Emerald Magic Page 11

  The hermit’s heart stopped, then began to hammer so hard he nearly fell over. Gold tempted him not at all—he had plenty of that if he wanted it, back in Somerset. Poetry—to be a true bard—

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Dear God.” But then, with every fiber of his being: “No. No, I will not. It would never be real. It would be yours, and I would always remember that. It wouldn’t come from inside of me.”

  She regarded him with respect, and bowed as if to a lord. “Integrity,” she said, “is the rarest of virtues. Tell me then, William Thorne. In return for the salvation of my people, would you take love? Would you take me?”

  He groaned aloud. Heaven was in his grasp, beauty beyond mortal, love that would be, he had no doubt, of quite literally legendary splendor. And yet he said, “I am a man of God. I have forsaken love.”

  “Even love of God?”

  He stared at her.Words were nearly beyond him. He was amazed that he had said as much as he had.

  “William Thorne,” she said so tenderly that his throat tightened with tears. “Did you think that the old hermits had abandoned the beauty that is between man and woman?”

  He could answer that, in a breathless croak to be sure, but there were words at hand, and he spoke them. “They gave up everything—all the lures and uses of the world. They lived pure; they lived clean. They devoted their every living moment to the worship of God.”

  “ ‘With my body I thee worship,’ ” she said. “Those words are in your ritual. I’ve heard them many and many a time from the church door when a woman weds a man. And do believe me, William Thorne, that many a hermit did just that, away in his tower or his bothy, when he needed a more solid proof of devotion than the words of a prayer.”

  “No,” said the hermit. “You’re telling falsehoods—wicked lies to win me over. I won’t listen. I won’t hear—”

  “William Thorne,” said that sweetest of voices, “I would never lie to so pure a spirit. I would give myself freely and love you truly, for yourself, and because you were the savior of my people.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I swore a vow. That I would never—”

  “You swore out of the pain of your heart,” she said, “and out of the conviction that, after all, no woman would have you. For who wants a fool and a mooncalf, a bad poet with nothing better to recommend him than a substantial income and a country house in Somerset? Who would truly love you, or want you for anything but what your father has to leave you? Who would want you as you are,with nothing to your name but a half-ruined tower and a borrowed gown?”

  Her words were so true, and so cutting, and so exquisitely cruel, that he could only stand and gape at her. He had thought his heart broken when his true love married another—and what was her name again? What had her face been like? When he tried to think of her, he saw only the face of this woman of the Sidhe.

  “I would take you,” she said, “though you were naked on a hilltop, bereft even of your wits. Even if you could not help us—yes, I would love you.”

  “Why?” he said. That tongue of his had a life of its own.

  “Because you are yourself,” she said. “I watched you long and long before I came to you. I saw what a fool you are, and how silly you can be, but also the goodness of your heart. You will help us, if you can convince yourself that it’s worth doing.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I will. But not because you bribed me. Because—because I think you’re worth saving. Prove to me that you are, and I’ll do it. Not that I don’t think you are beautiful and perfect and absolutely tempting, but they say the Devil can be dreadfully like you. Why should I turn against Christian doctrine and save the lives of a pack of pagan gods?”

  “Why indeed?” she said. She seemed in no way discouraged. “You love beauty, yes? You love the old things, the true things.”

  “Magic is all sleights and lies,” he said.

  “Is it? Do you know so much about it,William Thorne?”

  “I know enough,” he said. “Prayer is true. God is true.”

  “And did not God make us, too? We are Her first children. She gave us magic, for beauty and for delight. Yes, it could turn to darkness and terror, but that is true of anything in this world.” She held out her hand. “Come. Come and see.”

  The hermit knew that he should not. He had read the stories, heard the warnings. He could go under the hill and come out a hundred years later, and none of this would matter at all.

  And yet, in spite of all he knew or thought he knew, in his heart he trusted this woman. He thought he could sense the truth in her, and the lack of deceit, which ran against all the stories, but there it was. Stories were stories. She was there in front of him. He did believe in what he could see, however preposterous he might once have thought it.

