“I could go last,” Cat volunteered, but I shook my head again.
“I’m tallest with the most reach. It’ll be easier for Méabh to grab me than you.” I started to make stirrups again, but Gancanagh, to my surprise, intervened and tossed Cat up instead. Then he made a stirrup for me, and when I began the same protest again, shook his head. “Trust me.”
“On a cold day in hell.” But I stepped into the stirrup anyway, and he flung me toward Méabh with far more grace and strength than I expected. I didn’t know why: Morrison, whose build he appeared to share, was certainly strong enough to lift me. But I had this idea that under the Morrison image Gancanagh was a slight little thing, and therefore shouldn’t be able to fling me around.
Nor should he be able to fling himself around, by that logic, but he leapt up the wall with the insouciance of a cat, which made him seem really truly not human for the first time. He caught me gawking and winked, and I bit back another schoolgirl giggle. Not even Cernunnos made me want to lick him quite so much. Fairy magic, I decided, was dangerous.
Well, on a good day, so was mine. We all thumped down on the other side of the wall—a longer drop than I expected, as the hill ran down against it—and peered up at Aibhill’s castle.
There was a front door on the side facing us. That made perverse sense, particularly since the other side of the hill was a less treacherous climb than the side we’d come up. No reason to invite enemies in through the easiest access point. “I don’t suppose we just go knock.”
“Sure and she’d invite us right in,” Caitríona breathed. “What’s the worst a banshee can do?”
“Flay your soul from your skin with its voice.”
Her eyes bugged. I shrugged stiffly. My left arm didn’t want to move at all. I didn’t look at it for fear I’d see a wolf’s paw dangling from the shredded remains of my coat sleeve. Realistically I didn’t think I had a lot of choice coming up: I was afraid I’d have to go all lupine again to have even the slightest chance of us coming out ahead when we fought Aibhill.
The very thought just about talked myself into turning tail and running. Instead I made a dash for the castle’s front door.
There were two doors, actually, once I got close enough to see clearly. One was massive, large enough to let half an army out at once. The other was set inside the big one and was normal-size. It had one of those little barred windows for checking out incomers before they came in, but no one was standing guard. Instead a big hoary-looking lock made a promise that we wouldn’t be getting in anytime soon. I sagged as the other three caught up to me, but Caitríona glanced at the lock, sniffed and pulled a jackknife out of her jeans pocket.
Less than sixty seconds later the lock popped open and Cat folded the knife up, eminently satisfied with herself. “What?” she said to our wide-eyed admiration. “Me brothers used to try to keep me out of the shed they stored girly mags in. I thought they were hiding chocolates.”
Breathless with astonished laughter, I shoved through the door and the others spilled after me. Gancanagh whisked it shut behind him. We all pushed ourselves up against the big doors as if we were hidden by pressing against them, though in fact we stood inside a grassy courtyard with not a hint of cover in sight. Still, every one of us was bright with triumph at getting in. All we had to do now was find Aibhill, kill her and rescue my mother.
Right about then, the banshees came for us.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We all gasped right from our very toes, not one of us remembering that I was maintaining a magic that rendered us unseeable. That collective gasp should have been our undoing.
But nothing short of a freight train whistle could have been audible over the banshees’ keening, and even that would probably just blend in. They knew the door had opened and closed again: that was clear from how they dove at it time and again while the four of us scattered. Bleak-faced women zoomed by close enough to touch, scraggly hair streaming behind them and their skeletal faces contorted in rage. They scraped long nails through the grass, tufts flying everywhere as we all rolled frantically in different directions, trying to avoid their touch. It would take only one to let them know it hadn’t been the wind banging the locked door around.
By the time they began to settle we were spread across the entire courtyard. Caitríona had found a doorway to press into, but she kept giving it worried looks, as if it might open behind her. Méabh had curled up into a space next to what I thought of as a buttress, although I also kind of thought those belonged on castle roofs, not in their courtyards. Either way, the aos sí woman’s face was twisted, presumably with anger at being forced to hide instead of fight. Gancanagh had gone to ground in an oddly literal way, becoming a lump of earth that hadn’t been there before. I could see him if I tried, but his chameleon performance reminded me that this fairy realm was his as well as the Master’s.
That idea floated in my mind for an instant, then solidified on the thought I’d had earlier: that we’d crossed into the Lower World when we’d taken the tunnel beneath Sheila’s bones.
I was far more familiar with Native American cosmology than Irish. There were three easily accessible levels of reality in Native cosmology—the Middle World, which was the one everybody lived in day to day, the Upper World, a rarified place of spirits and souls, and the Lower World, which was very much like the Middle World except the colors were wrong, distances were peculiar and it was littered with all sorts of astonishing creatures, many of which were dangerous. Dangerous was still the name of the game, and although the landscape was different, Gancanagh’s sudden melding with the earth looked so much like something that would easily happen in the Lower World that I was pretty certain I was just viewing it through another mythology’s eyes. On one hand, that was great: I had a reasonable amount of experience in the Lower World.
On the other, it was very, very bad, because the Native American version of the Lower World wasn’t so permeated by the Master’s touch that its denizens regarded it as essentially his territory. I didn’t know if all of Europe—and if all of Europe then I would think all of what had been Mesopotamia and never mind the vast Chinese empire that stretched back far beyond European civilization—I didn’t know if Ireland’s corruption meant all those places also had versions of the Lower World that were saturated by the Master’s influence.
Which might mean the Americas, with their comparatively recent settlements—the Americas and maybe Australia—were the last holdouts in a world already deeply affected by the Master’s life-destroying ways.
I stood there squished into a corner while a host of thwarted banshees gathered in the center of the courtyard, their keening much quieter now, as if they’d lowered their voices to discuss what to do next. They chatted, and I glared futilely at the sky. At the makers of the world, if they lived up there. At Grandfather Sky, whom Coyote had once named specifically as someone responsible for my arrival on this little blue ball floating in space.
I didn’t want to buy into the whole “peaceful natives save the world” storyline. I might not have known a lot about the mythology of the Native peoples of America, but I knew a fair amount about their history. The modern implication of “peaceful natives save the earth” was “backward savages don’t recognize the benefits of progress,” a violently prejudiced viewpoint of what had been some truly astounding cultures. I wanted to scream with outrage at anything that lent itself toward perpetuating it, including myself. There were plenty of examples where American native settlements and cities had gone beyond their resources and collapsed the system.
None of which negated the fact that a great number of them had lived harmoniously within the system for a long time, and perhaps in doing so had given the Master just a little less room for a toehold in their territories. So by all rights maybe I should have been full-blooded Cherokee, one hundred percent about reversing wrongs and saving the world, but oh no. No, I was goddamned Luke Skywalker, bringing balance to the Force. Product of two cultures, both steeped in magic, one that had been fighting contamination since way back when and the other comparatively fresh and clean.