The Moon didn’t return until Cat’s trophy was scaled and filleted and steaming over a fire Tiernan had coaxed to life at the edge of the shelter created by the trees and the eroded bank.
You survived. I am pleased.
Tiernan arched a brow. Carefully lifting one of the leaves covering the fish with a stick and peering underneath, he ignored the orb edging over the horizon.
I am not sure whether Cat taught you manners, or you taught Cat.
The Moon sounded amused, rather than put out. Tiernan wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
A sigh was barely audible over the crackling of the fire and the constant sweep of the wind. You wonder why I left you at the girl’s mercy.
“You were taking a big risk, if you were assuming she had any mercy to leave me at.”
Cat stretched and yawned, ivory claws raking the sandy soil beside the fire and scattering tiny diamonds. His long whiskers twitched interestedly at the scent rising from the leaf-wrapped bundle.
“Looking for a reward? I didn’t notice you being much help either.”
Cat didn’t so much as blink.
I could not interfere—too much was at stake.
“That’s convenient.” Tiernan carefully kept his voice disinterested, his stance relaxed. Resentment had simmered quietly in the back of his mind for a handful of centuries, as far as he could tell, and after the events of the last few hours, it wanted out. But a scian-damhsa would never betray himself or his motives to a target so quickly.
I daresay it seems so. If the Moon noticed anything was amiss, she wasn’t letting on. But I am not as powerful as you seem to think I am. I rule time, but I cannot change its nature. When it has been disturbed, as the great Fae mages did, or will do, it refuses to behave as it should until the ripples of the disturbance settle.
“Awfully oracular of you.”
If I tell you too much, I will create turbulence of my own. Your time of exile has finally served to balance the damage your Loremasters did; I would not prolong it further.
“You’re talking as if you’re finally ready to send me home.” Tiernan measured his words carefully. This was far from the first time he’d dared to hope, and he wasn’t sure he could handle having hope shattered again.
I cannot do that.
So much for being careful. She had never spoken his doom so plainly before. “Then why the fuck did you just say—”
My children can.
The Moon’s calm cut into Tiernan’s nascent rant as efficiently as Aine’s knife in his throat would have. With an effort, he closed his mouth. “Your children?” he croaked.
Words formed from the rustling of oak leaves over his head, the creak of branches, the changing patterns of sunlight. WOMB-CHILDREN AND CRADLE-CHILDREN OF THE MOON AND THE SUN, OUR MOTHERS.
He’d heard that voice before. Yesterday, before he’d been dropped headlong into a memory of Kevin so vivid he’d expected to smell the smoke of the Marfach’s burning on coming back to himself.
This is a darag. My cradle-child.
Tiernan pictured the Moon smiling, a fond parent. It was a strange picture, given the level of snark that usually accompanied his own interactions with her.
Time is the darag’s treasure, each moment separate from all others, to be lived when it pleases. It can place you in the time from whence you came.
“Right now?”
Cat looked as uneasy as Tiernan suddenly felt. The big-eared feline was crouched in something like his usual attack posture, tail twitching, hindquarters shifting. But instead of fixing his prey with an intent stare, he was looking around nervously, pupils dilated, apparently wondering where the hell his prey was.
The Moon laughed. No, not now. You will need the help of my womb-child, the Gille Dubh who lives within the darag. But he cannot come out until sunset. Wait. Feed your cat—he has been more than patient.
* * *
The fire’s embers still glowed fitfully in the new evening, stirred by the never-ending wind, when the wind once again formed words.
You seem overdressed for an adventure.
Cocking a brow, Tiernan turned and looked up the bank. A male figure stood beside the largest oak, hands on hips, grinning, dark skin gleaming in starlight and ember-light.
And naked. Very naked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Tiernan replied evenly. “I prefer to keep something between me and the kind of adventures I’ve been having lately.”
Fair enough. I saw your encounter with the charming young huntress. Laughter was apparently the same as’Faen and in whatever language the dark male spoke—“male,” not “man,” since there was little that was human about the being other than his outer form.
Especially certain insistently erect details of his outer form.
Tiernan cleared his throat. “If you were watching, you know my name. Which means you have the advantage of me.”
And no Fae could possibly allow such a state of affairs to continue. The smile faded to a wicked gleam in eyes that seemed to flash brown and green by turns, depending on the light. I am Nycholl. And I am a Gille Dubh, paired with my darag. He laid a hand on the trunk of the oak, as if that explained something, and just for an instant Tiernan thought he saw hand and bark become one.
Maybe it did explain something, at that.
“I take it you and your darag are our way home?”
