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CHAPTER TWENTY

“ D o you feel clever?” the goddess asked. “You’ve finally got it right.”

“Morrigan?” Cadell’s voice was grim. “You’re a long way from home.”

“Ah-ah.” She shook her finger at the dragon. “Many years ago, I blessed this land by coupling with its king.” She lifted a curl of red hair and held it in the sun. “Even their queens carry my mark.” She lay back and closed her eyes, her leg starting to kick again. “All land I walk upon is mine, dragon. My crows fly everywhere.”

The birds above her laughed in a cackled chorus.

“They even keep ravens in their white tower.” She opened one eye and smiled at Carys. “A small offering, but I will graciously receive it.”

“Morrigan,” Laura said. “Isn’t she…” She seemed to remember that the goddess was right in front of her. “You’re a war god, right? Washing the bloody clothes of the dead or something?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Carys murmured.

The Morrigan was as much a fertility goddess as a war goddess, though popular depictions of her tended to lean toward the dark and macabre. This nubile redhead hanging out in the remnant of an ancient forest and lording over intoxicated teenagers was as much a part of her worship as bloodshed would be.

“War.” The Morrigan sighed. “Everyone remembers the blood.” She rolled to her side and the crows fluttered, rearranging themselves around her. “I granted these islands their sovereignty. Even those who came to invade them eventually…” She shrugged. “Well, they all just fucked and now it’s a… a tapestry, isn’t it?” She kicked her leg out again, surveying the young people around her with a tender smile. “Look how beautiful they are. This forest has changed so much since the last time I saw it, but I can find my Fianna anywhere I go.”

“Why are you here?” Duncan, as always, cut to the chase. “And why did you call me a thief?”

“Because you stole a branch from my forest! Orick should have killed you.” The Morrigan bared her teeth at Duncan before she turned to Carys. “Why him? The other one has much finer manners.”

“I am so not getting into this with you,” Carys said. “And you’re one to talk about manners. Didn’t you imply that you like to eat babies?”

“Oi, that’s disgusting,” a young man leaning against the trunk of the oak muttered. “You don’t do that, do you, Macha?”

“Don’t be silly.” The Morrigan winked at Carys. “I was playing a part.”

“Why?” Duncan demanded again.

She turned her face up to the sun. “Because I wanted to see the sun, of course.”

“You’re a goddess.” Cadell stared at her. “The magic of the fae gates shouldn’t bind you.”

The young woman blinked. “Shouldn’t it?”

“No, it shouldn’t,” Cadell said. “You were born here.”

“Was I?”

“The gods can walk between words,” Cadell said. “It is known.”

The Morrigan parroted him again. “Can we?”

Cadell frowned, but Carys knew exactly what the Morrigan was doing.

“Come on.” She grabbed Cadell’s arm and turned to leave. “She’s not going to answer our questions. Bye, Macha, or Badb. Or maybe Anu. Not sure what you’re going by today.”

“Oh, you’re so boring!” the Morrigan shouted. “Ugh.”

Carys spun around. “Why are you here? What offering is Queen Orla going to give you? What’s the big plan, Morrigan?”

The goddess stretched her arms out and hung on to a branch, bouncing a little bit.

Even Carys was distracted by her breasts.

“I’m here to visit the trees,” the Morrigan said. “I was worried about them.”

“Yeah.” Carys started to turn again. “She’s not gonna tell us. We should go.”

There was no way an ancient three-natured goddess of war and fertility was going to tell them her plans, so Carys wasn’t going to waste their time. It was entirely possible with an old deity like the Morrigan that she had no plans at all and just wanted to irritate someone to amuse herself.

But the longer they spent in the Brightlands, the more havoc Orla and Cian might be wreaking in the Shadows.

She knew where the Crow Mother was now, and seeing the Morrigan surrounded by drunk teenagers was actually a little bit reassuring. If they needed to find her, all they’d probably have to do was follow the police reports.

“Come back!” the goddess shouted. “I can curse you, you know.”

“Okay.” The thought sent a chill down her spine, but Carys kept walking.

Duncan leaned down. “You’re the mythology professor, but shouldn’t we?—”

“Nope. The surest way to give a god power is to pay attention to it.”

“Ah.”

Powerful she might be, but other than the kids hanging out in the forest, there were very few people in modern Britain who were actual acolytes of the Morrigan, and if there was one thing that Carys knew about old deities, the gods obtained power through sacrifice, elemental strength, natural phenomena, but most of all through human adoration.

