She wanted it for hers, this place of age and contrast and endurance.
She went back to him, took his hand again. “Promises made here would matter, and they’d hold, if the ones making them believed it.”
Back outside she wandered the ruins, brushing her fingers over old stone, moved through the cemetery where the long dead rested.
She took pictures to mark the day and, though he grumbled about it, persuaded Boyle to pose with her as she took a self-portrait with her cell phone.
“I’ll send it to my Nan,” she told him. “She’ll get a kick out of seeing . . .”
“What is it?”
“I . . . The light. Do you see it?” She held out the phone to him.
On the screen they posed with her head tipped to his shoulder. She smiled, easy, and Boyle more soberly.
And light, white as candle wax, surrounded them.
“The angle maybe. A flash from the sun.”
“You know it’s not.”
“It’s not, no,” he admitted.
“It’s this place,” she murmured. “Founded by my blood, kept by yours—that’s part of it. It’s a good place, a strong place. A safe one. I think they came here, the three. And others that came from them. Now me. I feel . . . welcome here. It’s a good light, Boyle. It’s good magick.”
She took his hand, studying the back of it where dark magick had spilled blood.
“Connor said it was clean,” he reminded her.
“Yeah. Light banishes shadows. Meara was right about that.” Still holding his hand, she looked into his eyes. “But like promises made, the light has to believe it.”
“And do you?”
“I do.” She lifted her free hand to his face, rose on her toes to brush her lips to his.
She believed it. Deep down in her belly she carried faith and resolve. And her heart came to accept what she understood as she’d walked with him along the paths and tidy gardens that opened for spring, among the spirits and the legends, into the promise kept by one of hers.
She loved. At last. Loved as she’d always hoped. He was her once in a lifetime. And with him she had to learn patience, and hold only to that faith as well. The faith that he would love as she loved.
She put on her best smile. “What’s next?”
“Well there’s the Ross Abbey. Actually, it’s a friary. Ross Errilly. It’s not far, and you’d probably like to poke about in it.”
“Bring it on.”
She glanced around as they walked to the truck, and knew she’d come back. Maybe to walk the Stations or just stand in the breeze and look out at the fields.
She’d come back, as her blood had come.
But now, as he drove away, she looked forward.
She saw it from the road, the foreboding mass of it, its peaks and tower and rambling walls. Under the thick sky it looked like something out of an old movie where creatures who shuffled in the dark hid and plotted.
She couldn’t wait to get a closer look.
The truck bumped down a skinny track with pretty little houses on one side, laced with gardens with blooms testing the chill. The other side of the track spread with fields loaded with cows and sheep.
Ahead, beyond the tidy and pastoral, loomed the ruins.
“I didn’t study up,” he told her. “But I know it’s old, of course—not as old as the abbey, but old for all that.”
She walked toward it, heard the whistle of the wind through the peaks and jut of stone, and the flapping of wings from birds, the lowing of cattle.
The central tower speared up above the roofless walls.
She stepped inside a doorway, and now her feet crunched on gravel.
Vaults for the dead, or stones for them fixed flat into the ground.
“I think the Brits kicked out the monks, as they were wont, then, as they were wont, the Cromwellians did the rest and sacked the place. Pillaged and burned.”
“It’s massive.” She stepped through an arch, looking up at the tower and the black birds that circled it.
The air felt heavy—rain to come, she decided. Wind blew through the arched windows, whistled down the narrow curve of stone steps.
“This must’ve been the kitchen.” She didn’t like the way her voice echoed, but moved closer to look down in what seemed to be some sort of dry well. “Stand over there.” She gestured to the ox-roasting fireplace.
He shuffled his feet, gave her a pained look. “I’m not much for pictures.”
“Indulge me. It’s a big fireplace. You’re a big guy.”
She snapped her pictures. “They’d butcher their own meat, grow their own vegetables, mill flour. Keep fish in the well there. The Franciscans.” She wandered out, even at her height ducking under archways, to an open area.
A line of archways, gravestones, grass. “The cloister. Quiet thoughts, robes, and folded hands. They looked so pious, but some had humor, others ambition. Envy, greed, lust, even here.”
“Iona.”
But she moved on, stopped at the base of steps where a Christ figure had been carved in the arch. “Symbols are important. The Christians followed the pagans there, carving and painting their one God as the old ones carved and painted the many. Neither understand that the one is part of the many, the many part of the one.”
Wind fluttered through her hair as she stepped out on a narrow balustrade. Boyle took her arm in a firm grip.
“I died here, or my blood did. It feels the same. Breaking the journey home, too old, too ill to continue on. Some would burn the witch, such is the time, but her power’s gone quiet, and they take her in. She wears the symbol, but they don’t know what it means. The copper horse.”
