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“There’s not a one of them who’d go against Mairghread O’Ceallaigh, and not a one of them who wouldn’t argue to death such as me.”
“Especially Nelly,” Morena added. “She’d be Mina’s great-grandmother, Breen, the young elf who runs the fields and woods with her friends.”
Laying some cheese on a bit of bread, Finola wagged them in the air. “Three years past at a valley fair, my peach pie won the prize, and never will she forget I nudged her out of it.”
“And your plum jam beat hers as well,” Marg recalled.
“True enough, though I’m not one to brag.” Laughing, Finola brushed a hand at her sassily cut chestnut hair. “We’ll have the baking contests for the festival for certain, and for certain as well, I fear we’ll all fall before our Marco. Is he over there then? The handsome Marco?”
“He is, learning how not to bang his finger instead of a nail with a hammer.”
Finola dimpled at Breen. “I’ll just go over, say a hello, see what’s what. And please my eyes with a look at all the men with hammers.”
“Not that she won’t please her eyes,” Morena began when Finolastrolled away, “but she’s wanting to give us the time to talk of what we can’t in front of her. It’s safe to do so here if we need, you said, Marg.”
“Odran can neither see nor hear anything that’s done or said in Fey Cottage or its land. We’ve seen to it, layers of seeing to it.”
“We’re careful what we say at the farm, but for when we have the council meetings and close him off there. I don’t know if it’s that I can all but feel him watching or my mind playing the trick on me.”
“He has to know Shana failed.” Breen glanced toward the woods. “And I’m actually not sure he ever expected her to succeed, but it’s been weeks, so he knows. And the cracks are widening, just a little more every day.”
“With Yseult’s dark magicks tied with his own, he’ll look through the cracks, through the glass, through the fire and the fog. But what will he see?” Marg asked.
“Talamh,” Breen answered. “Preparing for festivals to celebrate the solstice, and the Daughter’s return. More concerned, for those three days, it seems, with fun than any threat. Warriors competing in feats of skill and strength rather than training.”
“The Fey,” Morena finished, “dancing and feasting and ripe for the burning.”
“He doesn’t know us.” Marg listened to the laughter, the banging and buzzing behind the hedgerow. “In all his years he’s never learned, and never will, who we are and what we’ll do to hold this world. He sent that wicked girl to strike down our taoiseach, believing if she put that poisoned blade in Keegan, the whole of Talamh would fall into chaos and fear and despair. I’m grateful every day she failed, and can’t find any sorrow in me for her death.
“Her parents have mourned already.” Marg laid a hand over Breen’s. “Convincing Keegan to let that be was a kindness to them. But had Keegan fallen that day, on the path between the worlds, Odran wouldn’t have found chaos and fear and despair.”
“Rage and strength.” Morena nodded. “We find it and grow it tall even in our grieving. And what she told Keegan in her mad bragging? The red vines? We know that world and have it mapped, as we do the ice one with its searing light and its portal that connects it to this. Theheat and the cold, and the portal that steams from the clash between them.”
“Sedric’s gone back this day to hunt yet again for the portal that must link Odran’s world to the red vines.”
Breen turned her hand under Marg’s to grip it. “You didn’t say he’d gone again.”
“Not alone. He has three with him.”
“But you worry.”
“Love is worry. It’s a small world, he tells me, brutal with the wet heat, the thick vines, and the bogs. A red sun and a single small, hazy moon. He swears they’ll find it on this trip, as they’ve covered most of it on the others.”
“Will they seal the portal?” Morena asked.
“Keegan says no. They’ll lay a trap instead.” As she spoke, Breen glanced over toward the arbor, knowing this wasn’t for Finola’s ears. “It’s the connecting portal they’ll seal once they’re sure this is the way Shana came.”
“Ah, I see, I see.” Morena sampled the cheese. “And so they’ll have no way through.”
“More. The traps spring. When they come, when we know, we’ll seal the way back. I’ve been working on the spell for it,” Marg told them. “And with Sedric’s gift, we can do this. There’ll be no way back and no way forward for any he sends in that way.”
“It would take them days to get here that way, Nan. You protect this side, as those he’d send through would attack here. Keegan and his scholars believe she came into Scotland from the Ice World, and from there to Ireland and the woods right there.”
“The Fey pledge to protect all, and so we will. Do I worry? Of course. Sedric doesn’t just share my bed but my entire world. In truth he brought my heart back to life. But he’s as clever as the cat he is, so I trust he’ll come home to me, and stand with me when we celebrate the end of Odran.
“Now, Morena darling, go fetch your nan. We’ll talk of the festival and the fun—and gods, the headaches of seeing to the fun. And we’ll talk of the defenses we’ll have in secret that all in Talamh must know.”
When they planned the festival and the fun, Breen wished the complex logistics of that could be all of it. But every contest and game for the young, and the not so young, held under it a defense or an offense, or both at once.
