The Crow of Connemara (37 page)

The squadron sang an old tune as they marched: “Come away with me . . .” Their massed voices were like a gale wind whistling through bending trees.

They headed for Regan's
Pub
with a mission.

Colin paid the bartender for the pint and went into a shadowed corner of the bar to sulk and think.

The phone call to Jen and the way Lucas was steadfastly ignoring him left a taste in his mouth more bitter than the Guinness. He'd come to Regan's both to listen to Lucas' group and think over the paths he could take. Despite Superintendent Dunn's admonitions, he was still considering ways to get to Inishcorr. Perhaps he could bribe a local fishing boat to take him out, but it was even more probable that any attempt to do that would result in the locals sending word to the authorities about this American trying to reach Inishcorr, and
that
could only be a disaster, leading to questions, possibly arrest, and even revocation of his visa and deportation—not to mention that even if some boat captain would do that, they would be as blind as the patrol vessels in the fog around the island.

He could steal a boat and make the attempt himself, but he wasn't a sailor and didn't know how to handle anything beyond a simple rowboat—even if he could manage the long row out to Inishcorr, he doubted that a rowboat or one of the local currachs would be able to handle ocean waves with a rank amateur such as himself at the oars. He would more likely end up drowning than reaching Inishcorr.

And staying in Ballemór was looking more and more like an unpleasant experience. Mrs. Egan had made her suspicion and distrust of him plain, and as Lucas aptly demonstrated, all the locals looked at him as if he were already branded an Oileánach. The fiddler had made it obvious that he didn't want to talk to Colin and that there was going to be no offer to play with the group again.

He felt like a novice chess player playing against a skilled and relentless Fate, who blocked all his strategies. Rooks, knights, and bishops hemmed him in while the queen lurked ominously behind the ranks of pawns. There were no good moves, only less-bad ones, and checkmate was inevitable.

Then, it seemed, a storm broke in the street outside . . .

“What the feck...?” someone shouted from a table near the door. Colin glanced up, startled, the foamy tan head of Guinness at his lips. Patrons were already rising from their seats as the door of the pub rattled loudly in its frame, as if a hurricane were blowing in the square outside. The sound boomed. Lucas' group stopped playing in mid-song, and the muffled shouts from outside became audible, as well as the brittle sound of calling trumpets. There was a new, metallic sound as well, like screws and bolts being shaken in a giant tin can.

An ethereal chorus of low voices seemed to be singing “Come Away With Me” somewhere close by.

Colin set down his pint. He pushed his glasses up his nose.

The door blew open, the planks splintering as if kicked in by a massive giant's foot. A cold, thick mist blew into the pub, scattering napkins, place mats, and the sheet music on the bandstand, overturning pint glasses that crashed and broke on the floor, and causing those still seated to duck away from the flying debris. Curses and disoriented shouts erupted from all around the tavern. Colin shivered at the chill as his pint spilled over the tabletop and his lap. The mist wrapped around him; he could no longer see anything more than an arm's length away. He heard voices in the fog, voices that called his name.

“Colin Doyle, 'tis yerself we've come for. Colin Doyle . . .”

He backed away, his spine against a wall of the pub. Ghostly hands plucked at his sweater. “Colin Doyle, yeh ride with us . . .”

“Let me go!” he shouted back at the voice, flailing at the invisible hands. The mist in front of him cleared momentarily, and in the clear space, he saw a face he knew, though the man was clad in armor and a helm covered his hair. “Fionnbharr?” he managed to croak out.

“Aye. The same.” Fionnbharr leaned forward, his nose crinkling under the helm. “Yeh still have the smell of death around yeh. 'Tis fainter now, but never mind.” Fionnbharr held out his hand, the arm clad in mail, the hand gloved in leather. “Come! The Morrígan wants yeh.”

“Maeve—she's all right?”

“'Tis fine she is, but let herself tell yeh. Take me hand . . .”

