The Wickerlight

by Mary Watson

  ‘Is that a threat, Breanna?’ She breaks her gaze from Cillian’s with a small smile. He’s breathing loudly, sharp and shallow.

  ‘Just expressing our concern.’

  ‘Noted. Now get out of my way.’

  Breanna looks up and sees me watching: ‘We have a little spy.’

  Their attention now on me, Sibéal pushes through the gang, not looking back. I don’t want to pass them, but I can’t turn tail and hide. I step forward.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ I say, heart pounding, as I walk up to them. Cillian and Ryan stare, arms folded. Breanna is smiling, a mean little grin.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Sibéal stops. She turns around and yanks me away. ‘Do you have a death wish? Just ignore them.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I’m me. You’re not.’ Her hand grips my wrist and she pulls me down the road.

  ‘Sibéal,’ Cillian roars after her. I look back and see the rage coursing through his body. He’s rigid with it, like it’s bound him so tight he can barely move.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ I say to him.

  I can practically hear Sibéal rolling her eyes.

  ‘Don’t talk to them. Don’t look at them. Pretend they don’t exist, OK?’

  ‘Why do they hate you so much?’

  ‘Family stuff.’

  I’m thinking about Callie’s stories of discord in the village. I guess I’ve walked right into one of the feuds.

  Breanna comes running up behind us. I’m expecting her to launch herself at Sibéal, but it’s me she’s headed for. I feel my small backpack snatched from my shoulders as she laughs.

  ‘Give that back,’ I shout.

  ‘Make me.’ Breanna throws it to Cillian, who runs forward and out of reach. Ryan calls from the side, ‘Here, here.’

  He’s enjoying this. My attempt to get my bag back is laughable to them.

  My anger at them, at the universe for taking Laila, is building and it wants out.

  Cillian has my bag. He dangles it in front of me. I grab for it, but he snatches it back. I throw myself at him, and I don’t know how I do it, but now we’re both falling on to the patchy grass. The bag lands about a foot away.

  I’m leaning over Cillian, so furious that I want to pound him. I want to claw my nails down his face. I stare down at his small eyes, the sharp cheekbones. I’ve never before hated anyone. It’s strong and alive, I feel it like it’s in my bloodstream. I feel powerful with it.

  ‘You going to let me up?’ I hate Cillian’s lazy voice. ‘I mean, this could be fun and all, but I don’t think here’s the place.’

  I hate Cillian’s small piggy eyes.

  I hate his smiling mouth.

  I hate Cillian.

  I register Sibéal’s biker boots beside me. She picks up the bag.

  ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here.’ Sibéal speaks like none of this has happened.

  I stand up, still wanting to hurt him. It doesn’t help that he’s wearing that smug smile.

  He’s lying on the ground as we walk away, his elbows angled out from his head as he whistles up at the sky.

  ‘Best ignore Cillian.’ Sibéal must see how shaken I am as we walk away. ‘He’d like to be more dangerous than he is.’

  ‘Why are they like that?’ I say.

  ‘Some folk are just rotten.’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They really hate you.’

  ‘The feeling is mutual.’ She laughs. ‘And now I think they hate you too.’

  SIXTEEN

  A variation

  David

  Towards the end of the week, Lucia takes me down to the ring of stones at the lake. We’re lucky to have this nemeton on our land. Most gairdíní, groves too, share these sacred places, and the battle for ownership of them is as old as our feud with the augurs.

  ‘On your knees.’ Lucia arranges branches around me, placing an alder staff in my hands. This is a ritual for warriors between battles. It’s a gentle song to offset the harsh rigours of warfare.

  It’s easy to underestimate my mother. She appears vague, uncommitted. But this is a weapon, a tool in service of the steel beneath. Dad, who values decisiveness, doesn’t realise how much she, whimsical and distracted, manipulates him.

  She murmurs softly as she seals me inside a circle.

  ‘Your name means “beloved”, you remember that?’ she says.

  ‘I remember.’ Lucia doesn’t let me forget it.

