Shapeshifter (7 page)

Sive fled back up the mountain, not resting until the dark pines swallowed her.

THE MAGPIE’S WINGS flashed with startling white patches as it swooped through the gloom. Woodtits, treecreepers, squirrels—there were many in the pines, busily digging insects from under the bark or prying seeds from the cones. Magpies, though, favored the richer offerings of mixed woods and open hills.

Even through a deer’s eyes it was a handsome bird, and Sive paused in her miserable attempt to browse on the fungus growing from a fallen log to follow its flight. But the bird checked sharply and dipped down to perch on a dead branch thrust from the log. It cocked its head and stared at her with one shiny black eye.

Nosy thing, thought Sive. Find your own feast. But then she thought twice and stepped back. Lacking both a deer’s instinct and a mother’s training, she did not know enough about what was edible. If the magpie sampled her fungus, that would be one thing she could eat without fear of poisoning.

But the magpie did not move. It simply stared at her, first from one side and then the other, and suddenly Sive’s heart was pounding, not daring to believe yet somehow certain all the same. And sure enough the space where the magpie had been was rippling and blurring with color. In an instant, her father stood before her, the smell of him so familiar though a hundred times stronger to her animal senses, his shape and stance so well-remembered though his features were strangely blurred in her eyes.

And she was streaming into her own shape without even willing it, thinking only of rushing into his arms. But his urgent shout rang on the air.

“Sive, NO! He will be upon us if you change! You must stay as you are!”

“I can’t!” She was sobbing, caught in the stream of shifting energies, so full of need.

“Only for a moment, Sive, I promise you. You must not change here.”

Everything within her was rushing toward him, but she trusted his word. She closed her eyes and forced herself back to animal form. The pain of it was shocking—not a liquid flowing transformation, but flesh and bone ripped and shoved into place. She gritted the jaws that had already lengthened away from the hinge of the joint, caught between mouth and muzzle, and willed herself to endure it.

“Brave girl.” Derg spoke softly, not wanting to excite a new flare of emotion that might betray her. She trembled and panted already from the effort of the change.

“Come with me, dear one. There is a stream not far from here. Far Doirche is not all-powerful after all. Not yet.”

FAR DOIRCHE HAD been patient and pleasant for days, but now he rounded on the man who brought him the latest downed deer, mangled but alive.

“Am I paying you to feed all of Tir na nOg? Can you not tell the difference between a buck and a doe, at least?” He kicked at the offending beast, who struggled where it lay but was too badly wounded to rise.

The hunter blanched and took a hasty step back from the angry druid. “Of course, Far Doirche, but the hounds don’t distinguish. You asked to see all our catch, but I can instruct them to weed out the…” The man’s voice trailed off as he risked at glance at his employer.

Far clutched at the pendant at his neck, his eyes vague and faraway, the buck forgotten. “Here she comes at last,” he murmured. But his knowing smile faded away. His brows knotted; his knuckles whitened from the pressure of his grip. With something very like a snarl he released the amber talisman.

“Our vixen is a tease,” he said. Already composed, his voice smooth as tallow, he gave the hunter an easy smile that caused the man to take another cautious step backward. “Luckily there is no end to men who enjoy hunting, especially for a price. One way or another, I will have her.”

THEY WADED INTO the deepest water they could find, and then at Derg’s urging Sive sank down onto her haunches.

“This will buy us a little time,” he said. “Less of you to track. Let me see you now, daughter, but take care to stay covered.”

In a heartbeat she was with him. She gasped as the icy water pierced her thin skin, and then as her father’s face came clear and he waded forward to embrace her, she was weeping, sobbing into his chest like a little girl waking from a bad dream.

But already he was talking, his voice low and urgent.

“We must be quick. Even now he will know you have taken your right form again.”

“How can he?” Twice now Far Doirche had seemed to know exactly where she was.

“He has something of yours.” Sive shook her head against him, but Derg insisted. “He must have. It could be something you are unaware of, as small as a hair. But it draws him like a beacon.”

