Raven Calls

A few seconds later I straightened in my banshees’ grasps, gaping at the distant earth. Sunrise wasn’t white. Tara was white, a bastion of power glowing so brilliantly I didn’t need the Sight to see it. Like the spotlights after the twin towers fell, its circle of light shot straight up into the darkness, only gradually dissipating into mist and soft stars.

My shout of glee silenced even the banshees. Gary’s voice came suddenly clear: “Joanne? Jo? Jo! What’s goin’ on? Where are we? Are you arright?”

I bellowed, “I’m fine! I dunno what’s happening, but we’re not out of time yet!” and only belatedly realized that might not make a whole lot of sense. I started to explain, but the banshees got over their surprise and began wailing again, which left me effectively voiceless. But at least I knew Gary was still with me, and relatively safe. For the value of safe that meant “being hauled through the air by banshees,” of course, but it was better than, say, being dashed to the ground by banshees.

Tara grew more impressive as we flew closer. I’d seen it in its ancient glory, but an aerial view gave me a whole new appreciation for just how much territory the age-old holy site encompassed. It had to be half a mile or more across, and its Lower World replica had never been desecrated or destroyed. In fact, I suspected the Lower World version was in all ways more impressive than the Middle World’s original.

This one had a moat between the double row of oak henges that marked the site’s boundaries, just like the Middle World one had had thousands of years ago. But this moat had the smooth look of a deadly undercurrent, and I had the impression it ran much deeper than the Middle World’s moat had. This one was a captured—or coaxed— river, cutting Tara away from the rest of the world.

Inside the moat’s borders, ancient buildings still stood. The Hall of Kings, the Mound of Hostages, which in my time was a lumpy hill, and here, now, was a cairn with a narrow birthing canal that I bet looked out at a rising or setting sun on some important day of the year. Forts sprang up within the site’s boundaries, forts and temples and food halls and forges, the last of which made me smile. Maybe there’d been no forge in the Middle World, but the idea of it had stamped itself onto the Lower World’s copy of Tara. I glanced south, finding the distant tower at Troim, and saw it, too, glimmered with power. The other three towers, marking the outermost sphere of Tara’s influence, also stood squat and strong in the Lower World.

And at the heart of it all, at the center of the light, was the Lia Fáil. I wondered if it had ever glowed so brilliantly in the Middle World. It should not, I thought, be so pure here, where the Master’s power had reigned for so long. But so many little things had gone wrong for him: the Morrígan had sacrificed only a dozen or so aos sí kings to their cauldron before she and it were bound; the banshees had failed repeatedly to offer him sustenance over the past few decades. Moreover, the Tara of the Middle World had remained a place of human worship for generations after the sí had slipped away. Maybe that, too, had made it less the Master’s ground than mine. Something had, certainly, because at the heart of the Irish Lower World, Tara had held off corruption and its centerpiece, the Lia Fáil, was a bastion of hope and light. Elation stung me for about half a moment. If Tara could hold its own against the dark, maybe I could hold my own against the Morrígan.

The banshees dropped suddenly, bringing us closer to the power circle. I shrieked and tried to duck as we rushed the double row of oak henges. I’d passed under them with Nuada in his era, and they’d been easily twice my height, unquestionably impressive.

These ones, though, were massive. Twice my height ceased to be a useful term of measurement. They stood stories in height, two modern-building stories, pushing twenty-five or thirty feet. Every henge post was a tree unto itself, so large Gary and I wouldn’t be able to reach around and touch hands. The adjoining slabs were equally huge, six or eight feet thick. Different-colored wood blended together in the top slabs, and I had the impression that each of them was made from the two trees upon which they rested. It was beautifully sympathetic magic.

The banshees bounced off its sympathy like ping-pong balls.

Gary and I didn’t.

Momentum kept us going, but not nearly far enough. We hit the swiftly flowing moat—which probably wasn’t a moat if it had a current—about two-thirds of the way across its twenty-foot breadth, and the current whisked us away. I caught a glimpse of the banshees all but rubbing their noses in offense at having hit a wall, and then I was too busy trying to keep my head above water and worrying about Gary to think about the banshees.