  Drawing a knife, Lucia pricks the tip of my finger, an apology in her eyes. She doesn’t usually use blood for this ritual, and I’m not sure what she’s doing as she smears my finger across the staff.

  I lose track of time, and when I glance up, Lucia is ethereal, her golden hair glowing as she draws ash and alder branches in sweeping circles around me.

  Like Tarc and Cassa, Lucia’s affinity is plant. And like Tarc, her totem is tree, but her guide is oak. It’s how she survives the din of the Rookery: the trees keep her grounded while Dad, Mamó, and Oisín thrive on the chaos of noise.

  I am drawn to neither birds nor trees. Dad hasn’t forgiven me this. He sees it as a slight on his virility that I don’t share his guide, the rook, nor his totem, the bird. I am the broken link in a proud chain. In thirteen generations of warriors, every son has been guided by the rook. Until me.

  The bug boy.

  Our totems are blood drawn, we get them from our parents. Less frequently, a child shares a totem with a grandparent.

  Insect comes from my flighty maternal grandmother, commonly referred to as my grandfather’s midlife crisis. It’s a nothing totem, only found in unimportant families; it’s a totem weak enough to make a girl step back from a boy she might like.

  When younger, Dad couldn’t understand why I was so traumatised by the loud, relentless noise at the Rookery. He was perplexed when I put my hands over my ears and cried, instead of finding the music in the guttural cries of the birds. It didn’t occur to him that I would be anything else.

  And then they started coming to me, the bees, the wasps and earwigs. I’d find them in my bed, my shoes, my toothbrush as they tried to tell me the one thing I wouldn’t hear.

  I was eight when I finally realised my totem was insect. In the old ballroom, my aunts were squabbling. Suddenly everyone’s attention was drawn to the persistent buzzing of a large fly.

  The fly landed near Odile, the unreliable sister, then up again, dipping in towards Cassa, who swatted at it, a near kill.

  It buzzed off, landing beside my nose like a big green tear, where it stayed for a happy moment. My happy moment. Bewildered, and more than a little terrified of my aunts, the fly on my face was both itchy and right. Better than sweets. Then Cassa swatted, slapping her hand across my face.

  The fly landed on a large portrait. It walked up the gauzy dress of Granny Jenny, Lucia’s mum, once a nursery maid, always an insect lady.

  The fly lifted and flew back to me, losing itself in my hair.

  It was clear: I was an insect child. Lucia, who’d been hoping I’d follow trees, like her, stifled a sob.

  Insect is not so bad, Lucia later comforted me when Dad could barely look at me. Look at that dragonfly, it’s a noble creature. Choose your guide wisely. Which meant: Don’t embarrass us with fleas or cockroaches.

  I found as my guide the devil’s coach-horse beetle. Or rather, it chose me. It didn’t crawl to me the way the earwigs and ladybirds did. Instead, it waited at doorways, watching. Such a fierce, ugly creature. I knew, when one first settled on my palm, I could have no other guide. Lucia was dismayed, Mamó was furious, even though they knew that choosing a guide was more than act of will, that it was a connection that defied easy explanation.

  The devil’s coach-horse has always been an ill omen, a sign of corruption. This beetle is a little predator who eats carrion and lives in rot.

  We are well suited.

  In the grove this afternoon, Lucia’s hands are on my shoulders, telling me to rise. I feel a deep peace an
d resolve. Like an armour has settled around my heart, my mind. It’s unlike anything I’ve felt before. I don’t know what Lucia’s done, or how she knew I needed it, but I’m grateful.

  ‘What was that?’ I say as we walk back to the house.

  ‘A variation on the soldier’s fortification ritual.’ Lucia is deliberately vague, which means that she’s done something big. That this ritual is important.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I worry about you.’ She puts a hand to my cheek.

  I wonder if it’s the War Scythe contest that’s troubling her. It’s been ten days since the four contenders were announced. The first fight has to happen soon.

  ‘Did Dad ask you?’ Pricks of worry push through the armour. Is this a way to manipulate me into doing what Dad wants?

