The Wickerlight

by Mary Watson

  Gasping, Tarc slices Elliot’s hand but it’s awkward, not the neat cut he was aiming for earlier. As Elliot’s blood falls to the ground, Cassa raises her hand to call it. Tarc has won.

  But Elliot ignores the signal and jabs his knife in the back of Tarc’s thigh. Tarc stumbles. I’m running out to him, yelling at Elliot.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ I curse him. Anger’s always made him mean.

  ‘He’ll be all right.’ Bryce Kelly is beside me. ‘Get him to the house, I’ll treat him there.’

  Tarc’s face is strained. With Ryan’s help, they go back to the house.

  I’m ready to tear into Elliot. This is not how brothers-in-the-garden behave. But Tarc won the fight and with two fights lost, Elliot’s out.

  Then I look up and at first I don’t understand. They’re backlit by the sun, the line of them on the slight incline staring down at us. The haze from the bonfire warps the line of men and women. My scalp tingles, and I think maybe it’s head lice, even though I’ve asked them to show their affection otherwise. But my body is alert, and I’m drawing a knife. I don’t see any augurs as I scan the field.

  Something is wrong.

  As they draw closer, I see garraíodóirí and wardens, the very best men judging by their badges and decoration. Dad’s there, right in the centre.

  The bonfire is at full blaze. The Rose is uncharacteristically quiet.

  Cassa watches them approach. Her face reveals nothing, but she’s small and strong as they move towards her. They draw to a standstill.

  Dad steps forward.

  ‘Calista Harkness, First Cleave of all Cleaves, Grand Magistrate, Hand of Justice and Second Commander of Garraíodóirí. You are charged with consorting with augurs. That through your complicity, you have put the brithemain in danger. You will be held until the time you stand trial.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Not going to make it

  I don’t think Adam knows the boy he loves is keeping such a big secret from him.

  LAS

  Zara

  It’s the best kind of summer’s morning, sunny and sleepy. Flowers are in full bloom, birdsong fills the air. A magpie hops on to my window sill.

  I’m in bed, still thinking about David’s family war cry. Why was it above Laila’s shrine? And why was the scarf she wore in their laundry? When Canty warned me of dangers, did he mean them? Cillian is violent and has an agenda. And David, who is no angel, is his friend.

  But what is the link to Laila?

  Adam comes into my room and stretches beside me. He’s been so absent these last weeks, it seems like he’s grown since I last looked at him properly. His legs nearly reach over the end of the bed, and yet he is so unfinished. He’s an artwork in the making, eyebrows that are too heavy for his still-narrow face. His fingers are stained with ink and I couldn’t tell you if he loves sport or music more.

  ‘They’re not going to make it, are they?’ Adam is looking to me for reassurance.

  ‘You’ve been busy.’ I avoid the question. ‘I’ve hardly seen you.’

  ‘Anywhere else is better than being with them.’ He turns away, staring ahead. ‘It’s easier at Patrick’s house.’

  A pang of guilt pricks me. My family might be dysfunctional, but they’re mine.

  We’re both quiet. The sound of a door opening and Mom’s footfall down the passage, then on the stairs.

  ‘Dad wants to leave.’ I have to tell him. ‘He’s looking for jobs overseas.’

  Adam chews on his lip. ‘I can’t move again. I’ve made friends. There’re people …’ He pauses. ‘… I don’t want to leave. I’m not letting my team down. I can’t do it all again.’

  ‘And Laila’s here,’ I add.

  He closes his eyes. ‘And Laila’s here.’

  ‘Then we have to make sure we stay.’

  Mom knocks on the door and comes in. She is surprised to find Adam on my bed. His hairy toes on my white covers.

  ‘Dad and I thought we’d drive into the city. Do some shopping, get lunch.’ She’s trying to sound bright and breezy but her voice is a little strangled. They’ve not said a word to each other for two weeks. And now they’re suggesting a family outing. I want to shout at Mom, but that’s not going to help anything. I look at Adam, our pact fresh in our minds.

  ‘Sure.’ He plays it cool. ‘If I pick the music.’

  ‘God help us,’ I mutter, trying to push him off the bed.

