“The high king’s sorcerer wandered through Ireland in his time. It was here he found the Giant’s Dance, and coveting it for Arthur, floated it away over the Irish Sea to Britain. But while he took magic from this land, some he also left.” Watching Allena, she set the pendant swaying. “Here is some, and it belongs to you.”
“Well, I really can’t…” But Allena trailed off, her gaze locked on the pendant. It was a long oval, dulled and tarnished a bit, and centered in it was a carving in the shape of a bursting star.
It seemed to catch the murky, cloud-filtered light coming through the small shop window, hold it, expand it, so that it glittered hypnotically in Allena’s eyes. It seemed the star shimmered.
“I just came in to look around.”
“Sure and if you don’t look, you can’t find, can you? You came looking, all the way from America.”
She’d come, Allena tried to remember, to assist Margaret with the tour group. Margaret’s business, A Civilized Adventure, was very successful—and very regimented. Everyone said that Allena needed some regimentation. And Margaret had been clear, brutally clear, that this opportunity was her last chance.
“Be organized, be prepared, and be on time,” Margaret had told her as she’d sat behind her polished desk in her perfectly terrifying and perfectly ordered office in New York. “If you can manage that, there might be a chance for you. If you can’t, I wash my hands of you, Lena.”
It wouldn’t be the first time someone had washed their hands of her. In the past three years she’d lost three jobs. Well, four, but it didn’t seem necessary to count those hideous two days she’d spent as assistant to her uncle’s mother-in-law’s sister.
It wasn’t as if she’d spilled ink on the white Valentino gown on purpose. And if the Social Dragon hadn’t insisted that she use a fountain pen—I mean, really—for all correspondence, there wouldn’t have been ink to spill.
But that wasn’t the point, she reminded herself as she stared at the pendant. She’d lost that job and all the others, and now Margaret was giving her a chance to prove she wasn’t a complete moron.
Which, Allena feared, she probably was.
“You need to find your place.”
Blinking, Allena managed to tear her gaze away from the pendant and look back into the old woman’s eyes. They seemed so kind and wise. “Maybe I don’t have one.”
“Oh, there now, each of us has one, but there are those who don’t fit so easily into the world the way others see it. And us. You’ve only been looking in the wrong places. Till now. This,” she said again, “belongs to you.”
“I really can’t afford it.” There was apology in her voice, even as she reached out. Just to touch. And touching, she felt heat from the silver, and terrible longing inside her. A thrill raced up her spine even as something heavy seemed to settle over her heart.
It couldn’t hurt to try it on. Surely there was no harm in just seeing how it looked on her, how it felt.
As if in a dream, she took the chain from the old woman, slipped it around her neck. The heaviness in her heart shifted. For a moment, the light through the window strengthened, beamed brilliantly over the trinkets and pots of herbs and odd little stones crammed on the shelves and counters.
An image swam into her mind, an image of knights and dragons, of wild wind and water, of a circle of stones standing alone under a black and raging sky.
Then a shadow that was a man, standing still as the stones, as if waiting.
In her heart she knew he waited for her, as no one had before and no one would after. And would wait, eternally.
Allena closed her hand over the pendant, ran her thumb over the star. Joy burst through her, clear as the sunlight. Ah, she thought. Of course. It’s mine. Just as I’m his, and he’s mine.
“How much is it?” she heard herself say, and knew no price would be too dear.
“Ten pounds, as a token.”
“Ten?” She was already reaching for her purse. “It has to be worth more.” A king’s ransom, a sorcerer’s spell, a lover’s dream.
“It is, of course.” But the woman merely held out her hand for the single note. “And so are you. Go on your journey, a chuid, and see.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re a good lass,” the woman said as Allena walked to the door. And when it shut, her smile turned bright and crafty. “He won’t be pleased, but you’ll bring him ’round by Midsummer’s Eve. And if you need a bit of help, well, that will be my pleasure.”
Outside, Allena stared at the sea wall, the dock, the line of cottages as if coming out of a dream. Odd, she thought, hadn’t that all been wonderfully odd? She traced a finger over the pendant again. Only one, cast in Dagda’s Cauldron, carved by Merlin.