I rubbed my arm nervously, winced and rubbed it again, feeling vaguely that if I sat to give it a good scratch, doglike, it would improve. Only the need to respond stopped me, and even that was only a half-focused reply. “Look, either way it doesn’t matter. If she was buried here on the last spring equinox, a year and a day isn’t until tomorrow or even the next day, because the equinox last year was on the twenty-first.” Way at the back of my mind, pieces were falling into place, and I was afraid to think too hard for fear of jostling them and losing the oncoming epiphany forever.
“Then you’ve disturbed her early,” Méabh said with vicious pleasure. “That makes her weaker, and us all the stronger. We’ve a day and a night to find her, Granddaughter. A day and a night to fight together and protect this world.”
I nodded, but I was hardly listening. A year ago tomorrow I’d fought a banshee myself, a fight that had taken place not just in my own time, but almost thirty years earlier, on another equinox, as well. I’d almost died, but a woman called Sheila MacNamarra had gone to great lengths to keep me alive, both in the womb and as an adult.
And it had been peppermint. That was the smell that had caught at the back of my throat as I’d shifted into a wolf. Curiously strong peppermint.
The banshee was my mother.
Chapter Thirteen
“We can’t just…” My throat hurt. I cleared it and tried again. “We can’t just destroy her. We need to free her. To rescue her. ‘Master’s slave is driven wild,’” I whispered. “That’s what that was about. ‘Firstborn daughter, blooded child.’ She meant me. She knew me. And oh, Jesus Christ, she knows about Aidan now. I never told her. I never told anybody.”
Méabh had the look of polite incomprehension people tended to get around me these days. Actually, on reflection, it was more a look of irritated incomprehension. “Sure and we’ll destroy her, Granddaughter. There’s nothing to be done for it. That’s wh—”
“We will not!” I sprang to my feet, narrowly missing cracking my head on the cairn’s low roof. No wonder Méabh had remained seated throughout our exchange. She tensed as I leapt up, her fingers closing on a sword held only by her effigy, but she stayed sitting as I snarled, “We will not destroy her. We will find another way. I don’t give a damn if I have to go back to the beginning of time and rewrite history from day one. We are going to rescue her from slavery to the Master, and then we are going to kick. His. Ass.”
Rage-induced tears filled my eyes. God, I hated that part of being a girl. It was worse now because I’d only just told Gary to go kick the Master’s ass and now I’d lost him for maybe ever. Méabh drew breath to speak and I jammed a finger at her like it was a blade itself. “Don’t even think about arguing with me, or so help me God I will leave you here in this stone tomb to rot.”
“You,” Méabh said very, very mildly, “wouldn’t be knowing the way out, now, would ye, me fine girl.”
Logic was puny in the face of my wrath. Logic was puny and magic was mighty: I had just gotten rebirthed, refilled and renewed, and was fast on my way to resentful. The Sight flooded on full bore, showing me the ancient green serenity of the cairn’s protective nature as well as the stress points within the stacked stones. My own skin shimmered with rage. I could blast the goddamned cairn away, leave Knocknaree as flat as it had been when Gary’s legendary battle here came to an end, and at that shining moment in time I didn’t think anything could stop me.
Yeah, sure, it’d be an act of wanton destruction. Yeah, sure, it would probably make the power clam up and refuse to play along as punishment. But just then I was pretty much willing to take the Master on in barehanded combat, because for the second time in half an hour I had had enough. First Gary, now my mother. It was unbearable, and I had goddamned well had enough of bearing it.
Of course, the magic crackling through me also showed me the tunnel leading into the cairn’s heart, so in fact I knew how to get out of there, which took an itty bitty edge off my outrage. The detail that if I obliterated the cairn I would by definition not be leaving Méabh there to rot also came into play, but I ignored it with the fierceness of an ignoring thing. And finally it did work its way through my tiny brain that possibly Méabh would be on my side if she knew what the source of my discontent was.
It took every ounce of focus and willpower I had to grate, “She’s my mother. And I woke her up early, so what we have is a day and a goddamned night to save her, and that is what we are going to do.”
A genuine and terrible pity colored Méabh’s green eyes to almost brown. “Oh, my dear wee lass. My dear girl. Sure and that’s a terrible thing for ye to face. But she’s of the devil himself now, and there’ll be only one way to stop her. We must destroy her.”
“No.” All of a sudden my rage vanished. Not the good kind of cathartic burning out, but the subsumed fury that powered people through the most hideous scenarios and saw them triumphant on the other side. Mentally disturbed, of course, and wrung out til there was nothing left, but triumphant. “Let’s get something straight, Méabh. You may be aos sí and ard rí…ess…of all Ireland. You may be a legendary queen and a hero to the masses. But what you are not is in charge here. This is my time, you’re here at my invitation, and by your own admission you’re a warrior, not a healer. I’m both, and we will do things my way. Either that or you’re going home right now and I’m doing this myself.”
“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.