by C. E. Murphy
She bowed, which was pretty talented for someone sitting down. Coppery curls fell around her shoulders and she shook them back as she straightened again. I had hair envy. I’d never had hair envy in my life. I was so busy having hair envy I almost forgot to respond to her, “And you’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick, I think.”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, no. I like Joanne better. Jo.” I’d never voluntarily suggested someone call me Jo, before. It had always been Joanie. But aside from being welcome in the midst of the occasional meltdown, Joanie was starting to sound like a little kid’s name. I was finally clawing my way out of emotional immaturity, and I’d never been little. Sometime in the past year or so, I’d left Joanie behind. “Where are we?”
As soon as I asked I knew the answer. We were in Méabh’s tomb, of course, and the more interesting question was, “How did I get here? What happened? I…was a wolf. And there was a banshee…” Really. Normal people did not find themselves saying things like that. I pinched the bridge of my nose, noticing again that my glasses had gone missing, and muttered, “Don’t suppose you found my glasses out there.”
To my surprise, she held them up between two fingertips. “You were a wolf,” she agreed, “and there was a banshee. And I’ll have none of that sort of thing contaminating my bones, not even when she’s one of my own. What,” she added, pointing my glasses at my forearm, “is that?”
I tried to hide the half-bandaged bites with my other arm. The itching was gone, leaving ordinary pain in its place. “It’s a…” For a second I thought I could get away with “dog bite,” but something in Méabh’s expression suggested I would find my ass kicked from here to breakfast if I tried that. I mumbled, “Werewolf bite. I got bit by a werewolf the other day. I can’t heal it. Can you?”
Instead of helping she cast her gaze to the small room’s ceiling. “A werewolf bite,” she said to it. “Sure and I spend a lifetime building the stone circles, gathering the power, hunting the bitches down, and all for what? For my daughter to come to me poisoned by the very blood I bound.”
“I’m not your daughter.” I hadn’t liked my own mother very much in the short time I’d known her, but I’d be damned if somebody else would go around claiming me as hers. “I’m human, for God’s sake. You’re aos sí.”
“And Nuada was the last of the aos sí kings so,” she said with a shrug. “He wed my mother and broke the cycle of sacrifice, but the cost was the throne. It’s men who’ve come to the seat of Tara since, and all of them my husbands, too. The children I’ve borne have married men time and again, until it comes to you, Siobhán Walkingstick, Joanne Walker, my child. You are human,” she agreed. “There would be no trace of the sí in your blood. But you’re my child still, and heir to the power and the battle we fight.”
I opened my mouth to argue about whether somebody could find traces of the aos sí in my DNA if I was in fact genetically related to them, then remembered nobody had yet convincingly found Neanderthal blood in Homo sapiens even though I knew people who looked like immediate family had been straight out of that lineage. I shut my mouth again. Méabh cocked an eyebrow and I shook my head, looking for something else to say. I came up with, “How about granddaughter, then,” which wasn’t brilliant but was a bearable alternative.
“Sure and that’s a mouthful.” She got a look at my expression and said, as if she’d always meant to, “Granddaughter it is. We’ve work to do, Grand— ”
“Joanne. For God’s sake, just call me Joanne. I don’t need a damned title. What happened out there? Wait.” I sat bolt upright, sickness and hope both churning my stomach. “You’ve been around forever, right? Do you know what happened to Gary? Is he okay? Did he come back home? Did they fight the Master? Where is he?”
She couldn’t possibly answer through the barrage of questions, which, as they became more repetitive, I started to think was a deliberate delaying tactic on my part. There was only one answer I wanted, and if I kept asking questions she couldn’t give the wrong one. But I had to breathe eventually, and she snapped a hand up to stop me from continuing when I gasped for air. “Your friend is a legend, Gran—Joanne. He rode with the hounds to this very place, and here they fought so long and so hard the mountaintop melted into a smooth and bloody field. The Morrígan and her ravens came to do battle and was met by her sister Brigid, who had never before been seen to make war. A sea of dead men rose from the cauldron and were struck down by Brigid’s life magic. They say the necklace the Morrígan wore burned her then, like calling to like, and in that moment her master faltered, and she fell. It was a victory for the ages, Joanne. It set this world back on a path less dark than the one it had known.”
