“Your time has come, thief!”
She cuts deeper, tears streaming from her eyes. The spines are all but useless.
“How beautiful you will be when we are done with you! And then you will die!”
“Oh, yeah?” she screams at them. “Oh, yeah? Well, I had fourteen years of life in the Many-Colored Land. Do you hear me? I had the wind on my face, and by Danú’s tits it smelled sweet. And everything was green and alive and lovely. And the sun shines there; can you imagine it? Can you see the streams full of fish? The heavy orchards? You can’t. You never will, but every one of my ancestors had that. Every one for two thousand years! While your only pleasures are jealousy and blood!”
A great wailing sound comes from beyond the earth wall.
“You will stop, thief! You will stop this!”
“Bees!” cries Megan. “I sat outside when the whins were all golden flowers and the bees flew among them! And the sounds that you will never, never hear, you empty fools. The birds in the morning. The foxes barking at night under the glory of the stars. I had it all and I’ll take all of it to my grave. And taste! Strawberries picked in our garden. By the Cauldron!”
“I’ll shut her up!” says one of them now.
He catches poor Megan by surprise as his hand shoots through the remaining thin layer of soil and pulls her right out of her burrow. “I’ll shut her up,” he says again.
It’s strange, because in all the Testimonies the Sídhe are described as joyful. But a dozen of them around her are sobbing.
He continues to hold her by the neck, while blood runs down her wrist from the cuts she made.
Megan manages a smile. “I hope you live forever.” She grins. “Here.”
And then her captor reaches across with his elegant, free hand, and covers her mouth.
Megan returns. Dead. Her eyes wide. But no other expression can be identified on her face, because her nose and mouth have been erased as though smudged out by the hands of a child on a chalkboard.
“She suffocated,” somebody says. “She must have been mocking them; you know how she is.”
Nessa’s vision blurs. She is hyperventilating, as though she is the one in danger of suffocation, whose mouth is to be sealed. She has imprisoned her emotions for four years, but now they will have their way with her.
A chair crashes to the ground and so does she.
Hands lift her. Nessa shrugs them off and there’s a scream, like that of a wild, desperate animal.
“Nessa! Don’t! Wait!”
The rain is freezing on her face and she doesn’t know how she got outside. Beyond the college buildings is only blackness and mud. She scrambles through it on all fours, scraping her skin on the trunks of trees, with wails pushing themselves randomly from her raw throat.
It is impossible in such conditions, on such a moonless night, for anybody to navigate the forest. But Nessa’s path is unerring, though her legs keep betraying her and her hands are soon cut to ribbons. Eventually—she knows nothing of time now, knows nothing at all—those same hands are pulling her upright against a chain-link fence. Here, here in this presence, enough of her mind comes back to her to ask a simple favor: “Take me,” she begs. Megan’s wrists had been all bloody. She must have tried to kill herself. She must have failed. The pain she suffered! Oh, Crom! “Take me!”
Nobody answers and she screams her demand again as rain streams over her face and makes a sodden wreckage of her tracksuit.
But then she remembers the path. She remembers the door in the cliff. She pulls herself around, looking for the spot. Ms. Breen has had the fence repaired of course. And it’s supposed to be guarded at all times. But Nessa knows that it will have been broken again, that the guards will be huddling out of the rain in their hut. She will find her way inside. The door will recognize her emptiness and admit her. It must do.
Nausea! She had forgotten the nausea. Like a fist in the belly. Instead of welcoming her, she is pushed away. Nessa’s journey here has stolen every last scrap of strength and all she has left is the pitiful pleading of a child.
“Please … I need her … Please … I have no other friends … ” She has treated the whole world with disdain and this is her reward.
“There she is!” cries a voice. “Pull her away.”
A blanket materializes about her shoulders.
“I hate this place, by Crom. Let’s get her back.”
An impossibly strong arm lifts her onto a boy’s shoulders. He smells familiar. And there are girls’ voices, arguing excitedly. “I swear, Nicole,” says Aoife, “I’m trying. It was easy to find the mound, it drew us right here, but I think we’re lost now.”
“It’s this way,” Marya says, flighty Marya! And she adds, “Don’t worry, Nessa, pet. We’ve got you. We’ve got you.”
Nessa does not leave her bed the next day. Nobody can make her. Nor can they force open her jaws to give her food.
“I don’t understand,” somebody says. “You’ve fought so hard to live. What if they Call you now? Do you … ?” Do you want to end up like her, they might be saying.
Whoever it is, they are right. Nessa’s Call is not so very far away, and however much pain she is in now, it will all shrink to insignificance the instant she sets foot in the Grey Land.
But in the end, what pulls her back is the poetry.
On what might be the third or the fourth day, somebody has the bright idea of digging out her books and shoving them into her hands. She flicks idly through them and that smooth face of hers, once so impassive, twists into the ugliness of a sneer. What is this? What is any of this? Page after page of nonsense.
“I loved a maid who—” Useless! Useless! She rips it out.
“How lovely your shod feet—” Empty crap!
