I turn and jog back into town without answering the guard, leaving him to his condescension and casual misogyny.
In one of those soulless big box stores, I find a black jacket and gloves to cover up my tattoos and pick up a flower arrangement in a white vase, oranges and yellows and dark-green leaves with tiny white blossoms like snowflakes sprinkled on top of it. The walk back to the estate is slower, because it’s difficult to jog with a flower arrangement, but once I reach the wall, I make sure I’m unobserved and cast camouflage on my hound and myself. Then I unbind a portion of the cement block, which allows us to slip through.
The land of the Thatcher estate is expansive, with gentle sloping flats of tall grass punctuated by stands of timber planted purposefully long ago. In the distance, the white house rests on the light-brown plain like a dollop of cream on caramel. Orlaith and I might trip some motion detectors on the way to the house, but cameras won’t pick us up until I drop the camouflage, and the guard won’t alert the house until he sees something. My mother won’t think anything of me suddenly arriving at the door—deliveries were always waved through without comment by the guard.
I ask Orlaith to wait for me at the edge of a small copse perhaps a hundred yards from the house. I leave my weapons with her and promise to return soon. As the sun hovers low over the horizon, I dispel camouflage, stride up to the house, and ring the bell.
My mother opens the door, and I cannot help but catch my breath when I see her hair, dyed red now, presumably because she’d gone to gray recently. She’s smaller than me, kind of petite; I got my height from Dad. She wears jeans and a salmon tank top with a white button-up shirt hanging open on top of it, and her eyes—green like mine—do a quick scan before locking on my face. Then she gasps as her jaw drops. She still has her freckles, and when I see them, the tears start to well in my eyes. I think hers are filling, too, and a stillness stretches as we absorb the shock of seeing each other—until I remember that I’m not supposed to be her daughter and I’m missing my cue.
“Delivery for you, Mrs. Thatcher,” I say, and thrust the flowers toward her.
“Oh. Thank you,” she replies, and wipes at her cheek before reaching out to take the vase. Her fingers lightly brush against my gloves, and now I wish I hadn’t worn them; I would have cherished the contact forever. She cradles the vase in her hands and gives a tiny embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry to seem so surprised,” she says, “and I hope you’ll forgive me. It’s just that you look like the spitting image of my daughter.”
“Yeah? That’s a funny coincidence,” I say, sniffling and sweeping a hand across my eyes to clear them of tears. It’s only a temporary fix, I’m sure, but I try to hold myself together. “You remind me so very much of my mom. Probably because of this red-hair thing we have going.” I wag a finger between us, pointing at our heads. “I haven’t seen her for a long time.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry to hear that. And I know how you must feel. It’s the same for my daughter and me.” She takes a deep breath and tilts her head to one side, studying me, her bottom lip quivering a bit before she speaks again. “You know, she’d be in her thirties now, but I swear you look just the way she did the last time I saw her.”
My throat tightens, and I struggle to get the words out before I lose all remaining vestiges of self-control. “Would you mind—I mean, I haven’t spoken to her in forever, it seems like, and I’m never going to get to now, but there’s something I’ve always wanted to say to her. Would you let me say it to you instead? As a favor? Would you mind?”
“No, honey, of course, you go right ahead.” And she stands there, waiting, holding the flowers but unconscious of them.
Through a blur of fresh tears I manage to say, “I miss you so much. And I love you.” I sob once, and so does she, and my throat is so constricted with emotion that I have to whisper the last. “Goodbye, Mom.”
Something shifts in her expression, perhaps a recognition that I am more than someone who merely resembles the daughter she thought long dead, and she reaches out to me, the forgotten vase of flowers slipping from her hands and shattering on the threshold. “Granuaile?”
I want nothing so much as to be held again, but I can’t rush into those arms. It would lead to all the questions I cannot answer. No, I had said what I’d come to say, so I choke on another sob, back away three paces, spin on my heel, and run from the house, except it’s more of an awkward, loping stagger. My chest is heaving and I can barely see, because I’m crying so ugly—ragged whimpers alternating with convulsive shudders of grief.