Colin took Fionnbharr's hand in his own, and with the touch, reality did a reel and jig around him. Where the mist had once concealed everything, he now saw clearly within it, while it was the pub's interior that seemed to be clad in fog and shadow. The fairy host was all around him: fair and tall men and women clad in armor and bearing shields and spears, while the patrons of Regan's became pale and ghostly; on the bandstand, Lucas was but a specter holding a fiddle in dead hands. With Colin still clasping Fionnbharr's fingers, the lord of the aos sí gestured with his head and the host turned as one, leaving the pub.

Outside, in the square, the moon seemed nearly as bright as the sun, and there were more of the aos sí, who cheered as Fionnbharr emerged from the building. Colin blinked. A monument to the soldiers of the Irish Revolution stood at the top of Ballemór Square—a stone obelisk inscribed with the names of the locals who had taken part—but now a Galway hooker had been impaled upon it, the top of the plinth jammed into its hull so the boat hung at an awkward angle atop it. The red sails flapped uselessly in the night breeze, and a chain ran down over the railing of the ship to an anchor halfway embedded in the pavement of the street.

Fionnbharr's grip on his arm remained tight. “Yeh stay wit' us,” the man intoned as he gestured with his free hand to the others. “We've done as we promised. The Tuatha de Danann ride back now!” he shouted to the company. “Back to the mound! Back to Cnoc Deireadh!”

With that, the outside world seemed to shift and boil around them, the lines of the houses and buildings of Ballemór bending as if fluid and streaking away from them. A fierce gale wind blew from behind the host, taking them up as Colin saw the soldiers of the Tuatha de Danann leap into the saddles of their ghostly horses. Fionnbharr mounted as well, still holding onto Colin's arm. Colin thought he'd pull him up into the saddle, but Fionnbharr called out something in Gaelic and horns blared again. In the next moment, the host was moving, with Colin drifting weightlessly alongside Fionnbharr's steed even as he struggled in fright and called out to Fionnbharr. “Don't let go of me! And for God's sake, lift me up!”

“For which god's sake?” Fionnbharr laughed in reply. “If 'tis yers, I should let yeh drop, since it's the crucified bastard who's caused all our troubles.”

But Fionnbharr didn't drop him. Instead, the host swept over the land faster than any earthly horse or any car, rushing above the streets and out into the heather-blanketed hills, a spectral cloud of silver that rippled through the valleys and was gone again. With Colin gaping at the landscape below, the host flowed over the Connemara escarpments and out over the gray, moonlight-glimmering water. They passed phosphorescent whitecaps, dipping so low that Colin thought he could hear the hooves of their ghostly horses splashing the sea underneath them. A white wall slowly rose on the horizon, a storm cloud resting on the ocean with a patrol boat slicing the water before it. The host—clamoring, shouting, singing, the trumpets blaring, swept over and around the ship in a moment. With a shout of triumph, the host pierced the dense wall of fog that surrounded Inishcorr.

And it was then that Fionnbharr released Colin's arm and let him fall.

29

C
OLIN HEARD FIONNBHARR'S LOW, sinister laugh even as he felt the sidhe lord's fingers loosen around his arm. Then, abruptly, Colin felt himself falling, flailing in the gray tendrils of the fog as he shouted in mingled alarm, fear, and confusion. He had no idea how far he was going to fall, nor what he'd hit at the end of it. He wasn't sure how long he fell—it seemed an eternity, but it might have been but a moment. He waited for Fionnbharr to swoop down and grab him again; he waited for the ground to rise up and smash him.

His scream filled his ears, a wail that gashed the fog-hidden night sky.

The impact of intensely cold water shocked the breath from him and stung his back. He lost his glasses, torn from his face by the violence of the fall and the jarring impact with the sea. He gasped and inhaled saltwater as he sank under the waves even as he desperately tried to reach the surface again to tread water. He came up coughing, desperate for air. Waves came out of the moon-touched fog, lifting and tossing him, then leaving him in a trough while the sea seemed to heave itself into dark gray-green and shifting cliffs around him, harrowing in his myopic sight. Somewhere close at hand, he could hear waves breaking savagely on rocks, the direction confused and muffled by the fog. Colin's clothing was soaked, the weight of it dragging him down again even as he kicked frantically to keep his head above water. His thoughts raced: should he try to shed the woolen sweater and sodden jeans, his sneakers? But no, wouldn't the frigid water then just sap his strength even faster?

