Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (86 page)

Alabion
, she gasped.

Yes, my Fawn. Thackery led us here, said it would be safe. Put aside your wonder and fear for the moment. There is a child that needs you
, reminded the Wolf.

Others needed her, too. Thackery appeared as if from a puff of sorcery and startled her with a hug. He cried a little, as did she. Past his shoulder, the trio of those who had risked themselves for her in Menos rested in trampled grasses around a campfire. Mouse and Vortigern hailed her quickly and then went back to tending something on the ground, while Kanatuk leaped up and threw himself into her embrace.

“You are safe!” he said. “We are all safe. I don’t know which spirits to thank: Crow for her cleverness, Eagle for his bravery, or Seal for her luck. I don’t know who to thank, so I have thanked them all.”

A seal…a final task
, recalled Morigan, if the Wolf’s fiery insistence stirring her wasn’t enough to goad her ahead. Unfailingly, the bees told her where to go, and she separated from the two men and wandered over toward the fire. On the other side of the flames, closest to Mouse and Vortigern, a child was lying atop the bracken. She was wrapped in what cloaks the company had among them—minus the one that had been spared for Caenith’s loincloth—and was as pale and pretty as a princess of ice, even with the welts upon her skin. The child appeared to be sleeping, though the Wolf’s anxiety, the long face of Mouse, and the even deathlier expression of her father told
that this was a slumber from which she could not be stirred. The last sleep, the long blink before the darkness. As Mouse daubed Macha with a rag, Morigan could almost hear the girl’s life sliding away like the beads of water over her flesh.
Drip…drop…dead in an hourglass
, the bees lamented. Morigan refused this prognostication. After seeing Macha’s truth, after knowing how this child’s life was merely a transit from one tragedy to another, surely, this could not be a proper end.

Morigan went to her. Absorbed in the girl’s care, Mouse did not immediately acknowledge Morigan; the bees murmured of a delicious sympathy flowing from nursemaid to patient.
What did she see?
wondered the witch. A cast-off child like herself? Morigan did not interrupt, and after a while, Vortigern took his daughter’s hand and gently pulled her away.

“The big man says that you can help her,” said Mouse. “She deserves to live. Even if she doesn’t want to.”

Morigan nodded.

Her words are wise
, whispered the Wolf.
Daughters of the Moon were not healers as the West would know them, they could not play with flesh and bone like clay; their curatives ran deeper
.
To the soul, my Fawn. For what else keeps us in this world but that desire to live? Macha’s desire, her flame, is weak, almost out. If you can rekindle it, if you can remind her that this world still has love for her, then her flesh may mend itself
.

I shall try
, promised Morigan.
Even if I don’t understand what you are asking
.

Oh, but you do
, contended the Wolf, and his shadow was suddenly behind her.
You were my reason for crossing Geadhain; Thackery’s, too. You lured us as naturally as the moon calls to any wolf. You are an enchantress, though when a magik is as deep as yours is, it is no longer a talent but a characteristic of what you are. I understand you now, my Fawn. Perhaps better than you would see yourself. You find what is special, what is secret, what is sacred, and you bring it out for the pain and betterment of whom you touch. You healed me of loneliness, a curative no magik or fate has ever brought. You gave an old man the inspiration to discover his greatness again. You broke the chains in that Northman’s mind—as rusted with blood and murder as they were—and discovered the man inside. You found the withered tie of family between a man long dead and a child he thought he had lost. Your very actions are miracles.
You weave and bless the spirits of those around you into a radiant music, as sweet as the summer winds or freshest scents I have chased, and you do all this without realizing your own wonder. Look to these souls that you have touched. Look, my Fawn
.

A strange fear stalled her, an unwillingness to accept her own power. From face to face, her silver stare flashed, and even in the cagiest of her companions, she beheld gratitude. Five souls, each from the unlikeliest of places, the most jaded and dark of histories, all somehow drawn into a circle of fellowship.

Did I do this?
she wondered.

Aye
, insisted the Wolf.
Whether you see this now or will see it later, Macha is here by your Will. Another note in your song…acting through me, or through a pity you planted, for I was not the man who would have saved her before you, but an angry Wolf. Go now, finish your song
.

A song?

A song
.

A song
, agreed the bees, and they burst through her skin with stingers of light, chiming as they went and washing the fire, the woods, and even her bloodmate in silvery brightness. What the companions experienced was a sky that went swiftly dark, a woman who glowed pale and white as a newborn star, a prickling breath of bells upon their ears, and a choir of ageless high voices. How many sang or what words were used would never be understood; there was only harmony, a humming peace that froze all thought and instilled rapture. Caenith kept a hint of his senses and held the warm radiance that his bloodmate had become, feeling the woman inside shivering from the vibrations of her glorious magik; she was not quite in this world, and he would not let her slip from it.

She is in the Dreaming again: the neither here nor there of everything. Like a foggy sea, the grayness parts and there lies an island, small, white, and bare, and upon its shores, a child much the same. Hastily, her bees courier her to the island in a silver cloud; the island is distant and then it is present, the child now before her. If she has a body here, she cannot see it, though she sits on the ashy sand as if she does, and the child looks at her as if she does, too
.

“You are bright,” says Macha
.

Here, there are no words or languages, yet their souls speak fluently. Morigan replies, “You, too, are bright, though the darkness eats at you.”

For this is an ageless soul she speaks with, one of the oldest and wisest of the great cycles: a spirit that has been in and out of many bodies, each of them destined for magnificence. Not what mortals would claim to be greatness, but the true acts of virtue: a mother who has sacrificed herself in a fire to save her children; a man who died in the iron mines getting others—slaves and masters—to safety; a contemplative of the Southlands beyond Brutus’s kingdom who would not raise his hand to violence even as the sword of a man black with fury came for him. Selfless acts, in every iteration of life in which this soul has manifested. What calls herself Macha is so dazzlingly pure, and yet this last tortured existence has dulled her light
.

