The Wickerlight

by Mary Watson

  Laila.

  She’d been in our fields. She’d very possibly stolen the Eye. My box has to be in the tenants’ house. Or wherever the hell she’d hidden the Eye.

  I want to go there right away. But running into Dr Salie’s house breathless and demanding to search Laila’s room will get me nowhere. I have to be smart about this.

  Back at the house, Dad is in foul humour at the loss of another field and he can barely look at Oisín. He’s locked himself in his study with a bottle of wine.

  Oisín and I are alone in the kitchen. I open the glass cabinet for the Langstream crystal. But reaching up, I’m unable to help the grunt of pain that escapes.

  ‘Why did you do it, Davey?’ His face is blank. But he called me Davey. He hasn’t done that in months. ‘My reparation?’

  Placing the whiskey and glasses on the table in front of him, I twist open the bottle top.

  I push a glass in front of him. He looks at it.

  ‘What happened that night you were attacked?’ I ask.

  The silence drags out. And just when I think that’s it, that he’ll shut himself off again, he surprises me.

  ‘I don’t remember much.’ He’s fiddling with the glass on the table. ‘One minute, I was spying on three augurs who were humming binding songs at the megalith. Next, a bunch of them had surrounded me. We fought. I was holding them off. But I must have been hit on the head because I blacked out. Later, I was in a farm shed somewhere. Chained to a post, and drifting in and out of consciousness.’

  ‘Did they drug you?’ I take a deep slug of the whiskey, remembering too late Dr Salie’s warnings about the pills. Small sip won’t hurt.

  He thinks for a moment. ‘It was like being drugged, but I don’t think I was.’

  ‘Did you see anything? Hear anything?’

  ‘They said they’d take me to the woven room.’

  ‘The woven room? What the hell is that?’ Sounds like some kind of old people nightclub.

  He shrugs. ‘No idea. I remember a harsh white light. It would be on for a few minutes, then go out. And there was music. Like carousel music. It felt like I was in a theatre. On stage and part of an act.’

  This is the most Oisín has ever talked about that night.

  ‘I lost all sense of time. I was chained in a corner, the light flashing on and off. The rest of the place in darkness. But it felt like it went on for months, the music playing as I drifted in and out of consciousness. There were other things that I can’t explain. The sense of something large swinging across the room, then back again, like I was inside a giant clock.’ He glances up at me. ‘I’ve always been strong, both physically and mentally. That’s come easily to me. I used to despise weakness because I couldn’t understand it. But in that place, in that woven room, I was broken.’

  There’s more. I wait.

  He stares at the tumbler, struggling with what he’s about to say.

  ‘I told them one of the Badb’s offerings.’

  If Cassa hears this, she’ll never forgive him. It doesn’t matter if the augurs used thumbscrews or blades, he’ll be guilty of collusion – no matter how unwilling.

  ‘We have to keep this to ourselves,’ I say quietly. These are words that could disqualify me from the War Scythe contest.

  ‘They’re here.’ Lucia is at the door. From her troubled eyes, I know she’s heard enough. ‘Cassa’s impatient.’

  ‘Better go.’ I stand. The bite from hundreds of cuts has been clawing into my flesh with rising intensity. I pull the blister of pills from my back pocket. It’s going to be a long night.

  Outside, the garraíodóirí are waiting. We cross the fields until we reach Cassa’s new acre. We’re carrying an assortment of tools, as if heading to work the land. But the rising moon is yellow against the evening sky, and there’s time before it’s dark.

  ‘You up for this?’ Tarc is beside me.

  ‘Sure,’ I lie. I don’t want Tarc to shield me or bear the brunt of the work. And he’ll do that even though he has his own pain, and even though he is wary of me, because he is good. But if word gets back to Cassa, she won’t be happy. Elliot and Ian walk behind us, their heads bent together. They’re all right, but we’re rivals. And they won’t hesitate to push me down to keep themselves ahead.

  Raising tools, we break the soil. The earth is hard and stony, resisting our efforts. Gritting my teeth, I force the shovel down and dig.

