by K. C. Lannon
“Is this what family is really like?” Deirdre asked suddenly.
Iain blinked, turning to see her staring at him. Her pale blue eyes, he noticed for the first time, were nearly purple in color—unlike any eyes he’d seen before. And they were wide and imploring.
“What do you mean?” Iain asked, turning so he was facing her on the log.
“I mean—” Deirdre twisted her hands together, holding them against her chest. “I’ve never had a real family, so I don’t know what it’s like. I don’t know if I’ll have a younger sibling who will throw books at me or an older sibling who will look out for me or”—she took a shaky breath—“a father who’s a monster and maybe just abandoned me for no reason.”
Iain’s chest tightened as he grasped what she was asking, what monster she was referring to. He didn’t exactly know how to answer, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings by being too blunt, but he also didn’t want to wave away her concern.
He wasn’t used to thinking this hard before he spoke, not usually caring so much about what he was saying.
Before he could answer, Deirdre spoke up again hoarsely. “You think I’m naïve, don’t you, for looking for my parents? That’s what some of the girls at the orphanage used to call me, among other things. But when I heard the banshee say they were alive, I actually thought they might give me answers. Now I don’t know if I want answers.”
He had thought that, once. He’d thought she was as naïve as he had been when he’d believed the words of a banshee’s fortune years ago, when he’d been a foolish child. But he didn’t see her that way anymore.
“Deirdre,” he said, “you’re not naïve.” As he slowly got out each word, figuring out what he meant as he went along, he gained some clarity. “Hoping they’re alive and will give you answers isn’t naïve. If you feel it in your gut, and if logic’s telling you you’re right, then go with that, yeah?
“It’s when you see all the signs, ignore the warnings, and hope against logic that what you know is wrong…. that’s when it’s a problem.”
“Hmm?” Deirdre tilted her head quizzically.
Iain took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders and focusing his gaze on the ground. “It’s like, uh, with my dad…”
“You’re kind of mumbling. I can’t really hear you.”
“With my dad,” Iain continued, clearer this time, “I-I saw what he was really like, and I heard how he talked about faeries, but I didn’t… accept it. I ignored it, because I just wanted to believe what I wanted to believe… that he was looking out for us, that he was good. But it went against my gut, you know? It went against logic to believe that.
“But see, I know my mum’s alive, and I know she left for a good reason, yeah? So I know in my gut that I should find her. And, uh, I knew in my gut and by reasoning that you were innocent even if I didn’t trust your magic at first.”
Iain let out a breath, turning his flushed face away from Deirdre.
“That makes sense!” She sat up straight, her expression lightening. “Like, I feel in my gut that they’ll have answers, and it didn’t feel true or right when James suggested they were some freaky faery cultists!”
Iain just agreed quietly, not really wanting to hear an explanation for faery cultists and how his little brother knew about them.
“But”—she slumped forward again—“what if they’ve abandoned me because they didn’t want me? What if they’re awful and just left me carelessly, thinking I’d just find my way back, like the typical faery parents Alvey mentioned?”
“You can’t know for certain until you find out for yourself,” Iain said. “You’ve got to know. Good or bad, you’ve got to find out who they are, why they left you, no matter what. I don’t think you’ll have peace until you do.”
Deirdre nodded slowly. “You’re right.”
“And”—Iain swallowed hard—“family isn’t all good or all bad, yeah? My mum—she was wonderful. And there were a lot of good times too, despite everything. And…”
He trailed off, something occurring to him. Then he grabbed James’s abandoned pack from the ground and found Marko’s letters inside. Iain held them out to Deirdre to take. “You should read these too. If you’re going to help us find her, then you should know what James and I know, yeah?”
“I thought…” Deirdre looked up at him, puzzled. “I thought you wanted it to be kept between you and James, your family.”
“I gained some clarity about that,” he admitted. “I was… wrong not to trust you with this.”
I’m wrong a lot, aren’t I?
* * *
Deirdre began to read the letters silently, every now and then turning to Iain and asking him about unknown names or terms used that she didn’t understand. She laughed out loud at Kallista’s story about James and the bag of flour he’d poured over his head and admired her drawings around the border.
She felt a bit uneasy at first, wondering if Iain was expecting her to find something interesting or important as she read. But when he didn’t pressure her, she relaxed and just enjoyed reading and sharing, even when the letters got distressed and anxious, clearly indicating that Kallista was having a very hard time of it.
We’ve got to find her, she thought, thumbing a cross-hatch-shaded drawing of a bird. We’ve got to find her before anything really bad happens.
When she got to a certain letter, Iain suddenly pointed at a paragraph. “Don’t read that part. There’s… some kind of magic going on there, and it isn’t pleasant.”
“Magic?” Immediately Deirdre read it without thinking, pursing her lips. “I don’t see anything special. She’s saying that a Cait Sidhe has got her.”
“I…” Iain’s eyes shone, and he jabbed his finger at the paper. “You can read that?”
“Yeah.” She frowned, looking at him. “Why?”
