With a cry of shock, Sinead grabbed her by the shoulders: ‘Aoife, I am your best friend, so you have to listen to me!’
‘Sinead …’
‘No, you listen to me! If you allow Stinky-Mc— OK, OK – if you have the low self-esteem to let that Carla Heffernan get away with this, you will be doing the most stupid thing you’ve ever done in your whole life because you and Killian are made for each other – listen to me! – I’ve seen how happy you make him!’
‘That wasn’t—’
‘Listen to me! Don’t you remember how he was always so depressed about his life? That all changed when he started going out with you, but now he’s back there again, lying in bed just listening to music. And I know his feelings for you haven’t changed. I’m going to tell him this is all bullshit and that you’re still truly crazy about him, and he has to tell Carla to shove it even if you don’t—’
‘If you do that I’ll never talk to you again!’
Sinead’s green eyes filled with tears and her mouth quivered, but still she said stubbornly, ‘I don’t care. You can’t stop me. I’m going to say it to him anyway, however mad you get …’
‘Aoife!’ Maeve was calling up the stairs. ‘Another visitor!’
Glad of the excuse, Aoife leaped up and ran out onto the landing and, to her relief, it was Shay, his black hair freshly cropped, taking the stairs two at a time, wearing a ridiculously expensive pair of trainers and designer jeans and a white, close-fitting Gucci shirt.
As he reached her, she threw her arms around him. ‘Look at you! Where did you get all the fancy gear?’
He flushed – self-conscious. ‘Grainne McDonnell’s gone mad spending money. She wouldn’t bring me to see you in the clothes I was wearing, and everything else was burned to nothing.’
‘Great jeans!’
‘She tried to buy me a suit.’
‘Your trainers alone must be worth hundreds!’
‘Five hundred and twenty! I didn’t even know it was possible. I begged her for cheap ones but she just kept saying that her money is there to be spent, not hoarded.’
‘Oh, hi there, Shay. Loving the new clothes.’ Sinead was standing in the doorway of Aoife’s bedroom, arms folded, eyes shrewd. Lois was hovering at her shoulder, still humming tunelessly.
‘Hello, you two – didn’t see you there.’ Shay shot a startled look at Aoife.
She mouthed back, ‘Tell you later,’ then said aloud, ‘Lois and Sinead were just leaving – weren’t you, girls?’
Lois protested, disappointed, ‘Oh, but the playlist …’
But Sinead was already hustling her old friend down the stairs, saying under her breath, ‘Come on, Lois. I think we’ve seen enough.’ And hissing over her shoulder at Aoife, ‘I’m going to tell Killian, you know. And I’m going to sort this out. Because that’s what true friends do. They look after each other even when one of them is acting the total eejit.’
Shay said, ‘Give us a tune.’ He was lying on her bed, on his back, his arms folded behind his head, watching her dance around the room in her sunrise dress (too fizzy with joy at how well he looked to settle down). ‘Come on, Aoife. Sing to me.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t make me!’
‘Oh, come on. I’ve heard you at the school talent show. That’s when I first noticed you, to be honest.’
She blushed. ‘Seriously?’
‘You were great.’
She laughed. ‘Not according to Lois. She told me I was crap.’
‘Lois hasn’t got a note in her head, even though she thinks she’s a class singer. Come on, play to me.’
Feeling oddly shy, she took her battered old guitar from the corner – grateful that her father had kept it, even though the pooka-Aoife had wanted him to throw it out – and sat down on the bed beside him, leaning against his bent legs as she ran her fingers over the strings. Her father had also kept all her old song lyrics, and returned them to her with the guitar when she’d gone looking for it (saying happily: ‘Glad you changed your mind about giving up the song-writing, sweetheart!’).
Not that she needed to see any of her lyrics to remember them. Strumming the guitar, she hummed a tune that had come into her head over a year ago. There were words, but Shay would guess they were about him – so she let them run silently through her head:
I dream of this:
Under the hawthorns he raises me with a kiss.
