unnerving her. Nita laughed softly; she could hardly be much more unnerved than she was at the moment.
Off to one side, Nita caught sight of Aunt Annie, carrying Fragarach. Some way ahead of them, too, they saw Doris Smyth with the Cup, still in its pillowcase. Nita and Kit passed her, and Nita couldn't help looking at the striped pillowcase quizzically. Doris caught the look and smiled. 'Can't have it getting scratched,' she said. 'They'd ask questions when we bring it back.' Nita laughed and turned to say something to Kit, and stopped. Ahead of them she saw Ronan, stalking along in his black jeans and boots and leathers, carrying what looked like a pole wrapped in canvas. Except that she knew perfectly well that it wasn't a pole, since she got the clear feeling that from inside the wrappings, something was looking at her hard. I think he'll stop fighting it, Johnny had said. 'Come on,' she said to Kit.
They made their way over to Ronan. 'You OK?' Nita said.
Ronan looked at her. 'What a daft question. Why shouldn't I be OK?'
'The, uh. .' Nita almost didn't like to say its name in front of it. 'Your friend there. Don't you have trouble carrying it? Johnny was having a really hard time.' 'No. Should I? Is the wrapping coming undone?'
'Oh no,' Nita said. 'Never mind. ' But she remembered what Johnny had said about burdens, and cardinal virtues. Either Ronan was just not very sensitive. But no. It couldn't be that. She particularly noticed, though, a slightly glazed look in Ronan's eyes, as if he was seeing something else than the rest of them were seeing; an abstracted expression. Could the Spear make it easier for the person it wanted to carry it, by dulling or numbing their own sense of it? Or was it something else.?
She shook her head, having no way to work out what was going on, and went on with Kit and all the others through the silvery twilight. It seemed to get a little less gloomy as it went on, though Nita suspected this was just because she was getting used to it. Then the darkness seemed to increase suddenly, and a shadow passed over them. Nita's head jerked up. Something winged and big went by, cawing harshly, as the wizards passed through the space between two tongues of forest. The bird came to rest on one of the tallest of the trees, and looked down at them. The tree shuddered, and all its leaves fell off it on the spot. The crow laughed harshly. It was one of the grey- backed ones called hoodie-crows; Nita had seen her aunt shoot at them, and swear when she missed, since hoodies attacked lambs during the lambing season, killing them by pecking their eyes out and going straight through their skulls. There was muttering among the crowd as they looked at the crow.
Johnny, up near the front of the group, called, 'Well, Scaldcrow? Smell a battle, do you?' 'Have I ever failed to?' said the scratchy, cawing voice; and it was a woman's voice as well, and a nasty one, rich with wicked humour over some private joke. 'I see it all red; a fierce, tempestuous fight, and great are its signs; destruction of life, the shattering of shields; wetting of sword-edge, strife and slaughter, the rumbling of war-chariots! Go on then, and let there be sweet bloodshed and the clashing of arms, the sating of ravens, the feeding of crows!' And she laughed again. 'Yes, you would like that part,' Johnny said, not sounding particularly impressed. 'The rumbling of chariots, indeed! You've been picking up road-kills by the dual carriageway again, Great Queen.'
'Go your ways,' Doris said, beside Johnny.
'There'll be a battle right enough. But we'll need you at the end, so don't go far.'
The crow looked down at them, and the light of the Cup caught in her eyes. She was quiet for a moment, then laughed harshly, and vaulted up out of the tree, flapping off eastward. 'I'll tell Him you said so,' she said, laughing still, and vanished into the mist.
Nita looked over at Ronan. 'Now who was that?'
'It's just the Morrigan,' he said.
Nita blanched. 'Just!' said Kit. Apparently he had been researching matters in the manual as well. But Ronan just shrugged again.