That meant in modern London, the Morrigan likely had less power than the latest contestants on a reality dating show.

“Are we really just ignoring her?” Laura whispered.

“She’s a goddess,” Carys said. “And gods love the sound of their own voices. She’d like nothing more than wasting hours of our time, talking us in circles.” She looked over her shoulder as they made it back to the wider part of the forest path. “We’re not going to get answers from her no matter how long we stay.”

In the distance, the song picked up again, drifting faintly through the rustle of the trees.

“Oh the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree. They flourish at home in my own country… how I wish once again in the west, I could be…”

“So that’s it?” Laura asked when they were back in the cab. “We’re just going back to the…” She glanced at their driver, who was bopping along to the latest Punjabi pop hit and talking rapidly to someone via an earbud. “You know, the other place.”

Cadell stared at the mundane human who began singing along with the car stereo. “Human, we’re four travelers from a hidden magical dimension where dragons, fairies, and unicorns exist. Can you get us to a fae portal forthwith?”

“Eh?” The driver cocked his head. “I get you to the… Mandarin Crown on Knightsbridge, right?”

“That’s correct.” Cadell looked at Laura. “I believe we can speak freely here.”

Carys leaned toward Duncan. “There’s a pharmacy right on the corner of the?—”

“Already thinking ahead,” he muttered. “You and Laura grab some instant coffee at the corner market, and I’ll?—”

“Yep.” It was only midday in London, so they’d be returning to the Shadowlands in the middle of the night. “We’ll get it done.”

The black cab stopped and started through the clogged streets of Central London as Carys leaned into Duncan’s arm and closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her face. She was sleepy. It was a little like jet lag, and the feeling of the sun on her skin was another kind of enchantment that was its own magic.

Duncan knit his fingers through hers and leaned over, kissing the crown of her head as she dozed.

“You’re so like your mother.”

Carys blinked and sat up. She wasn’t in the cab anymore but sitting on the edge of the loch near Sgain Castle, staring at a woman with long wavy hair the color of chestnuts and dark brown eyes.

The woman stood on the edge of the water, but she was looking at Carys.

Carys looked around and rubbed her eyes. “Where am I?”

“In a taxi cab driving through London.”

“No.” Her head swiveled from side to side. “I’m obviously not.”

The woman smiled. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m dreaming.”

“Yes.”

Carys blinked. “Are you… are you fae?”

“The fae cannot visit dreams.” She turned from examining Carys and stared across the loch and the still grey water that mirrored the cloudy sky.

She might have been in a dream, but that dream was set in Alba. Carys was dreaming of the Shadowlands. “You mentioned my mother.”

“I did.” The woman walked over and sat in the green verge that flourished along the edge of the loch. “Your waking mind belongs to your darling father, and your dreams belong to your mother.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t.” She leaned back on long arms, and her dress floated around her body like a whisper.

As Carys stared at the beautiful woman who could have been thirty or fifty, she realized she’d seen her before. It was in this very place, standing on the edge of the loch and speaking to the dark apparition of a man who became a vicious water horse.

The woman had been speaking with the kelpie and hadn’t shown an ounce of fear. “I saw you talking with the kelpie.”

“Did you?” Her face lightened. “So that’s why your dream pulled me here.”

“I pulled you here? How?”

“That’s an excellent question.” She wrinkled her nose and leaned forward. “How did you do that?”

“You’re not a fae.”

She chuckled a little bit. “Oh no.”

“Are you a goddess?” Carys asked.

“You’re closer to the truth, but you’ll never catch the whole of it.” She turned from her examination of the water. Her brown eyes were soft with emotion. “Your mother knew me once. I’ve always hoped I’d meet her daughters.”

Carys’s mind was spinning. “How?”

“That’s an excellent question.”

“My mother traveled to the Shadowlands.”

The woman smiled. “That’s one way of thinking about it.”

“Who are you?”

“Do you mean to steal my name?” she asked. “Collect it in your pocket like a greedy fae?”

Carys shook her head. “I don’t know how to do that.”

“Names have power, you know. Names can conjure power. Names can trap.” Her brown eyes glittered. “Call a name often enough, and its owner might even become a god.”

Carys suspected she’d offended the… creature. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to tell me?—”

“Your mother called me Rhiannon.”

Rhiannon was a complicated figure, as much myth as reality. A queen or a goddess or maybe both. She was a central figure in Welsh mythology, a royal consort, a mother, and maybe even a deity. “Is that your name?”

“It’s one of my names,” she said. “You may call me Rhiannon. Many have.”

