Rain was streaming off the roof three stories overhead, pouring in sheets, overflowing the rain gutters. In the Alpha’s Woods, the piles of shoveled snow looked like icebergs in a growing sea.
Rage had me pacing, unable to stop. My head echoed with the same thunder battering the sky overhead, and I didn’t know which one was more powerful as the thunder boomed again and again and again until the building lights flickered.
Fee’s throat bobbed. He straightened awkwardly as the fury settled in to a dull rolling in the distance.
She will leave you… and you must let her go…
The witchy warning flashed on the heels of all the warnings Fee had ever given me.
“You were here when she left.” An accusation, not a question this time.
“Yes.”
“Did she have anything to say?”
“She said that wherever you are, she is there.”
The King of the Forest sighed when he grabbed my hand and held it in both of his. “She is following her path, dear boy. While you have a path of your own that must… must diverge from hers. Your job is to clear the path to Amal. Hers is to strike the killing blow. If she cannot do this, all is lost.”
I stared at the rain-lashed landscape, the darkening sky, torn by jagged lightning. “It’s already lost. More than you will ever grasp.”
CHAPTER 29
Noa
Thank the gods that the rain eased up, because the nymphs looked near drowned as it was. They’d made a change from their usual dresses and wore what they called fighting clothes—leather—the pants and shirt looking a lot like what Fallon wore. Caerwen’s hair hung in a wet braid against her back, while Effa’s sprouting curls made me think of a dripping umbrella as she stomped along.
Some threat we’d be, if we encountered anything more awesome than the graceful, leaping stag who startled everyone when he crashed through the underbrush.
The King of the Forest had opened a passage that ended in the high mountains of the Carmag, where we found a hanging valley, lush and thick with trees and the wide meandering meadows that drew Effa like a drug. I’d lost my sense of direction. Didn’t know if it was east or west. Up or down.
Caerwen whispered I wasn’t meant to know, as if she feared the malevolent spirits who might be hiding, listening. Fee had a lot of valleys secreted away in the Selkirks, places where the weather never matched the season, and creatures everyone knew about but never saw lived in undisturbed peace.
Somewhere in this valley, Aine had created a wrinkle to both hide and imprison a seidr witch named Pelonie. The Queen of the Forest had drawn on ancient Norse mythology for her inspiration; I expected a massive tree and a Well of Fate, since such a place was the original home of runes and their magic.
“Tell me what Aine told you,” I said, to pass the time.
“We did our own research, lady,” Caerwen explained. “Many myths exist about the Bone Woman. Some say she’s a wrinkled crone living in the dry deserts of northern Mexico. Others say she was thrown into an ancient well. Modern witnesses swear she’s a beautiful young woman who wears cut-off jeans, a pink shirt and matching flip-flops. She parks a broken-down car along the side of the road, and when lonely men stop to help, she steals their souls.”
“Angel said to beware of an old woman with firewood tied to her back.”
“Yes,” Effa nodded. “It’s not really firewood but brown bones. The truckers often see her after midnight and know to keep driving. She has many faces and many names. The Bone Woman, the Collector, the Wolf Woman. Many witches have come after Pelonie, since she was and still is the first. The imposters often add their own flair.”
“What was Pelonie’s purpose?”
Caerwen brushed at her thigh. “They say she was more than a seidr witch. Not a demigod, but her powers were beyond those who came after. Her task was to find and preserve the bones. Bring what was lost back to life so the animals would not become extinct. She would sift through the rocks, search the hidden spaces for the bones from birds and snakes. The deer, the foxes, and wolverines. But her love was for wolf bones. She would scavenge through the hills, along the dried-up rivers, and when she’d gathered enough bones for an entire skeleton, she would put the creature back together and sing a weaving song. A nonsense song, sung over and over. Changing the words with each verse until she found the right magic to breathe life into the skeleton. Bring back its form, the muscles, the beating heart. Air in the lungs.”
The perfect witch for Aine to turn toward when she wanted to null the wolf queens.
“Seidr magic is not evil,” Effa added. “But Pelonie used the magic in an evil way. She wanted the queens’ wolves for her own purposes, and she fled after the ritual. Took the runes with her into hiding.”
But wolf spirits were never meant to be trapped in the runes, and according to Aine, the building pressure on them was no different from the plight of silent wolves. The torture over centuries was sickening to imagine.
During the years after the ritual, Pelonie could have released the wolves. But to do so required the queens, and those who weren’t dead or insane would have killed her. The kings, too. Her sin rippled out into the world, a curse affecting the witches who followed, those in the Gemini coven. The seers. Not even Pelonie, in her wrinkled prison, escaped the consequences.
“Seidr magic,” Caerwen said, “once released, has repercussions that are unstoppable, lady. It’s runic magic. A magic so powerful, even Odin had to sacrifice himself before he could learn the fearful knowledge, the rituals and chants.”
“Do you know any happy myths about the Wolf Woman?” I’d been unable to stop the shudders, thinking of the nonsense song I’d always sung… hush, little baby, don’t you cry…
