Page 95 of The Shadow Path
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.” She leaned back on long arms, and her dress floated around her body like a whisper.
As Carys stared at the beautiful woman who could have been thirty or fifty, she realized she’d seen her before. It was in this very place, standing on the edge of the loch and speaking to the dark apparition of a man who became a vicious water horse.
The woman had been speaking with the kelpie and hadn’t shown an ounce of fear. “I saw you talking with the kelpie.”
“Did you?” Her face lightened. “So that’s why your dream pulled me here.”
“I pulled you here? How?”
“That’s an excellent question.” She wrinkled her nose and leaned forward. “How did you do that?”
“You’re not a fae.”
She chuckled a little bit. “Oh no.”
“Are you a goddess?” Carys asked.
“You’re closer to the truth, but you’ll never catch the whole of it.” She turned from her examination of the water. Her brown eyes were soft with emotion. “Your mother knew me once. I’ve always hoped I’d meet her daughters.”
Carys’s mind was spinning. “How?”
“That’s an excellent question.”
“My mother traveled to the Shadowlands.”
The woman smiled. “That’s one way of thinking about it.”
“Who are you?”
“Do you mean to steal my name?” she asked. “Collect it in your pocket like a greedy fae?”
Carys shook her head. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“Names have power, you know. Names can conjure power. Names can trap.” Her brown eyes glittered. “Call a name often enough, and its owner might even become a god.”
Carys suspected she’d offended the… creature. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to tell me?—”
“Your mother called me Rhiannon.”
Rhiannon was a complicated figure, as much myth as reality. A queen or a goddess or maybe both. She was a central figure in Welsh mythology, a royal consort, a mother, and maybe even a deity. “Is that your name?”
“It’s one of my names,” she said. “You may call me Rhiannon. Many have.”
“I see you too, blood of Rhiannon.”The water horse’s voice had come to her in a whisper not unlike the way that Cadell spoke to her.
“Someone told me once that the goddess’s daughters walk between worlds,” Carys said. “Was he calling me your daughter?”
“Are you my daughter?” Rhiannon spoke in a whisper. “If you were, I would tell you to go back.”
“Go back where?”
“Go back, Carys.”
“Back to California?”
Her eyes went wide. “Go back now!”
