The Crow of Connemara (29 page)

Maeve spoke as they walked. Colin had been silent since they'd left the cottage, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. She could see the confusion in his face, the visible sign of what she knew was an internal struggle to make sense of things.
Yeh can't make sense of this until yer willing to give up yer old ways of thinking,
she wanted to tell him. She hoped he was ready for that, because he would need to be.

“You're talking ghosts?” Maeve shrugged, and watched as Colin waited for her to say more. “I guess I have,” Colin said finally, when it was apparent she wasn't going to say more. They were standing near the mound of the hawthorn tree, on the small cliff edge with the cold water of the Atlantic crashing into the rocks below them. A briny scent from the spray filled their nostrils. To their right, a faint, steep path led down to a rocky beach, and a quartet of seals cavorted in the water below them, diving and honking at each other. “Sometimes, in old houses, I've heard creaks and groans or felt cold air, or had the classic shiver down my spine like someone's behind me. Sure. But I've never actually
seen
any apparitions or anything supernatural.”

“Maybe you just didn't listen or look hard enough. Come on.” Maeve took Colin's hand and led him to the path to the beach. “Be careful. If you slip here, you won't be stopping until you hit the stones at the bottom.”

That was true enough: the stones were wet with spray and moss covered, but Maeve had traversed them often enough to know where to walk. Behind her, Colin took his time, using his hands often to steady himself and at times half-sliding downward. She reached the beach long before he did, laughing as she looked back up the slope to him. “Are yeh asleep up there, Colin?” she called out.

“Very funny. You'd probably find it hilarious if I ended up on the rocks with a broken leg or arm.” It took him several minutes more to clamber down the path until he stood, panting, next to her. His glasses had slipped down his nose during the descent; she watched him adjust them. The beach was pebbled and coarse, little more than a few feet of shelf littered with broken mussel shells and small rocks at the foot of the cliff, and perhaps only twenty yards long before it vanished entirely. The seals had stopped swimming; they stared at the two of them from boulders a few yards out from the beach, wet in the green-gray waves. One of them honked curiously in their direction, and Maeve beckoned with a curve of her arm.

The seal barked in response, and slid from the rock into the sea. Colin watched it swim toward the end of the beach, behind a tumble of boulders. The seal vanished for several moments, long enough that Colin started to look away. “No,” Maeve told him. She put her hand on his arm. “Keep watching.”

She watched his face as a man rose up from behind the rock, entirely naked, his hair plastered wet from the sea. He carried a black pelt draped over one arm, and Maeve saw Colin's moment of recognition: it was Liam, one of the people he'd met that first evening in Regan's. As Liam approached them, stepping carefully on the rocks and shells, he held out to them a seal's pelt, also dripping wet, the skin whole. “This what you wanted him to see, Maeve?” Liam asked, holding out the pelt. Despite the nudity, his attitude was as casual as if they'd just met in the pub.

“Show him, Liam,” Maeve told Liam. Then, to Colin: “G'wan. Touch it.”

Liam held out the pelt, and Maeve nodded to Colin. He glanced from Maeve to Liam, then reached out and stroked the skin, though Liam held tightly to the pelt as if he were afraid that Colin might snatch it from him. The fur was soft and damp, with blue highlights glinting from the dark fur. “That's me,” Liam said. “At least, most of the time. The skin of my true form.”

Maeve saw Colin's eyes widen behind his glasses. “I . . .” Colin began to say, but his voice faltered. “You're saying you're a selkie?”

