Raven Calls

His host was smaller than I’d seen it before. The gray-bearded king was missing, as was the archer who had shot Petite’s gas tank full of holes. The boy Rider was with him, though, which gave me a shock. It shouldn’t have, since we were centuries, maybe millennia, before Herne and his spells, but I’d never seen the boy looking quite so comfortable at his father’s side. That child bound Cernunnos to time, but not, it seemed, to linear time. For a moment I wondered if magic was just physics nobody understood, but that was philosophy beyond my scope.

Particularly when Cernunnos himself was before me, taking up all the air in Tara. I loved Morrison, but something about the horned god just hit me on a primal level.

Probably the fact that he was a primal creature. Nuada, silver and beautiful as he was, looked like a bad knockoff beside the ancient god. Cernunnos swung down from his stallion, the beast that made me think of unicorns, if unicorns were depicted as savage, brilliant, vicious warmongers of devastating power instead of light fluffy balls of purity and rainbows.

“Little gwyld,” Cernunnos said, dry as a southwestern desert. “Siobhán Walkingstick. Joanne Walker. Thou has—”

Cernunnos rarely spoke English. Mostly, magic translated what he meant. In this particular case, I knew there were underlying words, a language I didn’t actually know, but what I heard was an incredibly idiomatic, “Thou hast a lot of nerve, Joanne Walker.”

That put the world back under my feet. I laughed and turned my palms up apologetically. “I know. Sorry. Hello, Cernunnos. It’s been a while.” It hadn’t really. Not from my direction. But from another direction it had been a few thousand years, and I figured that counted for more. I turned to Nuada, hands still spread. “Is this convincing enough?”

Nuada looked a bit pale around the edges. “It is.”

“A point?” Cernunnos asked in disbelief. “Thou hast—”

“I asked you not to do that. The theeing and the thouing.” I found it disconcerting and peculiarly attractive, which added to the disconcertment.

Cernunnos snapped his teeth at me, but for the second time in our relationship, complied with my linguistic preferences. “You’ve brought me here to make a point, Siobhán Walkingstick?”

“More like to prove I am who I say I am so he won’t marry the Morrígan and end up in that damned cauldron like the rest of them. Apparently elves need a lot of convincing,” I added a bit sourly, because really, I felt like the whole being out of time and having magic items created by the silversmith should count for enough. On the other hand, though I would have never believed I’d end up thinking this, any day that involved a chat with the horned god was a pretty good one, so I wasn’t going to complain too much.

“She speaks truly,” Cernunnos said, just in case Nuada hadn’t picked up on that. He nodded stiffly, and Cernunnos looked back at me, wickedness in his emerald eyes. “Ride with me. Let us go to Cnoc na rí and battle the beast who so nearly drains my spirit so many eons hence. Let us render the gift you gave me then unnecessary.”

His memory really did work in both directions. A shiver spilled over my arms and I looked away. “You knew,” I said uncertainly. “In the future, in my past, you must have known it was me at the diner. That I would take your sword. That we’d become…”

Wickedness lit his beautiful angular face again. “Siobhán Walkingstick, thou hast no idea what we shall become. But I do. I do. Come,” he said again as I gaped at him. “Let us change the future that you know, my gwyld. Let us defeat death in these backward days of history, and see what new world awaits.”

I wanted to. Oh, God, I wanted to. But I had ridden with the Hunt three times already, and I had barely escaped with my soul to call my own. And I knew I hadn’t ridden with him now, in the past, because I had escaped with my soul, and I didn’t think for a moment I could ride with him four times and not be his. Part of me wanted to be his. Part of me always would.

But sometime in the distant future I had already made this choice. Chosen a mortal existence with a mortal man, and even then Cernunnos had left me with an offer. A moment at the end of everything, where he and I might ride together one last time.

And he knew what I didn’t: what we would become. I had only had glimpses of it, if that was the future we shared at all, and I still wasn’t ready to make that choice.

“I can’t,” I whispered with genuine regret. “You know I can’t, my lord god of the hunt. I can’t ride with you again. I never could.”

“And yet I try,” Cernunnos said playfully. “Time and again throughout time, I try. Until we meet again, my gwyld. Until time brings us together again.” He swept a bow from the back of his great silver stallion, then looked to Nuada, all his grace turned to sour prissiness. “I would like that sword back, elf king.”