  ‘Go feed the rat,’ Mom says. She can’t hide her distaste for Laila’s pet rat, Silas. Adam has taken on its care, but none of us has the same enthusiasm as Laila did. ‘We’re leaving in twenty.’

  In the city, I remember why I don’t go shopping with Mom. If she picks up another mid-calf-length dress, I’m going to smack her over the head with it. She’s frowned at everything I’ve shown her, complaining they’re too short or too flimsy like she’s never looked inside my wardrobe.

  Dad lasted ten minutes before he disappeared for a newspaper and coffee. Adam abandoned me right from the get-go. The traitor texted old friends and met up with them, leaving me shopping with my mother.

  I settle on a playsuit which bothers Mom marginally less, even though it’s as short as any of the skirts. I’ve worn her down and I celebrate my victory by annoying her and putting it on right away. She’s emitting random long-suffering sighs when we see Dad at the coffee shop.

  I’m thinking how well we’re doing. How effectively we’re managing to ignore everything broken. I realise that even though our conversations are stilted and our smiles are strained, it was a good idea to come out together. To get away from the village for a little while.

  ‘You’re earlier than I expected.’ Dad looks up from his book while Mom goes to order. ‘I think this must be a record. How have you managed to finish shopping so quickly?’

  ‘We came to an agreement.’ I strike a little pose to show my new outfit, and his eyebrows go up.

  Laughing, I sit across from him. This is almost like before. This is as normal as we’ve been in so long. We’re a forced grimace that eventually becomes a smile.

  ‘Professor Swart?’ a voice says. Slinking down my seat, I see the woman in front of us. She looks around thirty. Long pale hair.

  ‘Margaret.’ Dad smiles at her. She stands there, hovering at the table, and something rings odd. I don’t know why she doesn’t move on, or why she’s looking at me so intently.

  ‘This is my daughter Zara,’ he says, still holding his book. ‘Margaret is doing her PhD in the department and she was a teaching assistant on my first-year course.’

  He’s over-explaining, and looking across the large, crowded room to the counter where Mom’s getting lunch.

  The worry is a prickle down my spine. Suddenly, I’m cold. My legs are covered in goosebumps.

  Margaret is wearing a demure sundress with a cardigan. To put it bluntly, Margaret is hot. But Dad has always stuck to middle managers in pencil skirts, avoiding the murky waters of dalliances with students. Surely he’s not that dumb?

  ‘Meg,’ she says stiffly. ‘I prefer Meg.’

  ‘Is there anything you wanted, Meg?’ Dad is beginning to sound strained.

  She pauses, then says, ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘So how was that talk?’ I look up from beneath my lashes. ‘The one on Byronic heroes in twenty-first-century stories?’

  ‘Oh, it was really good.’ Her enthusiasm falters and she flushes. ‘I mean … I should go, I have a family thing on. See you on Monday, Professor Swart.’ I’m sure the other graduate students call Dad by his first name.

  I’m confused. Terrified. I don’t know if I’ve become as neurotic as Mom. Maybe checking Dad’s computer isn’t a good idea. I don’t know if we’ve just been burned so much that any innocent encounter begins to take on significance that isn’t there.

  I don’t know if Dad had a particular reason for wearing his Rage Against the Machine T-shirt that brings out the green in his hazel eyes and makes his brown arms glow. It shows
off his shoulders, the biceps that are surprisingly defined for an English literature professor pushing fifty.

  What if Dad, thinking he had an extra hour before Mom and I finished shopping, decided to take a chance to meet up with Meg? I don’t know if this was arranged, and Meg was pissed off, or she’s just one of those awkward people who are better with ideas than social niceties. I don’t know.

  But it’s left a bad taste. And I hate that I’ve become so paranoid.

  In the car, I catch Mom’s face through the mirror as she rummages in her bag for her lipstick. For a moment, the mask slips. The strain, the weariness around her eyes and lips are pronounced. She exhales slowly and I see the deadness in her eyes. She pulls out the lipstick and holds it up to the mirror. She watches herself, and by the time the Velvet Teddy is pasted on, so is her smile.

  And it occurs to me, maybe she should go back to her real home. Maybe she should find happiness again. Who am I to keep her from that? But Mom will never leave Adam and me, she’d rather stay in a bad marriage than leave us with Dad. Than have a Lindy replace her in our lives.

