“Are you sure?” I had a lump in my throat I could barely swallow around.
She nodded. “Countless were the days she an’ me Kayleigh played in me gardens. Were yer locks blond, lass, I’d o’ been mistaking ye for her haint.”
“Tell me everything.”
Nana’s eyes narrowed. “She carried something, was ne’er wi’out it.” Her gaze clouded. “Though later, ‘twas lost. Ken ye what it was?”
“From the Seelie?”
Nana nodded, and my eyes widened. Slowly, I reached inside my coat and pulled out the spear. “My mother carried this?”
Nana’s eyes disappeared in nests of wrinkles as she smiled. “I fashed ne’er to see it again! Heard tell ‘twas fallen to nefarious hands. Blazes wi’ the glory o’ heaven, it does. Aye, yer mam carried the Spear of Destiny, and me own dear Kayleigh carried the sword.”
“Everything,” I said, dropping to Nana’s knees by the fire. “I want to know everything!”
Isla O’Connor had been the youngest sidhe-seer to ever attain the position of Haven Mistress—spokeswoman for the High Council—in the history of the abbey. Such a gifted sidhe-seer had not been born for longer than any cared to recall. The Grand Mistress feared the ancient bloodlines had been too diluted by reckless and unsupervised unions to again produce such offspring. Just look at those gallóglaigh MacRorys and MacSweenys, breeding with the Norse and Picts!
“Gallowglass,” Kat clarified for me. “Mercenary warriors of a sort.”
No one knew who Isla’s father was. My grandmother, Patrona O’Connor—Nana’s face creased in a smile of toothless delight when she said her name; they’d been contemporaries and friends dearer than sisters—had never wed and had refused to divulge his name. She bore Isla late in life and carried the knowledge of her child’s father to her grave, which, by the by, was a few miles south if I had interest in paying respects.
Patrona! That was the name Rowena mentioned the day I’d been searching the museum for OOPs and she’d found me in the street. She insisted I had the look of her but was unable to grasp how that could possibly be. She said she would have known. Now I understood why: Rowena had known my grandmother!
“Are there other O’Connors, besides me?”
Nana snorted. “Eire’s full ‘o ‘em. Distant kin. Nary a line as potent as Patrona’s.”
Rowena said there were no O’Connors left! Had she meant only my direct line? As far as I was concerned, at best she’d misled me, at worst she’d lied.
Although the Grand Mistress had disdained my mother’s un-proven lineage, Nana continued, there’d been no disputing Isla was the finest sidhe-seer any at the abbey had ever encountered. As time passed, she and Nana’s granddaughter, Kayleigh, had not only been initiated into the abbey’s most private and hallowed circle but were appointed to positions of the greatest power therein.
Life was blessed. Nana was proud. She’d raised her Kayleigh well, trained in the Old Ways.
The old woman’s eyes closed and she began to snore.
“Wake her,” I said.
Kat tucked the blanket more closely around her. “She’s lived nigh a century, Mac. I imagine her bones are weary.”
“We need to know more.”
Kat cast me a look of rebuke. “I’ve yet to hear a word about a prophecy or the Book.”
“Exactly why we need to wake her!”
“Focus less on your kin and more on our problems,” Kat chastened.
It took several minutes of gentle shaking and coaxing, but the old woman finally stirred. She seemed to have no awareness that she’d been asleep and resumed talking as if she’d never stopped.
It was a time of great hope, she said. The six most potent sidhe-seers lines began to grow stronger again: the Brennans, the O’Reillys, the Kennedys, the O’Connors, the MacLoughlins, and the O’Malleys. Each house was producing daughters with gifts awakening sooner, developing more quickly.
But things changed and dark days came, days when Nana walked the land and felt the wrongness beneath her feet. The soil itself had been … tainted. Some foul thing had roused and was stirring in the belly of the earth. She bid her girls discover the source. Bade them stop it at any cost.
“Are you a sidhe-seer, too?” I asked. “Did you once live at the abbey?”
Nana was asleep again. I shook her. It didn’t work. She snored on. Kat made the old woman tea. I added a second bag to her mug.