Derg released her and stepped back, so they could see each other’s faces. “Manannan taught me this trick. The formlessness of the water will confuse Far Doirche and slow him down.”

Derg nodded at her unspoken question, but his mouth drew into an angry line. “Manannan saw me, for your sake, and for your mother’s. But he will not set himself against the Dark Man, not until he is directly threatened.”

Sive shook her head in baffled frustration. “But isn’t that just what will happen?”

“It is, and by then the battle will be that much more perilous. But Far has put it about that it is I who have cursed you with the deer’s form, to punish you for defying me. He says I set myself against a love-match between you and him.” He acknowledged Sive’s indignant cry with a bitter smile. “Aye, a ridiculous pretense, as Manannan knows well. But until there is proof he will not challenge it. The old ones do not concern themselves with the loveknots of girls. That is a father’s duty, or a husband’s.”

Her father’s features twisted. “You’d be better off if you were Bodb Dearg’s daughter, and that’s the hard truth of it.”

Before Sive could say anything—and her mind was in such a turmoil that she did not know what words she would find—her father hurried on.

“There is not much time. The Dark Man will not be delayed very long by this ruse. Sive, there is one thing that may be of help to you. You know when Manannan drew the veil between Tir na nOg and the mortal world, he left doorways where those of us who wish to travel in our old lands may pass through.”

Sive nodded. She had never thought much about it, but she knew there were ways to get there.

“There are other openings between our worlds, many of them. Cracks and holes and burrows and streams traveled these many centuries by the wild creatures. They do not distinguish between worlds, and so they pass freely between them.”

He leaned forward, intent now. “Sive, when we are changed we can pass through as well. I have done it. If you have need, you can enter the mortal world and Far will not be able to follow you—not through the same portal. He must use the doorways Manannan created. I do not know if he will be able to track you in the mortal lands as he does here, but he will certainly be delayed in his pursuit.

“Wherever you flee, you must seek out these places. They may save you when nothing else can.”

“But—” Sive was overwhelmed. Time hurried on like the stream through her fingers, and Far Doirche’s shadow loomed. Her mind was a jumble of frantic questions. She grabbed at the most insistent.

“How will I find them? I don’t know what to look for.”

“Once you find the first few, you will learn to sense them,” her father assured her. “They will begin to draw you as you pass by.

“There are many in these mountains,” he added. “I will lead you to the one I have found. But we must not linger here, daughter. Become a deer, now, before the Dark Man is upon us.”

Sive Remembers

It was the last thing my father told me that put me into despair. I had changed by then, and could not speak, and so perhaps he did not know the hopelessness that came over me with this last, cruel fact.

“Be wary, daughter,” he urged gravely. “Do not think your red coat makes you invisible.”

Why not? I wondered, but could not say. But he answered all the same.

“I did you no favor, it seems, leading you toward your change so young, and for that I am sorry. For you have kept the form you first took—a nearly grown doe still carrying the last spots of the fawn.”

I remember craning my head around, trying to get a look at my own flank. I might just as well be marked with woad. Even the late fawns had taken on an adult coat by now. If every deer in these mountains were gathered together, and I in the midst of them, Far Doirche would know me. Woman or deer, he would track me down.

The cave Derg had shown me was a long, winding crevice into the rocky heart of the mountain. I imagined I could feel something as we neared the end—the way you can sense the coming dawn, though the world is dark as deepest night, or the way you know, even with your eyes shut, if you are deep under the water or near the surface. This was like being near the surface, a sense of being about to break through into air and light despite the close, dark confines of the cave. Or perhaps I did imagine it.

In any case, once my father led me back to the cave’s mouth and flew off through the dappled woods, despair took hold and with it a wild need to bolt. That was the deer driving me. When there is nothing left, you simply run.

But there was no place in my homeland where I could hide. No disguise that would hold, no sanctuary I could reach ahead of the Dark Man.