“Our” way? Nycholl’s head tilted to one side, like a bird’s. Or a cat’s. Accommodating you will be something of an inconvenience, but one I will gladly endure for the sake of your close company—
“Don’t get your hopes up. You’re returning me to my own close company, or you’d better be.”
You are a most unusual Fae. The tree spirit shrugged. The addition of your cat may prove more than our close quarters can bear. You will have to hold it, and cats of my acquaintance are not overfond of that.
“Which is one reason I overdress for adventures.”
Cat stropped himself against Tiernan’s shins, purring. But not, he noticed, retracting his claws.
“What do we need to do?”
Our Mother says you need to Fade without traveling, and come into the darag with me. From there, the darag will choose to live in the future-moment She has given it for this purpose, and you and I—and your cat—will simply live along with it.
“Nothing much, then.” Tiernan didn’t even bother trying not to sound sarcastic. Fading was a thing he’d discovered fairly recently and didn’t entirely understand; it seemed to involve letting go of the part of himself that was physical in one place and willing that part to be reconstructed around the living magick of another place. Each time he did it, it felt a little like stepping off a cliff—somehow, the knowledge that he’d survive if it didn’t kill him immediately wasn’t any comfort in either case.
And doing it without traveling anywhere, just deciding to become un-physical, sounded remarkably like stark raving lunacy.
But if that was what he had to do to get back to Kevin?
Tiernan glanced down at Cat, and braced himself, recognizing his feline companion’s I’m-about-to-pounce ass-wriggle. He managed not to yelp as claws sank into his leggings and vest and linen shirt; gritting his teeth, he plucked a hind-claw out of his navel with one hand while supporting Cat’s weight with his other arm. “You’re going to have to hold still and not do that again—I’ve never tried Fading both of us before, and I’m going to need all the non-hindrance I can get.”
Cat licked his whiskers.
You talk to cats?
“Not cats in general. Just Cat.” Tiernan drew a deep breath and turned to Nycholl. “Are you ready to do this? If I can even manage this kind of Fade, I don’t think I can hold it for long.”
Define “ready.”
“I think I hate you.”
Nycholl laughed, wind and starlight. We are at your service.
And with that, there was nothing for it but to try.
Taking a deep breath and doing his damnedest to relax, Tiernan imagined himself and Cat dissolving in a perfectly still pool of light, clear as crystal but touched with silver-blue.
He’d had enough practice to make the transition fairly simple, even with the addition of a passenger—the trick was to keep from reaching immediately for some other place in that pool of magick to anchor his physicality and start building it back up again.
Hm. Perhaps you should have stopped while I could still see you.
“If I’d done that, I could hardly walk into a tree, now, could I?”
Nycholl gave no sign that he’d heard.
“Fuck.”
Tiernan shrugged shoulders that didn’t technically exist at the moment, and climbed up the eroded face of the bank to stand beside Nycholl.
Or he tried to. Telling his legs to move produced something like a ripple in the pool of magick he was part of, and moved him not quite a finger’s-breadth toward the bank.
He tried again, harder. Two fingers.
At this rate, he wouldn’t have to move through time inside the darag, because he wasn’t going to get anywhere near the darag for a few centuries.
Are you ready?
Tiernan’s reply was brief, colorful, probably anatomically impossible, and largely automatic, preoccupied as he was with figuring out how to get up to the tree.
In the end, of course, it was—as so much else was—a simple matter of breaking the rules. He’d been told to Fade without traveling, but that was going to leave him stuck in his own world’s past, with no chance of seeing Kevin again.
So Tiernan Faded into the trunk of the tree.
Cat’s yowling, and the bizarre burning stiffening pain wracking his body, stopped him from rebuilding his body around the darag’s magick before he’d done much more than think about it.
COME, NYCHOLL. IT IS TIME.
Suddenly there was someone else in the tree with Tiernan and Cat. Someone occupying exactly the same space. Not that Tiernan could see anything
I did warn you about the close company. Nycholl chuckled. Are you sure you have no wish to—
“I wish to get the hell out of here before I lose control of my Fade or my cat.” Tiernan wasn’t sure how he was speaking; he was just grateful that he could.
There is wisdom in your counsel.
* * *
Wake up.
WAKE UP.
How the fuck wind was blowing inside a tree was a mystery Tiernan couldn’t fathom. Although, truthfully, he wasn’t all that interested in fathoming it, at least not until the top of his head stopped trying to come off.
You must leave us now.
The amusement in the voice tipped Tiernan off. “Nycholl.” Well, that explained the wind. “Am I supposed to have a hangover that would kill a large farm animal?”
Somewhere around his feet, Cat meowed pathetically.
