The Hawthorn Crown

by Helen Falconer

  Only the three demons who had been sitting on the wall escaped unscathed. They rose in fury, circling to see where the attack was coming from, spotted John Joe and flew straight at him. He hurled a lit bottle at the leader; the beast veered off course, smashing through the doors of the barn and setting the piles of hay alight. A second monster ended up in the chicken coop – the hens racing away from the wreckage, feathers blazing.

  John Joe rolled under the tractor just as the third demon grabbed for him. To get at him, it upended the tractor but Rex – stout heart! – grabbed hold of the monster’s scaly leg, and in the moment that the demon turned to savage the poor old dog – which screamed a scream to break your heart – John Joe scrambled to his feet and raced for the orchard behind the barn, where he crouched behind the water tank, his shotgun loaded.

  Moving in and out of his range of vision, the monster trashed its way around the yard, hunting for its victim in and under the cars, dismantling the boiler house. Searching everywhere. Until, eventually, it found him.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The last time they’d been in this sea-cave she’d thought they were going to die. Drowned by the rising tide, like rats in a hole.

  This time around it was beautiful. The two of them rushing together up through the silvery, salty water; bursting out of the sea-cave through curtains of rainbow spray, out across the sun-soaked ocean – the foam tentacles of the waves leaping up to them, trying to pull them down. Shay had his arms wrapped around her and his long legs intertwined with hers; his cheek pressed to her cheek.

  Aoife turned her head slightly to push her mouth into his thick black hair, feeling the roughness of it against her lips. Breathing him in. The sweet scent of him. Drawing on his energy. The secret power of the universe ran through him into her. He was her source; her power of flight. Her lenanshee lover. Her fuel; her fire; her wind; her sun.

  Above the waves, she swept in a wide circle, back towards the high grey cliffs. Slender white figures were emerging from the boiling white sea and swarming slowly up the vertical rock face, hand over hand, grasping at crumbling ledges with their fingers and toes.

  With Shay in her arms, Aoife exploded upwards past the climbing women – beautiful creatures with long black curls blowing in the wind, delicate dresses fluttering in the sea breeze – and rose straight up the cliffs, then high above the headland. The north of Mayo spread out beneath her – lilac mountains and russet bog, waving with bog cotton. Tiny white lambs were racing across the heather. Everything shimmering in warm, primrose-coloured sunshine, pouring from a soft blue sky. It must be April already. She’d been so long away.

  She stooped again towards the headland, reducing speed …

  But not reducing it enough.

  As she landed, she let go of Shay and went stumbling forwards, tripped, fell and rolled in a tangle across the sheep-cropped grass – ‘Crap!’ – then lay there, laughing.

  Shay crawled over and collapsed beside her on his front, smiling at her. He was still wearing his black shirt and jeans, from last Halloween. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I will be in a moment, when I get my breath back.’ Still laughing, Aoife rolled onto her back and stretched out like a star. She herself was wearing a beautifully simple dress of creamy lace, given her by the lenanshees, and she loved the feel of the cool grass against her bare arms and legs. So tempting to lie here for a while, with the sun on her face and Shay beside her …

  If it wasn’t for the war.

  In a flash, all happiness died. She scrambled to her knees, staring around in panic at the orange bog and lilac mountains – alert for any movement, in sky or land. Yet as far as her eyes could see – and her fairy vision was becoming increasingly powerful as she neared her sixteenth birthday – the soft heavens and coloured landscape were empty. No flights of sluagh, nor armies of dullahans crossing the wilderness.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Dorocha the Beloved had made her a cool, smiling promise: I will come for your family and your friends. But before he could make his move, the cold, dead boys of the Deargdue had risen against him …

  Yet they wouldn’t have held Dorocha back for long. He had the power of the devil – dark; secret; deep. The promise of eternal emptiness.

  His midnight eyes.

