by C. E. Murphy
I knew them. I knew all the ravens, all of them in their glossy blue-black feathers, in their wise and wicked eyes, in their prattling beaks and bouncing steps. Mine was foremost, my beloved spirit animal, half again the size of his brethren. But I knew them all: I knew the ancient bird whose wings had turned to white and whose black eyes were patient where all the others were anticipatory. That was Sheila’s friend, and I could see in him—See in him—the long stretch of Irish mages he had served over the millennia.
There were the Morrígan’s ravens, three of them again, as if the fight at the Lia Fáil had never occurred. There was another pair I recognized instinctively as Huginn and Muninn, and then there were dozens, hundreds, thousands of others: Tower Ravens and Quoth The Ravens and trickster ravens and battlefield ravens, and they all, all, all, spun into a madness of birds in the sky, blocking out the misty stars themselves.
The Morrígan came from their darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
She was crystal-hard, vivid against the black mist of birds. Her blue robes were crisp and the tattoos encircling her biceps were sharp and clear, as if new. Her hair was bound in a thick black braid woven with blue, and the sword she carried was so sharp it looked as though it could cut the very air in slices. She stopped about a dozen feet away and sneered, not that I could blame her. I mean, there I sat on the river’s edge, weaponless, barefoot, trembling with hunger and wearing a wet plaid cotton shirt. My hair, far from being so thick and long it could be a weapon of its own, was plastered against my skull. I was not exactly the most terrifying sight of the ages, and the Morrígan had seen plenty of ages to be terrified in.
“A Red Cap,” I said without getting up. “Sorry, fear darrig, right? Werewolves, and the Aileen Trechard.” I knew I’d bungled the pronunciation on that one, but it was the best I could do. “The banshee queen, and maybe even Gancanagh, although that one kind of backfired, eh? You sent them all after me, or put them between me and you in one way or another. So it doesn’t really matter if I don’t look like much, does it? You’re already afraid I’ve got it all over you, and a lot of what’s left is posturing. It’s okay if you just want to give up now. I’m not going to tell on you, and it might save your life.”
I knew there was no real chance she’d agree, but I had to try. My younger self had reminded me that not everything had to end in a fight. Also, while Lugh and Brigid needed avenging, I wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. I didn’t know how well I would handle facing the Morrígan in a battle to the death when I had to enter that battle not already in a panic for my life.
A third and much more immediate reason was I was freezing my ass off, half-naked, and shaking with hunger. Not, in other words, at the top of my fighting form. Even if I had been, I would still be toast. But none of that mattered, because from where she was standing, it was face down me or face down her master. I was the far easier target.
She came at me in a cloud of black birds. Rushed me, sword a shining line across the ravens, and she swung with all her considerable strength.
Swung, and instead of parting my head from my neck, crashed into my shields. Gary drew in a breath so sharp it sounded like an attack all by itself, but I didn’t even move. They were magic shields, solid as my confidence in them, and today, that was legendary.
But it was also a magic sword, and she was, in some distant way, my grandmother.
My shields dented. More than dented: gave way, so her sword’s edge bent my skin. But it didn’t prick, and I didn’t bleed. I did say, “Okay. If that’s how it’s going to be,” and for all that I was cold, wet and probably about to die, my blood started running hotter.
The Morrígan fell back, silent with fury at both her failure to chop off my head and, I suspected, at my blasé response. Nice that being obnoxious was good for something. I got to my feet, wriggled my toes in the grass and tried something I hadn’t tried before: asking the Lower World for a boost.
I’d blown out all the lights in Seattle asking for the same in the Middle World, but I was a lot better at this game now. I still didn’t expect the warmth that surged from the earth, drying me from toes to head. I certainly didn’t expect my clothes to come back, but they did, stompy boots and jeans and T-shirt and sweater and even my leather coat, which still had a ruined sleeve. The Morrígan looked startled, but I figured the Lower World could be affected by perception just like inner gardens. My self-perception was not of someone who went into a fight wearing a plaid shirt and no skivvies.
