Morrigan's Cross - Circle Trilogy 1 Part 30

"If time's short, it should be more important."

"You know nothing of time." He got to his feet. "You want to walk? Come on then, and learn something of time."

He walked on through the drenching wet so that Hoyt was forced to fall in beside him.

"Is it all still in your hands? The land?"

"Most of it. Some was sold off a few centuries ago-and some was taken by the English during one of the wars, and given to some crony of Cromwell."

"Who is Cromwell?"

"Was. A right b.a.s.t.a.r.d, who spent considerable time and effort burning and raping Ireland for the British royals. Politics and wars-G.o.ds, humans and demons can't seem to get by without them. I convinced one of the man's sons, after he'd inherited, to sell it back to me. At quite a good price."

"Convinced him? You killed him."

"And what if I did?" Cian said wearily. "It was long ago." "Is that how you came by your wealth?

Killing?"

"I've had nine hundred years and more to fill the coffers, and have done so in a variety of ways. I like money, and I've always had a head for finance."

"Aye, you have."

"There were lean years in the beginning.

Decades of them, but I came around. I traveled.

It's a large and fascinating world, and I like having chunks of it. Which is why I don't care for the notion of Lilith pulling her own sort of Cromwell."

"Protecting your investment," Hoyt said.

"I am. I will. I earned what I have. I'm fluent in fifteen languages-a handy business a.s.set."

"Fifteen?" It felt easier now, the walking, the talking. "You used to butcher even Latin."

"Nothing but time to learn, and more yet to enjoy the fruits. I enjoy them quite a bit."

"I don't understand you. She took your life, your humanity."

"And gave me eternity. While I may not be particularly grateful to her as it wasn't done for my benefit, I don't see the point in spending that eternity sulking about it. My existence is long, and this is what you and your kind have."

He gestured toward a graveyard. "A handful of years, then nothing but dirt and dust."

There was a stone ruin overcome by vines sharp with thorns and black with berries. The end wall remained and rose in a peak. Figures had been carved into it like a frame, and had been buffed nearly smooth again by time and weather.

Flowers, even small shrubs forced their way through the cracks with feathery purple heads drooping now, heavy from the rain.

"A chapel? Mother spoke of building one."

"And one was built," Cian confirmed.

"This is what's left of it. And them, and the ones who came after. Stones and moss and weeds."

Hoyt only shook his head. Stones had been plunged into the ground or set upon it to mark the dead. Now he moved among them, over uneven ground where that ground had heaved, time and again, and the tall gra.s.s was slick with wet.

Like the carving on the ruin, the words etched into some of the stones were worn nearly smooth, and the stones bloomed with moss and lichen. Others he could read; names he didn't know. Michael Thomas McKenna, beloved husband of Alice. Departed this earth the sixth of May, eighteen hundred and twenty-five. And Alice, who'd joined him some six years after.

Their children, one who'd left the world only days after coming into it, and three others.

They'd lived and died this Thomas, this Alice, centuries after he'd been born. And nearly two centuries before he stood here, reading their names.

Time was fluid, he thought, and those who pa.s.sed through it so fragile.

Crosses rose up, and rounded stones tilted.

Here and there weedy gardens grew over the graves as if they were tended by careless ghosts.

And he felt them, those ghosts, with every step he took.

A rose bush, heavy with rich red blooms grew lushly behind a stone no taller than his knees. Its petals were sheened like velvet. It was a quick strike to the heart, with the dull echoing pain behind it.

He knew he stood at his mother's grave.

"How did she die?"

"Her heart stopped. It's the usual way."

At his sides, Hoyt's fists bunched. "Can you be so cold, even here, even now?" "Some said grief stopped it. Perhaps it did. He went first." Cian gestured to a second stone. "A fever took him around the equinox, the autumn after... I left. She followed three years after."

"Our sisters?"

"There, all there." He gestured at the grouping of stones. "And the generations that followed them-who remained in Clare, in any case. There was a famine, and it rotted the land.

Scores died like flies, or fled to America, to Australia, to England, anywhere but here. There was suffering, pain, plague, pillage. Death."

"Nola?"

For a moment Cian said nothing, then he continued in a tone of deliberate carelessness.

"She lived into her sixties-a good, long life for that era for a woman, a human. She had five children. Or it might've been six."

"Was she happy?"

"How could I say?" Cian said impatiently.

"I never spoke to her again. I wasn't welcome in the house I now own. Why would I be?"

"She said I would come back."

"Well, you have, haven't you?"

Hoyt's blood was cool now, and eking toward cold. "There's no grave for me here. If I go back, will there be? Will it change what's here?"

"The paradox. Who's to say? In any case, you vanished, or so it's told. Depending on the version. You're a bit of a legend in these parts.

