It’s such an obvious plan that there are specific rules and penalties against it. But Megan thinks that even if they get in trouble, they’ll have saved their friend’s life for another fortnight. And that might be enough, for who knows what will happen in two weeks? Conor could be Called. Or Nessa.
“I’m always nervous of the Cage,” says Nicole, but Megan rolls her eyes.
“It’s the best and only time off I ever get in this place. Away from your snoring, Nicole.”
“I do not snore!”
“It must be a drill you keep under your pillow then!”
And Marya claps her hands and Nicole groans, because there’s nothing she can do now: Megan’s poor witticism will reach every dorm by nightfall.
Nessa grins too, until she realizes she hasn’t thought of Anto all morning. But already he’s creeping back into her head. “What do I care?” he said.
But here is Megan again, dragging her back to reality with a squeeze of her arm. “I need you focused,” she says. “Danú’s tits, but you’re a dozy slut.” This is Megan’s version of gentle.
“I thought that’s how you liked your sluts?” says Nicole, finally scoring a point. She’s off her game today. Maybe afraid of what will happen tonight if she takes part in balking Conor of his prey.
And so she should be! thinks Nessa.
Then everybody jumps, because Liz Sweeney is right there at the table with them.
“Well, well,” she says, looking from one face to another, before finally settling on Aoife. “So you weren’t able to keep your mouth shut, I see.” She grins as if she doesn’t mind at all—which means Conor doesn’t. He’s no fool, whatever else Nessa may think of him, and that means he has already guessed their oh-so-obvious plan, and that he has taken it into account.
“Mind if I join you?” she says.
“Yes,” Megan replies, but Liz Sweeney simply grins and slides into Squeaky Emma’s empty chair.
Ms. Breen is not yet at the top table. She’s stuck in her office with the human wreckage that calls itself Frank O’Leary squashed into the hard chair in front of her. His face is thinner than ever now, his legs too long for the space between him and her desk, his eyes glistening hollows.
“Oh, Frank,” she says, “you’re not leaving me with much choice, are you?”
“You promised … ,” he says. It’s the voice of an Egyptian mummy—far away and all the words crumbling to dust the instant they reach her ears. His breath too stinks of the tomb. It is all she can do not to gag. “You said … after she … when I lost my wife. You said I’d retire with dignity at the end of the year … Over Christmas, you said.”
She sighs, rubbing her eyes and thinking they can’t look much better than his. She sleeps badly, always waiting for the sound of mourning bells, despite the fact that they never ring without her say-so, and never at night. But there’s only so much a mind can take before it snaps: year after year of watching the murder of her beloved children here in the school. Of pretending wisdom and calm when all she wants is to be locked up somewhere quiet where the decisions are taken away from her.
But unlike Frank O’Leary, every morning she finds anew the strength she needs. She has been at this horrible game so long now that in the worst of times habit alone is just enough to keep her back straight.
“Listen, Frank,” she says, “you walked out of a class. I’m pretty sure you’ve had a nervous breakdown. Aren’t you? That means you’re delicate now. Too delicate for this kind of work.” She knows her words are cruel, that her job has made a monster of her, yet she does not stop. “The students need the best if they are to live.”
“Nobody knows more about the Grey Land than I do.”
“I know that. Your writings are brilliant. Why don’t you concentrate there?”
He manages to raise his chin. “Alanna,” he says, using her first name, as he has not done in over a year, “listen, I … ” And then he shocks her by slipping out of the chair and going onto his knees in front of her, his long fingers damp on the edge of her desk. “There’s only … a month to go. Six weeks anyway. Let me … let me leave with dignity. In my own time. I couldn’t take it. I just … ” He hangs there, and Alanna Breen thinks to herself that he is the most pathetic thing she has ever seen.
But she remembers his laughter from his better times, a great, braying roar that filled the staffroom from end to end. And it might not be the worst thing to wait for Christmas. The students will spend two weeks with their families, allowing time for the induction of a new member of staff. Less disruptive all round.
