved aside so I could see what he had wrought.
And what he had wrought was impossible. I had always assumed my necklace was poured into a mold: the long tubes that curved around its delicate chain, and the two triskelions that separated those tubes, were all much too finely worked to have been done with a hammer and…chisel, or whatever a silversmith called it. There was no roughness to the quartered circle that sat in the hollow of my throat as the necklace’s pendant, either, and it was just not possible such crude tools could produce an item of such smooth beauty.
Except they had. I took up the finished piece in astonishment, feeling faint warmth still within the metal. I was sure it had cooled completely, and looked at Nuada in confusion. “It lives, gwyld. A part of me. I have told you this already. It will be warm so long as I walk this earth.”
The necklace I had been given was warmed by my dying mother’s body heat, but hadn’t had an inherent warmth like it did now. For once I was smart enough not to say anything and nodded instead. “It’s beautiful.”
“It is invested with my being and yours, both bent to the
single intent of containing the Morrígan. It is a magic of two worlds, and will collar her wretched ambitions for eons.” That, apparently, was far more important to Nuada than its beauty, which was fair enough. But then he smiled, suddenly the artist and pleased with the compliment. “Thank you, Joanne.” He said my name carefully. “Not only for the making of the necklace, but the warning of what I face with the Morrígan. Now I must return you to Tara before the seasons turn again and my bride comes looking for her groom. You will not want to be there when she finds the trap we’ve laid for her.”
“No, I won’t. But I’ll throw down with her in my time, Nuada. I’ll set this right.”
“You cannot set it right, Joanne. You can only end what has been made wrong.” A smile twinged his lips. “And I cannot set it right, either, but I can go to my fate knowing I have helped set in motion a thing that will, in time, end the wrongness. There is little else a worthy king might ask for.”
My nose got all stuffy with emotion. I hardly knew the guy, but blatant nobility apparently hit me right in the soft spot. “Well, watch yourself, all right? You’ve got another sword to make, at the very least.”
“You, too, watch yourself, Joanne Walker.”
We walked back to Tara together without really speaking again. Even when we crossed the moats and passed under the huge wood henges to climb toward the Lia Fáil, there was almost nothing to say.
Almost. I reached for the stone, then hesitated just one instant, looking back toward Nuada, and we spoke at the same time: “Good luck.”
Smiling, pleased and ready for everything to be back to normal, I put my hands on the Stone of Destiny, and went crashing back through time.
Monday, March 20, 10:52 a.m.
There was a dead woman at my feet.
She sat propped against the Lia Fáil, in exactly the same position Brigid had been in last I’d seen her. A dead woman wearing a white cotton eyelet dress and scarves at her hips. The one around her shoulders had slipped away, revealing fiery tattoos around her biceps that hadn’t faded in thousands of years.