“It seems time and this gwyld are yours to weave and weft,” Nuada said without a hint of remorse. “Make your plea to her, not me. No one else in history has borne two of my blades, horned god. No one else has dared lose one.”

I actually expected him to finish the little lecture with “Don’t push it,” but he managed to avoid the temptation. Cernunnos crooked a smile, acknowledgment of both the scolding and its unspoken end, then reined the stallion up, its hooves punching dents in the soft green hillside. “A pity,” he said to all of us. “It would have been good to challenge the Morrígan’s master so early in his bid for power, but even I will not ride against death without a force for life at my side.”

Gary, diffidently, said, “I could go.”

Chapter Nine

“What?” At least this time it wasn’t just me. Nuada, Cernunnos and I all blurted the word, though Cernunnos looked an awful lot like the cat who stole the cream as he said it. Me, I finished with, “No way. Are you nuts? Are you crazy? Ride with the Wild Hunt without me to watch your back? Ride off through time on your own? Are you batshit insane? Are you nuts?”

“I’ve done it before,” Gary said a bit belligerently.

My hands flew upward and waved in the air like they were trying to escape my wrists. “With Morrison and Suzanne and Billy! You weren’t alone! And you weren’t thousands of years out of time! And—”

“And I didn’t have the Sight,” Gary reminded me. “And somebody’s gotta go meet Brigid, right? Maybe it ain’t you the cauldron spell gets bound to, Jo. Maybe it’s me. Besides, Horns here ain’t gonna let anything happen to me, are you?” he said to Cernunnos. “Because if you do, you’re gonna have Jo to reckon with, and I don’t figure that’s the kind of reckoning you’re lookin’ for with her.”

The horned god lifted an agreeing eyebrow, which didn’t reassure me at all. I gargled in frustration. “Come on, Cernunnos! You’re the one who remembers meeting me in the future! You’d remember Gary going gallivanting off with you in the past, too, if it had already happened!”

Cernunnos’s other eyebrow rose to match the first. “Would I? Perhaps in the past I remember best he came not to Tara with you. Of all mortals, you should realize that there are paths not taken. Nothing is immutable, Joanne. Not even for a god.”

That was not the answer I wanted, especially after future-Brigid hadn’t particularly seemed to know who Gary was. It lent credence to Cernunnos’s argument. I made throttling motions with my fingers, envisioning the horned god’s neck between them. “Okay, okay, all right, fine, but you just said you needed a force for life—”

“He may not heal,” Cernunnos said, “but Master Muldoon is as bright a force of life as I have seen, and I have seen many. More, he carries with him the spirit of tenacity, a creature of great age and soul. He—”

“That’s his spirit animal!” I howled. “I helped him find that!”

“All the better. It binds him to you and adds some note of your strength to his.”

Gary looked triumphant. I stomped my foot, afraid I’d already lost the battle. “I said no! God, just because I got you into this doesn’t mean you have to go gallivanting off across time and space to—”

“Save the world?” Gary planted himself in front of me. He made a big wall of a man, especially when he folded his arms across his chest and puffed up a little. “I’ve told you a hundred times you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years, Joanie. You got me all tangled up in this crazy fantastic world of yours and brought me back to life after Annie died. I’ve watched you fling yourself into things you got no idea what’s coming, and you do it all because you’re trying to make the world a better place. You keep saying you want to grow up to be like me. Kid, I wish I’d been young like you. Now listen to me. You’re my girl, and I’m doing this thing because it’s what you would do if you could. ’Sides,” he added, gray eyes bright, “this might be my one chance to kick death in the balls. Can’t let an old guy miss that dance.”

I laughed. I didn’t want to, but I laughed. Then I hugged him, muttering, “If you don’t come back,” which I repeated when I let go of him, except this time I said it to Cernunnos, with a threatening finger added to the phrase.

He inclined his ashy head, temple bones visibly distorted in the fading light. “You have my word, Siobhán Walkingstick, and that is not a thing I give lightly.”

“All right. Here.” I thrust my rapier into Gary’s hands. “You can use this, right? I mean, hell, you can do everything else.”

He took it, but not gingerly. “I’m better with a saxophone, doll, but I’ll make do. You sure? You might need it.”