  ‘Oh, Davey,’ she says. ‘Not at all. This is so you can find the bravery within. True bravery. Not bluster, not posturing.’ Her hand moves from my cheek to my heart. ‘It’s there. You just have to allow it out.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Welcome

  When I walk through the woods, I feel a pull. Zara says it’s only stories, but I know it’s more.

  LAS

  Zara

  I’m on my way home from a camogie match at the club two villages over when the car pulls up beside me. The same car I last saw careering down the road beside the village green.

  ‘Hop in.’ David leans over, opening the window.

  ‘I’m nearly home.’ I gesture up the road with my hurley. I haven’t seen him since that strange night.

  ‘I know.’ David glances curiously at my sports skirt, which is more like shorts if you lift it up.

  ‘You drive like crap.’ I nod to the car.

  ‘I’m sorry about that night.’ He looks sheepish as he cruises beside me. ‘I …’

  He gives up on the explanation.

  ‘I’m going to yours.’ He leans over and pops the handle, the door falling open. ‘So you may as well get in.’

  I’m sure Mom would have something to say about my getting into a car with him, this boy who needs repeat prescription drugs, who digs pits in the middle of the night. This boy with eyes that know pain.

  But I get in.

  The silence is uncomfortable. I don’t know what to say. And he doesn’t seem to either.

  ‘Finally fixing your window,’ he says eventually.

  I can’t think of a reply. I hate how tongue-tied I am. I’m awkward, he’s awkward.

  ‘What happened there?’ I leap upon the only words I can find and point to the steering wheel. A patch of leather has been cut out of it.

  ‘Seriously?’ His shoulders shake with laughter and it makes me smile. ‘There’s any number of things wrong with this car, like that smear there that looks like a vomit stain. Or the damp smell and water marks.’ He knocks on the roof. ‘And you ask about that?’

  He’s genuinely amused. It softens his face and seems to lift some of the tension from his shoulders.

  The three cookie-cutter mini-mansions are beside us. But instead of stopping at the end house, my house, he drives on to the iron gates.

  ‘Grabbing my tools.’ The gate swings open.

  The house appears at the end of the winding road, the imposing grey stone surrounded by ancient trees.

  And there it is: the place from the photograph.

  ‘Laila took a picture of herself there.’ I gesture.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At your house. It was on your bed that day I fixed the shelves.’

  ‘How well did you know my sister?’

  ‘I met her a few times walking our fields.’ He’s silent, looking out ahead. Something’s on his mind. Then he turns to me. ‘We spoke about the weather, the village.’

  I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he says, and reaches out a hand. ‘You’ve made a new friend.’

  There’s a long black beetle on my thigh. My skin tingles where it moves.

  ‘That’s one ugly creature,’ I say. ‘Does it herald plagues? Foretell my doom?’

  ‘It’s a devil’s coach-horse, so my guess is that your doom is pretty much guaranteed.’ David reaches over and quickly lifts the beetle from my leg. ‘That’s what you get hanging out with me.’

  Cupping the beetle in his hand, he looks at me strangely. We get out of the car, our shoes crunching on the loose stones. Outside the door, David sets the beetle down gently.

  Wearing Laila’s charm bracelet, I look for a crow-shaped lock but it’s just an ordinary old-fashioned doorknob. David opens up without unlocking it at all.

  So much for John Canty’s crow key. But I shouldn’t be surprised.

  ‘I’ll just, uh, grab the tools.’ He rubs the back of his head, flustered. I don’t know why he’s suddenly so distracted. Even more awkward.

  He walks me down the passage with its black-and-white floors. I peer into rooms, struck by the clutter, the worn antique furniture and threadbare Persian rugs. The height of the ceilings and thickness of the walls. The whole house conveys a sense of faded grandeur, something that was once the height of fashion, now fallen into disrepair. We pass the curving stone and iron staircase.

  ‘Wow.’ I can’t help myself. ‘This house.’

  And I see how perfectly David fits in here, this dark, sad prince in this house that was once luxurious.

  ‘It’s been in my dad’s family a few hundred years.’