She sighs. “Get up, Frank. It’s all right. Until Christmas will be all right, but not—I repeat—not if you can’t handle the children, do you hear me? Walk out again like that and I’ll have to get somebody else. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to address the students.” She flies out the door before he can babble his gratitude. And straight away, in the hallway, she runs into Horner, yet another broken man. He stops to allow her past and, as always in his presence, it is a struggle not to break into a run to get away.
Only Tompkins can get through to that man, and only Tompkins, it seems, can tolerate his fishlike stare and his eternal silences. Not for the first time, she wonders what they must have gone through together, that the steadfast, overwhelmingly … normal Tompkins can subject himself to all of that.
And then she’s through the door and into the steamy warmth. The students are already on their tea, so she wastes no time in calling for silence.
“All right!” she says, and pauses as her eye comes to rest on the empty Year 7 table. She remembers a year when one poor girl had to linger there alone all the way to March.
“Listen now,” she says. “I speak so that the Nation will survive.” These words always sober even the rowdiest of Year 4s. “We, the staff of the college, would like to apologize to you, our students.” She sees their puzzled looks. “A few weeks ago, during a hunt, some of our Year Fives found … well, you all know by now what they found, don’t you? And our attempts to cover it up proved to be not only pointless, but dangerous. Yes. Your curiosity is natural. Especially when it pertains to your survival. When we hid the girl in the rock from you, it resulted in three Year Fives being Called at once.” And she makes no mention of Anto, the boy who returned alive and who refuses to come out of his room to sit at the top table with the remaining veteran, Melanie.
The doctors have sent a report down from Dublin about his “condition,” and she is itching to read it. For the moment, however, Ms. Breen’s business is here.
“I’m sorry we were secretive. So let me give you my word on this: The girl has been removed from the forest along with all traces of the boulder she died in. We think the … the power of the place has gone with her. But we can’t be sure, so we have fenced off the entire mound. Let me emphasize, the fence is not there to stop you seeing anything, because I’m giving you my word now that there is nothing more to see. And I further promise that should the scientists make new discoveries about the girl in the rock, we will be open about it from now on.”
This is a lie.
She doesn’t tell the children that some of the scientists were against fencing off the mound in the first place. The strange feeling reported by the students once the rock had been cut open fascinates the investigators. “We could learn so much more,” one grey-beard suggested, “if we could map that feeling of theirs. If we could deliberately provoke the Call somehow.”
She growled the scientists into silence, protecting her young from the monsters from Dublin. She worries that certain parts of the government might yet try to force her hand.
But for the moment she is confident that the problem has been resolved.
And it’s back to the forest again with a head start that’s barely enough time to allow Nessa to make crutches for herself. This is not to be a nighttime hunt. The shade of the trees in mid-November is thought to be dark enough to give the feeling of being in the Grey Land, or so the staff like to think.
As soon as she’s ready, Nessa heads straight for the Fairy Fort.
She had the idea to go there when she heard Ms. Breen’s speech. “Listen,” she said to her allies, once they’d read the lists of hunters and hunted on the Year 5 board, “everyone will be afraid of the mound now. Of being Called.”
“They’re right!” Nicole said.
“Possibly,” Nessa said. “Look, I know it’s terrifying, but there are only two possibilities: The power is still there, or it isn’t, right? And if it is, if we’re going to be Called, what better time than at the start of a hunt, when we’re fit and well fed and ready? You couldn’t plan it any better than that.”
Nicole didn’t look like she agreed, but Megan interrupted her. “Oh, for Crom’s sake! The girl in the rock is gone now, and we won’t even be able to reach the bloody mound. It’s just a place to meet that they won’t be too keen on checking. Nessa—we’ll see you at the south end of it and ‘catch’ you there. Then it’s an early shower for all of us.”
