The Crow of Connemara (5 page)

He'd expected the storm to break then. It didn't. His father took another calm sip of the whiskey without moving. Then, very slowly, he turned. He set the glass down on his desk as he faced Colin. “No,” he said. Just the single, simple word.

“I don't need your permission, Dad. I'm an adult, and I've already made my decision. I can do this with or without your help and approval.”

“No,” his father repeated. He shook his head. “We had an agreement. I expect you to live up to it.”

“Dad, you're not listening to me. I know this isn't what we agreed to, but I've made plans and started to set things up over there.”

A nod. “So just what have you ‘set up'?” he asked. “What plans have you made?”

Colin blinked. “Stop it, Dad. You need to trust me.” In truth, about all he'd done was to check the airline prices and determine how long his savings could last at a bare minimum. A visa might give him two years in Ireland, but his savings wouldn't even give him a quarter of that. He would need to make money playing or busking to stay there more than six months, but he figured he could work on that once he was actually there and had surveyed the situation. He'd managed to scrape together a living, if a sometimes precarious one, here in Chicago, playing solo at local coffee shops and pubs and gigging with three or four different bands. He couldn't imagine that making the same kind of living would be harder in Ireland, which at least celebrated its musicians, writers, and artists, and where the cost of living would be decidedly lower.

“Trust you?” An internal mockery laced his father's words. “Your mother and I gave you all the advantages anyone could have, and you've done very little with them. Look at Tommy and Jen, and think about where they were at your age. Tommy had already graduated law school; Jen was getting her PhD and was already teaching. Or just look where they are now: Tommy's a respected partner in this firm, and Jen is on the tenure track at DePaul. Your brother and sister were both
ambitious
, and they went after what they wanted with all the energy and commitment they had. They still do. The decisions they made weren't selfish; they thought of their future and how they could use their skills to enhance the lives of others. They wanted to
do
something, not just indulge themselves.”

And what you're talking about doing is selfish, and what you're talking about doing is self-indulgent.
Colin could hear his father's subtext perfectly well. He'd heard it through most of his life: in his academic career, even back in grade school.
“The teachers say you spend all your time lost in your daydreams, that you don't pay attention. You need to buckle down and work . . .”

Colin swept his hands through the air, not caring that his whiskey glass slipped from his finger and went careening away spewing golden liquid. “Stop it, Dad. Just . . .” He swallowed the profanity he wanted to say. “ . . . stop it. I really don't need the ‘Tommy and Jen' lecture again. You've given it to me a few million times already, and you know what, they
have
done better than me, at least by your standards. But they're not me, and this is what
I
want to do.”

“What you want to do is what you
always
do,” his father shot back. “You always make the easy choice. And you know what? I'm done with it. You told your mother and me that if we gave you three years, you'd make it in music, and that if you didn't, you'd go to grad school and get your doctorate. You're a good musician, maybe even more, I'll admit that, but it's been three years now and you're just scraping by. Your mother and I still pay your health insurance, your car insurance, and are covering your student loans. Well, it's time to live up to the bargain. So no, you can't go. You made us a promise, and you're damned well going to keep it. We're done supporting you, unless you do that.”

Colin snorted derisively. “I don't want your help. I don't need it. Hell, you think you can solve everything by throwing enough money at it.”

“So you don't want our money now?” His father gave a bitter, loud laugh. “Whose money was it that paid for at least half of your music equipment? Whose money paid your rent last year when you were four months behind? Whose money bailed you out when you ran into credit card problems your first year out of college? Who let you stay in your old room when you dropped out in your fourth year after changing majors for the third time? Who found you a decent-paying job afterward—a job you quit after three months, as I recall, because it interfered with your precious gigs?” His father nearly laughed. “Right. You can take care of yourself.”

There it was, the endless litany of Colin the Failure, to be resurrected again and again until the end of eternity, it seemed.

“Don't worry, Dad. I promise I won't call you or Mom for help. I wouldn't want to give you the satisfaction.”

“You know what would satisfy me? You having some drive and responsibility. You keeping your word! You acting like you had an
ounce
of the goddamn sense you were born with!”

The thunder was in his voice now, the volume rising, and Colin knew that this was going to be another shouting match, and that there would be no reconciliation here. They'd both walk away furious, having said things that they'd both regret later.

It was the effect they had on each other. Maybe Jen was right claiming that they were both too much alike—in that way, at least.

And it had ended as he'd expected, a screaming battle that closed with Colin stalking out of the office in full retreat and slamming the door behind him, flushed and with his jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles ached for two days afterward.

And two days later, realizing that he had exactly eleven dollars in his wallet, an over-limit credit card, and a two-figure savings account, he'd relented. He'd kept his promise and enrolled in graduate school—one as far away from Chicago as he could find.

And now . . . now . . . he'd made the decision to renege on that promise once again.

He remembered all that, staring at the wasted figure on the bed and holding his father's cold, unresponsive hand.

Colin wept then, as he hadn't since he returned.