“Or a smallish non-farm animal.”
“Supposed to” is a difficult concept, when no Fae or smallish non-farm animal has ever done this before. Nycholl sounded somewhat discombobulated himself. But it seems appropriate.
“I don’t suppose you have a cure handy?”
Leaving the darag would be a good first step. Nycholl sighed dramatically. A shame. But the mage our Mother warned of your coming is here, and anxious for your arrival.
Tiernan closed his presently-imaginary eyes against the pounding behind them. “He can’t be half as anxious for my arrival as I am to get out of here. No offense to present company intended.”
Politeness? The breeze sounded shocked.
“Gratitude for service rendered. Please don’t make me regret it.”
Nycholl laughed. Perhaps we shall meet again someday, Wanderer. And the mage is preparing a channeling not far from here. If you can sense the magick of it, that direction is safe to Fade in.
Gathering his awareness of Cat close as best he could, Tiernan Faded.
When he took form again, the drumbeat in his head was gone, vanished like the light of a snuffed candle.
He and Cat stood in a small clearing in thick woods, where minutes ago they had been finishing a fish dinner on a low-tide beach. A slender auburn-haired female in elegant robes stood on the far edge of the clearing, tracing a finger in an intricate pattern over the surface of what looked like a large mirror; another female, dark hair caught up in a scarf of the same finely-woven blue linen as her dress, tended a fire in a stone pit. Both turned toward him, startled—
A wave of pure vertigo dropped Tiernan to his knees. Cat screeched, getting out of the way just in time.
Tiernan pressed his forehead into the cool grass, hoping it would make the Realm stop spinning around him. What the pernicious fuck? Where did this come from?
Even thought was difficult. He couldn’t shake a bone-deep sense of agór, wrongness. He’d gone into the tree in one place, and had come out somewhere else, and his body and hindbrain had some very definite opinions on the impossibility of such a thing.
Can I have the hangover back?
“Suan!” The voice was coming from the far side of the clearing, where the taller female had been tending the mirror. “I dare not leave this channeling until I can stabilize it—”
“I will help him, Lady.”
A hand under Tiernan’s elbow urged him to stand, took his weight when he staggered.
“Easy,” he muttered.
Light laughter greeted his grumbling, as if he had said something clever. “You act like you just got out of a covered litter.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The female eased her shoulder under Tiernan’s arm, the better to hold him up. “You know.”
“I’ve never even seen a covered litter, never mind been in one.”
As parsing the difference between up and down preoccupied him less and less, a murmuring in the back of his mind became louder—and louder still when he looked at the mirror the mage was preparing.
His memories. However many centuries’ worth of them there had been before he’d been hurled backward in time to slay a monster and midwife a world. They were chaotic, indistinct—but a few were trying to get his attention. The emergent few had one thing in common: being closed inside some kind of metal moving conveyance about the size of a coffin, from which he had emerged almost exactly the same shade of green he could feel himself turning now.
Wonderful. I’m almost close enough to my memories to touch them, and instead of finally remembering Kevin, I relive being locked in an iron vomit wagon.
“See? You know.” The female blushed as she looked up at him, trying and failing to suppress a smile, the attempt bringing out several very fetching dimples and setting the light of the fire dancing in her eyes.
Her unfaceted, brown, human eyes.
Suan. How had he forgotten that name?
Well, he hadn’t exactly forgotten it—remembering it had just been forced to wait its turn behind keeping his fish dinner where he’d put it.
“You’re Aine’s mother’s—” Tiernan barely managed not to blurt something unfortunate like pet or plaything.
“Cheanglá.” Suan nodded, the smile she’d kept back now blossoming.
Tiernan heard the echo of a word that had been familiar once—ceangal, a binding. A tricky word, one that could mean captivity or betrothal or marriage, depending on the context.
“The channeling is nearly ready, sule-speír.” The mage still didn’t look away from her working, but her smile showed she’d been listening, and made Tiernan glad he hadn’t been unnecessarily rude to her human mate. If never piss off a mage wasn’t a Fae saying in this Realm, he was willing to wager it ought to be. “Is our guest well enough to travel?”
Before either Suan or Tiernan could answer, Cat let out one of his overlook-me-at-peril-of-your-clothing yowls.
Both females laughed. Suan looked down at Cat, who was arching against her shins; that being all the invitation Cat needed, he swarmed up her skirt-swathed legs and settled himself with the very tips of his hind-claws digging into the generous curve of her right hip and his fore-paws kneading at either side of her throat.
Tiernan arched a brow. “I’ve never seen him do that before—when he wants to get my attention, he usually sits on my bladder.”
