Raven Calls

Chapter Eight

I refused to flinch. It took every last bit of willpower, but I refused to flinch. Instead, with all the panache at my command—which wasn’t much—I said, “I’m getting tired of mysterious voices and people disappearing,” to Gary before I allowed myself to look around.

The air had changed quality: mist sparkled more, like bits of ice rode on it, and my breath steamed as another of the annoyingly beautiful, slightly inhuman aos sí came up on us. This one looked like he’d been dipped in silver from his hair to his boots. I’d never seen genuinely silver hair before; even Cernunnos’s was really brown and ashy. This guy’s actually shone like the metal. My gaze fell to his left hand.

It was silver, the knuckles gleaming and flexing like molten metal as they moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, then shook myself. “You’d be Nuada, then.” I gave myself bonus points for pronouncing it correctly. He didn’t have to know I’d only just learned how.

“I would be. And you would be…” He was silent a long time, then cleared his throat uncertainly. “You would be my bride? The Morrígan?”

My jaw fell open and my eyes went googly while Gary had a good laugh. While it was nice to know having his throat cut hadn’t changed his laughter, it was also clear Nuada wasn’t keen on being the butt of a joke. I elbowed Gary, who manned up and stopped laughing as I said, “No, my name’s Joanne. The Morrígan’s stepped out for a bite to eat.”

Gary snorted laughter again. I elbowed him harder, to no avail. “Look, no, sorry. She just took off with Lugh, and Brigid disapp—”

“Lugh?” Nuada’s eyebrows made a heavy silver line across his forehead. “Lugh is half a year gone. How else might I be here, ready to wed the Morrígan?”

“What?” I’d thought the days of me saying “What?” all the time were past. Apparently not. “No, he just died not ten min—”

“Died?”

Oh yeah. The aos sí weren’t hip to the actual goings-on with the Morrígan. I started to cast my gaze heavenward, as if to gather strength for an explanation, but it got only about as high as the horizon before Nuada’s sword was at my throat. He repeated, “Died?” and it didn’t take a super genius to grasp that I was up next on the list of dead people.

Panic was clearly the right response. Panic, some flailing, a frantic explanation; all the sorts of things I’d done before. They’d gotten old, though. This time I just sighed and said, “The Morrígan killed him, your royal nitwitness, not me.”

His sword poked half an inch closer, which was enough to part the skin on my throat.

Or it would have been, if I hadn’t finally learned the habit Coyote had been trying to hammer into me my entire shamanic career: shields up, Captain. Shields up at all times.

Nuada’s sword rubbed against the glimmer of power layering my body, and didn’t so much as leave a scratch. The Morrígan hadn’t drawn blood, either. I had the damned werewolf to thank for that: she had driven home what Coyote had failed to. Unfortunately, she’d only done so after she’d bitten me. There was an argument for better late than never, but I probably wasn’t the person to be making it.

The silver-handed elf king’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. He pushed a little harder and the sword, rather than sticking in my gullet, began sliding sideways. Chagrined, he pulled it back into place, but stopped leaning into it. “What are you?”

“A shaman. Gwyld. You might as well put the sword away. It’s not going to do you any good. What do you mean, six months have passed?” The landscape looked the same. No particular hint of winter. Of course, I neither had any idea what an Irish winter thousands of years in the past looked like, nor any call in judging what time was or wasn’t doing. I was already millennia out of my league, after all. Six months here or there probably didn’t count for much, and the air was colder.

“What do you mean, dead?”

“It ain’t nice to go around interrogatin’ people by holdin’ swords at their throats,” Gary rumbled.

Nuada looked at him. Looked at me. I could just about see the wheels turning: if the young woman could hold a sword attack off with the power of her mind, what could the old guy with several decades more experience do?

Judiciously, and with the expression of a cat who meant to fall off the wall, Nuada put his sword away. Then he spread his hands, palms up, in a gesture of conciliation and goodwill. “I would hear your tale.”