Iona’s hand closed over her amulet. “But he knows. He smells her weakness. He waits, but must come to her. She can’t finish the journey. And she feels him nearing, greedy for what she has left. He has less than he did, but enough. Still enough. She has no choice now. it can’t be done in the place of her power, at the source. He’s whispering. Can you hear him?”
“Come away now.”
She turned. Her eyes had gone nearly black. “It’s not done, and it must be done. She has her granddaughter—such love between them, and the power simmers in the young. She passes what she has, as the first did, as her own father had done with her, and with the power, she passes on the symbol. A burden, a stone in the heart. It’s always been that for her, never with joy to balance it. So she passes power and symbol with grief.
“And the rooks flap their wings. The wolf howls on the hill. The fog creeps along the ground. She speaks her last words.”
Iona’s voice rose, carried over the wind—in Irish. Above the layered clouds something rumbled that might have been thunder, might have been power waking. The circling birds swooped away with frightened calls, leaving only sky and stone.
“The bells tolled as if they knew,” she continued. “Though the girl wept, she felt the power rise up—hot and white. Strong, young, vital, and fierce. So he was denied what he craved yet again. And again, and again, he waits.”
Iona’s eyes rolled back. When she swayed, Boyle dragged her in close.
“I have to leave here,” she said weakly.
“Bloody right.” He plucked her off her feet, carried her down the narrow, curving stairs, through archways where he nearly bent double to pass through, and out again into the air and the patter of rain.
The wet felt like heaven on her cheeks. “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy. I don’t know what happened.”
“A vision. I’ve seen Connor caught in one.”
“I could see them, the old woman, the girl, bathing her grandmother’s face. Fever, she was so hot, like she was burning from the inside out. I could hear them, and him. I could hear him trying to get to her, trying to draw her out. I felt her pain, physical and emotional. She wished, so much, she could spare the girl she loved from the risk and responsibility. But there wasn’t a choice, and there wasn’t time.”
He shifted her to open the truck door, maneuvered her inside, amazed his hands didn’t shake to mimic his heart.
“You spoke in Irish.”
“I did?” Iona shoved at her hair. “I can’t remember, not exactly. What did I say?”
“I’m not sure of it all. ‘You’re the one, but there must be three.’ And I think . . .” He struggled with the translation. “‘It ends here for me, begins for you.’ Something like that, and more I couldn’t understand. Your eyes went black as a raven’s, and your skin pale as death.”
“My eyes.”
“They’re back,” he assured her, stroked her cheek. “Blue as summer.”
“I need more training. It’s like trying to compete in the Olympics when you’re still learning how to change leads and gaits. And that’s a potent place, full of energy and power.”
He’d been there before, felt nothing but some curiosity. But this time, with her . . .
“It hooked to you,” he decided. “Or you to it.”
“Or she did, the old woman. She’s buried in there. One day we should come back, one day when this is finished, and leave flowers on her grave.”
At the moment he wasn’t inclined to bring her back ever. But as he walked around to get in the truck, the rain stopped.
“Look.” She took his hand, pointed with the other at the rainbow that glimmered behind the ruins. “Light wins.”
She smiled and meant it and, thinking rainbows, leaned over to kiss him.
“I’m starving.”
He didn’t think at all, but pulled her in again to kiss her until the image of her swaying on the ledge faded away. “I know a place not far that does a fine fish and chips. And Christ knows I could do with a pint.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Thanks,” she added.
“For what?”
“For showing me two amazing places, and for catching me before I fell.”
She looked back at the friary, at the black birds, at the rainbow. Her life had forever changed, she thought. But unlike her ancestor, she considered it a gift.
* * *
IN THE COZY KITCHEN WITH THE HOUND AT HER FEET AND a fire in the hearth, Iona told her cousins everything.
“A busy day for you,” Connor commented.
“And then some.”
“That would be three events, we’ll call them, in a single day.” Branna, her hair still bundled up from her workday, contemplated her tea. “But only the first involving Cabhan.”
“The last one, too,” Iona reminded her. “She felt him coming.”
“A vision of the past. Whether yours or another’s, still the past. I doubt he’d venture so far now.” Branna looked at Connor.
“Not now, no, and why should he? Tell me what you were feeling—before, during, after the vision came on you.”
“Before I’m not sure. I felt I’d been there before, like the abbey, but not . . . bright, not happy like that. It was dark and, well, sorrowful. I knew the layout, what things were, but I realize now it was her, our ancestor. I was thinking her thoughts, and some were pretty damn bitter. She knew she was dying, but more than death she hated passing the amulet, the power, the responsibility on to her granddaughter.