by C. J. Cooke
Inside the car, the wildling sat calmly in the passenger seat. “Where are we going, Mummy?” she asked, and my stomach clenched.
“We’re just going for a drive,” I said in that same light tone that I’d have used if I were speaking to the real Luna. Isla pulled off and I started my engine, following behind. I could see Mirrin was with her.
Isla drove us out to the large forest on the other side of the island. The wildling kept talking, her voice just like Luna’s. I could feel my mind beginning to tear itself apart, the divide between reality and a nightmare beginning to collapse.
“Are we going hiking?” the wildling asked.
“Just a little walk.” I had to force myself to say it.
Isla parked behind under some trees. She handed me a backpack and we walked into the forest, Isla’s steps quick and swift as she led the way. In the distance I could make out others, and I figured that Isla must have alerted the “wildling committee.” The wildling was a terrible threat, and they’d come to make sure it was taken care of.
My stomach dropping, I took the wildling’s hand. It felt exactly like Luna’s.
“This is it,” Mirrin told me quietly, nodding at a clearing. I saw a group of trees that looked like they’d been burned. The burning trees, I remembered.
The people from the committee drew closer. I saw some of them were wearing balaclavas, and others were carrying rowan branches. Rowan, I thought. For protection.
Isla flashed Luna a smile, then turned to me. “You brought everything?”
I swallowed back a sob. “I think so.”
She took a step closer and placed a hand on my arm. “I know this is hard. But you must do this. If you ever want to see your girls again, you must do this.”
“How do you know?” I said, looking down at Luna. Her tummy was rumbling and she was beginning to whine. Luna always hated walking long distances.
She gripped my hand. “Remember what I said? If you don’t act, you’ll lose everything. I promise you—Saffy and Clover will be found once you do this.”
I took off my backpack and, with trembling hands, pulled out the contents that Isla had packed.
The wildling’s whining was getting louder, more persistent, and Isla saw it was causing me to soften. She sounded so like my daughter. Perhaps she was. Perhaps there was some other explanation for the two Lunas.
But how could there be?
“Mum, I’m hungry,” she said, flopping down to the ground. “Can I please have a sandwich?”
Isla answered for me. “Of course you can,” she told the wildling, throwing her a wide, all-the-teeth smile. “But first, we have to play a game.”
“A game?”
Isla nodded. “You need to follow your mother.”
“What game are we playing?” the wildling asked, her face angled up at me, full of innocence.
I tried to smile, like Isla, but it was so hard to pretend. So difficult, when she looked so like Luna. “It’s kind of like hide-and-seek,” I said. My voice sound far-off, as though it wasn’t mine.
“Only we have to tie you to a tree while you count to a hundred,” Isla added.
It was time. The people from the committee were visible and coming closer. I thought they might hurt me if I didn’t do it. I thought of Luna, back at the bothy, all alone. What if they hurt her, too?
I could see that the wildling was getting distressed, her face crumpling. She looked so small, so vulnerable. I pressed a hand to my mouth, and instantly Isla was by my side, reassuring me.
“I know how hard this is,” she said. “Remember, everything you see before you is not what it seems.”
I nodded, but when the wildling turned, I had to crouch down to check the burn on the back of her leg to reassure myself that she wasn’t Luna.
And there it was. Four numbers, in a vertical row.
The sight of the numbers sent a fresh chill ripping through me. It was still there. The mark of a wildling.
“Stand against the tree,” I said, straightening. But the wildling looked at me with such fear on her face that I felt my resolve weaken again. It felt unnatural to treat a child this way, my own child, and yet I clung to what Isla had said. She was a wildling. She had to be.
Tentatively, the wildling stood against the tree, her face full of terror. I tried not to look in her eyes as I moved the rope around her, fastening her there.
Isla placed a bundle in my hands. The long, sharp knife from her home, wrapped in a blanket.
The wildling’s eyes fell on the blade and she started to cry. “I love you, Mummy!” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Do it now, Liv!” Mirrin shouted from somewhere in the trees. “Now!”
I raised the knife and willed myself to do what needed to be done. My daughters’ faces flashed in my mind. Saffy. Clover. Luna. I was wrong when I’d wished I’d never had them. Despite everything, no matter how terrible our lives had been, it was all worth it.
I would die for them.
And I would kill for them.
“Please, Mummy!”
I looked down into the wildling’s face, into the terror that was drawn across it. In that instant, something inside me sparked to life, screaming that this was my daughter. My instincts were suddenly loud, stronger than Isla’s whispers behind me and the wind in the trees and the fears that screamed in my head.
I brought down the knife to cut the ropes, but Luna had somehow wiggled her arm free and raised it, catching the nick of the blade before I could stop it in time. Blood flew through the air, landing on my face. I moved the blade to the ropes, cutting her free.
I shouted at her to run. Luna darted through the trees, quickly moving out of sight. I glanced around. Isla stared at me, her mouth open. She reached forward to grab me, but I lunged away. Behind her, I saw villagers starting to head after Luna.
I broke into a run in the opposite direction, drawing them away from her.
