There was something about watching the mighty fall ignominiously. Goddesses weren’t supposed to be taken down with a stone any more than Goliaths were. It lacked respect, and if I’d learned anything, it was that power demanded respect.
With that in mind, I bellowed, “Hot damn, you go, Gary!” dropped my sword and scrambled across the Morrígan’s unconscious body to get at Lugh.
Blood bubbled at his lips, a fine deadly froth. I was pretty sure that meant she’d gotten him in the lung. That should bode ill for him, but I’d healed myself from a punctured lung once. Healing somebody else couldn’t be that hard, especially since he knew of and accepted the power shamans wielded. Nothing like a willing victim to ease things along. I reached for the healing magic within me, flexing it for the first time since I’d arrived in Lugh’s era.
The Stone of Destiny stopped screaming.
It had gotten to where I didn’t notice it anymore, so the cessation was very loud. My head jerked up and I scanned for danger, but the Morrígan was still out and there was no one else at Tara but me, Gary and the ghosts of sacrifices past.
One of which went pop! like a soap bubble. Disappeared like he’d been erased entirely, and a glimmer of brilliant emerald-green power filled the space his voice had been in.
Familiar power. The power of a teenage demigod, granddaughter to the Wild Hunt. Suzanne Quinley, who had, at Halloween, unraveled a thread of history, and wiped a man from existence.
A man who had been birthed from a legendary cauldron that raised the dead as zombies, bound to do the bidding of the living. The Master had made it. Somebody had bound it so it could do relatively little evil. And I had—with some help—destroyed it.
If an ancient king of Tara had been one of the unfortunates caught within the cauldron’s magic, there was more than a little bad magic going on here. It was like the entire history of the world was corrupt, although as soon as I thought it I didn’t know why I was surprised. Corruption was kind of civilization’s story of humanity, from Adam and Eve all the way down the line.
That didn’t mean I had to like it. It certainly didn’t mean that in the here and now, thousands of years before my own time, I had to sit back and let him have his way. There was no point in having great power if I didn’t sling it around a little bit. Lugh, ard rí of the aos sí—I bet that sounded much cooler if I said it all in Irish instead of pidgining it together—did not have to die today. Determined, I pulled my magic into line and turned it on the dying king.
And slammed headlong into Suzanne’s power, lush and green and implacable. My own silver-blue talent shorted out in a fizzle of sparks, gathered itself again and buzzed against Suzanne’s, searching for a way in.
I hit reverberations instead, shockwaves that came from the none-too-distant past. No matter how I tried to slither by, they caught me in their wake and tossed me back to the beginning. I had mad skills, but they didn’t add up to godlike power. Despite this accidental traipse into the past, I also didn’t make a habit of jumping around through time, and the more I pushed for a way through, the more I had the impression I was simply on the wrong side of time to change anything in the here and now. To heal Lugh, I needed to step even further back, back to before Suzy’s rewrite, and work my way forward. Too much had already changed. The old needed to be fixed before the new could be altered.
Not very hopefully, I said, “Rattler? Raven?” but while my guides were still awake within me, they gave no clarifying power surge in response. Shapeshifting, dealing with the dead: they could handle those things. Time travel was evidently a whole ’nother kettle of fish.
For the first time since I’d gotten a handle on my shamanic powers, I let the magic go without having healed someone I genuinely wanted to see live. Lugh dragged another blood-bubbly breath and my face crumpled. Failure sucked. “I’m sorry. Something’s already happened here, Lugh. Time’s been changed, and I can’t change it again to heal you. Do you…”
Of course he wouldn’t remember. I didn’t even really have to ask. Suzanne had wiped out Lugh’s predecessor so thoroughly that he’d never existed at all. Someone else had played his role instead, a thought which dropped through me like a lead balloon.
Time had been rewritten. The Morrígan had accepted the Master as, well, her master. I was willing to put money on that not being a coincidence. “Lugh, ah, God, I’m sorry, but how long have the sacrifices been going on? How long have the high kings been marrying the Morrígan?”
“Al…ways. Since…Haw-hee…was slain…by the Morrígan.”
That was about as useful to me as a hole in the head, since I had not a clue what a Hawhee was, but this was not a good time to go into it. I nodded and clutched Lugh’s hand, feeling once more like the useless ingénue. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry, Lugh. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
He smiled, faint bloody expression. “It was supposed to happen…exactly…this way.”
Great. I’d just gotten an I told you so from a dying king. I was trying to figure out how to respond to that when his hand spasmed around mine and determined fear came into his eyes. He surged up half an inch, which under the circumstances was a heroic effort, and whispered, “Warn…Nooda…!”
I had no more idea what a Nooda was than a Hawhee, but I nodded a vigorous, wordless promise, and Lugh, reassured, collapsed silently into death.
Gary stopped to pick up the Morrígan’s sword and throw it several yards away, then came to kneel by me. We sat together silently for what seemed like a long time, but eventually I said, “Who’s Hawhee?” with no expectation of an answer.
“I’m guessin’ a king,” Gary said, which was equal parts obvious and helpful. “Nuada’s one. They called him Nuada of the Silver Hand ’cause his got— Ah, hell, that’s who Hawhee was. It ain’t spelled like it sounds. It’s spelled…” He frowned, clearly calling the name up in memory, then rattled off, “E-o-c-h-a-i-d-h, Eochaidh, yeah. He’s the guy who cut off Nuada’s hand.”
I’d heard of Nuada. He’d made my necklace. It was just, “I thought it was pronounced New-AH-da.”
“Yeah, well, I thought Eochaidh was pronounced Ee-ock-chaye-d-hhh.” He aspirated the last sound like an old wheezing dog and I coughed on his behalf. Gary closed Lugh’s eyes, then cautiously asked, “What happened, Jo? I kinda saw you start to do your thing and then bounce right off a green granite cliff face.”
I blinked up from the dead king in surprise. “You saw that? I mean, you Saw it? Wow. That was…” I trailed off and stared at Lugh again. “That was repercussions. That was Suzanne Quinley, Gary. That was her in the zombie fight. You know the one she obliterated? He came from here. Not quite now, but somewhen around now. Time had to be rewritten around the space he wasn’t anymore.” The language was not well suited to referring to events that had been made to not-happen. I wet my lips and kept going as best I could. “Maybe he was supposed to be Eochaidh’s successor. Maybe he was meant to defeat the Morrígan, or to really marry her, but maybe instead the Master slipped in where he was supposed to be and made her a goddess instead.”
We both looked over at where she still lay sprawled across the grass, a bit of blood leaking through her hair. I said, “Only she isn’t, you know. She’s more than Lugh was, but she’s not like Cernunnos. She’s just very, very powerful.”
“So’re you.”
Somehow that made me feel a little better. I said, “Anyway,” more softly. “Anyway, so this whole era, which I guess means the whole timeline going forward, is all screwed up because of Suzy wiping that zombie out. I couldn’t heal Lugh because there was already too much interference. Something big already got changed. It wouldn’t let me change even more.”
Gary’s gray eyes were big as a lemur’s. “Are you gonna rewrite the whole history of the world, darlin’?”