Prince of Hazel and Oak (Shadowmagic Book 2)

by John Lenahan

  ‘Who told you I was engaged?’ the Imp demanded.

  I quickly retrieved my hand. ‘Essa?’ I croaked.

  ‘Essa told you I was engaged?’

  ‘No, Essa is engaged,’ I said.

  ‘I know Essa is engaged but why is she going around telling people I am engaged? I’m a Prince of Ur. A rumour like that can cause a lot of trouble.’

  My head hurt too much for this kind of confusion. ‘No one said you were engaged.’

  ‘You said I was engaged.’

  ‘I didn’t mean you, I thought you were Essa.’

  ‘You think I look like Essa?’ Araf looked concerned. ‘I’ll go get a healer.’

  I dropped my head back on the pillow and covered my eyes. ‘Maybe you should get a healer – I need something for my head.’

  ‘There is something on your bedside table there.’

  I sat up and knocked back the thimbleful of liquid from a silver shot-glass. I’m sure my face went as red as the inside of a thermometer and, as it returned to normal colour, my headache subsided. When I could breathe again I said, ‘You knew that Essa was engaged?’

  ‘Well yes, everyone knows that. Gerard announced it about three weeks ago. He sent all of the Runelords a cask of special wine – it was a lovely red. The bouquet had the slightest hint of—’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I interrupted.

  ‘You didn’t ask. I assumed, since you left, that you had no interest in Essa.’

  ‘Well, you assumed wrong,’ I said, as I slowly sat up and put my feet on the floor.

  ‘But wasn’t Essa interested in you by the end of your last visit?’

  ‘She was.’

  ‘And you left her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling the pain in my head starting to return.

  ‘That is not a good thing,’ the Imp said in an ominous tone.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have known Essa a long time, my friend – she is not the forgiving type.’

  Mom apparently had administered first aid and chewed out Essa for trying to take my head off. You know how she gets when someone attacks her little bear cub. She also had given me some sort of meds that knocked me out for the whole night – so I was surprised when sunshine blinded me as I opened the door. Morning in the Hazellands was a busy place. Imps and Leprechauns were clearing away rubble and rebuilding walls, while others were drilling or practising archery with Spideog.

  I’ve started to realise that Araf only gets chatty when he is nervous or really happy. This morning he was still euphoric about his time with his fellow farmer Imps in the Field, so I pretended to be interested and asked him about his day digging in dirt. That kept him talking until we got our food and found a quiet table in the canteen.

  ‘So who is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who, the Banshee who is engaged to Essa.’

  ‘He is Turlow,’ Araf hery w/p>

  ‘So who is he then?’

  ‘He’s Turlow.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He is The Turlow?’

  ‘Araf, it doesn’t matter how many different articles you use before saying Turlow, it doesn’t explain anything.’

  ‘Have you never heard the story about Ériu and her sisters?’

  A spark flickered in my deep memory. Dad told me something about this when we were in the Rowan forest but there was so much going on and so much to remember. ‘Remind me.’

  Araf sighed like I was a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. ‘Ériu was the first. She discovered The Land. She either found or created the first oak and maybe did the same for the Leprechauns. Then she sent for her two sisters Banbha and Fódla. Fódla,’ Araf said as he touched his forehead in a semi-religious gesture, ‘created or found the Imps and the Orchardlands.’

  ‘What does this have to do with The Turlow?’

  ‘Banbha was different from her sisters – darker. She created or, depending on what you believe, found the Yewlands. Then she travelled to the Otherworld, killed the Banshee King and convinced his son, Turlow, to come with her to defend Tir na Nog’s shores. That is how the Banshees came to The Land.’

  ‘Are you saying that this guy is that Turlow?’

  ‘No, Turlow is the name passed down from father to son. This Turlow is said to be the direct descendant of the original Turlow. He is The Turlow. It is his name and his title.’

  ‘So am I supposed to be impressed?’