“Sweet girl, I hear your song and—” Another page torn and crumpled and flung away. She’ll burn it; she’ll burn all of it and everyone! How did she waste her life on this, on any of this? Spoiled men and women balked in their lust? For the first time in days laughter fills the empty dorm. But it is not a gentle sound.
And then her eyes fall on a few blurry lines, marked with what might be the tears of another owner.
Your blood flowed out of you
And I didn’t try to clean it
But drank it from my palms
The words startle her. They remind her of Megan’s poor wrists and they have no place surely in a collection of love poetry! Which might explain why she has never read past the first few lines before.
“Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire,” the title says, and it is not suitable for the young. Not suitable for anybody really, this ferocious screed of outrage, of fury, of pain. Untranslatable, its rolling Gaelic syllables echo in the bones and the teeth. It is a ghost. It is a curse. It is the last great cry for justice of a murdered culture before the darkness came to take it away, and Nessa swallows every word of it from start to finish.
She goes back to the beginning to read it again, aloud, as it must be read, her voice shattered like that of a hag, her bloodshot eyes wide with rage.
After the third reading she drops the book and falls immediately asleep on top of it, smearing the pages of the Lament and staining her skin with its old ink.
It is Ms. Breen herself who shakes her awake.
“I’m hoping, child, you’ll take some food? If not—”
“Yes,” the girl interrupts. “I want it. Megan would want me to have it.”
The head of the college feared she would have to send the girl home to her parents for a while. Or worse, to the hospital to be force-fed. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened. Now, however, she smiles. “Listen,” she says, “I’ve made the announcement to the rest of the students already. It’s … it’s about Megan. In a way it’s horrible, but … but it’s amazing too.”
“Tell me.”
“You saw the blood on her wrists?”
A nod is all Nessa can manage, her newfound strength suddenly dipping again.
&nbs
p; “Megan wasn’t trying to kill herself. She … she had a message for us. She knew she would die. She knew she would be sent back and she … she cut a warning for us into her own skin.”
“The Sídhe can’t read,” breathed Nessa.
“As far as we know. And probably not in English anyway.”
“Megan always preferred it,” Nessa manages through a catch in her throat. “What … what did it say?”
“Just three words. Our school next. They’re coming for our college. Any day now. They want to wipe us out the way they did the schools in Bangor and Mallow. I thought … I thought we should maybe evacuate, but—”
“No!” Nessa sits up violently. “No! We stay here! We kill them all! We’re trained! We’ll cut the lot of them, we’ll—”
She’s still weak enough that even Ms. Breen can push her back onto her pillows. “Yes, child. That’s exactly what Nabil wants to do. Exactly. We’re the only college to have prior warning. We have drafted in extra instructors from around the country. All our food will be brought in from outside and so on. Don’t worry. There’s even a cordon of soldiers from the regular army around the mound. Not that they do much these days but guard our biodiesel and the like. But they have guns, and if the Sídhe come here, they will suffer for it.”
And Nessa nods. “I want to see Anto,” she says.
“I’m not sure that’s appropriate … ”
But for a little while everybody will treat Nessa like a delicate piece of glass and she can do anything she wants.
A week goes by. Nessa still cries a lot for Megan. She doesn’t hide it from Anto, nor does she conceal the laughter that happens from time to time. And she makes sure to tell him she’ll miss him when they part for the night, each to their own bed.
“No more poetry for me?” he asks her one evening.
“There’s only one poem now,” she answers, “and it’s not for you. At least, I hope not.”
As for her other friends, she has yet to master the art of hugging them, but Aoife, Marya, and Nicole all have reason to know of her gratitude.
In spite of these changes, Nessa trains harder than ever, eating every available scrap of food for strength, clearing her mind before each sparring session. When she hits the mat, she doesn’t need to think before rolling out of the way or yanking opponents by the ankles so that they tumble down to join her.
It doesn’t matter. Nessa has far, far less time to prepare than she needs. The same goes for most of her class. Of the original sixty who came here as fresh-faced Year 1s, a higher proportion than ever before will be dead by Christmas. It’s going to be a bloodbath.
It is the twenty-first of December and bullets of rain spray against Melanie’s window. Beyond, ancient trees cower before a wind that, in spite of its strength, can’t seem to break up the freezing fingers of mist rising to waist height about the buildings of the college.
It’s finally happening, she thinks, and she has to control her breathing like the doctors taught her or the hole in her chest will kill her. This time tomorrow night, she will be beautiful again. She will be whole, because the Sídhe always keep their word.
She sets off across the parking lot with the windup flashlight she inherited from her grandfather.
They meet in the kitchens, and for the first time she sees those who will be working with her. She wants to weep, for what better sign could there be of her own evil than the identity of her allies? Horner was on guard duty for the kitchens. Now the blood of his only friend stains his hands, and his teeth too, if she’s not mistaken.
Then there’s the survivor from Year 5—Conor his name is. “I got most of the dogs,” he says. He’s breathing hard, failing to hide his glee. “Are any of them here yet?”
Melanie knows what he means by “them” and her pulse quickens dangerously. How? she wonders. How did I end up here? But she has seen the Grey Land and seen their power too. The Cauldron and all the rest. Everybody at the school will die no matter what she does. The only question is whether she will be joining them. And what would be the point of that?
