“Magic? Or something else?”

“Magic.” I glanced behind me. The knives hadn’t just cleared a path ahead, but also behind. “It’s another barrier.”

“A twin to the one I hit?”

“No, because the knives didn’t react to that one until you’d already hit it.”

“Is it safe to come up?”

I quickly re-checked there were no other traps except the one that lay ahead and then said, “I think so.”

He trudged up the hill and stopped behind me. “Will the knives be able to destroy it?”

“Maybe, but I’m not liking the feel of the spell, and I really don’t want to get that close to it.”

“Then throw them. I know you’ve a shitty arm but even you can manage to hit a wall that damn big.”

“Gee, thanks for the confidence boost, brother.”

He laughed, a soft but bright sound that felt like sunshine in the surrounding gloom. “Given what happened last time, I suggest we hug the ground and cover our heads.”

I waited until he’d done so, and then raised my arms and launched both knives toward the darkly pulsing barrier ahead. Then I threw myself down beside Lugh and twisted around to see what happened.

The blades flew straight and true, the pulsing purple fire spinning from their points seeming to guide them toward their target. They slid easily into the magic before coming to an abrupt halt at their hilts.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then cracks began to appear in the wall, radiating out from the point where the knives were buried. At the same time, a deep and decidedly off-sounding humming bit through the air, starting low but increasing in intensity until it was absolutely painful.

Then, with little other warning, the wall exploded, sending a wave of broken magic and debris flowing down the hill.

“Cover!” I yelled, and buried my face into the ground, my hands covering my head as much as possible.

The wave hit, so thick with foulness that for several seconds it was difficult to breathe. But it didn’t deposit its load of debris and magic on top of us, instead rolling on down the path.

A path I could now see clearly.

The explosion had swept away the fog.

I blinked, then twisted around to look up the hill.

A line of skeletal oaks ringed a hill that was topped by a solitary standing stone. A stone that held the dead remnants of what once had been old man’s beard.

Eithne’s monument.

“Well, fuck,” Lugh said. “We found it.”

“We did indeed, and in the first place we looked for a goddamn change.” I pushed to my feet, then helped him clamber to his. “Now we just have to hope that the spell placed around her clearing hasn’t actually sucked the life from her stone as thoroughly as it has the rest of the area.”

I moved up the hill and picked up my knives. They’d dropped to the ground when the spell had exploded and weren’t damaged in any way, which I guessed was not unexpected, given magic didn’t affect them. It did make me wonder what else they were capable of, though. After all, they’d been gifted to the women of my line back in the days when the Aodhán had been the warrior guardians of their hoards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, over the centuries, we’d simply forgotten the greater extent of their capabilities thanks to the fact we’d concentrated on the one aspect we’d found most useful.