I looked back at the Lia Fáil and at Brigid. Her eyes were closed, her breathing impossibly shallow. She was not going to be of any help, especially if she wouldn’t let me try to heal her. Sighing, I glanced toward the Hall of Kings. It lay off to the right now instead of straight ahead like it had been in Lugh’s time. I remembered the shock of power that had come from it being stationed right at Tara’s center. If worse came to worst, I would dig the damned stone up and put it back where it belonged in order to throw myself back in time so I could find Gary again.
It was a plan. It wasn’t necessarily a good plan, but it was a plan and I was satisfied with it. I crawled back to Brigid and took her hand in mine, whispering, “How about now?”
She said nothing, only slipped deeper into sleep. I didn’t want to go against her wishes by healing her, but I needed some answers, or at least some advice. I whispered, “C’mon, c’mon,” then, hoping one ancient thing might get the attention of another, put Brigid’s hand against the Stone of Destiny, and held it there.
The stone’s screaming leapt from inside my ears to outside them, and a woman appeared in my vision.
I knew her. Fair-haired and fair-skinned, I’d seen her work a magic well beyond any I could have imagined. She was the one who’d—centuries ago—lured the first three werewolves to her power circle and then bound them to the cycle of the moon. It had weakened them beyond measure: they had gone from creatures able to shift and kill at will to the traditional monsters as modern mythology knew them, only able to transform three nights out of the month. One of their descendants had tried very hard to make my magic her own in order to break that spell.
She’d failed, but she had managed to leave the bite in my arm. It flared up again, itching like a son of a bitch, and the fair-haired woman’s spine stiffened as she looked me over. Then her brow furrowed, confusion in gray-green eyes. “Tainted blood. You must be cleansed before you can survive this battle. Find me, daughter. Together we shall prevail.”
“Daughter? Wait! Hey! Wa—arghgl!” It was my turn for the tongue-trying-to-strangle-me sound as for the umpteenth time in recent hours, my mysterious visitor up and vanished. Next time somebody showed up like that I was going to cast a mystical net and hold on until I got some answers.
Like why she’d called me daughter. That woman was manifestly not my mother. She had been wearing my mother’s necklace, which probably meant a connection of some kind. That wasn’t good, since Nuada and I had just gone to the trouble of making the necklace for the Morrígan, who wasn’t supposed to be able to take it off. Of course, if she couldn’t take it off, then Sheila MacNamarra should not have been wearing it or giving it to me fifteen months ago in my own personal timeline. Which meant I shouldn’t have had it to show Nuada to commission it from him, which in turn meant that something had already gone horribly wrong.
I swore out loud, and pulled my hands from the standing stone. It went back to shouting only in my skull, which was an improvement.
“It only cries aloud when a scion of the true blood touches it,” Brigid whispered.
I knew she was there. I just about jumped out of my skin anyway. “The what? That’s ridiculous. I’m not an elf. Where’s Gary?”
“Not all the high kings of Ireland were aos sí, gwyld.”
I slid down the Lia Fáil and put my hands in my hair. “Okay. All right, fine, if you want to play it that way, I’ll play. Oh, gosh, Brigid, whatever do you mean? Lil’ ol’ me? The True Heir to Ireland? It cannot be so! I beg of you, tell me more!”
Brigid looked weary and for a moment I felt guilty. Then I remembered Gary hadn’t made it home with me. Anything resembling guilt went out the window. I genuinely did not give a rat’s ass about what my mystical or ethnic heritage might be. I wanted to fix the werewolf bite and get Gary back, not necessarily in that order, so when Brigid started up again I only half listened. “You already know of Méabh, Queen of Connacht—”
“Meabh,” I said under my breath. “That’s Maeve, right? You say it a little differently.”
As if I hadn’t interrupted, Brigid went on, “Méabh, Queen of Connacht, said by some to be the Morrígan herself. She was not. She was, though, the Morrígan’s first and only child, born to Nuada of the Silver Hand, High King of Ireland, who had gifted her with a necklace—”
My hand closed on the necklace in question and Brigid smiled faintly. “A necklace which would not come unclasped except by one of the blood of she who had commissioned it made. To be free of Nuada’s silver chains, the Morrígan had a daughter, and those daughters had daughters all through time, until it comes to you, Siobhán Walkingstick.”
My stomach dropped through the soles of my feet. “No. No, wait. The whole idea was she wasn’t supposed to be able to take it off. She was supposed to be bound until she faced me in my time. Blood to bloo—” My stomach would have started digging a hole, if it had the appendages. I stared at Brigid, hoping she would give me a different answer than the conclusion I was rapidly coming to.
Instead she gave my bandaged left arm a tired glance and used the same words the woman in my vision had: “Tainted blood.”
I hated cryptic statements. I hated them even more when they illuminated everything. I clutched my arm, teeth bared momentarily at the pain, then whispered a curse. The blood I’d dropped into the silver had been tainted. I’d been carrying the werewolf’s poison inside me, and I’d known the wolves belonged to the Master. The impulse to stop fighting the ache and the itch swept me again, and I raised my voice to deny it. “It made a window, didn’t it. A loophole, one she could get free of the necklace through. Blood to blood,” I said again. “Méabh was her way out. Blood of her blood, essence of Nuada’s essence. The same magics that bound her could free her. And I should have known that, because I had the necklace to show to Nuada, and if it had worked the Morrígan wouldn’t have been able to take it off and my mother never would have had it to give to me. Damn it.”
Somewhere in there I’d come around to accepting that the Morrígan was my great-to-the-umpteenth-grandmother. That Méabh, who had removed the necklace, basically had to be both the Morrígan’s daughter and some distant ancestor of mine. The blood demanded it. I still protested, albeit much less convincingly than I’d have liked. “I can’t possibly be the Morrígan’s granddaughter. We’re on totally opposite sides.”
“Like all children of power, Méabh had a choice. She chose the light, as have all her children in turn.”
For some reason I thought of Suzanne Quinley again. There was a kid with a whole lot of power. I wondered if she even knew she had a choice in front of her. I might have to talk to her about that someday. Because after all, I was so very, very good at choosing wisely when it came to great cosmic powers. Exasperated, afraid and unable to give in gracefully, I muttered, “Yeah, okay, fine, whatever. Didn’t Méabh have like twelve kids all named Finnoula or something? Maybe I’m one of their descendants, sure. I’m probably one of Genghis Khan’s, too. Everybody on the damned planet is. Or Charlemagne, or, I don’t know, Cleopatra. No, that’s reincarnated. Anyway, great, that’s dandy, but I’m not the heir to a defunct Irish throne.”
“You might be,” Brigid murmured, “if you were willing to accept that fate.”
I barked laughter, finding bitterness easier than acceptance. “Lady, you have no clue how much fate I’ve already taken in the teeth. I don’t need any more. All I want is to find my friend. And…” An obvious question finally surfaced. I straightened up, frowning. “Brigid, what are you doing here? Last I knew you’d…”