Raven Calls

Chapter Nineteen

Someday I was going to be cool enough to not shriek and fall over when things like that happened, but today was not that day. My raven dug his claws in, and Wings flew up into the air to go land on Sheila’s shoulder as I sat up again clutching my heart. She forgot me for an instant and turned her face against Wings’s wing, the small motion replete with joy. They communed a little while, until she finally looked toward me again, the corner of her mouth turning up. “Thank you for bringing him to see me, Siobhán. No,” she added without hesitation. “You didn’t like that. Joanne, then.”

Feeling like I was giving one up for the team, I took a deep breath and said, “Siobhán’s all right. I’ve gotten a little more used to it the past year.”

“Is that so.” I’d almost never seen my mother smile. It warmed her eyes considerably. I thought she was quite pretty in that clear-complexioned Irish way. It was even clearer now that she was dead, her freckles faded from lack of sunlight, so her dark hair was all the more striking around her pale face. I didn’t look like her, but I didn’t not, either. That was a revelation, since I’d thought we didn’t look anything at all alike.

She’d been studying me while I studied her, and broke the silence. “You’ll still prefer Joanne, I think.”

“I will. I mean, I do. Yes. But, y’know, whatever works.”

“The past year, is it? A year since when, Joanne? Since I died?”

“Since you saved my ass from the Blade.” That banshee had had a name. I didn’t know why it rated and the others were just nameless banshees, but probably the opportunity to earn a name was not something I wanted for my mother’s undead soul. “Look, um, I’m not sure I said thanks for that. Or…a lot of things. So let me just get this out of the way, okay? I understand a lot more than I did then, and I’m really sorry I was such a dick. Although to be fair you could’ve at least tried to explain why you’d brought me to America.” That was not exactly high up there in the ranks of graceful apologies. I cringed.

Sheila, however, looked ever so faintly amused. “Would you have listened?”

“No, but it might have seeped through eventually. Once I started learning about all…this.” I gestured to the complete and total emptiness around us, which didn’t really go very far in impressing a this on me.

“It seems to have seeped through anyway.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being funny or superior. My lips peeled back from my teeth in one of those telling microexpressions, and she looked away with a sigh. “A warm and loving family we are not, Siobhán MacNamarra. How bad has it gotten, then, that you come seeking me?”

“Did you know?” My voice broke on the three little words and I cleared my throat, trying to sound stronger. “When you came back from the dead to help me fight the Blade, did you know it was going to put you in thrall to…him?”

“For Heaven’s sake, Joanne,” my mother said crisply, “he’s not Voldemort. You can say his name.”

“I don’t…” I couldn’t get past my mother knowing who Voldemort was. It took a minute to finish the sentence. “I don’t know his name. All I’ve got for him is a title. The Master,” I said in my best portentous voice. “It gets old. So what’s his name?”

Sheila had the grace to look ever so slightly abashed. “I know him by the title, as well. The name itself is a secret well-guarded.”

“What, would the Rumpelstiltskin thing work on him? It didn’t on Rumpelstiltskin.”

“…you met Rumpelstiltskin?”

“A horrible little gnome creature, anyway. Caitríona said he was a frog derek. Something like that. A Red Cap. He was wearing one. Look, that’s not the point. Did you know you were going to end up his slave?”

“Rumpelstiltskin’s?” Sheila asked archly, and Raven, the betraying little bastard, laughed. So did Wings, which made it worse.

Ravens laughing would usually be awesome enough to undermine my irritation, but I wanted to throttle them both. All. Mostly because I had the sudden dismaying suspicion that I did exactly that same kind of verbal game. I put another bullet point on the endless list of things I really needed to change about myself, and grated, “No. The Master’s. I don’t know how long we’ve got here, Mom. Should we really be screwing around with semantics and unclear pronouns?”

Her humor fell away. “I suppose these are bridges that ought to have been crossed while I lived, not now. And I’m not enslaved yet, Joanne. Not yet. You’ve burned my bones, haven’t you? All that’s left is to destroy the banshee queen. I’m too small, too far removed from the Master for him to catch me with his own long fingers. He needs her, and so without her I’m free.”

