Morrigan's Cross (Circle Trilogy 1)

n nothing but dirt and dust.”

There was a stone ruin overcome by vines sharp with thorns and black with berries. The end wall remained and rose in a peak. Figures had been carved into it like a frame, and had been buffed nearly smooth again by time and weather.

Flowers, even small shrubs forced their way through the cracks with feathery purple heads drooping now, heavy from the rain.

“A chapel? Mother spoke of building one.”

“And one was built,” Cian confirmed. “This is what’s left of it. And them, and the ones who came after. Stones and moss and weeds.”

Hoyt only shook his head. Stones had been plunged into the ground or set upon it to mark the dead. Now he moved among them, over uneven ground where that ground had heaved, time and again, and the tall grass was slick with wet.

Like the carving on the ruin, the words etched into some of the stones were worn nearly smooth, and the stones bloomed with moss and lichen. Others he could read; names he didn’t know. Michael Thomas McKenna, beloved husband of Alice. Departed this earth the sixth of May, eighteen hundred and twenty-five. And Alice, who’d joined him some six years after. Their children, one who’d left the world only days after coming into it, and three others.

They’d lived and died this Thomas, this Alice, centuries after he’d been born. And nearly two centuries before he stood here, reading their names.

Time was fluid, he thought, and those who passed through it so fragile.

Crosses rose up, and rounded stones tilted. Here and there weedy gardens grew over the graves as if they were tended by careless ghosts. And he felt them, those ghosts, with every step he took.

A rose bush, heavy with rich red blooms grew lushly behind a stone no taller than his knees. Its petals were sheened like velvet. It was a quick strike to the heart, with the dull echoing pain behind it.

He knew he stood at his mother’s grave.

“How did she die?”

“Her heart stopped. It’s the usual way.”

At his sides, Hoyt’s fists bunched. “Can you be so cold, even here, even now?”

“Some said grief stopped it. Perhaps it did. He went first.” Cian gestured to a second stone. “A fever took him around the equinox, the autumn after…I left. She followed three years after.”

“Our sisters?”

“There, all there.” He gestured at the grouping of stones. “And the generations that followed them—who remained in Clare, in any case. There was a famine, and it rotted the land. Scores died like flies, or fled to America, to Australia, to England, anywhere but here. There was suffering, pain, plague, pillage. Death.”

“Nola?”

For a moment Cian said nothing, then he continued in a tone of deliberate carelessness. “She lived into her sixties—a good, long life for that era for a woman, a human. She had five children. Or it might’ve been six.”

“Was she happy?”

“How could I say?” Cian said impatiently. “I never spoke to her again. I wasn’t welcome in the house I now own. Why would I be?”

“She said I would come back.”

“Well, you have, haven’t you?”

Hoyt’s blood was cool now, and eking toward cold. “There’s no grave for me here. If I go back, will there be? Will it change what’s here?”

“The paradox. Who’s to say? In any case, you vanished, or so it’s told. Depending on the version. You’re a bit of a legend in these parts. Hoyt of Clare—though Kerry likes to claim you as well. Your song and story doesn’t reach as high as a god, or even that of Merlin, but you’ve a notch in some guidebooks. The stone circle just to the north, the one you used? It’s attributed to you now,

and called Hoyt’s Dance.”

Hoyt didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or flattered. “It’s the Dance of the Gods, and it was here long before me.”

“So goes truth, particularly when fantasy’s shinier. The caves beneath the cliffs where you tossed me into the sea? It’s said you lie there, deep beneath the rock, guarded by faeries, under the land where you would stand to call the lightning and the wind.”

“Foolishness.”