Hoyt of Clare-though Kerry likes to claim you as well. Your song and story doesn't reach as high as a G.o.d, or even that of Merlin, but you've a notch in some guidebooks. The stone circle just to the north, the one you used? It's attributed to you now, and called Hoyt's Dance."

Hoyt didn't know whether to be embarra.s.sed or flattered. "It's the Dance of the G.o.ds, and it was here long before me."

"So goes truth, particularly when fantasy's s.h.i.+nier. The caves beneath the cliffs where you tossed me into the sea? It's said you lie there, deep beneath the rock, guarded by faeries, under the land where you would stand to call the lightning and the wind."

"Foolishness."

"An amusing claim to fame."

For a time they said nothing, just stood, two men of striking physical similarity, in a rainy world of the dead.

"If I'd gone with you that night, as you asked me, ridden out with you, to stop as you said at the pub in the village. A drink and a tumble... " Hoyt's throat went hot as he remembered it. "But I had work on my mind and didn't want company. Not even yours. I had only to go, and none of this would be."

Cian slicked back his dripping hair. "You take a lot on yourself, don't you? But then, you always did. If you'd gone, it's likely she'd have had us both-so it's true enough, none of this would be."

What he saw on Hoyt's face brought the fury rus.h.i.+ng back into him. "Do I ask for your guilt? You weren't my keeper then or now. I stand here as I did centuries ago, and barring bad luck-or my own idiocy in letting you drag me into this thing and the serious risk of a stake through the heart, I'll stand here again centuries after. And you, Hoyt, food for the worms. So which of us has destiny smiled on?"

"What is my power if I can't change that one night, that one moment? I'd have gone with you. I'd have died for you."

Cian's head whipped up, and on his face was the same hot temper it had held in battle.

"Don't put your death, or your regrets, on me."

But there was no answering anger in Hoyt. "And you would have died for me. For any one of them." He spread his arms to encompa.s.s the graves.

"Once." "You are half of me. Nothing you are, nothing that was done changes that. You know it as I know it. Even more than blood, more than bone. We are, beneath all that, what we ever were."

"I can't exist in this world feeling this."

Emotion swirled now, into his face, his voice. "I can't grieve for what I am, or for you. Or for them. And d.a.m.n you, G.o.dd.a.m.n you for bringing me back to it."

"I love you. It's bound in me."

"What you love is gone."

No, Hoyt thought, he was looking at the heart of what he'd loved. He could see it in the roses his brother had planted over their mother's grave.

"You're standing here with me and the spirits of our family. You're not so changed, Cian, or you would not have done this." He touched the petals of a rose. "You could not have done it."

Cian's eyes were suddenly ageless, filled with the torment of centuries. "I've seen death.

Thousands upon thousands. Age and sickness, murder and war. I didn't see theirs. And this was all I could do for them."

When Hoyt moved his hand, the petals of an overblown rose spilled down and scattered on his mother's grave. "It was enough." Cian looked down at the hand Hoyt held out to him. He sighed once, deeply. "Well, d.a.m.n to us both then," he said and clasped hands with his brother. "We've been out long enough, no point in tempting fate any longer. And I want my bed."

They started back the way they'd come.

"Do you miss the sun?" Hoyt wondered.

"Walking in it, feeling it on your face?"

"They've found it gives you cancer of the skin."

"Huh." Hoyt considered it. "Still, the warmth of it on a summer morning."

"I don't think about it. I like the night."

Perhaps it wasn't the time to ask Cian to allow him to do a little experimental bloodletting.

"What do you do in these businesses of yours? And with your leisure? Do you-"

"I do as I please. I like to work; it's satisfying. And makes play more appealing. And it's not possible to catch up on several centuries during a morning's walk in the rain, even if I were inclined." He rested the sword on his shoulder. "But likely you'll catch your death from it, and spare me the questions in any case." "I'm made of stronger stuff than that,"

Hoyt said, cheerfully now, "as I proved when I bashed your face not long ago. You've a fine bruise on your jaw."

"It'll be gone quicker than yours, unless the witch intervenes again. In any case, I was holding back."

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks to that."

The shadows that always fell on him when he visited that graveyard began to lift. "If I'd come at you full, we'd be digging your grave back there."

"Let's go again, then."

Cian slanted Hoyt a look. Memories, the pleasure of them so long suppressed, crept back on him. "Another time. And when I'm finished pounding you, you won't be up to romping with the redhead."

Hoyt grinned. "I've missed you."

Cian stared ahead as the house peeked through the trees. "The b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l of it is I've missed you, too."

Chapter 14

With a crossbow armed and ready by her side, Glenna kept watch from the tower window. She'd considered the fact that she'd had very little practice with that particular weapon, and that her aim could be called into serious question.