“I see you too, blood of Rhiannon.” The water horse’s voice had come to her in a whisper not unlike the way that Cadell spoke to her.

“Someone told me once that the goddess’s daughters walk between worlds,” Carys said. “Was he calling me your daughter?”

“Are you my daughter?” Rhiannon spoke in a whisper. “If you were, I would tell you to go back.”

“Go back where?”

“Go back, Carys.”

“Back to California?”

Her eyes went wide. “Go back now!”

“Drop us off on Brompton Road.”

Carys sat up so fast she banged her head on the edge of the door.

“Lass, what’s the damage?” Duncan winced and leaned over, pressing his palm to the sore spot on her head that was stinging. “You were sound asleep.”

“I had a strange dream.”

Strange dream might have been an understatement. Her heart was racing.

“You are here.” The man reached his hand through the window. “Brompton Road. I only take cash.”

“No, you don’t.” Laura, ever the practical tourist, pulled pound notes out of the purse she carried at her waist. “All licensed taxi drivers in London have to accept cards and contactless payments.”

The driver stared at her. “But you have cash.”

“Yes.” She handed it over. “Because I’m nice. But I want my change.”

The cab driver muttered under his breath but handed Laura her change while Carys got out on the sidewalk and Cadell and Duncan unfolded themselves from the back seat.

Carys was still stuck between sleep and the waking world.

Go back now!

Go back where? To California? To Shadow London? What was Rhiannon trying to tell her?

After the driver had sped away, Laura walked over. “Grocery store before we head back?”

Carys wanted to shout no and run for the gate, but she had no logical reason other than a weird dream, and the others were nodding.

“Coffee,” Cadell said. “As much as we can carry.”

“And I just…” Duncan pointed over his shoulder. “I have a quick errand to run at the pharmacy. Meet in front of the restaurant when we’re finished?”

Duncan’s voice slapped her back to the present.

The pharmacy. She caught his eye. “Sounds good. We’ll get coffee.”

She grabbed Cadell’s hand and dragged him along the sidewalk before he could make a comment.

“Why are you embarrassed?” the dragon asked. “I approve of the surly human’s instinct to protect you from disease or untimely pregnancy.”

“Great.” Her cheeks were flaming. “I just don’t want to talk about it with you.”

Discussing her sex life with Cadell was a little like what Carys imagined it would be like talking about it with a judgmental brother.

They walked to a nearby city market that promised fresh food on the go, and Carys and Laura split up to look for the instant coffee while Cadell surveyed the plastic-wrapped packages of deli sandwiches, wraps, and salads.

Carys was debating the larger instant jars of coffee versus the smaller individual packages of espresso when someone bumped into her.

“Pardon me.” A woman in a business suit turned and grabbed Carys’s shoulder, steadying her as she tried to keep the jars of coffee from falling off the shelves. “Have you got it? Richard, let me call you back—I’m attacking tourists in the Sainsbury with my briefcase.”

Her voice was clipped, but her accent was delicately Welsh and had Carys looking slightly up and into familiar blue eyes set in a face that nearly stopped her heart.

“Mom?”

She was still standing frozen in the coffee aisle when Laura and the dragon found her.

“Carys, what’s?—?”

“I saw my mother.”

Laura’s face grew pale. “That’s impossible. There was a report. There were two bodies?—”

“Her Shadowkin,” Carys blurted. “No, her… I mean, it was her but it wasn’t, and at first I thought there was just a resemblance, but it was too exact. Even her voice was…”

Her heart was racing. Her skin felt clammy. She’d suspected. They both had.

Carys looked at Cadell. “It was her. It was?—”

“Her Brightkin.” Cadell put his arm around Carys and pulled her close. “Laura, can you take the coffee from Carys?”

“Got it.” Laura was already taking the jars Carys clutched to her chest. “Honey, go outside with Cadell. I’ll check out.”

“We knew.” Carys looked up into the dragon’s fierce gold eyes. “I don’t know why it was such a shock, because we… I mean we knew, Cadell.”

“We suspected, Nêrys.” He kept his voice calm as the aisle cleared in front of the massive man. “Suspecting your mother’s origins is entirely different from seeing your mother’s face on another and knowing that she was not what you thought.”

Carys was staring at a blackened smear of gum on the sidewalk when she heard Duncan’s voice.

“What’s going on? Is everything okay? I waited at the restaurant, and it’s been?—”

“Carys met her mother’s Brightkin.”

