Raven Calls

“All right. Here.” I thrust my rapier into Gary’s hands. “You can use this, right? I mean, hell, you can do everything else.”

He took it, but not gingerly. “I’m better with a saxophone, doll, but I’ll make do. You sure? You might need it.”

“I’m not the one proposing to go face down the man himself. You need it more than I do. Gary, are you sure? Because this is nuts.”

The big man’s voice gentled. “You can’t do it, Jo. It’s time you learn we’ll go into battle for you, even if you ain’t there.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Good generals don’t.” Gary stuck the rapier point down into the ground, took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you on the other side, darlin’.”

“Of time. Just the other side of time, okay? No stupid heroics, Gary. Not when I’m not there to save you.”

“I promise.” Gary let me go, took up the rapier again and turned to Cernunnos. “Mind if I share your ride?”

Cernunnos looked pained and gestured to the boy who rode beside him. “Share his. The mare is well used to a mortal rider.”

The mare was the boy Rider’s human mother, transformed. A whole pile of unfortunate things, mostly involving crude comments about riders, immortal and mortal alike, rose to and were compressed behind my lips. I could be dumb, but not that dumb. Gary took the kid’s hand and swung up onto the mare behind him, then gave me a jaunty salute. “Go get ’em, Jo.”

And then my best friend rode off into the sunset.

Nuada remained silent until Gary and Cernunnos vanished into misty golden skies, which was just as well. I didn’t like Gary going off on his own, and had the sneaking suspicion hypocrisy was my middle name. After a while I said, “So you can’t marry her,” at the same time he said, “I think I have no choice but to wed the Morrígan.”

I was tired of saying “What?” so I just looked at him. He exhaled slowly. I half expected to see silver stream on his breath, but it was just a puff of air like anyone else’s. On it, he said, “Because as we are bound to her, she is bound to us. I may be able to temper her actions if I become her groom.”

“Or you might end up skewered on the Lia Fáil.”

Nuada’s eyebrows quirked. “Not if I have yet to make that sword and that necklace. Did you not say the sword comes from many centuries hence?”

Everybody was smarter than me. I clicked my jaw shot, looked for an argument and didn’t find one. Or not much of one, anyway: “What if Cernunnos came back in time to have you make it?”

“Then I still live some little ways into the future, for that has yet to happen. She is a goddess, Siobhán. How would you have me escape her?”

“She’s only a, a, a small god. An avatar. You, aos sí, you’re more connected to the earth than humans are. You run way down deep, but the Morrígan’s lain down with the devil, which gives her bonus points in the mojo department.” I’d used the word mojo plenty of times in the past. It had never triggered the mojojojo thing until Gary’d started snickering. I was going to smack him as soon as he got back from galumphing across time and space. “But somebody saddled up with Brigid, too, and it looks like you hang around for centuries making priceless magical artifacts, so stop putting so much stock in gods and…”

He waited a moment while I stared at the earth, dumbstruck by a slowly forming thought. “And forge this necklace,” I mumbled eventually. “Close the time loop. Give it to her as a wedding gift. I don’t know if the necklace has any power itself.” Except it did, because in my personal arsenal it represented shielding my mind. My soul. My garden. However I wanted to look at it, the necklace was definitely invested with some power. I swallowed and kept going. “But it makes it down through the centuries from her all the way to me. That’s got to count for something. Maybe I’m not supposed to go up against her back now at all. Maybe this is all just preparation for a throw-down in my era.”

In much the same tone Brigid had used, Nuada wondered, “Is this how it is with you, gwyld? The connected I have known are not so…”

“Connected?”

He nodded, looking as though he felt a bit foolish. I shook my head, dismissing his embarrassment. “They’re probably not. I’m apparently a special case, which is less fun than you might think.”

His mouth pursed, almost a smile. “I might remind you that I came to be crowned ard rí, and instead have learned I walked to my doom. I may understand “less fun than expected” better than you think I do.”

I was too weak to resist. Given the opening, I seized it and nodded toward his silver hand. “You probably do. Gary said one of the other high kings chopped that off. What, um. How did…?”

“The magic that gives it life is beyond any I could command. The horned god invested it with warmth and motion in exchange for the sword I made him.” His eyebrows quirked again. “The first sword. I wonder what gift he offers for the second.”

“Probably not taking the magic hand away. Really? Cernunnos can do that?” An entire world lived and breathed with Cernunnos’s life force. It probably wasn’t all that difficult for him to lend a little life to a hunk of metal. I just didn’t know why he’d want to.

“He had to, or I could not forge the sword for him.”

“Oh.” I wondered briefly if Cernunnos lived linearly and remembered anti-linearly, but that was too much for my brain to handle. I put it away for another time, and asked, “Can you make the necklace? I don’t know what the timeline is here. Are you supposed to get married this afternoon?”

“You stand out of time already,” Nuada said. “Can you not step a day or two away and bid me make it then?”

“If I had the foggiest idea how, maybe, but I obviously haven’t because you hadn’t seen it until just now. Tara’s huge,” I said with a wave of my hand, trying to encompass it. “Isn’t there a forge around here somewhere?” Not that I remembered a Forge of the Kings on the tourist maps. That could be an oversight, but I was pretty sure forges left enough residue that somebody would’ve noticed and pointed it out.

Nuada looked bemused. “You know little of metal forging. It takes time to build the heat, to—”

“C’mon, it’s not like making steel.” Incomprehension made Nuada’s eyes more silvery still. I dropped my chin to my chest. “Steel. It’s a metal from the future. It takes a lot more heat than precious metals do. Maybe I could…” A couple times I’d worked up enough heat for self-immolation, once almost literally. I studied my hands, remembering the burn of a cut across one palm healing, and reached for my magic, hoping I could create fire through my will alone.

Fire rose up, all right, but it was the fire of pain, not actual flames. An itch erupted in the bite, like using my magic excited the cells there, and I hissed at the brief, compelling idea that life would be easier if I was a wolf. I said, “Forget it,” as much to the impulse as Nuada, then, more to the silver king, “We’ll need a real forge.”

“Then the Morrígan shall wait another year for her king.” Nuada sounded both resigned and calm. “She should have come by now, as it is. Perhaps your friend holds her attention so we might do our work.”

A fist knotted in my gut. “I hate that idea.”

“All the more reason to work swiftly and well. Come. The towers will have forges. Does one speak to you?”

Dismay rumbled through me. “I don’t want to leave Tara. I’m already in the wrong time. I don’t know what happens if I leave this location. If we’ve got time, why not build a forge?” Aside from the fact no evidence of one remained in my time, that was.

Nuada gave me a patient look. “I will return you safely to Tara. Now. Does one speak to you?”

I sighed and pointed southwest. “That one. It’s still there in my time. Or a tower is, anyway. I like the consistency.”

“At Troim. They will have what we need.”