“That would spell my doom.”
“Yeah, but I’m going to do that anyway. The cauldron’s been destroyed, Morrígan. The time loop is closing. All the hours and days that were bent wrongly to make a shape for you are coming to an end. You’re going to die,” I said flatly, “but how you die is up to you.”
She snarled, “In battle, if I must.”
“If that’s what you want.”
By all rights she should have charged me then. She might even have gotten lucky, because for the first time since the fight began I stopped paying attention to her, and turned all my focus on the magic within me.
Healer’s magic. Warrior’s magic. Two sides of a coin that couldn’t even see the other. I’d been running around the outer edge of that coin for over a year, falling one direction or the other depending on which kind of power I needed.
I reached into that mental image and plucked out the coin.
The sword had always been magic. It had always been able to accept more magic, lighting up with my power when I poured it in. It had been my own healing that had struggled against that amalgamation, but not anymore. Power fused, warrior and healer no longer at odds. Ravens settled on my shoulder: Raven on my left, above my heart, and Wings on my right. Something snapped into place behind my heart, a thick pinch. For an instant I thought of my younger self, and bid her a farewell.
Then I lifted my gaze, feeling as though it blazed.
The Morrígan flinched.
I banished the shield made by my talismans and instead came at her with a blade in one hand and a fist full of glowing power in the other. For the first time she retreated in full, almost running, and then running in fact. Running for the Lia Fáil, the source of power and the source of taint within Tara. I followed more sedately, confident of Tara’s ability to keep the Morrígan within its boundaries. Not that she intended to flee: she got to the screaming stone and gashed her arm open, letting blood splash over the white rock.
“Come! Come now! Your enemy stands at the heart of Tara! Her blood will bind it to you forever! Come now, my love!”
I got there before her Master did. Maybe he would never have come at all. I didn’t know, nor did I much care. She stood at the stone, wounded forearm pressed against it, even as I walked up to her and whispered, “I really am sorry about this,” and thrust my hand into her chest, searching for the power I knew lay there.
It burned cold when I found it. Cold like the space between stars, cold like the blizzard I’d struggled through in hunting the wendigo. Cold like something beyond death, because even dead things eventually responded to ambient temperatures. Cold like a power that could lift an extraordinary mortal into something nearly—nearly—immortal, and hold it there for millennia on end. Cold so immutable it seemed nothing could affect it.
But I had warmth. The persistence of life, the outrageous chaotic excitement that Áine, Brigid’s mistress, embodied. The burn of possibilities, all of the things that Brigid had offered me. Two sides of a coin, the one unable to survive without the other. The Morrígan had been doomed before we even began to fight.
Fire’s sources might be frozen and quench the flame, but a thaw always came, in the end.
I made a fist and lifted the ice from within the Morrígan, and it shattered into black dust as I removed it from her chest.
She screamed, and she died, and the Lia Fáil’s light went out.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The darkness was tremendous. Even with my sword still lit blue and bright and full of magic, there was nothing in the world but dark. I was a matchstick, not even a candle, just a firecracker popping sparks in the night. Even that light sputtered, my outrageous confidence suddenly cut down to size by the sheer intensity of black.
The silence was even worse. The stone’s scream had ended, hacked off as brutally as its light. If the fast-moving moat had whispered with water, it did no longer. My heartbeat echoed in my ears, each thump crisp and clear and clean, the only sound in the world.
Gary, somewhere in the near distance, inhaled to speak. My hand made a hatchet, cutting him off. I did not want whatever was out there in the dark—because something was out there, cold and malignant and so very, very angry—I did not want that thing’s attention brought to my friend. Bad enough to have caught its attention myself. I would not let it notice Gary. So we stood there, he and I, waiting in the failing light of my courage.
Ravens began to call.
A few of them at first, and from far away. Then more, closer, and more again. I’d thought the Morrígan had come on raven wings, but the blackness was filled with them now, their voices shrieking and their scent that of carrion. My blade’s blue light glittered on their feathers and reflected in shining black eyes, but could not distinguish between where they ended and the darkness began. My heartbeat was no longer loud enough to be heard over their screams of laughter and rage, and for a hollow moment I wondered if it was even still beating. I had been afraid dozens of times in the past year, but I had never been so cold with it. An hour ago I’d been ready to face the Master, but my confidence and resolution were bottled inside me, frozen by dark and raven calls. He was in there, my enemy. Somewhere in the blackness, and I was the only point of light. He could see me, and I could not see him.
The reckless impulse to extinguish the sword flickered through me and almost made me laugh. “Right,” I whispered beneath the ravens, “right. Turn off the light so I can’t see him coming. Good idea, Jo. Very smart.” Mocking myself made me feel ever so slightly better, which in comparison to numb, motion-stealing fear, was a huge improvement.
Claws tightened on my shoulders. A hard squeeze, neither warning nor teasing, but seeking comfort instead. My Raven, scared, which I’d never imagined he could be. And on my other shoulder, Wings, his aged feet flexing and loosening. He leaned forward, wings spread a few inches, and though when his mouth opened he made no sound, I had the impression he was—not laughing, but spitting. Spitting in the eye of the dark.
Because he had been here before, I realized. He had done this. He had faced the Master, even if Raven and I had not, and he’d lived to tell about it. “Yeah,” I said, very softly. “Yeah, okay, let’s do this thing.” I took a step past the Lia Fáil. Just one step, but it meant I could move, and that was enough to shore up my faltering confidence. Healing magic started to flow through me more freely, warming the chill, steadying the sick patter of my heart. “Your go-to girl is dead,” I whispered to the Master. “It’s finally just you and me. How ’bout I get a chance to see your ugly face?”
The thunder of wings ended, and I went cold again. I thought I should be braver, not running hot and cold with passions and panic, but maybe keeping going into the dark when I was terrified was what bravery was. My steps drifted left. Heart-side of the body, where the Master had always called to me from. Rattler, still weary, coiled at the base of my skull, waiting for me to need the speed he could offer. I didn’t know how to fight amorphous blackness, but hell, I hadn’t known how to fight most of what I’d faced. Learning on the job, that’s what they called it. I just needed to learn this one last lesson. Rattler’s speed wouldn’t hurt, nor the ravens on shoulders, nor the touch of Brigid’s fire still burning within me. I had my shields, my sword, my magic and I had Gary at my back. I knew I would die to protect him, and that was when my fear fell away.
The Master came to me as an old man, stepping free of the night all bent and broken with age. Thin hair drifted over his shoulders, white against a cloak of raven feathers, and his gaze was mild and blue. Tattoos banded the wasting flesh of his upper arms. He carried a walking stick and wore a shapeless white tunic and no shoes beneath the feathered cloak.