The Crow of Connemara (43 page)

“The spell-words. Yeh must speak them while the bard still sings . . .”
The words rang in Maeve's head, insistent.

She took a roll of parchment from the box on the ground and unrolled it. Maeve began to read aloud the words set there, the words given to her through the cloch while it had been hers to hold. Then, the stone had shouted in her mind as the sky had gone bright with the mage-lights of the land she'd glimpsed beyond this world. The words the voices inside had spoken that evening burned and screamed at her, not letting her rest or sleep until she set them down on paper that night.

Now, as she spoke each word, the inscription flared with a searing, bright flame on the paper and vanished. Her voice seemed to take on power and depth with each syllable as Colin's had, until it seemed that her voice roared so loudly in concert with him that they must hear the spell-song all the way in Ballemór. Above them, in the growing dusk, the mage-lights were ever brighter and more saturated in color, sheets and curtains of shifting hues with the flowing hems of their skirts so close that Maeve felt she could raise her hand to touch them, streaming down to the cloch in Colin's hand and around the portal.

She dared to give a quick glance toward Colin. He was no longer looking at her, but at the mage-lights curling and crawling in above them, and she could see their colors reflected on his face and in his eyes as he continued to sing.

She was coming to the end of the incantation. All that was left now were the final words, the words that required blood and sacrifice to even speak. She took Colin's free arm in her left hand, as with the right she slid the knife from its sheath, the dagger's point gleaming in the colors of the mage-lights. The light descended with her motion, now sliding around her right hand and arm with the dagger, coiling there as they did about Colin's arm and around the portal. Her flesh seemed to be alight. She held the final phrase in her mind; it pounded against her skull, aching to be released.

She glanced again at Colin. He stared at the knife tip wrapped in light and power, and nodded to her.

His eyes closed in anticipation of her strike.

The power snarled and crackled in her mind.
The blood must come now, but nah yet the death. The blood of a willing victim, the blood of one with the ability to wield the power himself, even if he do'nah realize it . . .

With a grimace, she cut down with the dagger's blade from his elbow to wrist, the edge digging deep into muscle and sinew. Colin sucked in a breath, but he didn't cry out. The blood flowed down his arm, dripping in thick red streams from his fingers. In his other hand, he still held the cloch.

He stopped singing. They could both feel the doorway opening, the mage-lights hissing and fuming around it.

Now the death . . . To finish the spell . . .

Maeve started to move the knife as Colin stared at his wounded arm. She could see the shock on his face, the glassiness in his eyes. His eyes shifted away from the bloody mess and found hers.

The death . . .
the voices crooned, but Maeve still didn't move.
She argued back to them.

He trusted me. He loved me. He still does.

The voices became insistent.
The spell requires a willing death . . . Yeh must do this or lose the chance . . . A willing death . . .

“Then you can have that,” Maeve said aloud.

“Maeve, go on.” She heard Colin's voice as if it were from some great distance, a whisper against the roar in her head, the last words of the spell searing themselves on her tongue. He lifted his head, offering his throat as if he finally understood the lie she'd given him and didn't care, accepting what must happen. He closed his eyes.

The willing victim . . .

Now!
She could hold it no longer; she could feel the opening to Talamh an Ghlas looming, the membrane between that world and this one ready to rip open.

A willing death . . . Someone agreeing to be the sacrifice that saves others . . .

And I am willing.
That was nothing that the old Morrígan could have said, and she knew then the entirety of how she had been altered and changed.

Colin realized now that Maeve had lied to him. He heard it in the voices that surrounded them, but it didn't matter.
This is why you came here, most of all—to give life to the old songs and those within them.
If that meant his death now, then he would accept that. He clasped his grandfather's stone, as if that could hold him grounded in these last few moments.

His eyes closed, weak and dizzy from the loss of blood from his wounded arm, he waited.

Maeve smiled at Colin. “Remember me, and I'll never die,” she told him. She reversed the knife against the side of her own throat and spoke the last words of the spell even as she pulled the hilt hard.

