October 28.
In the morning, two companies of soldiers make the rounds through Cloncarrig, taking stock of personal items so they can set up traces on Samhain as fast as possible. The soldiers can handle the adults, while Maidin and the goddess-saint Brighid help parents coax their children into giving up favorite toys and clothes.

“You’ll get it back soon, mate,” Maidin tells a sniffling boy. “They won’t break it, I promise.”

Alima heads for work once they make the rounds at the edges of town. She’s managed to pet Dandelion when she goes into the lean-to room, but her son is still refusing to leave the crate except for meals, so there’s not much to do but let him get out of his funk. She waters the plants, gives Bulan a good scratch under the chin, and leaves.

The healing spell and painkillers are doing their jobs for Ned, so he can limp wherever he needs to--generally outside for the bathroom, and then to his food bowl.

---

Come early evening, the smell of flowers drifts by his nose unbidden. It’s some kind of jasmine, but a mugginess rolls in with it--there must be a spirit from the tropics. Naturally, his first thought is the Philippines.

“-batu?” The woman asks. “Lucy Cabatu?”

“She’s Lucy Song now. One minute, please.” He lumbers over to Lucy’s bedroom, where the last few footprints from her shower are still damp. “Lucy?”

“What’s up?”

“I think one of your ancestors is here. She used your maiden name."

She cracks the door open. “Whoever you are, I’ll be out soon.”

A laugh, and then a faint question clatters through the air in a foreign language.

“Oh--Miss, I don’t speak Tagalog,” Lucy says.

“Americano,” she teases, and switches flawlessly. “Don’t worry, honey, English is cool!”

Ned catches Lucy’s wince. (It must sting when someone Alima’s age speaks more languages than her.) He lifts his head and sniffs--the jasmine smell’s pooling near the moonflowers.

“Are you an ancestor, Miss?” Lucy comes out tugging her head through her shirt, to where Ned sits by the moonflowers. A figure starts to gleam in the air. “Do you want anything to--”

A flurry of Tagalog cuts Lucy off, most likely swearing--the woman still hasn’t managed to appear properly before she’s snapped back into the Otherworld. All they catch before she falls are tight curls, dark arms, and a silvery dress.

“Uh-oh.” Ned noses at the dirt. “Is she a gardener? She smelled like jasmine and she went here instead of the altar.”

“I hope this wasn’t important.” Lucy scratches Ned’s shoulder. “I could ask the other ancestors, but ‘the woman who smells like flowers’ is not sufficient search criteria.”

“She was pretty dark,” Ned offers.

“Ned, dark for Asians from Asia means everyone from ‘kind of tan’ to ‘mistaken for black,’” Lucy reminds him. “I’d get at least fifty ancestors.”

---

Halfway through dinner in the Brú na Bóinne, the earth shakes under them. Danu thinks it’s just the Fianna and levitates the television with a sigh, but Brighid runs in with her skirt hiked up.

“Morrigan! Someone’s falling!” Her knuckles are white around her fistful of cloth.

The Morrigan appears in the space between words, a gun in hand as Brighid and Danu draw together. It might be hard to kill them, but fighting is tricky--Brighid’s job is to accept people into the home, and it’s hard for Danu to invoke her mother-fury when there are no children to protect. (The Tribe is her children in spirit if not blood, but they’re all long grown.)

This woman is from the south of the world, blasting humid like a furnace. Such foreign heat in the damp of October puts their teeth on edge.

She falls into the Bru na Boinne like a comet.

When she totters back up using a thick bamboo club, she’s almost disappointing in her lack of threat. Her inner dress is a plain sleeveless shift, but the outside is a tribal swath of pineapple silk that glows like the moon: Silver embroidery etches through white and indigo folds with a starry pearl fringe, and a crescent-shaped headdress almost floats above her head. Tattoos spiral down her bronze arms, while her zigzagging black curls look almost African.