The current was impossibly strong. I wondered if there was a river beneath Tara in the Middle World, one ready to suck down unwary travelers, but I wondered it with my head underwater and panic building in my chest. I was an okay swimmer, but not in stompy boots and a leather coat and besides, I’d need to be a damned dolphin to keep ahead of the current, and I was forty-seven years younger than Gary, which meant he was probably in twice as bad trouble as me. I couldn’t lose him. Not again. I kicked up, broke the surface and went down again without a whimper. All that splashing and screaming that went on in films when people were drowning was bullshit. Real drownings happened silently and fast, the body too concerned with surviving to flail or shout. I knew that. I didn’t think I’d ever experience it firsthand. My lungs already hurt, and any second I was going to gasp for air where there wasn’t any. I couldn’t even see Gary.

I would need to be a dolphin to survive the current.

The last thing I remembered clearly was screaming Rattler! inside my head. After that it turned into impressions, the way being a wolf had been, except there was no burst of excruciating pain as I gave in to the change. I lost my clothes, suddenly free and comfortable with my skin naked, to the water. The current was exciting, fast, throwing me around. I leapt into the air, chattering with delight. Hit the water again and my squeaks bounced off a familiar shape. A man. A man in trouble. Dolphins rather liked humans, a shared affinity between big-brained mammals. Darting against the current was easy.

The man was cold, clumsy. I slipped away from him and returned, trying to get his useless long flippers over my back. Failed. The man was like a drowning baby. It took many to keep a baby afloat, but there was only me. I pushed him up with my nose. He broke the surface. I rolled, putting a flipper under him while I breathed. Dove again, nose poking his back. Push push push. Toward the shore, where men were supposed to be.

He came to life with a surge. I clicked with pleasure and flipped over. He grabbed my fin. We went to shore. No beach, just deep water and then land. He grabbed for land and missed. I dove. Came up under him, between his lower fins. Rose all the way out of the water on my tail. Flung us both forward—

—Gary hit the earth and I smashed down beside him, landing on my belly with my arms sprawled wide and Rattler hissing horrified amusement at the back of my skull. Dolphins weren’t desert animals. Not, in his opinion, the sort of thing I should be turning into. I was just grateful I hadn’t turned into a flounder, and flopped onto my back, heaving for breath.

My stomach cramped, not with the need to pursue magic, but with simple hunger. I caught a sob between my teeth and Gary, gasping for air himself, sat up in a panic. “Jo? You okay?”

“I’m so hungry I could cry.” It was such a pathetic complaint in the face of almost drowning I laughed, except it turned into another sob. I was a child of the first world. I used the phrase “I’m starving” lightly, because I could. But right then I swore I could feel my body turning on its own resources to fuel itself. My extra five pounds had to be history. My muscles felt like they were going that way, too, shriveling under a healing magic’s desperate need to find something to survive on.

“Joanie, you look bad. Where’s your clothes?” Gary started patting his pockets, like he’d find a stash of airport candy in one of them.

I croaked laughter. “Guess so, if you’re calling me Joanie. Look, I’ll be fine.” In a show of bravado, I pushed up.

My arms collapsed and I fell down again. Gary pulled his shirt off—he was wearing a T-shirt beneath it, as perhaps only a man of his age would be—and covered me with it. It, like him and me, was wet, but it was very slightly better than being naked and starving. Then he put a hand on my shoulder, eyebrows beetled with real concern. “Seriously, Jo, you look bad.”

I lifted a shaking hand to examine it. I did look bad. My skin was drawn over ropy muscles, like I’d been exercising too much and not eating enough. “Shapeshifting,” I said after a groggy minute. “I’ve done it four or five times today. I guess it takes it out of me. Literally. I’m starving.” I struggled to sit up and struggled just as hard to get into Gary’s shirt—plaid cotton, long enough to come to my thighs—and sat there shivering. I’d have been shivering after a dip in the cold water anyway, never mind burning my own body up with