Suan giggled, curving her free arm under Cat to take some of his weight off his hind-claws. “That must be—au!—uncomfortable.”
The mage left off her preparations, gliding across the grass and slipping her arm through Suan’s. “Please forgive my manners; I should have noticed you came with a companion.”
Tiernan didn’t bother to comment on the rarity of a Fae apology, since it was obvious the auburn-haired mage was looking at Cat. Cat, for his part, purred like the low rumble of thunder accompanying the constant flicker of summer-lightning, and leaned into the mage’s caressing fingertips so hard he nearly unbalanced himself and had to clutch at Suan with all four pointy ends to keep his perch.
“Maybe I’ll be traveling alone,” Tiernan muttered.
Three heads turned toward him; three pairs of eyes blinked slowly. Two pairs, at least, seemed amused.
“I daresay our novelty would wear off in time.” Dropping a half-wink to her human, the mage extended her free hand to Tiernan, open palm up to show she bore no weapon. “I am Méalla, and you were my daughter’s master-hunt and teacher.”
Tiernan returned the gesture with the hand of living Stone that was all the weapon he needed. “Is that why the Moon chose you to send me home?”
“It might well be, though that Lady keeps her own counsel.” Méalla took Tiernan’s outstretched hand and led him toward the mirror. “I would enjoy keeping you here a while—long enough at least to tell you what you wrought when you spoiled Aine’s hunt—”
Tiernan cleared his throat. Neither Méalla nor Suan seemed to notice.
“—but you have waited long enough to go home, I think.”
He shook off Suan’s support, dropped Méalla’s hand, and hurried the last few paces, stepping around the mirror and coming face to face with—
Himself. And Cat, and the clearing behind him, and trees behind trees behind trees fading off into a hazy golden afternoon.
He rested a hand on the hilt of the sword belted at his waist, relaxing into a balanced stance, shaking off the last of his gryphon’s pellet of a hangover to open his senses up to his surroundings. Aine had caught him unawares; her mother would have a much harder time doing the same.
“S’ocan.” Méalla’s tone was gentle, but firm. “This is no trap, scian-damhsa. The channeling is prepared, and waits only on a summoning from the other side.”
“Forgive me if I keep my guard up while I wait.” Cat, picking up on Tiernan’s tone, wove a quick set of arcs around his feet before crouching between them. “It seems I’ve been dancing someone else’s figures for a very long time now, and I’ve had enough of it.”
“Any Fae would say the same in your place.”
“I seriously doubt any Fae has ever been in my place.”
His memories grew steadily louder. They were like the roar of a waterfall, now—but he was in a cave behind the fall, near deafened but untouched. Faces jostled one another just out of sight; voices murmured, shouted, laughed, wept, all unintelligible.
So close.
Méalla said something. Or he assumed she did—hers was simply one more voice in the chorus at this point. “Try that again?”
“When you feel the call, step through.” The mage spoke slowly, enunciating carefully. “Do not Fade—the mirror will trap your soul if you do.”
“Fuck me backwards.”
“An interesting concept.” Méalla raised one perfect brow; Suan blushed.
Cat arched and hissed at the mirror.
Music swelled within the roar of Tiernan’s memories, music with a driving beat, an insistence. Music that was itself a memory.
“I hear it.” He wasn’t sure if he whispered, or shouted, or even spoke aloud at all. “The call.”
Cat swarmed up into Tiernan’s arms, claws digging deep into chest and arms and abs, furry chin tucked firmly under Tiernan’s scruffy jaw.
“Go!” Méalla raised her hands, feeding living magick to the channeling.
Tiernan hesitated in front of the entirely solid-looking mirror.
“Trust my Lady! Go!” Suan’s hand between Tiernan’s shoulder blades pushed him forward.
The beat called him, the pulse of memory.
Tiernan stepped into the mirror.
* * *
A giant scorpion with a face out of nightmare and pincers by Ginsu yanked Tiernan out of Kevin’s grasp—
Only for Kevin would he even consider an entire evening in a tuxedo—
“Gan cé g’vratheann m’croí,” he whispered, straddling his lover’s thighs—
“Enjoying the show?”
“The kinslayer’s awake.”
Fuck me if I am entering yet another world on my fucking face. Tiernan would have loved to collapse on the grass and cover his head with his arms as Bastet alone knew how many years’ worth of memories descended on him like a barrel full of building-bricks. But a Fae had his limits, and his pride.
Prudently, Cat leaped free of his arms and raced off, yowling as if someone had knotted his tail around a burning branch. Hopefully he wouldn’t run out of earshot before the cacophony in Tiernan’s head settled down—at the moment, adding visual input to his internal chaos seemed like overkill.