Panic made his heart a hammer thrashing frantically against his ribs.

He was going to die here, just off Inishcorr's shore, and he suspected that death would come quickly. He wondered what it would feel like to go under that last time, his lungs burning as he fought not to take that inevitable breath, and finally, helpless, opening his mouth and gulping in sea water and drowning, the world fading away . . .

Something touched his foot, nudging it, and he reacted in terror, imagining a shark's snout bumping him and circling away, only to return with its enormous jaws opening to rip and tear at his legs. Another nudge, and then a shape emerged from the water: slick dark fur, polished eyes blacker than the darkness around him, a whiskered snout regarding him: a bull seal. It barked once at him, almost angrily, swimming under Colin's outstretched arm. Another bull surfaced with a flip of its tail, shook water from its head, and slid quickly under Colin's other arm. “Okay,” Colin said, but the effort of speaking started him coughing. He clung to the seals desperately, hoping that he understood their intentions. They began swimming hard through the surging water, with Colin kicking weakly in an effort to help them, and his cold-numbed fingers hanging on to them as best he could.

It seemed an eternity, this slow progress. The waves were starting to overwhelm him, and he could barely keep his grip on the slippery fur of the seals when the sound of the crashing surf grew louder. The larger of the bull seals gave another coughing bark, and the next wave broke white over Colin. He felt himself tumbling, lost and gasping for breath in the chaos of the water, but then realized that his body was scraping against rocky sand. He put his feet down hard and found himself standing chest-deep in surging water. He blinked, squinting as he tried to see through the fog and the faint moonlight that filtered through. He thought he glimpsed a rock-strewn beach as the receding wave attempted to suck him back into the sea.

The seals had vanished, and his confused mind wondered if they'd ever really been there in the first place. Colin staggered, trying to hold his position, then the next wave hit him noisily from behind, taking him briefly underwater again as he thrashed at the tan foam, kicking and paddling until his sneakered feet found the pebbled bottom once more. He pushed forward against the surf as it rushed back out again, stiff-legged against the pull of the waves and staggering toward the beach. He gasped with the effort, the cold, and the water-filled anchor of his clothing. He was waist-deep, then knee-deep, then he had collapsed onto the shingle, pulling himself on his belly out of the reach of the waves. He lay there, taking in great gulps of spray-wet air.

He felt hands on his arms on either side, and he let them pull him up and support him. He shook his head, doglike, drops of water splashing. He squinted at his rescuers as they stepped away from him. Both men were entirely naked. “Niall? Liam?”

“Aye,” Liam answered. “And here—yeh might be wanting these.” He handed Colin his glasses. Colin took them gratefully. The frames were bent and a bit awry, but at least he could see again. Colin blinked away the burn of the saltwater. “Thanks,” he said. “To both of you. You saved my life. How did you know...?”

“We were told to wait for yeh here,” Liam said, “when we heard that bastard Fionnbharr rush toward us, laughing. ‘Yeh'd best change form,' he told us as he passed. ‘I dropped the fool on the way in.' So Niall and I changed and came after yeh.”

“And it was easy enough to find yeh—hollerin' out there like a feckin' sow stuck under the garden fence,” Niall added. He'd gone to a large rock up the beach, placing a folded seal's pelt atop it along with his clothes. He yanked a sweater over his wet hair. “And as a swimmer, yeh do an excellent imitation of a rock.”

Liam chuckled—he was dressing also, his seal pelt placed carefully in a shoulder bag—but Colin was too busy shivering to care much. Liam evidently noticed Colin's condition. “Niall, the man's going to freeze to death. We need to get him up to the village. Besides, Maeve's waiting for us.”

