She saw it from the road, the foreboding mass of it, its peaks and tower and rambling walls. Under the thick sky it looked like something out of an old movie where creatures who shuffled in the dark hid and plotted.
She couldn’t wait to get a closer look.
The truck bumped down a skinny track with pretty little houses on one side, laced with gardens with blooms testing the chill. The other side of the track spread with fields loaded with cows and sheep.
Ahead, beyond the tidy and pastoral, loomed the ruins.
“I didn’t study up,” he told her. “But I know it’s old, of course—not as old as the abbey, but old for all that.”
She walked toward it, heard the whistle of the wind through the peaks and jut of stone, and the flapping of wings from birds, the lowing of cattle.
The central tower speared up above the roofless walls.
She stepped inside a doorway, and now her feet crunched on gravel.
Vaults for the dead, or stones for them fixed flat into the ground.
“I think the Brits kicked out the monks, as they were wont, then, as they were wont, the Cromwellians did the rest and sacked the place. Pillaged and burned.”
“It’s massive.” She stepped through an arch, looking up at the tower and the black birds that circled it.
The air felt heavy—rain to come, she decided. Wind blew through the arched windows, whistled down the narrow curve of stone steps.
“This must’ve been the kitchen.” She didn’t like the way her voice echoed, but moved closer to look down i
n what seemed to be some sort of dry well. “Stand over there.” She gestured to the ox-roasting fireplace.
He shuffled his feet, gave her a pained look. “I’m not much for pictures.”
“Indulge me. It’s a big fireplace. You’re a big guy.”
She snapped her pictures. “They’d butcher their own meat, grow their own vegetables, mill flour. Keep fish in the well there. The Franciscans.” She wandered out, even at her height ducking under archways, to an open area.
A line of archways, gravestones, grass. “The cloister. Quiet thoughts, robes, and folded hands. They looked so pious, but some had humor, others ambition. Envy, greed, lust, even here.”
“Iona.”
But she moved on, stopped at the base of steps where a Christ figure had been carved in the arch. “Symbols are important. The Christians followed the pagans there, carving and painting their one God as the old ones carved and painted the many. Neither understand that the one is part of the many, the many part of the one.”
Wind fluttered through her hair as she stepped out on a narrow balustrade. Boyle took her arm in a firm grip.
“I died here, or my blood did. It feels the same. Breaking the journey home, too old, too ill to continue on. Some would burn the witch, such is the time, but her power’s gone quiet, and they take her in. She wears the symbol, but they don’t know what it means. The copper horse.”
Iona’s hand closed over her amulet. “But he knows. He smells her weakness. He waits, but must come to her. She can’t finish the journey. And she feels him nearing, greedy for what she has left. He has less than he did, but enough. Still enough. She has no choice now. it can’t be done in the place of her power, at the source. He’s whispering. Can you hear him?”
“Come away now.”
She turned. Her eyes had gone nearly black. “It’s not done, and it must be done. She has her granddaughter—such love between them, and the power simmers in the young. She passes what she has, as the first did, as her own father had done with her, and with the power, she passes on the symbol. A burden, a stone in the heart. It’s always been that for her, never with joy to balance it. So she passes power and symbol with grief.
“And the rooks flap their wings. The wolf howls on the hill. The fog creeps along the ground. She speaks her last words.”
Iona’s voice rose, carried over the wind—in Irish. Above the layered clouds something rumbled that might have been thunder, might have been power waking. The circling birds swooped away with frightened calls, leaving only sky and stone.
“The bells tolled as if they knew,” she continued. “Though the girl wept, she felt the power rise up—hot and white. Strong, young, vital, and fierce. So he was denied what he craved yet again. And again, and again, he waits.”
Iona’s eyes rolled back. When she swayed, Boyle dragged her in close.
“I have to leave here,” she said weakly.