Shay stroked her hip, where he had once healed a nasty injury she’d got from falling off her bike – he had the same healing gift as his mother. ‘I like that. Are there any words?’
She smiled to herself as she continued playing. ‘No.’
‘Really? You should write some, and make it a love song.’
‘Mm …’
‘And then you could play it at the Foley wedding.’
She looked at him, her fingers paused over the strings.
He was grinning broadly. ‘Surprise! John Joe has agreed to marry Grainne McDonnell!’
She struck a startled, jangling chord. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yep! The lenanshees were a bit of a sticking point, but she’s quite friendly with them now.’
‘So your brother is in love!’
Shay widened his hazel eyes – all straight-faced innocence. ‘What do you mean, “in love”?’
She stared back at him, confused. ‘But you said he—’
‘What’s love got to do with marriage? Sure, if Grainne had come to me with twelve and a half million euros in her pocket, I’d have been down that aisle as quick as— Ow! Stop it! I’m joking!’ Laughing, he seized her battering hands, kissing her fingertips, trying to pull her down on top of him, to kiss her mouth.
She pounded at his chest, wriggling backwards. ‘No! Let go of me! You’re not worthy of me!’
‘Ah, I know that but … Hey, come back!’
She was already at the window. ‘Can’t catch me, ya fool!’ She sprang through the narrow casement into the pale green arms of the ash tree, tumbling out of it through the air, sweeping low over the lawn and dry-stone wall. Even that light sprinkle of kisses he had dropped on her fingers had been enough to make a bird of her. A joyful bird, not the dark cold creature that had flown back from the bog the night before …
‘Come back!’ Shay was clambering out of the window into the tree, shaking down the spring leaves. ‘Not fair! Stop flying!’
Laughing, she rolled in the air, arms and legs spread wide, then landed to wait for him in Declan Sweeney’s field – and then ran on. She hadn’t meant to run on. She’d meant to dance on the spot for a while, taunting him until he was nearly upon her. But she had come down on the pale green stripe of grass that ran up the centre of the stony slope, and the energy of it had struck upwards through her naked feet, carrying her onwards …
Oh, this ancient road!
When she and Carla were five or six years old, they’d loved to play in this field at ‘follow the fairy road’. They’d been dressed in sparkling fairy wings and princess dresses, and by that age Aoife had forgotten all about being a real fairy, and she’d thought the road was only a game that she and Carla had made up together, and that her memories of another more magical world, and a different mother, were only imaginings. And she and Carla had never made it further than the top of Declan Sweeney’s field.
Now she took a run at the high and thorny bank, and sprang and landed on the other side, and – feeling again the electric spark beneath her feet – ran on. The fairy road ahead was thick with buttercups – a track of gold a metre and a half wide. She ran faster. Faster. Overwhelmed by a sudden, fierce sense of urgency …
She forced herself to slow; turn back; wheeling in a long circle, like a grey gull at sea, arms spread for balance.
Shay …
He was already at the top of the bank, and as she watched, he leaped down and raced towards her – he was very fast himself, on land: he had all the speed and grace of his lenanshee mother. With a scream of laughter, Aoife fled on. A gate just a
head led into the next field – she sprang over it without even touching the top bar. The way ahead was blocked by a wide, spreading stream, usually narrow but swollen by recent rains, and coloured a deep dark red by the iron waters flowing down from the mountainous bog. A wicked thought came to her. She ran lightly across the surface of the flood, sending up a trail of glittering splashes, then turned to watch.
Shay leaped over the gate with one hand on the top rail, then paused to shuck off his extremely expensive trainers and roll up his new jeans a couple of turns before running after her across the water. After two strides he was up to his ankles. After two more, he disappeared in over his head.
By the time she dived in to rescue him, he was already rising up to meet her; they surfaced side by side. She spluttered, trying her best not to laugh, ‘I’m so sorry, how awful, I didn’t realize – I swear I didn’t realize it was that deep …’
He spat out a grim mouthful of the water. ‘Sure, you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t! I swear! I just thought you’d go in up to your waist.’
‘So you knew it was deep!’