Someone—several someones—caught him by the elbows, holding him up. He shook them off.
“I am sprung from the loins of an entire race of assholes.”
“I can’t love you—what part of that don’t you fucking get?”
“Then scian’a’schian let it be, until blades no longer thirst.”
“Is rejecting help wise, in your condition?” The female’s voice was familiar, but for the moment the name attached to it was roiling around in Tiernan’s head along with a very long lifetime’s worth of other remembered things trying to find their places.
Before you all was dust
Without you all would be ashes
To lose you would leave my soul empty for a silent eternity
Planting his feet as firmly as he could, Tiernan drew a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Again, and again. A simple, effective way to clear his head, to calm down.
When it worked.
It was not working especially well.
“The only help I need is my scair-anam. Right fucking now, if you please.”
“I would if I could.”
Unacceptable answer.
Hoping the ground would refrain from smacking him in the face, he opened his eyes. Aine—the adult Aine he had left behind with everyone and everything else, not the mocking adolescent Aine who had come within a heartbeat of ending him—was clearly exhausted, leaning on a dark-haired male with frosted-silver temples while she replenished her magick. A hand-mirror lay in the grass next to her, its surface spider-webbed with cracks.
“Why can’t you?” Out of consideration for her condition, Tiernan tried not to snap.
Aine’s lips pressed together into a thin line. “We have been unable to find a way back to the human world since the Demesne of Purgatory destroyed the Pattern.”
* * *
Anyone who saw Tiernan Guaire might have been forgiven for thinking him a Fae at ease with himself and his world. A large, flat stone by the lakeshore still gave off the heat of the now-setting sun, and he lay back, propped on his elbows, watching waterfowl glide to landings and set the water to rippling.
Any such hypothetical observer might have been forgiven, that is, if Tiernan weren’t exuding a fuck-with-me-at-your-peril mood potent enough to scare off the local fish. Even Cat gave him a wide berth, after an exploratory pounce nearly earned him a swimming lesson.
He remembered so much now. How long had he yearned for this peace, this supernatural beauty, after he’d been exiled from it the first time? He wouldn’t have admitted it then, of course, even to himself—and who else would a wary Fae in the human world ever have admitted it to?—but he had known, whether two centuries ago or 12, or 20, that his heart had only one home, and that home was the Realm.
I knew nothing.
His heart wasn’t here.
“May I join you?”
Tiernan didn’t bother to look up. “Suit yourself.”
Instead of sitting beside him, Aine went to sit on the edge of the rock, gathering up the layers of her skirts and dangling her toes in the crystal-clear water. She, too, looked out over the lake in silence, her unbound hair flaring even redder than usual in the rays of the setting sun.
“What happened to the Marfach?” she asked at last.
Memories of the battle under Purgatory slid into place alongside memories of his reawakening. “We tried to trap it, to send it here for you to destroy, or bury. And this is just a guess, but I think we fucked with time so badly when we trapped it that we broke it. Broke time.”
“And you broke the Pattern in doing so.”
“We had to. We couldn’t kill the Marfach, and while I may never remember those few minutes’ bod-snadhaem clearly, I’m pretty sure the timestop you and yours set up to keep us from sending it back here was going to blow everything straight to hell if we didn’t do something about it.”
Aine inhaled sharply. “Go on.”
Tiernan shrugged. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see him. “The Marfach had me when the trap closed. And all the time-fuckery threw us back in time, to before the Sundering. Maybe before there were Fae.”
“I saw you go, I think.” The Loremaster stared at her toes in the water. “I was the only one not in the Pattern when it was unmade. And I saw every moment of its making, and every moment of its existence... and the moment hell itself hung suspended in the middle of it.”
“Hell itself. Sounds about right.” Tiernan’s throat tightened around his words. He waited out the spasm, watching a V of geese pass between the horizon and the setting sun. “The Marfach forgot what it was, and I killed it.”
“And you forgot who you were.”
“Yes.” The sudden rawness of Tiernan’s voice surprised even him. “But I never forgot Kevin.”
Aine half-turned to look at him. The tears standing in her eyes were a shock. “When I told you we have been unable to find a way back to the human world, I did not mean that no way exists—only that most of us have been in no condition to search for one. And those of us who are, are needed to care for the others.”
Tiernan sat bolt upright.
The Loremaster nodded, as if Tiernan had spoken. “Most of us survived the unmaking of the Pattern. But only a few of my colleagues remember what it is to inhabit a physical body... and it is a thing that takes getting used to.”
Kevin.
I’m coming, lanan. Tseo mo mhinn ollúnta. This is my solemn oath.