  We’re just outside of Kilshamble, and everything is heavy again. I don’t know how to untangle this awful knot.

  I allow myself an Insta peek, to scroll through the many pictures of the life I no longer live.

  Then I see it: the late evening sun behind them, Hannah and Nathan are kissing. Really kissing. Devouring each other actually. It was posted by Ciara two days ago. The filter is dramatic, blurring details and rendering them ethereal. Magical.

  While I feel so dull and ordinary.

  This is why Laila longed for magic. I’m beginning to hope she found it.

  Maybe I’m beginning to hope I find it too.

  I don’t mind that Nathan’s kissing Hannah. My old friends are so far off my radar that it doesn’t hurt. But the picture unsettles me. It highlights that feeling of missing out. Life is happening around me, but I skulk in the shadows. I hide in abandoned houses, talking to an old woman and her ghosts. It doesn’t feel like enough. Looking at the picture, I realise the problem: I don’t feel alive enough. Laila’s dead. She’s literally dead. Can’t do anything at all. But I can.

  I stare at the picture a long while. My legs are hot and sticky against the car leather. Then I delete the app and say to Dad, ‘Can you leave me here?’

  We’re near the school bus stop.

  ‘Where’re you going?’

  ‘It’s a nice day.’ I’m clawing at the handle. ‘You know, fresh air and exercise.’

  I have a sudden longing for Maeve’s house. I want to talk and laugh with Sibéal and Aisling. I want to belong, to matter.

  I want to live.

  Dad pulls over and I’m out of the car, half running, half walking towards the quarry.

  I’ve lost so much in such a short time. Laila, my friends, my very sense of who I am. But as I walk, I know I will keep on going on. There will be new friends, new places. And I will shift, like a snake with its skin, into new versions of myself.

  I knock at the door of Cairn House. No one answers, and yet I can hear voices and scuffling inside. I shouldn’t have pitched up uninvited. I’m about to leave when the door opens.

  ‘Zara, this is a surprise.’ Aisling doesn’t sound as friendly as before.

  ‘Sorry, I should have called. I can come another time.’

  She steps out of the front door and pulls it nearly shut behind her. Inside, I can hear Maeve talking to a man.

  ‘I think that’s a better idea.’ Aisling glances back inside. Her voice is quiet. Maybe I’m paranoid, but it’s like she doesn’t want anyone to know I’m here.

  ‘Hey, look who’s here.’ Sibéal pulls the door wide open. ‘I’ve been hoping you’d come.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yeah, come on in. Mam’s baking.’

  In the hall, a guy, maybe twenty, stands with his arms folded.

  ‘That’s Simon,’ Sibéal says, and leads me to the kitchen. ‘Aisling’s boyfriend.’ Her tone is teasing. ‘It’s new, so I’m still ragging them.’

  She leads me to the kitchen, where Maeve is at the counter sifting flour in a bowl on a stand mixer. There’s a look between Maeve and Aisling, and I wonder what it means.

  ‘Hope you like cake.’ Maeve smiles at me as I cross the room to the table.

  ‘Want to play?’ Sibéal holds up a pack of cards. The others are hovering, watching. When I turn, they scatter. Aisling goes to the tractor stool, Simon leaves for the living room, leaving the door open. The wall’s been painted and the curtains replaced.

  ‘Sure.’ I pull out a chair at the table and watch as she shuffles the pack.

  An unpleasant sensation shoots through me. Like that stomach dip on a roller coaster, but in my head.

  It’s been a day, I tell myself. That odd encounter between Dad and Meg has left me rattled.

  Behind Sibéal, Maeve’s got the stand mixer going on a low speed. The rotary blades are turning, the bowl moving in circles. Simon’s on the couch, and through the open door, I watch him bounce a small rubber ball on the coffee table.

  That odd dissociation becomes worse as I watch Sibéal shuffle the pack.

  ‘I think they’re shuffled now,’ I say to her.

  ‘Will I read your cards?’

  I don’t quite understand until she hands the pack and says, ‘I can’t tell the future but I think the present is always more interesting.’

  She nods for me to cut the deck and I do. Sibéal takes the pack and starts laying cards out on the table. She shuts her eyes for a few seconds, then she looks at me with a penetrating gaze.