“But what happened to Gary?”
“No one knows.” Méabh’s voice dropped with sympathy. “Some say he rides with the Hunt even still, while others claim it’s the aos sí who have taken him in.”
“You’re aos sí,” I snapped. “Did they? You? Whatever?”
“I would not know,” Méabh murmured. “He fought before my time, and it’s much more part of the mortal world that I am, than part of my father’s people.”
“Well, go find out!”
“I can’t.” Her implacability silenced me, and when it became clear I’d shut up for a moment, she went on. “I chose the Fir Bolg, Joanne. I chose humanity. It’s unwelcome I am with my own kind. Every path has its price, does it not? If only the price of recognizing a life unled, but a price it is, and a price must be paid.”
I had a startling amount of experience with recognizing lives unled, thanks to Suzanne Quinley. She’d once shown me a whole host of choices I might have made, and I’d seen all the lives I hadn’t chosen. I regretted some of them right to the tips of my toes, though at the same time I couldn’t say I was willing to give up the life I had in order to live one of the others. Méabh had probably never actually stood at a crossroads of possibilities, watching all her different lives unfold around her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have an idea of what she’d lost.
And of what she’d gained. I finally spoke, focusing on a detail I’d noticed before but had been too busy envying her hair to comment on. “You’re wearing my necklace.”
A smile twitched her lips. “More I should say that you’re wearing mine.”
I closed my fingers over the necklace we both wore. “Well, whatever, but how can that be? Only one of us can have it at a time.”
“Only one of us does. You asked what had happened, and here’s what I know. Not an hour ago I stood ready to wed the next ard rí, and then an offensive magic shook my very bones. I could not leave it be, and in answering, found myself here. A banshee and a wolf fought over my grave, and I would have none of that. I called on the magic. The banshee was banished and you, Joanne, shed the wolf’s clothes and lay at my feet an unconscious child. I knew the passage into the cairn’s inner sanctum, though sure and I’d never thought to see it alive, and brought you here to waken. And now I stand ready and waiting, Granddaughter, to see what battle you have drawn me forward in time to face.”
“What?” I’d done it again. I clenched my teeth and my eyes, a hand held up for silence and patience. Really, if there was a way to excise that word from my vocabulary entirely, I’d do it. “That’s the second time today somebody’s told me I was screwing around with time. I wouldn’t even know how to begin doing that, so color me just a little skeptical, okay? But just for hilarity’s sake, let’s say you’re right. How do you know you came forward in time instead of me going back?”
“If you had come back,” Méabh said patiently, and pointed at the effigy behind me, “then she would not yet exist. This cairn has stood longer even than I have lived, but it’s here I’ll be buried should I die. And die I must, for there’s no other reason to stand a stone warrior so the world will remember my face.”
“This tomb’s never been excavated. I’m the only one who’s ever seen it.” Wow. I had a real skill for saying exactly the wrong thing.
Méabh shrugged
. “Time is long. The chance still lies ahead. Tell me what trials lie ahead and offer me a chance to see some of your world so I might know what my daughters have wrought.”
“You keep saying daughters. Don’t boys count?”
Surprise lit her face. “Of course, but it’s through the daughters that the line continues. A child can only be certain of her mother. Is that not so in your time, too?”
My mouth twitched. “Matriarchies have mostly been obliterated in my time. The idea of the king marrying the land for its blessings or power went out a few thousand years ago. It’s mostly about might makes right, these days.”
Her eyebrows pulled together. “Now, that’s a terrible thing to hear. That’s my mother’s master’s way of things, the very thing we’re fighting against.”
“Yeah, well, the fight’s a long way from won, even in my time. Maybe especially in my time.” Somehow I had accepted that Méabh was out of time. Part of me even thought she was probably right, that I was the one responsible. I was, after all, the commonality between this morning’s historical adventure and the afternoon’s time skip.
