Chapter 10 #2
I shook my head.
Her brows lowered. “You’ve come to foreign lands to cower on Celtic soil? Act your station. Speak your piece, Prince of Hell.”
Perhaps it was the years of solitude, or the repeated heartbreak, or maybe the emerald grasses and the cauldron-dark sky had churned me in peculiar ways, but my lips parted, and given that she had a heart for ballads, I offered her my tragic tale.
I told the goddess the story of how a human had caught herself a Prince, and how that Prince had spent hundreds of years following her from body to body.
I told her of our tumultuous lives, and of the long, healthy story of Yuka and the White Wolf.
She offered a single, humorless laugh when I shared how the twenty-nine-year hunt had ended on her land only for me to frighten a married woman.
The mist stopped, leaving us alone in the cold dew as she examined me.
“You are on my land,” she said, “so you will listen to my advice, whether or not you desire it.”
My single, low laugh was sincere, however brief the moment of levity may be.
I’d shirked my ambassadorship with the other gods for so long that I’d nearly forgotten how to interact with one.
“It seems to me, Prince,” she said at last, “you’re trapped between humanity and godhood.
Gods are freed from mortality by our detachment from it.
I may favor a practitioner. I may even love one from time to time.
But I balance affection while maintaining my sovereignty. You, however, appear to lend yours.”
I made no attempt to conceal my expression.
“On your journey to accepting your godhood, you must first learn what it is to be mortal. And for that, you have appointed a girl to teach you the lesson.”
This time, my chuckle was humorless. “Perhaps.”
“Let’s hope that’s the reason.”
I raised a brow.
Her laugh was equally dark. “No other justification would satisfy you,” she said.
“It doesn’t need to be satisfactory if it’s true. Do you have a prophecy for me, Brigid?”
She cast her eyes to the water, but it wasn’t in avoidance. I watched her contemplation as the threads of fate wove behind her eyes.
“She’s been born female in each life, has she not?”
I balked at the question. I hadn’t even considered it. “Yes, I suppose she has. Is that…unusual? I haven’t spent enough time with mortals to be familiar with their soul cycles.”
Brigid’s eyes unfocused. “Her ability to bear children may be a sign of things to come.”
I moved closer, if only by a fraction. “Tell me what you see when you peer into our future.”
“The thread is on the loom. It may be nothing. Your fates are undecided.”
I’d broken so many rules already, what was one more? I pushed my luck.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
The hardness in her gaze returned. She had finished playing along.
“Find your human. Learn what it is to be human. Pray that is the fate between the two of you. For any other path would mean something grand, something powerful, something bigger than you or me or your mortal. But one doesn’t see the story until it’s written. ”
My lips parted, head shaking in my silent question.
“You may remain on my land, as I hope this human is merely a tool for education…” Her eyes returned to the water. The last part was more to herself than to me as she said, “What a tragedy it would be if the two of you were crafted to create history.”
She’d already begun to wobble as her form stepped from the mortal soil to her own pantheon. I caught her just before she disappeared. “Will my presence be challenged in your kingdom while she lives?”
“Do what you must,” she said. “And for all of our sakes, I hope this lesson is your last.”
When she left, so did the light.
The mist resumed, abandoning me to the gray silence of damp moss and chill.
I lingered on the riverbank and stared at the trout swimming upstream, wondering as to how they kept their fervor even though it meant battling the current, struggling day in and day out to fight against the very environment for which they were made.
Were the trout born to learn a lesson? After which they might relax, they might find a pond, they might rest and join the idle slumber of freshwater fish?
Their answer echoed my own.
One could refuse to learn a lesson, but they could not deny purpose. Trout were the way they were because they had no other choice.
I was a phantom, unseen on the fourth day as I walked into her village. I planned to find her, but didn’t have to search far. There she was, a wooden pail on her hip as musical Gaelic rolled off her tongue, chatting with someone near a well.
My human had been more or less solitary in the lives I’d been her guardian, and I wondered as to the friendships I’d kept her from, the human experiences I’d limited by being in her life. The question burrowed into me as her face lit.
For a second, I thought she’d seen me.
