Somewhere in the back of my skull, thoughts finally connected everything together, I just needed enough air to speak. “Cailleach? What the fuck just happened?”

  I didn’t fight her when she grabbed my wrist and moved my hand away. It took a moment, but I realized I wasn’t sure I could have if I wanted to, as weak as I felt.

  “I’d like to know, myself,” she noted as she sat back and started to stand.

  Half-formed memories swam just outside of reach. I struggled to rise and couldn’t manage more than a half-hearted attempt at rolling over. On my side, it took me several long seconds to recognize the still form lying half-off my bed was a person. It took several more for reality to assert itself. The wall behind her had spots of blood spattered across it.

  I used what oxygen I’d built up to gasp, “Jenna?”

  Cailleach knelt next to me, blocking my view. She placed a hand on my shoulder and softly said, “Samuel, focus on yourself right now.”

  Hearing the gentle finality in her voice sparked an electric jolt through my soul. As much as I tried to get to my feet, all I managed to do was start to crawl forward and exhaust what little energy I had left in startlingly rapid fashion. As the lights turned off one more time, Jenna’s feet suddenly trembled and jerked in a sudden kick. The last thing I heard was a strangled, watery gasp.

  When the lights came back on, I felt feverish and ravenously hungry. Groaning, I tried to sit up and was immediately met with a hand on my chest.

  “Rest, Samuel.”

  Aoife’s face spoke of irritation and worry. I was in my bed and the wall above me was clean.

  “Where’s Jenna?”

  “Not far. Cailleach and Fiachra are seeing to her, as are our hosts. What were you thinking?”

  I blinked at the accusation in that question. “What do you mean what were we thinking? She just wanted to look at the sword. I don’t even know what actually happened.”

  Aoife’s irritation evaporated into something roughly puzzled. “She just wanted to look at it? She didn’t do anything to it?”

  Now I was irritated. “And what would she do with it? She’s had—what, less than a week of instruction with magic? She can’t even cast simple spells yet. I handed her the sword, and she looked at it. That’s it. She made some comment about it not wanting to be looked at, and— and things gets really fuzzy. Is she okay?”

  Aoife frowned. “It didn’t want to be looked at? Cailleach told me the sword belonged to the House. A sword, not an artifact.”

  I shrugged weakly. “Fucked if I know, Aoife. I’m telling you what I remember. None of the rest I kinda remember makes a lot of sense. I mean, I was unconscious, right? Maybe I was just dreaming.”

  The Harvester’s frown deepened. “Unconscious? Samuel, you were dead when Cailleach found you.”

  I answered with a sharp, barking laugh. “Bullshit, Aoife. Dead people don’t just come back to life on their own.”

  Her eyes widened ever so slightly and she tilted her head into her stare. “Maybe not in your world. I’d trust a member of the House of Silence when they tell me someone was dead. You and your sister were completely unresponsive. No breathing, no heartbeat, turned blue like someone that just suddenly dropped dead from sudden shock.”

  I leaned back, away from Aoife. “Wait, if I was dead—”

  “Then whatever you saw was certainly not a dream. Did Aoibheann intervene, perhaps?”

  Now fully concerned over the holes in my memory, I struggled to knit what that remained into something coherent. The hair on my neck stood on end as something light shifted in my mind, sparking a glimpse of a pair of pale grey eyes locked on mine and a small silver church bell.

  Almost as an afterthought, words tumbled out of my mouth. “No. Not Aoibheann.”

  Aoife’s head tilted as she leaned in. “Then who?”

  “Aoife, who is Lady Badb?”

  The harvester sat back and studied my face with a worried look without answering immediately. “A ghost story told to scare children, for most of us. No one has ever seen her, but the House, when they speak of her at all, whispers her name with great reverence. Seeing as it’s the House, it’s not really worth the time to argue over, really. Why?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her about what I saw, but a single thought jumped into my head before words emerged. “I think I need to talk to Cailleach.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “I— Look, Aoife, if you stumbled across something that might be a House secret, would you be eager to talk about it?”

  “That depends,” she said as she leveled a theatrically skeptical frown at me. “How tired of living am I?”

  I snorted and winced at the accompanying ache in my ribs. “Exactly.”

  “Now that you’re awake,” Aoife said, turning to my nightstand. Her hand came back with a wood cup.

