Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“More tea?” The woman—or goddess—Lakshmi held out a pot.
Carys dutifully nodded. “Please.”
Lakshmi glanced at Angus. “More tea for you, Pushan? Or is it Nomios again? What name do you go by these days?”
“Angus.” He cleared his throat. “Just Angus.”
“Well, just Angus, we have no wine in the shop tonight.”
“Tea will do nicely.” Angus held out his mug. “Thank you.”
“An oversight for company, I’m afraid,” Oshun said. “We usually keep a case.” She looked pointedly at the third woman.
“That’s my fault.” The round woman raised a hand, her wild curls bouncing. “I drank it all yesterday. See, I thought you’d be coming then, and I got very excited, but then you didn’t come.” She winked at Carys. “Well, I shouldn’t say that, because you did. A number of times.”
“Oh dear God.” Duncan wiped a hand over his face. “There’re more of them.”
“We’re fertility goddesses, love.” Oshun might be a Yoruba deity, but she spoke in a swinging Swansea accent. “No secrets about sex here.” She looked pointedly at Laura. “But dragon? You’re taking on more than a bit with that one, mush.”
When Oshun moved, the gold and silver around her neck and in her ears tinkled brightly. She was draped in jewelry, from brightly colored beads to rich, nearly orange gold chains.
Lakshmi was the most demurely dressed, in a flowing pink dress with embroidered flowers. She moved in silence, serving tea to all of them, as the intoxicating smell of jasmine and sandalwood drifted in the air.
And the first goddess, the one with the soft Valleys accent, wore earthen brown and deep green scarves around her plump neck. Her bright blue eyes were the color of the ocean, and silver and grey mixed with the deep-walnut-brown curls.
“Oshun, don’t warn the girl away from dragons,” she said. “Dragons are lovely. Just lovely. Very loyal mates.”
“I wasn’t warning her, I was warning him.” Oshun smirked at Cadell. “So what are you here for?” She turned her attention to Carys. “We knew you were coming, but we weren’t sure why.”
“Sorry.” Carys leaned toward the brown-haired woman. “Are you… D?n?”
She waved a hand. “Go by Donna here because, well, the humans mostly speak in the new tongue, don’t they? No shame in it, no shame, but it makes for fewer questions if I go by a modern name.”
That meant Carys was having tea and biscuits with the goddesses Lakshmi, Oshun, and… Donna.
“So… uh, Joshua said I should come here,” Carys started.
“Love Joshua,” Lakshmi said. “Such a sweet god.”
“So young but so wise.” Donna nodded. “Softhearted, that one.”
“He’s popular,” Oshun said. “I’ll say that for sure. I wonder if part of it is the lack of sacrifices.”
“Physical sacrifices, she means,” Donna added. “Sacrifices of the self are more challenging in their own way, but I can’t lie.” She smiled. “I do love a good grain offering.”
All three goddesses nodded and hummed in approval.
“Oh yes.” Lakshmi’s accent was soft Indian-British with a slight Welsh lilt. “Something about roasting barley when it hits the nose.”
“There are just not enough humans who appreciate roasted barley these days,” Donna said.
Oshun narrowed her eyes. “But why would Joshua direct you to us? You are the hero appointed by the gods to face the Morrígan in this chapter of her story, but I don’t know that we have much knowledge that will help you.” Oshun looked at Donna. “She’s a very accomplished scholar.”
“Oh, I’ve heard.” Donna nodded.
Naida chimed in. “I would just like to say that this tea is wonderful and very nourishing.”
“Little sister, we miss your kind,” Oshun reached over and enveloped Naida in a hug. “Seeing you makes me want to walk straight through those gates.”
“Can’t you?” Duncan said. “You’re goddesses.”
“Why, thank you.” Donna winked at him.
Duncan’s cheeks turned a little red. “I just mean you could walk on either side.”
“We could,” Lakshmi said, “but we don’t.”
“Why not? The gates were created by the gods, weren’t they?”
“In a sense, yes.” Lakshmi looked at her sisters. “But it’s not that simple.”
“Who else could create them?” Lachlan asked. “The fae may tend them, but Angus has said they are not of fae construction.”
Godrik spoke from the center of the room. “Who else but the gods has the power to create entirely different realms?”
The three mother goddesses had placed Godrik in the center of their circle, as if drawn to the fundamental masculinity of the wolf. It was impossible for Carys not to notice.
The three women were utterly feminine in every way, three earthy, creative forces of nature in entirely different forms but with deeply feminine energy.
Carys felt as if she’d been plugged into an electrical outlet the moment she walked through the door.