“I’m not the one proposing to go face down the man himself. You need it more than I do. Gary, are you sure? Because this is nuts.”

The big man’s voice gentled. “You can’t do it, Jo. It’s time you learn we’ll go into battle for you, even if you ain’t there.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Good generals don’t.” Gary stuck the rapier point down into the ground, took me by the shoulders and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you on the other side, darlin’.”

“Of time. Just the other side of time, okay? No stupid heroics, Gary. Not when I’m not there to save you.”

“I promise.” Gary let me go, took up the rapier again and turned to Cernunnos. “Mind if I share your ride?”

Cernunnos looked pained and gestured to the boy who rode beside him. “Share his. The mare is well used to a mortal rider.”

The mare was the boy Rider’s human mother, transformed. A whole pile of unfortunate things, mostly involving crude comments about riders, immortal and mortal alike, rose to and were compressed behind my lips. I could be dumb, but not that dumb. Gary took the kid’s hand and swung up onto the mare behind him, then gave me a jaunty salute. “Go get ’em, Jo.”

And then my best friend rode off into the sunset.

Nuada remained silent until Gary and Cernunnos vanished into misty golden skies, which was just as well. I didn’t like Gary going off on his own, and had the sneaking suspicion hypocrisy was my middle name. After a while I said, “So you can’t marry her,” at the same time he said, “I think I have no choice but to wed the Morrígan.”

I was tired of saying “What?” so I just looked at him. He exhaled slowly. I half expected to see silver stream on his breath, but it was just a puff of air like anyone else’s. On it, he said, “Because as we are bound to her, she is bound to us. I may be able to temper her actions if I become her groom.”

“Or you might end up skewered on the Lia Fáil.”

Nuada’s eyebrows quirked. “Not if I have yet to make that sword and that necklace. Did you not say the sword comes from many centuries hence?”

Everybody was smarter than me. I clicked my jaw shot, looked for an argument and didn’t find one. Or not much of one, anyway: “What if Cernunnos came back in time to have you make it?”

“Then I still live some little ways into the future, for that has yet to happen. She is a goddess, Siobhán. How would you have me escape her?”

“She’s only a, a, a small god. An avatar. You, aos sí, you’re more connected to the earth than humans are. You run way down deep, but the Morrígan’s lain down with the devil, which gives her bonus points in the mojo department.” I’d used the word mojo plenty of times in the past. It had never triggered the mojojojo thing until Gary’d started snickering. I was going to smack him as soon as he got back from galumphing across time and space. “But somebody saddled up with Brigid, too, and it looks like you hang around for centuries making priceless magical artifacts, so stop putting so much stock in gods and…”

He waited a moment while I stared at the earth, dumbstruck by a slowly forming thought. “And forge this necklace,” I mumbled eventually. “Close the time loop. Give it to her as a wedding gift. I don’t know if the necklace has any power itself.” Except it did, because in my personal arsenal it represented shielding my mind. My soul. My garden. However I wanted to look at it, the necklace was definitely invested with some power. I swallowed and kept going. “But it makes it down through the centuries from her all the way to me. That’s got to count for something. Maybe I’m not supposed to go up against her back now at all. Maybe this is all just preparation for a throw-down in my era.”

In much the same tone Brigid had used, Nuada wondered, “Is this how it is with you, gwyld? The connected I have known are not so…”

“Connected?”

He nodded, looking as though he felt a bit foolish. I shook my head, dismissing his embarrassment. “They’re probably not. I’m apparently a special case, which is less fun than you might think.”

His mouth pursed, almost a smile. “I might remind you that I came to be crowned ard rí, and instead have learned I walked to my doom. I may understand “less fun than expected” better than you think I do.”

I was too weak to resist. Given the opening, I seized it and nodded toward his silver hand. “You probably do. Gary said one of the other high kings chopped that off. What, um. How did…?”

“The magic that gives it life is beyond any I could command. The horned god invested it with warmth and motion in exchange for the sword I made him.” His eyebrows quirked again. “The first sword. I wonder what gift he offers for the second.”

“Probably not taking the magic hand away. Really? Cernunnos can do that?” An entire world lived and breathed with Cernunnos’s life force. It probably wasn’t all that difficult for him to lend a little life to a hunk of metal. I just didn’t know why he’d want to.

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