“The banshee queen.” I pressed my eyes shut. “Great. I’ll get right on that. You’re not answering the question.”

Tension came into Sheila’s presence, and when I opened my eyes she spoke through compressed lips. “Very well. Yes. I knew.”

A double prong of guilt and horror stabbed me in the gut. If my dead mother was reaching out from beyond the grave, I should probably make some effort to meet her halfway and try building a meaningful emotional relationship. But we were on a tight schedule, and really, shock obliterated the guilt pretty fast.

Despite asking, I hadn’t in a million years really thought she’d have known what she was getting into. That added a whole new level of guilt to the trip I was busy burying. Voice rising, I demanded, “Then what the hell’d you do it for!” even though the answer was terribly, terribly obvious.

Sheila said, “You,” and my world fell down.

The Dead Zone dissolved, which it had never done before. Soft green landscape melted like sugar in rain to reveal the black nothingness I was more familiar with. Then that softened, too, gray bleeding down to bubble against earth that slowly turned green with grass. Rigidly cut grass, millimeter-exact in height, but at least it was no longer so short the earth could be seen between individual blades. Elsewhere the Dead Zone’s matter began to burble, the sound of a small waterfall falling into a pool. There were paving stones leading hither and yon through the greening garden, and benches that had softened from concrete to slatted wood. I had a momentary vision of a day when they might just be moss-covered hillocks, cool and prickly to snuggle into, but the idea faded before the reality of my inner sanctuary.

I hadn’t been here in a while, truth be told. The tall ivy-covered walls were more fragile than they had been, time wearing away at them so they were lived-in and comfortable rather than imprisoning. A single bird twittered like mad, and I smiled. I couldn’t see him, but it was a robin. An American one, because it had twisted my brain inside-out the first time I saw an Irish robin and realized Mary Lennox’s key-finding companion had been a completely different kind of bird than I’d always thought. In my secret garden, the robins were like the North Carolina birds of my teen years.

“It’s not what I’d have expected of you,” Sheila said gently, and I closed my eyes. Her garden would have the sparrow-like robins, if it had birds at all. We were creations of completely different cultures, my mother and I.

“It’s a lot better than it was. The first time I came here it was almost dead. Not exactly the most spiritually competent kid on the block, me.”

“What happened?”

God. There was so much we hadn’t talked about. A whole lifetime, neither of us able to breach the chasm of my resentment in the few months we’d had. But I couldn’t just answer, oh no. That would be easy. Instead I said, “Don’t you know?”

She was silent a long time. So long I’d have thought she’d disappeared, except I had invited her here when I’d left the Dead Zone, and she wouldn’t leave without my permission. I wasn’t sure she couldn’t, but she wouldn’t, because this was the closest I’d ever come to opening up to my mother. This place was the center of my soul, with all the faults and flaws and strengths and wisdom exposed and on display. She’d have to be a real ass to walk out, and mostly that title belonged to me.

“Mother’s daughter was a little wild,” she whispered eventually. “Had herself a wee boy child.”

“And a girl.” I still hadn’t looked at her. I wasn’t sure I would, as long as we were in here. I already felt naked. Meeting her eyes seemed like it would be too much. “She died, she died right away. I wasn’t a healer yet. I’d stolen my own magic away and I couldn’t do anything to help. But that was after.” I made my voice harsh so I could keep talking. “The twins were the aftermath. That wasn’t what went wrong. My life is so screwed up, Mom. Do you reach through time? Because I’ve been doing it all my life. Right from when you were pregnant with me and we fought the Blade.”

Her silence this time was brief but full of the things I didn’t want her to say. I was about a hair’s breadth from crying on my mommy’s shoulder, and that was so far outside my comfort zone I couldn’t even begin to express it. I thought she knew it, too, because when she did speak, she said, “No, alanna. I suppose that would be from your father’s side of the family,” rather than offer any kind of sympathy or condolence.

That was okay, because it brought my brain to a full stop. Choked off Emo Jo and made me spin around on a heel to gape at her. “My father’s side of the family?”