  ELEVEN

  Get out of here

  I wish Zara would come with me to the woods sometimes. She’s been so distant since we moved here. I worry.

  LAS

  Zara

  I hesitate. I’m not worried about being caught, because that’s unlikely given the size of the grounds. But it feels I’m crossing a threshold, going through the hedging trees. I’m stepping into Laila’s world.

  It’s after ten and the sky is an array of grey-blues and oranges in the dying throes of daylight. To my left is the way to the Rookery. On the right, the hedge thickens and turns, a gate connecting to another field. I pause a moment, then head right.

  I climb over another cattle gate and walk on, wildflowers and tall grass slapping at my sandals.

  Then, on the other side of a thick line of trees, I hear it. A regular thu-thunk breaks the silence of the evening. Orange light from a flaming torch.

  Peering out, I see them. Four half-naked boys, and they’re digging. I hear the sound of their tools hitting the ground in a discordant tattoo. I watch one pull back his spade, tossing the dirt into the heap beside him. Another lifts a pickaxe, swinging it down to break the hard ground. The first thing that occurs to me is that they’re digging a mass grave. Because that’s what’s on my mind: graves and dead people. But the pit is wide and I don’t see any bodies. I edge a little closer.

  I watch as the boys dig.

  Their skin shines with sweat and dirt in the torchlight. They’re more than knee deep when they stop, and another boy wheels over a barrow of soil. It is disconcerting, watching these boys with their beautiful bare backs and shoulders working the empty field late at night. It feels dark and secret and I want to know more.

  David’s there. He’s concentrating hard on this inexplicable task. His skin has some kind of marking on it, but I can’t make it out. The smell of turned earth is sharp and fresh in the air. One boy stops to pick up a bottle of water and as he drinks, he pauses as if he hears something. He looks around and I duck behind the tree as his gaze turns my way.

  ‘Gallagher,’ David calls him. ‘Chuck that water, will you?’

  Gallagher tosses another bottle of water. David catches it, drinks it down. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, streaking dirt on his chin.

  Gallagher scans the trees again. I press against the tree, wishing myself invisible. I don’t know what this is, but these aren’t farm boys working the fields. Something feels off. They toss earth, filling the pit with new soil. They work mostly in silence, apart from the occasional word. David throws his spade to the ground and stretches out.

  ‘Back in a few,’ he says as he ambles off. I watch him jump over a gate and disappear.

  My phone vibrates: Where are you?

  Mom. Now she wants to know where I am.

  The phone buzzes with another, angrier message from Mom, when I feel the large hand cover my mouth, taste the grit. My back is pressed against muscle and bone, there’s sweat sticking to my long-sleeved T-shirt.

  ‘Looking to start another fire?’ a voice says in my ear.

  He turns me around to face him and I can see the surprise on his face. Whoever David thought he was grabbing, it wasn’t me.

  ‘Zara?’ he says.

  He takes my arm and leads me from the trees, back through the field. When there’s some distance between us and the boys he stops.

  ‘Why are you here?’ He is cold and distant, unsmiling. Not the charmer I met the previous day, nor the well-mannered boy at Kelly’s practice. Tonight he is something else entirely. Then I see him, pr
operly see him. I’m staring and he doesn’t like it. There’s ink on his body: his inner forearm, and the hint of something emerging from his waistband. But that’s not what caught my attention.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I want to reach out a hand to the cuts on his skin. It wasn’t markings I’d seen, but a myriad of incisions on his chest and arms. New wounds. Is this why Mom was so tight-lipped?

  ‘Fell through a window.’ He’s curt and I know he’s lying. ‘You have to get out of here.’ Taking my wrist, he strides across the field and into the next.

  ‘Stop.’ I’m breathless at keeping up with his pace. ‘Look, I’m sorry I was in your field. I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Not my field,’ he mutters.

  We’re at the hollow in the hedge when we finally stop. The dark is drawing in, closing around us.

  ‘What were you doing back there?’ I can’t help asking.

  ‘Had some tubers to plant. It’s a good evening for it.’ He shrugs uncomfortably and turns back to the direction we walked. ‘I’ve got to go, help out.’

