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It weighed on him, more stone. “Those friends knew what they risked, and took this place back with courage. You demean that by sucking up all the responsibility. You demean them.”
It sliced at her, the truth of it sliced. “That’s harsh, that’s cold.”
“Maybe, but it’s how I see it. Those men and women didn’t die for you, they died for what you represent. They died for their families, their neighbors, their futures.”
“Mick died because Petra wanted to hurt me.”
“Then let’s go get the bitch and her fucking hag of a mother.” He wanted it, could almost taste the bitter tang of their blood. “We go back to Scotland, close the shield, and we take down that dark bastard in the woods. We draw Petra and Allegra out, and finish it.”
She pressed her face to Laoch’s neck. “It’s not time.”
“Screw that, Fallon. If not now, when?”
“I don’t know!” And that sliced, too. “I just know it’s not time. There’s more to come. I can’t—” She whirled on him, stopped. Drew a breath. “There,” she said, and pointed.
And there where Mick had fallen stood a tree of life, blooming full, branches curving upward.
“Is that my solace?” she asked.
Now he whirled on her. “It’s acknowledgment. It’s gratitude and honor.”
Tears burned the backs of her eyes, and she wanted to scream and shed them. “Yes, yes, you’re right. The fact I can’t feel that, just can’t, is another reason I need to leave.”
“Leave? Go where?”
“I need solitude, I need to restore my faith. I need a couple of weeks, Duncan, just some time alone.”
“Alone?”
“Everything you said is right, but I can’t feel it. I need to feel it again, believe it again. And I can’t lean on you until I’m sure I can stand on my own. She broke something in me, Duncan, and I need some time to heal. When she killed Denzel, you needed to leave.”
“Part of that was distance from you, but okay, yeah.”
“A couple of weeks,” she said again, and though she felt his need, stayed behind the wall she’d built. “Will you stand for me tomorrow, at the memorial?”
“You’re leaving now?”
“If I don’t, I won’t, because I want to lean on you, I want my family, my friends. But I know it won’t be time to end this until I take back what she took from me today.”
“We need to—I need to just sit the hell down with you. Take a minute.”
“I can’t. I just can’t. I have to go.”
“Where?” he demanded. “Where the hell are you going?”
“To the quiet.” She felt his hurt, his need for more from her. But couldn’t give it. She mounted Laoch. “After the quiet comes the fury, and with the fury the end. The end of dark, the end of light—this hangs in the balance. Know the fire, the famine, the rivers of blood should dark tip the scales. Know the song of peace a thousand years if the light shines true. Shine true, Duncan of the MacLeods, and you will know when the time has come.”
She dropped out of the vision, looked at him under the streaming moonlight, the sparkle of stars that spread over the freed city.
“I love you,” she said, and vanished.
“You said no,” he murmured. “For the first time you said no.”
__________
Battles sparked as the Light for Life forces advanced in every direction. Duncan gave himself over to the fighting, joining Flynn’s troops in the green mountains of Georgia, flashing to Meda, the shuttered city of Santa Fe in New Mexico, and on the windswept fields of Nebraska.
He nursed his own wounds when he got them, cleaned his sword, and looked for the next fight.
Fallon might have taken the quiet, but he wanted the fury.
“You need some downtime, brother.”
He drank a beer with Tonia in the community gardens. Shrugged with it. “I’m sitting down right now.”
“You know what I mean. You only came back today to placate Mom. I know you’ve already grilled Chuck on where to find some action next. Maine, right? Vivienne’s troops and ours about to face off on the coast.”
“I’m needed there. I’m not here.”
He heard Eddie’s harmonica join in with someone’s guitar riff. And Rainbow, now a leggy teenager, danced in the air with some faerie friends.
Spring, he thought. Plenty of those signs of spring around him with the greening trees, the young crops, the burst of flowers, the balm of the air as it neared May Day.
Spring bloomed everywhere in New Hope. He wondered if it bloomed wherever Fallon was.
He shoved that thought away, turned his head to look at Tonia. “Anyway, seems to me you were into it with me when we took on those combined forces in Georgia.”
“I was needed. There’s also plenty of need here. We’re barely keeping up with training. And we’re losing Colin again. He’s taken Pennsylvania and going back to Arlington tomorrow. It’s spring, and that takes Eddie and some of the other serious farmers off rotation for scouting. They broke ground on the clinic expansion.”
“After Maine, I’ll be back.”
“That’s what you said after New Mexico.”
“And I came back.” Annoyance bit through the words. “We’re driving them down, Tonia. But the way they’re combining forces, that’s got to be a concern. We’re seeing more and more DUs fighting alongside PWs. More Raiders grouping together.”
“I can’t argue with that. There’s not even a pretext with the PWs now. It’s not magicks they want to destroy. It’s us. Did Chuck tell you about their latest dispatches, what they’re sending out?”
“Yeah. How the Uncannys who fight with them have been purified and redeemed or whatever. Using their powers for the holy war, blah blah. White’s a lunatic, and he’s an idiot if he actually believes the DUs won’t wipe him and the rest of the PWs out the minute they’re not useful.”
“A lunatic, an idiot, but he’s still managed to keep his cult going for more than two decades.”
“Fear and hate can work.” He drank more beer, brooded over the colored lights strung around the garden.
“I know you miss her. We all miss her.”
“It’s not about—” The hell it wasn’t, he admitted. “She said a couple weeks. It’s been nearly five. I shouldn’t have let her go alone.”
“Let, my ass. You don’t let her any more than I let you go to fricking Maine. You’re worried, I get it. Jesus, Duncan, so am I. So’s everyone. She’s been the prime target since before she was born.”
“Then stop making excuses.”
“Not excuses. Reasons. I think living with being the prime target, with being The freaking One takes a toll. Like losing your oldest friend five feet away from where you’re standing takes a toll. Like training recruits knowing when they’re ready to fight not all of them will come back takes a toll.”
“Sounds like somebody else needs some downtime.”
Tonia heaved out a breath. “Maybe.”
A fiddle joined the guitar, the harmonica. A few people started to sing a song he’d heard a few times about life on the farm.
Maybe Fallon had gone back to the farm. He could go, look. The hell with that, he decided, and chugged beer. He wasn’t a dog who’d belly crawl back to the boot that kicked him.
She hadn’t just left, she’d blocked him so he couldn’t even touch her mind, not even in dreams.
The hell with it.
“How about you come with me to Maine,” he suggested, “then when we drive those bastards into the sea, I’ll come back with you. I’ll take some of the recruits off your hands.”
“I could use the help, Duncan, no lie.”
Hannah came over, plopped down on the grass beside them. “Here you are. I’ve been going over clinic plans with Rachel and Mom, and I am seriously done. Where’s my beer?”
Duncan handed her what was left of his. She sighed at the couple of swallows. “It’ll do. Mom says she’s making French toast for bre
akfast—with pig bacon.”
While Hannah couldn’t read minds, she knew her siblings. “Oh, come on. You just got back.” She swallowed the last of the beer, poked the bottle at Tonia. “You, too?”
“We made a pact. I go shoot a few arrows with Duncan, and he comes back to take some of the training hours off my plate.”
Hannah let out a sigh. “A deal’s a deal. It’s fairly quiet at the clinic. Need a doctor in Maine?”
“You’re volunteering to take some of the heat off us,” Tonia decided.
“The three of us go, the three of us come back—and stay,” Hannah added, “for at least a full week. Mom’ll take it better if it’s all of us.”
“Best sister ever.” Duncan wrapped an arm around Hannah’s shoulders.
“Hey!”
