The Fire Opal (16 page)

Everywhere I looked, I saw the triple spiral carved into furniture in decorative repeated patterns, embroidered on the faded bed curtains. On the wall was a framed portrait of a little girl. I approached and recognized it as Ishleen, but she was feathered along the hairline like the mysterious woman who had given me the bottles for protection, and was wearing a cloak of white feathers, and a crown. Below the portrait was a mirror, shattered and etched with cracks, flecked black in places, so my own reflection was unclear. A piece of the mirror, big enough to fit into the palm of my hand, broke off and fell to my feet.

“Take it,” I heard a disembodied female voice urge. “You will need this when you go.”

“When I go where?” I asked, looking around me for the source of the voice.

But there was no answer.

I looked again at the portrait of Ishleen, but it had transformed into a portrait of a swan.

I awakened, and sat up panting and disoriented. Mam and Ishleen lay in the same vacant postures they had been in when I had fallen asleep. In my hand was the jagged piece of mirror. Shocked, I tried to understand how this could have occurred. My heart beat swiftly, and I listened for the weather. The wind had gone silent. I dressed and put the compass and the piece of mirror into my pocket.

Outside, streamers of sunlight threshed through the clouds. The sea was calm and could be, I decided, easily navigated. I went down and dislodged Da’s boat from the rocks. When I turned around, I gasped, wondering if I was still dreaming.

The Swan Woman was there, looking expectantly at me, her garment so white that it glowed in the sunlight. Her shoulders, I noticed, were taut, as if they might transform at a moment’s notice into wings.

“Maeve,” she said to me urgently, leaning slightly forward from the waist. “You cannot approach that ice barge alone and unprotected.”

“Are they there through that mist? My sister and mother?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Has my mother been there all this time?”

She nodded. “Though the ice barge has not always been at anchor this close to Ard Macha.”

I was flooded with anxiety. “All this time, she’s been on that barge waiting for someone to help her. I’ve got to go there and get them both back!”

I showed her the compass and the mirror, and told her how I had come upon each.

“The creature who lives on that barge was a battle goddess. Her name is Uria,” she explained. “The women in gray-green are some of her henchwomen. They taunted you with the compass, believing it was powerless because it was shattered. Instead, they provided you with an invaluable tool. For you, the needle is still sensitive and alive. You will need these items, but neither is enough to protect you. You will be killed if you try to approach.”

“What can I do? How can I save my sister and my mother?”

“I will tell you how you should go there, but first I have to tell you what you must do.”

Clouds were now gathering above us, their shadows moving across the landscape. Her eyes darted around uneasily.

“Somewhere on Uria’s barge, there is a jewel the size of a small apple, very cold to the touch but with a look of bright fire about it. It is called the Fire Opal. You must do everything you can to find it.”

“Why?” I asked. “What is its power?”

“I can’t tell you this, but you must find it, and when you do, guard it with your life. Danu needs it.”

“But what about my mother and sister?” I asked.

“I can only tell you that we are at the very precipice of a new cycle in nature. In order to save your mother and sister, you must first do this.”

As the moments passed, the feathers she wore looked more and more like they were growing directly from her skin rather than sewn to the fabric of her cloak.

Each time I had seen this woman, she had been in a different stage of transformation from swan into woman, or woman into swan.

“Tom Cavan’s unearthing of the armor five years ago, the day the first Ishleen fell ill and died, brought Uria back into the waters just beyond this shore. Uria, too, is after something she lost, without which she is incapacitated. She has made Tom Cavan her assistant, and he has been helping her search all these years for it. Tom has become indispensable to her. She liked that he killed birds for sport and encouraged him to continue doing it, fearing that Danu’s children might return to Ireland in bird form.”

“Why don’t the two goddesses meet and resolve what’s between them?”

“Uria can never penetrate Danu’s exile. Only the very subtle can survive the journey through the Realm of the Shee, which leads to Danu’s Holy Isles. Besides, Uria knows that what she is missing is somewhere in Ireland, and most likely in Ard Macha, where it was lost to her
seven centuries ago. But she cannot walk land without it, and thus Tom Cavan has become her agent.”

“What is it that Uria’s lost?”

“I don’t know all the answers, and besides, I can’t take the time,” she said, her eyes darting toward the bog or up to the hill. She seemed to mistrust the very atmosphere of Ard Macha.

“During his long absences, Tom Cavan lives splendidly on Uria’s barge,” she went on. “He has been watching everything here for her, and it was he who orchestrated the abduction of Ishleen. He recognized that the bottle she wore around her neck kept her safe, and he tricked her somehow into removing it.”

“That devil!” I muttered.

“What you must do, you will see, will go against every emotion you feel for Tom Cavan.”

“What?” I asked.

“Go to his mother’s house and tell her that you want to accept his proposal of marriage.”

I stared at her as if she had slapped me.

“She will take you to him on Uria’s barge. It is too carefully guarded by abysmal creatures for you to go there alone to try to save your mother and sister. You must go to Mrs. Cavan as if in despair.

“There is a kind of ventilation system to the ice barge, air shafts that connect every room and corridor, preventing the ice from fully closing off. When you find the Fire Opal, which is what you must do, eat this leaf, then light this pastille and put it into the main air current. The
smoke is narcotic and very swiftly moving. It will inundate the air of the barge. Everyone will fall asleep, but the leaf will keep it from affecting you. Take the Fire Opal downstairs to the lowest level and get into one of the small boats. Let your compass lead you to Danu’s isle.

