The Black Pool (Valhalla Book 3)

by Jennifer Willis

  “A leprechaun?” Thor asked in disbelief. “You’ve giving me the hammer of a wee little red-headed grump with a buckle for a hatband and a pot of gold in his pocket?”

  “A wee little—” Freya balled her hands into fists and called on her last ounce of restraint not to rip Thor’s beard from his fat face. She took several deep breaths to calm herself. “It’s not a gift. It’s a loan. And before you dismiss its significance out of hand, why not give it a try first?”

  Thor considered the tiny hammer in his hands and laughed. “Are you serious? It’s no bigger than a child’s toy! I’d surely break it.”

  Freya crossed her arms over her chest.

  “All right,” Thor sighed. He looked at Sally and shrugged. “At least this should be entertaining.”

  He turned toward the tree, but Freya lifted her hands in protest.

  “Not anything living, if you don’t mind.”

  Thor turned back to the stone dolmen but realized that was likely a poor choice of target as well. It would no doubt turn out to be a sacred burial chamber housing the remains of some fabled shamrock king whose guardian faerie cricket would haunt him ’til the end of his days. Or something like that.

  Thor walked toward Sally and raised the tiny hammer over one of the sagging fence posts.

  “Should I stand back?” Sally asked.

  Thor cocked an eyebrow. “What for?”

  He brought the hammer down and struck the old wood with an easy tap. A fountain of tiny gold harps and orange marshmallow crowns erupted from the site of the strike, mixed with brown, pint-shaped candies and little snakes made of what looked to be blueberry licorice. Finally a plume of seeds shot ten feet into the air and scattered in the grass all around Sally and Thor, sprouting immediately into white flowers and green shamrock leaves wherever they landed.

  “Bloody freaking Christmas!” Thor gaped at the flowers and candies strewn at least three meters in every direction. He picked up one of the pea-sized harps and realized it was pure gold.

  “Irish Lucky Charms!” Sally laughed in something between amusement and shock. She picked a few bits of marshmallow out of her hair and then plucked a gummy candy shaped like a beer glass from her shirt. She nibbled at it, then grimaced. “You really do have Guinness-flavored everything here.”

  Thor smirked at Freya and lifted the little hammer in the air. “So this is the big trick to this thing? Distract the enemy with an explosion of pixie trinkets while you beat a hasty retreat?”

  Her expression unchanged, Freya gestured toward the space where the fence had previously stood. There was nothing left of the structure but inch-long splinters of wood and smoking piles of ash.

  “Oh,” Thor said. “Well, that’s not so bad.”

  Without another word, Freya reached again into the open dolmen and pulled out five sticks, knotty and blackened, each about a yard long and sporting a rounded club at one end.

  “Shillelaghs,” Niall said as he stepped up beside Sally. His feet crunched on the newly sprouted shamrocks and the scattered gold harps. “Traditional Irish fighting clubs.”

  Freya nodded and handed one of the sticks to Niall. He took it into his hands and tested the weapon’s weight.

  Freya held another one out to Sally. “I hope you’ll have no use for this,” she said. “But if you do, know that this blackthorn cudgel was crafted by none other than Creidhne and his brothers Goibniu and Luchtaine.”

  Niall whistled. “The Trí Dée Dána.”

  Sally looked from Niall to Freya and back again with a blank expression.

  “They were the three gods of art,” Niall explained. “They forged the first weapons of the Tuatha de Danann.”

  Freya offered one of the shillelaghs to Loki, but he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Not for me.”

  “But you may need to defend yourself,” Freya insisted.

  Loki leveled a hard stare at her. His smile was cold.

  “All right then.” Freya laid a single weapon back in the open burial.

  Brushing a few licorice snakes and gummy Guinness pints off his shoulders, Heimdall stepped forward and accepted a shillelagh from Freya. He shook his head. “I don’t feel right about using one of these against the Vanir.”

  Freya lifted her chin. “May your aim be true.”

  16

  Badbh watched her grandson as he studied the rough walls of the narrow passageway. Not able to stand fully upright in the cramped space underground, Freyr hunched forward as he ran his hands over the stone in the darkness.