  He took a deep breath and crossed himself, at which she did not even flinch. He set his hand in hers. She was solid and warm. He had half expected her to be as cold and frail as mist, but that was real flesh against his fingers and palm, and real bone under it. Only the faint tingle of what must be magic betrayed that she was not a human woman.

  Her fingers closed about his. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  He had no time to reply. The mists were already rising, and the world melting away. He tasted blood where he had bitten his tongue. Wherever he was going, that taste of iron and sweetness would remind him that he, like it, was mortal; that magic was not his heritage.

  FATHER TIMOTHY’S ARMY had swelled to a hundred strong.Man and woman alike, they had armed themselves with axes and a fire of holy zeal. They gathered in front of the church in the morning, singing hymns to keep themselves occupied until he was done with the morning office. He had not known so many of them knew Latin, or that these unmistakably secular people could chant as sonorously as an abbey of monks. The long ominous roll of the Dies irae escorted him out into the watery sunlight.

  He paused on the church steps, giving a last tug to his vestments and firming his grip on the processional cross. For this he had judged it appropriate to appear in full uniform as it were.At the sight of him, the gathering raised a deep-throated roar.

  It was a little frightening to see how dedicated they were. Frightening and exhilarating. They were his army—his soldiers of the Lord. He marshaled them with a word and led them out of the churchyard toward the field of battle.

  The tree stood in a field beyond the water mill. The Druid wood came up close to it, but the tree stood alone. It was an oak, with a trunk so thick that half a dozen children could barely reach around it with their arms outstretched. Legend had it that a golden sickle was buried deep inside it, grown into the bark since some ancient Druid had left it there.What his reasons were or what had become of him, even legend did not say.

  What the legend did say was that it was the oldest tree in this part of Ireland, and maybe in the whole island. It had been sacred before Saint Patrick came, and had clung to that holiness through centuries of Christian rule. Until Father Timothy stopped them, people had been bringing offerings to it, hanging them in its branches, and whispering prayers into its gnarled roots.

  The oak was the last unabashedly pagan thing in Ballynasloe. A wind was blowing through its branches, rattling the dry leaves. Yet no wind blew on the army as it advanced. The air was perfectly still everywhere but in the direct vicinity of the tree.

  Out of the corner of his eye Father Timothy thought he could see a flicker of shadows. They swirled about the tree and spun upward toward the gathering of clouds over the wan sun.

  He raised his cross like a banner and swept it forward. “Onward!” he cried.

  “Onward!” they roared back.

  They came in ranks with axes at the ready. Seamus the woodcutter had the honor of the first blow. The ancient oak was as hard as iron. It turned the axe-blade even in those skilled hands and nearly took off the head of the man who pressed too close behind.

  Seamus cursed in most unsaintly fashion and hefted his weapon again, glaring down anyone who might
have thought to move in. He measured the tree with narrowed eyes, secured his grip on the handle, and swung with a much more carefully judged degree of force.

  Bark flew. The axe barely bit, but it was a start.

  With a hundred of them, some almost as skilled as Seamus, the tree could not hope to win the battle. It tried its best. Between its thickness and the hardness of its bark and wood, it put up a noble fight. Other things helped it, things barely to be seen but clearly to be felt. Cold iron was death to the old things, but they had ways to thwart it nonetheless.

  Father Timothy’s army was at it for half the day, taking turns and a long rotation. If anyone lost will or strength, or succumbed to the insubstantial horrors of the pagan belief, a dozen came to take his place. They cut down the Druid tree and hewed it into firewood. Father Timothy spoke the by-now-familiar words of exorcism over the stacked wood. It was all good hard oak that would burn well on the hearth this winter—not a hint of rot or softness in it, and that was a wonder in itself.

