“How long since she died?” Fionn asked. “And where exactly did you and Marta live?”
“In a town named Ely. I’m not exactly certain how much time has passed since I lost my last bond mate.” Rune shook himself from head to tail tip.
“About a month, maybe a bit more,” Aislinn cut in. “Animals measure time differently than we do.”
“We should leave tomorrow, then. We don’t want anyone to get there ahead of us, and it seems much time has already passed.” Fionn got to his feet. Looking at Rune, he asked, “Did Marta ward her home?”
“Of course.”
Fionn exhaled sharply. “Then we may not be too late.” He placed his hands on Aislinn’s shoulders. “Sit. I’ll get our food.”
She returned to her chair, thinking about looters. Christ, she’d looted the McCloud Fishing Lodge just yesterday. Or had it been the day before? Bottom line was everyone took whatever they could, wherever they could find it. Unless Marta’s house had been very well hidden, wards or no wards, they may well find it stripped of everything. No one else would care about her notes. They’d simply see paper as something to start a fire with.
“Thanks.” She beamed at Fionn, who’d just set a steaming bowl, fragrant with herbs and spices, in front of her.
“Eat. You could use a bit more meat on your bones.” He looked down his nose at her. “Nay, don’t crinkle up those golden eyes. Do you know they’re almost exactly the same shade as Rune’s?”
“Mother’s eyes,” she mumbled. “I have my mother’s eyes.”
“They’re a MacLochlainn trait,” he informed her with a hint of a supercilious grin.
They ate in silence. Once she started in on the thick stew, she realized she was half-starved. It was easy to simply follow one spoonful with another, washed down by several cups of mead, and not think at all.
“Maybe,” she ventured after her bowl was empty, “as long as we’re heading to where Rune and Marta lived, we could take whatever we find there to my place. It will be much closer than this. We’re still in California. Where I first met Rune was only a couple hundred miles from home.”
“Where’s that?”
She held up her hands, palms outward. “Near the Utah-Colorado border, about halfway down Utah.”
Fionn’s brow crinkled in thought. “I can’t tell for certain without dredging out my maps, but if Rune means Ely, Nevada, he and Marta lived just about dead center between our two homes.” He nodded. “Sure, we can go to your house if you’d like.”
Remembering Travis’s interest in her library, she felt uncomfortable. “There’s something I should tell you.”
His gaze zeroed in on hers, suddenly wary. He crooked two fingers as if to say, out with it, then.
“I, ah, I have books, too.”
A long, uneasy silence bounced back and forth between them. “That’s it?” he demanded. “You made a point of telling me you have books? So what?” He flung an expansive arm skyward. “I have books. Without them the knowledge of the world will truly die out.”
“I-I felt the same way,” she murmured, “which is why I kept all I could from Mom and Dad, even though it was forbidden.”
“Are you done?” He glanced at her empty bowl. When she nodded, he put it on the floor for Rune. Getting to his feet, he came to her, pulled her upright, and led her to some cushions. “Sit with me.
“People have been trying to outlaw books on-again, off-again ever since the fourteen hundreds, when Gutenberg invented the printing press. The thing I fail to understand is how the combination of the dark gods and the Lemurians managed to break the will of billions of people on this planet.”
“I wonder if there’s even a single billion left,” she muttered.
“Oh, I think there is.”
“How would you know?”
He draped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. “I know because I am not the only Celtic god left. We have ways of communicating with one another. And...”—his eyes glinted darkly—“we number far more than the dark gods. I am not so sure about the Lemurians. No one has ever been certain of their numbers.”
She thought about the hundreds she’d seen. “There were a lot of them in Taltos. It was odd, though. They all seemed to be hurrying somewhere. I wondered at the time what they were up to.”
“It could have been illusion. Maybe they wanted you to think there were lots of them. It’s possible that only the three you actually spoke to were real.”