The Wickerlight

by Mary Watson

  Knowledge of the offerings is gifted to deserving descendants of Badb. Mamó and Dad know at least three each, if not four. I remember Oisín, aged thirteen, blinking out in the courtyard the day one was revealed to him. I, apparently, am not deserving.

  ‘You’re wrecking the song.’ Oisín angles away from me. He’s cross, and I don’t know why.

  Together, my family could make the four offerings, summon Badb and make a demand. With her particular taste for death and carnage, we could cause severe damage to the augurs. If we wanted to.

  But, like I said: not monsters. The Eye is for desperate times, it’s the red button to be used only when the world is falling apart. Difficult as things may be, we are not at tethers’ end.

  If it’s not in the tenants’ house, and Maeve doesn’t have it, then where is the Eye of Badb?

  Out of the infuriating narrow lanes around Kilshamble, we make up time on the motorway. But in the network of roads around the city, the traffic moves at a snail’s pace.

  We’re thirteen minutes late by the time I drive through the gates at HH. Resisting the urge to dash inside like a naughty schoolboy, I pull myself tall. Mamó and Lucia said to always keep up appearances.

  Downstairs, to the back of the house, is the office for the Harkness Foundation, the arts and heritage organisation Cassa runs. Cassa’s private rooms are upstairs, but immediately at the top of the wide, marble staircase is the enormous room where she oversees judge matters. Her court.

  On the far side of the large room is an imposing table in dark wood with intricate carving. The vast area, the pressed metal ceilings and dark furniture are designed to intimidate. I’ve spent enough time bleeding on the floor to know it works only too well.

  The silence amplifies the sound of Oisín’s shoes as we cross the room. Cassa is seated at the heavy table, her bench, with Tarc and Ian standing beside her.

  ‘Did you have a pleasant afternoon?’ Cassa smiles at me. Her sweetest smile. The one she uses before she cuts me to shreds.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and even though I know better, I continue, ‘The traffic was worse …’

  ‘Save the excuses, David.’ She sounds weary. Like I try her. Test her.

  ‘It was my fault.’ Oisín is chatty today. ‘I delayed him.’

  ‘David took on the responsibility of bringing you here. He should have brought you here on time.’

  Always my fault.

  ‘Do you have the Eye?’ Cassa says.

  ‘The Eye appears to have been misplaced.’ Oisín sounds grand and ridiculous. Inappropriate laughter threatens to rip out of me. Knowing it would piss Cassa off makes the urge worse.

  ‘Misplaced?’ One raised eyebrow.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Oisín continues. ‘Misplaced. Perhaps my family can offer another piece in its place?’

  Cassa gives the smallest smile. ‘Your family doesn’t have much to offer.’

  Ouch. That knocks the laughter out of me.

  ‘Perhaps your grandmother has it?’ Cassa says. ‘For safekeeping?’

  ‘Mamó doesn’t have it,’ Oisín says.

  From the way she looks at him, I’m not sure Cassa believes Oisín.

  ‘The Eye of Badb is one of our oldest treasures. We can’t afford to lose it. And negligence, especially from the former War Scythe, can’t go unpunished.’ Cassa marks something down in the notepad in front of her.

  I’m waiting for her to offer Oisín the chance to pay in blood or coin. It’s going to have to be coin, even though we don’t have the money. But Oisín can’t pay a blood fine.

  ‘You will pay in blood and coin.’

  ‘Blood and coin?’ The words burst out of me. It’s too much. But I’m silenced by Cassa’s sharp glance.

  ‘Twenty thousand.’

  ‘Twenty thousand?’ We’re so badly in debt already.

  ‘But I’ll accept an acre.’

  Another field. Dad has been selling off our land, field by field.

  ‘And I will administer Niall’s ninth row.’

  ‘Cassa.’ I swallow hard. I’m going to make things worse if I don’t shut up. ‘That seems excessive.’

  ‘If the brooch is found before reparation, I will drop the blood fine.’ She gives me a quick nod. ‘You have until nine this evening.’

  Cassa is playing chicken with Mamó. She’s made the reparation particularly hard because she believes Mamó has the Eye.

  ‘Better get going.’ She nods to the door, dismissing us.