‘Can’t catch me!’ Aoife struck out hastily for the opposite bank. But this time she ran only a little way before flopping down on her back to wait for him, her arms and legs spread out to the sun. Steaming in the heat, letting her dress dry off.
Panting, he fell down beside her, and sat squeezing the worst of the water out of his jeans and Gucci shirt.
She pulled a face at him, grinning but guilty: ‘Sorry about the clothes.’
‘You’re grand – it’ll take off the smell of the shop.’ When he was done, he stuck a long strand of seeded grass into his mouth and shaded his eyes against the sun, gazing towards the distant mountains. His strong cheekbones were flushed under the sun-brown skin; his solitary silver earring glinting, high in his ear. He asked, ‘So, how far does this path go?’
She rolled onto her front, chin on fists, following his gaze. Under her stomach, she could feel the thrumming power of the road; it shivered up through her flesh, like a deep dark earthquake far beneath the earth.
‘All the way to the hawthorn pool on the bog, and then down to Falias.’
He turned to her, hazel eyes widening. ‘This is a fairy road? I never knew.’
‘Nor I, for years. Me and Carla used to play on it when we were little, but we thought it was a game and we never went further than that first ditch.’
‘So you’ve never gone the whole way?’
‘Only in the other direction, when I was first brought to this world.’ Sitting on Dorocha’s knee, in his black coach. An unexpected wave of memory crashed through her mind. ‘After my mother …’ She rolled onto her back again, hiding her eyes with her forearm. The fairy road hummed beneath her – a strip of magic torn from the other world of her childhood, bubbling up through a weakness in the earth. Vibrations from another realm.
Shay said quietly, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ Riding in the coach with Dorocha. And she wanted her mother, but she couldn’t have her mother, because her mother was—
He said, ‘You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.’
She said, ‘No, I do kind of want to. I think it would help sort things out in my head. I used to think all my memories of that other world were just my imagination, like the fairy-road game. But in the last year they’ve come back more and more – I need to figure out what is real.’
Shay’s hand rested on her stomach; she could feel the warmth of it through her damp dress. His energy, flooding through her. Intense life – sudden and wonderful and fatal, like a candle burning at both ends – the sweet, deadly gift of the lenanshee.
She was immortal and a lenanshee herself. A fairy queen. He could not harm her.
Her mother had been immortal and a lenanshee and a queen of the Tuatha Dé Danann. And Aoife had been such a little girl when she had pushed open that honey-coloured door. Dorocha had stormed past her, dragging a screaming human by his long black hair. And the four-year-old Aoife had shrunk aside in disgust, flattening herself against the door. And then, left alone, she had crept towards the high bed and stood on tiptoes, so she could see her fairy mother. Her beautiful mother; her eternal, immortal mother. The lamps were dark, but the translucent crystal walls glowed softly with moonlight. Her mother’s white face was turned away from her, her long curls spread darkly.
A trail of silver blood shining on the black sheets.
Somewhere high above in the tower, the terrible screaming of a human man. And then, silence. Everywhere, silence. And then, beyond the translucent crystal of the walls, the shadow of a man’s body falling …
Moving aside her arm, Aoife looked up into Shay’s serious eyes as he bent over her – the green depths of them dappled with chestnut and gold. Woodland colours. Her beautiful half-human, half-lenanshee boy. She had never told him the truth of how Dorocha had robbed her of her mother.
She sat up, facing him. ‘Dorocha told me that it was my mother’s human lover who murdered her. And I believed him, and so did my people. The Tuatha Dé Danann tore down all the tunnels to the human world and sailed with my mother’s body for the Blessed Isles.’
Another memory: Distant voices raised in weeping. The ships with their green and golden sails, disappearing into the mist, heading for the islands. And there her mother lay on a slab of rock, washed clean at high tide by the cold grey sea.
Shay said, ‘I know. Caitlin told us both, remember?’
‘But she was wrong. It was Dorocha who murdered her, with an iron knife so she could never be reborn.’