One great bound took me back inside the cave’s granite walls. Quickly, without thought or plan, I retraced the steep narrow path to its end. I hesitated, but only for a heartbeat, before the black pool that lay silent before me. I could smell the water better than I could see it. It seemed a certain death, but my father had said that water led to the mortal lands, and yes, I could feel it beyond the depths. It called to me, for was Eire not our old homeland as well?

If I died, it would not be the worst thing that could happen. With a scrape and clatter of hooves on wet rock, I threw myself in.

THE BLACK WATER SUCKED her down, the undertow strong as the ocean’s pull despite the stillness of the pool’s surface. Sive’s limbs thrashed instinctively against it, but she could make no headway. Her fate was with the water now— to drown or to be somehow delivered to a new land.

Her lungs burned; her ears pounded. The need for air grew beyond refusing, and she was on the very brink of the great gasping breath that would bring water rushing into her lungs and death on its heels.

And then the pool released her, shooting her up to the surface, and it was life that flooded into her after all. With the last of her strength, she hauled herself over the slippery ledge and lay, flanks heaving, on the cold rock.

It hadn’t worked. There was magic in that pool—Derg had been right about that. But it had spit her back to the same dank, tight cave, to the very ledge she had jumped from, as if it knew she was an imposter. She could not pass through.

Sive lay a long time in the dark. Doing nothing, thinking nothing—it was a relief. She could give up, hide in here till she starved. Or go back to the dark pool and this time let it take her.

And yet…she had fought to live, in that water. Gasped in the sweet air like a newborn baby when it was returned to her. She was not ready to die. Gingerly, her mind began to stir. It began to search, once again, for a way out. She would have to try again to break through the ring of hunters before it drew any tighter. She would roam the mountains, always on the move, or work her way northeast and try once more to reach Manannan’s stronghold. Surely he would not refuse her face to face? She shook her head. Far Doirche would expect that, would be waiting to corner her on the strand. Bodb. She would cross the country, ask Daireann to intercede for her.

Such faint hopes. She did not believe any of them could succeed. But she could not—yet—lie down and die, and so she gathered herself up and picked her way through the narrow passage back to the open air.

She heard the rain before she saw it: drumming rain and lashing wind that made the trees groan and snap. At the mouth of the crevice she stared, astonished, at the fury that raged over the mountains.

Sive thought she knew rain. It showered down often, watering the crops and keeping the land green and fresh. She knew wind, as well, from the gentle summer breeze that dried the sweat on her brow and freshened her chamber to the crisp, stiff wind that blew the leaves from the trees in autumn. But this!

This rain lashed down so hard she could hardly see through it, flung from thick gray cloud that smothered the earth. It drove into the cave where she sheltered, blown almost sideways by a wind that roared through the mountains like a mad beast.

And freezing. Even in her stiff fur hide, she felt the bite of that wind, the rain like ice needles in her face.

The crack and the flash came almost together, lightning forking through the gloom only a short way down the slope. Sive jumped at the noise, her nose wrinkling at the bitter, burnt smell.

Coat shivering and rippling with alarm, she retreated back into the passage and huddled in a dry spot. It would not be dry for long, not with the amount of water already flowing down the sloping passage.

Sive had never known a storm like this. Weather that could kill a person, violent as a battlefield—it was not part of her world.

Wherever she was, it was not Tir na nOg.

NINE

W
inter came to the mortal lands, and Sive still wandered, afraid to leave her animal form lest she alert Far Doirche. The full moon lit the earth as before, but it was not the gentle wash of light Sive remembered. This moon had a fierce white face, so cold and distant its only intent might be to make a young woman trapped in a deer’s flesh feel smaller and more alone than she had ever imagined possible. Gazing at it summoned a tearless mute grief that verged on despair. Sive learned to keep her eyes down on clear nights.

Through that first hard winter, Sive thought only of returning home. Her plan, such as it was, was to travel far away from anywhere Far Doirche might be seeking her, taking enough time in the journey that he might even give up his fruitless quest. Then she would find a doorway to Tir na nOg and slip back in.