  I regretted my life choices the moment the contents hit my tongue, and the unforgettably vile flavor yanked its associated partly forgotten memory into crystal clarity. After spending the next minute alternating between coughing and trying not to gag, I was breathless and not quite thinking straight when I muttered, “Fuck, no matter how many times you drink this shit it doesn’t get better.”

  Aoife eyed me warily. “Where’d you get this before? It’s not something we just hand out.”

  My mistake being quite apparent, I grinned innocently and looked away. “That’s a Cailleach question.”

  “But— Oh. Well, I guess I should go check on her now that you’re clearly not just going to randomly stop breathing in your sleep.” She paused at the door. “Also, you’re not going anywhere until I have a better idea of what kind of shape you’re in.”

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  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She gave me a friendly smile and stepped away, leaving me with my thoughts.

  I’d just started dozing off again when I heard a knock and opened my eyes to find Tomas in the doorway.

  “Hey, heard something happened. Figured I’d check on you before turning in for the night. You okay?” When I nodded, he added. “So what happened?”

  “Not entirely sure. I was in here with Jenna looking over equipment and then I woke up on the floor.”

  Tomas leaned in far enough to glance about the room. “You don’t think the previous occupants left a trap or something?”

  “Is that kind of thing common?”

  “Depends on who you’re dealing with. The Kharkans? Not really, at least when it comes to magic. They don’t exactly encourage that particular talent amongst their subjects. The folks you and I tussled with to get Jenna? What little I got out of Rowan, I wouldn’t put it past them, but I don’t see anything out of place where something like that could be hidden.”

  “Speaking of which, have you seen Jenna?”

  The bard broke eye contact. “No. Tried to, but was told no visitors.”

  I sat up. “By who?”

  “Fiachra.”

  “Help me up. Let’s go.”

  He blinked at me. “What?”

  I scooted to the edge of the bed and held out my hand. “You heard me. We’re going. Now.”

  Not arguing any further, Tomas helped me up and said nothing when I paused to stuff my pistol in my waistband. While that style carry is generally a bad idea, good ideas don’t generally occur on time to people as suddenly irritated as I was at that moment. As Tomas helped me hobble down the hall, I contented myself with the fact that at least it wasn’t a Glock or a Sig P320.

  As we reached the end of the hallway, Aoife stepped out of a room, closing the door behind her. Noticing us, she asked, “Sam, what are you doing out of bed?”

  “I’m visiting Jenna.”

  As Aoife frowned, I let my free hand fall to the small of my back. Before she could give voice to whatever objection it looked like she was about to make, I leveled a flat stare at the Harvester. “I wasn’t asking permission.”

  Aoife held up both hands. “I was just going to tell you that it’s crowded in there right now. I was getting in the way just being in there.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  Looking uncomfortable, Aoife held up a finger and used the other hand to knock on the door. Several long seconds passed before someone opened it.

  “What?” a clearly irritated Cailleach asked from inside.

  When Aoife nodded in my direction, Cailleach poked her head out and her expression instantly shifted from deep irritation to something more neutral. “A moment, please.”

  The door closed and several heartbeats later Cailleach emerged. “Tomas, I’ll take over from here. Thanks for your concern, Aoife, we’ll keep you abreast of any change in condition.”

  Tomas eyed me a moment, and when I slowly nodded, he followed Aoife down the hall.

  Cailleach sighed and set her gaze on me the moment the others were out of sight. “Sam, we need to talk.”

  After exchanging determined stares, she faintly nodded and held out a hand. “As someone who carved a path through my brothers for Aine’s sake, I understand more than anyone else here, Samuel. I ask you come with me, not to divert you from your path, but because not every ear need hear what we speak. Hear me when I say that Jenna is alive and we’re working to keep her that way.”

  Hearing the truth in her words, I accepted the hand and used her shoulder while she led me back to my room. After helping me down onto my bed, she settled down beside me.

  “Samuel, I’ve kept my counsel to myself as much as duty and honor allowed, but I need to know what actually happened. Do not dissemble. Despite my short years, I’ve introduced many a mage and more priests to their own gods than will ever be acknowledged. I know the touch of the divine when I see it.”

  Cailleach’s declaration jackknifed the explanation I had started to give in my mouth. “I— Cailleach, I don’t actually know what happened. Jenna asked to look at the what Fiachra gave me because she hadn’t seen it before.”

