Chapter 13:
Morrígan the Black
The sun set crimson over the Eternal Sea, bathing all the houses on the High Road in fiery light.
Morrígan gazed out from the clinic. The days are growing shorter. Summer had somehow slipped by between all her glass beakers and broken bodies. It was almost a full year since her mother died.
She sighed and turned her attention back to her patient. Darragh went on chatting casually as if he hadn’t almost sliced his own finger off with a meat cleaver an hour earlier.
“… and his da’s new inn is gonna open soon, too, over in Point Grey. We should all go visit them soon. What do you think? I’ve never been outside Roseán before.”
“Is that so?” said Morrígan, concentrating again on Darragh’s wound. It was clean and deep, with bone exposed right across his knuckle. She had applied some pappavar oil to alleviate the pain, but she thought her job would be much easier if the fool would just pass out in agony.
“Yeah,” he continued, his eyes hazy from the medicine. “Never even put a toe outside the village, so I haven’t. Sure, there’s no need to! What do the other cities have that we don’t?”
He waved his free hand across the room. Yarlaith’s clinic was empty, cleared entirely of its contents, the healer himself down in the caves. Morrígan desperately wanted to finish fixing Darragh’s stupid wound so she could assist in Yarlaith’s final experiment.
“Hold still,” she said, her fingers pressed firmly on either side of the gash. Reaching out and grasping living flesh was quite similar to Necromancy, she found.
To think, every white mage in Dromán has been dabbling in arts so close to sin. There isn’t much difference between healing and heresy.
The Human body was capable of a sort of white magic, too, Morrígan supposed, as she watched the blood clot and coagulate under her control, slowly forming a dark scab across the boy’s knuckle. With a little more time, it would have healed itself just as easily.
As she dabbed the wound with cleaning solvents and solutions, Darragh filled Morrígan in on the funeral of Mrs. Mhurichú. He didn’t ask where Morrígan had been, and for that she was especially grateful; she hadn’t come up with a reasonable excuse to miss such a big day.
Maybe I’ll tell them where I’ve been after we bring Mother back. Maybe they’ll understand, once they see what we can do.
The battlemages had formed an honour guard, but some villagers saw it as more an insult, considering Mrs. Mhurichú’s strong position on the Crown’s ‘occupation’ of Roseán, as Darragh put it.
Sounds more like his father’s words. Morrígan turned to tidy away the vials and solutions she had used for the procedure.
“It hasn’t been the same, you know?” said Darragh, standing from the bed and flexing his healed finger. “Ever since Mrs. Mhurichú died, that is. Sorcha hasn’t left her house in weeks, and I’ve only seen Taigdh once or twice. He told me that he wants to be there for Sorcha, but it seems like she just wants to be alone.”
“I know the feeling,” she said, hoping he’d take the hint.
Darragh bowed his head in response. “I’m… I’m sorry, Morrígan. I know it must be awful to lose someone like you have. Even though the whole town is upset over Sorcha’s ma’ right now, it doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about you.”
Morrígan placed the bottles and vials inside a glass cabinet beside the bed, locking the tiny doors. “Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said. “Anyway, I better get back to my studies, Darragh. There might be some scarring there, so try not to touch it for the next few days.”
Darragh looked down at his hand, eyes opened wide in amazement. “Wow, that was fast! Thanks, Morrígan!”
He took a step towards her, stuffing his newly healed hand into his trouser pocket. He shuffled for a bit, as if in hesitation, and then finally pulled out a long silver chain. Staring at his feet, he held the chain out to her.
His face turned red as he stammered. “I… I know it’s not much, and I know you and Yarlaith don’t normally ask for anything… but I wanted you to have this.”
Oh, what now? Morrígan took the chain in her own hand. The links were heavy, but delicate and intricately designed with silver inlays of swirls and spirals. At the end hung a small pendant of three interlocking circles, each dotted with tiny stones of blue, red, and gold.