“Yeah, I just bet you would.” Snark would get me nowhere. I raspberried a long breath out, inhaled again and put on my best perky tour guide voice. “The Morrígan’s been murdering your high kings for at least the last ten or so. I would strongly suggest not marrying her, if I was you. Were you. Was? Were. If I were you.” I didn’t care if it was right. It sounded better.

“Jo,” Gary muttered, “shut up.”

I said, “He asked,” with the pitch and tone of an insulted child, then kicked myself in the ankle. It was a good thing I already had an Indian name, or my Indian name would be Kicks Self In The Ankle. “Nuada,” I said with every ounce of patience at my disposal, “your bride to be is one of the bad guys. I have literally traveled through time to tell you this, a statement which I expect is supported by my outlandish clothing. I would beg of you, your majesty, to listen to me.”

The poor guy recognized the patience in my voice, but not that it was directed at myself. Nobody could be as exasperating as I was. I suddenly felt sorry for Morrison. And for Nuada, who drew himself up with offense, because who wouldn’t when some weirdly dressed chick from the future condescended at you.

“I’m sorry,” I said before he had time to launch into a tirade. “Really. It’s me I’m disgusted with, not you. I’m having a hard time with the explaining. Time travel sucks.” Lightning struck—metaphorically, thank God; that was not the sort of phrase I should use lightly—and I shoved a thumb under my necklace, bringing it to his attention. “Look! Wait! Look at this!”

If nothing else, my increasingly bizarre antics caught him off guard, giving me time to unfasten the choker before he decided to berate my bad manners. The necklace gleamed as I handed it over, misty light catching the triskelions and the quartered circle that was its pendant.

Nuada took it with his silver hand, which wasn’t articulated or in any other fashion prosthetic-like, aside, of course, from it being silver. It moved and flexed like flesh, and I fancied I could even see blood vessels beneath the surface as he turned the necklace up to examine it. “This is my work,” he said eventually. “I would know it anywhere. And yet I have never made such a piece in all my years.”

“And this?” I put my hand out and called my sword. It zinged across the ten or so feet of intervening space and slapped into my palm like it and I were magnetized.

Nuada’s eyebrows shot up, though his words suggested he was more impressed by the sword itself than the zooming across space: “I’ve never seen a blade such as that. What is it?”

“It’s called a rapier. They come into fashion in about…” I had a vague idea rapiers were sixteeth-century weapons, but I had no idea when that was in relation to us. “In a few thousand years.”

“It’s beautiful.” He opened his hand in request and I put the sword into it, watching his attention flit between rapier and necklace. “Both mine,” he said. “Both not yet forged. For whom do I make such pieces of art? A far-flung gwyld?”

“I think you make the necklace for the Morrígan. The sword belongs—belonged—to Cernunnos. I took it.”

His gaze snapped to mine. “You took a blade from the god of the Wild Hunt?”

“It’s a long story.”

“This is not the sword I made for that god.”

For a statement, it sounded remarkably like a demand. I nodded and made a space of about four feet between my hands. “You made him one about this long. Narrower at the hilt and broader at the point. It’s beautiful, too, but it’s brutal. It’s for killing things. This one’s more elegant. It’s for killing things, too, obviously, but you can imagine it’s for…toying with them, too. He asked for it, when they came into style, and after he lost it to me you wouldn’t make him another.” I wet my lips. “That happens in the future. Don’t tell him I told you you didn’t make him another, because I’m pretty sure that’d end up being my fault somehow and he and I already have a lot of water under the bridge to get over.”

Nuada squinted. So did I. Gary just groaned. “You gotta learn to control your mouth sometimes, Jo.”

“What fun would that be?”

“Can you call him here?” Nuada asked, ever so softly. “I am inclined to believe you, unborn gwyld, but I would like to hear it from Cernunnos, as well.”