Colin heard Maeve's final words, and he wondered at them. But before he could react, he felt a wind rushing past him, as if the world itself wanted to tear him away from where he knelt on the ground. He still waited for the slicing edge of the knife, but there came instead the splash of hot, thick liquid against his face and he opened his eyes to see Maeve falling, a spray of red still gushing from the terrible wound on her neck, her head canted at a wrong angle. As if in slow motion, the dagger she held clattered against one of the stones at the foot of the mound.

The world screamed her name with him: “Maeve!”

Even as he crawled toward Maeve's crumpled form, the universe ripped open around him. The glowing tendrils in the sky had coalesced, tornadoes of wild colors that framed a doorway into which the island was being sucked, a doorway that sat on Fionnbharr's mound in front of him—and beyond that doorway stood not the gray Atlantic but a land of rolling, verdant hills with valleys clad in dark forests of oak and ash. Even as Colin let the cloch fall back on its chain around his neck and reached one-handed for Maeve, he felt her body being pulled inexorably away from him toward that rip between the two worlds, as if by invisible, insistent hands. He tried to stand and run toward her, but the wind abruptly reversed itself and pushed him back. There were hands in the wind, and voices. Something struck him in the face, knocking off his glasses; he grabbed belatedly for them with his good hand: the cloch, smeared with blood, whether his or Maeve's, he couldn't tell.

He brushed the gore away from his face as he knelt and found his glasses on the ground. The wind was throwing saltwater, leaves, and dirt through the air, making it difficult to see. Maeve was gone; he had no idea where.

Hunting horns trilled, and Colin heard the soft pounding of hooves on earth: Fionnbharr's host rushed past him into the doorway, a fog-ridden haze of riders and voices; Lugh, holding his spear, nodded to Colin as he passed. He saw Niall and Liam, Keara and Aiden among them along with the rest of the Oileánach, riding on ghostly steeds with the aos sí. They galloped through the doorway; he could see their hooves tearing at the turf in the soft hills beyond the rift. “Take me with you!” he pleaded. He lifted his hand and the cloch toward them, but none of them reached out to pull him along with them.

The doorway shuddered, the mage-lights above him sputtering and flaring like dying fireworks. The cloch swaying on its chain and thudding against his chest, Colin pushed himself up again, stumbling forward toward the closing gateway, trying to get through it before it closed, but again the hurricane wind reversed itself and pushed him back.
Nah for yeh . . . Nah yet . . .
voices whispered in his head.

The ground trembled underneath Colin's feet, and terrifying rents appeared in the earth around him as he clawed his way up the hill. The doorway was now but a single thin break in the fabric of reality, the sunlight beyond a mockery against Inishcorr's evening. The standing stones about the mound were swaying and falling. Beyond Inishcorr's cliff, a massive rampart of gray-green water with white foam on its summit, loomed against a sky alive with clouds painted red with the last of the day's light. Towering above him, the water seemed to pause, then—as the doorway closed completely, the green land and the sunlight winking out of existence—the wave crashed down, hard and terrible.

The full weight of the water slammed into Colin, and he tasted brine as he was borne away into darkness.

34

H
IS ENTIRE WORLD was rocking and swaying gently. Colin forced his eyes to open, then as quickly shaded them with a hand against the sunlight that threatened to blind him. He was lying in a shallow pool of water, his glasses were somehow still on his head, and his vision was bounded by ribs of wood wrapped in tar-covered hide. His right arm seemed to be afire, pain radiating from it so harshly that he cried out involuntarily from the sensation. He tried to move the fingers of that hand, but they obeyed only grudgingly. He looked down and nearly lost consciousness again, seeing a ragged line of clotted blood over a gaping, deep wound, and he remembered Maeve's knife. He closed his eyes to stop the nausea; when he opened them again, his stirring caused cold water to slosh over his wooden horizon.

He was in a small, round-bottomed boat: a currach like the ones he'd seen pulled up on the pebbled beach of Inishcorr's harbor or along Beach Road. Holding onto the side of the boat with his good hand, he managed to pull himself up to a sitting position, blinking into the sunlight.

How did I get here?