I shot a glance at Gary, whose shirt had returned to him, and who looked a whole lot warmer and drier, too. I said, “Stay out of it,” and he said, “Like hell,” and I laughed and turned to face the Morrígan in battle for the second time.
Brigid stood before me instead.
For the space of a breath I was flummoxed, and then I laughed. “If you strike me down I’ll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine?”
Brigid looked utterly blank. Humor rolled out of me and I ducked my head in apology. “What are you doing here?” I asked instead. “You were dead.”
“The aos sí are of the Otherworld, Joanne,” Brigid said. “We came from below the human world and we can, if we wish, return to this place in death.”
I remembered my fleeting speculation that the body I’d left at Tara would just sink into the earth or otherwise disappear, and blushed. I’d been being a smart-ass, trying to convince myself I hadn’t done something reprehensible. It had never occurred to me that I might be right. “You’re really from the Lower World,” I heard myself say. “You’re really not human. I mean, I knew that, I just…wow. I thought it was all demons and monsters down here.”
“Nowhere, Siobhán Walkingstick, is all of one thing and nothing of another.”
I smiled a little. “Yeah, no, I guess not. I knew that. But you haven’t been coming back here when you die, have you?”
“Those of us who could have chosen nothingness over the corruption that has filled our home. Now we have another choice, offered by the Horned God.”
“But you’re not going with him.” That one wasn’t a question.
Brigid gave me a small smile in return. “No. Not I. My sister is bound to her master, and cannot take that path. I have served my mistress, and so neither shall I. I am dead, Joanne, and she and I are sides of a coin.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again, a chill sweeping me before I could speak. “Are you saying what I think you are?”
“Her strength is my strength,” Brigid answered softly. “My weakness is her weakness. She cannot survive without me, and she has killed me even so.”
“She was trying to kill me!”
“She never could, not in that moment, not in that time. But by trying, by seeking your death on a day that I could accept it instead, she bound me to you, Joanne Walker. You pulled me through time so I might die at your side, in the moment you would most need my strength. I might have done much more,” she said, as she’d said earlier. “I might have brought the world toward the light, instead of skipping through, touching down only when fate lay in the balance. But today we bring light together, you and I.”
“I have to fight her,” I said blankly. “You’re the healer, the peacemaker. The hearth and home, not the warrior.”
“Just because I do not fight does not mean I cannot fight, Siobhán. I have had so long, in and out of time, to learn. Do they not say what is so fierce as a mother defending her young?”
Brigid had fought at the battle of Knocknaree, Méabh had said. It was the only time she’d been known to fight at all.
Gary had been at Knocknaree.
I never had the chance to ask. Brigid came toward me, and with every step shed her aos sí figure, until the mother’s fire burned within me, and I once more faced the Morrígan.
She knew. I was sure she knew, when she looked at me, what had happened. But there was no sign of it as she roared anger and came at me with lifted blade.
I sidestepped neatly, astonishing us
both, and slapped her on the ass with my own magic sword, which surprised her a lot more than it did me. It shouldn’t have. She’d seen me draw the sword from nowhere before. Still, apparently it wasn’t a trick she expected a second time, because she swung again like my blade didn’t even exist.
I flung it up and caught hers against it, reverberations rattling both our arms. There were no sparks: silver didn’t spark the way steel did, and we both fought with Nuada’s swords. My strength matched hers; I’d expected that back at the beginning, thanks to all my years of working on cars. But my skills had stepped up. I shoved her away, kicked her in the stomach and launched a flurry of attacks that sent her retreating several feet over Tara’s soft rolling hills. She broke away and ran several more feet, coming around at me on the left side. Ravens exploded from the air around her, a black flurry to help her attack. I turned toward them, toward her, but I couldn’t see a damned thing. Even the Sight was only an eruption of wings and feathers.
It didn’t matter. There were shields, and then there was The Shield. The Morrígan’s sword slammed into it before she’d even seen it, ravens doing her as much damage as they did me. She bounced back, just like the banshees had done at Tara’s border, and gaped at the small round bracer-style shield on my left arm. “C’mon,” I said, just a little smug. “Give it another go.”
