Raven Calls

thousands of years ago. Could be anybody on the throne. Lugh’s part of the mythology here, though. Sun god, I think, so maybe not. What?” he demanded when I gaped at him. “Look, it ain’t native knowledge, doll. I been reading up the past year, just like you have. Guess we’ve been covering different territory. Anyway, aincha ever heard of fairy mounds? ’Swhere the fair folk go to ground. Everybody knows that.”

“No, I’ve never heard of fairy mounds! I swear to God, did I miss a college course? Life Lessons 103: How to Recognize Magic?” My hands waved in the air like demented puppets. “And I thought I was doing so much better!”

“You are.”

That was not reassuring. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets, shoulders hunched defensively high as I shuffled to face Lugh again.

He didn’t look any more reassured than I felt. I sighed and scrubbed my hands through my hair, which needed to be washed. “So this Morrígan. Is she really a goddess? I’ve never met a goddess.”

“The Morrígan,” Lugh said, a bit severely. “She was one of us once, long ago. She has left us since, and rides the night sky with her ravens and her bloody blades.”

“Ra…” The woman in my vision had been accompanied by ravens. I swallowed and gestured to indicate a height equal to my own. “Is she about yay tall, with hip-length black hair and a death’s head face? Blue robes? Badass tattoos? Necklace like this one?” I stuck my thumb under my necklace, bringing it to Lugh’s attention.

He focused on it momentarily. “All but the last, yes.”

I tried to focus on the necklace, too—difficult, when it was a choker and didn’t pass my chin when tugged forward—then muttered, “She’s the reason I’m here. I mean, in Ireland. Not here—here, whenever this is. Hey!” I let go of the necklace, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe I really do get to save you! Maybe that’s why she called me!” Of course, the call had felt like more of a gauntlet across the face than a request for a rescue mission, but maybe that didn’t matter.

Or maybe it did. Lugh shook his head. “She is not known for her kindness. I think she wouldn’t call you to rewrite my fate.”

“Well, I’m here now. I think I’ll give it a shot, if you don’t mind.”

Complexity crossed Lugh’s face and he looked to Gary. “You are her teacher. In my time the connected say fate is not to be toyed with. Is it not so in your time?”

Gary’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Forgive me for sayin’ so, your majesty, but what the hell’s the point in being connected if you don’t mess with fate? Rightin’ wrongs, fighting the good fight, setting kids named Arthur on the path to be king? That’s what the connected do.”

Now Lugh shot a surreptitious glance at me. “Arthur?”

“After your time. Don’t worry about it. What do your adepts do?”

He tipped his head curiously, then smiled. “Adepts. A suitable word. They maintain balance. Between justice and injustice, between life and death, between light and dark. What do you do?”

“That,” I admitted, “only less portentously. I hope. My version involves getting my ass kicked a lot, and screwing around with fate. I don’t know what else to call getting a kid turned into a sorcerer’s vessel.” There were a whole bunch of other threads I’d tugged in my year as a shaman, but that one continued to upset me.

“Your world,” Lugh said after a long, long time, “must be badly out of balance.”

“You have no idea.”

He drew himself up, suddenly regal. “Then you must see what a world in balance looks like, gwyld. Perhaps that is why you’re here. Come.” He turned and walked away and I made to follow him.

Gary hissed, “Jo,” despite my name having not a sibilant in sight. “Jo, hang on.”

I hung, letting Lugh stride down the Hall of Kings without us. “What’s wrong?”

His eyes popped. “We’re standin’ in the middle of a million-year-old hall that’s just a bunch of green hills in our time, talkin’ to an elf king, and you gotta ask what’s wrong? What’d you do to us, Jo? This ain’t what the Sight’s like, is it?”

“Oh. No. Not normally. I mean, no—wait. What do you see?”

“I see Tara, Jo. Tara the way it musta been a million years ago. It’s…” Gary, who was never at a loss for words, trailed off as he gazed around. “There’s swords on the walls. Lot of ’em don’t look like they’ve ever been used. They’ve got carvings below them, faces. Except they don’t look like carvings, more like they just lifted right out of the stone itself. All the kings, I guess. Makes you feel like you’re walkin’ through history.” He paused, then said in a more normal tone, “You know what I mean.”

I grinned. “Yeah. I don’t see that, not as clearly. I’ve got overlap going from our time. I don’t see the faces.”

“Too bad. They’re somethin’, Jo.” He refocused on me. “So what the hell’d you do? You said your rhyme, then disappeared for a minute, and then everything changed to this and the elf king.”

I stared at him. “How’d you know he wasn’t human?”

Gary did his plate tectonics shrug. “Pretty sure the human high kings of Ireland married Maeve, not the Morrígan. That and the mythology said Lugh was one of the sí. It stood to reason.”

My hands started doing the Muppet thing again. “What the hell’s a shee? No, never mind, forget it, just tell me how it stood to reason that some random guy in the annals of history wasn’t human? How it stood to reason that—”

Gary gave me a level look. “Sweetheart, in the fifteen months I’ve known you, I been stabbed by a demigod, ridden with the Wild Hunt, fought a wendigo, been witched into a heart attack an’ killed a couple zombies. What part of that would make a guy think there weren’t any elves prancin’ about somewhere in the world?”

I stared at him again. Pushed my glasses up. Stared some more. Then, in my very best academic tone, I said, “Oh. Well, when you put it like that, yeah, okay. I don’t know how we got here, Gary. And what do you mean, I disappeared?”

“Poof,” he said with a demonstrative puff of his fingers. “Gone. Had me worried for a minute, but then I got sucked back through time, too.”

“I can still See our time,” I said nervously. “I don’t like that I went poof. That can’t be a good sign.”

He whacked my shoulder in a way that could, if I was liberal with my definition, be construed as a pat. “Roll with it, doll.”

“Right. Because I don’t know how to get us home, so what choice do I have.”

Gary beamed and patted my shoulder again. This time I didn’t stagger from it. “That’s my girl. You’re getting the hang of this carpe diem stuff.”

“I have a good teacher. I think I also have an impatient elf king up there.” Indeed, Lugh stood framed by the hall’s far doorway, looking for all the world like a graceful marble statue. A graceful, impatient marble statue, though I’d never encountered a statue which exuded impatience. It made me wonder if there was a Museum of Statues of Unusual Expression somewhere in the world. There should be, if there wasn’t.

Lugh’s statuesque pose relaxed as we caught up to him. Gary caught his breath—his own breath, not Lugh’s—and even I, who still saw my era overlying ancient Tara, said, “Wow.”

The screaming white stone stood a few hundred yards away in a straight shot from the hall’s exit. I could See another version of it about a hundred yards off to the right; it had been moved in comparatively modern times, but the sheer solidity of its long-term presence beyond the hall made its modern-day location a mere shadow. Beyond it, the henges rose up with banners snapping, making the barrier around Tara that much more impressive.

Everything within the henges was focused on the screaming stone, which shone with gathered energy. It was capped with rich green magic at the moment, power waiting to be released. I wanted to yank the cap off to see if the energy shot upward like a spotlight directed at the sky. I kind of thought it would. That it would shoot up, crash into the cloud layer and rain back down over the entirety of Ireland in an island-size distribution of goodwill, serenity and balance.

Except Ireland didn’t exactly have a history of goodwill, serenity and balance. I frowned at the screaming stone like that was its fault, but Lugh brushed the thought away with a dramatic sweep of his hand. “Here lies the heart of our civilization. The collected spirit of the aos sí, where at midsummer those who would rule pass through the hall and come to the Lia Fáil, the Stone of