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Mannie studies him.
“You,” he says quietly.
Robert lets out a breath that almost becomes a laugh. “You’ve lost me.”
“You are a marked one,” Mannie says.
Robert’s shoulders stiffen. “Marked how?”
Mannie’s gaze stays assessing. “I can see an old familial tie that binds you to the others. In the way the threads gather and converge.” His voice lowers. “There is an older current running through you, Robert. Older than the kingdoms carved upon these lands. Older than the wars men remember.”
Robert shakes his head once. “That makes little sense.”
“It would not,” Mannie agrees softly. “Not yet.”
His expression sharpens.
“The blood in your veins is older than it has any right to be. And these hounds,” he continues, “know the bloodline of those they once served. It may have sensed my crossing, which surprises me, but that alone would not have drawn it here. If it had only been me, the hound would have answered the thinning elsewhere.”
“It turned its head from me to you because it recognised something.”
Robert’s stare hardens. “Recognised what?”
Mannie exhales, almost to himself.
“I felt the pull of this place from Iberia,” he says, not directly answering the question. “It was a relic’s call that brought me back to mortal soil.”
His eyes sharpen slightly.
“But when I stepped through… there was another current already running. Older. Quieter. Closer. I did not understand it,” he admits. “Not until now. It sensed my crossing, but what made it choose this land instead of the shore where I arrived—”
He studies Robert openly now.
“—was you.”
Robert looks as though he would rather be anywhere else than here.
“And that,” Mannie finishes, “is where two stories become one.”
He lets the quiet hold, long enough that the hearth seems louder than our breathing.
“Tell me… have you heard the story of Ériu?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ROBERT
Ériu.
I know the story. Of course I know it. All of Ireland and her people know it.
It’s a name woven into most of our prayers, curses, and the folktales told to babes.
The Goddess of Sovereignty.
The old queen of the isle who gave her name, her breath, her life-force to the soil itself.
But that’s all it is. A story.
