‘If you would, my dear,’ the Muse said, gesturing to Remi. ‘Sing.’
‘Sing what?’
‘Anything.’
Remi curled her bandaged fingers into her palm, then sent a cautious look Nicole’s way.
‘It’s okay.’ Nicole nodded. ‘I’ll be right here and I’ll be fine.’
Remi deliberated a moment before her lips parted and, hesitantly, a note formed. Nicole bent closer as Remi did and the liquid rippled.Before Nicole could drag Remi backwards – after the lesson she’d learned with the Nymphs – the image changed.
The harp no longer had seven strings, but three.
The effigy on the urn was no longer written in Latin, so the name was readable, and instantly recognisable.
Then the final piece of the painting changed: the girdle around the stone effigy transformed.
Into a torc.
‘So you see,’ the Muse said, in that hypnotic voice, ‘why the Wake could never know.’
Amazed at the painting’s metamorphosis, dread sank through Nicole.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, her awe transformed into concern. ‘I see.’
She felt Remi’s eyes slide to her but tried not to react.
Kyan.
The passage had rewritten itself to spell one of his mythological names.
Cú Chulainn.
Kyan had been entwined in this conspiracy since at least 1902, when her mother had tried to stop him taking the oath. Was this the reason? Was his torc – that torc she’d seen around his neck in the very first vision she had ever had of him – the next goddess-blessed item they needed?
‘Freya believed it was forged by one of the Irish gods,’ the Muse said.
Goddess-blessed.A god would know how to hide blood in something like that, which would make this the second item, the artefact.
It was more and more evidence of the gods and their lost treasures; of that epic Irish civilisation that had shaped the supernatural world.
Nicole sucked in a shaky breath.
‘Do you believe it?’ Nicole asked. ‘That the gods could have made his torc?’
The Muse’s eyes glinted, dark and ensnaring. ‘My girl, you haven’t even scratched the surface of this world’s powers. Ancient civilisations were not as separate from the divine or the supernatural as society is now. You’ve lived as a human too long if this truth startles you. Gods walked the earth for millennia and the Irish gods were gods of the arts.’
Divino artista …
That had been the first of her mother’s clues to Estwood.
The Muse continued, ‘The myths say that before the gods came here, they lived in a world of the occult magic and beauty and pleasure, where there were five islands in which they learned and revelled in all their luxuries. But then, of course, Ireland called. And so they came.’
Nicole tried to blink away the spell of her words.
‘Which one?’ Nicole found herself asking. ‘Which god did she think made the torc?’
‘Most likely Goibniu, the Divine Blacksmith. He and his brothers, Credne and Luchta, created many masterpieces: astrolabes that charted the dark expansive universe, blades that could cleave stars from the cosmos. Torcs fit for the necks of the most blessed royalty.’
