“This tomb’s never been excavated. I’m the only one who’s ever seen it.” Wow. I had a real skill for saying exactly the wrong thing.
Méabh shrugged. “Time is long. The chance still lies ahead. Tell me what trials lie ahead and offer me a chance to see some of your world so I might know what my daughters have wrought.”
“You keep saying daughters. Don’t boys count?”
Surprise lit her face. “Of course, but it’s through the daughters that the line continues. A child can only be certain of her mother. Is that not so in your time, too?”
My mouth twitched. “Matriarchies have mostly been obliterated in my time. The idea of the king marrying the land for its blessings or power went out a few thousand years ago. It’s mostly about might makes right, these days.”
Her eyebrows pulled together. “Now, that’s a terrible thing to hear. That’s my mother’s master’s way of things, the very thing we’re fighting against.”
“Yeah, well, the fight’s a long way from won, even in my time. Maybe especially in my time.” Somehow I had accepted that Méabh was out of time. Part of me even thought she was probably right, that I was the one responsible. I was, after all, the commonality between this morning’s historical adventure and the afternoon’s time skip.
A handful of disjointed memories floated to the surface: the way time had stretched and snapped back into place when I’d gone into Morrison’s house after Barbara Bragg. I’d gone in astrally first, examining the scene before coming in physically, but I still couldn’t remember actually entering his house. It had seemed more like my physical body had simply stepped forward through time to catch up with where my spirit had gone.
Something not exactly similar but not exactly different had happened when I’d been hung upside-down over a cauldron. And I’d been in innumerable fights now where time had slowed down to an impossible degree. That was a common enough phrase that I’d never considered the possibility that time had actually slowed. And then there were all the damned time loops that even I could recognize, reaching back to take the studies and power my younger self had accumulated; saddling up with my mother to win a fight that had happened months before my birth, and hell, just this morning trying to tidy up the mess Suzanne had set loose.
Nervousness churned my belly. I had a great big talk with Coyote—and with Raven and Rattler—coming on fast, if I was somehow capable of mucking with time. Nobody had even hinted that was on my skills list, and I had no idea why anybody would be granted that kind of power. Especially since, presented with the idea that I potentially could step back and forth through time, I could think of about a hundred and sixty things I’d like to go back and change. Oddly enough, arranging to get the winning numbers for the lottery wasn’t even high on that list.
It didn’t matter. The nice thing about time travel was that if it hadn’t already happened presumably it wasn’t going to, so I didn’t really have to worry about the temptation to go mucking about with my own timeline. With a degree of trepidation—ignoring things often made them worse, in my experience—I put aside the whole question of my ability to alter time so I could focus on what was going on around me right now.
“Okay. All right, let’s just assume you’re right and it’s my fault you’re here. There are at least three things you can probably help with. The first is this.” I raised my arm to display the werewolf bite. “You bound them. You must be able to…” I waved my arm around, trusting random gesticulation to get the point across.
It obviously did, but Méabh shook her head. “It’s a warrior’s path I’m on, Joanne. I’m no healer, for all that ye might wish me to be.”
Every time the woman opened her mouth she said something flummoxing. Everybody. Everybody I had met who had shamanic power was on the healer’s path. Granted, there hadn’t been that many of them, but thus far I was a survey sample of one in terms of being out there fighting the good fight with a sword and shield instead of just healing hands. To come face-to-face with someone on the other end of the spectrum, so far to the fight that she didn’t heal, was completely beyond my scope. “Wow. Wow. How do you do it? I mean, you called up a whole countryside’s worth of power to bind the werewolves. And I know that wasn’t healing. Believe me.” Hairs rose on my arms and the bite started to itch again. I’d sanded Tia Carley’s ability to transform to her lupine form away just minutes after she’d bitten me. It had probably been the cruelest thing I’d ever done. “Believe me, I know that wasn’t an act of mercy. You’d have been kinder to kill them. So how do you juggle the power with the fight? Because my magic rebels if I use it offensively, and everybody else I know can’t even pick up a sword. Literally or metaphorically.”
“Then there’s a balance in you,” Méabh said with remarkable satisfaction. “There’s none in me, Granddaughter. It’s a reaction I am, a reaction to the dark path my mother walks. But I’m a warrior, too, just as she is, and there’s no escaping that. It’s better,” she said more quietly. “I would say it’s better, to have the balance.”
All of a sudden I really, really wished I’d known my mother better, and what path she’d imagined herself to be on. I closed my eyes a moment, remembering her fondness for Altoids, then let it go. “Okay, if you can’t help with the bite, maybe with the banshee. I didn’t do so well against one on my own last time.”
The softness escaped her expression, leaving her looking fully the part of a warrior queen. “Sure and there’s trouble to be found there, when she’s one of my own. That’s a fight I can take on, sure enough.”
That was the second or third time she’d said that. I frowned at her, niggling bits of information refusing to come fully to mind. “What do you mean, one of your own?”
“It’s a great victory for him,” Méabh said grimly. “To dig his claws into one of our lineage so deeply she is his thrall after death. It’s her we must stop, Joanne, for so long as she fights for him I think we’ve no hope of winning.”
“There’s a jillion generations of this family line. How is it that one person is weak enough to fall? You’d think it would be either dozens or none.”
She shook her head. “It’s bargains made and sacrifices accepted. My daughters are all children of the aos sí. Perhaps every banshee that ever wailed is one of us, and perhaps he draws power from that even as we lose it. I only know that this one now is one of ours, and only newly risen as the wailing woman. We must hunt and destroy her, or we stand no hope at all.”
“Guess that answers why you’re here, then. How do you know she’s a recent convert? A new banshee, I mean?”
“Her bones lie outside my cairn.” My blank look conveyed incomprehension and Méabh continued like I wasn’t the slow kid in the class. “To become a wailing woman, the banshee’s bones must lie undisturbed for a year and a day, from one high holy day to another. The first light to fall on them wakens the beast, and it’s the Master’s they are from that day onward.”
I turned my gaze to the unseen sky and said, a bit numbly, “But it’s the twentieth. The equinox is tomorrow.”
Méabh shook her head once, firmly. “You called me on the quarter day, to be sure. I felt the balance in my bones.”
“I thought the equinoxes and solstices were on the twenty-firsts of the months.”
I got a peculiar glance, and wondered if they’d numbered the days of the month in Méabh’s time. It suddenly seemed not only unnecessary but possibly dangerous. Slow dread climbed in me. Of all the things I should be confident of, equinoxes and the like seemed pretty high on the list. If I’d misjudged by a day, trusting the calendar instead of the actual sun, that meant Tia Carley’s attempt to line up the power of the full moon with the equinox had come a lot closer to succeeding than I’d realized.