  ‘David,’ I call out.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know what’s the hardest thing?’

  His eyes are hooded and I’m not sure I like this version of the boy I met yesterday. But then something gives. He shifts, relaxes slightly: ‘What?’

  ‘That I didn’t ask questions. That there’s so much about my sister that’s a mystery to me. She had this whole other life, this whole other world that had enraptured her. I knew nothing about it, and I wish I could change that.’

  I don’t know why I’m telling him this. It’s an apology. An explanation. I’m trying to tell him why I’m here where I shouldn’t be. And perhaps I’m trying to understand it myself, this strange new appetite that’s stirring.

  He looks at me with an odd expression, and I turn away, making my way through the hedge.

  At home, Adam’s in the den. He’s watching something violent and I sink on to the couch beside him. I watch the screen but none of it makes sense. All I can see is boys digging, the dusky indigo sky, the burning torch.

  He glances at me. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  He gestures to the muck on my arm.

  ‘Mom was looking for you. You might want to wash up.’ His attention is back to the wild shooting on the TV screen.

  Upstairs, I duck into the bathroom and drop my clothes. There’s dirt on my shirt from when David grabbed me, long streaks of sweat and soil on the back. My hair is half undone and when I catch my reflection, I see my eyes are impossibly large. I look like a girl with a secret.

  I look like Laila.

  TWELVE

  Beloved

  David

  When I get back to the digging, Cassa and Dad have arrived.

  Dad’s got swagger tonight as he lights the small pyre, feeding it with bonemeal, oakmoss and sage. He’s glowering, pissed about losing this field. He doesn’t understand why Cassa gets to tell him what to do, when he’s so certain of his own greatness.

  Even in the near dark I can see how much Cassa loathes him. And he her.

  ‘Find anyone?’ Tarc examines the peony tubers in a brass dish. Their odd little bodies were sprinkled with garraíodóirí blood at the equinox. They blindly stare at me with their pink eyes.

  We’d both sensed it, someone hiding by the trees. With the field now belonging to Cassa, the rooks won’t alert us to augurs. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Sibéal here with leg-hold traps. Or landmines.

  ‘No one there.’ I really shouldn’t lie during a ritual, even an informal one like this. The stink of the bone fire, sacred fire to lure silver magic, burns my nose and eyes.

  Zara’s confession, made in the darkness, bothers me. Whatever Laila was up to, doesn’t look like Zara was in on it. But spying on us? Not cool.

  ‘No one? Really?’ Tarc’s surprised. I get it, the uneasiness he feels. I feel it too. Something ugly is coming our way.

  Tarc hands the tubers to Cassa, who kneels in the dirt to plant them. She’ll do this herself, just as she’s prepared the soil brought in from the walled garden at HH. She chants in Old Irish as she places the tubers in the new bed.

  Beneath the burning torch, I see the lines of the Bláithín mark, the five-looped knot, near Tarc’s hipbone. I was thirteen when I received mine. Made to stand unflinching when the inked needle branded my skin. Set me aside as a special little soldier.

  I hate this tattoo, which says I am from a long line of soldiers, as much as I hate the snake on my forearm that marks me as garraíodóir. I hate their smothering permanence. Sometimes, when they catch my eye, I can’t breathe and have to fight the urge to scrub them off my skin with some corrosive surface.

  Cassa calls us to take our positions for closing, one in each of the five loops of the large Bláithín mark carved into the soil. Her eyes are troubled, and I know why: this ritual feels weak. Even with the sacred fire, it doesn’t have the charge it needs.

  Later, back at the house, I want only a shower and bed. Dad’s in his study, nursing a drink. Hunched over the amber liquid, his eyes are troubled.

  ‘I’m going to fix it.’ He stands, throwing back the drink.

  ‘Fix what?’ Because there’s so much that’s wrong. ‘How?’

  ‘Everything.’ He glances at me. ‘For too long we’ve been sitting back just letting things happen. It’s time to take control.’

