Raven Calls

Like why she’d called me daughter. That woman was manifestly not my mother. She had been wearing my mother’s necklace, which probably meant a connection of some kind. That wasn’t good, since Nuada and I had just gone to the trouble of making the necklace for the Morrígan, who wasn’t supposed to be able to take it off. Of course, if she couldn’t take it off, then Sheila MacNamarra should not have been wearing it or giving it to me fifteen months ago in my own personal timeline. Which meant I shouldn’t have had it to show Nuada to commission it from him, which in turn meant that something had already gone horribly wrong.

I swore out loud, and pulled my hands from the standing stone. It went back to shouting only in my skull, which was an improvement.

“It only cries aloud when a scion of the true blood touches it,” Brigid whispered.

I knew she was there. I just about jumped out of my skin anyway. “The what? That’s ridiculous. I’m not an elf. Where’s Gary?”

“Not all the high kings of Ireland were aos sí, gwyld.”

I slid down the Lia Fáil and put my hands in my hair. “Okay. All right, fine, if you want to play it that way, I’ll play. Oh, gosh, Brigid, whatever do you mean? Lil’ ol’ me? The True Heir to Ireland? It cannot be so! I beg of you, tell me more!”

Brigid looked weary and for a moment I felt guilty. Then I remembered Gary hadn’t made it home with me. Anything resembling guilt went out the window. I genuinely did not give a rat’s ass about what my mystical or ethnic heritage might be. I wanted to fix the werewolf bite and get Gary back, not necessarily in that order, so when Brigid started up again I only half listened. “You already know of Méabh, Queen of Connacht—”

“Meabh,” I said under my breath. “That’s Maeve, right? You say it a little differently.”

As if I hadn’t interrupted, Brigid went on, “Méabh, Queen of Connacht, said by some to be the Morrígan herself. She was not. She was, though, the Morrígan’s first and only child, born to Nuada of the Silver Hand, High King of Ireland, who had gifted her with a necklace—”

My hand closed on the necklace in question and Brigid smiled faintly. “A necklace which would not come unclasped except by one of the blood of she who had commissioned it made. To be free of Nuada’s silver chains, the Morrígan had a daughter, and those daughters had daughters all through time, until it comes to you, Siobhán Walkingstick.”

My stomach dropped through the soles of my feet. “No. No, wait. The whole idea was she wasn’t supposed to be able to take it off. She was supposed to be bound until she faced me in my time. Blood to bloo—” My stomach would have started digging a hole, if it had the appendages. I stared at Brigid, hoping she would give me a different answer than the conclusion I was rapidly coming to.

Instead she gave my bandaged left arm a tired glance and used the same words the woman in my vision had: “Tainted blood.”

I hated cryptic statements. I hated them even more when they illuminated everything. I clutched my arm, teeth bared momentarily at the pain, then whispered a curse. The blood I’d dropped into the silver had been tainted. I’d been carrying the werewolf’s poison inside me, and I’d known the wolves belonged to the Master. The impulse to stop fighting the ache and the itch swept me again, and I raised my voice to deny it. “It made a window, didn’t it. A loophole, one she could get free of the necklace through. Blood to blood,” I said again. “Méabh was her way out. Blood of her blood, essence of Nuada’s essence. The same magics that bound her could free her. And I should have known that, because I had the necklace to show to Nuada, and if it had worked the Morrígan wouldn’t have been able to take it off and my mother never would have had it to give to me. Damn it.”

Somewhere in there I’d come around to accepting that the Morrígan was my great-to-the-umpteenth- grandmother. That Méabh, who had removed the necklace, basically had to be both the Morrígan’s daughter and some distant ancestor of mine. The blood demanded it. I still protested, albeit much less convincingly than I’d have liked. “I can’t possibly be the Morrígan’s granddaughter. We’re on totally opposite sides.”

“Like all children of power, Méabh had a choice. She chose the light, as have all her children in turn.”