There’s a black patch on her left eye, a god-inflicted wound that separates her from the post-Spain Philippines’ Santa Marias and their pale, unblemished beauty.

She couldn’t be less Catholic if she tried.

And that’s why the Morrigan grins.

“God, I’m so sorry for scaring you!” She dusts herself off. “I’ve been to Europe about twice, and neither time was the mortal side!”

Danu releases Brighid cautiously. “Well… hello, Miss.”

“I’m Mayari.” The moon-goddess puts her club away. “I was trying to talk to Lucy Song, but she’s really far from home.”

“The Morrigan.” She needs another look. “Persephone went to the Philippines weeks ago.”

“People can’t ask my help if they don’t even know my name,” Mayari points out. “I’m stronger in Asia and America, but this far away, I can only do little things. I found their cat, I guess.”

“That’s Catholicism for you,” the Morrigan empathizes.

“Did you give Alima the moonflowers, too?” Brighid asks.

The moon-goddess sighs. “That was technically a coincidence, but I ran with it.”

Mayari’s starting to shiver, and Danu gets a chair for her now that the alarm’s faded off. “Here, love, you’re going to need something hot.”

---

The Morrigan wanders unseen around the walls of the Hawthorn Fort, and she walks through the hawthorn hedgerow to the gravelly mess of the German’s Gate. The Timberdeep is never that bright, but the dawn feels more like evening.

The hedgerow’s trees give rustles of alarm, but she gives a patch of drystone a pat. The Fort sways happily and quiets down--good for her, but the Hunter wouldn’t have been taking care of the Fort if it’s so eager for attention. She wonders if he bothers to sleep or eat.

“Is anyone around?” She whispers to the stairs.

Steward, the Fort supplies. In the village.

“Who’s there?” A watchman calls, tinny through his bronze helmet. The Morrigan steps back into the thorns of the hedge.

A deer, the Fort tells him, and a few twigs snap off unbidden. Chewed a branch.

The watchman takes a glass orb out with a bronze ring stretching across, and he twists it. “False alarm--a deer was snacking on the hedgerows.” His voice ripples faint across the stretch of empty wall. “We might need to lure them off if they get any hungrier.”

“Good castle.” The Morrigan pats the Fort’s wall again. It rumbles forlorn as she leaves.

---

Alima comes home in the evening smelling like pets and disinfectant--she was watching the dogs today--and Ned lumbers over to sniff her hands. There’s eight dogs, and two-female-strangers, and Brighid’s normal scent with a trace of her coconut soap…

“Dog, sit.” Alima tries to push him--no sell. “I can’t step over you.”

Crap, he was in the doorway. He sits after a final set of sniffs and gets an ear-scratch before she goes inside to change.

“Honey, do you know any ancestors with really curly hair?” Lucy asks through Alima’s door. “A lady came by earlier today, but she got stuck in the Otherworld. She smelled like flowers.”

“Nope.” Alima crosses to the lean-to’s door in laundry-scented pajamas. “I’ll let you know if I meet her, though.”

Dandelion purrs almost before she reaches Alima’s feet, but her son crouches behind a shelf warily. “Hi, mystery boy!”

She only gains a few steps before the spotted cat goes to his crate as usual. To his credit, he’s not hissing anymore.

---

The Morrigan drifts under the earth and resurfaces by the orchard. It almost looks like the lip of the forest under the stony blue sky--but before she wades to the village across the sluggish dark stream, her god’s vision sees carefully trimmed branches among the damp black canopy, and the trees are raised on telltale mounds, packed with gravel for draining.

“Hello, Morrigan.” An old man waves to her, wearing a cloak of fine blue wool.

“You got old, Cian.”

“That’s the human blood,” he chuckles.

“Do you know where the Fort’s steward is?”

“Raghnall? He’ll be talking with the headman,” Cian says. “They’re in the village green--I’ll portal you there.”

