Dark Witch (The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy #1)(79)

“This must’ve been the kitchen.” She didn’t like the way her voice echoed, but moved closer to look down in what seemed to be some sort of dry well. “Stand over there.” She gestured to the ox-roasting fireplace.

He shuffled his feet, gave her a pained look. “I’m not much for pictures.”

“Indulge me. It’s a big fireplace. You’re a big guy.”

She snapped her pictures. “They’d butcher their own meat, grow their own vegetables, mill flour. Keep fish in the well there. The Franciscans.” She wandered out, even at her height ducking under archways, to an open area.

A line of archways, gravestones, grass. “The cloister. Quiet thoughts, robes, and folded hands. They looked so pious, but some had humor, others ambition. Envy, greed, lust, even here.”

“Iona.”

But she moved on, stopped at the base of steps where a Christ figure had been carved in the arch. “Symbols are important. The Christians followed the pagans there, carving and painting their one God as the old ones carved and painted the many. Neither understand that the one is part of the many, the many part of the one.”

Wind fluttered through her hair as she stepped out on a narrow balustrade. Boyle took her arm in a firm grip.

“I died here, or my blood did. It feels the same. Breaking the journey home, too old, too ill to continue on. Some would burn the witch, such is the time, but her power’s gone quiet, and they take her in. She wears the symbol, but they don’t know what it means. The copper horse.”

Iona’s hand closed over her amulet. “But he knows. He smells her weakness. He waits, but must come to her. She can’t finish the journey. And she feels him nearing, greedy for what she has left. He has less than he did, but enough. Still enough. She has no choice now. it can’t be done in the place of her power, at the source. He’s whispering. Can you hear him?”

“Come away now.”

She turned. Her eyes had gone nearly black. “It’s not done, and it must be done. She has her granddaughter—such love between them, and the power simmers in the young. She passes what she has, as the first did, as her own father had done with her, and with the power, she passes on the symbol. A burden, a stone in the heart. It’s always been that for her, never with joy to balance it. So she passes power and symbol with grief.

“And the rooks flap their wings. The wolf howls on the hill. The fog creeps along the ground. She speaks her last words.”

Iona’s voice rose, carried over the wind—in Irish. Above the layered clouds something rumbled that might have been thunder, might have been power waking. The circling birds swooped away with frightened calls, leaving only sky and stone.

“The bells tolled as if they knew,” she continued. “Though the girl wept, she felt the power rise up—hot and white. Strong, young, vital, and fierce. So he was denied what he craved yet again. And again, and again, he waits.”

Iona’s eyes rolled back. When she swayed, Boyle dragged her in close.

“I have to leave here,” she said weakly.

“Bloody right.” He plucked her off her feet, carried her down the narrow, curving stairs, through archways where he nearly bent double to pass through, and out again into the air and the patter of rain.

The wet felt like heaven on her cheeks. “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy. I don’t know what happened.”

“A vision. I’ve seen Connor caught in one.”

“I could see them, the old woman, the girl, bathing her grandmother’s face. Fever, she was so hot, like she was burning from the inside out. I could hear them, and him. I could hear him trying to get to her, trying to draw her out. I felt her pain, physical and emotional. She wished, so much, she could spare the girl she loved from the risk and responsibility. But there wasn’t a choice, and there wasn’t time.”

He shifted her to open the truck door, maneuvered her inside, amazed his hands didn’t shake to mimic his heart.

“You spoke in Irish.”

“I did?” Iona shoved at her hair. “I can’t remember, not exactly. What did I say?”

“I’m not sure of it all. ‘You’re the one, but there must be three.’ And I think . . .” He struggled with the translation. “‘It ends here for me, begins for you.’ Something like that, and more I couldn’t understand. Your eyes went black as a raven’s, and your skin pale as death.”

“My eyes.”

“They’re back,” he assured her, stroked her cheek. “Blue as summer.”

“I need more training. It’s like trying to compete in the Olympics when you’re still learning how to change leads and gaits. And that’s a potent place, full of energy and power.”

He’d been there before, felt nothing but some curiosity. But this time, with her . . .

“It hooked to you,” he decided. “Or you to it.”

“Or she did, the old woman. She’s buried in there. One day we should come back, one day when this is finished, and leave flowers on her grave.”

At the moment he wasn’t inclined to bring her back ever. But as he walked around to get in the truck, the rain stopped.

“Look.” She took his hand, pointed with the other at the rainbow that glimmered behind the ruins. “Light wins.”