  “Have I been here before?”

  “Oweynagat,” Badbh answered him. They had some time yet before the others were due to arrive, so she decided to indulge a few of his questions.

  “Oweynagat,” he repeated. “The cave of the cats?”

  “That’s one interpretation.”

  “How far are we from the Black Pool?” Freyr asked.

  Badbh laughed. “You are still thinking in human terms,” she chastised him. “You’ve spent far too long with the Æs—” Again, she had to stop herself from making references that might jog unpleasant memories. She needed him focused now, with no chance of divided loyalties.

  “You were away from your homeland for a long time,” she said instead. “You have forgotten so much of your own people. But we will rectify that in short order.”

  “I think I would like that. To remember.” Freyr looked at her and smiled. It wasn’t the expression of cunning or joy that she would have hoped for, but this glimmer of acceptance was a step in the right direction.

  “But we are still underground,” Freyr observed. “When do we emerge?”

  “Soon.” Badbh motioned him to follow her along the low-ceilinged tunnel of rock. “We are very nearly there.”

  “This day feels . . . special.” He frowned at not having the right words.

  “It is that,” Badbh replied. As soon as the ritual was performed, the mantle of Éireann would descend fully onto Freyr’s shoulders, and he would be transformed out of the questioning child the cauldron had turned him into. Until then, she would have to lead him as she would a clumsy toddler.

  “If only you had come willingly,” Badbh muttered.

  “You keep saying that,” Freyr answered. “Are you speaking to me? Because I am coming with you.”

  Badbh closed her eyes and breathed in the close, earthy scent of Vanaheim’s passage of first creation. Even if Freyr was too addled to understand the significance of this journey, she would at least mark it for him.

  “And thus springs forth the heir of the Vanir,” she whispered to the stone walls as she and Freyr continued toward the faint light at the end of the tunnel ahead. “He comes from out of the darkness, having completed his journey through the underworld. Having given himself as a willing sacrifice to the sacred waters of the cauldron, to cleanse his people and his land of their oppression.”

  Freyr followed along behind her, stumbling occasionally on a stray rock on the path.

  They drew close to the tunnel’s exit, where the path angled sharply upward and opened in a triangular cleft in the grass beneath native trees and shrubs. Standing just inside the fissure, leaning against the stone walls and blinking at the Samhain sun that lay beyond, stood the two figures Badbh had been longing to see.

  “Nemain! Macha!” Tears sprang to Badbh’s black eyes. “My sisters!”

  The two turned toward Badbh in a single movement. Macha’s thick mane was as fiery as Badbh remembered, her skin still a golden bronze that offset her emerald eyes. Nemain was the darkest of the three, her ebony skin and hair giving her the appearance of nothing more than shadow.

  Badbh felt the withered appearance of extreme age falling away from her own body with every step toward her sisters. Her gray-toned skin evened to the color of old bone as the dense patterns of wrinkles were smoothed away. The gnarled claws of her hands and feet retreated to become nimble fingers and toes. The silver shone brighter in her hair, and her eyes sparkled with obsid
ian light.

  “Badbh,” Nemain and Macha said in unison. “Sister.”

  Nemain and Macha joined hands and reached out to welcome Badbh. She slid the eel cuff from her arm and let the enchanted iron fall to the dirt. She no longer needed it.

  Badbh opened her arms to her sisters. Tears sparkled in her eyes as they formed their circle of three. They stood together just inside the shadows of the Oweynagat entrance.

  “You have been too long exiled, my sisters.” Badbh gripped their forearms and looked at them in turn. “And I have been too long slumbering.”

  “We have been busy, in our own way.” Nemain smirked, her white teeth flashing against black lips.

  “You haven’t been imprisoned?” Badbh asked.

  “It’s a long story, sister.” Macha laughed, and her red-orange hair rustled against her nearly naked back.

  Badbh regarded her sisters in their modern warrior costumes of leather and simple cloth. “You do not wear your robes.”

  “It is warm, where we have been,” Macha replied. “It is easier to blend in dressed as an Amazon.”