“You’re— That’s brilliant!” He shot up from his seat, grinning. “We, James and I, we couldn’t read it. It was enchanted. But it must not affect you! A— What did you say it was? A Cait Sidhe?”
“Yeah! That’s Irish Gaelic, right? Is it some kind of Irish faery?”
“I…” Iain frowned, the excitement disappearing from his face. “I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know anything about it?” he asked hopefully.
Deirdre just shrugged. “Sorry. It sounds familiar, but…”
Just as she handed the letters back to Iain, Alvey rolled over, asking, “You two have been whispering over here for the past several minutes. What exactly about these letters from his mother is so interesting?”
Deirdre gasped at her, then stood up, scowling. “You shouldn’t listen in to people’s conversations without them knowing, Alvey! It’s really not—” She stopped, raising her eyebrows as a new thought occurred to her. “Hey, how could you hear well enough to eavesdrop, but you didn’t hear Boyd sneaking up on us in the cave?”
“I was distracted then, whereas now I am bored and weary. ’Tis getting late, is it not? Where is that small boy? We should make haste for a campsite.”
“When are we leaving?” James’s voice came from behind. She turned around as James walked over to the three of them, looking quite surly. He didn’t have a bag on him.
“Where’s my pack?” Iain asked, standing up.
“Over with the others.”
“Fine.” He ran a hand over his face, then looked at his brother. “Deirdre was able to read that part in Mum’s letters—about the faery that’s holding her.”
James’s expression immediately lightened, though it wasn’t any happier. “Really? What was it? What’s it called?”
Deirdre began to sway back and forth on her heels. “It just said it was a Cait Sidhe.”
“That means faery cat,” Alvey said. “There are an ample number of those.”
“What about on the moors?” Iain asked, and James nodded in agreement.
“There are several types there, some great, some small.”
“But it’s not neces
sarily a faery,” James said quickly. “Sometimes, um, it can refer to a witch.”
Iain made a face. “A witch? As in the Scottish play kind of witches?”
“You mean Macbeth?” Deirdre asked; the two boys gave her a look, and she tilted her head, confused. “What’s wrong?”
James ignored her question, going on to say, “Cait Sidhe doesn’t really refer to that type of witches. I don’t think they can predict the future.” James shrugged. “No one really knows much about the ancient witches… only that they could supposedly transform into animals and curse people.”
“It sounded like a faery from how she described it,” Deirdre added.
James frowned, saying flatly, “I guess that explains the banshee’s warning. Cats.”
Letting out a groan of frustration, Iain hid his face in his hands and said, muffled, “Would it have killed her to be a little more specific? I mean, I know we didn’t pay for it, but… if she was trying to be helpful, she kind of botched it.”
“Maybe she only had a vague idea?” James suggested, though he did not address anyone in particular. “Or maybe she thought it was funny and didn’t really care.”
A moment of tense silence followed. Alvey opened her mouth to say something, but Iain smoothly cut her off: “Alvey, let’s get ready to go. We can figure this out later.”
“Very well,” she said with an uncharacteristically warm smile, beginning to roll back toward where she and Deirdre had left their things, with Iain behind her.
James made to follow, but Deirdre reached out for his shoulder. “James, we need to talk.”
He raised an eyebrow, his expression a bit colder than she was used to. “About what?”
She took a breath, thought about it for a second, then said, “First I need to apologize; I never should have gone along with that plan to try to rescue Iain and Alvey. I’m older than you, so I should have realized there was no way in the world that plan would have worked.”
James frowned, looking away as he replied, “It would have worked. It almost worked. If I just had more time to figure it out, then—”
“Even then, it would not have worked! We’re just two people, and they were a bunch of armed, trained soldiers! The plan was stupid.” She winced internally; that was definitely the wrong word to use.
James colored, glaring. “What’s your point then? Just to tell me that I’m stupid, that I’m not clever?”
“No! I think you’re very clever, just…” She searched for the right word, carefully sounding out, “inexperienced. You’re just inexperienced.”
“I’m more experienced than you think. Besides, you didn’t even know that those machines were for mining or that those boxes had dynamite in them.”
Deirdre had heard this strain of smarter-than-thou arguments before from younger girls back at the orphanage, so rather than rattle or irritate her, it helped her refocus and say, “The point is, James, you must be more careful in the future! Doing things like that can—will—get you hurt, or killed. We were just really, really lucky. But we both almost died.”
James scoffed, roughly brushing his bloodied forehead as if to push the memory away. “Aside from Boyd grabbing me, which was a… a big fluke, I was fine!”
“You were this time, but there’s no guarantee next time, James! Look…” She unclipped the button at the cuff of her sleeve and rolled it all the way up to her shoulder. Then she turned her arm toward James, showing him a long, ragged scar that was only a year old.
His eyes bulged only slightly at the sight of it. “Deirdre— What—?”
“I got this while I was hiking, just last autumn. I was the most athletic in the whole school, even more so than some of the village boys… so when I was dared to, I thought I could jump over this one gorge just fine.” She grinned. “I didn’t. Though it was kind of worth it to see this one really snooty girl—she’s the one who dared me—faint at the sight of all the blood. And she always said she wasn’t afraid of anything!”
