The Hawthorn Crown

by Helen Falconer

This time she waited for him to continue. But he said no more, just sat looking at her – his green eyes flecked by gold.

  Her heart twisted slightly. ‘I’m serious – don’t do this. I have lenanshee blood through my mother. We know that now. Your own mother told me. I’m well able for you.’

  He smiled then, and leaned across and took her face between his brown hands and kissed her on the mouth. Pressing his lips hard against hers. Daring her with the intensity of his grá. For a moment all energy drained from her, rushing out of her veins into his, and she drifted … But then life came pouring back, fed by his own, and the joy of it made her feel utterly weightless, as if she was flying with him, even though they were sitting quite, quite still in a Mayo field.

  Drawing back, he brushed her hair from her face, tucking a strand of it behind her ear, then again cupped her face in his hands. ‘Aoife,’ he said. As if that was the only word he knew, or needed.

  That afternoon, after Shay had left with Grainne (in a brand-new Land Rover!), Aoife Facetimed Carla – guilty that she’d been distracted all day from the business of war. Distracted by her own concerns. Her fairy mother. Her love for Shay.

  When Carla picked up, Aoife could see that she was riding her bike up the hill past the GAA pitch. ‘You OK?’

  Carla panted, wobbling around on the bike: ‘Just back from another meeting in the deanery.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one – I’m so sorry!’

  ‘That’s all right – it was just me and Father Leahy. He asked to see me by myself. Hang on.’ She pulled into a gateway and got off. ‘That’s better. Can’t really cycle uphill and Facetime at the same time.’

  ‘Want to call back when you’re home?’

  ‘No, you’re good. I’m going to pop into Killian’s on the way, but I wanted to talk to you first. Why are you sitting in a tree?’

  Aoife was straddling the fork of the ash tree outside her bedroom window, swinging her bare feet, scuffing them through the fresh spring growth as she watched the day fade over the mountains. ‘Better reception out here. How was the meeting?’

  ‘Ugh.’ Carla pulled a disgusted face. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It was an absolute disaster. Father Leahy’s gone from being all fired up about demons to saying we should wind the committee down.’

  ‘What?’

  Carla groaned. ‘I know! But it seems people complained to the bishop about yesterday’s sermon – actually, I think my mam was one of them, though she’s not saying – and now he’s terrified he’s going to be defrocked, and he’s started saying maybe the pooka really was only a gorilla suit and maybe the sluagh were only the Greenland geese. And of course we can kiss goodbye to his offer of church funds, so we’re back to relying on Nan’s pension.’

  Aoife offered reluctantly, ‘Do you want me to talk to him?’

  Carla’s face grew hopeful for a moment – but then fell. ‘Mm, no. If I even mention you he gets very twitchy. What is all that about a failed christening? You never told me, and he keeps dropping these dark, awful hints …’

  (The priest lying on the altar steps, holding up his crucifix like a shield against her: ‘Cast out the power of Satan, the spirit of evil! Get away from me, demon, in the name of God! Get out of my church!’)

  Aoife changed the subject. ‘Listen, Carla – how many wishes can a fairy grant? And don’t tell me I should know – you’re the brains of this operation.’

  It proved to be a good distraction. Carla suppressed a pleased smirk. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that …’

  ‘Well, I do. Come on, tell me what you think.’

  Carla looked even more pleased. ‘OK, OK. As far as I know, they can only grant three.’

  ‘Right. Good.’ Disappointment washed through her.

  (‘I wish I could see her face once more.’

  ‘I wish you could see her too.’)

  Too late for wishes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The night was dark purple, and the stars of gold, and the woman sat on a stone by the pool, wringing the water from her long red hair. A heavy rain began to fall, a distant roll of thunder …

  Wake up, Aoife!

  She was waking now.

  And the heavy rain was gravel being thrown at her bedroom window – tinkling off the glass and pattering through onto the carpet, because the window was half open. A low, persistent voice: ‘Aoife, wake up! Aoife! Aoife!’

  It was only ten, according to her phone. Her parents were still downstairs watching television – she could hear it through the floor. She must have fallen asleep by accident, while Facetiming Shay about his brother’s wedding.