Sweat runs down her face and Horner licks the last of the blood from his lips. Then the door from the refectory opens and she thinks it’s another conspirator. Instead it turns out to be Frankenstein. Horner grins, producing a knife, and Melanie has a crazy notion of throwing herself at the ex–special forces soldier to save the life of this wasted old man.
“Wait!” Conor warns the soldier. “He’s with us. You are, aren’t you, Frankenstein?”
The old man nods. His whole body seems to pulse in the light of Melanie’s flashlight.
“I want what I was promised,” says Conor. “I still have a lot of friends here. I won’t enjoy hurting them, so you’d better keep your word.”
Frankenstein is swelling before their eyes. His voice is harsher, hoarser, more muffled than ever. “We always keep … our word … you will … have what … ”
He explodes. Pieces of flesh spatter across the kitchen and Melanie can’t resist a gasp when something warm and slimy hits her on the cheek.
Impossibly, Frankenstein, now a mass of blood and viscera, still lives. He shakes himself like a dog before wiping his face. Underneath lie the features of an angel. Of a Sídhe.
“I used the flesh of a thief,” the newcomer explains, “to stay here in the Many-Colored Land. From this moment on, the world of our exile will call me back.”
“You’ll get smaller?” Melanie says, overcoming her disgust. She has seen far worse than this in the Grey Land. “Is that it? You’ll shrink to nothing? But surely … I mean … It will happen fast, like it did in Bangor, won’t it?”
“Not as swiftly as before. Our worlds circle each other like motes in a pool. Far away sometimes. But when they draw close, as now, our grip grows strong and bargains with such as you may open doors.”
Melanie opens her mouth to ask what he means about opening doors, but the bloody prince cuts her off. He wants to know if they have each kept their part of the bargain. And so Horner shows his knife and Conor repeats his boast about killing the dogs.
When the handsome grin turns to focus on her again, Melanie removes a shaking hand from her pocket and produces the keys she stole some weeks before and copied. They belong to a shed behind the college and she has no idea why her part in the murder of her own people lies in procuring them. But the Sídhe is more delighted with her than with either of the killers.
“You will be whole again, sweet thief, and while we will allow you no children, you may live out your natural span.” She shudders, feeling tears pricking at the corners of her eyes.
The shed, it turns out, has a steel door and is full of priceless fuel. A few more human men and women, strangers to her, slosh it generously all along the ground floor of the student dorms, hiding their faces from each other, or openly weeping as they work. For some reason, nobody upstairs awakens and none of the guards comes to investigate the flashlight beam.
By the time they have finished, the Sídhe lord is a head shorter than Melanie, but still as perfectly proportioned as a Greek statue and delighted by everything he sees.
“Are … are you going to light it now?” Melanie asks him.
“Not yet, sweet thief,” he answers. But he doesn’t say what he is waiting for.
“And what about me?” Conor asks. “I don’t see this getting me what I want.”
“We always keep our word,” the Sídhe replies. “The power of a promise is all that keeps our two worlds together.”
Fifty soldiers guard the mound.
They waste vast quantities of fuel to keep spotlights trained on the little hill, and have spent the last few days cutting down the surrounding trees to provide themselves with a clear field of fire. Not that they expect anything to come out of there. Mainly they have been told to keep the kids away, the ones who are always coming back, for whatever reasons.
Private Shields can’t understand what the students see in the Fairy Fort. He is one of the very few young men and wo
men who have not only survived the Call but have been judged safe enough afterward to wield weapons in the defense of fuel convoys and warehouses and whatever other resources the Nation has left. Only he knows how close he has come on several occasions to turning the barrel of his gun the wrong way. Or how he smashes all the furniture when he argues with his wife, until their small daughters plead with him to stop.
But he’s trying. Every day he’s trying and making progress.
“What are you staring at?”
It’s Rebecca—Private Madigan. Barely twenty-five and already the mother of three. Even then she had to fight to be allowed to join up without having any more.
“Staring?” he asks. Like many of the young, they still speak in Sídhe among themselves.
“You’re staring at the mound.”
It’s hard to see it through the curtain of rain, luminescent in the glare of the spotlights, but eventually he finds an answer for her.
“The color’s wrong,” he says. “I know … I know that’s just the … the night. The rain or whatever. You know.”
They watch it together for a moment. Neither can feel the mound’s presence as the students do, but their eyes begin to play tricks on them.
“I think,” says Private Shields, “I think I’m having one of my flashbacks.” He points a shaking finger out from under the flap of the tent. “Is that … is that slicegrass growing there?”
“By all the gods,” says Rebecca, “I think you’re right. I think it’s happening.”
“What?” he asks. “What’s happening?”
He has no idea she’s been holding a dagger this whole time until she slides it into his kidneys. By then she has her hand over his mouth and she whispers in his ear. “Yes, it definitely looks like slicegrass to me. There’s a spider tree behind it. See?” She lowers him to the ground and needs now to kill the rest of the sentries, but she’s too slow. Humanlike figures are pushing themselves out of the earth all over the mound, as though climbing from a stormy sea onto the deck of a boat.
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