“What’s the point here?” he asked a bit sharply.
“The point,” Deirdre said carefully as she rolled her sleeve back down, “is that no one ever died from being careful. But loads of people do die from overestimating themselves. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
He looked at her squarely in the eye. “It won’t. I promise.”
She reached over and took his hand in both of hers. He jolted in surprise, but she didn’t let go. He looked down at her hands, his glowering expression softening slightly.
“Can you also promise me that if you ever come up with another big plan like that, you’ll talk about it with me and Iain before you do anything?”
He let out a long sigh, clearly not thrilled by the prospect. “I promise…”
“Look me in the eye and say that.”
He did so and said more firmly, “I promise.”
“Good.”
Chapter Seventeen
Six Years Ago
In a small town on the outskirts of the North York moors, stories had become almost a form of currency. Townsfolk shared tales over drinks after long, hard days of working their farmland—some of them were of legends well-known across the country, while others were local folktales.
Because the moorland was known to be crawling with Unseelie faeries, the nearby villages already shared a sense of kinship and solidarity; they had to be a tight-knit community—no one else in England wanted anything to do with their little cursed towns where people vanished and animals were mysteriously slaughtered. Iron Wardens dreaded being stationed there.
The bond between the villagers was strengthened still by stories of woe, stories of triumph, and stories of hilarious mishap.
There were some tales, however, that the more elderly folk dared not speak of, like of the beast that had roamed the moorland for centuries. They scoffed at the youths who dared to test the limits of the rules born of both superstition and experience.
There were some who, oftentimes on a dare or in a drunken stupor, shouted a name to the wily winds: the name of that beast that prowled the moors. Legend had it that even uttering the name or merely seeing it written on paper brought misfortune. When the wind would inevitably howl back the way it did on the moors, the legend gained traction.
Misfortune, the villagers believed, was also brought by outsiders. Outsiders were not to be trusted or welcomed—for they could be faery folk in disguise.
Despite this belief, somehow no one questioned Vera’s occasional presence in the town—the young traveling fiddler with the fair hair and no trace of English in her foreign, vaguely Slavic accent and the strange, melodic gibberish she sang. No one could quite remember when the young woman had first waltzed into their quiet town—even the elderly knew her to have always been around playing in the pub or on the street for coin. Most accepted with a dazed look in their eye that she had simply always been visiting, which was, of course, impossible.
But Vera was the exception to the town’s rule on strangers. Whenever any other outsider appeared, they were met with shifty eyes and silent, turned backs. It was safer that way.
So on one particular evening when an unfamiliar woman darted into the town’s only pub, which was abuzz with live music and boisterous chatter, the wind and lashing rain flinging open the door with a loud slam, everyone gawked and ceased their conversations.
Even Vera stopped plucking out a tune with pale, nimble fingers, ceased her rhythmic jiving, and trailed off in her singing. She stared, also, but not out of fear or suspicion. She stared like a doll—glassy eyes peering under lashes, a knowing, secretive smile painted on pink lips.
The outsider woman had an appearance that some in the village considered unusual—long, dark hair down to her waist, covered by a bright red head scarf, a modest sweater, twin braids plastered wetly to her face on either side, olive-brown skin, and most notably, long colorful skirts that fell just above her ankles.
Once the door was closed to the pelting rain and whistling wind, the a
ir grew stagnant and still.
“She’s one of those Traveller types!” one of the servers had whispered to the barkeep.
“My goodness!” The woman grunted as she slammed the door closed by throwing her petite body against it. “That wind is strong!”
Oblivious to the stunned silence, the woman had continued loudly, “What kind of man forces a woman to get out of his truck and walk the rest of the way to town in the middle of a downpour? ‘But the moors are cursed!’ Pah! And I still paid him the full amount for the journey anyway. Foolish, foolish.”
She rested her hands on her hips, looking around the room, taking in all the gaping expressions. “Is there anyone that might tell me about the Moorland Beast? I was told this is the town to ask, yes?”
Someone coughed.
Another swore under his breath.
It was at that moment when she received no spoken response that she must have realized what kind of town she had stumbled into and how odd she must have appeared. The woman had sighed wearily and retreated to a corner table by the blazing hearth.
“What’d you think her story is?” one of the older patrons asked the barmaid, dabbing at his sweating glass of ale with a napkin first and his face second. “D’you think she’s one of his?”
The barmaid had frowned, chewing on one of her chipped black painted nails. She’d heard the rumors that the beast of the moorlands sucked out and devoured the souls of the lost that wandered the moors at night and used them as servants to spread his terror, but she figured, like most young people her age, that was just talk to keep teenagers inside and sober at a decent hour.
“I s’pose she wouldn’t be askin’ around for him if she were one of his messengers,” the man answered his own question, his tense posture relaxing somewhat as he assured himself. “She’s still got to be bad luck though, I reckon.”
“Never seen her around before, that’s for sure.” The barmaid then nodded in the direction of the musician, who was smiling fondly at the woman like one would an old friend, and said, “But Vera seems to know her, so she must be all right. Maybe she’s a traveling performer too.”