SIXTEEN
Diarmid
Diarmid couldn’t take the ogham stick to Finn and Cannel right away. When he’d returned to the stables after visiting Grace Knox, the whole place had been in a flurry—Devlin had needed the carriage, and Jerry was snarling “Where the hell were you?” and Diarmid had been unable to sneak out the rest of the night. Instead, he lay in the darkness and thought of her, the curves of her body beneath that flimsy shift—it had been all he could do to make the noise that kept her from drawing it off. He needed her silence too much to make her angry. But now he was haunted by how familiar it had felt to lie beside her, as if he belonged there, as if he already knew her every breath and sigh. He had not wanted to leave, and the urge to touch her, to keep touching her, to kiss her, had shaken him. He’d fought himself with every breath. If she was the veleda . . . he did not want to finish the thought. Best to keep his distance, he knew, and her despair had only settled his intentions. He made himself stop thinking of her and focus on getting the ogham stick to Finn.
But the next day was no better; no chance to escape at all. Leonard came back from driving Lucy to some social call, saying, “Devlin’s in a panic. Police all over this mornin’. I guess somethin’ went missin’ from his study.”
The police. Already. Diarmid had hoped it might be longer before the theft was discovered. He’d hidden the ogham stick in the pile of manure and dirty straw from mucking the stables, and he tried to keep from constantly checking it. He hadn’t even had the time to look at it or to decipher the ogham runes, and he didn’t have the chance the next day either, nor the one after that. Diarmid chafed with anxiety and impatience, but he couldn’t risk losing the job by just leaving—and he didn’t want to raise suspicion either.
But that night, finally, things calmed enough that he had the opportunity he needed. When darkness fell—bringing with it distant thunder and air that felt thick and swollen—Diarmid was up at the sound of Jerry’s first snore, pawing through the filthy straw until the stone was in his hands. He washed it and his hands, shoved it into a saddlebag that he threw over his shoulder, and stepped into the sweltering night.
He nearly ran to the tenement. Keenan and Goll were practicing parries and feints in the yard, and he waved for them to follow as he raced up the pitch-black stairs. His boots slipped on something wet—by the gods, wet. Garbage or drink or blood?—and he rapped out the code they’d devised on the door and was through it in a single motion, breathless and sweating.
Finn was laughing as he tore a hunk of bread from the loaf on the table. His pale eyes darkened when he saw Diarmid, with Keenan and Goll coming in a rush behind.
“What is it?”
Diarmid slung the saddlebag off his shoulder, removing the ogham stick. “It’s Devlin’s,” he said. “I stole it.”
“You stole it? Does he know it’s gone?” Finn asked.
“Aye. The police know it too.”
Finn put aside the bread and made a quick, commanding gesture to Cannel, who’d been standing against the wall, laughing with Ossian as he drank a mug of ale. The whole room smelled of it, and now Diarmid saw a keg dripping into a small puddle on the floor and more than bread on the table: apples and meat. He caught the scent of roasted pork, and his mouth watered.
“What’s all this?” Diarmid asked.
Oscar came up to him, smiling. “Keenan’s working at a saloon up the street. Goll got a job at a butcher’s. Ossian’s won two boxing matches. All in all, a good week.”
“You should come around more often, and you’d know,” Finn said, faintly chiding as he took the ogham stick and turned it in his hands.
“He’s too busy with his girls,” Oscar said, tousling Diarmid’s hair.
Diarmid dodged. “Too busy stealing relics from Patrick Devlin and evading police, you mean.”
Cannel reached out to touch the stone in Finn’s hands and then recoiled as if it had burned him. He turned to Finn. “How can you even hold it? It’s hot as an oven.”
“It burned my hand,” Grace Knox had said. Diarmid’s gut tightened.
Finn tossed it from one hand to the other. “I don’t feel anything.” He looked at Diarmid. “You?”
“It’s just stone,” Diarmid replied, not saying that he knew someone else the stick had burned.
“Can you read it?” Finn asked Cannel.
The Seer shook his head. “What is that? Runes of some kind?”
Finn crooked his finger at Diarmid, who came over. The smell of the roasted pork was making him sick now. Without a word, Finn handed him the stone.
The runes were worn; in some places entirely chipped away. Diarmid ran his fingers over them, feeling the cut in the stone, reading the language he’d been taught when he was only a boy, hearing the voice of Manannan’s Druid, Tadg, in his head: “Only the strongest spells and curses are committed to stone or wood, lad, and those cannot be undone, not by the strongest heart.”
And this was a spell; he knew it the moment he looked at the first rune. Darkness, and thunder. Blood. Fire. The eye of one who—Diarmid squinted, trying to make out the next symbol, which had been rubbed thin at one side—slays, he thought. The eye of one who slays. As one is bid, so come the rest.
The thunder in the distance seemed to grow louder.