  “Or disguised as an Orisha,” Nemain chuckled.

  “Stirring up trouble?” Badbh grinned.

  Nemain and Macha glanced at each other.

  Badbh imagined her sisters as they had been in the old days, before their banishment, when The Morrigan had roamed wasted battlefields, each sister dripping head-to-toe with the blood of the slain, the flesh of their enemies snagged in their teeth.

  “Furies to the last.” Badbh sighed. “When our work here is done, you must share with me your many generations of adventures. Where you have been, what you have seen.”

  “First you will explain yourself,” Nemain said. “To what purpose have you called us?”

  Macha narrowed her eyes at Badbh. “And why to this place? On this day?”

  “Grandmother?” Freyr stood still in the darkness. Badbh looked back at him, and he was startled by her transformation from wizened hag to ageless, wicked beauty. The sisters were of identical height and shape, their features all formed from the same mold. But where one blazed hot like fire, another was cold and dark like a New Moon night. And then there was Badbh, made of silver, coal, and smoke.

  Freyr was dazzled at the sight of the trio, arms intertwined, black and green eyes searching his face.

  Badbh laughed and motioned him forward. “My sisters, this is a most fortuitous day. May I present to you Éireann’s rightful king.”

  “Freyr,” all three sisters sang together.

  “The Morrigan has spoken.” Badbh smiled. “The time of your ascension is at hand.”

  Sally startled awake when the tour van came to a stop. She looked out at the green countryside as Niall switched off the engine and opened the driver’s door.

  She frowned at the grassy mound in the distance. “That’s the Hill of Tara?”

  Loki tugged at her elbow as he passed her and stepped out of the van. “You won’t want to miss this.”

  Sally rubbed at her face to wake up. How could she have fallen asleep? Was she really becoming so used to these end-of-the-world scenarios that she could so easily nod off in the middle of a crisis?

  Sally suppressed a loud yawn as her sneakered feet hit the gravel of the small parking area. She smelled the earthy dampness of the air and remembered the turf incense the vendor had pushed on Clare at the Magickal Marketplace. It really was an “authentic Irish” smell.

  Had that been only four days ago?

  Sally looked up at the sky, cloudy and gray as always. The sun was making fewer direct appearances as the wheel of the year pushed toward winter, but Sally could still make out a trace of the pale orb hidden behind the cloud cover. From the sun’s position, she guessed it was just past noon.

  Mid-day on Samhain. Sally felt a dull pang in her gut. Halloween in Ireland, the day the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. Once the sun set—in just a few hours—the magick of this land would be at its strongest. At least, that’s what Clare had argued.

  And now Clare wasn’t here to see it. She’d missed it by a single day.

  Freya pulled the weapons out of the back of the Red Top Tours van and handed a shillelagh to Sally.

  “She would understand,” Freya said, seeming to read Sally’s mind yet again. “I’m sure of it.”

  Sally sighed and followed behind the others as they started walking out of the parking area and toward the grass. She used the shillelagh as a walking stick, club-side down, and let the uneven wood slide beneath her fingers as she moved. For an ancient weapon, it was in surprisingly good condition. Freya had said something in the van about the dolmen from which the shillelaghs and the leprechaun hammer had been taken. About particular underground spaces being outside the realm of time. Or something. Sally had already been half-asleep by that point.

  At the head of the line, Thor and Heimdall walked side by side. Sally couldn’t help but smile at the minuscule size of the cobbler’s hammer in Thor’s massive hand, even after she’d seen what it could do. Then she thought about the tiny specks of light that had so thoroughly trashed her apartment on campus. Size really didn’t matter.

  The path wound upward around a tree and split off in three directions. The sturdy signpost announced the site as Cruachain and had guiding arrows pointing toward Rathcrogan Mound, Rathbeg, Rathscreg, Oweynagat, Rath na Darbh, Cashelmannaman, and a half-dozen other names Sally had never heard of.

  Heimdall and Thor followed the right-most path, with Freya and Loki falling in behind them. They were headed away from the grassy mound Sally had spotted earlier.

