C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

It slowly dawned on me that for someone who’d been buried alive I could see very clearly. Not the glowy bright world visible through the Sight, but just ordinary ol’ Joanne vision, slightly fuzzy because I’d lost my goddamned glasses again when I shapechanged. I was still wearing my clothes, though, including the leather coat, which had apparently fit a wolf well enough not to entangle me while I jumped a banshee. Either that, or someone had thoughtfully dressed me before burying me.

I was clearly not dead if that was my major concern. I exhaled very, very carefully, and lifted my head to look for the source of the light.

It came from somewhere beyond my feet. I dug my heels in, bent my knees until they hit the low ceiling and hitched myself down a few inches. After a few repeats, I edged off the tomb’s far end and landed on my ass in a small round room covered in rubble.

“Sure and it’s sorry I am for shoving ye in there,” said the living embodiment of the granite woman, “but there was nowheres else to put ye so I could sit and wait on ye, too.”

I did not say “What?” which I thought took a great deal of restraint. I didn’t say anything else, either, not out of restraint but out of gaping astonishment.

She wasn’t just the living color version of the effigy. She was the woman in my visions, the one who had bound the werewolves to the moon’s cycle. Fair copper hair in as much quantity as the statue possessed, which made me touch my own short-cropped and stick-straight hair self-consciously. Light eyes, a strong build and an aura that sank down into the earth, anchoring her so it looked like nothing could possibly knock her from her feet. After many long seconds I managed what I thought was a pleasantly casual, “Méabh, I presume.”

She bowed, which was pretty talented for someone sitting down. Coppery curls fell around her shoulders and she shook them back as she straightened again. I had hair envy. I’d never had hair envy in my life. I was so busy having hair envy I almost forgot to respond to her, “And you’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick, I think.”

“Yeah. Well, I mean, no. I like Joanne better. Jo.” I’d never voluntarily suggested someone call me Jo, before. It had always been Joanie. But aside from being welcome in the midst of the occasional meltdown, Joanie was starting to sound like a little kid’s name. I was finally clawing my way out of emotional immaturity, and I’d never been little. Sometime in the past year or so, I’d left Joanie behind. “Where are we?”

As soon as I asked I knew the answer. We were in Méabh’s tomb, of course, and the more interesting question was, “How did I get here? What happened? I…was a wolf. And there was a banshee…” Really. Normal people did not find themselves saying things like that. I pinched the bridge of my nose, noticing again that my glasses had gone missing, and muttered, “Don’t suppose you found my glasses out there.”

To my surprise, she held them up between two fingertips. “You were a wolf,” she agreed, “and there was a banshee. And I’ll have none of that sort of thing contaminating my bones, not even when she’s one of my own. What,” she added, pointing my glasses at my forearm, “is that? ”

I tried to hide the half-bandaged bites with my other arm. The itching was gone, leaving ordinary pain in its place. “It’s a…” For a second I thought I could get away with “dog bite,” but something in Méabh’s expression suggested I would find my ass kicked from here to breakfast if I tried that. I mumbled, “Werewolf bite. I got bit by a werewolf the other day. I can’t heal it. Can you?”

Instead of helping she cast her gaze to the small room’s ceiling. “A werewolf bite,” she said to it. “Sure and I spend a lifetime building the stone circles, gathering the power, hunting the bitches down, and all for what? For my daughter to come to me poisoned by the very blood I bound.”

“I’m not your daughter.” I hadn’t liked my own mother very much in the short time I’d known her, but I’d be damned if somebody else would go around claiming me as hers. “I’m human, for God’s sake. You’re aos sí. ”

“And Nuada was the last of the aos sí kings so,” she said with a shrug. “He wed my mother and broke the cycle of sacrifice, but the cost was the throne. It’s men who’ve come to the seat of Tara since, and all of them my husbands, too. The children I’ve borne have married men time and again, until it comes to you, Siobhán Walkingstick, Joanne Walker, my child. You are human,” she agreed. “There would be no trace of the sí in your blood. But you’re my child still, and heir to the power and the battle we fight.”

I opened my mouth to argue about whether somebody could find traces of the aos sí in my DNA if I was in fact genetically related to them, then remembered nobody had yet convincingly found Neanderthal blood in Homo sapiens even though I knew people who looked like immediate family had been straight out of that lineage. I shut my mouth again. Méabh cocked an eyebrow and I shook my head, looking for something else to say. I came up with, “How about granddaughter, then,” which wasn’t brilliant but was a bearable alternative.

“Sure and that’s a mouthful.” She got a look at my expression and said, as if she’d always meant to, “Granddaughter it is. We’ve work to do, Grand— ”

“Joanne. For God’s sake, just call me Joanne. I don’t need a damned title. What happened out there? Wait.” I sat bolt upright, sickness and hope both churning my stomach. “You’ve been around forever, right? Do you know what happened to Gary? Is he okay? Did he come back home? Did they fight the Master? Where is he?”

She couldn’t possibly answer through the barrage of questions, which, as they became more repetitive, I started to think was a deliberate delaying tactic on my part. There was only one answer I wanted, and if I kept asking questions she couldn’t give the wrong one. But I had to breathe eventually, and she snapped a hand up to stop me from continuing when I gasped for air. “Your friend is a legend, Gran—Joanne. He rode with the hounds to this very place, and here they fought so long and so hard the mountaintop melted into a smooth and bloody field. The Morrígan and her ravens came to do battle and was met by her sister Brigid, who had never before been seen to make war. A sea of dead men rose from the cauldron and were struck down by Brigid’s life magic. They say the necklace the Morrígan wore burned her then, like calling to like, and in that moment her master faltered, and she fell. It was a victory for the ages, Joanne. It set this world back on a path less dark than the one it had known.”

“But what happened to Gary? ”

“No one knows.” Méabh’s voice dropped with sympathy. “Some say he rides with the Hunt even still, while others claim it’s the aos sí who have taken him in.”

“You’re aos sí, ” I snapped. “Did they? You? Whatever?”

“I would not know,” Méabh murmured. “He fought before my time, and it’s much more part of the mortal world that I am, than part of my father’s people.”

“Well, go find out! ”

“I can’t.” Her implacability silenced me, and when it became clear I’d shut up for a moment, she went on. “I chose the Fir Bolg, Joanne. I chose humanity. It’s unwelcome I am with my own kind. Every path has its price, does it not? If only the price of recognizing a life unled, but a price it is, and a price must be paid.”

I had a startling amount of experience with recognizing lives unled, thanks to Suzanne Quinley. She’d once shown me a whole host of choices I might have made, and I’d seen all the lives I hadn’t chosen. I regretted some of them right to the tips of my toes, though at the same time I couldn’t say I was willing to give up the life I had in order to live one of the others. Méabh had probably never actually stood at a crossroads of possibilities, watching all her different lives unfold around her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have an idea of what she’d lost.