“It’s the symbol of the Trinity,” said Darragh, stating the obvious as usual. “It used to be my mother’s, before she left.”
Although she was eager to return to her uncle, Morrígan found herself transfixed on the necklace.
It used to be his mother’s? She had never really given much thought as to why Darragh lived with his father.
“Darragh, what happened to your mother?”
The boy looked away, the colour fading from his chubby red cheeks. “I don’t know. I never knew.” He paused, eyes glancing past hers. “One day, when I was little, I came home from my reading lesson with your uncle, but when I went to look for my ma’ in the house, she was just gone. I found my da’, alone in their bedroom, crying and drunk, and nothing he said made much sense. He just kept saying that it’d just be the two of us. Then it was just up to us to look after the shop, and I’ve never heard anything else about her since.”
Morrígan’s first reaction was to sneer, to say, Oh, at least your mother isn’t dead, but she stopped herself. Ever since her own mother died, she had thought her own lot was far worse than anyone else’s. Sorcha’s mother had died peacefully, and Taigdh’s parents were just off with his grandmother in Point Grey. Their grief and sadness couldn’t possibly compare to hers, who still had to live with the image of the mountain troll etched into her mind.
But Darragh’s situation was different. Worse, even. His mother didn’t get sick. His mother wasn’t murdered. She had made the sober, calculated decision to abandon her husband and son. And somehow that seemed a far crueller fate than being smashed against the ground by a blood-crazed beast of the Glenn. Morrígan’s mother was just up in the plains of Tierna Meall, waiting for her, as the others would say, but what about Darragh’s? Sure, she could be dead somewhere too. But what if she had just moved on? What if she was somewhere else with a new lover, living a happy life without sparing a thought for the little boy she had left without saying goodbye?
Morrígan tried to picture herself in Darragh’s shoes, but she couldn’t. Instead, something stirred in the back of her mind. It no longer seemed so bad to be left without parents, as long as she remembered that her mother always loved her. Her memory drifted back to the words of the Simian after her mother’s funeral: As long as you remember your mother, a piece of her will live forever. Looking back, it seemed like an eternity ago. Before Mrs. Mhurichú got sick. Before the mages came. Before she found out about her uncle’s caves—
Her gaze flashed towards the trap door in her uncle’s study. For just a moment, she had forgotten that down there, her mother was finally ready to be brought back from the dead.
“Sorry, Darragh, but I really have to go. Thanks for the gift.”
And she was gone, leaving the butcher’s son behind the firmly shut door to the study. The key was already in place, and she carefully twisted it, locking the door without making a sound. As soon as she heard Darragh leave, she descended down into the damp, bloody caves.
Once her feet touched the ground, it all came back to her. The hard work she and Yarlaith had gone through, the hours she had put in, down in the darkness, researching, studying, experimenting…. All it took was a stupid necklace to distract her from the fact that they were on the verge of changing the world. With a spring in her step, she made her way to her uncle’s chamber.
As she turned the final corner and saw her mother laid out in the same spot she had been in all year, the words of the butcher’s son were entirely forgotten.
This was what it meant to conquer death, to take control of the Lord’s gift, to wield more power than the Gods themselves.
Yarlaith was busy shuffling through pages of notes on his desk. Beside them, the tiny Simian weapon lay dismantled. It was a simple device, and elegant in its design. Yarlaith had been fascinated with its mechanisms when Morrígan first presented it to him. With the pull of a switch, it caused a tiny flint hammer on its surface to strike a tiny flint anvil, creating a spark in the same manner as a Pyromancer’s rings. However, instead of using magic to manipulate and expand the flame, the spark ignited a strange powder inside the device, causing a small explosion that expelled whatever else was inside the chamber. When Morrígan had found it, there was just one little metal bead there, and just enough powder for one shot. Yarlaith had been thrilled with his findings, but Morrígan was unimpressed.