Sheila MacNamarra got a sly little smile that made her look about nineteen. “Sure and you didn’t think I flew all the way to New York just for a pretty face, lovey, though oh my Lord, he was pretty. I could feel his pull from Ireland, Siobhán. The power, the passion for the earth, the…”

I could not have been more astonished if she’d pulled up her skirts and started doing an authentic Can-Can. She trailed off, then said, “You don’t know any of this, do you, my girl?”

“Dad…has magic?”

“A shaman’s magic, to be sure. Not like my own, oh no. Magery is spells and incantations, Siobhán. I could do most anything with it, but with preparation and study. Your father, though.” Mother’s eyes were shining. I’d thought she and Dad hardly knew each other, but it suddenly struck me that didn’t mean they hadn’t been in love. That she wasn’t still in love with him, a year after she’d been buried. No wonder I didn’t have any siblings. “Your father could just will it to be, and it was. He said it could be such a dangerous magic, such an easy path to the dark, but he shone like nothing I’d ever seen. Everywhere he went, the very earth responded to him like a lover, eager for his touch.”

Our endless road trips abruptly made more sense. I’d thought Dad just hated being in one place, since the only time he’d settled down for any length of time, an Irish woman had come back from across the ocean and handed him a baby before disappearing forever. I’d just found out a few days earlier that the only other time he’d come close to settling down, his mother had been killed in a horrific car wreck that had sent him away from Qualla Boundary for good.

But maybe we’d been on the road constantly because he was responding to the needs of a weary earth. My vivid memory of visiting Montana and the Battle of Little Bighorn site abruptly seemed a lot like the afternoon’s antics on Croagh Patrick. Dad had been disgusted with the white men who’d fought there, which even my eight-year-old self had understood. There were still bullets buried in the tops of the small, sharply rolling hills: it was not a site for modern warfare to take place. But Dad’s disgust could have gone much deeper than that…and so could have the time we’d spent there, crawling up and down hills, our hands in the dirt. I’d just been playing, but if Dad had power, too, then that wasn’t a place he’d be playing at.

An awful, awful lot of the places we’d visited came clear when seen in that light. We’d followed the Trail of Tears. Visited nuclear test sites in Nevada, and I remembered Dad talking with Shoshone tribal elders before we went out into the desert. The Hopewell mound cities in Ohio. Mount Rushmore, which I recalled had almost literally made Dad’s head steam. I’d been about twelve then, and wondered now if I’d been Seeing some of his anger at the desecration of ancient Native holy places.

I sat, face hidden in my hands. After a moment I spread my fingers to stare between them at Sheila, who looked discomfited. “You’d no idea, had you.”

“Not a clue. Not a single…” I closed my fingers again and sat there a long damned time. Finally, and more to myself than Sheila, I said, “I’d like a do-over. I mean, in the end I’m doing okay with my life, I think. I got the guy, I got the best friend, I got the magic. I’m doing okay. But I want a do-over. I want to go back through my life and knock the giant-ass chip off my shoulder. I want to hear what Dad might’ve been trying to say to me. I want to have the nerve to ask about my mother. I want…” It didn’t really matter what I wanted. I pushed my tongue around inside my lower lip, contorting my face before finishing, “I want to know what my life would’ve been like if I hadn’t been such a jackass through most of it. It’s too damned late to be sorry, but I am anyway, Mom. You probably deserved a much better kid than me. I’m sure Dad did. So I’m sorry.”

“It may be you deserved a better mother, alanna. Shall we forgive one another while we still can?”

“Oh, sure. I’m sure I deserved a better mother than the one who chose not to hand the Master a major defeat because it might’ve risked my unborn self, or the one who gave me up to my father so the Master couldn’t keep the bead he’d had on me, or the one who gave me a magic silver necklace to protect my soul from evil, or the one who came back from the dead to lay a smackdown on the Master and kick a banshee’s ass because I was too new and feeble in my powers to do it myself. I’m sure I deserved—”

“A mother,” Sheila interrupted, and to my horror tears flooded my eyes. “Shall we forgive?” she asked again, even more quietly. I nodded, miserable with embarrassment, and she sighed before a note of playfulness came into her voice. “Now, I know we’ve little time and much to talk about, Siobhán, but there’s two things you’ve said that have my attention, so they do.”