The something wand. Rowan. The rowan wand and virtue—he thought it was virtue. Virtue gone. An eric—blood price—paid. Now come the Children of Dom—Here the rune was completely gone.
Diarmid let out his breath in a rasp. Domnu. It had to be that. The Children of Domnu. “The Fomori.”
Finn froze. “What?”
“The Fomori.” Diarmid looked up at his leader. “It’s a spell to call the Fomori.”
“By the gods. Are you sure?”
Diarmid nodded.
“Tell me what it says.”
“Wait,” Cannel said, putting up a hand. “If it’s an incantation, he shouldn’t be speaking it.”
“I’m no Druid,” Diarmid told him. “I don’t know how to say it.” And that was what mattered, the saying of it. How each word was emphasized, the cadence. “And I don’t think ’tis complete either. It mentions a rowan wand. I think you need that too.”
“They would be fools to put the whole spell on a single stone,” Finn agreed. “To call the Fomori . . . ’tis a serious thing.”
“You mean a disastrous thing,” Ossian said, pushing past Conan, who had paused in the middle of grabbing a piece of roast.
“Aye.” Finn looked again at Diarmid. “What exactly does it say?”
Diarmid read, “‘Darkness and thunder, blood and fire. The eye of one who slays. As one is bid, so come the rest. The rowan wand and virtue gone. A blood price paid. Now come the Children of Domnu.’”
They all went quiet as if they were waiting for the sky to crack open and the Fomori to rain down upon them. Diarmid’s memory of Fomori destruction and desecration was as heavy as the smell of roast pork in the room.
“Do you think Devlin knows what this is?” Finn asked him.
Diarmid shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not. ’Twas in a locked case, but it wasn’t hard to get to.”
“Even if he does, he doesn’t know how to say it,” Cannel added.
“Do you?” Finn asked him.
Cannel hesitated. “Perhaps. When I touched it, it burned. Then when Diarmid was reading it . . . well, I knew how it must be said. At least, I think I knew.”
It had burned when she touched it. What would she know if he said the words to her? Diarmid felt cold.
Cannel went on, “But Diarmid’s right. It needs the rowan wand. No one could call the Fomori with this alone.”
“You didn’t see a rowan wand?” Finn asked.
“No,” Diarmid said. “But she said the collection in the study wasn’t all of it.”
“Who said? Devlin’s sister?”
Diarmid cursed himself. “His lass. That’s how I knew about it. She said he had the relics, so I went to see for myself.”
“Ah. Well done.”
Diarmid knew how foolish it was, but he felt warm at Finn’s praise.
“No horn, either, I’d guess?” Ossian asked.
“No horn,” Diarmid confirmed. He nodded toward the stone. “I’ll have to take that back. What with the police all over looking for it.” And him.
Finn shook his head. “’Tis too dangerous to return it. You know this.”
“But if he’s the one who blew the horn, why would he call both us and the Fomori?”
“Because he wants a war?” Conan guessed.
“That makes no sense. He wants to liberate Ireland from Britain,” Diarmid pointed out. “Why would he call us and our enemies?”
Ossian said, “Sometimes men are fools.”
Finn rubbed his chin. “We must keep it.”
As much as Diarmid didn’t want to say it, there was no choice: “She saw me take it. Devlin’s lass. She’s promised to keep quiet as long as I return it.”
Oscar laughed. “Well, she’s a girl, isn’t she? I’m guessing you can talk her into keeping her silence whether you return the thing or not.”
Down the table, Conan laughed in agreement and stuck fingers already shiny with pork fat into the roast, pulling loose a piece to pop into his mouth. Diarmid felt increasingly ill.
“She’s loyal to Devlin,” he managed.
“So make her loyal to you,” Oscar said.
Diarmid glared at him. Then he noticed Finn was watching the both of them, and he tempered his anger. “’Twould be better if I could return it.”
Finn said, “I’ll think about it. For now, find out where the rest of the collection is. If it turns out there’s no rowan wand, this won’t matter, and Devlin can have it back. But we can’t take the risk that he knows what he has, Diarmid. If he has the means to call the Fomori . . .” None of them needed him to complete the sentence.
Diarmid’s heart sank, but he nodded.
Finn gestured toward the roast. “Have some meat with us then, and some ale. You’ve been too long away.”
And Diarmid recognized that as an order too. Not that he didn’t want to be with his friends. He’d felt the strain of being away, of living in a world where he wasn’t himself, where a girl could disdain him for being a stableboy and he was unable to say: In my world, there wasn’t a lass who didn’t want me. In my world, I could have anything. I could give you anything you wanted; I could make your troubles disappear.
The thought startled him. He had too soft a heart when it came to girls. And her plaintive desperation had moved him. That was all it was.
