“Just Jo.” I released him slowly, feeling the magic linking us stretch, then settle comfortably. “How’s that?”
“Incredible.” His voice softened with awe. “You can see like this and you don’t all the time?”
“It’s too much.” I turned back to Tara, cold swimming over me as the stone screamed again. “I’m afraid if I always look at this world, I’ll lose sight of the real one. I’ve been afraid of that since the beginning.”
“I think there ain’t much more real than this.”
I smiled at him, then did a double take. Gary’s eyes, usually gray, were as solid silver as his aura. I chortled and hugged him, inordinately pleased. He grunted, a sound intended to mask his own pleasure, and made a question with his eyebrows that I answered cheerfully: “Your eyes are silver. You’re the only one who’s ever held his own when I set this spell on him. Everybody else’s have gone gold, like mine.”
“Old dog’s got a lot of tricks, darlin’.” Gary did not look old, not one little bit at all. Not to my normal sight, and not to the Sight. Part of it was his totem spirit, a tortoise whose steady ways had gotten us out of major trouble at least once. I could See it now, surrounding him comfortably, always there if its strength needed to be drawn on.
But mostly it was his joie de vivre. Nobody who loved life and new experiences that much was ever going to get old, not really. Wiser and eventually dead, maybe, but not old. This time I said what I’d so often thought: “You’re my hero, you know that, Gary? I want to grow up into somebody like you.”
Color stained his cheeks, which I hadn’t thought possible. “You’re doin’ just fine, doll. C’mon. We better go see what there is to see.” He offered his hand. I slipped mine into it, and we walked together into the Hall of Kings.
The stone’s cry went mute as the Hall’s ephemeral walls surrounded us. I slowed, straining to hear it, and Gary stuck a finger in his ear. “What was that? I didn’t even hear it until it quit.”
“I don’t really kn… Do you hear that?” Whispers rattled around the hall, bouncing off my skin. Drowning out the stone, maybe, except they were whispers and the stone had screamed. There was probably some old adage about a whisper being louder than a scream, but I couldn’t come up with it off the top of my head.
Gary swallowed audibly. “What’s weird is I can understand ’em, doll. Pretty sure that ain’t English they’re speaking.”
“It’s not.” My mother had spoken in Irish a few times in the months we’d walked side by side without ever getting to know one another. It had sounded more or less like the whispers did, but somewhere in my mind the words twisted from a language I didn’t know into one I did. “It’s like with Cernunnos. Remember how you only understood him when he wanted you to? There’s magic afoot.”
The half-spooked expression faded from Gary’s face. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I grinned. “That’s why I said it. All right, let me listen.” Why I thought me listening would do any more good than Gary listening, I didn’t know. Of course, if he was quiet then we could both listen, which was probably twice as good as just me listening. Which I couldn’t do when I was running on at the brain, again. In the past, my brain babbling at such length had meant there was something it either didn’t want to think about—which things numbered in the dozens right now—or it was working out some extreme cleverness that would at any moment leap out and surprise me.
Much to my dismay, nothing leapt out. The whispers, though, became clearer: men, all of them men, which in a hall called of Kings probably made sense. Some were bitter, claiming unrighteous loss of kingship; others were pure and joyful with their duties. Hints of decay spread through all of them like a warning that their histories and legends, that those stories were being lost to time.
Less lost than some, though. At least Tara remained and was recognized as an important site. There were so many places in the world completely lost, or barely rediscovered, that for a moment, standing in the heart of memory broke my heart.
Ice touched the back of my neck and I turned without thinking. A tall and slender man, almond-eyed and pale-skinned, stood behind me. He wore leather and wool and metal, and a crown of silver over fair hair, and there was nothing even remotely human about him.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that. He had none of the telltale marks that non-human people in legend had: his ears were round, his eyes, while not Western-European-shaped, were hardly so tilted as to be inhuman, and his build was no more slender than that of a slim mortal man. But he wasn’t human, and with my usual flair, I said, “What are you?” only realizing afterward that that was probably unforgivably rude.
“The ard rí,” he said in a tone which suggested I’d been unforgivably rude. “What are you?”
“Gwyld.” I was a bit startled the word came out of my mouth, but Cernunnos—and a woman who had died hours after I’d met her—had both used the word for me. It was, as best I could tell, an old Irish word for shaman or magic-maker, and it apparently meant something to this high king, because surprise filtered through his gaze.
“I thought I knew all the connected at Tara.”
Delighted, I chewed on connected as a new term for magic users. I liked it more than adepts, and wondered why it had fallen out of use. Then again, maybe it hadn’t in Ireland. It wasn’t like I’d grilled my mother on the subject.
While I chewed, the high king looked me over, his expression growing incrementally more dour. “What,” he finally asked, “are you wearing, gwyld?”
I said, “The fashion of my century,” then kicked myself in the ankle for setting up a question that had to be answered.
Except instead of looking like he needed answers, his shoulders relaxed and he let out a soft sigh. “And which of us is displaced? The Tara I see before me wavers and trembles in my sight. Have you called me forward, gwyld, or have I called you back?”
I scrunched my face. “Joanne. My name’s Joanne, not ‘gwyld.’ And I think I’m the one displaced. Who…when…are you?”
“My name is Lugh,” he said, “and today is the day I die.”
Chapter Four
“Gosh,” I said brightly, “good thing I didn’t show up tomorrow.” Then I wanted to kick myself, but I’d done that once already during this conversation. I didn’t want Lugh to think I had a nervous twitch.
Much better he should think I was an unbelievable idiot with a terrible sense of humor and no manners instead. I puffed my cheeks and stared at the wavering walls a moment before trying for a more human and humane response. “I mean, how awful, are you sure?”
Judging from his expression, I had not much improved my original comment. “The dark of winter is upon us, gwyld. My wife and mistress must be assuaged to bring back the light.”
“Has anybody suggested marriage counseling?” There was something wrong with me. I was usually mouthy, but not this much of a jackass. I took a moment for introspection and determined the cause of my behavior was probably the unmitigated terror sluicing through my veins. I’d meant to give Gary the Sight, not throw myself back through time. I had no clue how I’d done it or, more important, how to get home again. Lugh was attractive, but not worth staying displaced in time for. Especially since he was going to die soon. I held up a finger, asking for his patience, and knelt to curl myself up in a little ball, forehead against the grass.