The air was filled with the sounds of imaginative Scottish cursing. Seconds later, the watery vision of the smeared gum was gone, and she was crushed to Duncan’s chest.

The crushing felt good. It broke her mind out of the frozen pattern she’d been circling before.

“Oh, lass.” He pulled away and tipped her chin up to meet his eyes. “What do ya need? A good cry? Privacy? We can go to my mother’s house if you want. We don’t have to go back right away if you’d rather?—”

“I called her mom.” Carys blinked, and tears fell down her cheeks. “She must have thought I was insane. And she was wearing a suit.”

Carys couldn’t get the image of the tidy woman who reminded her slightly of Helen Mirren out of her head.

Tegan Morgan hadn’t worn a business suit a single day in her life. She wore long flowered dresses, linen pants in the summer, and the occasional pair of faded jeans with feathers embroidered on them “to cheer them up” when she was gardening or hiking.

“Come on.” Duncan put his arm around her and hustled her down the sidewalk. “You’re in shock.”

“She’s not in shock,” Cadell said. “We knew this was a possibility. We already suspected?—”

“She saw her dead mother’s face on a living woman,” Duncan snarled. “Shut your mouth or go back to the gate, but don’t tell me she’s not in shock.”

Carys felt like she was spinning, stuck in a car skidding on ice. Her mind raced from one thought to the next.

Her hair was grey.

Her mother’s hair was only silver at the temples.

But this woman was older than Tegan had been when she died. Her mother never cut her hair; it hung nearly to her thighs. It looked nothing like the smart grey bob the woman in the shop had worn.

Of course it wouldn’t be the same. That woman was years older than her mother had been when she died. Of course she was different. She was Tegan’s opposite, in fact.

Dafydd was boisterous and a bit explosive. Nothing like her father’s steady, quiet demeanor, so of course her mother’s Shadowkin?—

Brightkin.

That had been her mother’s Brightkin .

Which meant Tegan Morgan—painter, dreamer, mother who left out milk for the brownies at the hearth—had been born in the Shadowlands, her essence brought to life in the shadow of the fae gates and pulled into reality by magic.

Nothing was born in the Shadowlands except by magic.

Her mother was Shadowkin. She’d crossed the gates to the Brightlands just as Lachlan had.

Don’t be curious, my Carys. Leave the rabbit to the wolf. Never follow the lights. They want to lead you away from me.

Carys murmured, “They want to lead you away from me.”

Her mother had known. Somehow Tegan had known that even though she’d crossed into the light, a little of the shadow lingered in a place where the gates between myth and reality were thinner.

Rhiannon’s daughters walk between worlds.

Go back now!

“Carys?”

She looked up and realized that Duncan had led them off the main road; they were standing on a residential street where white-tipped dogwood trees arched over the narrow lane, dropping petals on them as the breeze rustled their branches.

“I’m okay.” She wiped her cheeks and tried to get her bearings. “I’m… okay. It was a shock. I was just surprised.”

“Of course you were.” Laura was still clutching the paper bag from the market. “Do you want to go to Duncan’s house?”

“No.”

Go back now! Rhiannon’s words pushed her toward the fae gate.

She frowned. “We should head back. We need to go back.”

“You’ve had a shock,” Duncan said. “Are you sure?”

We’ve been gone too long.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re not fine.” Duncan bit out the words. “I cannae imagine what you’re feeling, and I’ve met both my parents’ Shadowkin.”

She looked at Cadell. The dragon’s eyes were steady on her, and his face was stoic. “We knew. I knew. I think as soon as I crossed the first gate, I knew.”

There was a reason the shadows had always felt familiar. There was a reason the gates tried to grab her and hold on.

“Your mother must have pleased the gods greatly.” Cadell’s voice was soft.

“Why do you say that? She left the Shadowlands.”

“But they gave her a child.” Cadell smiled. “Even when she crossed into the Brightlands, she would not have been a mother without the help of the gods. And from what you have told me, being a mother and having a family was Tegan’s greatest joy.”

“It was her.” Rhiannon. Epona. The Celtic goddess of horses, the Welsh mythical queen. “Your mother knew me once.”

She looked at Duncan. “I dreamed about Epona. I think it was her. Or Rhiannon. Or maybe they’re the same. I don’t know. But in the car—earlier today—I dreamed about her.”

“And then your mother’s Brightkin just happened to run into you at the grocery?” Duncan shook his head. “What is happening?”

Carys looked at Cadell. “She said I pulled her into my dream. How is that possible?”

“I don’t know, but I agree with you,” Cadell said. “We need to get back across the gate.”