Raven Calls

They did. They also had a village full of curious people—humans, not the aos sí—which made me and my short hair and my formerly awesome white leather coat feel considerably more awkward than I had standing more or less alone on a hill in the middle of a sacred circle. Worse, nobody spoke to me. They just watched us, wide-eyed and silent, as if we were wraiths passing unwelcome through time.

Which was unfortunately accurate. Nuada was a dead man walking and I didn’t belong there at all. The blacksmith, though, nodded to me when Nuada explained what we needed. That made me feel better until he backed rapidly as soon as he’d shown Nuada where the tools lay. I had a bunch of friends at home who had started reacting the same way after my abrupt shamanic awakening: nominally polite, but eager to get out of my presence. Apparently living sometime in the indeterminable past, alongside elves and small gods, did not make most people any happier or more comfortable with magic being done around them.

“They fear me,” Nuada murmured as the blacksmith backed off. I startled, having been so busy taking all the discomfort on myself it hadn’t occurred to me he might be a problem, too. He worked as he spoke, bringing the forge’s fires up higher and selecting the finest and most delicate tools the blacksmith had to offer. “We live side by side in this place, your people and mine, but we are not friends. We share this site of worship, but never ritual or passion. To them, we are the whispers in the wind and the lightning in the sky. To us, they are the brutal and dangerous things in the night.”

“The Fir Bolg,” I said, dragging up the name from some bit of reading I’d done. “Weren’t they the enemies of the aos sí?”

“So they are. Dark men, tied to the earth with their short and ugly lives.” He glanced at me, and clarified, “Humans,” just in case I hadn’t gotten it.

“What a charming sentiment. No wonder you get along so well. Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”

He gave me a look that said volumes about my intellect, which was fair enough, because what he was doing was extremely obvious: he’d stuck his silver hand in the flame and was melting his fingers off. Liquid metal dripped into an iron trough while I watched with horrified fascination. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Metal feels no pain.”

“But—but—!”

“Where did you think the metal for your necklace came from? For the swords? They would be nothing if they were not made of the living silver. Anyone might forge a sword. This is my blood, gwyld. My essence. My very life, made metal.”

“That’s the most awful thing I’ve seen.” I couldn’t stop watching. It was like a magical train wreck. Creepy crawlies ran down my spine, up my arms, all over, but I couldn’t look away. “It just keeps…bleeding?”

“Melting,” he said dourly. “Yes. It has no end, or none I’ve found. Gift of the god, Siobhán.”

I muttered, “Joanne,” without any real hope. Siobhán obviously sounded more like a name to him, and having heard it from Cernunnos’s lips, Nuada wasn’t about to let it go. I felt at my hip, not that I ever carried my sword there anyway, and didn’t find it. “It really is a magic sword.” I hoped like hell that was doing Gary some good.

“And a magic torc. What power will it have?”

“The power to bind. That’s what we’re doing with the cauldron. Binding the Morrígan to me, so she can do no harm until she faces me again.” That sounded pretty good. Some aspect of it would no doubt go terribly wrong, but I was doing my best.

Nuada nodded once. The smell of hot silver baked in my nostrils and the color burned my eyes. Nuada could make the necklace at my request, out of his own very essence, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Not to bind the Morrígan to me, not to render her impotent across the centuries. Something else had to lock the time loop in place, and all of a sudden I knew what it was.

Quickly, before my confidence evaporated, I picked up a piece of edged metal from the forge, slashed my palm and let my blood fall into the sizzling metal.

Chapter Ten

Silver turned red for the space of a breath. I was certain that with ordinary silver that wouldn’t happen, but this wasn’t ordinary. Then it all blackened, like the silver had aged a hundred years in an instant. Nuada, unconcerned, worked the metal with a small hammer until black was beaten away and thin sheets of silver remained. He moved quickly, certainly, until I was half hypnotized with the steady flow of his actions and the atonal music of the forge.

He might have worked for an hour or forever, for all I could tell, but suddenly he was finished, stepping back from his work with a critical eye. I hardly dared move, afraid he’d find some flaw, but after long minutes of examination he grunted—not a sound I expected from an elf king—and moved aside so I could see what he had wrought.

And what he had wrought was impossible. I had always assumed my necklace was poured into a mold: the long tubes that curved around its delicate chain, and the two triskelions that separated those tubes, were all much too finely worked to have been done with a hammer and…chisel, or whatever a silversmith called it. There was no roughness to the quartered circle that sat in the hollow of my throat as the necklace’s pendant, either, and it was just not possible such crude tools could produce an item of such smooth beauty.

Except they had. I took up the finished piece in astonishment, feeling faint warmth still within the metal. I was sure it had cooled completely, and looked at Nuada in confusion. “It lives, gwyld. A part of me. I have told you this already. It will be warm so long as I walk this earth.”

The necklace I had been given was warmed by my dying mother’s body heat, but hadn’t had an inherent warmth like it did now. For once I was smart enough not to say anything and nodded instead. “It’s beautiful.”

“It is invested with my being and yours, both bent to the single intent of containing the Morrígan. It is a magic of two worlds, and will collar her wretched ambitions for eons.” That, apparently, was far more important to Nuada than its beauty, which was fair enough. But then he smiled, suddenly the artist and pleased with the compliment. “Thank you, Joanne.” He said my name carefully. “Not only for the making of the necklace, but the warning of what I face with the Morrígan. Now I must return you to Tara before the seasons turn again and my bride comes looking for her groom. You will not want to be there when she finds the trap we’ve laid for her.”

“No, I won’t. But I’ll throw down with her in my time, Nuada. I’ll set this right.”

“You cannot set it right, Joanne. You can only end what has been made wrong.” A smile twinged his lips. “And I cannot set it right, either, but I can go to my fate knowing I have helped set in motion a thing that will, in time, end the wrongness. There is little else a worthy king might ask for.”

My nose got all stuffy with emotion. I hardly knew the guy, but blatant nobility apparently hit me right in the soft spot. “Well, watch yourself, all right? You’ve got another sword to make, at the very least.”

“You, too, watch yourself, Joanne Walker.”

We walked back to Tara together without really speaking again. Even when we crossed the moats and passed under the huge wood henges to climb toward the Lia Fáil, there was almost nothing to say.

Almost. I reached for the stone, then hesitated just one instant, looking back toward Nuada, and we spoke at the same time: “Good luck.”

Smiling, pleased and ready for everything to be back to normal, I put my hands on the Stone of Destiny, and went crashing back through time.

Monday, March 20, 10:52 a.m.

There was a dead woman at my feet.

She sat propped against the Lia Fáil, in exactly the same position Brigid had been in last I’d seen her. A dead woman wearing a white cotton eyelet dress and scarves at her hips. The one around her shoulders had slipped away, revealing fiery tattoos around her biceps that hadn’t faded in thousands of years.

I stared at her, numb with incomprehension. The Sight slipped on, not because I wanted it, but because I