“I called on the power of the land, as I did to bind the wolves. A power circle, Joanne, to guide the sword’s strength. Against mortal enemies the blade is true, but when the taint it fights is older than its forging…” Méabh shook her head.
I finished getting dressed as she spoke, and asked a question I didn’t much want the answer to: “How much older?”
“You already know.” Gancanagh spoke from beside me, nearly earning himself a punch in the nose by doing so. He gave me a wink, a once-over and a sly smile, and I did punch him, because Morrison, who he still reminded me of, wouldn’t have been so crass. He clutched his upper arm where I’d hit him, looking crestfallen, and as if hoping to get back in my good graces, said, “The Aillén Trechend has risen from the depths since the ard rí Bres was stolen from time. This is a blow, gwyld. This is a blow against the dark one.”
Morrison wouldn’t have called me gwyld, either. I almost started to like Gancanagh for that. For differentiating himself. Then I remembered he’d led us smack into the dragon’s jaws, and again lifted a fist to hit him. “You said evil’s lair!” he blurted before I could. “Not Aibhill’s! And we’d reached evil’s lair, had we not? Even the mistress of banshees places guards between herself and the world, and her domain lies just beyond. You don’t want to be without me, not yet.”
I didn’t lower my fist. I did look beyond my erstwhile boss at Caitríona and Méabh, to see what they thought. They both looked like I should go back to my original plan of stringing him up by his toes, but Méabh, rolling her jaw, said, “He may still be useful.”
“As cannon fodder,” Caitríona suggested darkly.
I turned back to Gancanagh with the fist still cocked. “One false move, buster. One false move.”
Green glinted in his gaze as he lowered his eyes, then led us once more into the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Caitríona sidled up to me as we left the dragon’s dusted remains. “You turned into a snake.”
She’d said that once before. On the other hand, by all reasonable expectation she should be gibbering like a madman about now, so probably a little repetition wasn’t that big a deal. “I have a peculiar repertoire of talents.”
“Will I turn into a snake?”
“I seriously doubt it. Even if mages can accomplish shapeshifting, Ireland doesn’t have snakes. It probably wouldn’t be high on your list of things to turn into.” I thought of beached flounders and Coyote’s warning about how a shifter should always have a clear idea of their target animal, and amended, “But if it’s something you want to change into, then yeah, probably you could. Assuming it’s in the skill set.”
“What about an elk? One of the big ones, the Irish elk?” Hopeful, she extended her hands to approximate the rack on an Irish elk, which was about twice as long as her armspan.
“You’d make a really tiny elk. You saw how big a snake I was? That’s because as far as I can tell, mass doesn’t change. I bet one of those baby Irish elk weighs as much as you do, so that’s about as big as you’d be. A hundred and sixty-five pounds of rattlesnake is awe-inspiring. A hundred and sixty-five pounds of baby elk wouldn’t be so much so.”
I saw her do the conversion in her head before offense flew across her face. “I do not weigh twelve stone!”
“No, not you, me. You probably weigh, what, one…fifteen?” I figured it was more like one-thirty, but no one in their right mind ever guessed a woman’s weight at what they thought it really was.
She eyed me, doing the conversion again, then resentfully allowed, “A bit more, maybe.”
“Okay, so you’d be a…” I was pretty sure a stone equaled fourteen pounds. I did the conversion myself and came up with, “An eight-and-a-half-stone elk. Not exactly the six-foot-tall behemoth you’re imagining, right? But I could be wrong, maybe there’s a spell that lets you change mass. You’re handling this pretty well.”
“I half think I’m dreaming,” she admitted. “That it’s some wild story Auntie Sheila’s telling me, and I’ll wake up snug and sound in me own bed. But it’s not, is it. Why did ye tell us none of this at the funeral?”
“My life wasn’t like this then. It only started after I got home. Besides, I’d have never dreamed anyone would believe me. I didn’t know my mother very well. I had no idea she might have softened you up for accepting this kind of weirdness. Do you watch Star Trek?”
Caitríona blinked, rightfully bewildered by the segue. “Sure, who hasn’t seen an episode or two?”
“Good. You know the ship’s shields? You’re going to need something like that to protect yourself with.”
“Like you’ve been using on us, all blue and shimmery?”
“Except yours won’t be blue. That’s a reflection of my power. Of my aura, really. Mine’s blue and silver. Yours is more red and green.”
“Ah sure,” she said in disgust, “sure and I’m a tartan so.”
I laughed, which made Gancanagh look back at me with a full-court-press smile. I bared my teeth at him and he deflated, which somehow made the light dim even further. I checked the impulse to catch up to him and say it was all okay, and instead focused hard on Caitríona. “Do the Irish even have tartans? I thought it was all about the sweaters, here.”
“The Aran clan sweaters? That was a marketing ploy.” She took no notice of my dismayed gawk as she went on. “We’ve a few tartans, but not like the Scots. I wouldn’t know the O’Reilly tartan if it bit me,” she admitted. “How do I build shields?”
“It’s a really internal thing, and probably hiking through the heart of the Master’s realm isn’t the best place to learn. I’d hate for him to get a thread inside your shields, because it’s a bitch to root those out.”
“You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
“In the case of letting unfortunate people inside my shields, yeah, I do. This would be a good time to learn from my mistakes.” We’d covered a lot of distance while chatting, but I was starting to get worried. The clock was running out, and I had no way to tell, down beneath the earth, just how close we were pushing it. “Gancanagh?”
“What do you want, Walker?”
I tripped over my own feet, bit my tongue and righted myself with a curse. “Stop that. Don’t use my name. Not like that. You are not Morrison. How much farther do we have to go?”
He turned with a finger against his lips: shh. “Do you not hear it?”
I hadn’t, of course, because Cat and I had been talking. As soon as we went silent, though, I did hear it: wailing, not unlike the Lia Fáil. Only that had been one voice, the voice of the land, whereas this was many. Twenty-five, at a guess, assuming Aibhill was not only mistress of the banshees but a banshee herself. Hairs stood up on my neck and arms and I dragged to a halt.
Truth was, I didn’t want to go into banshee stomping grounds. I’d been stomped the one time I’d really gone up against one of Aibhill’s blades, and having a touchy aos sí and a newborn mage along with me this time didn’t seem like it evened the odds enough. “A battle plan might be a good idea here.”
“Have ye the lay of the land?” Méabh asked Gancanagh with a note of doubt.
“She’ll be in her tower on the hill.” Whether it was due to my objection to him sounding like Morrison or because he was talking to Méabh, he sounded more Irish again, for which I was grateful. Morrison didn’t put his sentences together the way the Irish did, which made it easier to remember the handsome fellow in front of me wasn’t my captain.
Méabh, however, wasn’t concerned with his linguistic choices. She grimaced and loosened her sword in its sheath. “And will there be an easy route up that hill, or will it be a battle every step of the way?”