“A cold one for me,” Nessa replied. She grinned, and not just at her best friend, but at Aoife and Marya and Nicole. In spite of her coldness to so many people over the years, here they are, four girls—young women really—ready to risk the Cage, to risk Conor, just to keep another person safe.
The only problem is that Conor has certainly guessed what they’re up to by now. He’ll be looking for Nessa, checking for a weak footprint that points slightly inward, for the indentations of improvised crutches. And he’ll know to follow her comrades too if they’re not careful.
Nessa has a plan to keep the Round Table from tracking her, but it’s not going to be fun. The sky is spitting hailstones and an east wind slips between the trees to suck all the warmth from her bones. “By Crom,” she mutters. “By Crom … ”
She throws her crutches over a pile of boulders before crossing them on hands and knees, keeping away from moss and lichen to hide her passage. On the far side lies a freezing-cold stream.
Lots of Testimonies recall survivors who walked through water to hide their scent. But with no “dogs” to fear, and the summer long gone, it’s not something any sane girl would want to do now.
“Oh, by Crom!” she says again as the water starts to work on her, as the ache spreads up to her ankles and her teeth chatter enough to catch her tongue.
And then she hears the horn that releases the hunters to the chase. The Round Table will have seen where she entered the trees and will follow her there. She has five minutes, maybe ten, before they get here and she’d better be long gone. Her allies, on the other hand, will run straight for the mound …
“Hello, there.”
Nessa jumps in shock. The hunted should all be well ahead of her by now and the hunters well behind. But then Liz Sweeney steps out onto the rocks she has just crossed.
“W-what are you doing here?”
Liz Sweeney’s lips twitch into a smile colder than the stream that’s numbing Nessa’s legs.
“I’m a hunted, just like you. I’m entitled to be here.” The big girl is an excellent athlete and crosses to the far bank of the stream with a single jump. Then she turns to face Nessa. “We’re allowed to work together, you know? And I’ve brought something for you.”
But all Liz Sweeney has brought is a trick. She grabs away one of Nessa’s crutches and snaps it in half. It’s all very sudden, and she’s grinning wide enough to swallow Ireland. “I bet you weren’t expecting—”
Nessa hits her across the face with the other crutch, water spraying from the tip. Then it becomes a spear, taking Liz Sweeney hard in the solar plexus while she’s still clutching at her mouth. And down she goes, winded and gasping.
Nessa flees, as fast as she can with only one crutch, and it isn’t more than a brisk walk, with a trail left behind her that her granny could follow. Her only hope now is that Liz Sweeney won’t get up for a while and that Megan will spirit her away before the Round Table in all their Monty Python glory run her to ground.
Ten agonizing minutes pass, as she pushes her useless legs harder than ever. She is panting and sweating enough in the cold that her tracksuit is glued to her. The Round Table will have found Liz Sweeney by now. They could just “capture” her and go back to the college for a warm meal and a shower. Somehow Nessa doubts they’ll be doing that today.
She thinks she has somehow gotten lost when she comes across a two-man-high chain-link fence. There is a strange feeling in the air, as though somebody is standing right beside her. She felt the same way once before, and she knows now that this is the fence Ms. Breen promised for the mound. For some reason, in her mind’s eye, she had pictured a wall of pine planks with a warning sign on it. Nothing this anonymous, this easy to climb over.
She begins to follow it around, looking for a place to hide until Megan and the rest can get here. The wire gives her something to hang on to over the uneven ground, but that itching sensation, that presence, only seems to strengthen the more she walks and she has a horrible, horrible feeling that she shouldn’t be here, that she is about to be Called. It’s so strong that an involuntary whimper escapes her. She clamps down on that right away.
Nessa is fitter and stronger than she’s ever been in her life. Probably more than she ever will be again. Isn’t that what she said to Nicole? That this would be a good thing? Let it come! She utters the mental challenge several times more. When nothing happens she peels her clawed fingers away from the fence and continues on her way.