  Except I know Mamó hasn’t taken the brooch. She’s way too proud to claim a family heirloom in such an underhanded way. More than that, Mamó likes that it’s part of the War Scythe’s trove, it appeals to her own predilection for death and blood. Her sense of grandeur. And she’s pretty determined I will be the next War Scythe, so hiding it is counterproductive.

  Oisín is going to have to pay that blood fine.

  I can’t let him.

  Oisín isn’t able for this. Niall of the Waters was a fourteenth-century War Scythe who had some pretty sick ideas. Of all the punishments, the ninth row is one that demands endurance. It’s a punishment for a garraíodóir, for someone at peak strength. Oisín is so thin, so diminished. His eyes are empty and I think that the ninth could finish him. Send him so deep inside himself that there’ll be no hope of getting him back. I remember finding him after the attack, lost beneath the blood and bruises, and I can’t let him do this.

  ‘Cassa,’ I say again. She looks up from her notes, peeved that I’m still there.

  ‘I’ll perform the reparation,’ I say. My eye twitches; I’m remembering three months ago when Cassa served me Niall’s second row, which had me walking stiffly for a week.

  ‘This is my punishment,’ Oisín objects.

  ‘Oisín has been ill for months,’ I plead with Cassa. ‘He’s not strong enough. The old and infirm are allowed a stand-in to bear their punishments. These are our rules.’

  Cassa examines Oisín and for once I’m glad he looks as awful as he does.

  ‘Very well,’ she concedes. ‘David, you must return at nine tonight for reparation.’

  SEVEN

  Fix that too

  I watched a boy take a metal box from the hollow of an oak. He unlocked it and spread these ordinary objects like they were treasures.

  LAS

  Zara

  Laila’s depressing ‘spell’ is on my desk.

  I don’t know why this hideous thing unsettles me so badly, why it gets in under my skin. Makes me feel peculiar.

  Sometimes it feels like this house does that too. Today when I came home, it felt strange. Like someone had been there, touching our things. That odd feeling of the air having changed. Like the dust was disturbed, or things shifted the tiniest fraction from where they’d been before. This is the secret lives of houses: that fleeting certainty that things happen when we’re not there. But I’m being fanciful. Like Laila.

  I glance at the time. It’s well after six. Mom’s taken Adam for new strings, so there’s at least an hour before they’re back.

  I can’t focus on my reading. The spell is distracting. Laila prized her long hair. She must have wanted something really badly if she cut off her hair for it. Using a pencil, I turn it over, looking for something that will help me understand.

  Mom can’t find this. Laila made this Horrible thing in the weeks before she died, and Mom will think it’s further proof of how she failed Laila.

  I wrap it in a scarf and hide it in my grey mini backpack. I move the chest of drawers that blocks the knee-wall door and open it. Crouching, I go into the dark attic and leave it there, like I’m hiding evidence of a crime.

  My crime.

  Laila called me a few hours before she died. And I wouldn’t help her.

  We’d argued earlier: she’d lost my lipstick, she was always taking my things. When she rang, I’d coddled my anger until it had swelled from lipstick, to that dress she’d wrecked, to my life without my friends. To Nathan.

&nb
sp; I rejected her call.

  Much later, I saw she’d left a short message on my voicemail, something she never did. I hadn’t even known I had voicemail until that message.

  ‘Zara, I need to talk to you.’ She sounded upset.

  I called her back, but she didn’t answer. I sent a text. No reply. Going to bed, I found she’d started a WordSpat game, sending a new word. Boot. When I couldn’t get her on the phone, I texted that we’d chat in the morning. I’ll never know if she read my final message because her phone was found weeks later between the shrubs on the green, destroyed by rain.

  If I’d answered her call, maybe she wouldn’t have died.

  In need of old comforts, I break my rules and open Instagram.

  I’m still one of the gang, I tell myself. Even though I don’t recognise where they are, or the people smiling beside Ciara and Hannah and Nathan. My oldest friends.

  That grief, always present in my body, pulls from my arm all the way down to my hands. Sharp pricking pain on my palms reminds me how much everything hurts.

  Even though we only meet up once a month. I’m still one of the gang.

