Curse of the Celts

by Clara O'Connor

  “What a little shit.” My heart broke for the much younger Devyn, even as I noted that Callum hadn’t mentioned intervening himself either.

  “Humph. Wasn’t a good time for anyone. Anyway, the time came some years on from the death of the lady and her daughter that they came to clear out the nursery. Devyn still attended lessons though he never did anything more than sit in his chair like a sullen pup. When he heard the men down the hall and realised what was happening, he tore out of there like his arse had been lit on fire. There came then the sounds of a fierce battle.” Callum had settled into the story, clearly relishing this part of the tale. “That boy had set two grown men on their backsides and was picking up furniture and replacing it in the nursery. Two or three more men came running and took him on, and he fought them like a wild thing, doing a fair job of holding them off until they fetched a few warriors who were only too happy to be handed their chance at giving young Devyn a whipping. Most of them had argued that he be thrown out in the streets, that he was no longer worthy of being fostered. Oh yes, they were happy to help put some manners on him. But nobody had told Devyn he should give these mighty warriors any more respect than he dished out to the servants who tried to subdue him. Eventually, they overpowered him – he was still only a lad, after all – and, well, they set to give him a beating he wouldn’t forget.”

  “What happened?” I asked intently.

  Callum had paused his story, snarled in memory.

  “What happened?” I asked again. The warming fire in the room we occupied suddenly blazed into a mini explosion which I knew would be more style than substance. It was a flash that set the little room alight with dancing colours that ricocheted outwards. It was a significantly more spectacular display than the spark we had been aiming for earlier during training.

  Callum grinned at the evidence his ploy had worked. Distracted and emotionally roused, I had finally shown some ability. “Well, his friend went over and helped him. Sent them all away. He crouched down when Devyn collapsed on the floor and asked him what he was doing, why he wouldn’t let them take the stuff away. Devyn told him that the little girl was still alive. His friend nodded, and that was that.”

  “What do you mean, that was that? He believed him? They went back to how it was before?”

  “Nothing was ever as it was before. The two boys were close again but not as they were; that wasn’t possible. His friend was a wild one, and as they grew older, Devyn was the shadow to his raging fire, always at his side, but… a shadow. Until the day he disappeared. And left his friend behind.” Callum indicated the dancing streamers playing around the room. “How’s about we try doing something a little more practical then?”

  Despite what had appeared to be a breakthrough, my progress continued to be patchy at best. I consistently failed to command the elements while inadvertently succeeding at one or two exercises. Callum’s exasperation had turned to a more focused investigation as he threw test after test at me, by turns baffled, outraged and tickled by the results as no clear pattern emerged as to why I was so inconsistent.

  “You really shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said, stroking his beard and surveying the results of a rare successful test – the smoking husk of what used to be a stone. “It defies the laws of physics. It shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Isn’t that why they call it magic?” I laughed up at him.

  He shook his head. “That’s not how it usually works.”

  I smirked, throwing out a hip and leaning against the tree in the middle of the circle. “And yet somehow I…”

  I trailed off as my palm tingled in its contact with the great oak. The bark was intense against my hand, my eyelids were incredibly heavy and they closed as I swayed closer, leaning against the tree. And was transported…

  * * *

  A dark, thin boy railed against the servants who were attempting to take furniture out of a room. Another boy with fair hair stood silently by. The servants ran off and reappeared with guards… no, warriors, for these were Celts. They were tall and broad, and clad in dark leathers with their swirling tattooed arms and long hair. They pushed the boy away, but he grabbed a sword and somehow managed to lift it. His pale face was defiant and determined. I couldn’t make out the words that were spoken, but it was clear he had no intention of letting anyone in the room – or rather of letting any furniture out. Another large man stepped forward. This one wasn’t dressed like the others. He spoke softly and the boy let his guard down. The large man, Callum, stepped forward and snatched the sword away before backhanding the boy with a hard blow. The boy crumpled in the doorway, struggling to find his feet, his arm up not in defence but in his ongoing attempt to bar the others’ entry to the room. Callum and the warriors were angry now and moved forward with violent intent. The fair-haired boy stepped in front of the fallen one, his face blank but determined. No one moved.

  * * *

  I snapped back to the courtyard as the vision faded.

  “You lied. You lied to me,” I accused the older, greyer Callum who hovered over me, concern in his eyes. “You beat him. It wasn’t the warriors, it was you.”

  Callum stepped back, away from my anger and accusation, his face taut with regret.

  “I know. How do you tell a girl that you struck a silent grieving child? For I see now that he was grieving. Devyn was supposed to be her protector…”

  “He was no more than a child himself!” I cut across him.

  “Not then. I mean, when he was older… when they both were older, as his father was for her mother. But the Griffin failed. Instead he saved his own son whose very existence was a constant reminder, and who sulked about the castle, not deigning to speak to anyone. We were all hurting, and he was there, always there. That day, they were clearing the room, but he wouldn’t let them. He wouldn’t let people move on with their lives. All he would say was that she was alive. The baby girl was alive. He needed to accept that she was gone, to let us all accept it. That day… I’m a teacher, Cassandra. I’m a big man. I’ve never struck anyone, and that day I struck a child. I’ve never been so sorry for anything in my life.” Callum’s voice was barely a whisper by the time he had finished, his hand shaking as he lifted it to brush his shaggy hair off his face. “Never been so sorry.”