She is straining for the sounds of pursuit, for the voices of her friends. But halfway around she finds a break in the barrier. One of the metal poles that holds the iron links in place has been knocked over. As if a boulder, or an elephant, has smashed into it from the inside, popping the links to leave them scattered around like petals in the summer.
Never has a generation of Irish children been so aware of its own folklore, especially as it pertains to the enemy.
In olden days farmers lived in terror of blocking “Fairy Roads”—those secret ways by which the Sídhe were said to travel the country at night. No work of man could long survive in such a place! So anyone building a house would ensure the Sídhe had no prior claim to the land by marking the outlines of the site with loose stones. By the following morning, if the stones had been moved the builder would be wise to go elsewhere.
If that isn’t a Fairy Road, Nessa thinks, looking at the torn metal, then nothing is. Indeed, the horrible feeling that someone is right here with her grows all the stronger as she passes the broken part of the fence. So powerful is it that twice she spins to look behind her. But nobody is there, and the feeling eases as she moves away.
Finally she reaches the southern end of the mound. She crouches behind a weary rhododendron. She can see right down the overgrown path, where nature walkers and joggers took their leisure in happier times.
There is no sign of her friends yet, but Nessa’s patience is infinite. She knows they can’t be more than ten minutes late, that they’re likely just working to make sure nobody is on their tail.
“They’re not coming.” Nessa jumps. It’s Conor who speaks, his voice and demeanor sorrowful, dignified. He can’t see her—he’s looking in the wrong direction! But he’ll be ready to move should she so much as twitch a muscle. Three boys emerge from the trees to stand with him on the path: Fiver and Bruggers from left and right, with Tony to bring up the rear, although he should have been another “hunted” like her. He looks particularly queasy, and must sense, as she can, the power of the mound behind her. But Conor displays no doubt.
He swivels his head as he did during the last hunt, raking the undergrowth, twitching his nostrils. He takes a sudden stride forward, hoping his very presence will make her dart from cover. But although she is terrified by what she thinks he will do to her—what he must do, to avoid losing the last of his authority—Nessa is a girl who imagines a great destiny for herself: survival. She will fight anyone who threatens to steal it from her. Most especially, she will
fight her weaker self. The self that copies other people’s poetry and pines for a boy who doesn’t care. The self that wants her to run like a startled rabbit for the pleasure of the wolves. She stills her pounding pulse and bares her teeth in a silent snarl.
“We’ve driven them off,” says Conor to the undergrowth. “All your little friends.” His Sídhe is excellent and formal, the R’s rolling, while every lenition and conjugation falls gratefully into place. “Megan ran like a red-haired rat. Nicole squealed when we threatened to break an arm. Only Aoife put up a fight. Am I right, Bruggers?”
“Crom curse you,” says the other boy, and he has blood running from his nose. “You should have let me bend those fingers for her.”
But the king is shaking his head. “I told you. We can only afford one accident today. And that’s you, Nessa. That’s you.”
“Clip-Clop’s hiding behind that bush.” Liz Sweeney has arrived, her face already swelling from where Nessa got her with the crutch.
They all turn at once toward Nessa’s rhododendron.
“Are you willing to bet your dessert on that, Liz Sweeney?”
“Are you? But listen, Conor, I want to be the one to do it to her. She’s loosened a tooth on me.”
The king shakes his head regretfully. “I’m not cruel, but the responsibility is mine and I cannot shirk it.”
And then, with no warning, he leaps forward, as light on his feet as any goat, landing right on top of a rock beside Nessa’s hiding place. She wastes no time on startlement, but sweeps her crutch across his shins so that he has to hop back again, laughing and shouting, “Leave her to me! I owe her this!”
That should have been the end of it. He should have had her in a flash, but now Megan arrives from the left, her head connecting with his stomach, tumbling him over even as his allies cry in outrage. She is already leaping to her feet to flee down the path. “Go! Nessa! Go!”
The Call Page 14