Cate Tiernan - Seeker

However, when I got back, the cabin was empty, the fire burning unbanked in the fireplace. I knew immediately where he had gone. As fast as that, my anger erupted afresh, and in the next second I had thrown the groceries across the kitchen, seeing the container of milk burst against the wall, the white milk running down in streams. This wasn’t me—I had always been self-control personified. What was happening to me in this place?

This time it took only twenty-five minutes to get to the hut, despite the fact that the path was still spelled and it was dark outside. My anger propelled me forward, my long legs striding through the woods as if it were daylight. The closer I got to the hut, the more I was assaulted by waves of panic and nausea. When I could hardly bear the feelings of dread, I knew I was close. And then I was in the clearing, the moonlight shining down on me, witnessing my shame, my anger.

Without hesitation I stormed into the hut, ducking through the low doorway, to find Daniel crouched over the eerily black bith dearc . He looked up when I came in, but this time his face was excited, glad. He flung out his hand to me.

“Hunter!” he said, and it struck me that this was perhaps the first time he had used my given name. “Hunter, I’m close, so close! This time I’ll get through, I know it.”

“Leave off this!” I cried. “You know this is wrong; you know this is sapping your strength. It’s not good, it’s not right; you know Mum would have hated this!”

“No, no, son,” Da said eagerly. “No, your mum loved me; she wants to speak to me; she pines for me as I pine for her. Hunter, I’m close, so close this time, but I’m weak. With your help I know I could get through, speak to your mother. Please, son, just this once. Lend me your strength.”

I stared at him, appalled. So this was what the bith dearc had really been about. Not helping others—that was incidental. His true goal had always been to contact Mum. But what he was suggesting was unthinkable, going not only against the written and unwritten laws of the craft, but also against my vows to the council as a Seeker.

“Son,” Da said, his voice raspy and seductive. “This is your mother, your mother, Hunter. You know you were her favorite, her firstborn. She died without seeing you again, and it broke her heart. Give her the chance to see you now, see you one last time.”

My breath left my lungs in a whoosh; Da’s low blow had caught me unaware, and I almost doubled over with the pain of it. He was wily, Daniel Niall, he was ruthless. He had seen the chink in my armor and had rammed his knife home. It was a mistake for anyone to discount him as weak, as helpless.

“It’s a powerful magick, Hunter,” he wheedled. “Good magick to know, to be master of.”

I snorted, knowing that anyone who thought he was master of a bith dearc was telling himself dangerous lies. It was like an alcoholic insisting he could stop anytime he wanted.

“It’s your mother, son,” said Daniel again.

Oh, Goddess. The reality of this opportunity suddenly sank in with a power that was all too seductive. Fiona. . I had missed seeing my mother by two short months. To see her now—one last time—to feel her presence. . Fiona the Bright, dancing around a maypole, laughing.

I sank to my knees across from my father, on the opposite side of the bith dearc . I felt sick and weakened; I was angry and embarrassed at my own weakness, angry at Da for being able to seduce me to his dark purpose. Yet if I could see my mother, just once. . I knew how he felt.

Da reached out and put his bony hands on my shoulders. I did the same, clasping his shoulders in my hands. The bith dearc roiled between us, a frightening rip in the world, an oddly glowing black hole. Then together, with Daniel leading, we began the series of chants that would take us through to the other side.

The chants were long and complicated; I had learned them, of course: they were part of the basic knowledge I had to prove before I could be initiated. But naturally, I had never used them and had forgotten them in places. Then Daniel sang, his voice cracked and ruined, and I followed as best I could, feeling ashamed for my weakness and his.

I don’t know how long we knelt there on the frozen ground, but gradually, gradually I began to become aware of something else, another presence.

It was my mother.

Though I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in eleven years, there was no mistaking the way her soul felt, touching mine. I glanced up in awe to look at Daniel and saw that tears of joy were streaming down his hollowed cheeks. Then I realized that my mother’s spirit had joined us in the hut. I could sense her shimmering presence, floating before us.

“At last, at last,” came Da’s whisper, like sandpaper.

I was scared, my mouth dry. I was not master of this magick, and neither was Daniel. This was wrong, it was trouble, and I should have had no part of it. This was how my brother had died, calling on dark magick to find a taibhs that had turned on him and taken his life.

“Hunter, darling.” I felt rather than heard her voice.

“Mum,” I whispered back. I couldn’t believe that after eleven years, I was near her again, feeling her spirit.

“Darling, is it you?” Unlike Da, Mum seemed genuinely happy to see me, genuinely full of love for me. From her spirit I received waves of love and comfort, welcome and regret— more emotion than my father had spared for me so far. “Oh, Gìomanach—you’re a man, a man before my eyes,” my mother said, her pride and wonder palpable. I started crying.

“My sweet, no,” came her voice inside my head. “Don’t spoil this with sadness. Let’s take joy from this one chance to express our love. For I do love you, my son, I love you more than I can say. In life I was far from you; you were beyond my reach. Now nothing is. Now I can be with you, always, wherever you are. You need never miss me again.”

I’ve never been comfortable with crying, but this was all too much for me—the pain of my last five days, my fear and worry for my father, my anger, and now this, seeing and hearing my long-lost mother, having her confirm what I thought I would wonder about my whole life: that she loved me, that she’d missed me, that she was proud of me, of who I had become.

“Fiona, my love, you’ve come back to me,” said Da, weeping openly.

“No, my darling,” said Mum gently. “You’ve called me here, but you know it can’t be. I am where I am now and must stay. And you must stay in your world, until we can be together again.”

“We can be together now!” my father said. “I can keep the bith dearc open; we can be together.”

“No,” I said, pulling myself back to reality. “The bith dearc is wrong. You have to shut it down. If you don’t, I will.”

His eyes blazed at me. “How can you say that? It’s given you your mother back!”

“She’s not back, Da,” I said. “It’s her spirit; it isn’t her. And she can’t stay. And you can’t make her. This isn’t good for her, and it’s going to kill you.”

Angrily my father started to say something, but my mother intervened. “Hunter’s right, Maghach,” she said, a slight edge to her voice. “This isn’t right for either of us.”

“It is. It could be,” Da insisted.

“Hunter is thinking more clearly than you, my love,” Mum said. “I am here this once. I can’t come here again.”

“You must come back,” my father said, a note of desperation entering his voice. “I must be with you. Nothing is worthwhile without you.”

“Be ashamed, Maghach,” my mother said in her no-nonsense tone. It gave me joy to hear it, bringing back memories of my childhood, when I’d had parents. “To say that nothing is worthwhile dishonors the beauty of the world, the joy of the Goddess.”