“I don't think we really have had much of a chance, Dad,” he said when he felt able to speak again. “There was so much you wanted to do yet, but there's also so much
I
want to do. I'm sorry that I wasn't like Tommy, but the time I've spent as a musician . . .” He patted the hand. “Dad, I can't tell you how much I've learned and how much I've grown, and how good it's been for me.”

He laughed then; an incongruous sound that was mixed with a sob. “Maybe I'm more like Grandpa Rory—I can still remember him telling us all these far-fetched tales about his boyhood in Ireland, how he saw leprechauns and the fair folk. He was never afraid to say what he believed. I have been, and I'm sick of it, Dad. Sick of lying to everyone around me and to myself.”

He was staring at the monitor, at the eternal marching of the graphs on the blue screen. He thought he caught movement on the bed from the corner of his eye. When he looked, it seemed for a moment that it was a woman's face that he saw, not his father's: the woman he'd seen in his dream the night before was lying there, her long dark hair spread out on the pillow, her green eyes staring at him. Her lips moved, as if she were trying to speak. “I need you . . .” he thought he heard. For a moment, the whirr and beeping of the machines receded, and he thought he could smell sea air and see a green coastal landscape overlaying that of the hospital room.

Somewhere distant, a crow cawed its shrill note three times.

Colin gaped. He drew his hand back, his spine tight against the back of the chair in which he sat. But he blinked then and the vision vanished, and it was only his father lying there.

The ventilator chuffed; his father's chest rose and fell in concert. He could smell only disinfectants and the faint, sour odor that lingered in the room. The IV bag dripped on its stand, like a sterile hourglass ticking away the last moments of his father's life.

“Shit,” he muttered. He was sweating despite the room's chill. Maybe the waking dream was just latent exhaustion from having been up so long the last few days. Maybe he'd never seen or heard anything at all. Now, in the glaring light of the hospital room, it seemed impossible: a momentary and lost dream fragment. Colin leaned forward again to examine the face on the pillow, trying to remember how his father had once looked in motion even though it seemed impossible. The face was pale, the cheeks more sunken than he remembered, just empty flesh hanging from a skull. “I hope you're happy wherever it is you've gone, Dad. I hope you can hear me there. I just wish . . . I just wish your kind of afterlife was something I believed in myself, but I can't. I lost that faith a long time ago, and I especially can't believe it now. Maybe . . . maybe you're where you always expected to be. Maybe that's how it works—you go to whatever afterlife you expect to have, and maybe those of us who believe in nothing end up going nowhere at all.”

He chuckled once, dryly and humorlessly. “I guess I won't know until it happens, huh? I remember that when I first told you I'd lost my faith, you said you weren't having ‘a goddamn pagan son.' It wasn't the first time I'd disappointed you; I know it certainly wasn't the last. Sorry I couldn't be who you wanted me to be. I wish I could have been less of a disappointment to you, and I'm . . . well, I'm sorry. Sorry for everything.”

He rose from the chair. Leaning over, he touched his lips to his father's forehead.

“Bye, Dad,” he said.

5

F
O
R
A
MOMENT
, just a moment, she'd seen him as if he were standing over her. He wasn't quite what she'd expected: a young man wearing glasses, his brown hair longish and disheveled, but he looked at her with a sadness she nearly couldn't bear, the emotion so strong in him that the shock of it threw her entirely from the vision . . .

“M'Lady?” Keara was crouched alongside Maeve's chair, the other woman's hands cradling hers and Keara's face staring up into her own with a look of concern. Maeve took in a breath she hadn't known she was holding. She blinked and realized that she was crying.

“'Twas him,” she said to Keara. “Finally. Almost as I remember him.”

“You're certain?”

“Aye. And neh.” Maeve took another breath and wiped at her eyes. Even though the kitchen of her small house was warm, she felt cold. Everything around her now was in too sharp a focus, as if she'd been seeing with eyes other than her own: the brazier with its curls of aromatic smoke, the herbal potion that Keara had fixed. Her ears rang with the memory of Keara's long chant, and she could feel the exhaustion from the effort touching every joint in her body.

It had been over half a century now that she'd been searching and calling. At first, she'd been able to touch him, but he fought her every time, ignoring her calls and her signs. Then, for long decades, there'd been nothing at all, and she despaired of ever recovering what she'd lost, knowing that as a mortal, he was gone. She could feel her own slow but inevitable death approaching, and that of those she'd gathered around her. But then she'd felt a sense of that presence again, fainter but growing stronger each time she'd reached out.
Him, but not him. Him, and stronger yet
. “I could nah feel the cloch na thintri with him,” she told Keara, “but this one has the gift of song that t'other di'nah. But 'tis the same family, aye. The same line. He'll come to us. I have to nudge the boy, is all, and he'll come.”

Keara smiled. “Good. Then nudge him.”

Maeve shook her head. “Not yet. Not till I know that he has the cloch. 'Tis near him, I'm certain. I could almost feel it. But we need that as well as the boy himself.”

Keara squeezed Maeve's hand. “You should be pleased then, and those must be tears of joy. Niall and the others will be happy to hear this. Fionnbharr, too.” Keara stood, releasing Maeve's hand. “I can make a potion 'twill call him from under the mound.” Maeve saw her gaze suddenly drop, as Keara evidently realized how that might have sounded. “I di'nah wish to presume, m'Lady. Only if that's what yeh wish, of course.”