  Danny Murphy the carter was waiting to haul off the wood. He needed two trips to carry it all, with plenty of willing hands to help him load and unload.

  Father Timothy looked on in satisfaction. That was it, he thought. That was the end of the cleansing of Ballynasloe. The sunlight was clean, and the earth was consecrated to the proper Faith. The village was as Christian as it could ever be.

  And yet as he contemplated the Mass of celebration that he would perform when Sunday came round again, he paused to wonder why he was not more deliriously happy. He could not help feeling that he had missed something. The exorcisms were all done, the prayers all said, the perimeters secured. Surely there was no pagan thing left to trouble him or anyone else.

  Maybe Saint Patrick had felt the same way after he drove the snakes out of Ireland—as if he could not have expelled them all. He must have missed one.

  He had not, and nor had Father Timothy. The world was clean. It all belonged to God, and God, he imagined, was glad.

  JUST AS THE MIST ROSE TO OBSCURE THE WORLD, the hermit pulled his hand out of the lady’s grasp. “No!” he said. “I don’t need proof. I don’t want to go away for a hundred years or a thousand and one nights or whatever it is. I can’t afford the time, and if you’re telling the truth, neither can you.” He looked her in the eye. “Tell me your name. Just do that, and I’ll believe you.”

  He had startled her. That must be hard to do, if she was as ancient as she said she was. “Just like that?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe not just like that. Hold my hand and meet my eyes and tell me your true name. If it’s the truth you’re telling, I’ll do what you ask.”

  “You know what you’re asking of me,” she said. “If you gain that power and use it badly, it will go ill for you as well as me.”

  “You said I was trustworthy,” he said. “You’ll have to trust me, then, and do as I ask—or,” he said, and for all that he could do, his voice quavered, “or go away and never come back.”

  For his soul’s sake he should have wished that she would do exactly that, but his heart hoped devoutly that she would not.

  She took his hands as the mist melted away in the pale sunlight, and looked into his eyes. Her beauty threatened to break his poor long-suffering heart. She was even more beautiful inside, he thought as he met that deep blue gaze.“My name,” she said, “is Deirdre.”

  He gaped. “Not the . . .”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “My sorrows are much more recent and less personal.”

  “Deirdre,” he said dreamily. “Beautiful Deirdre. Lady of sorrows.” He blinked hard and pulled himself forcefully back to earth. Her gaze kept trying to lure him away again. Never mind whatever journey she had had in mind—one long look into those eyes, and he had traveled as far into enchantment as he ever needed to go.

  He was lost, he supposed, and his soul was in dire danger. He could not find it in himself to be concerned about it.

  As he stood staring, she gasped and swayed. Her face had gone stark white. She seemed for a moment to lose substance, to become transparent.

  He clutched at her hands and willed her back to solidity. Her fingers locked in his. She clung for her life.

  “What,” he said. “What—”

  “The tree,” she said faintly. “They cut down the tree. Its roots go deep, so deep . . . it draws up magic. But no longer. It’s broken, bro ken and dead. William Thorne, if you can do anything, I beg of you—”

  And that was the trouble. He could not think of a single useful thing to do, except help her into the tower and sit her down by the fire and spoon broth into her from the pot that Pegeen had brought that morning. She did not object to mortal sustenance, nor cast it back up again, either.

  While he looked after her, he began to feel odd. Things were fluttering on his skin and flickering just out of sight. The floor suddenly felt . . . full.As if a great crowd had gathered under it.

  She read his thought as always. The broth had revived her; she was still weak, but she could speak. “Yes,” she said. “They’re here. They’ve all gone under the hill. There’s nowhere else that they can go.”

  “If the priest finds out,” said the hermit, “we’ll be exorcised with the rest.”

  Her lips twitched ever so slightly at that we. “We can make a stand here. There’s still a little power left in us. All together in one ancient place, we’ll be able to resist him for a while.We’ll go out with honor, at least, and die in battle.”

