It was silver, the knuckles gleaming and flexing like molten metal as they moved. I stared at it, mesmerized, then shook myself. “You’d be Nuada, then.” I gave myself bonus points for pronouncing it correctly. He didn’t have to know I’d only just learned how.
“I would be. And you would be…” He was silent a long time, then cleared his throat uncertainly. “You would be my bride? The Morrígan?”
My jaw fell open and my eyes went googly while Gary had a good laugh. While it was nice to know having his throat cut hadn’t changed his laughter, it was also clear Nuada wasn’t keen on being the butt of a joke. I elbowed Gary, who manned up and stopped laughing as I said, “No, my name’s Joanne. The Morrígan’s stepped out for a bite to eat.”
Gary snorted laughter again. I elbowed him harder, to no avail. “Look, no, sorry. She just took off with Lugh, and Brigid disapp—”
“Lugh?” Nuada’s eyebrows made a heavy silver line across his forehead. “Lugh is half a year gone. How else might I be here, ready to wed the Morrígan?”
“What?” I’d thought the days of me saying “What?” all the time were past. Apparently not. “No, he just died not ten min—”
“Died?”
Oh yeah. The aos sí weren’t hip to the actual goings-on with the Morrígan. I started to cast my gaze heavenward, as if to gather strength for an explanation, but it got only about as high as the horizon before Nuada’s sword was at my throat. He repeated, “Died?” and it didn’t take a super genius to grasp that I was up next on the list of dead people.
Panic was clearly the right response. Panic, some flailing, a frantic explanation; all the sorts of things I’d done before. They’d gotten old, though. This time I just sighed and said, “The Morrígan killed him, your royal nitwitness, not me.”
His sword poked half an inch closer, which was enough to part the skin on my throat.
Or it would have been, if I hadn’t finally learned the habit Coyote had been trying to hammer into me my entire shamanic career: shields up, Captain. Shields up at all times.
Nuada’s sword rubbed against the glimmer of power layering my body, and didn’t so much as leave a scratch. The Morrígan hadn’t drawn blood, either. I had the damned werewolf to thank for that: she had driven home what Coyote had failed to. Unfortunately, she’d only done so after she’d bitten me. There was an argument for better late than never, but I probably wasn’t the person to be making it.
The silver-handed elf king’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. He pushed a little harder and the sword, rather than sticking in my gullet, began sliding sideways. Chagrined, he pulled it back into place, but stopped leaning into it. “What are you?”
“A shaman. Gwyld. You might as well put the sword away. It’s not going to do you any good. What do you mean, six months have passed?” The landscape looked the same. No particular hint of winter. Of course, I neither had any idea what an Irish winter thousands of years in the past looked like, nor any call in judging what time was or wasn’t doing. I was already millennia out of my league, after all. Six months here or there probably didn’t count for much, and the air was colder.
“What do you mean, dead?”
“It ain’t nice to go around interrogatin’ people by holdin’ swords at their throats,” Gary rumbled.
Nuada looked at him. Looked at me. I could just about see the wheels turning: if the young woman could hold a sword attack off with the power of her mind, what could the old guy with several decades more experience do?
Judiciously, and with the expression of a cat who meant to fall off the wall, Nuada put his sword away. Then he spread his hands, palms up, in a gesture of conciliation and goodwill. “I would hear your tale.”
“Yeah, I just bet you would.” Snark would get me nowhere. I raspberried a long breath out, inhaled again and put on my best perky tour guide voice. “The Morrígan’s been murdering your high kings for at least the last ten or so. I would strongly suggest not marrying her, if I was you. Were you. Was? Were. If I were you.” I didn’t care if it was right. It sounded better.
“Jo,” Gary muttered, “shut up.”
I said, “He asked,” with the pitch and tone of an insulted child, then kicked myself in the ankle. It was a good thing I already had an Indian name, or my Indian name would be Kicks Self In The Ankle. “Nuada,” I said with every ounce of patience at my disposal, “your bride to be is one of the bad guys. I have literally traveled through time to tell you this, a statement which I expect is supported by my outlandish clothing. I would beg of you, your majesty, to listen to me.”
The poor guy recognized the patience in my voice, but not that it was directed at myself. Nobody could be as exasperating as I was. I suddenly felt sorry for Morrison. And for Nuada, who drew himself up with offense, because who wouldn’t when some weirdly dressed chick from the future condescended at you.
“I’m sorry,” I said before he had time to launch into a tirade. “Really. It’s me I’m disgusted with, not you. I’m having a hard time with the explaining. Time travel sucks.” Lightning struck—metaphorically, thank God; that was not the sort of phrase I should use lightly—and I shoved a thumb under my necklace, bringing it to his attention. “Look! Wait! Look at this!”
If nothing else, my increasingly bizarre antics caught him off guard, giving me time to unfasten the choker before he decided to berate my bad manners. The necklace gleamed as I handed it over, misty light catching the triskelions and the quartered circle that was its pendant.
Nuada took it with his silver hand, which wasn’t articulated or in any other fashion prosthetic-like, aside, of course, from it being silver. It moved and flexed like flesh, and I fancied I could even see blood vessels beneath the surface as he turned the necklace up to examine it. “This is my work,” he said eventually. “I would know it anywhere. And yet I have never made such a piece in all my years.”
“And this?” I put my hand out and called my sword. It zinged across the ten or so feet of intervening space and slapped into my palm like it and I were magnetized.
Nuada’s eyebrows shot up, though his words suggested he was more impressed by the sword itself than the zooming across space: “I’ve never seen a blade such as that. What is it?”
“It’s called a rapier. They come into fashion in about…” I had a vague idea rapiers were sixteeth-century weapons, but I had no idea when that was in relation to us. “In a few thousand years.”
“It’s beautiful.” He opened his hand in request and I put the sword into it, watching his attention flit between rapier and necklace. “Both mine,” he said. “Both not yet forged. For whom do I make such pieces of art? A far-flung gwyld?”
“I think you make the necklace for the Morrígan. The sword belongs—belonged—to Cernunnos. I took it.”
His gaze snapped to mine. “You took a blade from the god of the Wild Hunt?”
“It’s a long story.”
“This is not the sword I made for that god.”
For a statement, it sounded remarkably like a demand. I nodded and made a space of about four feet