“You have only three days to return before they all awaken. You must be expedient, or the ghost souls of your mother and sister will be in danger.”

Some sound or shift in the light startled her. In a flurry she transformed into a swan and rose into the sky with a melancholy shriek.

Overwhelmed by thoughts of what might be ahead of me, I remained where I was, watching her and listening to the brush of her wings as she flew seaward.

CHAPTER 15

I
t seemed a long time before Mrs. Cavan came to the door once I’d knocked. When she did, she opened it only a crack and peered out at me with one wide-open eye.

“May I speak with you, Mrs. Cavan?” I asked.

She hesitated, a wrinkle deepening over her brow, before she allowed me in.

I was astonished. This was not the cottage I remembered at all: big upholstered pieces of furniture; sweeps of fine curtains over the windowless walls; velvet and silk brocades; exquisite things, as if she had bought out the entire Muldoon’s shop. Even the kettle was solid gold, and lined up on the mantel were crystal goblets and fine china cups with their saucers leaning upright behind them.

There was no sign of the old furnishings: the rush-and-cane chairs, the rough wood table, the mattress stuffed with hay. And unless they were in the shadow behind one of the brocade curtains, the sow and her sucklings were nowhere to be seen.

Mrs. Cavan herself was festooned, almost outrageously so, in feathers and lace.

Yet there was something eerie about the light in the house, an atmosphere of shadows and pale iridescent glitter. The light seemed to be missing some important quality that light needed. The entire effect was unsettling and caused a slight pounding in my temples. I tried to figure out what was wrong with this illumination, and what its source might be.

In my peripheral vision, the curtains and furniture seemed to be shivering, but when I looked directly at anything, it took on solidity. I reached across to the surface of a gold and green silk curtain, and when my fingertips grazed it, a very faint smoke or steam appeared.

I turned around and found Mrs. Cavan peering up at me intently.

“Are you expecting company?” I asked, focusing on her clothes.

“No, Maeve. Since Tom has come into a small fortune, I dress this way every day and for my own pleasure.”

“And what of Mr. Cavan?” I asked. “Has he not come back from English custody?”

One side of her mouth twitched at the question.

“No,” she said curtly. “Why are you here?”

Her harsh gaze belied a hushed expectancy. It was all I
could do to remain calm. “I have decided to accept Tom’s proposal,” I answered. “It is, as he said, inevitable that we marry.”

Her eyes widened. She let out a strange extended sigh and said in a small voice, “He will be very gratified.” She focused hard on me again. “I always knew things would turn out the way he wanted. I’m going to take you to him.”

“Where is he?”

Little fireworks went off in her eyes. “He’s on a beautiful ship, more like a kingdom on the waves. Everything you could want is there.” She grew thoughtful, then looked at me from under her brows. “No one trusted me when I expounded on his qualities. You didn’t.”

I tensed but forced myself to respond. “I understand now.”

She searched my eyes a little nervously, but whether she trusted me or not, she was excited to bring me to Tom and began to fuss about the room in preparation.

She took a lit lamp from a sconce on the wall and, sweeping aside a purple velvet curtain, beckoned me to follow her through a door in the hard, rough limestone wall.

“Come,” she said, gesticulating with excitement. When I crossed the threshold, I found myself at the top of a steep staircase that had been dug and carved directly inside the hill of Ard Macha. As she descended, Mrs. Cavan’s swinging lamp illuminated fossilized seashells and delicate spiders, trembling and glistening as they crept over the cavelike walls.

After a dizzying descent, the staircase became a passageway, and the farther we went, the more I could smell the saline proximity of the ocean. Suddenly we reached a slender ascending staircase carved of stone that ended at a doorway. It opened onto a jutting rock crag, the ocean splashing about five feet below. What I saw as I stood there stunned me.

About thirty feet away, a massive drift of ice, partially carved to look like a ship, exuded a shimmering solitude, anxious seabirds mewing and screeching in the air around it. Half of it was rough and unformed, while the other half was beautifully detailed as if by fine artisans, with frozen towers and pinnacles and terraces. The entire thing was encased in its own wide dome of mist.

Numerous transparent carvings of faces and figures lined the upper tiers of ice, lit from within with shivering bright lights, some pale gold, some white. I was startled to perceive tiny figures—little girls, I realized as I squinted—hanging suspended on rope swings, busily carving and chipping at the ice, forming delicate embellishments around arched windows at the towers.

The entire structure emitted a subtle steam, the sea splashing at it, waves refracting on the ice walls.

At the lowest tier of the barge, closest to the water, the ice was carved into lanes or piers where a few small boats were docked.

A whistle sounded, and out of one of those lanes a small boat with no one in it came toward us through the waves, moving forward purposefully, as if navigated by
some invisible being. We stepped into it, and it turned, taking us back to the barge, the low roar of the swells beneath us.

We docked, then climbed out of the boat onto the ice pier, went up a staircase that rose directly out of the water, and walked through an arch to a landing, still not too far above the water level. It was a wet open-air entranceway crowded with hordes of disfigured mermaids similar to the one who had bitten me.