  ‘It is very impressive.’

  ‘Did you hear him keep calling Essa “Princess”?’

  ‘Essa is a princess,’ Araf said, looking confused.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s the way he said it. And now that I think of it, he called me a Faerie.’

  A little buzz started on the other side of the room which caused me to turn. Mom and Dahy had just entered and were making a beeline to our table.

  Araf stood, so I did too. Mom gave me a hug and asked after my head.

  ‘I’m fine thanks.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ She held my face in both of her hands and looked deep into my eyes.

  ‘I’m sure, Mom.’

  ‘Good, because we have work to do.’

  The next couple of days were exhausting. The Land is a magnificent and beautiful place but it is seldom restful. I spent my time equally between rebuilding walls, training new recruits in sword-fighting and, most taxing of all, deciphering and filing old manuscripts, read with Mom’s magic paperclip.

  There were only two of Mom’s amber reader thingies, so ten of us rotated in twenty-four-hour shifts. It meant that I did four hours reading every twenty hours, resulting in my stint getting four hours later every day. My first couple of shifts were mostly spent trying to get my written Gaelic back up to speed. Dad had made me learn how to read, write and conjugate ancient Gaelic but it wasn’t the language I read my comic books in and the stuff I was reading could hardly be called page-turners. My first thrilling manuscript was a contract and shipping manifest between the Elves and the Vinelands. It took me all of the four hours to figure out that it was a barter agreement where the Elves would provide wood for barrels and Fingal (who was Essa’s grandfather) would pay in wine. From the amount of wine it seemed to me that the timber industry is a pretty lucrative business. I guess it’s hard work when you have to ask permission from the trees if you want to cut them down. I had an image of an elf kneeling in front of a tree with an axe, saying, ‘Please, I’m desperate for a drink?’

  When I finally figured out that the piece of parchment I was studying didn’t contain anything that would help us with Dad’s condition I would place it in an envelope and label it so that in the future it could be transcribed into a new book. Not a job I will be volunteering for.

  It wasn’t just the grammar that was proving taxing but the actual reading of a manuscript required immense concentration. The paperclip thingy sensed the page you were looking at as long as you were focused, but if you were reading, say, a scintillating essay on seed germination and you happened to let your mind wander, the page you were reading would fade into all of the other pages in the book, producing thousands of words on one page. Since there was no way to find your way back to the page you were reading, you would have to go back to the beginning.

  After my first session I staggered back to my tent and blissfully closed the eyes that I had been afraid to even blink for the last four hours. Not even the blinding headache could keep me from falling asleep, but I didn’t nap long. Dahy woke me and, despite my protests, dragged me out to the training fields and put me in charge of teaching sword-fighting to a group of helpless recruits. As soon as the old man was out of sight I told my charges to take the rest of the day off and I crawled back to bed. The next day Dahy warned me that if I did that again I would be cleaning latrines and I had a suspicion that he meant it.

  My second reading session started promisingly enough when I found what I thought was going to be an interesting essay on banta stick manufacture. After I don’t
know how many pages, I figured out it could have easily been condensed to this one sentence without losing anything: ‘Get some good wood and make a stick out of it.’ By the end, my head hurt worse than when Essa hit me with one of those sticks.

  I periodically saw Essa but we didn’t speak to one another. I was desperate for some alone time with her but I was so busy, and when I wasn’t busy, I was exhausted. When I did see her she was always with The Turlow. The closest I got was an uncomfortable lunch where the royal couple sat behind me at a table just within hearing distance. I couldn’t make out much but every time I heard him say ‘Princess’ I felt like returning my lunch back onto my plate.

  After about a week’s worth of reading sessions I was starting to believe that 99 per cent of the books that were in the old library were about farming. I ploughed through endless manuscripts explaining crop rotation, plough manufacture, planting timetables and even one about delineating soil types by taste. I filed that under the heading of ‘Eating Dirt’. I got mildly excited when I found a scrap entitled ‘Leprechaun Genealogy’ but it was literally just a list of names. I filed that as ‘A Short History of Short People’.