  Dad’s always been a weird mirror of the future for me. In him, I see the man I’m meant to become. I’ve been taught to idolise his strength, his way with weapons. To be gruff, blunt, abrupt. Relentless. Without mercy or remorse.

  But lately, what once seemed like vigour and fortitude now looks like bluster and stubbornness. His scrabbling for power seems desperate.

  It’s unfamiliar, this pity I feel for him as he pours another whiskey. He’s in no way unsteady or slurring, but I can tell from the rigid way he moves that Dad is hammered. This is all he has: drunk, angry plotting that will come to nothing. Powerlessness sits poorly on him.

  ‘Sure, Dad.’ It’s painful to watch.

  ‘I’ve a job for you. In a few weeks.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I can count on you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Promise me, David.’

  ‘Promise, Dad.’

  I leave him to his whiskey-fuelled dreams of power.

  I can barely drag my feet up the stairs. But I stop at Oisín’s room. I want to test if that tenuous connection we forged at the kitchen table still holds. Knocking at his door, there’s no response, so I push it open quietly.

  Oisín is bent over his desk. From his profile, I can see the fierce concentration on his face. The room is lit only by the desk lamp. He doesn’t realise I’ve come in, that I’m halfway across the floor, watching.

  On his desk are several objects. The lid of a jar, a shard of glass. A leaf, a pressed flower and bit of twine. Oisín is positioning them carefully. I see his mouth moving as he whispers the words enclosed in the objects. I should leave, but I’m so relieved to see him doing something to help himself that I’m rooted to the floor.

  Oisín is using his words. Finding a way out. Making sure we can track down the Eye and lift the cloud of suspicion that hangs over us. It feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

  ‘Beloved.’ He picks up the leaf. It’s mottled and brittle. He places it at the top of the black velvet cloth he’s laid out on the desk. The twine, a button and jar lid are already positioned.

  ‘Molten.’ A dull, thick shard of glass is at the opposite end of the leaf.

  ‘Princess.’ The pressed flower at the centre.

  It’s not the strongest law, with only seven words. Ten is best; after that words are wasted as adding more doesn’t achieve much. The words themselves have to match the intention: you can’t use the word Love to make yourself rich, or Brave to cower. But Oisín is good at investing, and that counts. It could shift a law from
grey magic, low level and mildly effective, to blue. He’s infusing the law with the strength of his feeling, which is why he doesn’t sense me watching. He’s silent for some minutes as he bends over the cloth in silent supplication.

  I’m about to back out – I really shouldn’t be watching this – when he speaks his intention. The sentencing.

  ‘For David. That he may be free.’

  I watch him sweep a hand over the objects to set the intention. He has passed a law. The air feels thick and charged, like he’s channelled blue magic despite having only seven words.

  ‘Oisín!’ I yell, but he doesn’t even look my way.

  I’m horrified that he’s wasted his words. Words that would have taken him the better part of a year to collect, on some insane notion that I need to be free when he is so utterly, utterly fucked right now.

  I stare at the objects on the black velvet. They’re now husks, useless. The words have been removed from them and something has been set in motion.

  ‘Why did you waste them?’

  ‘You need them more than I do.’

  He picks up the husks and throws them in the bin. Ignoring me, he potters around his room, looking at his bookshelf and picking up a book. Then, pulling off his T-shirt and jeans, he drops them to the ground. He’s pale, and though there’re remnants of muscle definition, he’s painfully thin. Oisín gets on to his bed, pulling up the covers as if to hide from my scrutiny.

  ‘Get out, Davey.’ There’s a bite in his words. I stand there, still trying to figure out what’s going on with him.

  ‘Out,’ he roars, and throws the book at me. It hits me on the head. I smile.

  ‘Get the fuck out.’ He picks up the Langstream crystal carriage clock beside his bed and hurls it at me. I dodge and it hits the wall, landing in pieces at my feet. He falls back on his bed like all his energy is spent.

  I leave his room, laughing. I sound crazed. I am crazed. The incisions in my skin are burning, my muscles ache. My head smarts from where the book hit. And I’m pissed that Oisín wasted his words when he could have used them to find a way out of this mess.