Maeve gave a low chuckle. “No, yer perfectly correct. Fionnbharr needs to wake, since we'll require him and his people soon enough. And I . . .” She lifted a shoulder. “I'm nah as strong as I once was, either. I'll need yer potion if I'm to call him forth, Keara. I ca'nah do it m'self, not as tired as I am.”

She saw the young woman smile at that. “Then I'll get it ready for yeh. 'Twas me mam who knew the recipe and showed it to me, from her máthair before that, an' who knows how many generations back.” Keara flashed a grin. “Sorry, m'Lady. I'll prepare it. 'Twill take a day or so; I'll have to do some gathering, and might have to take a trip to Ballemór if I ca'nah find what I need.”

“Have Niall take you in, then,” Maeve told her. “G'wan, then. No sense waiting.”

Keara curtsied to Maeve. “I'll leave me things here, then, an' come back later to clean up. Yeh rest, m'Lady. All this 'tis harder on yeh than anyone.”

Maeve waved a hand at Keara, and the woman smiled at her and vanished. A few moments later, she heard the door to her cottage open and close again.

“It will happen, this time,” she said to the air. “No matter the cost.”

Her voice was grim and dark.

The potion that Keara gave her was so pungent that Maeve was certain the smell alone would wake the dead. Under the stars and the moon, she poured the oily mixture onto the roots of the hawthorn tree that crowned the mound on the seaward side of the island, then stepped back toward the ring of standing stones that surrounded the mound's base.

She waited, the salt wind ruffling her hair and the long dress she wore. Beyond the mound, she could hear waves breaking in the erratic rhythm of the ocean against the rocks at the foot of the cliff. The sound soothed her: an ancient and eternal heartbeat.

She didn't have to wait long.

“I should have known 'twas yeh from the foul stench.” The voice was deep and low, like a growl of thunder. Maeve saw a shadowy form appear, stepping from under the darkness beneath the hawthorn branches into the moonlight. He was of average height (though, she had to admit, she would have once thought of him as tall), with a muscular build accentuated by the ringmail he wore, chiming as he stepped forward on the mound's top. His features were hard and marked by jagged scars on his left cheek; his hair was long and fair, caught in a braided golden band. He held a tall spear in one hand.

“Fionnbharr,” she said. “It's been a long time yeh've slept.”

He yawned dramatically, and his nostrils flared. “I still remember yer face, and not necessarily kindly. It haunted my dreams. What are yeh calling yerself now, m'Lady?”

“Maeve,” she answered.

“Maeve.” He spoke her name as if tasting its single syllable. “That's appropriate, I suppose. 'Tis a mortal's name, too.” His head tilted as he stared at her. “Yeh look more and more like one. I can smell how close death is to yeh. Maybe yeh'll join us under the mound yet.”

“Not yet,” she told him. “Not ever.”

He sniffed. “Why have yeh summoned me, m'Lady?” He sniffed the air again. “Yeh do nah have the cloch, and yeh do nah have yer bard, either. I would know if they were here.”

“They'll be here soon enough,” she answered firmly. “But the leamh are causing trouble, and I may need yer people to deal with them.”

“'Tis why yeh woke some of 'em already, when yeh brought that leamh's soul to the mound a few days past?”

“That one is one of the few left who truly believe in us, and I thought he deserved to come with us—and he can tell us what the leamh world is like now, and what they might do. Yeh should talk to him, Fionnbharr. The world has changed much since yeh last rode.” She pulled her cloak more tightly around herself as a cold gust from off the ocean swirled around her. “An' I feel it changing faster with every year,” she added, “and I like it less.”

“Yet yeh stay in it.” His voice mocked her.

“I've made promises. Yeh know that.”

“Promises. Aye. Yeh were always so good at keeping yer promises.” His sarcasm bit at her, but she said nothing. “Yer half-leamh yerself now,” he continued, when she didn't respond. “Yeh've had too many forms and too many names, and now yeh have the smell of 'em. When I knew yeh with another title, yeh would have killed those who stood in yer way without another thought, and yeh would have laughed as yeh did it. This Maeve that stands before me now . . .” He pointed the tip of his spear toward her. “Yer telling me what
I
must do. Can
yeh
do what's needed, or have yeh become too mortal yerself? Can yeh deceive yer bard the way yeh know yeh must?”

“I can,” she told him. “And Fionnbharr of the Mound, can yeh do what's needed when I call?”

“If it means we can finally follow the others, then aye, we can.”

Maeve nodded. “Good.”

“I still smell death on yeh, Maeve-of-many-names. Yeh sure yer not just a mortal?”

She smiled at that. “Death drives us all, mortal or not,” she told Fionnbharr. “Some to run from it, some to seek it.”

He laughed at that, and with the laughter, he plunged the base of his spear into the mound. There was a flash and the sound of rolling, distant thunder. Maeve blinked, and when she opened her eyes again, Fionnbharr was no longer standing on the mound.

“Stay awake,” she said to the night, to the hawthorn. “There will be death and a need for you to ride out soon enough.”