“Still don’t get why you need me, mate.”
“He’ll be drawn to you more than to me.”
“That would be a first in the history of the world.”
Bryde snapped, “If he dies, this is the last time you’ll see him and then all of this was for nothing.”
Hennessy brought her mask.
Hennessy dreamt of the Lace.
She dreamt of the Lace, its checkered edge, its simmering hate, and then—
She was climbing through the dark.
The Lace was gone. It was gone so thoroughly it was difficult to remember it had ever been there.
Instead there was the dark, and there was a full moon right above her, bigger than any moon she’d ever seen before. She couldn’t see its face but it seemed upset.
She was climbing.
It was too dark to see what she was climbing over, but she could feel rocks and stones sliding beneath her feet.
She was not alone.
She was aware of a companion making their way beside her, although she could not see them. She could hear their process, though, the scrabble and skitter of feet on the rocks. Her companion seemed lighter than her, different than her, although the sound might have been distorted by the hidden landscape. It seemed more like a body hopping and flapping, talons or claws finding purchase before lifting off. But it could not be a bird, she thought, because a bird would fly. Unless it was just suffering alongside her to be companionable, she thought. To appear more like her.
She didn’t know where they were going, apart from up, where it was a little lighter. She could see it, a suggestion of gray. Not dawn, but the promise of dawn, the best that dawn could do in the current situation.
Up. Up. Up they went and her legs were heavy, but it felt crucial to get out of the dark. It was getting lighter up ahead, she thought, light enough that she thought the sky might even have some pink to it. Light enough she thought she might see an edge to the bare rock they climbed.
The edge was just shattered enough to remind her of—
“I know this is not my dream,” Hennessy said. “Because it doesn’t have—”
“Don’t say that name here,” her companion said. “That is not what the dream is about. Who are we looking for? This is important. I’m not going to help you remember.”
“Ronan,” she said.
The black clung to them as they climbed. It was everywhere. Nightwash.
Yes, she remembered.
“You can do it,” her companion said. “You are not different when awake and when asleep.”
Hennessy remembered a little more. “Rhiannon Martin would think differently. Your optimism in me, bruv, killed her. How’s that feel?”
Her companion said nothing, climbing in the dark. Scrabble and claw, flap and click. It put her in mind of Chainsaw, Ronan’s raven.
“I would dream it away, if I could,” Hennessy said. “I would wake up without it. Just walk away.”
“You insult her death,” Bryde said, because now it was certainly his voice. “You insult what we’re trying to do.”
The sky above them lightened still more. It was becoming that complicated pink and gold and red and blue that sunrises can be without conflict. There was a definite line to the summit now, a jagged edge that would mark the end of their climb. It looked like the Lace, but Hennessy didn’t say it out loud.
“You say the lines are getting worse,” Hennessy said. “You’re saying the dreaming is worse. But it’s the same for me. It’s always looked like this. It keeps looking like this. How many dead dreamers you want with my name on them?”
Now it was light enough that he had come into view beside her, his silhouette climbing, face pensive. He was a peculiar-looking person, she thought. Most people could be put into this pile or another. So-and-so reminds me of whatsherface, one says. This dude is this sort of person. Oh, they’re that kind of a person. But what was Bryde? Bryde. Party of one. If he reminded her of anything, he reminded her of … the resemblance slipped away.
Bryde said, “Get better, then.”
“Get better, he says, bread-and-jam, easy. You’re a real ass, did you know? When have you ever failed at anything?”
“You’ve been at this for weeks,” he said. “Do you know how old I am?”
There was something a little dangerous about the question. Hennessy couldn’t tell if it was dangerous to answer it correctly or dangerous to answer it incorrectly, though. Eventually, she said, “Older than Ronan thinks.”
“Yes,” Bryde said.
Now it was possible to see they were headed toward a great hollow stump, a tree that must have been enormous when it was alive. But then Hennessy remembered: It was alive. It was the tree from West Virginia, transplanted. Ilidorin.
“Yes,” Bryde said again, and he sounded tired. “Older than he imagines.”
The tree grew from bare, dark rock on a precipice that jutted high above a vast and glittering pink-orange-yellow-blue ocean. The sea below looked cold and ancient, the barely audible waves breaking slow and sure. Everything was still black where the sun had not yet reached.
It was beautiful, and Hennessy hated it. She hated it, or she hated herself.
That one.
“Self-hatred is an expensive hobby paid for by other people,” Bryde said. “Look. Here he is.”
Ronan was in the tree. Or rather, a Ronan was inside the tree. The Ronan inside the tree was dressed in black, curled inside the hollow, his arms crossed over each other, his posture undeniably the same as Ronan in the real world. But this Ronan was old. Well, older. Grizzled. This Ronan had walked and walked through this world. His cheeks were hard and chiseled beneath scrubby shadow. Deep crow lines formed around his eyes from decades of laughing and frowning into the sun. His shaved head had grown out just enough to show that his temples were gray, same as the hair that shadowed his jaw. There was one thick trail of nightwash that oozed from one of his closed eyes, but two tiny mice the size of walnuts were furiously working away at it with their paws and their tongues.
Old. Older than he imagines.
Hennessy wanted to say something to cut the moment, but she couldn’t. She was so angry, so tangled in the grips of this wild ocean, this distant sunrise, this lightening peak, this wearied Ronan from another time curled in an ancient tree. Why did it have to be this way? she kept thinking. Why did she have to be this way?
She longed for the Hennessy in the car, the one who thought she didn’t care about anything. What a splendid liar she was. She cared about everything.
After the mice were done, they scurried away into the darkness of the hollow of the tree, leaving Ronan motionless in the protective curve of the stump.
“Come back, Ronan,” Bryde said softly. “The nightwash will not have you this time.”
Silence. Just the barely heard sound of that slow, old ocean down below.
“Ronan Lynch,” Hennessy said.
Ronan’s eyes opened.
They were his eyes after all, bright blue and intense.
He looked at them both, this young, old Ronan.
“No more playing,” he said. He sounded tired. “We save the ley lines.”
Declan had been told a long time ago that he had to know what he wanted, or he’d never get it. Not by his father, because his father would have never delivered such pragmatic advice in such a pragmatic way. No, even if Niall Lynch believed in the sentiment, he would have wrapped it up in a long story filled with metaphor and magic and nonsense riddles. Only years after the storytelling would Declan be sitting somewhere and realize that all along Niall had been trying to teach him to balance his checkbook, or whatever the tale had ever really been about. Niall could never just say the thing.