“We called it Cromm Crúaich. My father fought a battle here when they first came to Ireland,” Méabh said. “Who is Patrick?”
“He was…” I didn’t really want to give her Saint Patrick’s whole story. “A holy man after your time. He did a pilgrimage on that mountain so they named it after him.”
“Patrick defeated Cromm on the mountain.” Caitríona gave Méabh a good hard stare. “Cromm was an old god and Patrick banished him along with all the snakes in Ireland. Who are you?”
“She’s Méabh,” I said again. “Honestly, are you sure you don’t want to go home? It’s too early in the day to be climbing mountains, isn’t it?”
Caitríona turned her good hard stare on me. “No.”
Well. No arguing with that, then. I sighed and turned back to the car, bumping the suitcase along behind me. “You really think she’d like to be burned up there on the mountain?”
“Oh, yes. She wasn’t even a pagan, was Auntie Sheila. She was something else all her own. Connected, like. Connected to everything. Are ye like her?” she said to me, and I startled guiltily.
“Not very much, but in some ways, yeah.” Wow. Prevarication 101, that was me. “Yes.”
Caitríona said, “Hnf,” which I felt was somehow condemning, and we all went and got in my car and drove to Croagh Patrick.
Sometime on Saturday night I’d sworn I would take up jogging Monday morning. I hadn’t, of course, expected to be in Ireland when I’d made that oath. Nonetheless, Méabh bounded up the damned goat trail leading to Croagh Patrick’s summit with the agility and speed of…well. A goat. And Caitríona, full of teenage resiliency, was barely a few steps behind her. I did have the excuse of lugging a suitcase full of bones, but mostly I was just in no condition to be running up mountainsides. I felt this was not unreasonable, as normal people didn’t climb mountains anyway.
Of course, I’d left normal behind a long time ago, a fact which Gary should be happily reminding me of right about now. I hitched the suitcase over a rock and threw out the promise to start jogging in favor of a promise to get him back. I’d already made that promise about a thousand times, but once more didn’t hurt. Especially if it got me out of jogging.
I walked into a wall and bounced off. The wall said, “You’re no fit warrior, Granddaughter.”
I sighed and edged my way around Méabh. “I’ll start running up and down mountains as a fitness regime next week. Right now I just need to…” She’d been in the way of my view of the path, and now that I could see it, I wished she’d stayed in front of me. “…I just need to get up that horrible, hideous switchback without killing myself. Does anybody have anything to eat?” The last real food I could actually remember eating was a sandwich sometime early Saturday afternoon. There’d been some candy and potato chips since then, but they didn’t count.
“You will not want to have eaten, for this.” Méabh passed me again, taking long easy strides up the mountainside while I drooped. Ritualized magic apparently went hand in hand with self-denial. Cleansing the body and spirit and all that crap, I guessed, but since no food was forthcoming there wasn’t much reason to bitch about it now. I was going to eat half a cow when we got back down to ground level, though.
“I’ve eaten.” Caitríona surged ahead to catch up with Méabh. “Will it be a problem so?”
Méabh gave her a considering look. “Have ye the power?”
Cat glanced back at me, then settled on Méabh. “Like Auntie Sheila? No. Me Gran had it, but then, she was Sheila’s mam, too. We all thought one of us cousins might have it.” She said that like it was my fault, which in a way I supposed it was. Probably if Mother hadn’t had me, the magic would have come to the fore in somebody else. It didn’t seem likely it would just die out after several thousand years of coming down the line.
“Then it should be no trouble. It’s Joanne we’ll be looking to for the circle.” Méabh glowered at me over her shoulder. “Should she survive the walk up the hill, at least.”
They were starting to piss me off. As a rule, the healing power I commanded didn’t think much of me utilizing it for personal gain, but I took a deep breath and tapped into it, searching for the cool rush of strength that would buoy me through the last couple hundred yards up the mountain.
Instead my arm cramped, muscle around the bites twisting as if using the magic within me only encouraged the impulse to transform. I clenched my fist, afraid to look and see it had become a wolf’s paw, but it closed normally. Or as normally as it could, when the muscles used to close it had big teeth marks through them. I swallowed down a whimper and dared peek at it.
The bite itself was starting to look hot again. Not quite as bad as before, like my brief shape change had bled off some of the infection, but it was building again. For the first time I thought maybe I should do what other people did, and go see a doctor. Maybe I would. After I got done climbing a mountain and burning my mother’s bones.
On the positive side, panic over the idea of turning into a werewolf gave me a plenty-big boost, and I trotted up the rest of the mountain on Méabh’s and Caitríona’s heels with no problem.
The view was incredible, with the Atlantic spilling off to the west and half of Ireland glimmering through soft mist around and behind me. Not for the first time, the old country steeped me in magic and power, in presence and in continuity. There was a peace to it unlike anything I’d ever encountered in Seattle. I understood why Saint Patrick had stayed up there for forty days, absorbing everything that Ireland had to offer.
So it really was a pity about the residual human sacrifices staining the mountain so deeply it felt like a mallet to the head.
Chapter Fifteen
I did very well, all things considered. Instead of collapsing, I carefully knelt until my forehead touched the ground and folded my hands at my nape while I took some deep breaths. Being that close to the earth didn’t make it any worse. There were mitigating factors at play, which probably helped. Saint Patrick really had been here once upon a time, and whether I approved of going around converting the masses or not, the guy had apparently wielded—welt?—some significant power. The land had been healed to some degree, the deepest of the bloodstains washed away, and several hundred years of ordinary human worship had gone further yet in wiping out the death magic that had been done here. Had gone a long way, in fact, because otherwise I’d have known from Westport’s streets that the mountain was a blight on the land. That didn’t make it any more pleasant to discover now that I was up here. Muffled, because I was mostly talking into the dirt, I said, “So who was the Crúaich guy your father fought here, Méabh?”
“Cromm,” she said. “Crúaich is the mountain itself.”
If I wasn’t trying so hard not to puke I’d have gotten up and kicked her. “What. Ever.”
Sensitive creature that she was, she picked up on my irritation. “He was the Fomorian king. It was his people we drove from this land so we might call it our own.”
“Fomorians. I don’t know the Fomorians.” I’d been doing so well to pull the Fir Bolg out of my sketchy memory. Discovering there were still more ancient Irish peoples I’d missed was kind of depressing.
“Dark and cruel monsters,” Caitríona said, but she said it with an edge. I turned my head half an inch to peer at her. She clearly didn’t know which of us to glare at more fiercely. “Cromm was defeated by Nuada of the Silver Hand when the Tuatha de Daanan came to Ireland.”
I decided Méabh was getting the hard end of the glower. That was okay with me. I put my head back where it had been and kept breathing deeply. The impact was lessening some. I was reminded of the baseball diamond back in Seattle where three ritual murders had been carried out. It had been a literal black stain on Seattle’s psychic energy. Croagh Patrick was both worse and better than that. The deaths here were far more numerous, but also much older, and a lot of effort had gone into cleaning them up. They still made my stomach churn, and the sweat standing out on my body wasn’t from hiking up the hill. I snaked an ever-so-tentative thread of power into the earth, torn between hoping to help and terrified at how my magic might respond to being used. Bizarrely, it didn’t object at all, and the ground sucked it down greedily, like a drink it was dying for.