The Last Days of Magic (8 page)

Una’s legs sagged, and she grabbed the table for support. Liam moved closer in case she collapsed, but Una straightened, met her husband’s eyes, and nodded.

Quinn placed Anya on the table and stepped back, where Liam put a hand on his shoulder. “They’ll be all right.”

Quinn glared at his old friend.

“I promise, they will be all right,” Liam repeated. “This is what called me here.”

Una announced unsteadily, “Sire, I present the Morrígna twins and request the Test to prove their return and right to rule.”

Turlough rose from his seat with outstretched hands to quiet the now buzzing room. The whispers transformed into the scrape of benches being pushed back as everyone stood. Then, again, silence.

No one in the room had been present at the last Test of the Morrígna twins, nor would any of them have been able to recite the rigidly prescribed ritual if asked the day before. Yet today the entire assembly knew what was about to happen, and all understood their role in it.

“Who else speaks for the Test and puts forth their bond?” recited Turlough.

Brigid stepped forward. “I, Brigid, rightful and undisputed high
priestess of the Order of Macha, call for the Test. I have heard the Goddess’s command in my dreams and will forfeit my life should the Test fail.”

“Then let it proceed.”

Una carefully unwrapped the white linen encasing each girl, leaving them bare on the table, exploring the air with their freed arms and legs, a dash of red hair crowning their heads. Turning to the assembly, she demanded, “Give me a blade of ordinary iron, nothing with a spell on it.”

The seven people closest to her pulled their daggers and offered them to Una. She studied each one, then chose a delicate knife with an ivory handle from a woman she did not know. Una turned back to the baby Aisling, raised the dagger, and paused, the tip of the blade hovering above her daughter’s chest. The room held its breath. A tear slid down Una’s cheek, followed by another. She gave a small sigh, then pushed the blade through the skin into the tiny heart.

Aisling did not cry, she simply stared back at her mother with large gray eyes that were turning vivid green. Then she yawned and looked over at her sister, whose eyes had undergone a similar transformation.

Una released the handle and stepped back into Quinn’s arms, their intense gaze not leaving their children.

“Who will remove the blade?” asked Brigid.

“I shall,” Liam declared.

Brigid smiled at the man who had long ago been her first lover and replied, “No.”

Liam nodded and moved to stand in front of the table next to the twins, where Aisling was happily cooing while seemingly indifferent to the dagger protruding from her chest. The symbolic first offer, always declined, indicated his unquestioned belief in the Morrígna’s return and the dedication of his life to protect the twins. The Test turned to acceptance of their right to rule. In the Celtic way, a challenger was needed.

Brigid looked across the audience and to no one’s surprise called, “Lord Maolan, will you remove the blade?”

“Maolan! Maolan!” the audience shouted its consent.

Satisfied that everyone had joined the chant, Brigid waved Maolan forward.

Head held high, Maolan scowled as he approached the twins. He looked down into Aisling’s green eyes—which signaled her unity with her sister and with Anann in the spirit realm to form the Morrígna—and yanked out the dagger. A small spurt of blood caught his hand. He stared at the half-inch pink line on Aisling’s chest where the knife had stood, then studied the blood on its blade and his hand.

Turning to face the audience, Lord Maolan held out the dagger, a drop of blood falling from its tip. As required, he wrapped his other hand around the sharp blade and broke it away from the handle to confirm to all that it was not enchanted, in the process cutting his own flesh to the bone. The resulting scar was intended to proclaim for the rest of the challenger’s life his acknowledgment of the dominion of the reborn Aisling and Anya.

. . . . .

Patrick realized he’d been clutching the silver cross, which he wore on a braided leather cord around his neck, and let it drop. Had this been a Christian rite, he would have declared that he had witnessed a miracle. But the terms used did not matter to him; he was once again in awe of the many ways God manifested his glory in this magical land. They may call their Gods and Goddesses many names—Danu, Frey, Morrígna, among others—thought Patrick, but they were all one God.

