“It was a choice you made in a different time.”
“Are you going to tell me what the choice was?”
“No. I can’t.”
“What do you do apart from pop up and give me random advice in the guise of riddles?”
She had the cheek to smile. Curse her.
“I’m your conduit. I help, where I can.”
“So, tell me, my father.” Again, I kept quiet that the bastard turns up in two thousand years’ time still wanting my power. “Does he know who I am? Did he call me?”
“He wishes.” Her snort was wry and short. “No. But he’s like the others. He wants you. Needs what you can do.”
“For his ways? To maintain the Druid ways?”
She shrugged. “He just wants you, Mae. Most men want the power you hold; it gives them what they need.”
“Which is what?”
“The ability to change the fortunes of the earth. Imagine if you were man and you could make your land the most fertile in the world? On the planet? Imagine if you never had drought, never had famine. If the riches the earth had to offer were all yours at the taking. If every child was born into sunshine, a loyal dependent, to be bent at will.”
I thought of this. The modern world I’d left behind had nothing like this. It was broken, the planet slowly dying from the greed of mankind.
Oh. My. Shit.
I dropped my gaze, my eyes filling with tears. “Heather, I need to tell you something.”
“Don’t!”
“No. I need to. Where I come from,” I skipped the details. “Where I come from there is no abundance. Well, there is for some, but there are hard times for many. Hard times, death, the beauty of the world it hardly exists.”
Her face folded into a frown, her hands reaching for my face. “Then, Mae, wherever you have come from, is a place you haven’t existed in.”
“But Tristram.” I go to tell her about the stones, about us dying wrapped in one another’s arms.
“He’s your man.”
My eyes narrowed. “My man? Could you sound more seventies?”
She shook her head in confusion. “No, Mae. He’s your protector. He’s the man, the earthly being you chose over everything. He keeps you safe from the others that will take you.”
“He’s dead, Heather.”
She didn’t pause to take in the words I muttered. “He’s the father of your children. You chose him and marked him with the fate of the gods. A mortal for a god.”
“What? Those girls down there come from the two of us?”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved that in some other time Tristram and I had managed to get down and dirty—At least one version of me got to know who he really was—or be upset it hadn’t been me.
“Yes.”
“I need to think.”
“You have to get ready for the dinner. The god of war won’t be refused.”
“Well, he wants me, needs me. They all need me, don’t they?”
“Yes, Maia.”
“Mae,” I snapped. “I’m just Mae.”
She nodded, her lips crimped together.
“He can goddamn wait.” I scurried from the bed. I’d need to walk and think.
Somehow Heather managed to weave us through the endless corridors of the palace without finding a guard. Whatever her role as conduit involved, stealth moves were right up there.
The whole time we walked in silence. I needed to think. To process. I hadn’t believed Claudius when he told me, but I believed Heather. I’d believe Mrs Cox, too, and I knew now we were linked, much the way Tristram and I were. Maybe one day she’d tell me about it, but I guessed in the way that I had chosen Tristram as my protector and earthly being, I must have chosen her, too.
She was there to find me and guide me. To keep me safe if she could; but she couldn’t prevent what fate greeted me with.
Only I could do that.
As we tiptoed along, I thought of the fate of my world in my own time. The rivers and seas polluted, the greed of men who didn’t care. The angry ruptures from the earth and the violence and hatred that scaled from all-out war and mass destruction, to muggings and assaults on street corners and back alleys.
With fundamental certainty, I knew it was because of me.
Just me.
Mrs Cox had been waiting for me for two thousand years. Maia, the goddess of abundance and fertility, had been missing for two thousand years.
Since Tristram and I had died on the stones.
And because I hadn’t cycled back, because Tristram sacrificed for me, with me, our blood merging, the earth had suffered.
Holy fuck.
I’d said only myself that after the fall of the Roman Empire the earth had plunged back into the dark ages.
Was that because Tristram and I died together?
I hadn’t been able to heal the wounds men had wreaked on the earth.
So if I went back through the stones now what would happen? What would the world be like now Tristram had died his own death and I left Mae alive?
The passageways became gloomier, warmer, and I knew we were nearly at the jail. I had one vague plan. Half-cocked and insane as it was.
If all these girls had some element of me within them, I needed them to get more. Somehow there had to be a way to make them stronger, more powerful.
They might never be me, but they were descendants of my blood and now they were imprisoned because of me. I’d thought when I’d met them that they’d been captured because of their own skill. That was only partly true.
Vaguely surprised not to find a guard on the door, I held my hand against the wood. Free of my own restraints, I let the golden power locked in my chest roam free. As it spread through every vein into every cell, I sensed my own ability growing. I knew who I was. I’d journeyed a very long way to discover it, and now I’d found others like me, part me.
It was time to bring the family home.
Chapter Fourteen