She did. Rage and power and the fear of her master drove her, and I ducked and parried and hit back and swore when she scored blood and felt vicious triumph when I did. We were fast, much faster than I could usually move; that was Rattler’s gift, maybe, but he hadn’t given me the fighting knowledge to go toe to toe with a warrior born. I almost felt sorry for the Morrígan, not because I might win, but because she couldn’t imagine that happening.
When she broke away the next time it was to pant, “How? You were no match for me, gwyld. No match at all.”
“Well,” I said brightly, “that was thousands of years ago.” She snarled and I grinned, but my flippancy faded fast. “Your gentler half gave me the gift of her fire, Morrígan.”
A sneer marred the Morrígan’s features. “Brigid is weak, a healer, a coward. She hasn’t the strength to face me.”
“Or she did, and she was storing it up against when it counts. She’s dead, Morrígan. You killed her, and she’s sent the one you were aiming for to finish the fight. I’m the vessel, that’s all.”
Her bravado faltered for an instant. She was aos sí, not a human magic user. I didn’t know if she could See, but I knew what fire burned inside me. If the Morrígan’s colors were blue and black, colors of cold and dark, then Brigid’s were gold and white, shades of heat and light. My own mother had carried some of that gold within her, and if I’d inherited any of it at all, Brigid’s burning spirit brought it to the fore. “This is it, you know,” I said quietly. “This is pretty much the last chance. You’ve got a lot to answer for, but you could answer by forsaking your master.”
“That would spell my doom.”
“Yeah, but I’m going to do that anyway. The cauldron’s been destroyed, Morrígan. The time loop is closing. All the hours and days that were bent wrongly to make a shape for you are coming to an end. You’re going to die,” I said flatly, “but how you die is up to you.”
She snarled, “In battle, if I must.”
“If that’s what you want.”
By all rights she should have charged me then. She might even have gotten lucky, because for the first time since the fight began I stopped paying attention to her, and turned all my focus on the magic within me.
Healer’s magic. Warrior’s magic. Two sides of a coin that couldn’t even see the other. I’d been running around the outer edge of that coin for over a year, falling one direction or the other depending on which kind of power I needed.
I reached into that mental image and plucked out the coin.
The sword had always been magic. It had always been able to accept more magic, lighting up with my power when I poured it in. It had been my own healing that had struggled against that amalgamation, but not anymore. Power fused, warrior and healer no longer at odds. Ravens settled on my shoulder: Raven on my left, above my heart, and Wings on my right. Something snapped into place behind my heart, a thick pinch. For an instant I thought of my younger self, and bid her a farewell.
Then I lifted my gaze, feeling as though it blazed.
The Morrígan flinched.
I banished the shield made by my talismans and instead came at her with a blade in one hand and a fist full of glowing power in the other. For the first time she retreated in full, almost running, and then running in fact. Running for the Lia Fáil, the source of power and the source of taint within Tara. I followed more sedately, confident of Tara’s ability to keep the Morrígan within its boundaries. Not that she intended to flee: she got to the screaming stone and gashed her arm open, letting blood splash over the white rock.
“Come! Come now! Your enemy stands at the heart of Tara! Her blood will bind it to you forever! Come now, my love!”
I got there before her Master did. Maybe he would never have come at all. I didn’t know, nor did I much care. She stood at the stone, wounded forearm pressed against it, even as I walked up to her and whispered, “I really am sorry about this,” and thrust my hand into her chest, searching for the power I knew lay there.
It burned cold when I found it. Cold like the space between stars, cold like the blizzard I’d struggled through in hunting the wendigo. Cold like something beyond death, because even dead things eventually responded to ambient temperatures. Cold like a power that could lift an extraordinary mortal into something nearly—nearly—immortal, and hold it there for millennia on end. Cold so immutable it seemed nothing could affect it.