  I couldn’t blame him for hiding his misdeed in his telling. Why would he want to share that shame with a stranger? That said, why had the oak chosen to share that part of the story with me? I had already known about the incident… mostly. What was the point of telling me the rest?

  “Have you ever struck a child since?” I asked.

  Callum recoiled, horrified that I would even ask the question. “No, of course not. Never, never again.”

  “Have you done anything against Devyn again?” I pursued. There had to be a reason for the vision, there had to be. Oaks had shown me things before, things that gave me insight or information that was crucial for me to know so I could understand better what was going on.

  Callum’s face was closed as he turned away. He looked at the tree and then back at me as he realised where I had gained my newfound knowledge of the long-ago incident. His eyes widened.

  “You’re a crannoir, a type of seer,” he breathed. “Such an unusual gift. But then, you’ve managed to reach the elements… but not with the kind of power that would have sent the hounds after you. You are a conundrum, child.”

  “Fidelma said that too.” She also said I wasn’t the girl Devyn sought. Was the reason why I was unable to control the power in my blood the same reason she had failed to see the truth? “She said if I made it out of the city I should go to her.”

  “She did, hey?” Callum pulled at his beard. “If Fidelma saw a use for you, there must be more than just the ability to commune with tree spirits. Let’s try again.”

  Some hours and little further success later, we made our way back to his rooms where I fell into a chair, exhausted. While Callum was a little distracted, I asked the question that had been buildin
g up inside me for days since he had let slip that Devyn had been fostered in the house into which I had been born.

  I couldn’t ask him directly because Devyn had warned me about showing interest in the lost lady and her child, but surely somehow I could figure it out myself?

  “Magic is in the bloodlines, right? So somewhere in the past, before the Code, I must have a Briton ancestor. Is there a way to identify which family I might descend from?”

  Callum didn’t look up from the books he was rifling through, muttering under his breath and cursing at whatever elusive tome he was searching for. The question hung heavily in the air – on my side at least.

  “Ah, there you are.” He pulled a dark-green book off a shelf. “Yes, and I’ve only ever heard of the ability to see the past manifesting in the older bloodlines. Crannoirs are rare. Even with the increase in city latents like yourself, it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out which line you trace back to.”

  “Oh yeah?” I dragged a finger through the dust on the shelf I stood beside, trying hard not to appear over-eager. When my parents locked me up to prevent me escaping with Devyn, when they failed to turn up at my trial, thereby washing their hands of me, I had started to accept the fact that they, the only family I had ever known, were not really my family. They adopted me for profit, not for myself, and for the advantages the city bestowed on them for raising me until I was old enough to be married off to the groom of their choosing. My birth mother died trying to protect me, and I had lived my life under the false care of people who were merely doing their city a service. My family, my home, my city – everything I had ever believed in and loved – was a lie.

  Devyn was all I had. And he was as hard to hold onto as water in a stream: mesmerising to watch, whether it was still and deep and simply reflecting its surroundings, or turbulent and boiling over in a storm and pulling me along in a current that I was powerless to resist. But every time I tried to hold on to him, he slipped away. I needed something I could hold on to, a new centre that would ground me. Something to give me a connection to this new life, this new world.

  “It would have been generations ago, but I suppose you might be able to trace it,” he acknowledged.

  “Is it possible to trace what kind of magic a particular bloodline has?”

  “Yes, there are only so many families with the kind of magic you seem to have. It should be possible to figure out with which family you have the most affinity. In fact, that might be the answer to why you struggle so. If we speak to someone in the family, we could find some answers, or, better yet, solutions.”

  “It’s possible? I might have a living family?” I rushed, tripping over the words. My entire being bubbled with hope and joy. I wasn’t alone out here. There was somewhere I could go. Somewhere I could call home. I had promised Devyn I wouldn’t tell anyone that I was anything other than Marcus’s betrothed, but if I could figure it out on my own… They used books out here, so it wasn’t like I would leave an electronic trail as I would have if my research had been online.

  “It depends. Latents with magic tend to have a single gift. The stronger, older bloodlines can have different strengths, but some affinities are seen again and again. The House of York is particularly strong at healing. They usually have an affinity with air and water. Their magic originated with a woman called Jacquetta, a refugee from central Europe who settled in Anglia. Her daughter married into the House of York shortly before Anglia was regained from the Empire so it’s no surprise Marcus is gifted at healing. You could have a poke around upstairs and look?”

  Of course. I was in a college and colleges had libraries. There must be some kind of record. I knew by now that the power flowing through my veins wasn’t entirely common. Based on the magic I had manifested before, I seemed to have some touch of all four elements. I didn’t feel overwhelmingly stronger in one over another, which would have helped to narrow it down, but it seemed my ability to connect to trees and have visions of the past was rare. Apparently, there were only a few families left on this island who had any real power, and they were amongst the most important in the land. Devyn and Calchas had both been sure of the identity of my bloodline. Surely there was some history book or lineage of magic that would have recorded something about my mother… and any other surviving family?