He sniffed and shivered. “Aye. As are some of the others here: Niall, for instance,” he answered. “And if yeh don't mind, it's fierce cold out here without clothes an' in this form, so I'll be changin' back now.” With that, he opened the pelt as if it were a cloak, placing it around his shoulders. As Colin watched, the skin seemed to writhe and envelop Liam's human form: as he hunched down, first to his knees, then lying down entirely. The seal's head opened like a mouth along its throat, swallowing Liam's head and pulling down tightly. Maeve had heard the accompanying sounds from the transformation a thousand times in the past, but she still wasn't certain how to describe it, like the crunching of small bones under a boot or the crackling of a fire against damp wood. The sealskin fully covered Liam's body now, muscles and hidden forms wriggling under the fur. With a shudder, the seal suddenly lifted its head, its black eyes like polished jet staring at Colin, the whiskered muzzle lifting, the mouth opening. The seal barked once, then waddled over the beach toward the water, its flippers raking the beach. It pushed into a wave and started swimming back toward the rocks.

To Maeve, Colin looked slightly sick, as if someone had just punched him hard in the stomach. He was shaking his head. “Are you saying you're one of . . .
them
?” he asked Maeve.

“I'm nah one of them,” she answered. “I'm something else entirely.
Someone
else.”

That made him feel slightly more comfortable. “So what are you to them? What's going on here?”

“Yeh already know, my love,” she answered. “Yeh just haven't wanted to admit it aloud because it threatens the entire way yeh view the world.” Her chin lifted. The wind from the sea lifted her dark hair as she stared at him, her gaze tinged with sadness. She closed her eyes momentarily, letting the spell that held her appearance relax and taking on her old form, her true form. As she did so, a glow kindled around her, brightening so that it was visible even in the wan daylight, as if a floodlight the color of the late afternoon sun had sparked deep within her, its radiance shimmering through skin gone translucent. Shadows shifting along the beach in response as the seals on their rocks barked raucously.

Her hands spread wide. Her voice was a trumpet, her breath was spice and blood. The seals howled into the storm of her words. “Oh, my dear one . . . I'm what yeh thought I might be, what yeh've seen once already, what yer grandfather knew. Back when we first met, Colin, yeh said that I was named after Queen Medb of the
Tain
, but I was never her friend even if I've used her name. I've had so many names and guises in the past that I've forgotten most of them. As the hag told yeh under the mound on Ceomhar Head, I am the Morrígan. I am the Phantom Queen.”

In that moment, the radiance of her was so bright that she saw Colin shade his eyes. He staggered back, cold waves lapping at his ankles as mussel shells cracked under his sneakered feet. “No, that isn't possible.”

Through the brilliance, she smiled toward him, understanding his confusion and denial. “Yeh say that, my love, even when all your senses insist that yer wrong. Listen to yer heart and believe this. I am the Queen, we are going to war, and you, Colin of the Caul, are to be my Cúchulainn.”

The radiance died around her as she brought the spell back around her like a cloak, and Maeve closed her eyes to take in a long breath of the sea air. “Ahh,” she sighed. “That's
so
exhausting to do,” she said. She opened her eyes again to see Colin still staring at her, his mouth open, almost wet to the knees from the surf in his retreat from her. “I'm sorry,” she told him. “'Twas time to open yer eyes, love.”

She held her hand out to him. He just stared at it. “Colin,” she said gently, “I'm still the same person. I'm Maeve, the woman you slept with last night. I'm no different now than I was then.”

He didn't move. On their rocks, the seals watched and listened, and she gestured at them to leave. Colin's head turned with the movement of her hand; they both watched the two selkies slide into the water, diving underneath the foam. Colin's head swiveled back to her. “The woman I slept with last night didn't function as her own nightlight. I'd've noticed that.”

“Cute,” she told him. “But wrong. Colin, yeh asked me to show you what I was, and now I have. But I haven't changed. I've always been this, ever since yeh knew me.”

“The Morrígan? A goddess from Celtic mythology. Someone who only existed in ancient tales and stories? How am I supposed to believe that?”

She could feel his distress, and that made her want to take a step toward him, to fold him into her embrace as she had last night, to comfort him however she could. The potential inside him surged and roiled; she wondered that Colin couldn't feel it, that he couldn't take it up himself and use it, too early now.

This isn't the time or the place . . .