For some reason I thought of Suzanne Quinley again. There was a kid with a whole lot of power. I wondered if she even knew she had a choice in front of her. I might have to talk to her about that someday. Because after all, I was so very, very good at choosing wisely when it came to great cosmic powers. Exasperated, afraid and unable to give in gracefully, I muttered, “Yeah, okay, fine, whatever. Didn’t Méabh have like twelve kids all named Finnoula or something? Maybe I’m one of their descendants, sure. I’m probably one of Genghis Khan’s, too. Everybody on the damned planet is. Or Charlemagne, or, I don’t know, Cleopatra. No, that’s reincarnated. Anyway, great, that’s dandy, but I’m not the heir to a defunct Irish throne.”

“You might be,” Brigid murmured, “if you were willing to accept that fate.”

I barked laughter, finding bitterness easier than acceptance. “Lady, you have no clue how much fate I’ve already taken in the teeth. I don’t need any more. All I want is to find my friend. And…” An obvious question finally surfaced. I straightened up, frowning. “Brigid, what are you doing here? Last I knew you’d…”

She hadn’t vanished, per se. Not the way the Morrígan had. Brigid had faded, becoming ephemeral beside the standing stone. “Last I knew you’d saved my life and then time shifted and you were gone. You obviously bound the cauldron, because all that happened to me back in October. So what are you doing here with a fritzed-out aura that looks like it only just now took the Morrígan’s best shot?”

“We are sides of a coin, she and I,” Brigid said. “My weakness is her strength, and I have been weak since that day. She might have slain me then, had you not been there, pulling time askew. Because of that, I have only touched time, where she has traveled through it.”

For a moment I just didn’t get it. Then my eyebrows pinched so hard my head hurt. “You mean you, like… you’ve been bouncing through time? Like a skipping stone?” I mimed throwing one. Brigid nodded and I blurted, “Why?”

“So that I might awaken again here, with you, at the place it both begins and ends. I have done less than I might have through the centuries, only acting when the balance was in the measure, rather than fighting to tip the scales toward the light. That, I think, is why the cauldron’s bindings failed before you reached it, and for that I apologize.”

“Forget it.” My voice cracked. “You bound it. That means it was one of the places, one of the times, you splashed down. You were there, Brigid. What happened to Gary?”

“A reckoning is upon us, Siobhán Walkingstick. What strength I have will be yours, but you must rid yourself of the infection or all is lost.” She sounded tireder than before, like she was slipping away. It took everything I had not to grab her and rattle the answers out of her. Her eyes closed, and for a moment I thought she’d died. Then she whispered, “He awaits you at Méabh’s final resting place.”

And then she did die. A rattling exhalation and her eyes half opened, looking sleepily at the world beyond. My heart lurched so hard I nearly threw up. Healing magic jerked through me, spasming toward Brigid, but the reawakened Sight gave it nothing to grasp on to. My hands slid to my sides and hung there uselessly as Brigid grew colder. I could have rushed off to the Dead Zone, trying to catch her spirit, but it seemed unlikely that aos sí souls took the same bus that human ones did. I probably could have done about a dozen things, but they all should’ve been done five minutes earlier, when she wasn’t dead yet. When she’d been telling me not yet. I bowed my head, eyes closed, and made a promise not to listen next time someone told me not yet.

The Morrígan, I thought after a while. The Morrígan had killed Brigid. It had taken her thousands of years to die, but the bleak web of poison within her—the web meant for me—had killed her, and that put me on strangely familiar ground. I’d dealt with a lot of mystical murders in the past year. They pretty much never ended well for the killer.

I got to my feet and straightened my coat. I was going to make damned good and sure this one didn’t end well, either.

Calm with anger, I left Brigid’s body behind and went to find Méabh’s tomb.

Monday, March 20, 1:17 p.m.

That would have been much more dramatic if the tomb in question didn’t turn out to be another heritage site. It’d be one thing to traipse the length and breadth of Ireland, seeking out dead life forms and ancient civilizations