A handful of disjointed memories floated to the surface: the way time had stretched and snapped back into place when I’d gone into Morrison’s house after Barbara Bragg. I’d gone in astrally first, examining the scene before coming in physically, but I still couldn’t remember actually entering his house. It had seemed more like my physical body had simply stepped forward through time to catch up with where my spirit had gone.
Something not exactly similar but not exactly different had happened when I’d been hung upside-down over a cauldron. And I’d been in innumerable fights now where time had slowed down to an impossible degree. That was a common enough phrase that I’d never considered the possibility that time had actually slowed. And then there were all the damned time loops that even I could recognize, reaching back to take the studies and power my younger self had accumulated; saddling up with my mother to win a fight that had happened months before my birth, and hell, just this morning trying to tidy up the mess Suzanne had set loose.
Nervousness churned my belly. I had a great big talk with Coyote—and with Raven and Rattler—coming on fast, if I was somehow capable of mucking with time. Nobody had even hinted that was on my skills list, and I had no idea why anybody would be granted that kind of power. Especially since, presented with the idea that I potentially could step back and forth through time, I could think of about a hundred and sixty things I’d like to go back and change. Oddly enough, arranging to get the winning numbers for the lottery wasn’t even high on that list.
It didn’t matter. The nice thing about time travel was that if it hadn’t already happened presumably it wasn’t going to, so I didn’t really have to worry about the temptation to go mucking about with my own timeline. With a degree of trepidation—ignoring things often made them worse, in my experience—I put aside the whole question of my ability to alter time so I could focus on what was going on around me right now.
“Okay. All right, let’s just assume you’re right and it’s my fault you’re here. There are at least three things you can probably help with. The first is this.” I raised my arm to display the werewolf bite. “You bound them. You must be able to…” I waved my arm around, trusting random gesticulation to get the point across.
It obviously did, but Méabh shook her head. “It’s a warrior’s path I’m on, Joanne. I’m no healer, for all that ye might wish me to be.”
Every time the woman opened her mouth she said something flummoxing. Everybody. Everybody I had met who had shamanic power was on the healer’s path. Granted, there hadn’t been that many of them, but thus far I was a survey sample of one in terms of being out there fighting the good fight with a sword and shield instead of just healing hands. To come face-to-face with someone on the other end of the spectrum, so far to the fight that she didn’t heal, was completely beyond my scope. “Wow. Wow. How do you do it? I mean, you called up a whole countryside’s worth of power to bind the werewolves. And I know that wasn’t healing. Believe me.” Hairs rose on my arms and the bite started to itch again. I’d sanded Tia Carley’s ability to transform to her lupine form away just minutes after she’d bitten me. It had probably been the cruelest thing I’d ever done. “Believe me, I know that wasn’t an act of mercy. You’d have been kinder to kill them. So how do you juggle the power with the fight? Because my magic rebels if I use it offensively, and everybody else I know can’t even pick up a sword. Literally or metaphorically.”
“Then there’s a balance in you,” Méabh said with remarkable satisfaction. “There’s none in me, Granddaughter. It’s a reaction I am, a reaction to the dark path my mother walks. But I’m a warrior, too, just as she is, and there’s no escaping that. It’s better,” she said more quietly. “I would say it’s better, to have the balance.”
All of a sudden I really, really wished I’d known my mother better, and what path she’d imagined herself to be on. I closed my eyes a moment, remembering her fondness for Altoids, then let it go. “Okay, if you can’t help with the bite, maybe with the banshee. I didn’t do so well against one on my own last time.”
The softness escaped her expression, leaving her looking fully the part of a warrior queen. “Sure and there’s trouble to be found there, when she’s one of my own. That’s a fight I can take on, sure enough.”
That was the second or third time she’d said that. I frowned at her, niggling bits of information refusing to come fully to mind. “What do you mean, one of your own?”