He was on the ocean; he could see the unbroken line of the Atlantic horizon, with low, calm swells rolling in. It was morning; the sun low in the east. Turning his head, he saw the high, familiar bluffs of Ceomhar Head with its low farmland spread at its feet, green and pastoral in the morning light. He appeared to be two or three miles or so out from the mainland shore—nearly where Inishcorr itself had been. He glanced over his other shoulder again, seaward, to where Inishcorr should have been visible close by, but there was nothing there at all.

Inishcorr was gone. Vanished. He gaped. The effort of sitting nearly defeated him. The world threatened to go away again, the edges of his vision narrowing. With his good hand, he held onto the side of the currach, closing his eyes and just feeling the welcome heat of the sun on his shoulders.

He remembered nothing after the impossible wave washed over Inishcorr as the doorway to Talamh An Ghlas closed: the wave, taking him into darkness. He had no memory of anything past that moment. “Maeve . . .” He called her name, his voice cracked and broken. He tried to move and felt something move on his neck. He put his left hand around the cloch, holding it tightly . . .

...and nearly foundered the currach as a deep horn blast startled him. He turned, the boat rocking wildly with his movement, to see a naval patrol vessel approaching him from the direction of the Ballemór Estuary. “You there in the currach,” a crew member on the bow called. “Show your hands!”

Slowly, every muscle aching, Colin obeyed, displaying the ugly wound on his arm. “Right, then,” the crew member called back, waving to the glassed-in bridge of the vessel. “Stand by to be brought aboard.”

“You can take a break, Sergeant, an' go get some tea if yeh like,” Colin heard Superintendent Dunn say to the garda stationed outside his hospital room. “I'll be responsible for Mr. Doyle for a few minutes.”

Groaning with the pull of the staples in his arm, Colin used his left hand to push the button on the side of his bed, raising him up to a sitting position as Dunn entered the room, closing the door behind him. The Superintendent glanced at Colin once, nodded silently, then went to the chair alongside the bed and sat. He leaned back, hands laced behind his head, staring at the humming fluorescent lights.

“Water?” Dunn asked.

“No, thanks.”

For several seconds more, there was silence. Then Dunn shuffled his feet and brought his hands down to his lap. “'Twas a strange, strange day, that. I still don't half-believe it.”

“You were there? On Inishcorr?”

“Aye,” he replied, “I was there.” His eyes were trapped in tired lines, and the bags underneath were gray and pouched. “An' I still don't know what it was I saw.” He was staring at Colin as if waiting for him to answer the riddle, but Colin only pressed his lips together, returning the stare. Finally, Dunn looked away again toward the ceiling. “One of the naval CPOs, I heard him telling his captain that the Oileánach must have had hallucinogens in that fog they put around the island, because there wasn't any other explanation for what we saw.”

“And what did you see, Superintendent?”

Dunn almost seemed to laugh. He ran a hand over his short-cut gray hair. “The impossible. Things that were just stories and tales, only they were there all around us, an' all too real.”

“You think the Oileánach could do that with hallucinogens, and that all of you would see the same things? You think Maeve and the others had the resources and the science to do that?”

“Nah, I do'nah,” Dunn answered. His gaze returned to Colin. “Would yeh be having a better explanation, Mr. Doyle?” When Colin remained silent, Dunn sighed. “I di'nah think so. Not after the other night when yeh vanished from Regan's. But that would'nah been anything supernatural, would it? At least I wouldn't be admitting it if I were you.”

“What happens now?” Colin asked. “Am I being charged with something? Am I going to be deported? What about my things?”

“Yer guitars? I'm afraid they're gone with the island and the Oileánach. I suppose they might wash up somewhere, but they will'nah be worth anything if that happens.”

What about the cloch?
Colin wanted to ask, but didn't want Dunn to know that was the only thing he wanted. When he'd been brought onto the boat, they'd taken everything he'd had, the cloch among them. He could
feel
that loss, and the pain of its loss overshadowed the dull throbbing of the healing wound on his arm. He wanted it; he yearned to hold it again in his hand.