  From which way would his armies come? Many roads connected the wilds of north Mayo to the fairy world that lay beneath. Shay’s lenanshee mother had brought Aoife and Shay out by the sea-cave – and had sealed it with a deep spell, in case of pursuit. The banshee road led up through the hawthorn pool, out on the bog – Dorocha himself controlled that path, and had closed it. A labyrinthine stairway rose straight into the heart of Kilduff – open and therefore dangerous – but at least only a few of the older changelings (cut-throat smugglers, the lot of them) knew of the right way, up or down. Although …

  Aoife’s heart twisted with fear.

  Wee Peter, chief of the smugglers, had been caught and tortured by the zookeeper before he died. How strong had he stayed as the cooshees ripped him limb from limb? If he’d broken down …

  She needed to get to Kilduff, right now. ‘Shay, are you OK?’

  But he didn’t answer. His face was turned towards her on the grass, but his eyes were closed – his long thick black lashes resting on his strong cheekbones.

  She leaned over him, saying more softly, ‘Shay?’ She needed him. She could fly if she kissed him again, stealing more of his energy for herself. ‘Shay?’

  He opened his eyes with a start. ‘Sorry … fell asleep.’ He struggled into a sitting position, his green-gold eyes confused. ‘Are we going again already?’

  And suddenly she was too afraid to pull any more of the life out of him. He looked so pale and drained – he was still not recovered from his torture, when the Deargdue had tried to turn him into the last and most beautiful of her cold, dead boys. Tenderly she touched her fingers to his upturned face – tracing the outline of his jaw. His skin felt freezing cold. His wounds must have been very deep. Deeper perhaps than she had realized. And because of the threatened war, she had insisted on coming home so quickly – before his lenanshee mother had fully healed him.

  She made her decision. He would be better off being minded by Eimhear for a little while longer, in his old bedroom at his brother’s farm.

  ‘Everything seems very quiet. I’d say it will be at least a month before anything happens, with the time difference. Rest here on the grass until Eimhear arrives. I’m going on ahead. I’ll come back for you as soon as I’m certain everything is quiet in Kilduff.’

  Before he could summon the energy to object, Aoife jumped up and ran away along the path at the edge of the cliff, then cut across the high back of the bog towards the valley beyond.

  She wouldn’t be able to fly properly without his kiss, but she could at least glide like a fledgling down the hillside to the Foley farm. And once there, she could ‘borrow’ John Joe Foley’s battered old red Ford – he could hardly complain, now he had the vintage BMW – and drive to Kilduff. (Or rather, the car could drive her – thanks to her fairy power.)

  The heather gave way to granite, and the land dropped away beneath her feet – and there, far below among flat green fields, was the farm, nearly obscured from this height by a thick column of black smoke. John Joe must be burning old tyres in the field behind.

  Taking a deep breath of the sweet, flowery air, she stood poised at the top of the slope, her arms stretched out to either side, ready to launch herself. The breeze shifted a little, ruffling her hair; parting the distant smoke … And she froze – a dark hand clutching at her heart.

  What she’d thought was a bonfire was the farm itself.

  ‘Aoife!’ Shay had followed her, struggling through the knee-high heather. Moments later, he was also staring down into the valley. Slowly making sense of what he was seeing. ‘Oh God. John Joe.’

  She made a wild grab for him. ‘NO!’

  Too late. He had already hurled himself down the near-vertic
al hillside – immediately losing his footing; tumbling and rolling down the loose, grey scree. Aoife threw herself after him, gliding, swerving, trying repeatedly to catch him, in a panic that he was going to break his neck.

  At the foot of the hillside he picked himself up and ran on across the field. His fear for his brother had given him a sort of wild strength. Yet his heart had been sucked to its dregs by the Deargdue, and he was still weak. Catching up, she ran with him, her arm round him – supporting him as he stumbled. But as they neared the back wall of the farmyard, the going became more difficult. Broken furniture littered the grass, as if the long, single-storey house had not just burned down but exploded. The remains of an armchair blocked their way. Half of a table. A kitchen range, smashed to pieces over a wide area as if dropped from a great height. The blue tin roof of the farm – stabbed upright in the ground, in two jagged sections.

