C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

“Probably not taking the magic hand away. Really? Cernunnos can do that?” An entire world lived and breathed with Cernunnos’s life force. It probably wasn’t all that difficult for him to lend a little life to a hunk of metal. I just didn’t know why he’d want to.

“He had to, or I could not forge the sword for him.”

“Oh.” I wondered briefly if Cernunnos lived linearly and remembered anti-linearly, but that was too much for my brain to handle. I put it away for another time, and asked, “Can you make the necklace? I don’t know what the timeline is here. Are you supposed to get married this afternoon?”

“You stand out of time already,” Nuada said. “Can you not step a day or two away and bid me make it then?”

“If I had the foggiest idea how, maybe, but I obviously haven’t because you hadn’t seen it until just now. Tara’s huge,” I said with a wave of my hand, trying to encompass it. “Isn’t there a forge around here somewhere?” Not that I remembered a Forge of the Kings on the tourist maps. That could be an oversight, but I was pretty sure forges left enough residue that somebody would’ve noticed and pointed it out.

Nuada looked bemused. “You know little of metal forging. It takes time to build the heat, to—”

“C’mon, it’s not like making steel.” Incomprehension made Nuada’s eyes more silvery still. I dropped my chin to my chest. “Steel. It’s a metal from the future. It takes a lot more heat than precious metals do. Maybe I could…” A couple times I’d worked up enough heat for self-immolation, once almost literally. I studied my hands, remembering the burn of a cut across one palm healing, and reached for my magic, hoping I could create fire through my will alone.

Fire rose up, all right, but it was the fire of pain, not actual flames. An itch erupted in the bite, like using my magic excited the cells there, and I hissed at the brief, compelling idea that life would be easier if I was a wolf. I said, “Forget it,” as much to the impulse as Nuada, then, more to the silver king, “We’ll need a real forge.”

“Then the Morrígan shall wait another year for her king.” Nuada sounded both resigned and calm. “She should have come by now, as it is. Perhaps your friend holds her attention so we might do our work.”

A fist knotted in my gut. “I hate that idea.”

“All the more reason to work swiftly and well. Come. The towers will have forges. Does one speak to you?”

Dismay rumbled through me. “I don’t want to leave Tara. I’m already in the wrong time. I don’t know what happens if I leave this location. If we’ve got time, why not build a forge?” Aside from the fact no evidence of one remained in my time, that was.

Nuada gave me a patient look. “I will return you safely to Tara. Now. Does one speak to you?”

I sighed and pointed southwest. “That one. It’s still there in my time. Or a tower is, anyway. I like the consistency.”

“At Troim. They will have what we need.”

They did. They also had a village full of curious people—humans, not the aos sí —which made me and my short hair and my formerly awesome white leather coat feel considerably more awkward than I had standing more or less alone on a hill in the middle of a sacred circle. Worse, nobody spoke to me. They just watched us, wide-eyed and silent, as if we were wraiths passing unwelcome through time.

Which was unfortunately accurate. Nuada was a dead man walking and I didn’t belong there at all. The blacksmith, though, nodded to me when Nuada explained what we needed. That made me feel better until he backed rapidly as soon as he’d shown Nuada where the tools lay. I had a bunch of friends at home who had started reacting the same way after my abrupt shamanic awakening: nominally polite, but eager to get out of my presence. Apparently living sometime in the indeterminable past, alongside elves and small gods, did not make most people any happier or more comfortable with magic being done around them.

“They fear me,” Nuada murmured as the blacksmith backed off. I startled, having been so busy taking all the discomfort on myself it hadn’t occurred to me he might be a problem, too. He worked as he spoke, bringing the forge’s fires up higher and selecting the finest and most delicate tools the blacksmith had to offer. “We live side by side in this place, your people and mine, but we are not friends. We share this site of worship, but never ritual or passion. To them, we are the whispers in the wind and the lightning in the sky. To us, they are the brutal and dangerous things in the night.”

“The Fir Bolg, ” I said, dragging up the name from some bit of reading I’d done. “Weren’t they the enemies of the aos sí? ”

“So they are. Dark men, tied to the earth with their short and ugly lives.” He glanced at me, and clarified, “Humans,” just in case I hadn’t gotten it.

“What a charming sentiment. No wonder you get along so well. Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”

He gave me a look that said volumes about my intellect, which was fair enough, because what he was doing was extremely obvious: he’d stuck his silver hand in the flame and was melting his fingers off. Liquid metal dripped into an iron trough while I watched with horrified fascination. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Metal feels no pain.”

“But—but—!”

“Where did you think the metal for your necklace came from? For the swords? They would be nothing if they were not made of the living silver. Anyone might forge a sword. This is my blood, gwyld . My essence. My very life, made metal.”

“That’s the most awful thing I’ve seen.” I couldn’t stop watching. It was like a magical train wreck. Creepy crawlies ran down my spine, up my arms, all over, but I couldn’t look away. “It just keeps…bleeding?”

“Melting,” he said dourly. “Yes. It has no end, or none I’ve found. Gift of the god, Siobhán.”

I muttered, “Joanne,” without any real hope. Siobhán obviously sounded more like a name to him, and having heard it from Cernunnos’s lips, Nuada wasn’t about to let it go. I felt at my hip, not that I ever carried my sword there anyway, and didn’t find it. “It really is a magic sword.” I hoped like hell that was doing Gary some good.

“And a magic torc. What power will it have?”

“The power to bind. That’s what we’re doing with the cauldron. Binding the Morrígan to me, so she can do no harm until she faces me again.” That sounded pretty good. Some aspect of it would no doubt go terribly wrong, but I was doing my best.

Nuada nodded once. The smell of hot silver baked in my nostrils and the color burned my eyes. Nuada could make the necklace at my request, out of his own very essence, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Not to bind the Morrígan to me, not to render her impotent across the centuries. Something else had to lock the time loop in place, and all of a sudden I knew what it was.

Quickly, before my confidence evaporated, I picked up a piece of edged metal from the forge, slashed my palm and let my blood fall into the sizzling metal.

Silver turned red for the space of a breath. I was certain that with ordinary silver that wouldn’t happen, but this wasn’t ordinary. Then it all blackened, like the silver had aged a hundred years in an instant. Nuada, unconcerned, worked the metal with a small hammer until black was beaten away and thin sheets of silver remained. He moved quickly, certainly, until I was half hypnotized with the steady flow of his actions and the atonal music of the forge.

He might have worked for an hour or forever, for all I could tell, but suddenly he was finished, stepping back from his work with a critical eye. I hardly dared move, afraid he’d find some flaw, but after long minutes of examination he grunted—not a sound I expected from an elf king—and moved aside so I could see what he had wrought.