“Believe your eyes,” she told him. “I'm a woman first. The Morrígan . . . I'm born in a new body as soon as the old one wears out—it's a weary thing, to carry the Morrígan in human form. This body—” she spread her hands out, “—is the latest of many. More than I could ever count over the centuries. I'm as human as yeh are yerself, Colin, but aye, I'm also the Morrígan, and I have always lived here in this land. I'd hoped to always be here, but 'tis not to be. One way or another.”

She didn't move. She waited.
You have to trust him. He's the one you chose.

“You said you're going to war?” he asked, his incredulity making almost a laugh of the phrase.

“Not just yet, and not war as yer thinking of it,” she answered. “But that's what it feels like, to those of us who have gathered here. The world out there doesn't want us anymore; too few of 'em have any belief in us, which is all that sustains us, and so we keep losing ground. Yeats called it the ‘Celtic Twilight,' this dwindling and shifting of beliefs way back at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, and 'twas true then that the old ways had already begun to die. 'Tis a long, slow, and incomplete death we face, but the pace is quickening as the centuries and decades and years go by. So many of our kind are gone now: vanished, or asleep in their barrows, or entirely dead. Those of us who are left are fighting to hold on until we can find our own place.”

“Here? On Inishcorr?”

She shook her head. “No. But 'tis here that we'll find the path to that place, if we can. With yer help.”

“
My
help?” His forefinger stabbed at his glasses, dewed with spray from the surf. “I'm a nearsighted guitar player and singer. You want to entertain someone with old Irish folk tunes, I'm your guy. Want me to help plant your potatoes or cut some turf or herd your sheep, I could probably manage to learn to do that, too. Beyond that, I don't see what I have to offer. I don't know what you're talking about or what to do.” He stopped, his hands wide.

“Yeh might try stepping out of the water first, before yeh catch your death,” she told him. She extended her hand again. He wouldn't take it, but he did step back fully onto the beach. His pants dripped; his sneakers were soaked through. He shivered. Again, she felt the impulse to embrace him; again, she held back, knowing he wouldn't accept it. Not now.

“Back on Ceomhar Head,” he said, “in that dream, you . . . or the Morrígan I dreamed was you . . . said something about me being able to open a door. What's that mean?”

“Are yeh admitting that the dream was real, now?”

He shrugged. He shifted his feet on the pebbles and mussel shells, and she could hear his socks squelching. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his T-shirt. “Dunno,” he answered. “I'm just asking.”

“Then let's get ourselves back up there,” she said, pointing to the cliff top, “an' maybe I can answer.”

Maeve turned at the top of the path; Colin was climbing up after her, on all fours and scrabbling for handholds on the mossy gray rocks. She watched him, wanting to reach down and help him but knowing that he wouldn't allow it. He finally managed to reach the top without mishap and stood, his jeans and jacket stained with mud. He wiped his hands on his jeans. She could feel the cloch there also, a simmering power. “Okay,” he said, “so what—” He stopped, and she saw him looking past her shoulder, his eyes narrowed. “Who the hell's that?” he asked.

She glanced back, and her own breath slipped from her. “Yeh
see
him?” she asked Colin.

“Aye, that he does,” the figure answered for Colin, though he spoke in Gaelic, not English. “What did you expect, Morrígan? One caul was taken from him at birth, and now you've ripped away the other. He sees true enough now. So this is the one t' open our path, is he?”

The speaker was a man, as tall as Colin, handsome and fair-haired, with eyes the same green that Maeve saw in the mirror each morning. He was dressed in a fine, silken cloak of blue, belted over plainer clothes, and from his side hung a long sword in its scabbard, the pommel wrapped in well-worn leather. One hand rested comfortably there; the other was on his hip as he stood at the base of the mound of the hawthorn tree. Maeve inclined her head to him. “Fionnbharr. Yeh'll be leaving Colin alone,” she said, speaking also in Gaelic. “He's mine.”