Inkiri made a growly hissing noise and pulled me back even farther behind him.
“Nokim, Fellisse, will you take Rory inside and watch over him?” Inkiri bit out. “It is not safe here.”
“We could always just kill the Koa Esher.” Vergis turned his knife so the Koa Esher could see. “That’d make it safe.”
The Koa Esher didn’t seem to understand English, but he could clearly tell what was going on. He looked scared now, saying something in a low voice that sounded like pleading.
Kinnek grabbed one of the Koa Esher’s asymmetrical horns and twisted, revealing the bagu’s throat. My jaw dropped when Kinnek whispered something into his ear. The way he said it, eyes wide, lips pulled back to show his teeth, all humor or joviality gone, it was enough to make my blood curdle.
“But he said he wanted to talk.” I looked at Fellisse, who stepped back and took hold of my upper arm. Nokim had closed ranks next to Vergis, but was stepping back now as well.
“There is never much talking that goes on with them, sweet thing. They’re deceiving. Go with Fellisse and Nokim.” Inkiri pushed me and my berry basket toward the big, oceanic bagu, and Nokim glanced at Vergis, but then came up on my other side.
I had the sinking feeling that this was going to turn bloody, and it was a sickening moment of déjà vu, taking me back to the religious compound. Really, I hadn’t been in that place long, but there had still been an inordinate amount of terror in that time.
I focused on the presence, which lingered. It was curious about the Koa Esher, given that his magic was different, not as familiar as Vergis’s smooth if relentless spells, not as comforting as Kinnek’s highly sophisticated yet humble workings.
Can you tell me for certain if the cola ash dude is lying? I asked the presence. If it could, I wouldn’t have to worry which pumpkin he’d end up buried under.
The presence’s focus shifted toward me, but it didn’t outright answer. Instead, vertigo and nausea hit me hard, and the world slipped away from me, fast. I knew I was falling, but I was no longer there by the time I should’ve hit the ground.
Chapter 16
I was back on the Hill of Tara, fog everywhere, vegetation where there shouldn’t have been any.
The girl was here as well. It was foggy, and the fog moved, curling between me and the girl. The tendrils coalesced into the shape of a face. It was looking right at me, and then it opened its mouth and spoke.
Before, when one of you was anointed, they were sacred, not to be harmed. Their people dressed them in white linen and gold, and they would bleed to protect them.
I walked closer to where the fog was still coiling as if it were a living thing. Maybe it was.
“What…are you?”
The fog sighed. Now you ask. I am the land and the sky above the land, the water that runs through its bedrock like blood and breath. I am the earth that holds the bones of many ages, and the rain that washes those ages away like ash after a fire.
“Where are the others? My guys? I didn’t just die of a heart attack, did I?”
The fog shivered, and leaves shuddered. Laughter. No, Rory. They are where they were, as are you. But my memory is long, and I remember this well. They found her in the end, although she fought. She had no knights like you, and as you saw, they’d already taken her sister, her last remaining relative. She was tired from running and hiding. They did to her what they would have done to your mage knight, the one held dear by our Lady Death.
As I was standing in what was apparently the land’s memory, I wondered how I had ended up here. I also considered that I was not exactly the best person to be here, because clearly, the situation at hand demanded some first-class adulting skills and life skills in general, and I didn’t have any of those. I lived for my cute cat socks and loved my big strong mate, but I’d never done taxes, never gone to a job interview, nor had I mastered anything more complicated than booking the trip to Ireland and arranging for the hotel, really.
And yet the land, if that was what the presence was, clearly wanted to tell me things, things I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to think about what the cola asshats would have done to Vergis, what the humans had done to the girl who’d had fire in those green eyes when I’d seen her, running and hiding and calling the fog. I just…wanted to be background. Sweet shrubbery, swaying in imagined wind. I wanted nothing to do with danger and murder and other horrible things. Being pursued by bears was not for me, I’d recently learned.
“I don’t understand what any of this means.” I dug my fingers into my hair and almost screamed at the fog. “I don’t even know what all this anointing means.”
When one of you drinks from a sacred spring or bathes in it, when one of you touches a sacred stone or sleeps in a sacred clearing, that is anointing. Though the clearings are gone now, and the springs are long since tainted. There is only this now. The fog curled around the Stone. Before you, I thought there’d never be another, not when the last of your bloodline left these shores.
“Right. Sorry Gran emigrated. Look, can I go back to the guys now? They were about to kill the cola asshat, but maybe I can get them to just kick him out, so uhm…” I gestured. At wibbly wobbly fog.
The presence sort of pushed into my mind like a migraine. It was frustrated, I realized. It was stalling.
They stole from your bloodline. They tried to make themselves better than they were. As if they could ever be anointed like the true bloodline. As if kingship were magic.
I sighed. “Okay, so people are assholes. What else is new?”
The presence was still agitated. It wanted me to see something.
Before, they clad your kind in white, but it was respect. It was not so you’d be used.
