“Leave off, now! My head is circling over the rest of me.”
“He’s so pale,” Teagan said. “Here, here, I’ll fix you tea.”
“Tea would be welcome. I went on a journey. I don’t know how, but I went home, but ’twasn’t home. I need to sort through it. But I know something I didn’t. Something we didn’t.”
He guzzled some water Brannaugh pushed on him, then shoved the skin away again. “He can’t leave there. Cabhan. He can’t leave, or not far. The farther from home, from where he traded for his new powers, the less they are. He risks death to leave there. He can’t follow us.”
“How do you know this?” Brannaugh demanded.
“I . . . saw it in his mind. I don’t know how. I saw it there, that weakness. I met a man, he’s ours. I . . .” Eamon drew a long breath, closed his eyes a moment.
“Let me have some tea, will you then? A little tea, then I have a tale to tell you. We’ll bide here awhile yet, and I’ll tell you all. Then, aye, aye, south for us, to learn, to grow, to plan. For he can’t touch us. He won’t ever touch you.”
Whatever boy he’d been, he was a man now. And power still simmered inside him.
3
Autumn 2013
WHEN CONNOR WOKE EARLIER THAN HE LIKED, HE hadn’t expected to meet an ancestor, or the greatest enemy of his blood. He certainly hadn’t anticipated starting his day with an explosion of magicks that had all but knocked him off his feet.
But, in the main, he liked the unexpected.
With the dawn barely broken, there’d been no hope his sister might be busy in the kitchen. And his skin meant too much to him to risk waking her and suggesting she might like to cook up breakfast.
More, there hadn’t been a hunger, and he always woke ready to break the night’s fast. Instead there’d been an odd energy, and a deep need to get out, get about.
So he’d whistled up his hawk and, with Roibeard for his companion, had taken himself into the mists and trees.
And quiet.
He wasn’t a man who required a great deal of quiet. He preferred, most of the time, the noise and conversations and heat of company. But this soft morning, the call of his hawk, the scrabble of rabbit in the brush, and the sigh of the morning breeze had been enough for him.
He thought he might walk over to Ashford Castle, let Roibeard soar in the open, over the greens there—and that would give any early-rising guests at the hotel a thrill.
Thrills often drummed up business, and he had one to run with the falconry school.
He’d aimed for that exactly, until he’d felt it—the stir of power, within and without. His own rising without his asking it, the dark stain of what was Cabhan, smudging the sweetness of the dewy pines.
And something more, something more.
He should have called his circle—his sister, his cousin, his friends, but something pushed him on, down the path, through the trees, near the wall of vines and uprooted tree where beyond lay the ruins of the cabin that had been Sorcha’s. Beyond where he and his circle had battled Cabhan on the night of the summer solstice.
There the fog spread, the power thrummed, dark against white. He saw the boy, thought first and only to protect. He would not, could not, allow harm to an innocent.
But the boy, while innocent enough, had more. The something more.
Now, the fog gone and Cabhan with it, the boy gone back to his own time, his own place, Connor stayed as he was—on his knees on the damp ground, fighting to get his breath fully back into his lungs.
His ears still rang from what had sounded like worlds exploding. His eyes still burned from a light brighter than a dozen suns.
And the power merged with joined hands sang through him.
He got slowly to his feet, a tall, lean man with a thick mop of curling brown hair, his face pale yet, and his eyes deep and green as the moss with what still stirred inside him.
Best to get home, he thought. To get back. For what had come through the solstice, and hidden away till the equinox lurked still.
A bit wobbly in the legs yet, he realized, unsure if he should be amused or embarrassed. His hawk swooped by, landed with a flutter of wings on a branch. Sat, watched, waited.