The door clicks shut behind me, dimly heard, my mother no more able to step forward into my world than I am able to step back into hers. Atticus had warned me of this, when I first began my training; he’d said that becoming a Druid would mean giving up my family, so abandon all ties, ye who enter here—but I didn’t fully understand then. To achieve my goal at the time, I had blithely traded some pain in the distant future, unable to fathom how much it would hurt when it came time to pay that particular bill. I thought it would be like homesickness tempered with the wistful hope that someday you could go home again—intense, to be sure, but endurable so long as you knew it would end one day. But now I see that it’s terrible and irrevocable. As large and wondrous as my world is now, it will forever be a world without my parents. And it stings especially that I consciously chose this fate—it isn’t something that happened to me. I made it happen. Now Dad is gone and Mom lives in a headspace with no room for magic in it. No room for me.
When I approach the stand of timber, reeling and weaving, Orlaith hears me long before I hear her, and her voice enters my head before I spy her narrow body scissoring through the tall grass toward me.
She comes to me, ears up, and I fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her neck, bawling.
Yes. I miss my mom.
I can’t talk to her. Can’t tell her the truth.
It’s like there’s a giant river of time and circumstance between us and I can’t figure out how to cross it safely. It’s too dangerous for both of us.
I’m sorry to be such a downer, Orlaith, but I need to cry for a while.
I hold her hard and cry for my lost mother and father until the setting sun, conspiring with my exhaustion and the wind sighing through the treetops, sends me adrift into a dreamless sleep, the two of us sprawled out of sight in the tall grass.
Brighid doesn’t want to talk in the Court, where anyone can hear us, so she leads me to her own private residence and a room she calls the Iron Hall. It’s a grand name for a very small chamber, not much more than a closet, but it has a beautiful round table, a pair of stools, a cask of dark beer, and two glasses waiting inside. The walls, door, floor, and ceiling are all covered in solid black iron.
“Casting a binding to keep our conversation private can conceivably be countered,” she explains, “but iron cannot. We will not be overheard here, and we can speak in comfort for as long as we wish. I needn’t be so formal either, where no one can see me. Would you like a beer?”
“That would be grand.”
She pours for us both and we clink glasses. “Sláinte.”
It’s wonderful stuff, something Goibhniu probably brewed, and I praise it before we return to business.
“Tell me of the Morrigan,” Brighid says.
“Right. It was more than two thousand years ago when the Morrigan approached me with a deal. I was seventy-two and had no nuts left in me sack. There is nothing worse than being old and miserable and hurting everywhere. I don’t recommend it. It was a cold-ass day in the darkest part of winter and she drops down from the sky, all naked and sexy, and I get annoyed that
she’s blocking me view of the sunset—that’s how bad it was. Ye can die now, she says to me, or I can put ye on a Time Island, where ye might get to continue your life in some distant future. A far distant future, she says. And in that future, ye might get to be young again. All I had to do was deliver a message. I took the deal, o’ course, and here I am.”
“And the message?”
“It made no sense when she made me memorize it, because I didn’t know anything about these other pantheons, but here’s what I’m supposed to say, from the Morrigan’s own lips to your ears: ‘Brighid, I am dead now, either at the hands of the Olympians or by Vedic demons, and a great danger gathers among the Norse. I have seen terrible futures, and I tell you three times, the difference between life and death lies with the Svartálfar. Recruit them to our side at any cost.’ ”
When I fall silent, Brighid frowns. “That is all?”
“Aye.”
“Tell me everything else she said or did.”
“There’s not much else. She opened a portal behind me and said I would owe a great debt to Siodhachan, and then she pushed me through as I was about to tell her how I felt about that.”
“And Siodhachan knows nothing of this?”
“No. The message was for you, and you can tell him or not, as ye please. But he’s spent some time telling me about recent events, and I had to pretend to be surprised when he told me the Morrigan was dead.”