“We didn’t create the realms,” Donna said. “We wouldn’t do that. We gave them shape, we created passage. But the lines between worlds were not built by the gods.”
“Who then?” Laura looked around the bookshop. “Who would have that power? Who would even want to?”
The three goddesses were silent. They turned their eyes toward Carys and let their stillness fill the room, the shop, the very air that she breathed.
She was steeped in their silence until every other sense faded away and her vision turned inward. In her mind, she saw the worlds she had traveled, the twin worlds of light and shadow, and from that twin trunk sprouted other branches.
Branches of dreams and pockets of vision.
Worlds of the dead and amorphous realms of the infinite.
A sorceress’s cottage on a misty mountain and a green hovel in the middle of the forest.
A still silver pool with no end and no beginning.
“We created them.” The realization sank into Carys like water into thirsty ground. She looked at Laura. Then at Duncan. “Humans did it. Brightkin.”
Oshun raised one eyebrow. “They were wise to pick this one. You are closer to understanding the nature of the gates now. Why they must be. How they must be protected.”
“Carys.” Duncan’s voice was hoarse. “What are you talking about?”
“We stopped believing in magic.” She looked at Naida. “We stopped believing in you. And the moment we stopped believing, we started pushing all the magic in the world away.”
Carys moved back from Naida and stood.
The three Mothers were sitting in a triangle with Godrik in the center, and Naida, Lachlan, and Cadell angled like spokes from him.
Duncan, Carys, and Laura stood on the outside with Angus in the periphery.
Three ordinary humans looking at the circle of magic in the center of the room.
Awareness dawned in Laura’s expression. “We turned to science and modernity and forgot the past. More than forgot—we rejected it. We rejected… you.”
“The wheel turns and turns again,” Lakshmi said. “It has not happened once but a thousand times, as long as human belief has existed.”
Donna looked at Carys. “The barriers formed gradually and then all at once.”
“Long, long ago,” Oshun said. “Before human history was written, the first walls between the worlds were formed.”
“And things that were once real in the Brightlands,” Lakshmi said, “drifted into the shadow as humans stopped believing.”
Duncan cocked his head. “So then every time we stop putting our faith in something—started thinking it was a myth or folklore—it moved from our world into the Shadowlands?”
“We are born in halves” —Carys looked at Duncan, then Lachlan— “because we continually reject parts of our own nature.”
“Shadowkin have always existed.” Donna brushed the back of her hand along Lachlan’s cheek. “Because the human mind cannot survive in contradictions. Not as the gods can.”
Oshun looked at Carys. “There are worlds within worlds within worlds. You see the Shadows and the Light, but we see all of them.”
“And they are all beautiful.” Lakshmi’s face took on a radiant glow. “But the tender creatures of magic” —she put a hand on Naida’s shoulder— “would be crushed out of existence if the worlds collided as the Morrígan desires.”
“She wants all of them.” Oshun’s dire words echoed through the bookshop. “One world is not enough for her.”
“She can’t help it,” Donna said. “She can only be as she is.”
“She is three and she is one,” Lakshmi said. “She must have everything or she would have nothing.”
Duncan murmured, “Gods are contradictions.”
“That is why the horse goddess bound the Morrígan to one world,” Donna said. “And that is why she must be bound again or none of the worlds will be safe.”
“So the Morrígan can’t help herself,” Lachlan said. “She must try to conquer the world and create war.”
Laura added, “And it’s not like it’s a hard push for humanity these days.”
“As it has ever been,” the three goddesses said in unison.
“I understand that,” Lachlan said. “But how does that help Carys?”
“Because in the circular way of things, the heroine has already defeated the goddess,” Lakshmi said. “She simply has to realize how.”
“Not. Helpful!” Carys paced around the library of their borrowed house in Mumbles, a small town just south of Swansea.
Duncan had called another friend from school, and that friend had an oceanfront “cottage” with five large bedrooms that sat empty for most of the year and a garden house in the back that Angus had claimed as his own.
Floor-to-ceiling windows lined the front sitting room, which also contained a decent library where Laura had spread out their research, again in neat piles.
“I’ve already defeated the goddess in a ‘circular way’” —Carys’s air quotes were more than sarcastic— “so why not just tell me how?”
“Carys.” Laura tried to calm her down. “We’re going back in the morning. Maybe this is a… thought exercise. Like learning how to picture the worlds. Maybe they want you to just think about what that could mean, but they’re going to give you the answer tomorrow.”
“Really? Has anything over the past month been that easy?”
Laura opened her mouth, then closed it.
Lachlan was looking oddly cheerful since their visit to the bookshop. “Maybe it means that you’ll only have defeated her once you realize how.”