mind-set.” The path up to Tara was foot-worn but not paved. Nothing suggested “tourist attraction” except for the gift shops, and even they weren’t particularly in-your-face about it. Gary and I kept pace with one another, both stealing glimpses at each other from the corners of our eyes like we expected something to jump out at us but if the other was cool, we weren’t going to show our nerves. After the third or fourth time we caught gazes, Gary actually giggled, which was unnerving in itself. Six-foot-one former linebackers in their seventies weren’t supposed to giggle.
A woman said, “There’ll be nothing to worry about,” out of nowhere, and we both shrieked like little girls. I regained my equilibrium first. Gary, after all, had already been giggling, which was bad enough with me as an audience, never mind with a complete stranger looking on. We turned together, though, to find a lovely woman of indeterminate age smiling at us. She wore a white eyelet-lace sundress with gold scarves wrapped around her hips and shoulders, and sandals on her feet. On most people I would call it a hippy-dippy look, but somehow she imbued it with more elegance than that. Her hair was the color of sunrise shot with clouds. She wasn’t young, even if I couldn’t tell how old she was.
“You’ll be Siobhán Walkingstick,” she said to me.
Hairs stood up on my arms. The bite itched, and I rubbed it surreptitiously, resulting in a wave of oh god, scratching feels so good I may never be able to stop that sometimes happens. I wondered suddenly if that was why dogs would go thumpa-thumpa-thump with a hind leg when a human got a good itchy spot, and then I wondered if, as a werewolf, I would do the same thing.
I stopped scratching and muttered, “People don’t normally use that name for me. Who’re you?”
“Am I wrong to think until very recently it wouldn’t have been you at all?”
Another chill ran over me. I made fists to keep from scratching again. “…you’re not wrong.” The name she’d used, Siobhán Walkingstick, was technically the one I’d been born to. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad had taken one look at that mess and nicknamed me Joanne. I’d dropped the Walkingstick myself, taking Walker as my mostly official last name when I graduated high school. Joanne Walker and Siobhán Walkingstick had almost nothing in common, at least not up until the past year. More specifically, up until two nights earlier, when I’d been reborn under a rattlesnake shapeshifter’s guidance. That had a lot to do with why my powers were out-of-control wonky. Joanne had had a handle on her skill set. Siobhán apparently resided in another league. And I was going to have to stop thinking of them as separate or I’d become a headcase in no time flat.
“But you’ll prefer Joanne,” the woman said with a nod, then looked to Gary. “And you come with a companion.”
Gary, who was rarely gruff, said, “Muldoon. Gary Muldoon,” gruffly, and she inclined her head toward him.
“Are you here of your own free will, Mr. Muldoon? Will you be traveling the roads Joanne travels, walking beside her, or will you stand aside and let her pass where she must go alone?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
The woman smiled. “So you are. Now there’re two ways to approach the Hill. You might go the way everyone does, and see what they all see. Perhaps more,” she added, giving me a significant look. “Perhaps not.”
I was pretty sure I would See more than most people, assuming the Sight didn’t knock me for another loop. I was equally sure strange women didn’t show up to make portentous comments if they expected me to take the path more traveled by. It hadn’t passed me by that she’d failed to say who she was, but I’d lay long odds she wouldn’t even if I asked her again, so I just said, “What’s the other way?” like a good little stage player.
She gestured to the rise of green grass behind her. “Pass through the Hall of Kings, and hear what secrets they might share with you.”
“I didn’t even know there was a Hall of Kings. I thought Tara was…” For once I shut up before I made a total fool of myself. Truth was, I hadn’t really thought much at all about what Tara was or wasn’t. I figured it was mystical. Druidic. Stuff like that. I hadn’t considered that ordinary mortals might have passed this way, too, not that kings were exactly ordinary.
The woman’s mouth quirked, which was nicer than her outright laughing at me. “Tara is where the ancient kings were crowned, Joanne. Temair na Rí, Hill of the Kings. Here they wedded Méabh to become ard rí, the high kings.”
“What, all of them? Liberal sorts, weren’t they?” That time my mouth should have shut up before it did.
The woman gave me a sort of weary look, the kind mothers bestow on precocious but irritating children. “Symbolically, Joanne. Symbolically. Méabh was—”
“No, wait, I know this one! She was a high queen, right? Kind of a warrior princess?”
There was a certain expression I tended to engender in people more mystically apt than I. It started under the eyes with a slight tensing of fine skin, and went both up and down, making lips thinner and foreheads wrinklier. As a rule, I interpreted it as the pain of one whose cherished childhood dreams have just been spat upon, and it always made me feel guilty. The woman got that expression, suggesting that “warrior princess” was not how she thought of Méabh, but it was too late. I couldn’t take the words back. I put on a pathetic hangdog smile of apology instead, and the look faded into resignation, which was generally how people ended up responding to me. At length she said, “Something like that. Queen of Connacht and of Ulster, descended from or perhaps incarnated of the Morrígan herself, and any man who would be king of Ireland needed the blessing of the trifold goddess.”
“I thought that was Brigid,” I said nervously. Brigid was the only deity I knew anything about—well, besides Cernunnos, but I had a close personal relationship with him—and what I knew about her fit in a nutshell. “Trifold goddess” was stamped on the nutshell, in fact, and that was the sum total of my knowledge.
A little of the dismay left the woman’s face. Apparently I’d gotten something right. “Brigid would be the Morrígan’s other face, perhaps. The coin turned upward instead of down. Maiden, mother, crone, to the Morrígan’s warrior, witch and death.”
I swallowed. “Right. Um. We’re not going to meet her, are we?”
The woman stepped aside with another smile, gesturing us up the hill. “There’ll be one way and one way only to find out.”
Gary was halfway up the hill before the woman finished speaking. I jolted after him, vaguely ashamed that even now, he was more enthusiastic for my adventures than I was. I caught his shoulder as he reached the low crest and tugged him back. “Hey, hang on a second, wait up.”
He glanced at me with elevated bushy eyebrows, and I found myself mimicking the woman’s gesture, waving at the low stretch of land beyond our hill. Annoyed that I’d done so, I glanced back to glower at her, but she was gone. I stared down the deserted pathway a moment, then passed a hand over my eyes and said, “Hang on a sec,” again.
“I’m hangin’, doll. What’s up?”
“Obviously there’s something down there for us to see. I’m just thinking it might be helpful if you could…See.”
“I see just fine,” Gary said in mild offense. “I wear reading glasses, but who doesn’t?”
“No, not see. See.