“I see. You have done the Tuatha Dé Danann a service. What would you have in return, Eoghan Ó Cinnéide?”
I hadn’t expected a favor. I thought getting to extend my life was payment enough, but it would be a shame to pass on an opportunity like this.
“I have a question,” I says, “and I would like ye to answer it truthfully in that three-part voice o’ yours. Ye have my word I won’t repeat it to anyone.”
She eyes me warily and gives the faintest of nods. “Ask.”
“What do ye know about the death of Midhir?”
Brighid sits up straight with a jerk, and her eyes light up all blue. She speaks simultaneously in three different registers: “Nothing. I did not even know he was dead, nor did I realize anyone wished to kill him.”
She couldn’t lie with that voice. I can safely cross her off the list of suspects.
“He’s been dead for at least a couple weeks now, maybe more. He’s hangin’ upside down in his bedroom, strung up in iron chains with his throat cut.”
I catch her up on some of the things Siodhachan shared with me while I was touching up his tattoos—and I reveal to her that I’m his archdruid, figuring it’s safe to do so now that I’m sure she doesn’t have it out for him. When I finish, she sighs and says, “You’ve given me much to think about and much to investigate, but I will need to keep this secret until I know more. Therefore, you will present yourself formally at the Court this morning, say nothing of these things, and I will welcome you and give you my blessing to follow your own desires. What are they, by the way, now that you have discharged your duty to the Morrigan and to me?”
“I’d like to get back to the world and take on apprentices. We need more Druids.”
She looks surprised at first but then relaxes with a happy sigh. “I will have no trouble blessing that. It is precisely what I would wish myself.”
“Would it be rude of me,” I says, “to ask if I might dine with you and your boys? An informal thing, of course.”
“Not at all. I invite you now.”
“Excellent.”
She leaves me in the care of a steward while we wait for dawn. I’m able to grab a few hours’ sleep before it’s time to go to Court and pretend this is the first time we’ve spoken. I feel hundreds of eyes on me, judging and calculating and scheming already. I am judging them in return. In front of the Court, Brighid invites me to dine with her and a few others, and my acceptability is immediately established. Manannan Mac Lir extends an invitation to join him the next night, and I accept. I catch more sleep after that in preparation for the evening, and I have no doubt that Brighid is investigating Midhir’s estate as I do so.
Ogma joins us for dinner, which consists of some magnificent whiskey and some other things that I don’t remember but which were chewier than the whiskey. I’m paying far more attention to my company than to the food. Ogma sits on my right and Brighid to my left; facing us across the table are the brothers Goibhniu, Creidhne, and Luchta. They’re all dark-eyed and mischievous, but I think it’s the good-natured type of mischief they prefer. They seem to have made a wager amongst themselves as to what kind of weapon I’d ask them to make, even though no such idea had crossed me mind. Their disappointment when they learn that I have no epic project for them to tackle is so profound that I feel guilty.
“Wait,” Goibhniu says. “I know how to settle this. Eoghan, when you fight, what is your preferred weapon?”
“Well, I like to fight with me fists, if ye can believe it,” I say. “Especially now that the ache in me knuckles is gone.”
Creidhne whoops in victory. “That’s it! Brass knuckles! That’s my job, brothers! Victory is mine!”
“What’s all this, then?” I ask.
They confess that they cannot wait for more Druids to walk the earth, because we offer them new challenges as craftsmen.
“Goibhniu and I had such fun crafting Scáthmhaide for Granuaile,” Luchta says, “that we were a bit sad when we finished it.”
“I was left out of that project entirely,” Creidhne says, “but this will make up for it. I’ll take your measurements after dinner and we will speak of what might be done.”
Apparently I’m not to be given a choice in the matter. These boys are artists who love life for the beauty it shows them. They spend their days wondering how they can be creative rather than destructive. I have always secretly admired such people and their vision and wished I possessed a quarter measure of what their eyes perceive. I cross them off my list.