She takes his wrist and they coast on the breeze to the inn. At the far corner of the green by the Timberdeep, newly-cut boards are lying on racks to season.

“You’ve barely come here since King Odar died.” Cian leaves footprints, but not her. “Is something wrong?”

“Ned Song swore an oath to kill the Hunter. He’s about to start the Fairy Raid.”

“That’s a bastard to pull off.” He checks back and notices his lone track through the mud: A joint-popping stretch and a sigh later, marks of his presence have vanished.

“It is,” she agrees. “That’s why I’m here.”

The steward of the fairy-hills has brown hair and sky-blue eyes. The other Folk press sideways to let the Morrigan through-- her gloom cuts like knives into their skin. They don’t fear death like most humans do, but they don’t have to like it.

“Is something coming, Morrigan?” Raghnall nearly echoes the old man’s question, and he checks the twilight sky for ravens or crows.

“We need to help Ned Song kill the Hunter,” she says. “The Irish gods can’t help unless he’s in immediate danger, but the Folk can.”

The Folk check over their shoulders and draw together in one motion, even with a goddess there--an animal instinct, for all their love of words.

“Morrigan, that’s oathbreaking!” Raghnall hisses. “He might be shit at ruling, but that’s his right. He spilled the king’s blood and claimed the Night’s Throne. We cannot turn our hand to our ruler--not even for the gods.”

“But you can help with other matters,” the Morrigan tells them pointedly. “The Fairy Raid has nothing to do with the kingdom. If you disagree with it, you can at least help the marks.”

“Loopholes won’t stop him from getting fuck-all mad!” A woman reminds her. “If he finds out we’re helping the Tuatha de Danaan, he won’t even bother to find out who did it! He’ll just raze the whole damn village!”

This isn’t an empty threat from the One Who Chases Prey. She wonders if he’d stop at just killing people--he might level the village itself, shingles to basements. “Would it help if you were pledged to another god?”

“He told us not to help already,” Raghnall points out. “We can’t do anything for anyone in Europe. Not the big or little gods, not the demigods, not the other rulers. Not even the random spirits who just want to help the marks out--”

The Morrigan barely hears the rest, ripping her fingers through tangled waves. She wonders if she needs to take a few hours at the gun range, because mother of god he’s been fixing his curse like a road-worker on potholes.

But Europe, she remembers. How big are any mortal countries, compared to the Otherworld?

Raghnall says more words, and the villagers’ thoughts start to cave in amongst themselves, but she’s too busy brainstorming to hear.

How far is the Philippines from Ireland? She wonders. Does he know Mayari’s crossed an ocean and two continents to check on her people?

“…Maybe he just doesn’t care.” She starts to laugh.

The nearby fairies start rustling from nerves as the Morrigan’s smile nearly splits her face. Oh, to think like the Hunter: He tries his best to fix things, but he’s still so proud--

“Are--are you all right?” Aodh asks, but doesn’t touch her.

Laughter grates out from deep in the Morrigan’s chest, and the earth rumbles in assent. The villagers move back in their animal sync, but Brighid appears in a surge of homey warmth.

“Morrigan, use your words.” She glances back at the villagers with a sigh. “Don’t worry, loves, she’ll come back in a minute.”

She knows that Mayari hears her thoughts: From the other side of the island in the Brú na Bóinne, the moon-goddess starts to work her way over.

The Morrigan straightens up, wiping a few tears away. “Mayari?”

The Filipina is whisked over. The moon on the horizon glows brighter, as do Mayari’s white and silver--but her curls and her eye-patch are a velvet black.

“Yeah, I heard about the Fairy Raid thing and that’s just no,” Mayari says. “Is there anything I can do to help the Songs without making him kill his own subjects?”

“He told them not to help European gods!” The Morrigan caws fresh laughter. “You’re Asian! You could punch him in the face if you fucking want!”

“He what?” Brighid can’t seem to believe it, but Mayari falls down laughing.

Next Chapter: XXX: to see what he could see