She looked right through me, the sun shining from her on the overcast day as if it belonged in her chest. Caoimhe set the pail atop the well’s stony ledge and opened her arms wide when something scurried into the space that existed between my world and theirs, directly through my legs as it ran to her.
Not it. He.
This was genuinely surprising.
A boy no older than four, with hair the color of strained peaches. His fat cheeks glowed with his mother’s light, with health, with joy.
Love, my Love, had a child?
And a happy one at that. This plump boy grinned without his front two teeth.
I almost hated the child as his mother scooped him into her arms. She squeezed the boy, spinning him in a quick circle as he giggled, kicking and squirming to be free.
Jealousy was an unbecoming emotion, and it wasn’t one I was prepared to handle.
I’d arranged marriages, fought off fathers, and killed husbands.
But a son?
I turned away, though I wasn’t sure where I planned to go. I couldn’t spend twenty-nine years searching just to leave because she was fine without me. Unless it was the kind thing to do. The noble thing.
And then she spoke.
“How is my love today, Little Rabbit?”
My head whipped back as if she’d spoken my name—my true name. Fuck nobility. I looked at her through the veil knowing she couldn’t see me. She had no idea I was there. And yet…
“We’ll play a game, you and I…”
Yuka’s eyes had sparkled at the prospect. She’d been so certain that her soul would recognize me, just as I did hers.
Hares.
Snow hares, to be exact.
It wasn’t exactly evidence, but…
She’d looked at her son—the extension of her soul—and called him her love, her Little Rabbit.
And maybe this is what it was like to survive as a mouse who fed on crumbs. Perhaps this was why birds roosted where once grain had been spilled. It wasn’t a clue, not exactly. This wasn’t a password. But…I was an addict, and she was my drug. I clung to the word with indescribable desperation.
So, I remained.
It shouldn’t have sustained me, but I’d cling to the dagger’s sharpened edge of hope until it sawed my fingers to the bone.
She didn’t know me in this life, and I could use that to justify tending to some long-neglected obligations.
I forced myself to strike what passed for balance, since I’d had none with Yuka.
From the moment I’d met her in her last life, I hadn’t given her a single moment alone.
Yuka hadn’t had the peace to receive a papercut, even if she’d wanted one.
This version of my human had already walked the earth for nearly three decades. She’d made it this far without me. Perhaps I could wean myself from my addiction by finding the barest of moments to leave her unprotected, as I had in lives prior.
I had obligations to my kingdom that I’d thoroughly abandoned for some time.
Visits to my realm were in minutes instead of days—half an hour, on average.
Forty-five infernal minutes if I was pushing it.
It would give my human time alone in the human realm and offer me the chance to stay abreast of Hell’s activities.
My father was pleased with reports that I’d made contact with indigenous deities and at least one high-ranking member of the Celtic pantheon.
He was less pleased with my reputation for tearing through unknown territories without doing my princely duties, and we reached a compromise that satisfied us both.
I could continue my station topside, but from this moment forward, I would introduce myself as Hell’s representative and establish positive relationships with the land’s entities, whether or not my human was there.
In return, he would hold his tongue about my obsession—one that drew Hell’s only heir far away for centuries at a time in the heat of war—and we would share an excuse for why I spent so much time away from our realm.
I was the traveling face of Hell, and I was to conduct myself as such.
“After all,” he’d said, “you’ve been with this human of yours on and off for…what is it? A grand total of less than two centuries, when you combine her lifetimes. That’s an excusable drop in the bucket. I’ll defend you, my son, if anyone says otherwise.”
He meant well, but my human was no drop in the bucket. She was a storm.
I’d abandoned my citizenship, as far as I was concerned. Returning to her side felt like coming home, whether or not she knew I was there. One lungful of painfully clean air, a single pearly shimmer, and I was where I was meant to be.
It didn’t hurt my sense of belonging that her body moved every time I entered the room. She responded to the preternatural shift each time I arrived, whether consciously or not. Another crumb in my nibbling diet: she knew my energy. Absence made the heart grow fonder, or so I was told.
And fonder I was.
From our fourth day onward, Caoimhe was eternally healthy, her family was unnaturally prosperous, and fortune seemed to befall the woman, her son, and her husband at every turn.