  In the yard, an old-fashioned tractor lay upturned, its engine bleeding diesel. The vintage BMW was crumpled against the barn, its roof ripped open as if by an enormous can opener. The stone farmhouse and breeze-block shed were still smoking, sending up plumes of thick black smoke, and everywhere was the stench of burning flesh – brown chickens with their feathers scorched off, and inside and outside the house, the charred remains of fifty to a hundred—

  Sheep?

  Their blackened limbs and heads tucked beneath their bodies. Smouldering stubs of wings remaining …

  Not sheep.

  Aoife’s blood ran cold.

  Sluagh.

  So the war had begun already.

  The last of the sluagh lay crumpled over the water tank, two jagged shotgun wounds in its chest; its scarlet eyes dulled to blank pink.

  John Joe had his back to them, burying the three dogs. He had dug their grave under the largest apple tree, with the best view of the mountains – a fitting resting place for heroes.

  As Aoife hesitated at the orchard gate – anxious to be gone, but wanting to question John Joe first – Shay ran to his older brother at the graveside. Briefly, the two lads put their arms round each other; they were so similar, with their mother’s deep black hair and their father’s gold-green eyes. Then Shay broke away, and looked into the grave, and – wiping his arm across his eyes – stooped for a handful of soil to toss down on top of his childhood friends.

  John Joe stopped him. ‘Wait. This first.’ From inside his shirt he took a small wooden frame with a few scraps of canvas still clinging to it, and showed it to his younger brother. ‘There’s no fixing her portrait, but the ghost of it will be something for Rex to guard in heaven. Bella and Dean were born too late, but Rex knew and loved our mother. The old dog was a fool for her like the rest of us.’ And he tossed the broken picture of Moira Foley into Rex’s portion of the grave.

  Shay said, touching his arm, ‘John Joe, our mother …’

  The older lad grabbed up his spade, saying impatiently, ‘I’ve said enough about that woman, and what I said I didn’t mean to say.’

  ‘John Joe, listen. When she jumped from the cliffs …’

  His brother hurled an angry shovelful of earth into the hole. ‘Be quiet. I don’t want to hear anything about it.’

  From where she was standing by the gate, Aoife could see over the stone wall into the field. Slender, white-clad figures were picking their fastidious way through the broken furniture, and as John Joe threw in another spade of earth, the first wave of lenanshees reached the wall and stepped up onto it, hand in hand – a hovering line of beauties in pale lace dresses, long black curls loose around their shoulders. Their turquoise eyes (so like Aoife’s own, because her own fairy mother had been part lenanshee) peered through the spring-green branches of the apple trees.

  Aoife murmured, ‘Shay!’ – and when he turned, she pointed. Easier then telling John Joe: showing him.

  With a smile, Shay went to offer his hand to his mother so that she could leap easily over the brambles that grew under the wall. She fluttered down as light as a bird; she was no older in her looks or ways than she’d ever been – younger now than John Joe, her oldest son. A dark, immortal fairy. A muse. A bringer of passion, poetry and untimely death to any human man who desired her.

  John Joe turned, frowning, to see why his brother had walked away from him.

  And the strength that he had summoned in the face of so many ferocious demons drained from his limbs at the sight of his mother – the mother he’d loved and hated in equal measure since she had abandoned him eleven years ago, throwing herself from the cliffs above the farm.

  A terrible cry burst from him; he fell to his knees.

  Releasing Shay’s hand, Eimhear came barefoot through the grass towards him; she bent over him, stroking his thick dark hair and smiling into his upturned face, then murmured in her low, musical voice, ‘Ah, John Joe, my son – you’ve grown so big and strong since I last saw you, and yet it’s been only forty days and nights.’

  Which, in her fairy mind, was the true reality.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The rotting corpses of the sluagh sank through cracks in the concrete yard, then burst back up again as bluebells; crimson fuchsia had already curtained the shattered windows of the house; elderflowers were spreading across the charred rafters, forming a roof of sweet creamy froth.