“I am tired,” says the girl, and pulls her glowing legs up to herself, withdrawing. “No more pain. No more watching what I love die. No more dying, either. I want to go. I want to forget. I want to fade.”

In her omniscience, Morigan knows what the girl means. Of the endless sleep, the great mystery into which all things can go. If Macha heads there, she will never return; she will be gone forever
.

“But there are ones who care for you,” she puts forth
.

“And I care for them, but I cannot stay only for others. That is the story of my soul. You know that.”

Macha smiles sadly. Her features are blurry, as if she is many persons at once—tall, short, bearded, smooth, old, young—all of them smiling, though. The soul stands and waves to the traveler. She reaches for Macha, but her hands are not hands, only nothingness, and she cannot hold the soul here if it chooses to leave, not with any of her power. This isn’t right, she thinks. Not another death, not when so much has been lost. Where is this soul’s happiness? Is that all they are meant for, to live and suffer, to never know love without sacrifice?

No, the bees whisper, and her headless head fills with a premonition: a stare of green ice, a cold kiss of passion, a frosty blanket that is a man’s arms around her, and the sense of perfection in that moment, even as all else descends into ruin. Short and quick is the vision, like a dagger to the gut, and just as effective
.

“Wait!” cries Morigan
.

“What is it?” asks Macha wearily. Bits of her are sparkling away
.

“Stay! I have seen it! A reason! If you remain in this life and the many others to come, if you persevere in this cursed journey you have been living, I promise you glory! You will have a reason, a destiny that will fill you wider than the greatest sea, will stir you more than any pleasure you have known!”

The spirit stops fading; half in, half out of time. “What reason?”

“Love. A love as treasured as mine. A love that the world will honor. A love to last for always.”

“You promise grand things, witch.”

“I am the Daughter of Fate, the weaver of destinies. I know what I have seen. It is no mistake that our paths have crossed, that our souls have met. They will meet again, in a time when Geadhain is at her weakest, when I am an aged memory, and it will be you who must right her wounds.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

Even with her omnipotence, Morigan cannot assure herself of what she witnessed, and the vision is crumbling into vagueness. Only she knows that it is important, perhaps the most important thing ever. This soul cannot go into the great mystery. It must stay
.

“Stay, and you will know bounty and purpose. Stay, and one day you will save us all and live to share the light with one you love, in that one blessed life. I promise you this, if only you endure.”

The soul of many faces is crying with each one, its glittering tears falling like stardust. Momentously, it considers her words, weighing the cost of any future loneliness against the dream of this distant time. Yet it is a brave soul, and a dreamer’s soul—it had to be to suffer as it did—and it accepts the witch’s offer. The soul gives its hand, now solid again, to the witch
.

Morigan knows that the words must be spoken. She asks, “It is sworn, then?”

“It is sworn.”

With that, the soul-pact is made, that these two will forever be entangled until the ordainment—of an icy man’s love and a calamitous time—comes to pass. The soul is in Macha’s shape once more, and it hugs the body that Morigan feels and cannot see
.

“Shall we return?” suggests the witch
.

“Yes.”

Now they can hear the enchanting music to which their companions outside the Dreaming listen. And the bees gather them up, as tightly as they hold each other, and whirl them into the grayness, through tides of space and time, and into the circle of the bright souls who pray for them
.

Cruelly the light and song ended, leaving Morigan’s audience stunned and mournful. She was again in the dark spooky outskirts of Alabion, with the heat of her lover behind her and the salt of his tears—which the bees could taste—upon her shoulder. For a time, they were all at a loss. Each of their memories was inconsistent, as if they had fallen asleep with their eyes open and had a beautiful and melancholy dream. Morigan was particularly afflicted by forgetfulness. She remembered a flash of a white island, a girl who was and yet was not Macha, and words that made no sense to her at the moment. Was there a vision? A dream within a dream? she speculated, as the truth was not so clear.

Macha’s whimper snapped them all from their reveries.

“She stirs!” exclaimed Mouse.

The company rushed to the child, who was not awake or miraculously free of scars, and only a little less pale. Though at least she was making the sweaty squirms one made when a fever was breaking, at least she was showing signs of life, which was more than she had done in the last few days. When she thrashed in her throes and clasped Morigan’s knee, the witch recalled a fragment of her travel in the Dreaming: a promise for happiness and love had been forged in the gray lands beyond. She cupped the hand, kissed it, and whispered to the sleeping child that this promise began today.

IV

While the rest of Geadhain recovered from the storm, the company camped in the untouched shade of Alabion and finally found a moment of peace to savor. Alabion could be frightening, yet it was also quite enchanting. Full of harvest and game to those who knew how to brave its entanglement, and there was nary a secret that Caenith appeared to have forgotten in his thousand or so years away. Indeed, without venturing too deeply, he showed the
companions the safest of mushrooms and plants to eat before leaving them with the dead man to sniff out beasts to roast over the coals at night.

Once the gathering was done and those who stayed behind had eaten their fill of berries and roots, Thackery suggested taking a constitutional. He proved to have a bit of a woodsman in him, or was familiar with the area, as he was only a little lost as he led them along the forest’s edge. With Macha resting in his arms, he and the others headed northward; they cheered with joy as they came to a babbling stream spilling out of the woods. Thackery left Macha in Mouse’s care, and the two groups—men and women—washed and refreshed themselves at opposite banks. Morigan noticed the old man glancing off rather often, and followed his stares to a misshapen mound like logs or stones long ago taken over by moss, plants, and time.