V
I could not kill Amy. I knew that, as much as I knew I was looking at the mark of a wildling on my wife’s skin. I could never kill her, not for anything.
I told her to relay to me what had happened when she’d gone through Witches Hide. She said that she arrived on the shore and found herself addressing the daughter of Christopher Darroch, Marion, who told her that the year was 1707. The proof, she said, lay in the church graveyard, where a fresh tombstone was marked with the year—1707, just as the mark on her skin stated.
Amy was mesmerized, she said, and terrified, for although she looked for me, she could not find me.
She climbed back into the cave and went through once more, hoping to arrive back in 1667. She went dozens of times, the cave spitting her out at whim to the years before her own birth, before her mother’s birth, and far into the future. She said she passed through the cave and it sent her where it wished her to go, branding the year on her skin each time like a burn.
Slowly, she lifted her right sleeve. Just as trees are ringed inside their bark with each passing year, so, too, did the flesh of her arm report hundreds of fiery red numbers, etched painfully into her skin. All marking the years to which she had traveled.
“Time’s stigmata,” she said, fingering a particularly livid wound.
She told me she spent two months in 1921, hiding in an abandoned croft on the south of Lòn Haven and living off crops and stolen milk from a nearby farm. She knew she had to work out the spell to enable her to return to her original time. And once she did, she went through.
“So . . . do you know everything that is to come?” I said, feeling sick at the thought of it. What would that kind of knowledge do to a person?
“The boy they killed,” she said. “Angus’ son. He wasn’t a wildling. He had traveled through the cave from the future.” She turned her face to the fire, her jaw set. “I’m going to tell the Privy Council
that the mark isn’t what they think. That it’s not the mark of the fae.”
I told her, as gently as I could, that they’d never, ever believe her. They would believe she was bewitched, or in league with the Devil. They would kill her for possessing the mark.
It had to remain a secret.
“Why don’t we go through the cave together?” I told her. “You’ve worked out the spell that sends you back to the time you came from, have you not?”
She nodded. “There is a problem with that idea,” she said. There was a possibility of encountering yourself in the past, or in the future. In such a case, there would be two of you. Two Amys, or two Patricks.
I could not comprehend this.
“If this happens, you must be careful not to take hands with your other self. If you do, the two of you will become one.”
She was both in awe and fearful of the magic, of interrupting the course of events. We were taught, as children, not to dabble with the course of nature. This was the same; she had seen her sister in the past, but did not approach her for fear of changing the order of time. And while she ached to prevent her sister’s death, she knew that there were consequences to using such magic.
We planned one day to go through the cave together. We just had to decide on the year.
But the Privy Council had other ideas. Despite her efforts to conceal the marks on her skin, Isobel Boyman, one of Amy’s good friends, spotted them while they were walking. She told the elders, and a charge was given to apprehend her immediately.
Not just Amy.
They also came for me.
“Amy and Patrick Roberts,” a voice called from the front door. I looked through the slats of the wood and saw a crowd of ten men, maybe more, all of them armed.
“Come out now or be forced out by fire!”
SAPPHIRE, 1998
I
“I’ve done it,” Brodie says as soon as he climbed up the rocks. “I told Rowan it was over.”
She studies his face, scared to believe what he is saying. “You told her.”
He nods. “Aye. I told her.” He kisses her again, his tongue quick and searching. She pushes him back.
“And what did she say?”
“She wanted to know . . . if . . .”
“If what?”
“If I was in love with you.”
“What did you say?”
He looks away. “I said, yes. I’m in love with you.”
His tone isn’t convincing. “And was that it? She was OK with it?”
“Aye. She was fine.” He grins, slipping his hand under her shirt. “Now, about that payment you promised.”
II
The next day is Samhain. Saffy doesn’t go to school. She feels like a coward, but the thought of seeing Rowan’s sullen face, stained with tears, no doubt hissing to everyone in earshot how Saffy stole her boyfriend, doesn’t exactly appeal. And at least she’d not have to endure any more poetry.
And she needs to process what had happened with her and Brodie, the so-called loss of her virginity. She didn’t feel like she’d lost anything. It had felt like a violence to her body, and that was really what she needed to process—why an act of love should feel so much like violence. He hadn’t even kissed her, hardly even touched her. Just pushed her knickers to one side and shoved himself in, and she’d whimpered for him to stop but he kept going, panting like a dog for thirty seconds until it was over, and she felt blood wetting her legs.
Only then did the fear set in that she might get pregnant.
“Did you use a condom?” she whispered as he buttoned himself up.
He shook his head. “Pull-out method. Just as safe.”
She had no idea what the pull-out method was. She’d ask Machara, once she went back to school.
She spends the day in the hut in the woods, smoking and listening to music. She doesn’t need food or water. She doesn’t feel hungry at all, isn’t even cold despite the shade of the trees and the damp clinging to the walls of the hut. She’s stopped bleeding but inside she feels bruised and uncomfortable. She tries to quell her misgivings about sex by recalling Brodie telling her that he loved her. The weak look on his face when he’d climaxed, and the way he’d laid his forehead against hers, as though they were the sole survivors of a cataclysmic event, bonded by the agony and ecstasy of sex. Perhaps the ecstasy part will happen for her, one day. For now, she hopes she doesn’t have to do it again for a long time.