“As to what else happens to yeh, I do'nah know yet,” Dunn answered. “There will be questions, lots of them, and from lots of people who are angry and confused about all this. But no one from the gardai or the Naval Services saw yeh there on Inishcorr this time, and there's none of the Oileánach left to ask.” He inclined his head toward the door. “As far as any of them out there know, as far as
I
know, yeh were just trying to find the island again when yeh got caught up in the terrible storm, if yeh take me drift.”

“I think I do. Superintendent, I had a pendant,” Colin said. “You probably remember it: an emerald-like stone in a silver setting. It was my grandfather's.”

Dunn nodded. “Aye, I remember it. Yeh had it around yer neck when yeh were found. It's back at the station, along with the rest of what yeh had in yer pockets. It's safe, and I'll make sure yeh get it back.”

“Thank you, Superintendent. Could I have it now? Today?”

“We'll see about that,” Dunn grunted and lumbered to his feet. Standing next to the bed, he looked down at Colin. “The woman yeh were seeing out there . . .”

With the mention, Colin felt tears burn in his eyes. “She's gone,” he said.

Dunn nodded. “Aye, all of 'em are. Which seems odd, if yeh ask me. Not a single body washed up on the shore anywhere. Do'nah seem possible, that, does it? But I'm sorry for yer loss, Mr. Doyle. I truly am.”

The tears seared his skin, tracking down his cheek. He said nothing, and after a moment, the Superintendent heaved another heavy breath. “If yer still around after this all dies down, Mr. Doyle, I'd love a talk with yeh. Unofficial-like, and over a pint.”

“You'll have that, Superintendent. If I'm still around.”

Dunn's thick fingers patted the sheet near Colin's hand. “Yeh should get some rest,” he said. “I suspect yeh'll be needing it. And as to the pendant, I'll do what I can, seeing as it means so much to yeh.”

With that, he left the room, calling for the garda to return as he closed the door behind him.

“Breakfast is ready, Mr. Doyle.”

“I'll be right down, Mrs. Egan.”

Colin pulled a sweater over his T-shirt, being careful as he put his heavily bandaged right arm through the sleeve. He put on the necklace with the cloch over his head, tucking it carefully under the sweater, and went downstairs. The bed and breakfast was full—as were most of the rooms in Ballemór at the moment. The other residents—an older couple from Hamburg, Germany; a single woman from Galway who always seemed to be around whenever he walked into a room; a mid-thirties married couple with two young children from Kansas City—watched him as he entered the dining room and took his seat, though no one addressed him directly. He was a curiosity, a carnival freak to be stared at, but one that was perhaps too dangerous to approach closely. Mrs. Egan seemed to take pride in his presence, as if he were her prized and private possession.

After Superintendent Dunn's visit in the hospital, Colin had endured the inquiries of the various authorities—from the Naval Services to the NPWS to Dunn's local gardai for a week, asking him a thousand questions—some that he couldn't answer, some that he wouldn't. From them, he learned the official tale was that a massive and fast-moving storm front had blown over the island just as the sun was setting, driving the patrol vessels, half-wrecked, away from Inishcorr even as a small battle was being waged in and around the harbor. If those he talked to were coy about the details of the battle and who they found themselves fighting, Colin let that be.

The monstrous swell had been pushed along by the storm, washing over the island, rolling up the Ballemór Estuary, and swamping much of the local coast. When the wave and the storm passed, Inishcorr was gone, not a trace of it left: no flotsam, no wreckage, no hint that it or its inhabitants had ever been there. There wasn't—according to one crewman who took pity on Colin—even a sonar rise on the ocean floor. “'Twas gone like it had never existed,” the man said, almost wonderingly.

Somehow, none of the naval personnel or gardai had been killed in the incident and the tidal wave, though there had certainly been injuries and broken bones in plenty. Several of those who had been involved in the attack on Inishcorr and caught up in the great wave found themselves somehow washed onto or close to the
Grainne Ni Mhaille
, the Oileánach's hooker, which had somehow stayed afloat despite its broken mast and torn sails. Superintendent Dunn had been among them.