  He rose up in protest. “You are not going to die! I’ll think of something. Just give me time. I do have a little, I hope?”

  “A little,” she said with a sigh.

  “I’ll pray it’s enough,” he said. He appreciated the irony of that after he had said it, but he did not try to call it back. These were God’s children, too. He had convinced himself of it, looking into her eyes. God would listen to a prayer for their welfare.

  THE FAERIE FOLK CAME in all shapes and sizes, from the slender height of the Daoine Sidhe to the diminutive sturdiness of the bogles and hobs and leprechauns, and every range between. Kelpies had come to live in the stream that flowed around the foot of the hill, and but for their magic it would have been a tight fit for all of them. But they managed.

  How many of the rest filled the halls under hill, the hermit did not try to guess. Many, that much he could tell: more than he might have expected from the lady’s laments. If they were but a fraction of their former numbers, in their heyday they must have been as thick as midges in a marsh.

  He had all the evidence he needed now of their existence and their various natures. Deirdre’s race and rank protected him from the worst of the mischief, and most of the magics slipped harmlessly away when he happened by. Even so, he could not prevent them from turning his tower into an otherworldly palace and his robe into faerie silk. He would rouse from prayer or sleep to find himself decked with gold and jewels or banked in flowers.

  The gold was more lasting than the flowers—stolen from old hoards as the lady had said. He did not find it tempting at all—not being an antiquarian except in the matter of his martyrdom, and honestly having no care for such things.

  THE MORNING AFTER the Sidhe came to his tower, the hermit was up at dawn. He struggled out of his bed of lilies and roses, shedding bloodred petals, and pulled off the rings and armlets and brooches with which he was weighed down. There was nothing to be done about the shimmering glory of his robe but hope that daylight would turn it to plain brown serge again.

  There was no sign of the lady. Her relatives seemed all to have retreated under hill, having made an uproarious and nightlong carouse up one side of his tower and down the other. It was a miracle he had slept through it.

  His boots were standing by the door. They had been repaired at every point and polished until they gleamed, but they were still their sturdy selves. He pulled them on and tramped out in the pale grey light.

  He had not left his hill since he came to it in the spr
ing. It was strange to set foot on the road again, winding down it toward Bally-nasloe. The stream that crossed it was empty of wild black horses, magical or otherwise.

  By the time he passed the first house of the village, he had lost most of what courage he had. His plan was worthless. He would do much better to stay in his tower, try to keep his multitude of guests under control, and pray that the priest never learned where the faerie folk had gone.

  His feet carried him onward. He had nothing to do with it. They brought him to the tavern and deposited him in the empty taproom, face-to-face with a startled Pegeen.

  PEGEEN BELIEVED HIS STORY, wilder bits and all. Better yet, she knew exactly what to do about his rickety bones of a plan.“Leave it to me,” she said.

  He had no choice but to trust her. There was no one else in the village to whom he dared go. She fed him oat bread fresh from the oven and tea with milk that had not quite begun to turn, then sent him back to his fantastically crowded tower.

  THE BISHOP’S MAN was peacefully clopping down the road to Cashel, with no thought in his head but his dinner, his pipe, and his well-earned bed. He was shocked to the marrow to be halted in mid-clop by an apparition of power and terror.

  The younger of the two women gripped his horse’s bridle. The elder sat in the buggy that had been in her family for time out of mind and peered at him through her little round spectacles, just as she had when she was his housekeeper in the parish of Ballynasloe. “Monsignor Edward O’Reilly,” she said. “I’d like a word with you, if I may.”

  Monsignor O’Reilly would never rise so high in the Church that he could defy the will of the formidable Mrs. Murphy. He bowed, as speechless as he had been in his raw and undignified youth.

  It was more than a word and more than a moment, and as he heard it, he remembered who he was and what responsibility he had to the bishop and the diocese.When she was done, he said, “A crusade can be a marvelous thing. A crusade without the sanction of one’s superiors in the Church . . . that could be another matter.”