  There’s a massive chandelier with missing crystals. A huge family crest on the wall. It’s hard to make out the spiky letters between the swooping crows, the menacing eye at the centre.

  ‘Red the blade,’ I read aloud.

  ‘It’s a call for blood.’ He disappears down the hall. ‘Our family war cry.’

  Family war cry.

  Maybe we need one of those.

  The kitchen is big and bright. The windows are large, the worktops black granite. But the vanilla paint is chipped and breakfast dishes spill from the sink. The milk is out of the fridge, the cereal boxes not packed away. Mom would evaporate if we left our kitchen like this.

  David’s gone through into the utility and I follow. The room smells of laundry detergent. A mess of clean, loosely folded laundry spills out of baskets and I think he’s embarrassed about the half-in, half-out underwear.

  I lean against a cabinet and he searches the shelves. Then suddenly he stops. David turns to me and looks at me. Really looks at me. Boy-fixes-on-girl looking at me. He seems bewildered.

  ‘I’ve never brought a girl to the house before,’ he says, as if he’s just realised that I’m one. And that I’m in his home.

  ‘Never?’ I swallow the word. The gear change is abrupt.

  ‘The tools are just behind,’ he says, inching closer.

  I might know that look, but I can’t be sure. It’s searching and slightly dazed. Mesmerised. Not one I know well, having kissed Nathan only twice before we moved away and one time after.

  It’s a question, waiting for me to answer.

  But then something catches my eye. Hanging out of the laundry basket is a large scarf. Grey with red stripes at the bottom. I’ve seen it somewhere before but can’t think where.

  ‘Zara?’ David follows my eye.

  ‘Yeah?’ I move from the cabinet, chasing the connection. But I can’t put it together.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He’s looking at me intently. And I realise I’ve killed the moment. That he’d been declaring an interest and I was too distracted to notice.

  But maybe that’s for the best. I can’t figure him out, this boy who is awkward and defensive. He has a family war cry, for heaven’s sake, and one that uses ‘red’ as a verb.

  I suspect that kissing David will yank me out of my carefully created numb zone and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

  ‘We should probably head.’

  David smiles. It’s a smile that
says, Hey, no big deal, which miffs me a little. Couldn’t he be a little disappointed?

  David reaches on the shelf behind me for the tools, his T-shirt inching up and exposing creamy skin. It rides up further and I’m thinking about changing my mind, about touching my finger to skin, when I see them. The scars. I notice what I didn’t two weeks ago: the precision with which they’re laid out. The regularity. His shirt falls down as he turns, unaware of what he’s inadvertently shown me.

  I look away too quickly. Not understanding what I’ve seen, he frowns.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ he says as we walk into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m grand.’ But I can’t look at him. Outside, the birds are loud, they’re cawing and screaming and I can’t hear myself think. How do they live with this noise?

  ‘You get used to it,’ David reads my mind.

  Around us, the raucous cries fill the air.

  Oisín is standing near the fridge, watching us.

  ‘Hello, Zara,’ this haughty, withered boy says. ‘Welcome to the Rookery.’

  David and I cross the fields, go through the hollow and into my back garden. I’m carrying my camogie stick hooked into the helmet, while he holds the heavy-looking box of tools.

  ‘You’re from the city, right?’ He seems almost shy. ‘This place must be a change.’

  ‘You can say that.’

  ‘Do you like it here?’

  ‘It’s taken a while, but yeah. I do.’ I pause. ‘It’s hard, fitting in to a place like this.’

  ‘It’s a strange little village, all right.’

  ‘Laila really loved it here. She was excited by the stories and decided that she’d be part of things and no one would stop her.’

  ‘She sounds a real character.’

  ‘That she was. She made this shrine that I found in this old …’ I shut up abruptly. Laila’s shrine is a secret. I’m not ready to talk to anyone about it. And when I am, I want to tell Adam first.

  ‘A shrine?’ David glances at me.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  I open the sliding door and we step inside. He looks like he’s about to ask a question, but then we hear them.