Drink Down the Moon Read Free Page A

Jenna said. “And he’s gone now.”
    Loireag frowned. “It’s a new one then— one who hasn’t made himself known yet.”
    “What I want to know,” Tuir said, “is this: Gruagagh or whatever, it has your scent. When you go, will it follow you, or will it chase down your sister, or some innocent like your tadpole whose only crime is that you gave him a charm with your scent upon it?”
    “You’re too soft-hearted,” Loireag told the little man before Jenna could reply. “It’s just a human we’re talking about. Better the enemy goes sniffing after him than follows our Pook. At least she’s doing something to help us.”
    “Johnny Faw will be in no danger,” Jenna said. “The charm will sain him from evil influences. And as for my half-sister, she goes her own way— as we all do.”
    Tuir nodded and kicked at the turf with the pointed toe of his boot.
    “I just wish you didn’t have to go,” he said.
    “Or that you’d at least not go alone,” Loireag said.
    “The Bucca will be hard enough to track down as it is,” Jenna said. “I’ll never find him with you in tow. He’s never been one for company— two’s a crowd, so far as he’s concerned. I don’t doubt he’s hiding away in an Otherworld of the manitous and I’ll have a stag’s own time chasing him down.”
    There was nothing the other two could say. They’d been through this argument before— too many times since Jenna had announced her intentions to leave a few days ago.
    “When do you go?” Tuir asked.
    “Tonight. Now. Johnny Faw’s calling-on tune strikes me as a sign of sorts. Giving him the charm was like completing the last piece of unfinished business I had. So I’ll go now with my own calling-on tune
    for the Bucca.”
    Loireag nodded and stepped close to her, enfolding Jenna in a quick embrace.
    “Luck,” she said gruffly, and stepped back.
    Jenna found a smile, but Loireag had already turned and was making for her home in the river. Halfway between the water and where Jenna and Tuir still stood, the running figure of the ebony-skinned woman became a black-flanked horse. She reared at the edge of the river, hooves clattering on the flat stones, then the water closed over the kelpie’s head and she was lost from sight.
    “Don’t worry so much,” Jenna said to her remaining companion. “I’ll be back before you know it, and then I’ll lead us all on such a rade as we’ve never seen before— high and low, we’ll follow more roads than a spider has threads in its web.”
    Tuir nodded, blinking back tears. In his eyes, Jenna could see the same foreboding that had been in the kelpie’s. She watched him swallow uncomfortably, his Adam’s apple bobbing, as he obviously tried to think of something cheerful to say. Finally, he gave her a quick kiss and a tight hug, then hurried away, following the bicycle path that Johnny Faw had taken when he’d left earlier.
    Alone now, Jenna stood for long moments, breathing the night air. Everything had a clarity about it in the moonlight, a sharpness of focus that kept her standing there, drinking in the sight of it, the smells, all the sparkle of the moment. Then she shook herself, like a person who’d caught herself dozing. Fetching a small journeysack from where she’d left it by Loireag’s river, she shouldered it and set off, crossing the river and heading north.

     
    It was the quest itself that was as much to blame for what happened, as anything else.
    After long weeks and months of fretting and danger, of losing the rade and its luck, of being hunted but not being able to strike back

to finally be doing something
    Jenna let her guard down as she ran at a pace-eating lope that she could keep up for hours.
    She was thinking of the road before her and the Bucca at its end, not about what had driven her to set off on this quest. Her heart felt lighter than it had for a very long time, for she’d always been a doer, not a thinker. She even hummed a tune to herself, a fiddle