  I make myself look at how Nathan’s arm is draped around Hannah, his fingers curling around her exposed hipbone. I’ll mind him for you, Hannah had laughed. Slipping the phone in my school skirt pocket, I issue another temporary ban on social media.

  But, what was it like in those last minutes? I’d heard of fear so overwhelming it could turn dark hair white. And I was afraid that what happened to Laila was so terrifying, so awful, that her body had just stopped.

  There’s a tread in the passage. I turn out of the room, thinking Dad’s home early. And I collide with an intruder. Suddenly, fear in the abstract becomes this living thing that makes my heart gallop and my body go rigid. I think of the Inky Black.

  ‘Whoa,’ the stranger says, hand on my arm to steady me.

  I step back, taking him in. He looks as solid as he feels. Dark hair, waxed jacket and dark jeans. Heavy boots, which aren’t allowed on the pale blue carpet. He’s both pretty and fierce, the wind-stirred pink on his cheeks softens the hardness and undermines the sullen, bruised jaw.

  ‘What do you want?’ I demand, hiding my fear. Even with the split lip, he doesn’t look like an intruder, but then I wouldn’t exactly know the current preferred garb and demeanour for breaking into houses. He’s carrying a metal toolbox that could well contain torture weapons. Punishment for jealous, cowardly younger sisters.

  The shake of his head is barely perceptible and then he smiles and loses that heaviness in his eyes.

  ‘This is embarrassing,’ he says with practised self-deprecation. ‘I rang the bell and when no one answered, I came in. I am so sorry.’ He is laying on the charm now, his smile slightly crooked.

  ‘The door was locked,’ I say, my heart still thudding. I trust charming boys least of all.

  ‘I’m from the Rookery.’ He holds up a key. ‘David.’

  One of the Creaghs. I can see a little of Jarlath Creagh, our surly, hulking landlord, in the boy in front of me.

  ‘Your mam called my dad about some things that needed fixing. Said she wanted them done today.’

  ‘The window is downstairs.’

  ‘Yeah. Dad said some shelves in the hot press have fallen down.’

  I reach for the key and grab it.

  ‘Hey.’ He frowns.

  ‘The doorbell doesn’t work.’ I walk down the passage. ‘You should fix that too.’

  He follows as I drop the key into my pocket.

  ‘My key,’ he protests.

  ‘No, my key.’ I don’t turn around. ‘Next time, try knocking.’

  He follows me into the dark hot press, flipping on the lights.

  ‘This doesn’t look good,’ he says to the shelves. He stops to examine the wall where the shelves had been unsuccessfully attached.

  David starts moving towels and bedding from beneath the fallen shelves. I help him, carrying them to the low shelf beside the boiler.

  ‘She was your sister, right?’ he says, addressing the thing that follows me everywhere. It’s weird if people don’t talk about it, and it’s weird if they do. ‘Laila?’

  I pause. Usually people say the dead girl or that poor girl dead-on-the-grass. They hardly ever use her name.

  I nod and scoop up another pile of sheets, avoiding the sympathy in his eyes. He doesn’t need to say it, it’s so obvious, but I hear the awkward sorry anyway. Like he could have done anything to stop it. I wonder which of the village versions for dead-on-the-grass he believes. The most pervasive has Laila dying by drug overdose. I swear I’ve even heard a suggestion of death by foreign food. For some of our neighbours, it doesn’t matter that I’ve lived in this country my whole damn life, for them I am still from somewhere else.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  An earwig scuttles towards his foot but he doesn’t move.

  ‘Zara.’ I’m curious: ‘Did you know Laila?’

  He’s searching the toolbox but glances up. ‘Seen her around.’

  Lifting another stack of bedding, I glimpse Laila’s Princess Jasmine bedcover and I can’t believe that Mom has kept it all these years. I have a sudden vision of Laila’s room, thirty years on, with thick spiderwebs covering pink lip gloss. Mom’s sorting will never bring the closure she needs.

  David takes down the loose bracket, frowning. I can guess what he’s thinking: whoever put up these shelves did a shitty job. I’ve zero interest in home construction and even I can see it’s a shitty job. The whole house is like that, put up quickly on the cheap. For all that it’s a big fancy house with a stupid number of bathrooms, it’s a knock-off. All appearances but when you look hard enough, you see the faults.