  Leaving the lenanshees to their work, Aoife ran out of the gate and down the boreen to where John Joe had told her he’d left the old red Ford. She had slipped away without Shay: the exhausted boy had fallen into a deep sleep under the apple tree, after his mother had pressed on him a drink of honeysuckle which she’d claimed would give him strength.

  The red car was parked at the far end of the track, at a careless angle. On reaching it, Aoife dragged open the driver’s door, jumped in and touched her fingers to the ignition. It roared into life. The tank showed empty, but that didn’t matter: the car was already picking up on her desire to reach Kilduff as soon as possible – doing a clumsy turn in the narrow lane, bouncing furiously from side to side, denting both wings on the walls. After finally getting itself pointed in the right direction, it shot forwards, burst out of the boreen and swung north up the empty coast road.

  Perfect.

  In normal circumstances the old Ford had a maximum speed of forty kilometres an hour, but already it was doing a hundred and twenty … a hundred and forty … tearing along the cliff-top road, far above the pale blue ocean. Aoife battered her hands on the steering wheel, shouting gleeful encouragement: ‘Faster! Faster!’ John Joe had assured her that according to a tweet he’d seen early that morning (before his phone had melted in the flames) the sluagh had flown over Kilduff without landing. But that had been hours ago …

  A hundred and sixty. Seventy.

  A small yellow sports car shot out of a side road, causing the Ford to swerve wildly, brakes squealing, wheels screeching. ‘Oh, for—’ Aoife glared furiously in the rear-view mirror. The sports car was blaring its horn while at the same time skidding back and forth across the road … before tipping sideways into a ditch full of brambles.

  ‘Crap. Crap!’ She slapped the wheel in frustration. ‘Stop!’ Very slowly – sensing her reluctance – the Ford rolled to a halt several hundred metres on and sat there, literally steaming. Leaping out, Aoife raced angrily back towards the sports car. The driver’s door was opening upwards into the air. She fully expected some idiot boy racer’s head to emerge, but instead an old lady in a tasselled green hat and a long purple cape came climbing out.

  ‘Teresa!’ Suddenly delighted, Aoife raced the last fifty metres with her arms outstretched. ‘Teresa! It’s me!’

  The result was unexpected.

  Carla’s grandmother whipped out a crystal from under her cape, screaming, ‘Stop where you are! I’m heavily armed!’

  And when Aoife – assuming that she hadn’t been recognized by the short-sighted old lady – kept on coming, Teresa added in a high-pitched wail, ‘Get back to hell!’ and then ran away as fast as her obviously painful knees could carry he
r until she tripped over her walking stick and fell with a terrified howl face down in a pothole.

  It took Aoife a while to convince Carla’s palpitating grandmother that she was the real Aoife, returned from the fairy world.

  ‘I can’t believe you thought I was a pooka!’

  ‘Well, that’s what you were the last time you were here,’ argued the old woman as the car whizzed past the boarded-up coastal café.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before Carla cut your throat.’

  ‘She did what?’

  ‘You can’t blame her for doing it – you were kissing Killian!’

  ‘Oh, that’s disgusting, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Look, if you’re not going to believe anything I say …’ The yellow car swerved to and fro as the old lady reached behind her to fish an iPhone out of a clinking leather bag.

  (Aoife fought a serious urge to grab the wheel. A short while earlier she had used her fairy strength to drag the little car out of the ditch – a huge mistake, because Teresa had immediately insisted on driving them both to Kilduff: ‘You young people think ye are all such marvellous drivers, but look at the way you ran me off the road back there – nearly got us both killed!’)

  Straightening the car, the old woman tossed the phone into Aoife’s lap. ‘Now – search YouTube for Mad Irish girl pranks screaming boyfriend with gorilla suit … Agh!’ Suddenly realizing she’d missed her turn, Teresa did a squealing U-turn on the cliff-edge and shot left up the mountain road.