Niall scowled at that. “No doubt. All right, can yeh leg it?” he asked Colin, who shivered again, but nodded. “We'll get yeh in front of a fire ninety to the dozen. C'mon.”

He'd imagined their reunion a few thousand times since Superintendent Dunn had removed him from the island. In those imaginings—at least the ones that weren't more private—Maeve would run to him and hold him tenderly. She would kiss him with fevered, urgent lips, whispering to him how much she had missed him, how she hadn't felt complete since he left the island, how she'd longed for him to be with her, how she loved him . . .

It was massively evident that his imagination was terribly defective. Maeve did rush over to him as he was half-carried into her house in the village, but the rain of kisses weren't forthcoming nor were the whispered endearments. His imagination hadn't included the worry lines creasing her face and the nearly-angry tone of her voice, nor the crowd of Oileánach that filled the room beyond the door. “Jaysus, 'tis about time,” he heard her say. “An' look, the poor dear's half-drowned and positively foundered.”

“Maeve. God, I've been trying . . .” he started to say through chattering teeth, and she shook her head.

“Nah. Do'nah talk. Niall, get him into the bedroom. Someone bring him hot tea and something to eat. Put some more turves on the fire and get it going good. The first thing we need to do is get these wet things off him . . .”

Colin blinked, shivering helplessly. Someone had his arm, leading him into the bedroom and letting him fall on the bed. He heard a drawer opening in Maeve's dresser, and a pair of blue jeans and a sweater that he recognized landed on the bed near him. His imaginings had included losing his clothes—at least some of them had—but not quite so roughly and perfunctorily, and not with Niall doing half the undressing. He started to push away Niall's hand as he pulled Colin's soaked sweater over his head, but his hands didn't seem to want to cooperate; Maeve tugged at his belt and unzipped his jeans; that at least he didn't mind, though when she started to roll his underwear down his legs, he shivered again. “It's the cold water, Maeve,” he gritted out, forcing his lower jaw to stop shivering. “Sorry.”

At the head of the bed, Niall laughed mirthlessly. “Niall,” Maeve barked warningly.

“Aye, I hear yeh, Maeve. Here, put yer arms through the sleeves, boyo . . .”

Maeve pulled away his jeans . . . and Colin suddenly felt sick, as if she'd torn away a part of him. He forced the gorge down. “The cloch's in my pocket . . .” he managed to croak out. He held out his hand to Maeve. “Give it back.”

She cocked her head at him strangely. “Yeh'll have it,” she told him. “Just wait a mo'.”

That didn't comfort him. The discomfort grew, even when a few minutes later, he was dressed in dry clothes—the clothes he'd left here, he realized—and was wrapped in a blanket in front of the hearth in the front room, his hands cupped around a steaming cup of black tea. The fire in the hearth curled greedy blue fingers around the turves, throwing out welcome heat and the distinctive scent of burning peat. He sipped at the bitter brew, relishing the heat as it flowed down his throat. His hands had stopped shaking from the cold, but there was a burning need inside him now.

Maeve crouched alongside him, one hand cupping his neck, her face still worried. He saw his grandfather's stone in her hand, the silver chain falling between her fingers. A quick surge of intense jealousy went through him at the sight; he nearly reached out to snatch it back again, a desire to hold the stone, to put the cloch back in his pocket.
It's mine.
The impulse was difficult to ignore; his fingers, unbidden, had bent into claws.
Give it back! You can't have it!

She seemed to understand his distress. “Here,” she told him, holding the stone out to him. He opened his hand underneath hers, and she dropped the pendant there. “I believe this is yours.”

Holding it, he felt the anger and distress dissolve. He closed his fingers around the stone, protectively.

“Here. I believe this is yours.”

She saw Colin stare at the cloch in his hand, and she wondered if he knew how important the stone was and what it meant to all of them. She believed his grandfather had at least suspected it, when he'd taken it away. “Yeh want the cloch, but yer not worried about yer wallet or cell phone?”