Finn had turned back to the food, as had most of the others, and the talk and laughter returned, though with an edge to it this time. The ogham stick had changed everything; Diarmid felt the tension in the room, the fear that the thought of the Fomori raised in anyone who had ever known them.
Oscar clapped his shoulder. “Come, Derry. Have some ale. You look bedeviled.”
Which he was, there was no denying. He went with his friend to the keg. Oscar poured ale into a broken mug. “We’ll have to share. No one’s thought to buy crockery yet.”
“Except you,” Diarmid said.
“Well, yes, I’ve thought of it. But I haven’t actually bought it, as you can see. And Da won’t part with a coin. He’s stingy as a virgin.”
Diarmid followed Oscar to the fire escape. The bolts that fastened the flimsy metal to the mortar grated; the whole thing creaked as if it were complaining of their weight. Diarmid sat beside Oscar, leaning against the brick wall. The rest of the world was on the fire escapes tonight as well, people talking and laughing, their faces moving in and out of the light coming from their windows. Someone sang a melody he thought he recognized, though the words had changed considerably over the years.
Oscar said, “The air’s hot as Senach Siaborthe’s kiss.”
A demon allied with the Morrigan. Diarmid smiled.
“So tell me about Devlin’s sister. Since I’ve no female companionship for myself, I’ll have to live through your tales.”
Diarmid took a long sip of the beer, which was warm and strong. He didn’t want to think of Lucy. “She’s sweet and she likes ice cream, and that’s all you’ll hear of it.”
“Then what about the other one?”
Diarmid tensed. “What about her?”
Oscar looked at him. “What’s wrong with her?”
“What d’you mean?”
“You get riled as a nasty boar when she’s mentioned. I thought you would take my head off in there.” Oscar grabbed the mug of beer from him and took a long draught. “So tell me why.”
Diarmid realized that getting Oscar’s opinion was part of the reason he’d come tonight. “She troubles me,” he admitted, taking the mug from Oscar.
“She’s loyal to Devlin, you said. Does she know about us, d’you think?”
“I don’t think so. She makes a lot of noise about Devlin and his plans, but I don’t think she truly knows them. She’s an innocent, but . . . you saw the way the ogham stick burned Cannel?”
Oscar nodded as he took back the mug.
“It burned her the same way.”
Oscar’s brow furrowed. “You saw it?”
“She told me. She thought it was because it had been in the sun.”
“Had it been?”
“There’s something else.” Diarmid lowered his voice. “I told you the first time she saw me she swooned.”
“Hardly unusual,” Oscar said wryly.
“Not for the reason you think. She said I was glowing.”
“Glowing?”
“As if I were the sun itself. That’s what she said. It gave her such a headache she collapsed with the pain of it. And not just once. There was a second time too. Not so strong, but the same.”
“And the ogham stick burned her the way it did Cannel. Who’s got Druid blood.” Oscar’s voice was flat.
Diarmid nodded. The ale settled badly in his stomach.
“The veleda,” Oscar whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“But you suspect it might be so.”
“I don’t know. I’m still trying to work it out. If she is, she knows nothing about any of this. She doesn’t even realize what she is. By the gods, Oscar, I thought at least she would know.”
“You like this girl,” Oscar said slowly.
“I like all girls.” Diarmid heard her voice in his head, a nagging whisper, “What can you possibly give me that I want? Can you change the world?”
If she was what he believed, he would do much worse than change her world. He would destroy it.
Oscar said, “You’ll have to tell Finn.”
“Not yet. Not until I know for sure. I’ll have your word that you won’t say anything either.”
“By the gods, Derry, if she is the veleda—”
“Your word,” Diarmid said roughly.
“You have it. But you’d best discover soon whether she is or not. If Devlin knows what he has, if he’s the one who called us . . . There’s something in the air, Derry. I can feel it.”
Diarmid didn’t disagree. “I want you to come with me to see her. I wonder if she’d see a glow in you too.”
“You think the veleda in her is seeing the Fianna in you.”
Diarmid nodded.
“When? The sooner the better.”
“I’ll have to think of how to get Grace alone.”
“Grace?” Oscar said.
“Miss Knox,” Diarmid corrected. Miss Knox to you.
“Why not just pay her a visit?”
“I’m a stableboy, Oscar, remember? She wouldn’t invite me into her house.” Which had been nearly empty, he remembered. Only a few pieces of furniture, and her bedroom so plain he’d wondered at first if it was a spare room. “And I don’t want to take the chance that her brother might be there. Though I suppose he’d probably be too busy sleeping it off.”
“Ah. He likes his liquor?”
“A bit too much.”
“Then where?”
Diarmid thought. Finally he said, “Meet me at the stables the day after tomorrow. Midmorning. I’ll figure out some way.”
“And then all I need do is step into her path?”
“All you need do,” Diarmid said, “is glow.”