“It’s a great victory for him,” Méabh said grimly. “To dig his claws into one of our lineage so deeply she is his thrall after death. It’s her we must stop, Joanne, for so long as she fights for him I think we’ve no hope of winning.”
“There’s a jillion generations of this family line. How is it that one person is weak enough to fall? You’d think it would be either dozens or none.”
She shook her head. “It’s bargains made and sacrifices accepted. My daughters are all children of the aos sí. Perhaps every banshee that ever wailed is one of us, and perhaps he draws power from that even as we lose it. I only know that this one now is one of ours, and only newly risen as the wailing woman. We must hunt and destroy her, or we stand no hope at all.”
“Guess that answers why you’re here, then. How do you know she’s a recent convert? A new banshee, I mean?”
“Her bones lie outside my cairn.” My blank look conveyed incomprehension and Méabh continued like I wasn’t the slow kid in the class. “To become a wailing woman, the banshee’s bones must lie undisturbed for a year and a day, from one high holy day to another. The first light to fall on them wakens the beast, and it’s the Master’s they are from that day onward.”
I turned my gaze to the unseen sky and said, a bit numbly, “But it’s the twentieth. The equinox is tomorrow.”
Méabh shook her head once, firmly. “You called me on the quarter day, to be sure. I felt the balance in my bones.”
“I thought the equinoxes and solstices were on the twenty-firsts of the months.”
I got a peculiar glance, and wondered if they’d numbered the days of the month in Méabh’s time. It suddenly seemed not only unnecessary but possibly dangerous. Slow dread climbed in me. Of all the things I should be confident of, equinoxes and the like seemed pretty high on the list. If I’d misjudged by a day, trusting the calendar instead of the actual sun, that meant Tia Carley’s attempt to line up the power of the full moon with the equinox had come a lot closer to succeeding than I’d realized.
I rubbed my arm nervously, winced and rubbed it again, feeling vaguely that if I sat to give it a good scratch, doglike, it would improve. Only the need to respond stopped me, and even that was only a half-focused reply. “Look, either way it doesn’t matter. If she was buried here on the last spring equinox, a year and a day isn’t until tomorrow or even the next day, because the equinox last year was on the twenty-first.” Way at the back of my mind
, pieces were falling into place, and I was afraid to think too hard for fear of jostling them and losing the oncoming epiphany forever.
“Then you’ve disturbed her early,” Méabh said with vicious pleasure. “That makes her weaker, and us all the stronger. We’ve a day and a night to find her, Granddaughter. A day and a night to fight together and protect this world.”
I nodded, but I was hardly listening. A year ago tomorrow I’d fought a banshee myself, a fight that had taken place not just in my own time, but almost thirty years earlier, on another equinox, as well. I’d almost died, but a woman called Sheila MacNamarra had gone to great lengths to keep me alive, both in the womb and as an adult.
And it had been peppermint. That was the smell that had caught at the back of my throat as I’d shifted into a wolf. Curiously strong peppermint.
The banshee was my mother.
Chapter Thirteen
“We can’t just…” My throat hurt. I cleared it and tried again. “We can’t just destroy her. We need to free her. To rescue her. ‘Master’s slave is driven wild,’” I whispered. “That’s what that was about. ‘Firstborn daughter, blooded child.’ She meant me. She knew me. And oh, Jesus Christ, she knows about Aidan now. I never told her. I never told anybody.”
Méabh had the look of polite incomprehension people tended to get around me these days. Actually, on reflection, it was more a look of irritated incomprehension. “Sure and we’ll destroy her, Granddaughter. There’s nothing to be done for it. That’s wh—”
“We will not!” I sprang to my feet, narrowly missing cracking my head on the cairn’s low roof. No wonder Méabh had remained seated throughout our exchange. She tensed as I leapt up, her fingers closing on a sword held only by her effigy, but she stayed sitting as I snarled, “We will not destroy her. We will find another way. I don’t give a damn if I have to go back to the beginning of time and rewrite history from day one. We are going to rescue her from slavery to the Master, and then we are going to kick. His. Ass.”
