The Crow of Connemara (31 page)

It might have been the two pints he'd already had, or perhaps the long and strange day, or perhaps the residue of the power and fire from his grandfather's stone. Colin could feel the muscles tightening in his face. “Y'know, Niall, if I ever find your sealskin on the beach, I might just take it and burn it.”

Niall sniffed in disdain. “Boyo, the problem with yeh is yer all mouth and no trousers.”

Colin could see Maeve over Niall's shoulder, glancing in their direction with a worried look on her face. “Look, just let me by . . .”

Niall didn't move. “Yer going to hide behind the lady's skirts? Are yeh that scared a'me that yer brickin' it?”

He knew that Niall was deliberately goading him. He knew that he shouldn't respond, that he should just press his lips together, grab his pint, and slide past him, knowing that Niall probably wouldn't do more than make another comment to his back.

He knew that. He started to move, and Niall pressed a hand against his chest, pushing him. “Niall!” Colin heard Maeve call in warning, but Niall ignored her and pushed at Colin again.

The shove seemed to click something over within Colin. He let all the anger, frustration, and confusion of the day take him.

He slammed his pint glass down on the bar, and he swung.

Colin's fist hit Niall square in the nose. He heard a distinct crack and saw blood smear across Niall's cheek as the man staggered back. Niall howled and threw a wild roundhouse punch in Colin's direction. Colin blocked Niall's fist with left forearm, though he winced with the force of the contact, and struck again, this time sweeping his fisted right hand across Niall's chin. He felt the contact, jarring his arm and splitting open the skin of his knuckles. Niall went down, suddenly, to his knees, his eyes glazed and his mouth open, his bottom lip drooling red.

By that time, hands had grabbed Colin from behind, and another of the islanders stepped between Niall and Colin as two other patrons helped Niall to his feet. Niall was cursing, spitting blood, and trying to lunge at Colin, but the others held him and dragged him away. “C'mon,” one of them said. “Yer bloody bolloxed, Niall. Let's take the air . . .” The door to the pub opened, and they escorted him outside, with Niall still shouting obscenities and fighting their restraining hands.

The hands around Colin relaxed, one of them slapping him affectionately on the back as he looked at his right fist. Blood was smeared over it, his own and Niall's. His knuckles throbbed. His left forearm was going to have a nasty bruise tomorrow. He saw Maeve making her way through the crowd around him. In front of him, she put her hands on her hips, shaking her head. “I hope yer feeling proud of yerself now,” she said, but a smile lurked in the corners of her lips.

“Actually, I am,” he told her. “Niall's done nothing but act like an ass toward me, and he deserved that.”

“And yeh think that come tomorrow he'll come up and give yeh a big hug all friendly-like, now that yeh've shown him what a real man you are?” Sarcasm rode heavily on her words.

“No,” he admitted sheepishly, then added with a smile: “But it still felt good.”

Maeve shook her head again. “Boys,” she said. She took his hand in hers. “Let's get yeh cleaned up. Why don't yeh get yer guitar and we'll walk back to the house? There's been enough excitement tonight.” She hugged him then, lifting on her toes to whisper in his ear. “I thought yeh did just grand, all around.”

He grinned at her.

He didn't sleep well that night. His dreams were wild and touched with violence and strange mythical characters. He awoke as false dawn was painting the horizon, slid from bed without waking Maeve, and left the house. He walked up the path toward Fionnbharr's mound. The air was still; mist-ghosts writhed and rose from the dewed ground. He strode through them, the cold wetness leaving droplets on his woolen pullover and beading his glasses so that he had to wipe them clean more than once. The mist seemed to cling to him with insistent fingers that didn't wish to let him pass. He thought he could hear a constant whispering around him, words in Gaelic that drifted just on the edge of comprehension.

It seemed he couldn't leave his dreams behind.

He shivered.

He half-expected to see Fionnbharr standing inside the circle of stone around Croc Deireadh, but the hawthorn stood lonely, its branches swaying in the ocean breeze, the leaves rustling softly. He remained carefully outside the ring of stone, walking uphill around them until he stood at the sea cliff, at the head of the path down to the beach. Fifty feet or more below him, waves battered at the rocks there, foam making lacy patterns on the gray-green water as it surged away, then in again.

Colin sat on a mossy rock at the top of the cliff, his thoughts as chaotic and torn as the waves below him.

The previous day . . . it had been nearly too much to process. Seeing Liam transform from seal to human and back; the blubbery soft fur of his sealskin; Maeve's insistence that she was the Morrígan or at least some shadow of that ancient goddess; the way she'd changed her appearance; Fionnbharr of the aos sí and his hints of death and violence; the way his grandfather's stone had reacted to the music last night; the way his voice had morphed into something he'd never heard before; the glimpses of another world he'd seen as he sang; his fight with Niall . . .

Now that the alcohol had worn off, here in the unrelenting light of a new day, all of it seemed distant and impossible.

He put his right hand in his pocket, wincing a bit as his bruised knuckles slid along the denim, and took out Rory's stone—his cloch, as he'd called it. He held it in his fingers, looking at it from all sides, staring into its emerald-hued depths as if it might hold the answers he sought.

Yes, maybe Maeve could have set all of this up, performed some elaborate deception involving special effects, sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors, whatever—but
why
? Why go to all that trouble to convince him that what she was saying was true? He had nothing to offer the Oileánach; he wasn't rich, and while his family wasn't poor, they were solidly middle class and entirely lacking influence in Irish affairs. He couldn't change anything for them. There wasn't any
reason
for such a complex hoax.

Why him? Why?

