The Shadows (18 page)

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

Derry jerked. “What?”

“In America. How long have you been in America?”

“I suppose . . . since Beltaine.”

That he mentioned the ancient Celtic festival made me smile a little. “You speak Gaelic. You say Beltaine as if I must know it when no one talks of such things anymore. And I saw the way you watched those Magic Lantern pictures. As if you might jump through the screen to go where they are.”

He frowned as if he was trying to make sense of my words.

“It’s obvious you miss Ireland terribly,” I explained gently. “Why did you leave it if you love it so much?”

“There was no choice,” he said.

Now I frowned. “No choice? What do you mean?”

Derry hesitated, and I found myself holding my breath.

In the main room, someone was making an announcement in a very loud voice. There was a host of cheers.

Derry glanced toward the sound, and when he looked back at me, he said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now. There’s nothing to do but make the best of it.”

I was disappointed. It wasn’t what he’d been about to say, I knew. It was the kind of answer he might give to a stranger, to Lucy, and then I realized how odd it was I’d thought that. Lucy was no stranger to him. She was closer to him than I was.

I looked down at my hands again. The truly odd idea was that he might tell me anything of importance at all. Odder still was why I should care.

Derry said, “Tell me, lass, this glow . . . have you seen it before? Before me, I mean?”

“No. Just you,” I said.

“And the pain? Anything else like it?”

“I’ve been having headaches lately. Not so bad as this, but they come with the dreams.”
Dreams. Oh, very good, Grace. Why not just say dreams of you?
“Nightmares,” I blurted.

“Nightmares?”

“Storms of fire and lightning and a strange light, like the one around you. And ravens.”

“Ravens.” Derry was very somber, all traces of his teasing, arrogant self gone.

I nodded. “I know. Ravens are harbingers of doom. My grandmother says it all the time.”

“Beyond that, anything else? Anything you’ve seen that affects you the same way I do?”

“Nothing affects me as you do,” I muttered.

He gave me a half smile. “I heard that, you know.”

“You shouldn’t take it as a compliment.”

“I don’t,” he said. “Do you mean to answer me?”

“There’s nothing,” I said. “The nightmares and you, and . . . oh, there was an ogham stick Patrick gave me to hold that burned my hand. But I think it was only that it had been in the sun.”

He went very still. “An ogham stick?”

“A piece of stone with . . . well, they’re words of a sort, carved into it. The Druids used them to cast spells and . . . I don’t know, read fortunes, I suppose. It’s quite ancient.”

“Where did Devlin get such a thing?”

“Patrick collects Celtic relics. So did his father.”

“What kinds of relics?”

“Statuettes and torcs, stone reliefs, drawings, that kind of thing. He has four cases in his study, and that’s not even all of it. You should see it. . . .” I trailed off as I realized that there was no chance Derry would ever be invited into Patrick’s study. “He says he means to return them to Ireland one day, where they belong.”

“Does he?”

There was something funny in his voice. “Is something wrong?”

He stared at me as if he couldn’t look away. Then he smiled, and it was like a sign saying
We’re done with all this now. Back to the usual.
“Are you feeling better, lass?”

Again, I felt disappointment. “I am.”

“My healing touch.” He waggled his fingers at me. Just then Lucy returned, bearing a little plate full of petits fours. She was licking icing from her fingers. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said as she gave me the plate. “I couldn’t resist trying one.”

The white icing gleamed in the gaslight, piped roses a moist and glistening pink, sugared violets twinkling. My mouth watered.

“It’ll just make you sweeter,” Derry said, rising, pulling her laughing and squirming into his arms. Very deliberately, he licked a bit of icing from her lower lip.

“You’re so
bad
.” Lucy giggled in the moment before he kissed her, deeply and thoroughly. Her arms curved languorously around his neck; she buried her hands in the waves of his thick dark hair.

And I was jealous. Terribly, horribly
jealous.
Miserably, I looked into the plate of petits fours. The smell of them was sickly sweet, the sugared violets melting purple, the piped roses wilting. The thought of biting into one turned my stomach. I put aside the plate and sat there, waiting until Derry and Lucy unknotted themselves. And then once they had, the way Lucy looked . . . as if she’d just risen from bed; no matter
that she was fully dressed—everyone in the place must know exactly what she’d been doing. Derry was no better. His dark hair was sticking up where she’d tangled her fingers in it.

“I saw a man over there with a machine that makes paper flowers,” Lucy said, straightening the bow beneath her chin, gesturing for us to follow as she turned. “He’s giving a demonstration now. Let’s go see.” She hurried off.

Derry held out his hand to help me from the bench. I ignored it. “She ran her fingers all through your hair.”

He leaned close to whisper, “How would you know that unless you were watching?”

“I know because it’s a mess,” I snapped back.

He grinned. “You seem to care a bit too much about my hair, lass, if you don’t mind my saying so. But I suppose if you’re very nice to me, I might let you comb it.”

Whatever truth had passed between us when Lucy was gone had completely disappeared. He glanced past me to the bench, to the plate with the petits fours. His grin faded. “You didn’t eat.”

“The two of you made me so sick I lost my appetite,” I said, and then I marched away, following Lucy into the crowd.

TWELVE

Diarmid

A
idan Knox was very drunk when they left the fair, and somehow drunker still when they dropped Lucy at her house. Diarmid realized then that Grace was keeping her brother upright. “D’you want help to get him home?”