  “And?”

  “She looked at it. After a minute, she told me, in broad brushstrokes, what she thought it did.”

  “Just by looking at it?”

  I nodded. “She said when she looked at magic items, she could see things. Sounded to me like she could see the magic imprinted on the object.”

  “Was she correct?”

  I shrugged. “She was close enough to correct for someone still figuring things out. She’d asked Fiachra about being able to see things like that and he evidently didn’t believe people could do that.”

  “When you say she could see the magic, was she using a spell or object to help her do it?”

  “No? Not that I saw. She’d just stare at it, super focused like she was trying to see through it. The little metal artifact, she described it as a squiggly bit with a trigger attached. Something like that, anyway. When I asked her to guess what that meant, she was close enough to Fiachra's explanation for me.”

  Cailleach sighed and scooted back on the bed, twisting how she sat to face me. “Samuel, I am reminded how many assumptions I’ve made about you and your sister because of the time we’ve spent together and the fact you speak our language. It’s very easy for me to forget just how foreign the idea of magic must be to you, even after you told me that it didn’t exist where you came from.

  “For the vast majority of people, magic is not a thing they can sense without a tool of some sort, not until the magic does something noticeable on its own anyway. For those of us who can sense it, there are as many ways as there are senses, if not more. That gift is phenomenally rare, even amongst the Syr, and most bearing that gift amongst us are seconded to the House. Even then, what we sense is magic’s presence. The truly gifted might even be able to tell what type, but gift or not, the best any of us can do is use our experience and study to guess at what that magic might do. I’ve never met a person, or even heard of one, who could tell what an item did with a mere glance. That sort of thing is the work of master Sages and unless the item were terribly simple, doing so would take days or even months of study.”

  I blinked a few times. “Oh.”

  “When you tell me Jenna can do that, I believe you, but only because I know you. If anyone else said the same, I’d assume it a fanciful tale or boast.”

  Suddenly curious, I asked, “What does magic look like to you? Or feel?”

  “That’s a complicated question with a complicated answer, Samuel; one I might share at some point. We still haven’t discussed what happened.”

  I took a moment to mentally rewind and go through things. “Well, she was really happy she figured out the cleaning tool and asked for another. The only other magic item I had was—”

  Color drained from Cailleach’s face as her eyes widened. Her hand went to her mouth.

  “You handed her the sword.” She leaned in, grabbing my knee. “Samuel, quickly now. Be specific. What happened when she set her eyes upon the sword.”

  My skin went cold at the urgency in her voice. “Uh, nothing, at first. She said something like it didn’t want to be looked at.”

  “But she pressed on,” Cailleach said in quiet horror.

  I slowly nodded. “And then something happened. I didn’t see anything change, but she reacted like the sword was suddenly blindingly bright, she said it was beautiful.” I swallowed, concentrating to pull the detail out of the indistinct memory. “Then everything froze, like Aoibheann had intervened.”

  Cailleach tensed and slid her feet off the bed to the floor. “And then?”

  “Jenna said something. I, I don’t know what or how, but her lips moved, she spoke but there was no sound. Aoibheann’s gift— I—” The memory stuck in my head, refusing to play any further forward.

  Cailleach shook my knee. “What did she say, Sam?”

  Throbbing pain bloomed in my skull when the memory suddenly ripped free of its bindings. “Aoibheann’s gift translated them anyway.”

  “What were the words?”

  I grit my teeth and forced them out. “The bell rings, yet none answer.”

  Cailleach went shock white and utterly still for the briefest instant before darting off the bed and sprinting out of the room. In the state I was in, I could do little else but cradle my aching head in my hands and wait for her return.

  Minutes passed. The pounding in my head faded, but my strength did not return. I only noticed I was no longer alone because I heard the door close. I looked up to find a much paler Cailleach making short, rapid gestures at the door. Background sounds from beyond the door vanished and her face wore both fatigue and troubled relief when she turned to me.

  “Thank you, Samuel. Jenna should recover.”

  When she came to sit on the corner of the bed, I nodded to her now bandaged hand. “What’s that?”

  “Some sacrifices are necessary.”

  The evasion was too obvious. “Cailleach, no more secrets. Not when family is involved.”

  The elf closed her eyes and slowly breathed in. “When we are finished, Samuel. Only then. There is more to your story, is there not?”