“Have I given yeh too much to think about, darlin'?” The voice made him start, standing abruptly and turning. Maeve was there, dressed in a red robe over her nightgown, her hands on her hips as she smiled at him. Her gaze slid from him to the stone he held, in its cage of silver; Colin closed his fingers around it.

“That's the cloch Rory took with him.” Maeve nodded toward Colin's fisted hand. “I remember it.”

“
You
remember it? That's not . . .” Colin began. He stopped.

“Aye,” she said. “'Twas me, or rather, me in another body. I knew yeh had the cloch. I could feel it, all along, and 'twas the cloch that called down the lights t'other night. When Rory found it, I thought it was for me and I took it, but I was wrong. 'Tis the bard it gives its power to, and yeh are the bard.”

Colin kept his hand fisted around the cloch. He could feel the wires of its cage pressing into his skin.

“I woke and yeh were gone,” Maeve continued. “I figured yeh might come here; the place does pull at one.” She nodded to the mound and the hawthorn. “'Tis them under there does it. Their sleep is restless lately, just like yers and mine. They can feel the storm a'coming.” She came up to him, standing so close that he could see the flecks of color in her irises. “How's the hand?”

He glanced down at the swollen knuckles of his hand. He flexed the fingers, revealing the cloch in its silver prison, grimacing slightly as the scabs on the two middle fingers pulled. “At least it won't hurt my guitar playing,” he said.

Her lips pulled upward. She touched his cheek, then took a step back from him. “Yeh still don't understand?”

He shook his head mutely.

“Give me yer hand,” she said. “The one with the cloch.” He held it out to her, and she clasped his hand between her own.

She closed her eyes and gave a long, slow exhalation. As she drew in the next breath, he saw the emerald began to glow between their fingers. The glow intensified, streams of greenish-white light streaming westward over the waves below. The radiance coalesced a few strides out, over thin air, an aerial whirlpool that slowly thinned and spread out, and in the growing vacant center framed by the light from the stone, Colin saw it—not misty and translucent, as it had been in the pub the night before, but solid and genuine, another landscape over which they seemed to be suspended.

He felt again that pull of the land, both familiar and strange to him: rolling hills like those he'd walked here in Ireland, alive with heather and gorse, the grass a lush, saturated green, the white dots of sheep punctuating the fields. There was a village, with turf smoke curling from the chimneys, so real he thought he could smell the burning peat, and among the cottages, people strolled a grassy lane. A dark forest lurked beyond the cleared fields, a forest like those that had once graced Ireland before they were all chopped down and destroyed; beyond the forest were taller, pine-clad mountains, old hills that reminded Colin of the Appalachians. It was either early dawn or evening there, and in the darkening sky, he could see the colorful sheets of an aurora like the one he'd seen above Inishcorr the last time he'd been here: low in the sky, and brighter and more saturated in color than the other aurora he'd seen.

There was a gasp and a moan behind him, and even as he turned, he saw the radiance from his grandfather's stone diminish and the phantom landscape disappeared into the brightening sky. “Maeve?” She was kneeling on the ground, hunched over, her arms wrapped around her waist as if she were sick. He crouched down in front of her, worried. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she breathed, the word a husk. She lifted her head, lines of weariness in the corners of her eyes and mouth. She still cradled herself, but whatever pain she felt seemed to be fading. “Yeh saw it?”

He nodded. “I saw another place. Maybe another time. How did you do that?”

“'Twas Talamh an Ghlas, the Green Land—'tis where I intend to take my people, since it's clear we ca'nah stay here and survive much longer.”

“Okay . . .” Colin said tentatively. “Then why...?”

Maeve was shaking her head even as he spoke, sitting on the rock he'd sat on before. “I opened a wee window, that's all. I could let us look in, but even that was exhausting. It
hurts
to handle the power in the cloch, yer stone—hurts more than I care to tell yeh. To actually open a door into that place, a portal . . .” Her sigh trembled. He watched her fingertips slide over the emerald in his hand, like a priest touching a sacred relic. “I ca'nah do that. Not alone.” She was staring at him, and he found himself backing away from her and closing his fist around the cloch again, shaking his head.

“I can't help you with that,” he heard himself saying.

“Yeh can,” she answered. “Yeh just don't realize it. Though doing so will hurt yeh far more than doing this much hurts me.”

“Why?”

She laughed, a brief amusement, and held out her right hand. “Yeh can help me stand up, first. Then yeh can help me walk back to our house, and yeh can help me eat some of Keara's lovely scones and drink her tea until I recover my strength. Can yeh manage that?”

He was still shaking his head, still trying to believe what she'd told him, but he took her hand and helped her to stand. She
was
weak; he had to support her. “Thank yeh, love,” she told him. She leaned her head on his shoulder, embracing him. “I
do
love yeh, Colin,” she whispered. “I want yeh to know that and believe it, because yeh'll need the truth of it. I know all this confuses and worries yeh, but do yeh at least feel that much? Do yeh believe me?”

Colin took a breath. He kissed the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her hair, and he could feel the certainty inside him, solid and unyielding. He knew what Mrs. Egan would say, that she'd ensorcelled him, worked a spell on him to make him feel that way, but he couldn't deny the growing affection he had for her, despite the impossibilities she'd shown him. Part of him still denied what he'd seen here, still refused to believe the evidence of his senses.
She can't be what she says she is. She can't be the Morrígan, she can't be the Máire my grandfather met. The Irish gods are myth and legend and dust.

Yet he couldn't deny that he felt more drawn to this strange woman—no matter what she claimed to be—than any of the other women he'd been involved with. He tightened his hold on Maeve.

“Yeah,” he told her. “I do. Come on, let's go back to the house.”

Still supporting her, his arm around her waist, he led the way down the path.