Page 156 of Broken Veil
“What the fuck is happening?” Duncan asked. “Carys, are you okay?”
“Wait.” She narrowed her eyes, pulling the eye patch back over her left eye so she could focus her vision on what she was seeing.
Red-haired maiden.
Black-haired mother.
Silver-haired crone.
And round and round she went, the one turning to three turning to one whirled vision in Carys’s eye.
But as she turned into one and three, another vision became clear too. The nubile body was scarred with a deep bruise over her abdomen, purple and green, weeping blood from under the ribs.
Her dark eyes were bleeding, but not to cause terror. One eye was completely destroyed, the socket empty and dripping blood.
And as she turned, she leaned a little, as if one of her legs was broken. When Carys looked closer at the whirling dancer, she saw deep punctures in the Morrígan’s leg.
Wounds from a wolf’s bite.
“Sheiswounded.” Carys couldn’t laugh because the sight before her became more horrible by the second, but she did feel a sense of relief. “You guys, we did hurt her. Badly.”
Carys flashed back to the days immediately after the Morrígan’s barrow had risen and a conversation with the son of a god.“I assume you’ve heard ofThe Cattle Raid of Cooley…”
The eel.
The bear.
The bull.
“It’s not the same story, Carys Morgan, but it just might rhyme.”
Each battle had weakened the goddess, and now all Carys needed to finish her was…
A story.
Carys felt a drop land on her shoulder.
The dancers worshipping in front of Macha’s altar slowed, then stopped. They looked at the sky, turning their faces up to the clouds that had gathered over Cley Hill.
And a loud groan came from all of them.
“Stop!”Macha screamed. “Where are you going?”
It wasn’t everyone, but while the crowd at the top of the hill continued to dance and sway and chant, some of them even more enthusiastically than they had been before, the Morrígan wasn’t looking at the worshippers closest to her.
She was looking at the phones being turned off and stuffed into pockets.
She was looking in the distance at the crowds that were no longer pushing up Cley Hill.
Macha stomped her foot. “Stop it!”
Nothing stops a party like rain.
I see it. Carys smiled.I feel it.
The crowds on the hillside were breaking up. Fires were going out, and the few people who had brought rain ponchos were holding them over other revelers, joking as their attention shifted from Macha to the people around them.
“Look!” Macha screamed like a petulant child. “Look at me! Look at me!” She stamped her foot and lifted her arms to the bloody sky.