“So what do you do to keep yourself busy these days, Ogma?” I ask. He’s big and bald and fond of gold hoop earrings. At first I think that’s a tempting target for an opponent, but then I realize he wants you to reach for them and see what happens.
“These days I dance among the planes on behalf of Brighid, an ambassador of the Fae. Not the sort of heroic thing I was used to doing in the old days, but the other pantheons need to know the Tuatha Dé Danann are serious, and sending a liveried faery to represent us somehow doesn’t have the same gravitas.”
“Ah, I see. And you’re scouting, of course, while you’re there. Wherever you’ve been going, I mean.”
He looks at me, I think, for the first time. He’d been avoiding eye contact and until that moment had given the impression that sitting down to table with me was a duty rather than a pleasure. Suddenly, dinner was interesting.
“Of course,” he says, a small smile tugging on one side of his mouth.
“Because if ye want to lay the hurt on someone, it’s best to know where they’re hiding their soft bits.”
“Precisely.”
I raise my cup and says, “To punchin’ ’em in the pillows,” and he smiles heartily at that and drinks with me.
“Do you know of the Wendish gods?” he asks.
“No, I don’t even know the Wendish people.”
“They have largely disappeared as a distinct ethnicity, assimilated into Germanic and Slavic cultures,” he says. I don’t know those peoples either, but I hold me tongue and let him keep going. “Their pagan shrines were attacked and destroyed by surrounding Christians. They have been out of any significant worship for centuries and they’re very weak, so I cannot imagine why they would want to pick a fight with us. One of Brighid’s faeries went to their plane recently, however, and never came back. I went to investigate and just returned.”
And as he speaks of Wendish strengths and weaknesses on their plane, I can see that he’s a fine military mind, but it is straightforward thinking and lacks subtlety. He has no ideas about how to outthink an
d outmaneuver them, only about how to overpower them. It’s not that his ideas aren’t fine—I admire them and can’t find fault—it’s just that they are of a particular flavor, and it’s not the one I’m looking for. Ogma is clever, but he’s not a mastermind; he’s the competent guy the mastermind sends in to pound your organs into jelly.
I stay the night at Creidhne’s place after he’s finished measuring me hands and making molds and so on, and as I drift off to sleep, I catch myself wondering what Greta is doing. Even in my subjective timeline, it has been a long while since I cared enough about anyone to wonder such things. I wonder next if I might be the only man who ever made a deal with the Morrigan and came out ahead.
After concluding my chat with Rebecca Dane, I fled north to Flagstaff, grabbed a slice at Alpine Pizza on Leroux Street, and then drove my rental car to a winding forest road behind the mountains on the north side of town. I planted myself in Lockett Meadow underneath a stand of aspens, to think of how best to act now that Inari and her cabal o’ gods had given me the green light to do as I wished. But I couldn’t focus. Lockett Meadow is a popular place, and since the first snow hadn’t fallen yet, there were other people around—only nine hardy campers, mind you, but that was enough distraction for me at the moment.
Every so often I have to get away to a quiet place to think, take my brain somewhere that the noise of the modern world cannot be heard, and seek clarity in an unspoiled environment without a hint of cell phone service. Rebecca Dane’s revelation required a good long think, and I knew just the place. There’s a waterfall in Glacier National Park that they call Bird Woman Falls these days, reachable by car in the summertime only but reachable by me year-round via plane-shifting. I’d bound the trees there long before it was a national park or the falls somehow became associated with a bird woman. It has a view of Heaven’s Peak, snowcapped and jutting defiantly above the clouds. Once I’d shifted there with Oberon, a breathtaking panorama of natural beauty was spread before me, and I didn’t have to share it with anyone. Going-to-the-Sun Road was closed off at this time of the year, so there was no traffic passing below the falls at all. The only noises were the companionable rush of the falls and the friendly whispers of the wind in the trees. I was all alone with my hound.