  “It’s worth a look,” I agreed. “While we’re here.”

  Callum, his interest already dragged away by the volume in his hand, nodded absently. “Good, good.”

  Despite the thousands of books at my disposal, I still hadn’t managed to locate one that gave me the information I needed. It was incredibly frustrating; used to hundreds of instant answers at the touch of a few keystrokes, following the trail of references and misleading titles – not to mention incorrectly shelved books – was unbelievably slow. And distracting. I started with a clear objective: to identify families with magical bloodlines. But these were often the highborn Britons, and the genealogical tangle assumed some previous knowledge of the families, the events and the major battles. My understanding of magic itself was basic, so that was another avenue I got sucked down. Even when I did hit on something it was often obscure. It became apparent that most information about magic and its uses was held by the druids, and it had not been written down in order to protect it or to make it even more annoyingly mysterious. I could find little to nothing about how or why seeing visions was only truly strong in particular bloodlines, or why magic itself randomly manifested in people like Marina.

  I lost an entire evening to a pile of books that I found in a small room off the library, awaiting the return of whatever holidaying academic had assembled them. It wasn’t particularly helpful but the study was intriguing, involving a great many tomes on ley lines, as well as histories of the Empire. I even studied a large map on a wall that traced outbreaks of the illness the Britons knew as the Mallacht across a timeline. It appeared that what Devyn said was true, and the instances had spread across the Empire over the last century or so. In the Empire they called it the Maledictio, the curse of the Celts. They blamed the magic of the druids and had hunted them into extinction across Gallia and Iberia. While the number of Maledictio cases were fewer in the absence of druids, the crops still failed and records showed severely declining harvests in the last ten or more years. The last known major outbreak in the central Med was over two decades ago – this was the outbreak that had claimed the life of Devyn’s mother – but occasional dots on the map signified more recent cases in the last decade. These were rare though, and in more remote regions, like the Alps and the Ethiopian mountains.

  For all the thousands of books, I had little to go on and was unable to ask either Devyn or Callum for help without revealing what I was up to. I’d had little luck in identifying potential bloodlines, but while success evaded me, it did allow me to get away from the increasingly toxic atmosphere in Callum’s rooms in the evenings.

  Whatever good the sword and fight training was doing for Marcus physically, it certainly wasn’t improving relations between him and Devyn, which had gone from frostily indifferent to downright antagonistic. I didn’t understand why; it wasn’t over me, I was pretty sure. Marcus and I were on reasonably good terms, and over dinner I chatted to him about the things I had learned that day, with Callum occasionally correcting my interpretation. Devyn had been subdued since our arrival in Oxford, but tried to be polite, at least in the evenings. But the new bruises that decorated them both every evening testified that training was anything but polite.

  The next day we spent the morning down by the river. Callum had suggested that being closer to nature might help. While the results were the same as in the courtyard, it was a relief to have further evidence that, out of the borderlands, the handfast tether between Marcus and me had expanded to more normal distances. At lunch, Callum and I headed back to the college, passing by where the other two trained.

  They were both sweating, their shirts discarded in the late autumn sunshine. Not that it mattered to me; it
was foolishness to be playing at swords with no clothes on, if you asked me. Yet my eyes were snared by the play of muscles in Devyn’s chest as he disarmed his opponent, and not for the first time if Marcus’s expression was anything to go by.

  Devyn nodded in greeting as we passed, pushing his damp curls out of his face as he demonstrated a stance or something to Marcus. Wooden swords, I noticed; that explained the bruises. I didn’t suppose you got too many bruises with real swords.

  Back in the training yard, Callum was starting to look defeated as I failed yet again to command the elements. Frustration seeped out of every pore and his mouth was set in a grim line.

  “Give me your hand.” I did as commanded.

  He took my hand in the traditional Celt grip – hands clasped higher on the forearm, pulse points at the wrist facing each other. He closed his eyes and concentrated.

  His blue eyes opened, and he frowned.

  “There’s barely a glimmer in your veins, girl. Did he think he could fool me? That believing you had strong magic meant I wouldn’t hurt you?” His broad smile was unnerving.

  I attempted to step back, to pull away. Devyn was right: Callum was not to be trusted. Suddenly I glimpsed an echo of the angry man who had hit Devyn as a boy. I tried to escape his grip, unnerved by his strength, his size.

  “Now, now, my dear, I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere.” He started to drag me towards a different door to the one we normally used. I tried to pull away again, but he held fast. Turning, he raised his hand as if to hit me.

  Suddenly, fire licked along his hand, and as he let go of me, a gust of wind pushed him off his feet, sending him to the other side of the courtyard. The sky darkened overhead. I felt powerful. Crackling with energy. It was too much. I needed to get to Devyn. We needed to leave. Now.

  Before Callum regained his feet, I was away across the yard and racing down the long corridor.