My heart jumped at the idea. If it was midwinter, Cernunnos rode our world with the Hunt at his back. I might be able to call him to a center of power like Tara. “He and I don’t meet for thousands of years.”

Nuada gave me a familiar look, the one suggesting I was the slow kid in the class. “Do you imagine one such as he is bound by time?”

“…” I shuffled my arguments away without even voicing them. Cernunnos had never mentioned meeting me in the distant past. On the other hand, it wasn’t like our first encounters had been old home night at the bar. Having silenced my own objections, I glanced around Tara.

“It’s too big.” It wasn’t, and I knew it. The tower to the south—southwest, really—was matched at the other three lesser compass points, too, though none of those had survived into my time. I could feel power lines dragging through all four of them, centering in Tara. Centering where we stood, really, at the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny. Some idiot had moved it, in my time. Not very far, a couple hundred yards, maybe, but it was no longer dead at the center of a vast quartered circle.

I knelt, one hand on the blood-spattered stone and one in the cool green grass, and my last thought for a few minutes was that maybe it had been a wise man, not a fool, who had moved the Stone from its original resting place.

Tara required only a nudge to awaken. Just a touch of magic seeking out the power circle. I was astonished, in fact, that it hadn’t roared to life when I’d healed Gary, but perhaps that had been internal enough not to draw the site’s attention. Now, though, with my power seeking to build a sanctuary and to gain a god’s attention, Tara came to the fore. I was little more than a conduit for a land so steeped in magic that it had its own will. No wonder the Master wanted this place under his thrall: with Tara’s power at his command he could alter events in an ever-growing circle from this epicenter.

Magic shot up from the Lia Fáil, hit some distant invisible ceiling and spilled down evenly to set the four towers alight. The faintest gray taint ran through it all. Gray, not black; the Master’s hold wasn’t that strong, not here, not yet, despite the sacrifices. This was still a place given over to what was good in humanity, and if I had anything to say about it, it would remain that way.

I glanced up at the midwinter sun and whispered the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever spoken. A plea to a god to come and visit me, so I could prove myself to a skeptical elf king and perhaps alter the course of events back to how they always should have been. It was possible he would; these were the first days of his greatest power, the time from the solstice through to the twelfth night after Christmas. He rode across the world now, collecting souls, and would soon retreat to the world he had been born of, Tir na nOg, there to rest until Halloween welcomed him back to our world. He had ridden to others when they’d asked, in the past.

I was still somehow surprised when the sky split open and he came to me.

Even knowing what to expect, he was overwhelming. The changes were coming on him, earlier than they had in my time. A thickness to his shoulders and neck, preparing to bear the weight of horns beginning to distort his temples. His eyes were light-flecked, wild and alien: this was a being who belonged to the universe, and the universe to him. He went beyond time as I understood it, a raw piece of star stuff made into a beautiful, inhuman form full of lust and energy and anger.

His host was smaller than I’d seen it before. The gray-bearded king was missing, as was the archer who had shot Petite’s gas tank full of holes. The boy Rider was with him, though, which gave me a shock. It shouldn’t have, since we were centuries, maybe millennia, before Herne and his spells, but I’d never seen the boy looking quite so comfortable at his father’s side. That child bound Cernunnos to time, but not, it seemed, to linear time. For a moment I wondered if magic was just physics nobody understood, but that was philosophy beyond my scope.

Particularly when Cernunnos himself was before me, taking up all the air in Tara. I loved Morrison, but something about the horned god just hit me on a primal level.

Probably the fact that he was a primal creature. Nuada, silver and beautiful as he was, looked like a bad knockoff beside the ancient god. Cernunnos swung down from his stallion, the beast that made me think of unicorns, if unicorns were depicted as savage, brilliant, vicious warmongers of devastating power instead of light fluffy balls of purity and rainbows.