I looked up, snuffling, to see her smile and lift a finger to touch its tip. “One—you got the guy?”

I laughed through snorting snot, which made for a very wet burbly disgusting laugh, but it was heartfelt. “My boss. My former boss. Captain Morrison? Did I mention—”

“The one who can’t tell a Corvette from a Mustang,” Sheila said, eyes solemn. Then she leaned forward confidentially and admitted, “I’m Irish, lass. I wouldn’t know the one from the other if my life depended on it.”

“Yes, but you’re Irish. He’s a red-blooded American male, it just shouldn’t be possible for him not to know.” I snuffled again and wiped my hand under my nose. Six-year-olds had more dignity than I did. “But anyway, yeah. We sort of…yeah. It’s not like you and Dad.” A thought which bent my brain. “Morrison’s not magical at all. But I don’t need any more magic in my life. He grounds me. He’s…” God. My stupid eyes filled up with tears again, for a whole different reason this time. I was turning into a regular Waterworks Wendy.

“That’s grand so,” my mother said in delight. “Congratulations, Joanne. Be happy, alanna. Be happy.”

“I hope so.” I cleared my throat. “What was the other thing?”

“Oh!” Her eyes lit up. “A magic necklace?”

“Yeah, my—your—silver choker? It’s magic. Didn’t you know that? Nuada made it for the Morrígan when he married her and it bound her to this whole fight we’re in. Hobbled her, like.” I was falling into the Irish idiom of adding “like” or “so” to the end of sentences for no apparent reason. If I stayed here more than a week I’d forget how to speak American English. “I don’t know if it’s got any other power, but reining in goddesses is a pretty good one-shot to have. And, oh, it’s, um, sort of bound to our family line. I was kind of there when it was forged and put some of my blood into the forging. The Morrígan had to bear a child to have it removed, and that child was Méabh, who made a choice to fight against her mother and our whole family has been doing it ever since. I’ve got Caitríona O’Reilly with me now. She’s taking up your mantle, she’ll be the new Irish mage, since I’m not cut out for it.”

Mother hesitated. “Caitríona? Truly?”

“Oh, yeah. She found us at the graveyard about to burn your bones and made us come up to Croagh Patrick, where Áine triggered her magic. Méabh’s having a fit because that’s not how it’s done in her estimation, but it sure looks like that’s what’s happened anyway.”

I was as unaccustomed to seeing pride on Sheila’s face as I was smiles, but there was unmistakable pride now. “Caitríona will be grand so. Oh, but she’s got so much study ahead of her, Joanne. The mage’s path isn’t an easy one. She’s a fine lass, though, strong and quick. She’ll do well. Tell her I said so, won’t you?”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Yeah, of course I will. It’ll torque Méabh’s jaws, but that’ll be fun, too.”

It was Sheila’s turn to clear her throat, after which she said, “Méabh,” cautiously. “We’re the daughters of Méabh? Of the Méabh? Queen Méabh of Connacht?”

“Yep, that one.” Ah, how my life had shifted, that I could say that so casually. “She’s kind of hanging around on Croagh Patrick right now while I talk to you. Do you want to meet her?”

Mother’s eyes got very nearly as big as saucer plates, which in the garden of the soul was a dangerous kind of phrase to indulge in. “I would so,” she whispered, and I sat up straighter, pleased to be able to offer something to my mother that would mean something to her.

If I turned my attention outward, Méabh’s presence was easy to distinguish, a roaring flame of connected power. A flame which appeared to be in heated argument with Caitríona. I was going to have to separate those two, but not just yet. I softened my shields ever so slightly, extending an invitation to Méabh. She broke off fighting with Cat and spun to face me, her own shields melding until they fit the shape of doorway I offered. A moment later she stepped through, larger than life and glorious even in the garden of my mind.

Which would have been fine, except the Morrígan stalked into my garden on her heels.