myself. Does anybody have anything to eat?” The last real food I could actually remember eating was a sandwich sometime early Saturday afternoon. There’d been some candy and potato chips since then, but they didn’t count.
“You will not want to have eaten, for this.” Méabh passed me again, taking long easy strides up the mountainside while I drooped. Ritualized magic apparently went hand in hand with self-denial. Cleansing the body and spirit and all that crap, I guessed, but since no food was forthcoming there wasn’t much reason to bitch about it now. I was going to eat half a cow when we got back down to ground level, though.
“I’ve eaten.” Caitríona surged ahead to catch up with Méabh. “Will it be a problem so?”
Méabh gave her a considering look. “Have ye the power?”
Cat glanced back at me, then settled on Méabh. “Like Auntie Sheila? No. Me Gran had it, but then, she was Sheila’s mam, too. We all thought one of us cousins might have it.” She said that like it was my fault, which in a way I supposed it was. Probably if Mother hadn’t had me, the magic would have come to the fore in somebody else. It didn’t seem likely it would just die out after several thousand years of coming down the line.
“Then it should be no trouble. It’s Joanne we’ll be looking to for the circle.” Méabh glowered at me over her shoulder. “Should she survive the walk up the hill, at least.”
They were starting to piss me off. As a rule, the healing power I commanded didn’t think much of me utilizing it for personal gain, but I took a deep breath and tapped into it, searching for the cool rush of strength that would buoy me through the last couple hundred yards up the mountain.
Instead my arm cramped, muscle around the bites twisting as if using the magic within me only encouraged the impulse to transform. I clenched my fist, afraid to look and see it had become a wolf’s paw, but it closed normally. Or as normally as it could, when the muscles used to close it had big teeth marks through them. I swallowed down a whimper and dared peek at it.
The bite itself was starting to look hot again. Not quite as bad as before, like my brief shape change had bled off some of the infection, but it was building again. For the first time I thought maybe I should do what other people did, and go see a doctor. Maybe I would. After I got done climbing a mountain and burning my mother’s bones.
On the positive side, panic over the idea of turning into a werewolf gave me a plenty-big boost, and I trotted up the rest of the mountain on Méabh’s and Caitríona’s heels with no problem.
The view was incredible, with the Atlantic spilling off to the west and half of Ireland glimmering through soft mist around and behind me. Not for the first time, the old country steeped me in magic and power, in presence and in continuity. There was a peace to it unlike anything I’d ever encountered in Seattle. I understood why Saint Patrick had stayed up there for forty days, absorbing everything that Ireland had to offer.
So it really was a pity about the residual human sacrifices staining the mountain so deeply it felt like a mallet to the head.
Chapter Fifteen
I did very well, all things considered. Instead of collapsing, I carefully knelt until my forehead touched the ground and folded my hands at my nape while I took some deep breaths. Being that close to the earth didn’t make it any worse. There were mitigating factors at play, which probably helped. Saint Patrick really had been here once upon a time, and whether I approved of going around converting the masses or not, the guy had apparently wielded—welt?—some significant power. The land had been healed to some degree, the deepest of the bloodstains washed away, and several hundred years of ordinary human worship had gone further yet in wiping out the death magic that had been done here. Had gone a long way, in fact, because otherwise I’d have known from Westport’s streets that the mountain was a blight on the land. That didn’t make it any more pleasant to discover now that I was up here. Muffled, because I was mostly talking into the dirt, I said, “So who was the Crúaich guy your father fought here, Méabh?”
“Cromm,” she said. “Crúaich is the mountain itself.”
If I wasn’t trying so hard not to puke I’d have gotten up and kicked her. “What.
Sensitive creature that she was, she picked up on my irritation. “He was the Fomorian king. It was his people we drove from this land so we might call it our own.”
“Fomorians. I don’t know the Fomorians.” I’d been doing so well to pull the
“Dark and cruel monsters,” Caitríona said, but she said it with an edge. I turned my head half an inch to peer at her. She clearly didn’t know which of us to glare at more fiercely. “Cromm was defeated by Nuada of the Silver Hand when the
I decided Méabh was getting the hard end of the glower. That was okay with me. I put my head back where it had been and kept breathing deeply. The impact was lessening some. I was reminded of the baseball diamond back in Seattle where three ritual murders had been carried out. It had been a literal black stain on Seattle’s psychic energy. Croagh Patrick was both worse and better than that. The deaths here were far more numerous, but also much older, and a lot of effort had gone into cleaning them up. They still made my stomach churn, and the sweat standing out on my body wasn’t from hiking up the hill. I snaked an ever-so-tentative thread of power into the earth, torn between hoping to help and terrified at how my magic might respond to being used. Bizarrely, it didn’t object at all, and the ground sucked it down greedily, like a drink it was dying for.
While I did that, Méabh, serenely, said, “Yes. My father was Nuada, and he would be your grandfather a thousand times removed.”
“Jo
I had never had a younger sister, but I imagined that was exactly what one sounded like when someone older and presumably wiser was giving her a line of bullshit and she wanted Big Sis to make it stop. It was kind of nice. It was equally annoying. I wondered if that defined the relationship between most sisters, and thought maybe I was glad I didn’t have one. “I told you she was Méabh.”
“Yes, but—em. Em. What are you doing?”
I’d forgotten how many of the Irish said “em” instead of “um.” It had driven me crazy when I’d visited the first time. Now it was more of a charming idiosyncrasy. “Trying not to puke.”
“No, I mean like everything’s glowing so.”
I peeled one eye open. Caitríona was right. The ground half an inch away glowed with my magic, silver-blue power pouring into parched earth. I’d done something like that one other time, in Cernunnos’s home world of Tir na nOg, but it had taken it out of me then. This was a much more gentle flow, magic seeping down dry cracks and swelling them with revitalization.
All of a sudden I had the distinct feeling it had been one year, and possibly as many as, oh, twenty-eight come May, since someone had been up here to offer anything other than ordinary human worship to the mountain’s hungry stone. “You said my mother would like to be burned up here. Did she come up here a lot?”
“All the time. On the holy days when she could, but she’d say there were so many sites that needed tending to that she couldn’t always be here on the day itself. So she’d use other holy days instead. There isn’t a day in the year that someone doesn’t hold high, she’d say. I liked that idea, so I did. It’s why I didn’t worry about coming to the graveyard on the equinox proper. There’s always something special going on in the world. Always a reason to give thanks to God. Always a good day to worship.”
This was probably not the time to get in a theological debate with my Irish Catholic cousin. Besides, regardless of who or what thanks might be given to, she was right. It was a nice idea, and it was probably true. “How many holy days? Or not holy, whatever.”
“Every six weeks or so. Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, Samhain and the quarterly days. The solstices and equinoxes.”
Eight times a year. And she’d missed at least three while we’d traveled Europe together eighteen months earlier. No wonder the ground was parched. I nodded against the stone my forehead rested on. “Just how glowy are we talking?”
“The whole of the mountaintop,” Caitríona said in satisfyingly obvious awe. “Even the chapel is
