When Marg gripped her hands, Breen felt the fear. In herself, in her grandmother.
“Leave it in the water, and lose nothing.”
“It’s mine,” Breen murmured. “If I didn’t feel that before, I do now. It’s part of why I am, why I’m here, what I’m here to do. I’m afraid of it, of all of that, so I pulled back each time before instead of taking it.”
She spun around. “He put me in a cage in this water. He’d havetaken all I am. And because of that, all I amwastaken from me for most of my life. So it comes to me here. You know that’s why. You made the choice, Nan, made the pledge, a girl younger than me, you said. Her whole life ahead of her. But you took it because that’s who you are. I can’t be less.”
She heard her own heart beating over the beat of the waterfall as she stepped to the bank, stared down at the pendant.
A choice, she thought. The choice. If she had to give her life, if it came to that, she’d had a year like no other. She’d lived.
She heard Bollocks whine and Marg sob once as she simply walked into the water. Reaching down, she closed her hand over the gold chain and lifted it and the stone free.
“I pledge my loyalty to Talamh and the Fey. I pledge my respect to all the worlds and the laws in them. I pledge to stand for the Fey in times of joy and of strife when strife comes. I pledge to give my life willing for Talamh and all the Fey should it be asked, in the moment of asking. All life over one life. All light over one light.”
Trembling a little, she lifted the pendant high toward the sky, then draped the chain over her head. “If I break any of these vows, I’ll lose my powers, my gifts. And I will deserve to.”
Lightning cracked over the clear blue of the sky; thunder followed in a roar.
Then all stilled again as Breen stepped out of the water to take her weeping grandmother in her arms.
“Don’t cry, Nan. It’s mine. It’s waited for me since they joined the stone with the chain. Everything Odran’s done, through greed and thirst, ends with me.”
One way, she thought, or another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They rode back, out of the soft green light and into the bright.
“I would go by your father’s grave site. A moment there,mo stór, for both of us.”
“Yes, I’d like that, too.”
Breen told Bollocks, but instead of dashing off, he kept pace with the horses and stuck close.
Breen felt the weight of the pendant, not merely the gold and stone but the symbol and the pledge. Would she grow used to it, she wondered, as she’d grown used—or nearly—to all the rest?
She lifted her face to the breeze as they rode. Today, she thought, the air held so much promise, and the earth offered the same with the scatter of starry white flowers along the roadside, the bold yellow of buttercups poking their heads above the green in the fields.
On the hills, mixed with the deep green of pine, she saw that tender wash where new life began.
She’d remember this day, she promised herself, for that, for all that as much as for what now hung around her neck.
She saw the ancient stone dance on the hill and the rambling spread of the ruins, now cleansed of the dark.
And she saw some black-faced sheep grazing close to the ruins as they hadn’t before. She wondered if they came from the fields across the road, where a family had lost a daughter to her own weakness.
She dismounted, then tethered both horses before joining her grandmother at the grave.
The flowers they’d planted with love and magicks the summer beforebloomed fiercely, and always would, Breen knew. The carpet of color spread over the grave of a man she’d had for so short a time but remembered so clearly.
“He’s so proud of you. I feel that as I stand here. I feel his love and pride for you. When you were only hours old and your mother resting, I found him holding you and, though you slept content in his arms, singing to you.
“I have that memory of my son and his daughter, together in the light. A painting in my mind so vivid, Breen, and his voice through the painting so strong and clear.”
“What did he sing, Nan?”
“Ah, an old, old song, and a sweet one of peace and beauty. A song of Talamh, and the light that comes with love.”