Shadow Spell (The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy 2)

The ornament of a house is

the friends who frequent it.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1

Autumn 1268

MISTS SPIRALED UP FROM THE WATER LIKE BREATH AS Eamon rowed the little boat. The sun shed pale, cool light as it woke from the night’s rest and set morning birds to their chorus. He heard the cock crow, so arrogant and important, and the bleating of sheep as they cropped their way across the green fields.

Familiar sounds all, sounds that had greeted him every morning for the last five years.

But this wasn’t home. No matter how welcoming, how familiar, it would never be home.

And home he wished for. Home brought him wishes aching down to his bones like an old man’s in damp weather, longings bleeding through his heart like a lover scorned.

And under the wishing, aching, longing, bleeding, lived a simmering rage that could bubble up and scorch his throat like thirst.

Some nights he dreamed of home, of their cabin in the great woods where he knew every tree, every turn of the track. And some nights the dreams were real as life, so he could smell the peat fire, the sweet rushes of his bed with the lavender his mother wove through for good rest and good dreams.

He could hear her voice, her singing soft from below the loft where she mixed her potions and brews.

The Dark Witch, they’d called her—with respect—for she’d been powerful and strong. And kind and good. So some nights when he dreamed of home, when he heard his mother singing from below the loft, he woke with tears on his cheeks.

Hastily brushed away. He was a man now, fully ten years, head of his family as his father had been before him.

Tears were for the women.

And he had his sisters to look after, didn’t he? he reminded himself as he set the oars, let the boat lightly drift while he dropped his line. Brannaugh might be the eldest, but he was the man of the family. He’d sworn an oath to protect her and Teagan, and so he would. Their grandfather’s sword had come to him. He would use it when the time came.

That time would come.

For there were other dreams, dreams that brought fear rather than grieving. Dreams of Cabhan, the black sorcerer. Those dreams formed icy balls of fear in his belly that froze even the simmering rage. A fear that made the boy inside him want to cry out for his mother.

But he couldn’t allow himself to be afraid. His mother was gone, sacrificing herself to save him and his sisters only hours after Cabhan had slaughtered their father.

He could barely see his father in his mind’s eye, too often needed the help of the fire to find that image—the tall and proud Daithi, the cennfine with his bright hair and ready laugh. But he had only to close his eyes to see his mother, pale as the death to come, standing in front of the cabin in the woods on that misted morning while he rode away with his sisters, grief in his heart, fresh, hot power in his blood.

He was a boy no longer, from that morning, but one of the three, a dark witch, bound by blood and oath to destroy what even his mother could not.

Part of him wanted only to begin, to end this time in Galway on their cousin’s farm where the cock crowed of a morning, and the sheep bleated in the fields. The man and witch inside him yearned for the time to pass, for the strength to wield his grandfather’s sword without his arm trembling from the weight. For the time he could fully embrace his powers, practice the magicks that were his by birth and right. The time he would spill Cabhan’s blood black and burning on the earth.

Still, in the dreams he was only a boy, untried and weak, pursued by the wolf Cabhan became, the wolf with the red stone of his black power gleaming at his throat. And it was his own blood, and the blood of his sisters, that spilled warm and red onto the ground.

On mornings after the worst dreams he went to the river, rowed out to fish, to be alone, though most days he craved the company of the cottage, the voices, the scents of cooking.

But after the blood dreams he needed to be away—and no one scolded him for not helping with the milking or the mucking or the feeding, not on those mornings.

So he sat in the boat, a slim boy of ten with a mop of brown hair still tousled from sleep, and the wild blue eyes of his father, the bright and stirring power of his mother.