C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

“And how is it you’ll be sending me home when it’s no idea you have of how I got here?”

Shit. She was going to make me ante up. Well, that was fair enough, because if I was going to be slinging myself or other people through history, I’d better have a clear idea of what I was doing. I lifted my gaze to the low ceiling once more, looking for cracks in time.

There weren’t any.

What there was was a sense of the passage of years. The idea of eons settled into the stones around me. They had been stacked by human hands millennia ago, each touch leaving the faintest impression of the men and women who had put them there. They had built this place and others like it as signals to the future: they had been here.

And if they could touch me from thousands of years in the past, I could touch them from as many centuries in the future. That was the bedrock of shamanism: belief and change, and for one precious instant I absolutely believed I could connect with a people and a place far out of my time just as they had in their way touched me. I reached , and like Tara had, Knocknaree changed around me.

The mountain had never been pointy, of course. Not since the ice ages had faded, anyway, but stories of great battles flattening it were at least as good as sheets of ice. There was no sense of battles being fought, for that matter; it was just the old patient earth and the footsteps of hundreds moving stones from one place to another. Building cairns, but Méabh’s tomb was not yet among them. Hers was the last and the greatest, and it dissolved around us as I strained to anchor us in time. Méabh took a sharp breath, and that reminded me of what she’d said. That she’d been pulled away from a wedding, ard rí to warrior queen, and so from our tenuous place in ancient history, I searched forward, looking for the moment where time hiccuped and a wedding was disrupted.

It was that simple. It was not easy. The effort pulled at my bones, time objecting to being stretched. Time and space, because the wedding had been at Tara, not in the west at Knocknaree. A flash of understanding hit me: I’d timeslipped at Tara in part because of the sheer ancient power built up there. Knocknaree was sacred, but not quite so persistently holy. It didn’t stand at the center of a power circle, the one defined by the towers around Tara. Tara was made for magic users. Knocknaree was made for the dead. No wonder, then, what had been literally thoughtless at Tara was exhausting here.

But time did shift at my command, speeding awkwardly forward. Méabh’s tomb lurched up around us, dozens of smaller kings and chieftains buried there before Méabh was even born, much less before she became a legend. And once her tomb was built, I still saw the world pass by, Sight unhindered by the aging stones around us.

There was a battle atop Knocknaree, brief and bloody, and for a heartwrenching moment I laid eyes on Gary.

He rode a horse I recognized, not the golden mare that belonged to the boy Rider, but the solid brown beast that later would carry a sad-eyed king. He looked confident on the animal’s back, wielding my rapier like he’d been doing it all his life. The Morrígan was there, blade flashing and hair wild, and as she rode for Gary, Cernunnos intervened.

A cloak of blackness shot up from beneath the earth and swept away all hope of seeing what happened. I cried out and time nearly stopped, but Méabh was suddenly, finally on her feet, and held my lapels gripped in two strong fists. “You were not here,” she warned. “You cannot be here, Granddaughter. This fight is not yours to fight. Should they fall it cannot be your fall, too.”

“You said they won!”

“Legend says they won,” Méabh said with great and honest sorrow, “but sure and legend never lets truth get in the way of a good story.”

“I don’t care! It’s Gary! ” It was also too late. Too much of my energy had been focused on shoving us forward to the moment Méabh left, and she had broken the concentration that had almost stopped us at the battle. We were spinning forward again, rushing headlong toward a spike of familiar silver-blue power: my magic stabbing backward, finding Méabh, the one person my subconscious thought could get me through the werewolf and the banshee alive. Teeth gritted, I put the brakes on, and time lurched to its normal pace around us as I scowled at Méabh. “This is it, sister. Pay up or get off the ride.”

To my credit, Méabh looked very slightly impressed. I had the idea that making the aos sí look slightly impressed was kind of like calling the Grand Canyon a little ditch, so I was good with that. “It’s your rules, then,” she said. “It’s your time. It’s your way we’ll do things, but—” and she gave me a gimlet stare “—if we cannot rescue the banshee…”

“Sheila,” I said. “Sheila MacNamarra. My mother. And yes.” The last was through once-more gritted teeth. “If we can’t rescue her I’ll finish it. I. Will finish it. Not you. You understand that?”

Her eyebrows lifted, a mixture of agreement and mild offense. I didn’t imagine most people went around using phrases like “You understand me, young lady?” on legendary warrior queens of old. Then again, I wasn’t most people. “Okay then. We’re going home now, and then we’re going to rescue my mother.”

Reaching back through time was exhausting. Staggering forward trying to find the moment Méabh had left was uncomfortable. Going home, though, was like a rubber band snapping into place. I cast one miserable look over my shoulder, like I’d be able to see Gary through the annals of history, then lurched back into the modern day with Méabh still standing more or less nose to nose with me.

Nose to nose because we were still in her tomb, and standing up she really was about eight inches taller than I was. There wasn’t room for her to straighten, so she hunched uncomfortably and half a breath from my face said, “I’ll be leaving this place now.” She shouldered past me to uncover the dug-down tunnel that led out of the cairn, and crawled out.

I stood there alone in her tomb for a long minute, a dozen tiny thoughts whirling around my brain. She was so very tall. The other aos sí had been tall, but not that tall. It was magnificent. I was six feet and a bit in the boots I had on, but I wanted to be tall like her. Except then I would tower over Morrison, and while once upon a time I’d have liked that, now the idea we were exactly the same height was kind of appealing. And I wouldn’t want to be that much taller than Gary. Gary, about whom I was trying hard not to think. It wasn’t working very well. I kept seeing the Morrígan riding down on him, and ashy-haired Cernunnos blocking the way. In theory, I knew Cernunnos survived because I’d met him for the first time in my past, but he wasn’t quite bound by time, so I couldn’t be sure. And Gary’s linear life was still in effect, so there was no reason I couldn’t have met him a year ago and still have gotten him killed in the distant past. And I really needed to sit down and talk with Coyote about this time thing, because it was absolutely beyond me why anybody would be given the power to timeshift.

It struck me that although I’d napped the entire transatlantic flight, I was still very, very tired, and that dragging my ass back and forth through time today hadn’t helped that at all. I said, “Miles to go before I sleep,” to the empty tomb, took one thing from its inner sanctum and followed Méabh back into the modern world.

She stood watching jet contrails in a fading sky. She didn’t seem like a woman out of time right then. Aside from the contrails, there were no particular signs of my world visible from the mountaintop, and her tall, slender, armor-bedecked self fitted in better with the gray cairns than my leather-coated stompy-boot self. The armor—a breastplate, some kind of thigh guard and what I cautiously thought of as greaves—was silver. Of course it was. Probably magic silver, compliments of one Nuada of the Silver Hand, also known as Daddy. Like the Morrígan, Méabh’s arms were both bare and tattooed, bands of knotwork around each biceps. I’d noticed all that in the cairn. I just hadn’t noticed it. Somehow it all made a much more impressive picture out in the open with fiery sunset washing over her than it had in the little fire-lit stone room. I wasn’t strictly sure that made sense, as she’d been the most impressive object in the cairn, but sense or not, that was how it was.