  Just like us. Doctor, university professor and A-grade, sport-trophy-achieving children all put together in an attractive package. But inside we’re hanging by the hinges.

  David is looking at me, a pensive stare that makes my cheeks burn. It’s like he can see more than he should. That he knows I’m a little Horrible. And he gives me a small smile, as if to say, Yeah, I know what it’s like.

  In the yellow, energy-efficient light, I look at this boy, his wide shoulders and dark hair. A little tight around the mouth, and I don’t think kindness comes easily to him. His eyes are heavy lids over whiskey brown. I realise, as I study him, that I find him attractive. This doesn’t happen often. For as long as I can remember, all I’ve seen is Nathan.

  But, this boy. I inch a little closer, Princess Jasmine’s smiling face between us. There’s something disconcerting about this boy. He’s a polka played slow. Something fast, hard and vital stretched out with each note strained and deliberate. And then I get it. He’s sad. Like he too has been burying his dead.

  Oddly embarrassed, I put down the pile of bed linen. But the stack is too high and it topples over. Lifting Princess Jasmine, I see that something has shaken loose from its folds. David leans in and picks up a red leather zip purse.

  He holds it out in his work-roughened hand and I wonder who this boy in front of me really is. He has the bearing of someone who has been told that he’s important, who believes that he is important. The only boy, other than Nathan, who’s stirred this flare of interest in me. An interest I thought had vanished after dead-on-the-grass.

  As I take the red purse, Laila’s red purse, Laila’s charm bracelet dangles down from my wrist. His eye catches the bracelet, lingering on the charm, on the black crow. David looks up at me, his surprise evident. He opens his mouth to speak but my phone pings and he raises his drill.

  ‘The jammed window is in the utility,’ I say, and walk away, wondering if he was Laila’s secret boyfriend. He’s really not her type, not otherworldly enough. Too present in his body for my sister’s taste. Not enough tree bark.

  On my bed, I tug the zipper on Laila’s purse and it snags. Pushing my fingers in, I see the curl of notes. Tearing the zip, I pull out the bundle. Five hundred euro. Our allowance goes straight into o
ur bank accounts and Laila always ran dry before the month end. Yet there’s five hundred on my bed. I can’t think of an easy explanation for this.

  The Scavenger Hunt business card and the disgusting hair thing. The photograph of Laila outside the grey house. Five hundred in cash. These are fragments of a secret life.

  I catch the words in Laila’s scratchy writing: Bad Eye. Like some evil thing watching.

  The walls I’d erected around Laila’s secrets are flimsy. Like this house, pieces are beginning to fall.

  But I’m glad. Because I’m ready. I want to know what happened to my sister.

  EIGHT

  Each time he is destroyed

  David

  Drill to the wall, I wonder how I could have mistaken Zara for Laila out at the village green last night when they are so different. Un-neighbourly creature that I am, I’d had this weird idea Laila’s siblings were much younger.

  I fix the broken shelf and reinforce the others. When Dad called about the repairs at the tenants’ house, I was quick to agree my help. Even though Oisín’s searched, doesn’t hurt to have a nose around.

  Tools packed, I leave the hot press. What a disaster these rental houses have been. After Oisín quit, the judge families who rented the other two huffed off in disapproval, escaping the taint of the failed War Scythe.

  I peer in the bathroom, wondering about the people who live here. There are no long hairs on the tiles, no toothpaste smears. The house is clean, but uncomfortably so. The beds belong in a hotel. Nothing, not a book, not a pen is out of place, and it’s making my freaky radar ping. This house a home only in the way that it resembles one. Like a mannequin resembles a person.

  I peer into Laila’s room. Step inside.

  But it’s no good. I’d need to look in her wardrobe, open the drawers, sit on the bed, and I can’t do that with Zara in the next room.

  Towards the end of the passage, Zara reads on her bed.

  ‘Shelves are fixed. I’ll head downstairs for the window.’

  There’s a picture of Laila on the bed, the grey walls of the Rookery behind her. A fierce wave of empathy hits me: when Oisín was thought dead last year, I couldn’t bear it.