'She loves to stir up troubles and wars,' he said to Kit. 'But she can be good, too. She's one of the Powers that can go either way without warning.' Nita shivered a little: she saw more than the recitation of myth in his eyes. That dazzled look was about him again, but it was an expression of memory this time. He knew the Morrigan personally, or something looking through his eyes did. 'Well she doesn't look very friendly at the moment,' Kit muttered. 'I'd just as soon she stayed out of this.'
They walked on. Distances seemed oddly telescoped here. The landmarks were the same as they were in the real world, and Nita was seeing already things that had taken them half an hour to reach in the car. She was just pointing Three Rock Mountain out to Kit when they heard the first shouts of surprise from the wizards at the front; and then the first wave of the Fomori hit them. They ran out at the wizards, screaming, from the shelter of the trees. Nita and Kit, being well off to one side and their view not blocked, had a chance to look the situation over before it got totally incomprehensible. There were a lot of the same kind of drow that they had seen in Bray; some of them were riding black horselike creatures, but fanged like tigers. There were strange headless humanoid creatures with eyes in their chests, and scaly wormlike beasts that flowed along the ground but were a hundred times the size of any snake. That much Nita could make out before the front line of the Fomori smashed in among the leading wizards, and battle broke out. The wizards counterattacked; spells were shouted, weapons alive with wizard-light struck. And the fight started to be a very uneven one, so much so that Nita was surprised by it. The drows, at least, had seemed much stronger in her own world. But here they went down fairly quickly under the onslaught of the wizards; many of those not directly attacked turned and ran away wailing into the woods, and some of those who had been resisted simply fell down dead after a simple stunning-spell or in the backlash of a stasis or rebound wizardry.
'It's just a feint,' said Kit, shaking his head in disbelief. 'That can't be the best they've got.' 'I hope you're wrong,' she muttered.
There were a few moments of confusion while the wizards sorted themselves out. 'Oh, no,' Kit said softly. 'Not already.'
She looked where he was looking. Off to their left a young woman was lying, loose-limbed and pale, like a broken doll thrown down. There were several drows lying in pieces by her, but it was no consolation, seeing they were spattered with that shade of red so bright even in this dim light that it looked fake. Nita shuddered, for experience had shown her over time that this was a sure sign it was the real thing.
'Two more over that way,' Kit muttered. 'I thought there was supposed to be safety in numbers, Neets.'
She shook her head. Two other wizards had gone over to check the young woman: now one of them came back to Johnny, shaking her head.
'They'll have to be left here for now,' he said. 'We'll see to them later. we can't wait. Come on.' They headed out again.
'It's getting darker,' Kit said, looking ahead. 'Is that where we're supposed to be going? Downhill there?'
'I think so.'
'Great,' Kit said. 'By the time we get down there, we won't be able to see anything.' That thought had occurred to Nita; it was getting hard enough to see their footing as it was, and since there were no roads here, this was a problem. She had made a small wizard-light to bob along in front of her, like an usher's flashlight in a cinema, to help her see where to put her feet. Meanwhile, she might not be armed with anything concrete, but she had the spell ready that she had used on the drows in Bray. It hadn't functioned too well there, but here, to judge by the reactions of the drows to the wizardries used against them in the skirmish just past, it would work just fine. 'You got anything ready to hit things with?' Nita said to Kit.
He looked sideways at her and smiled very slightly. 'Well,' he said. 'There's always the beam-me-up spell. If you just leave the locus specification for the far end of the spell blank — or if you specify somewhere, say, out in deep space. .'
Nita shuddered. 'Yecch.'
Kit shrugged. 'Better them than me.'
The crowd was heading downhill now, on a path paralleling the way the road would have run in the real world, down on to the little twisty ridge of Kilmolin and then further down into Enniskerry village. As they came down there seemed to be some confusion among the front ranks; they were milling around, and the wizards behind were pushing up close behind them.
'Hmf,' said the young wizard in the leather jacket, as they came up abreast of him. 'Not the best of positions. Look at that.' He pointed down the valley. 'All strung out like this, if anything should come at us from the sides, it'd break us in two. No, he's doing the right thing, gathering us together. That way if anything happens.