“Little gwyld,” Cernunnos said, dry as a southwestern desert. “Siobhán Walkingstick. Joanne Walker. Thou has—”

Cernunnos rarely spoke English. Mostly, magic translated what he meant. In this particular case, I knew there were underlying words, a language I didn’t actually know, but what I heard was an incredibly idiomatic, “Thou hast a lot of nerve, Joanne Walker.”

That put the world back under my feet. I laughed and turned my palms up apologetically. “I know. Sorry. Hello, Cernunnos. It’s been a while.” It hadn’t really. Not from my direction. But from another direction it had been a few thousand years, and I figured that counted for more. I turned to Nuada, hands still spread. “Is this convincing enough?”

Nuada looked a bit pale around the edges. “It is.”

“A point?” Cernunnos asked in disbelief. “Thou hast—”

“I asked you not to do that. The theeing and the thouing.” I found it disconcerting and peculiarly attractive, which added to the disconcertment.

Cernunnos snapped his teeth at me, but for the second time in our relationship, complied with my linguistic preferences. “You’ve brought me here to make a point, Siobhán Walkingstick?”

“More like to prove I am who I say I am so he won’t marry the Morrígan and end up in that damned cauldron like the rest of them. Apparently elves need a lot of convincing,” I added a bit sourly, because really, I felt like the whole being out of time and having magic items created by the silversmith should count for enough. On the other hand, though I would have never believed I’d end up thinking this, any day that involved a chat with the horned god was a pretty good one, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.

“She speaks truly,” Cernunnos said, just in case Nuada hadn’t picked up on that. He nodded stiffly, and Cernunnos looked back at me, wickedness in his emerald eyes. “Ride with me. Let us go to Cnoc na rí and battle the beast who so nearly drains my spirit so many eons hence. Let us render the gift you gave me then unnecessary.”

His memory really did work in both directions. A shiver spilled over my arms and I looked away. “You knew,” I said uncertainly. “In the future, in my past, you must have known it was me at the diner. That I would take your sword. That we’d become…”

Wickedness lit his beautiful angular face again. “Siobhán Walkingstick, thou hast no idea what we shall become. But I do. I do. Come,” he said again as I gaped at him. “Let us change the future that you know, my gwyld. Let us defeat death in these backward days of history, and see what new world awaits.”

I wanted to. Oh, God, I wanted to. But I had ridden with the Hunt three times already, and I had barely escaped with my soul to call my own. And I knew I hadn’t ridden with him now, in the past, because I had escaped with my soul, and I didn’t think for a moment I could ride with him four times and not be his. Part of me wanted to be his. Part of me always would.

But sometime in the distant future I had already made this choice. Chosen a mortal existence with a mortal man, and even then Cernunnos had left me with an offer. A moment at the end of everything, where he and I might ride together one last time.

And he knew what I didn’t: what we would become. I had only had glimpses of it, if that was the future we shared at all, and I still wasn’t ready to make that choice.

“I can’t,” I whispered with genuine regret. “You know I can’t, my lord god of the hunt. I can’t ride with you again. I never could.”

“And yet I try,” Cernunnos said playfully. “Time and again throughout time, I try. Until we meet again, my gwyld. Until time brings us together again.” He swept a bow from the back of his great silver stallion, then looked to Nuada, all his grace turned to sour prissiness. “I would like that sword back, elf king.”

“It seems time and this gwyld are yours to weave and weft,” Nuada said without a hint of remorse. “Make your plea to her, not me. No one else in history has borne two of my blades, horned god. No one else has dared lose one.”

I actually expected him to finish the little lecture with “Don’t push it,” but he managed to avoid the temptation. Cernunnos crooked a smile, acknowledgment of both the scolding and its unspoken end, then reined the stallion up, its hooves punching dents in the soft green hillside. “A pity,” he said to all of us. “It would have been good to challenge the Morrígan’s master so early in his bid for power, but even I will not ride against death without a force for life at my side.”

Gary, diffidently, said, “I could go.”