  ‘You’re sad, and I know that’s obvious but it’s so thick around you, you can barely see your way. You’re going to be sad for a while longer, this kind of sorrow takes a long time to clear.’

  In the background, the stand mixer is going. Aisling sways on the tractor stool and it emits a long thin whistle each time she swings it. I feel a pressure around my face, like something invisible around me has been disturbed.

  ‘You want something very much.’ Sibéal’s eyes are on mine, like she’s reading me and not the cards. ‘But it will bring dangers that you’ve never dreamed possible.’

  That odd nudging pressure moves down from my face, travelling down my arms, pushing at my legs, then back up to my head.

  I’m transfixed. What has started as a game seems to be something more. I feel like Sibéal is somehow able to look into me and see things that I can’t begin to understand.

  ‘You’ve been following Laila.’ The pressure increases, except now, I’m feeling it inside me. Like it’s somehow crossed my skin, these light tingles in my head. ‘You found something. Hair? Something else?’ Sibéal frowns, like she doesn’t agree with herself. ‘No, just the hair.’

  Her gaze is becoming too intent and I’m beginning to feel dizzy.

  ‘Laila made a shrine,’ Sibéal breathes out. ‘But I can’t see where it is.’

  Nausea rises and I curl my fingers around the seat of the chair.

  ‘There’s a wall up, it’s blocked somehow.’ The tingles are stronger. It feels like invisible hands rummaging inside my head. I’m so light-headed.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sibéal is muttering to herself. ‘There’s something very strong here, but it’s dark and damaged.’

  ‘Focus, Sibéal.’ Maeve’s voice drifts over. ‘Does she know about the Eye? The offerings?’

  ‘You were both close to Laila and not close.’ It’s like boxes being upended, drawers opened and contents tossed aside. ‘You don’t know …’

  ‘David.’ She smiles like a hacker who got into a government database. ‘Ah, you really liked him. You were so disappointed in him when he pushed me. But Zara, I’m no fragile flower. David can’t hurt me.’

  The nudging is harder, more urgent. I hold my hand up to my head and bend over.

  ‘You dream of him.’ She’s still smiling.

  ‘Please stop,’ I breathe out.

/>   ‘Here’s what you have to do, Zara,’ Sibéal whispers to me, concentrating hard. She’s as white as a sheet, with her sleek black hair falling into her bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Sibéal, you’ve got to stop.’ Aisling’s spinning ends abruptly.

  ‘You’ve got to get David to tell you the last two offerings. Go to him. Forgive him, really he didn’t hurt me.’

  ‘He didn’t?’

  ‘No, Zara, silly girl. I’m fine. Now, you go to him. Kiss him. Let it happen. He wants it as much as you do. And then ask for his deepest secret. Ask him if he’s ever been told an ancient truth in a vision. Ask him to tell you the offerings.’

  It feels like the invisible hands have taken something and pushed it into a fold inside my head.

  ‘What must you do?’ Sibéal’s voice is so gentle.

  ‘Go to David. Kiss him. Two offerings.’

  ‘It won’t work, Sibéal,’ Aisling argues. ‘You’re crazy if you think he’ll tell her.’

  ‘He likes her. A lot. Enough to be stupid. Stupider, rather,’ Sibéal snaps at her sister. ‘I don’t see you coming up with anything.’

  ‘Because I’m not rash.’

  Sibéal touches her hands to my head.

  ‘You’re going to forget that I asked you to retrieve the offerings. I can’t make you forget all of this afternoon, but you won’t remember me talking about David. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ I feel so very far away from myself. I feel myself falling off the chair and pulling up my knees.

  But there’s something I need to remember, something about David.

  ‘Mam, make her stop the Delve,’ Aisling pleads. ‘Zara’s in a bad way.’

  ‘But I can see what she knows about—’

  ‘That’s enough for now, Sibéal.’

  Everything is quiet for a moment, and I can feel them all looking at me. I sense Aisling’s fear and worry.

  But David. I must remember David.

  With everything I have, I get to my feet. I am so light-headed and nauseous I can barely stand. Moving away is like breaking an invisible hold. I stumble forward, bumping the table and knocking over the chair.

  I have to remember that thing I have to remember.