“Where do you think she is?” I asked as I waited outside his bunk while he gathered up his staff and his satchel of herbs.
“Sif?” He shook his head. “Probably by the barrow. She’s been spending a lot of time out there lately looking for wisdom that she’s not going to find among the dead.”
“Have you told her that?”
“What’s the point?”
“I think you’re the only one she’ll listen to.”
He snorted humorlessly as he shouldered his bag and motioned me back out into the corridor. “Not bloody likely, leánnan. She’ll listen to you, I’m thinking. Probably your brother, too. She had great respect for—well.”
“For Brighíd and Ciar,” I surmised, stepping out into the shadows and heading for the bunk I shared with Thom. “She knows we’re not them, right?”
“Yeah,” Phelan said as he trailed behind me. “But at the same time, the souls are the same—just bigger, older. You know that as well as I do.”
I exhaled. He was right, of course—I knew full well he was, just as well as I knew that I shared the same soul as a chieftain that had united half of ancient Ireland against enemies forgotten by time in an era that was lost to history, and that Matt shared his soul with her brother, the man once known as the Ridden Druid. Ciar of the Imbolg had been the only other man to ever leave the Wild Hunt and live to tell the tale before Seamus was freed from their service.
“What I don’t understand is why,” I said, shouldering open my door.
Phelan shrugged. “Ask her.”
“She won’t answer.”
“Maybe she will eventually.”
I snorted humorlessly, picking up my bow and my quiver of arrows. Phelan and Neve had made them for me while he was recuperating from the last round of attacks against him, keeping a promise he’d made months ago.
“I still owe you a spear,” he said after a moment of watching me.
I smirked. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“You’d be bloody well surprised,” he said, straightening from his lean. “Let’s go.”
