C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

“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.