His voice sent shivers through me, resonant and deep. “I’m looking for someone,” I said.
The giant swelled, his color fading, then he settled back. “A woman.”
“Her name is Meryl Dian.”
He shuddered as he flowed into a standing position. Thick hair sprouted from his head into long tangles above deep-set eyes that glittered in hues of storm and shadow. A blue robe flared out of his back and across his shoulders. I stepped back.
“What is this?” I asked.
His entire body spasmed. “Naming is a deep matter.”
“Dammit, where am I?” I asked.
Yellow essence swirled, and the first incarnation reappeared, wrapping his golden cloak about him with a smug smile. “You’ve danced on my borders many times, but never crossed. How come you now with a sliver of the Wheel?”
“What borders? What do you mean?”
The figure moved nearer, essence rising like a shadow. “You warp the Ways. You are not worthy to wield such Power. Surrender it to me.”
I held the spear across my chest. “No.”
He shivered, his body fragmented, then pulled back together. He extended a jeweled hand. “Surrender it.”
The gesture felt oddly indifferent, as if he had merely asked me for some small token. He didn’t look happy. I sought his eyes, but their shifting colors made it difficult. He made no move to take the spear. Despite his enormous essence, whatever he was, he seemed unable to act. Feeling more confident, I hefted the spear. “You can’t take it from me, can you? You’d have done that by now.”
The unsettling eyes remained fixed on me as his skin blurred and shifted, swelling as he fleshed into the burly giant. He sat before me again, looking down at me with a feral gleam. “What value has this woman that you dare the Ways?”
Talking about the value of anything would be a dangerous question from a normal fey. I had no doubt a mistaken answer could be dangerous. “What value should be placed on a life?”
The giant grunted, as if confirming something in his own mind. “You would wager your life for something that you cannot assign value?”
“It’s not my place to wager.”
The giant laughed, a deep rumble that I felt in my own chest. He swept into the form of the blue-robed man. The spear tugged at my hand, and I tightened my grip. “Sorry. I’m keeping it.”
His body undulated and the roar of crashing waves broke through the mist. “You do not know what you risk.”
I had to crane my neck to see his face. “I never do, buddy. Are we done? Because I don’t have time for this.”
His enormous hand reached for me. I instinctively held up the spear. He paused, shuddered, and the wild man was back. “You dare much. The living disturb this place to no good end.”
I tilted the tip of the spear away from him. He was enormous. No need to provoke him any more than I had. “I’m here to take the living back with me.”
Again, the disconcerting shudder, and the blue-robed man reappeared. “In this, then, we are aligned. I will be obliged to you if you succeed.”
“Can you point me in the right direction?” I asked.
The golden-cloaked king shuddered into view. “The Wheel of the World turns as It will. It is not mine to lead even a sliver of It.”
The wild man returned. “The wielder wheels and is wheeled but chooses his own path. We are the Wheel and Its instrument.”
The robed man towered up. “The Ways seal and unseal. A needle binds even as it pierces.”
A great wind rose. The figure pulsated as its forms sought to dominate each other, then spun outward in a flash of white. It vanished. He vanished. They. Whatever the hell it was. The mist wall wavered and dissipated.
The dagger in my right boot twisted in its sheath, digging into my ankle. A spell maintained it as a short fighting knife most of the time, but it changed shape through some means I didn’t understand. Heat emanated from the hilt as I withdrew it. It squirmed in my hand and stretched into the full length of a sword. The last time it did that, I was in a fight for my life.
I faced an opening in a wall of standing stones. A brief glimpse of Nigel leaning over Ceridwen flashed by. The scene slid to a vision of the Civil War monument on the Common, then another of the townhouses on Beacon Hill. The perspective never remained for long, as if the opening itself was in constant motion. My stomach did a little flip. I was looking at Boston through the perspective of the fairy ring. I was in the hazy column of essence, really and truly beyond the veil. I had entered TirNaNog.
CHAPTER 31
An enormous circle of standing stones surrounded me, enclosing several acres of beaten grass. Granite lintels ran along the tops of the standing stones except for a single break in the circle opposite my position. In the center, nine trilithons stood, arches formed of two standing stones with a lintel across their tops. They made a crescent around a towering pillar stone tapering to a height of several meters. I had seen paintings of such places, fantasies I thought, of what an active stone circle would look like. It was Stonehenge on steroids.
A woman in an ancient druidic robe brushed past me and approached the portal to Boston. When she stepped between the standing stones, gray spots of essence materialized like a barrier. She pressed forward, muttering, and melted through to the other side. A perplexed look came over her face as she stared at a Boston police officer, and her body shield activated as the scene swept away from me. However she made it through, it looked a lot less painful than when I had done it.
Around the circle, the other portals between the standing stones showed a steep grass embankment outside the circle. A few standing stones framed an opalescent haze of essence that resonated the same way as the fairy ring back on Boston Common. Across the inner field, the Dead of TirNaNog moved from portal to portal, attempting to walk through, but except for a few with powerful body essences, they met the same resistance I had earlier. Two portals framed visions of rioting on the other side, and another showed a huge bonfire. Around me, fey of all kinds gravitated to the portals, pushing at them like the druidess had done.
I paused by a trilithon in the center. The lone breach in the outer circle of lintel stones aligned with the back of the crescent-shaped arrangement of center stones. A long line of standing stones marched off into the wide field beyond the stone circle. Stone circles have a causeway approach and an entry portal, and this one was no different. Bigger by a factor of ten, but classic.
The place resonated essence in a pale shadow of what I knew, except for two things. The pillar stone at the center shone stark blue-white, an intense concentration of Power. And a trailing streak of two body signatures — Powell’s and Meryl’s. Their trail led from the Boston portal, around the center of the henge, and out the entrance portal. Powell had come to find one of the Dead and taken Meryl with her outside the circle. I followed them to the gap in the circle.
Beyond the two large stones that flanked the entrance, an earthen embankment surrounded the entire stone circle, rising higher than my head. A ditch lay beyond that, then another embankment, not as high as the first, but still taller than I was. And another ditch beyond it, and another embankment, and on and on with each embankment becoming progressively smaller, while each ditch became shallower. The causeway itself ran straight and flat, lined with paired standing stones for nearly a quarter mile. As the embankments to either side became low enough to see over, a green field came into view and spread for miles outside the standing stones of the avenue. A breeze danced over the grass, sending flowing waves over the surface that caught afternoon sunlight and tossed it back.
At the end of the causeway, the hope that I would find Meryl and leave quickly faded. A few scattered people roamed the field. They had essence signatures with the distinct edge of TirNaNog about them like the Dead within the circle. On the edge of sight, a forest line crouched in several places, dark and motionless. Except for the Dead moving toward me, the only other movement was a dark smudge on the horizon. It was too far off to make out details, but the essence within it shone brighter than everything around it. Whoever was out there was alive.