But I had warmth. The persistence of life, the outrageous chaotic excitement that Áine, Brigid’s mistress, embodied. The burn of possibilities, all of the things that Brigid had offered me. Two sides of a coin, the one unable to survive without the other. The Morrígan had been doomed before we even began to fight.
Fire’s sources might be frozen and quench the flame, but a thaw always came, in the end.
I made a fist and lifted the ice from within the Morrígan, and it shattered into black dust as I removed it from her chest.
She screamed, and she died, and the Lia Fáil’s light went out.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The darkness was tremendous. Even with my sword still lit blue and bright and full of magic, there was nothing in the world but dark. I was a matchstick, not even a candle, just a firecracker popping sparks in the night. Even that light sputtered, my outrageous confidence suddenly cut down to size by the sheer intensity of black.
The silence was even worse. The stone’s scream had ended, hacked off as brutally as its light. If the fast-moving moat had whispered with water, it did no longer. My heartbeat echoed in my ears, each thump crisp and clear and clean, the only sound in the world.
Gary, somewhere in the near distance, inhaled to speak. My hand made a hatchet, cutting him off. I did not want whatever was out there in the dark—because something was out there, cold and malignant and so very, very angry—I did not want that thing’s attention brought to my friend. Bad enough to have caught its attention myself. I would not let it notice Gary. So we stood there, he and I, waiting in the failing light of my courage.
Ravens began to call.
A few of them at first, and from far away. Then more, closer, and more again. I’d thought the Morrígan had come on raven wings, but the blackness was filled with them now, their voices shrieking and their scent that of carrion. My blade’s blue light glittered on their feathers and reflected in shining black eyes, but could not distinguish between where they ended and the darkness began. My heartbeat was no longer loud enough to be heard over their screams of laughter and rage, and for a hollow moment I wondered if it was even still beating. I had been afraid dozens of times in the past year, but I had never been so cold with it. An hour ago I’d been ready to f
ace the Master, but my confidence and resolution were bottled inside me, frozen by dark and raven calls. He was in there, my enemy. Somewhere in the blackness, and I was the only point of light. He could see me, and I could not see him.
The reckless impulse to extinguish the sword flickered through me and almost made me laugh. “Right,” I whispered beneath the ravens, “right. Turn off the light so I can’t see him coming. Good idea, Jo. Very smart.” Mocking myself made me feel ever so slightly better, which in comparison to numb, motion-stealing fear, was a huge improvement.
Claws tightened on my shoulders. A hard squeeze, neither warning nor teasing, but seeking comfort instead. My Raven, scared, which I’d never imagined he could be. And on my other shoulder, Wings, his aged feet flexing and loosening. He leaned forward, wings spread a few inches, and though when his mouth opened he made no sound, I had the impression he was—not laughing, but spitting. Spitting in the eye of the dark.
Because he had been here before, I realized. He had done this. He had faced the Master, even if Raven and I had not, and he’d lived to tell about it. “Yeah,” I said, very softly. “Yeah, okay, let’s do this thing.” I took a step past the Lia Fáil. Just one step, but it meant I could move, and that was enough to shore up my faltering confidence. Healing magic started to flow through me more freely, warming the chill, steadying the sick patter of my heart. “Your go-to girl is dead,” I whispered to the Master. “It’s finally just you and me. How ’bout I get a chance to see your ugly face?”
The thunder of wings ended, and I went cold again. I thought I should be braver, not running hot and cold with passions and panic, but maybe keeping going into the dark when I was terrified was what bravery was. My steps drifted left. Heart-side of the body, where the Master had always called to me from. Rattler, still weary, coiled at the base of my skull, waiting for me to need the speed he could offer. I didn’t know how to fight amorphous blackness, but hell, I hadn’t known how to fight most of what I’d faced. Learning on the job, that’s what they called it. I just needed to learn this one last lesson. Rattler’s speed wouldn’t hurt, nor the ravens on shoulders, nor the touch of Brigid’s fire still burning within me. I had my shields, my sword, my magic and I had Gary at my back. I knew I would die to protect him, and that was when my fear fell away.