She flashed him a look of pure fury, and he knew she must be overcome with shame. “Thank you, no. Good night.”

“Yer a strange ’un, aren’t you, Derry-erry-erry?” Aidan slurred before he began laughing helplessly, falling over his sister’s shoulder.

Diarmid caught Aidan’s arm, helping him upright again, but when he began to walk with them, Grace said, “Good
night
, Derry,” and he stood back and watched them go.

For a block. Then he followed, discreetly, just to make certain they made it home without someone robbing them or worse. There were desperate men about in these times and wilding boys who roamed the streets looking for prey, which
a girl and her drunken brother surely were. It wasn’t until she manhandled her brother up the steps and into their house that Diarmid relaxed and went back to the stables.

The night was too warm; it set his mind turning. He thought about her obvious distress tonight and how fiercely he’d wanted to ease it, to touch her, to tangle his fingers in
her
hair. He wanted to believe it was no different from the way he felt about girls in general, but it was, and he knew it.

He thought of how she’d seen his homesickness during the show, and her question about why he’d left that he’d wanted to answer. But he couldn’t say:
I was called. It was a spell. A prophecy.
And so he’d said nothing, and seen her disappointment when he’d put her off.

And twice now she’d seen him glowing. Twice it had caused pain that left her weak and helpless. An ogham stick—
by the gods, Patrick Devlin has an ogham stick—
had burned her hand.

Once he was back at the stables, he went to the little tack room he shared with Jerry, the other stableboy. Jerry was hardly a boy, closer to thirty than twenty, but jobs were hard to come by now, and he said he’d rather be paid to be a stableboy than not be paid at all; and Diarmid saw enough tramps in the streets, sleeping on stoops and in dank corners, to agree. Diarmid took off his shirt and lay on his cot, listening to Jerry snore, feeling the sweat prickle on his skin and promising himself that everything about Grace Knox could be explained away. She’d said it herself: he’d stepped in the light just the
right way, and she’d been faint again from not eating. The ogham stick had been in the sun.

But . . . her nightmares. Nightmares about storms of fire and ravens. Still, everyone had nightmares. And it was only because he’d been on battlefields where the Morrigan’s Badb had sent her ravens descending in a cloud of screaming terror that he’d felt such an anxious dread when Grace had said it.

Yes, easy to explain. But for one thing:

He’d realized who Grace reminded him of: Neasa, who’d been Finn’s adviser and Seer and sometime lover. A Druid priestess with the gift of oracle and spell casting. She, too, had dark and dancing eyes and thick, curling hair and skin pale as milk. Diarmid had seen that hair of hers swirling as if it were alive as she called up storms that chased and blistered in their fury. Storms of wind and thunder and crackling lightning.

Neasa, whose daughter had been the
veleda
. Who’d been given the care of the
dord fiann.
Who’d lived at the foot of the Fianna stronghold, Almhuin. The Hill of Allen.

“My family is from Allen,”
she’d said.

The
veleda.

Diarmid pushed the thought away the moment he had it, the same way he’d been pushing it away all night—really, since she’d told him where her people were from, though he couldn’t deny it was why he’d asked Lucy to bring her along to the fair. He was trying not to spend much time with Lucy now—it only made him feel terrible. He hadn’t wanted to spend another evening watching the lovespell shine in her
eyes, but there had been no other way to get close to Grace Knox. It had been his whole reason for the fair: to ask Grace questions, to discover . . . what? Something, anything. He hoped to find that she was no one. Just a girl whose family had fallen on hard times, who hadn’t eaten and had swooned from hunger.

And that wish troubled him too. Because the only reason he was working in the Devlin stables was to discover who had called them and why. To find the
veleda
. Without her, they were dead. Samhain would be here soon enough; it was already June. They needed the
veleda
.

He should be overjoyed at the idea that he might have found her.

“When she makes the choice, the sacrifice must be at your hand,”
Manannan had said.
“This is the
geis
put upon you, lad. ’Tis you who must kill her. If you refuse this, the Fianna will fail and be no more.”

He’d thought that the
veleda
would know the prophecy, that she would know her role and the sacrifice that must be made. He had no wish to kill a lass, but the Druid priestesses he’d known had been as strong as any man, and as determined. There was no weakness in them, no hesitation. They would have been trained to die. But here was Grace Knox, with her worn gowns and dancing eyes and the blithe way she told him that her soon-to-be fiancé collected Celtic relics, as if she didn’t understand the significance of that at all.

Because she didn’t.

She was an innocent.

She could not be the
veleda.

But he felt in his heart that she was.

He woke the next morning to heat that made him sweat before he even moved, and a dread that lodged in his chest. He buried himself in work, in mucking stalls, trying not to think. In the light of day, nothing seemed quite so dire; it was easy to feel that he wasn’t certain, to decide merely to watch Grace Knox for a while until he was sure. Then he would tell Finn. Finn was charming and charismatic, but he was also ruthless, and—Diarmid had to admit this troubled him even more—he doubted Finn would miss her resemblance to Neasa. What Finn would do about the fact that Grace looked like his old lover Diarmid didn’t know, and didn’t want to guess.

So he would watch. And while he was watching, he would get into the Devlin house and look at these relics. Ancient Celtic torcs and statuettes, she’d said, and he wondered if there had been a horn among them. If Devlin had been the one who called them.