Changeling
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"Not to a government school," he said. "The village parents get home-schooling certificates. As long as the children can pass the standard tests…" He shrugged. "They can read and write and do sums. It's just that all the indoctrination, the government oppression, the skewed view of history—they don't get that."
"How much did you teach Killian, and Kyle, and Iona?"
Killian had told me the names of his siblings. My other half brother, my half sister.
A troubled look clouded Ciaran's face, and he looked out the window into the thin, pale winter sunlight. "Is there somewhere else we could talk? More private? I had mentioned the power sink…"
"I have an idea," I said. I stood up and gathered my cup of tea and a scone in a napkin. "I could show you our park." I acted like his agreement was given. I couldn't go to the power sink, knowing that any magick he worked there would be dangerously enhanced. But if I were driving, if I chose the place—though really, there were only superficial reassurances. Ciaran was so strong that there wasn't much I could do to protect myself from him except work the ward-evil spells Eoife had taught me and hope for the best. But I was almost glad to be spending some time with him. When we were apart, I was both scared and intensely curious about him. When I was actually with him, my fears danced around the periphery of my consciousness, and mostly I just soaked in his presence.
"Lead on," he said, and fifteen minutes alter I parked Das Boot next to a Ford Explorer at the entrance of our state park.
We sat and drank our tea and ate our scones in silence. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence. But I had noticed that most witches were more peaceful to be around than most regular people. It was as if witches recognized the value of silence—they didn't see a lack of noise as a vacuum that needed to be filled.
"So how much did you teach Killian, Kyle and Iona?" I repeated.
"Not very much, I'm afraid," was his quiet reply. "I wasn't a good father, Morgan, not to them, not by a stretch of imagination."
"Why?"
He grimaced. "I didn't love their mother. I was tricked into marrying her because my mother, Eloise, and Grania's mother, Greer Murtagh, wanted to unite our covens. I was just eighteen, and Grania got pregnant, and they promised me leadership over the new, very powerful coven. I would inherit all their knowledge, my mothers and Grania's."
I knew he was lying about being tricked into marrying Grania, but I played along. "Why would you inherit and not Grania? I thought the lines were supposed to be matriarchal."
"They usually are. But by the time Grania was eighteen and had been initiated and all the rest, it was clear she lacked the ambition, the focus, to lead a coven. She wasn't really interested." His words were tight with derision, and I felt sorry for Grania. "But I was amazingly powerful. I could make the coven something new and stronger and better."
"So you married her. But she was pregnant. She didn't get pregnant by herself," I pointed out primly.
Ciaran's body tightened with surprise, and he looked at me as if trying to look through my eyes to something farther in. Then he threw back his head and laughed, an open, rolling laugh that filled my car and seemed to make the darkening twilight brighter.
I waited with raised eyebrows.
"Maeve said the exact same thing," he said. Saying her name, he grew more solemn. "She said the same thing, and she was right. As you are. My only excuse is that I was an eighteen-year-old-fool. Which is not much of an excuse and not one that I've ever accepted from Killian. So I have a double standard."
His frankness was disarming, and I tried to picture him as a teenager. A very powerful Woodbane teenager. I had to lead him back to my question about Imbolic.
"Then I met Maeve," he went on, and his voice took on a richer timbre, as if even remembering his love made his throat ache with sadness. "I knew almost instantly that she was the one I should be with. And she knew it about me. Her eyes, the wave of her hair, her laugh, the shape of her hands—everything about her was designed to delight me. We were drawn to each other like—magnets." He looked at his own hands, fair skinned, strong, and capable. The hands that had set my mother on fire.
I desperately wanted to hear more, more about her, about them, about what had gone so terribly wrong. But I struggled to keep my focus on Starlocket. I had to put other needs before my own.
"Imbolic is coming up," I said. "Are you going to celebrate with Amyranht? Is Amyranth the coven you inherited from Greer?"
Inside my car it became very still. We kept our gazes on each other, each of us measuring, waiting, judging.
Then Ciaran said, "Amyranth is part of the coven I inherited from Greer. Not entirely—not everyone from Liathach wanted to join. And Woodbanes from other covens have joined us. But for the most part, those are people I grew up with, who I'm related to, who I can trust with more than my life." His words were soft, his voice like warmed honey. "We share blood going back thousands of years," he went on. "We're intensely loyal to each other."
"Like the mafia?" I said.
Again he laughed.
Still, I found his description oddly compelling. The idea of being among people who were completely accepting and supportive, who only wanted to help you grow and increase your powers, who, you could trust implicitly, no matter what—it would be amazing. That picture of a Woodbane clan was to painful to think about—I could almost taste my own longing for it, and it terrified me to know that I was thinking about Amyranth. The coven that had tried to kill me. The coven that right at this moment was planning to destroy Starlocket. From the inside, I realized, it might not feel evil at all.
No one in my life had ever accepted me exactly the way I was. I didn't fit in as a Rowlands. Within my coven I stood out as a strong blood witch, and it had become clear to me that not even Robbie and Bree, my closest friends, could feel entirely comfortable around me anymore. Hunter and Sky and Eoife all seemed to want different things of me, for me to be different somehow, to make different choices.
My glance flicked back to Ciaran. How far could I push this? Was this the time to ask about the dark wave? Surely he suspected I was up to something.