“They haven’t stolen it, you old crow. That druid-house was abandoned to blight so long ago the roof was caving it. Would you have preferred they’d left it there?” Meeve held out her goblet to her cup-bearer and nodded at the end of the table. “We’ve all had news today, it seems. I had a few messages myself, thanks to Ronalbain and Fahrwyr.” She raised her brimming goblet again in the direction of two mud-splattered men who crouched over the long board, hunks of stringy meat clutched in both hands. There was a look on Meeve’s face Connla couldn’t quite read as she stared harder at her sister, deliberately opening her druid Sight. A gray veil of mist appeared between them, and Connla realized Meeve was hiding something.
Connla glanced around the table at the reddened, grease-stained faces, and spoke beneath the raucous laughter that followed some half-witted remark. “May I speak to you alone?”
Meeve only belched and waved an airy hand. “Why don’t you come eat? Come, sit…you, Turnoch, and you, Dougal, move aside, make room for Callie Connla.” Even before the sentence was completely out of her mouth, the men began to shift, benches began to scrape across the wooden planks of the raised dais. Meeve nodded. “There you are—go sit. Let’s eat and drink like civilized people, and then we’ll talk.”
“You’ll be too drunk to talk soon.” The silver chalice and blade of her office clanked against Connla’s thigh as she hoisted her robes above her knees and hauled herself onto the dais, waving away hands that would’ve helped her. She leaned as far over the board as the piled platters would permit and stared directly into her younger sister’s eyes. Another peal of thunder rolled through the room, echoing in the high rafters. The storm was moving closer. “I need to talk to you now. Alone.”
“Now?”
Connla glanced at the warriors leaning on either side of Meeve, at the guards lined up along the wall. Sweat began to gather under her armpits as a sense of spiraling disaster, of something very dangerous coming closer, almost riding on the edge of the storm, began to grow. She shoved the feeling away and concentrated on Meeve. “Yes, now. Unless you’d like to discuss this in front of everyone?”
Meeve belched again. “You’re not the only one with something to say, sister. If I were you, I’d take the time to fortify myself first.”
“Am I to understand that as a threat?” Connla narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re doing, sister. You don’t know what balances you’re upsetting—no one would dare to touch that silver but those Lacquilean robbers you’ve let loose upon the land.”
“Well, now, sister. That’s hardly diplomatic of you, considering I’m expecting a delegation from this person or persons who call themselves the Voice of the city, whatever that means. I thought to do you a favor—”
“A favor? You take our silver to appease foreigners, bargain it away and call it a favor?”
“Is silver all you’re worried about, Connla?” Meeve put her goblet down with a thump and leaned forward with a clink of twisted gold and copper bracelets.
“Of course silver isn’t all I’m worried about. That silver was guarded by the khouri-keen—your knights should not have been able to find that silver, let alone take it away. There’s far more at stake—”
“Then I should think you’d better be off to Ardagh, don’t you? If there is some sort of problem with those creatures, the silver’s safer with the Fiachna than it was in that burned-out grove.”
“Will it be here when I return? Or will robbers have somehow snatched it away from the Fiachna, or will pirates have managed to sail all the way into Lake Killcarrick and raid the druid-house at Killcairn?”
“You still blame me for that?” Meeve hiccupped softly, her golden brown eyes hollow in the torchlight. Lightning flashed, accompanied by a sharp crackle and a sudden blast of cold wet air. Torches whipped out in long plumes of white smoke, casting shadows on Meeve’s face. Buffeted on all sides as warriors and servants scattered to bolt the shutters against the rising winds, Connla could only stare in disbelief at the undeniable ring of tiny white flames wreathing Meeve’s face.
“What’re you about, Meeve—” Connla began, but her question faltered and died on her lips as rain splattered on the roof, then settled into a fast, steady drumming. So that’s what Meeve doesn’t want us to see, she thought. That’s what Meeve doesn’t want me to know. “Why didn’t you tell me you were dying?”
Meeve knocked over her goblet, spilling purple wine across her white linen and cloth of gold. With a curse coarse enough for the stable, Meeve pushed back her chair and rose. “You come with me. Sister.” The last word was a snarl that sounded anything but sisterly.
Perhaps it was the hard pounding of the rain that contributed to Connla’s sense of ripping through some layer of reality as she followed Meeve across the crowded floor, eyes riveted on Meeve’s rigid back as if she were the only other person in the room. The only person who mattered, Connla thought, and out of the corner of her eye, against the kaleidoscopic background, Briecru, Meeve’s chief Cowherd, stood out, his rich gold chains and red mustaches vivid against the shifting shadows forming around him like a cloak, so that it seemed he stood in a pool of black. The idea that Briecru could betray Meeve bolted through her mind, just as Meeve pulled her into the small antechamber to one side of the hall, her fingers clamped like a vise around Connla’s upper arm.
Meeve slammed the door, then wiped her hand ostentatiously on the thigh of her trews and made a face. “Faugh, Connla, must you wear all that wool? You not only sound like a crow, you reek like a dead one.”
“Better like a dead crow than a living thrall.” Connla met the wall of Meeve’s anger. She was still partially in that hazy state between the two worlds where she could see the flames flickering around Meeve’s face, but she was too angry not to retaliate. “Is that what you need my silver for, sister? For the perfume you’ve taken to wearing?”
“I should slap you for that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were dying, Meeve?”
Meeve snorted and shook her head. “You druids tell us we’re all dying, some of us sooner than others is all. I don’t want your pity, Connla, and I don’t want your help.” Black anger surged around Meeve like a cloak, cutting off Connla’s Sight.
Stung, Connla could only blink. “But I—I don’t understand. Surely, sister, there’s something that can be done—”
“Oh, spare me.” Meeve sank down in the wide chair on one side of the fire and leaned back against the linen-covered cushions, then held out a scroll. “It’s what killed Mother. I’ve all the same symptoms—the rashes that come and go, the aches, the sweats, the flesh falling off my bones. There was nothing to be done for her and I know there’s nothing to be done for me. If you were really concerned, you’d mind your own affairs so I wouldn’t have to. Do you have any idea who sent the message Ronalbain brought? He’s the one who brought the most distressing news, I think.”
“And what’s that?” Connla raised her chin. Meeve’s words pelted her like windblown acorns.
“He brought me a message from Deirdre, who—though I find it hard to believe—is yet still with child. Can you explain that, as well as why my daughter’s begging me to rescue her?”
“Rescue her? From what?” Connla faltered a little and tightened her hand on her staff. Deirdre, one of Meeve’s twin daughters, was a gifted druid who had been under Connla’s guardianship since her arrival at the White Birch Grove at the age of seven.
“Maybe if you’d paid more attention to your duty, this disgraceful situation would never have occurred. But when it did, I told you to take care of it. Now it seems that not only did you not address it when it could’ve been easily eliminated, Deirdre’s now in such a state she thinks her sisters are trying to kill her. Are they?”
Connla tried to breathe through the grip of the palsy that shook her