  I started screening my reading material so as to keep my sanity. I’m sure Araf would find a paper on ‘Planting Row Orientation According to Crop and Season’ fascinating but it just made me want to hold my breath and bang my head against the floor. When no one was looking I scanned my new manuscripts for key terms. I’d clip the reader on a sliver of paper and if I saw any words like: seed, or soil, or yield, I would slip the piece under the bottom of the pile. I prayed to the gods that I wouldn’t still be doing this by the time we got down to that fragment again.

  The reading eventually got easier, partly because I got better at it but mostly because Mom invented a Shadowbookmark that held your page if your mind wandered. But it was the sword-fight teaching that became the highlight of my day. In the beginning my students were pretty much in awe of me, even after seeing me get popped in the temple by Essa. They all wanted to know about the Battle of the Twins of Macha and how I chopped Cialtie’s hand off and the Army of the Red Hand and what the Real World was like. I spent a lot of the first couple of days just talking to them, especially when Dahy wasn’t around, but then I really started to get into teaching. A lot of these kids were just bad, so I had to reach back into my memories to the basics that Dad had taught me when I was a kid. Back when I thought it was really cool being taught sword-fighting, as opposed to when I was a teenager and I thought Dad was a borderline lunatic. I found that the nice thing about teaching is that it makes you realise that a lot of the stuff you think you do by instinct and without thinking, is actually a well-honed skill. Dishing out all of this stuff to eager students, who were improving, made me appreciate my father even more and it gave me strength when I had to go back to the reading sessions.

  I was usually so tired at night that I didn’t have the energy to kick Brendan out of my tent – so we became roommates. He spent most of his days under the tutelage of Spideog. When no one else but me could hear, he made fun of his master’s mystical ravings, but he listened and adopted every drop of archery advice he was given. When he wasn’t talking about arrows and trajectories or how sore his arms and fingers were, he quizzed me on our progress towards finding a cure for Oisin. He never talked about his daughter. I suspected that the reason he had thrown himself so fully into training was to give himself something else to think about.

  Mom gently kicked me awake at four in the morning. It was my shift in the reading room. Since Mom had the stint before me we saw each other every day at changeover. We didn’t say much. I didn’t ask her if she found anything ’cause I knew if she did, she would tell me. She looked tired as she handed me an envelope that had my handwriting on it. Inside it was a fragment of a document I had read the morning before about the cross-pollination of grape plants. I had entitled it, ‘Everything will be Vine in the Morning’.

  ‘Is that a joke?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, it was supposed to be but obviously it didn’t work on you.’

  She gave me that patronising mother look.

  ‘Sorry, Mom, I’m just trying to keep my sanity in there.’

  ‘I know, son,’ she said as she cupped my cheek in her palm. ‘Just have a little thought of the poor people who are going to have to sort this paperwork out after us.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek, ‘get some rest, you look beat.’

  It was still dark when Mom and I got outside. The November air stung my cheeks as I walked her back to her tent. She promised me she would sleep and not sit up all night working and worrying. Then I turned and took a deep cold breath and steeled myself for an early morning adventure in dull literature. It was as bad as being back at school – worse actually; I didn’t have Sally’s notes to borrow here. As I groped in the dark towards the always lit reading room, a flicker of light caught my eye. As I got closer I saw it was the unmistakable glow of Lampróg light. My heart skipped a beat as I saw the only girl I know that travels with a firefly. As she heard me approach she cupped the bug in her hand but when she recognised me, she opened her fingers and bathed her face in light. Wow, Essa is beautiful in any light but she really is made for firefly light.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ she said, breaking the magical moment that was obviously playing out only in my head.

  ‘I’m off to do my shift in the reading room. What are you doing up? Is the Turd-low snoring?’