The Morrígna, in particular, echoed many of his beliefs. Like the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, she also carried three aspects, though she sent two physically into this world. Patrick knew all the stories of the Morrígna, though after what he had just seen they no longer seemed like mere myths and fantastical tales. The events that had unfolded fifteen hundred years ago—the dreadful battle between
Celt and Sidhe that had resulted in the Treaty of Tailltiu—now seemed to him to live and breathe.

The Celts had invaded Ireland using the knowledge of iron weapons and enchantments given to them by the fallen angels Azâzêl and Semjâzâ. The final savage battle ended in a draw. Celt and Sidhe faced each other on the frost-ringed, blood-soaked battlefield, strewn with thousands of their dead and dying. It was the poet Amergin who stood on that field between the Celtic and Sidhe high kings and convinced them to make peace, creating the Treaty of Tailltiu. The two races, magical and human, called upon their Gods to help uphold the treaty and to bring a dreadful fate upon whoever broke it. They were soon to discover that the Goddess Morrígna answered.

A huge pit was dug, filled with dry wood, and lit. To the disappointed cries of ravens attempting to feed on the dead, Sidhe and Celt worked together to drag the bodies from the battlefield and cast them into the fire. With each corpse the smoke became thicker.

Toward the end of that gloomy work, the Sidhe high king knelt in the bloodstained mud beside a mortally wounded Celt warrior, a woman he did not recognize. As he stroked her face gently with his soiled hand, her eyes flickered open. Misinterpreting the plea he saw in them, he drew his misericorde dagger—a long, needlelike blade—placed the point under her arm angled toward her heart, and thrust it in to administer a mercy kill. He was surprised when life did not fade from her. Instead she gave a frantic shake of her head. Withdrawing the blade, he suddenly sensed a second heartbeat, a beat carrying a burgeoning female spirit.

It was from that act that the Test originated, Patrick recalled. He picked up the broken blade from the table and examined the tiny smear of Aisling’s blood still on its tip.

On the field of Tailltiu, the Celtic high king carried the mysterious woman into a tent close enough to the funeral pyre to keep her warm. When all the dead had been consigned to the flames, the two high kings ordered that the fire be kept burning. If the unknown
woman and her unborn daughter died, as expected, they would join their fellow warriors in the flames.

Tended by widows of the battle—a group that became the Order of Macha, now led by Brigid—the fire burned for nine months. Unable to speak, eat, or drink, the woman seemed to sustain herself on the thick smoke that streamed into the tent from the giant pyre. She drew her last breath upon the birth of not one but twin daughters. The Sidhe high king named the first Anya, and the Celtic high king named the other Aisling—the names every set of Morrígna twins has carried.

Patrick knew from his Christian teaching that a God, or in Ireland’s case a Goddess, cannot fully inhabit this limited world. That portion of the Morrígna that remained in the Otherworld they called Anann. When Anya and Aisling merged their spirits and acted as one being, it was said that their power was channeled from Anann. And what strength they had, by the time the first twins were fourteen, they wielded magic more powerful than that of a hundred Celtic druids or Sidhe witches.

Over the centuries that followed, the Morrígna returned eleven times, whenever Ireland was threatened—sometimes from afar, but most of the challenges arose from within Ireland’s own shores. Given enough time, people chafed at being ruled and came to believe that they would be better off governing themselves, even when their sovereign was a Goddess.

And now it was Kellach trying to break the treaty, Patrick thought. The new twins would have to deal with him. But first seven years of training: Anya to be a druid, Aisling to be a warrior, followed by the Ceremony of Hearts. Then seven more years of training to merge themselves into the Morrígna, when at last they would rule both Ireland and the Middle Kingdom.

Patrick watched as Liam and Brigid, each carrying a twin, left the hall, followed by Quinn supporting a sobbing Una. They would never embrace their daughters again. Tradition dictated that the Morrígna
twins’ parents be kept away so that human sentiment would not interfere with the twins’ learning to become one with the mother Goddess.