  “Wait a minute.” Sally halted in front of the signpost. “Isn’t the Hill of Tara in the other direction?”

  Niall came up behind her. “We’re at Cruachain, in County Roscommon.”

  “Assume that means nothing to me,” she replied.

  Niall gestured for her to keep walking along the path, and he fell into step beside her.

  “The Hill of Tara is in County Meath,” he explained. “That’s about 140 kilometers east of here.”

  “But we need to get to the Hill of Tara!” Sally protested. She hurried ahead and caught Heimdall’s elbow. “Heimdall! Clare said Tara was where the High Kings of Ireland were installed, or consecrated, or whatever it was that they did. If Badbh,” she lowered her voice when speaking The Morrigan’s name, “if Freya’s grandmother really intends to name a new King of the Vanir, that’s where it would happen.”

  Heimdall looked down at Sally, then glanced at Freya. Sally turned to face the Vanir goddess. “Isn’t it? I mean, if we have any hope of saving Freyr, if it’s possible he’s not really dead—”

  “That time is past,” Freya interrupted. “This is where we make our stand.”

  Freya moved past Sally and took the lead of their small band. Heimdall and Thor followed.

  “Loki?” Sally turned to the god of chaos.

  “It was an inopportune time to nap,” he replied. “The prince must first be reborn, from the womb of his homeland. Only then can he ascend to the throne of Vanaheim and wear the crown of Éireann. That’s what brings us here.”

  Sally twisted the club of her shillelagh in the grass beside the walking path. “At some point, someone’s going to explain to me the difference between Vanaheim, Ireland, and Éireann. Right? Or are they just completely interchangeable?”

  Loki rested a strong hand on Sally’s back and compelled her up the path. Niall fell in on her other side.

  “Vanaheim is the domain of the Vanir,” Loki said. “Wherever they establish dominion.”

  “Éireann is the ancient name of this island,” Niall added. “Ireland is its modern equivalent.”

  “Does that help?” Loki asked.

  “A little,” Sally said. “But I still don’t understand why we’re here and not at Tara.” The sacred name caught in her throat. Clare had wanted so badly to be part of the magick of this place. Why had Sally spent so much time humoring or dismiss
ing her instead of just sitting her down to have a frank discussion?

  Because Clare thought she knew everything, Sally remembered.

  Clare had never said much about why she wanted so badly to be a witch, but it was obviously a major force in bringing Clare to Ireland. She’d probably read in a book somewhere that Ireland was the ultimate source of “real magick.” Sally wondered what Clare might have accomplished if she’d simply listened to her own gut instead of relying on what she read in books and on using tools like wands, Tarot cards, and fake faerie talismans as crutches.

  “Wait.” Sally stopped in her tracks and grasped Loki’s elbow. “Phelan said that he’d been holding the stones, the two eyes from the eel bracelet.”

  Niall stood beside Sally. Loki looked down at her and nodded.

  “He’d been holding onto them for a really long time though, right? He said that he didn’t try to get that first one, the one he sold to Clare, out of Ireland until he felt Badbh stirring. Or something like that.”

  The corner of Loki’s mouth ticked up into the barest hint of a smile.

  “But that didn’t happen until really recently, right?” Sally asked. “That first sign of trouble?”

  Loki remained silent.

  “Holy gobstoppers.” Sally sighed and rubbed her face. “I was the first sign of trouble. Even though I wasn’t practicing magick, it’s still in my blood.”

  “Sally, it’s not your fault,” Niall began to say. But Sally brushed him off and took an angry step toward Loki.

  “And you knew this would happen!”

  “I knew it to be a possibility,” Loki replied calmly.

  Sally looked down and tapped her shillelagh in the grass. “I don’t freaking believe this. I trusted you.” She turned her face back up to Loki with tears shining in her eyes. “I thought you were my friend!”

  “And I have not done nor said otherwise,” Loki said. He gestured up the path. “Now, if you would like to continue, we have a rather serious appointment to keep.”

  “Clare died.” Sally glared sideways at Loki and started walking, with Niall close on her heels.