Shay paled. ‘That … devil.’ He rose to his knees, clenching his square fists, muscles tight in his sloping jaw, gazing up the road towards the mountains.
She put her hand on his arm, not wanting him to lose his new-found strength through worrying. ‘Don’t. He can’t come back – I laid iron all around the hawthorn circle, and that keeps the way sealed, even if Dorocha unseals it in Falias. And the smuggler’s road is blocked as well, and your own mother closed the sea-cave.’
He shuddered and sank back onto his heels. ‘I don’t want him anywhere near you, ever again. I can’t believe your people abandoned you with him.’
‘But he was the queen’s servant, and they trusted him. I did too. Back then, I wasn’t afraid of him at all. He was so handsome and cheerful, and he played with me and dressed me up in pretty dresses. I didn’t know he was the devil. It was the others that frightened me – the ones that slunk up from the Land of the Dead to be with their king, now he was in charge of everything. The dullahans and the sluagh. And the banshees! When Dorocha brought me to the surface world, I was happy to sit on his lap. But a banshee came with us in the coach, and I was absolutely terrified of her. She was so tall, and her eyes were so strange, like big holes in her face with nothing behind them. And I knew she was going to give me away to human parents, so she could steal a human child for herself.’
‘Ah, Aoife.’
‘And the worst thing was, I knew I would get older in the human world, and that terrified me. I had been four years old for a thousand years. My fairy mother had wanted me to stay a child for ever. She was fond of me, as a sort of a pet. Fonder than most fairy mothers of their children. The only reason I even got to four was that she used to bring me with her to the human world every time she wanted to wash her hair in the soft water of the bog. And while I was waiting for her, I would age a little. Sometimes I think I almost remember what it was like back then. Emptiness, and so many birds. The stars looked different. Bigger, hotter. And sometimes I can see her too, sitting on a stone, wringing the bog water out of her long hair. I’m told she looked like me. But I can’t remember her face, not properly. I think I do, but when I look closely she has it turned away from me. I wish I could see her face once more.’
Shay said softly, ‘I wish you could see her too.’
If only she was able to grant more than three wishes … As Killian h
ad said, she was a queen! Heart fluttering, she gazed up the fairy road to where it crossed two more fields before reaching the Clonbarra road and the Munnellys’ bungalow. No one coming.
She said, ‘Do you know, it was at the hawthorn pool where she met my father? He was a warrior of the Fianna. Only seventeen years old. One year older than you. Apparently, he forgot everything when he saw her – his family, his friends – and just followed her down into the pool. Your own mother told me that it was a true love story – although he died very young, because of the power of the grá. I wonder, was he sorry he followed her?’
Shay ran his eyes over her face; her long red-gold hair; the fairy dress, with the sunrise bursting from the inky sea. He said in a low voice, ‘Not if she looked anything like you.’
‘Ah, stop … Would you die for love of me?’
‘I would, my queen.’
‘Well, I order you not to.’ She smiled shyly at him. He smiled back, but then dropped his eyes and made no move to kiss her. Instead, he played an old trick – plucking a caterpillar from a flower, holding it in his hand for one moment, then releasing it into the air as a butterfly, sending it fluttering up into the sunshine. It was the power of a lenanshee, to make life intense and joyous. And too fast. Caterpillar to butterfly. And then, very soon, to dust.
And suddenly Aoife was annoyed with herself for telling him her parents’ story – reminding her own lenanshee boy of how the grá of a lenanshee could be dangerous for its victim. Shay’s father’s desire for his lenanshee wife had destroyed him – making a poet of the farmer and then a corpse of the poet. For too long, Shay had stayed away from Aoife, to protect her from the grá. Wistfully, she reached to stroke his wrist – the pale line where he had once worn the golden locket that now belonged to Eva. ‘Don’t start being afraid for me again, mister.’
He glanced up from under his black lashes. ‘Aoife …’
‘Don’t start saying “our love is too dangerous” or stupid crap like that.’
‘Aoife.’ Again, he just said her name – low and firm.
The Hawthorn Crown Page 17