  ‘It’s Turlow,’ she said, ‘and you only have to call him The Turlow at official functions.’

  ‘Like your wedding?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘So are you really going to spend a lifetime with a snorer? You would think with all of the magic healing stuff around here they could cure that and you wouldn’t have to be roaming around all night.’

  ‘I’m not awake because of him. I’m not sleeping with him and he’s not a snorer.’ She was getting more flustered with every word.

  ‘Why not? Oh no, is he diseased? These royal weddings are so treacherous.’

  Essa threw both of her hands into the air. ‘Why did you have to come back?’ she hissed and stormed off, leaving her firefly fluttering around confused. I whispered, ‘Lampróg,’ and it tentatively came and sat in the palm of my hand as quietly, in the darkness, I answered Essa’s question, ‘I came back for you.’

  I bounced into the reading room with the echo of Essa saying ‘I’m not sleeping with him’ rolling around in my head. It wasn’t until I placed the first piece of parchment into the Shadowreader that my spirits dipped. The Shadowbook was a collection of Leprechaun poetry. I had to stick it back in the pile – there was no way I was going to sift through poetry at this hour all of thee morning. The next piece caught my eye ’cause it was short and it had two names I recognised on it. It was a letter from Spideog to Dahy describing the last battle of Maeve’s army in the Fili war.

  Apparently the forces of the House of Duir were seriously getting their butts kicked by Maeve and the Fili. The Shadowmagic stuff was completely unknown to them and they found it impossible to defend against. After Maeve issued an ultimatum to Finn, which he refused, the Fili regrouped into one giant battalion with Maeve in the centre. Using several barrels of tree sap, the Fili queen conjured up some sort of spell. Everyone watching could feel the power of it building in the air and then, with a large flash of light that seemed to implode without a sound, the Fili were gone.

  I always thought the Fili were killed but they just vanished. They left behind their clothes, weapons and every other earthly possession, but the Fili themselves had just disappeared. Spideog finished by writing, ‘It was a blessing for The Land, my friend, but a personal disappointment for me. I would have liked to have taken a few Fili down before I died in battle.’

  I could see now why my grandfather Finn had forbidden Shadowmagic – it had caused much hardship. Now, ironically, it was the only thing keeping my father alive.

  The ne
xt slip of paper grabbed my attention; it was a thesis on sword parries and counter-attacks. I knew I would find it interesting and possibly very useful for my students but it wasn’t going to get Dad healthy so I just skimmed it and stuffed it into an envelope. I wondered when I would have the leisure time to come back later and read it properly. With a little over an hour to go I found something else. I was pretty sure it had nothing in it that would help Dad but there was no way I was going to skip it. It was entitled: ‘Banbha and The Turlow’.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Grey Ones

  This manuscript was old and it certainly wasn’t easy to decipher. I admit I started reading it just to get some dirt on Essa’s Turd-low boy but I soon forgot all of that when I got into the meat of it. It was the story of the end of the first millennium, when the three sisters ruled The Land. The original Turlow went to Banbha and demanded to be allowed to return to the Otherworld. Banbha told him that leaving was impossible. She warned that the further any of them sailed from The Land, the faster they would age and die. The price of immortality, Banbha told Turlow, was that he and his kinsmen must remain in The Land.

  Turlow refused to believe her and set sail for his long-lost homeland. But as he sailed away he and the members of his crew felt the effects of ageing in their bones. Their skin creased and when their hair began to grey, they turned back, daring to go no further. Turlow and his group, now called ‘the Grey Ones’, still did not give up searching for a way to leave Tir na Nog. A sorcerer atop Mount Cas told them of a creature called tughe tine whose blood could renew their youth and allow them to leave unharmed. Even though the sorcerer told them that gettinhis blood would be an extremely perilous undertaking, they swore that they would find it.

  When Banbha heard of their quest she and her guard set out to stop them. Neither Banbha or her guard, nor Turlow and the Grey Ones were ever seen again.