She doesn’t hear the first couple of knocks on the door of the hut. She is absorbed in her book, the grimoire. She’s learned about wildlings, and she wants to tell the whole community of Lòn Haven that they were wrong. Or at least share the book with them. Maybe it was fictional, but it was very convincing.
Another knock. Luna, she thinks. Or maybe Liv. She removes her earphones and stands up, yanks the door open, and makes to pull her little sister into a hug.
But it isn’t Luna. And it isn’t Liv.
“Hi,” Rowan says. Saffy’s stomach drops. She looks over the figure in her doorway, dressed in a long black cape over a purple velvet dress. She doesn’t look upset or angry. She looks calm, even friendly. As though she’s popped by for a chin-wag over a bottle of vodka.
“Hi,” Saffy says warily. “How did you know where I was?”
“I need to talk to you.”
Saffy hesitates. She feels suddenly trapped. Why had she even opened the door? She straightens. “What’s this about?”
“This,” Rowan says lightly, producing a thick wadge of paper and holding it out to her.
Saffy takes it. “What is this?”
“Have a look and see,” Rowan says. “They’re all over the village.”
Saffy takes one of the sheets of paper and stares down in horror. It is a photocopy of her posing naked in the Longing. One of the Polaroids she had given Brodie.
“How did you get these?” she says, grabbing the rest from Rowan. There are dozens of photocopies. Hundreds. She starts to tear them up frantically. “Why did you do this?”
“Me?” Rowan says, affronted. “I didn’t do anything. I came to warn you. Brodie made copies.”
Saffy covers her mouth, utterly horrified. “Brodie? Why would he make copies?”
Rowan gives a little smile. “They’re everywhere. He said he even sent them to your old school back home.”
Saffy bursts into tears, letting the papers fall from her hands to the ground. She has never felt such crippling shame, and now it comes to rest in her, like a weight on all her organs.
“You poor thing,” Rowan says, stooping to gather up the papers before they blew into the trees. “Brodie told you he’d broken up with me, isn’t that right?”
Saffy nods, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Rowan gives a coy smile as she curls the papers into a thick scroll, removing a hair band from her wrist and sliding it down the tube. “Well, he didn’t. He thinks I don’t know about you, but I do.” She glances behind her. “You want to go for a walk?”
III
Saffy isn’t sure what Rowan is up to, whether she has really come to warn her or if she is just wanting to gloat. She offers Saffy weed. Hell yes, she wants weed. And she wants to scream into the air and punch Brodie’s stupid face and erase everything that’s happened.
They head toward the moonlight that streams through the trees, and when they reach the road, she can see lights from the village in the distance, a low thrum of music.
“They’re celebrating Samhain,” Rowan says. “It’s the biggest event of the year on the island.”
“I thought you’d be celebrating,” Saffy says.
Rowan smiles. “I am. But obviously I needed to tell you about this.” She holds up the scroll, and Saffy takes it, holding her spliff to one end until it catches alight. She stands for a moment, holding the sheaf of photocopies alight li
ke a torch. She feels daring as it blazes, letting it move down close to her hand before dropping it to the ground and stamping it out.
“I hate him,” Saffy says, punctuating the words with a fresh stamp on the photocopies.
Rowan takes a long drag of her joint and exhales in Saffy’s direction. “What you have to understand about Brodie is that he likes to control people.”
“Is that why he made the photocopies?” Saffy asks, looking at the ashes on the ground. She could burn twelve more sheafs and it wouldn’t stop the pictures spreading. He has the Polaroids. She was stupid to have done that.
“I think it comes from a deep-seated fear of not being good enough,” Rowan says wisely. “The control impulse. Like he has to force people to do things that they’d probably do anyway if he was just kind to them.” She gives a little shrug of her shoulders and a smile, as though this is acceptable.
“Why did you spend three years with him, then?” Saffy says.
“Because I love him,” Rowan says, blowing a ring of smoke.
Saffy wants to say something to that but her thoughts have become soggy, a big sopping mess of anger and confusion. She hadn’t felt ready to have sex with him, but at the time she’d felt like she was just being stupid. He’d coaxed and made a little joke about payment, and her confusion over her own feelings had blindsided her into acquiescing. She wanted to be wanted, and at the same time she didn’t want to sleep with him. At least, not so early. Not in a way that felt like she was paying him.
But she did it anyway, because it felt like too hard a thing to explain.
They make their way slowly to the Longing, the conversation spinning off into music, TV shows, and they have a long conversation about how Quentin Tarantino glorifies violence against women in his films but manages to get away with it because of his talent (“You have to admit Pulp Fiction is crazy-brilliant,” Saffy offers), and also because Hollywood was basically the patriarchy. Saffy still isn’t clear on the purpose of this chat. Maybe Rowan just wants to get to know her. She’s been Brodie’s girlfriend for a long, long time. Maybe she’s just trying to clear the air so that there’s no bad feeling between them.