As soon as they were gone, Maolan scurried out to have his hand stitched up. The members of the assembly slowly took their seats, some talking in low tones, most lost in silent thought.

King Turlough banged his fist on the high table. “Steward, throw open the gates of the keep. Set the grand hall. Send criers out to every village in the surround. Empty the cellar and the larder. Slaughter a dozen pigs and set them roasting. Tonight we don’t sleep, tonight we feast! I will not have quiet in my castle. The Morrígna is reborn!”

Cheers rose throughout the room.

“If you have family within riding distance, send for them now! We’ll make a story of this evening. Summon the bard—a song must be written.”

Those who had squires dispatched them. Others ran for the stables. All who remained filled their cups.

“Patrick,” Turlough said, slapping the monk on the back hard enough to spill his wine, “it is truly the beginning of a new age.” He refilled Patrick’s cup, then pulled on the gold chain around his own neck, dragging a black leather pouch from under his tunic. “In this is a piece of the heart of the previous Morrígna, passed to me in trust by my successor. Now I’ll be the one to carry it to the Ceremony of Hearts.”

To be so close to such a relic caused Patrick to catch his breath. The Ceremony of Hearts was an affair of magic and beauty prescribed by the first incarnation of Anya and Aisling.

Each time the Morrígna twins’ human shells were exhausted, the twins passed together and their hearts were removed and divided by the Celtic and Sidhe high kings into fourteen segments with a silver knife. The segments were entrusted to seven custodians from each race, but even though the Morrígna had just left, prejudice crept in and the segments were never equal.

Then, on the first winter solstice after the seventh birthday of new twins, the ceremony would take place in an ancient stone pyramid, completely covered with a mound of earth and grass, which stands in the center of the Sidhe city of Brú na Bóinne. Curving along one half of the earthen mound, the lower eight feet is embedded with quartz stones echoing a crescent moon. Through the center of this white arc, a long, straight entrance passage joins with three chambers, a head and two sides, to form the shape of a cross. Patrick had often wondered how the Celts and Sidhe came to use that shape before Christianity came to their islands.

In the dark of the morning, the new Morrígna twins would be led down the entrance corridor to the center of the cruciform. In the arm to the left would sit the Sidhe high king, the Celtic high king in the other, with the head left vacant for the Otherworld aspect of the Morrígna, Anann. Coals that originated in the ancient pyre of Tailltiu, attended to day and night through the centuries by the priestesses of the Order of Macha, would glow in a brazier between the girls. Brigid would set an iron bowl on the brazier. One at a time, the seven Celtic and seven Sidhe custodians would enter, place their Morrígna heart segment in the bowl, bow to each twin, and leave.

When the sun rises, a beam of light penetrates the chamber through a narrow channel above the temple entrance—which occurs only on solstice mornings—and travels diagonally from left to right along a series of carvings representing the Battle of Tailltiu until it illuminates a rendering of the Goddess. At that instant the heart segments transform into two thick ribbons of smoke, which snake toward the twins and are inhaled.

Following the ceremony they start learning to become truly powerful, Patrick knew.

L
ONG
AFTER
P
ATRICK
contemplated the events of the Ceremony of Hearts, on the first solstice after the seventh birthday of Una and
Quinn’s twins, their ceremony did not go as planned. Moments before sunrise a message from Kellach stated that he would not be returning the heart segment entrusted to the Skeaghshee. Kellach further declared that without this heart segment the twins would not be whole and by law could not rule, a declaration the Celtic and Sidhe high kings decided to ignore. The ceremony proceeded with one less segment and a little less smoke.

From that morning until Aisling and Anya were attacked by the Skeaghshee, days before their fourteenth birthday, many druids tried to divine the impact of the loss, but none had been able to pierce the veil of uncertainty that had fallen over the twins’ future. The general conclusion was that the effect would become manifest after their coronation.