  (There was going to be an invitation to every single person in Kilduff, including babies and children, because Grainne McDonnell was intending to spare no expense. Every single person from the town was to be crammed into the church. It would be bursting at the seams – mad!)

  When she went to the window – holding the curtain to shield herself because she was wearing only pants and a sleeveless T-shirt – a handsome boy was standing under the ash tree, looking up through the leaves. The moon glistening in his eyes. Crystal eyes.

  She clutched the curtain closer: ‘Killian, God’s sake, what do you want?’

  He said softly but clearly, ‘You.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You. I want you.’

  She cried in disgust, ‘What are you on about? Go away!’

  Those shining eyes – like a fox in the dark. ‘I am going away. I’ve had enough. I don’t belong here, I know that now. I’ve heard their voices.’

  ‘Killian, you’ve been dreaming, go home …’

  ‘I am going home. And I haven’t been dreaming. I heard my fairy parents, calling me down.’

  She shuddered: ‘No, you’ve gone mad!’

  His fox-eyes gleamed up at her. ‘What – you mean, like when you went mad? Like when Carla told everyone you were having a nervous breakdown?’

  ‘That was different …’

  ‘No it wasn’t. Come with me, Aoife. We don’t belong in this world. We belong together. Sinead says you love me.’

  She hissed through the window, ‘That’s a lie!’

  ‘Is it? You loved me before.’

  ‘That wasn’t me!’

  ‘But I can feel the dark creature in you. I can feel it calling to me, like my true parents …’

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘I won’t stop. Sinead says the only reason you’re being cruel to me now is because of Shay Foley being rich, because of Grainne McDonnell. But that’s crazy. You don’t need Shay to make you rich. You have everything you want in the fairy world – gold, jewels, magical weapons. Carla told me you’re powerful, and the leprechaun said the same. A powerful, immortal fairy queen. I love you, Aoife.’

  ‘Killian, go home before I call your dad to come and get you!’

  His voice turned sour with anger and contempt. ‘If you’re too scared to be who you are, I’ll go to the fairy world without you.’

  ‘Fine!’ She slammed the window. Then stood out of sight behind the curtain, heart stuttering with rage, watching to see what the stupid boy would do next.

  He walked down to the garden wall and stood looking over it into Declan Sweeney’s field, where the moon, shining between thorn trees, had laid a pale stripe down the centre of the slope. He stepped up on the wall and walked to and fro for a while, before jumping down and starting up the path of moonlight towards the top of the field.

  The brambles were much higher than when Aoife had been a child – two metres now. Head-height and painful with thorns. Three days ago, Shay had bounded over it like a true lenanshee – but Killian, a human boy, would be forced to go round: back out by the gate into the lane. And once away from her and the fairy road, he would surely realize what an eejit he was being.

  Except, he didn’t go round. He ran up the hedge quite lightly – fitter and less heavy on his feet than Aoife had imagined. Reaching the top, he paused again, glancing back at the
house – she drew further behind the curtain – then jumped down out of sight into the field beyond.

  Aoife threw herself back across the room into her bed and lay there on her back, fists clenched with fury.

  Forget the fool. Let him off. He would soon give up. When he got to the flooded field, he would be unable to go any further. (Unless he plunged into the freezing water, as Shay had done, and swam across. Ugh. How well could Killian swim? She didn’t know. And even if he could swim as well as Shay, if he fell unexpectedly into deep water in the middle of the night … Aargh!)

  Grabbing her phone, she scrolled down to Dark Beloved and hit the number.

  He answered gleefully: ‘I knew you’d change your mind!’

  ‘I’ve not changed my mind, I just wanted to tell you that—’

  His voice darkened with disappointment. ‘Goodbye, Aoife.’

  Furious, she rang straight back.

  The person you called may have their phone powered off.

  ‘Oh, for—!’ Panic tore through her. And then real fear. Carla … How could she face her friend if Killian’s drowned body was found in the field, and she’d done nothing to save him?

  The image scared her so much – Killian floating, face up, arms out, his silver eyes staring at nothing – she didn’t even pause to get dressed properly, grabbing only a pair of teddy-bear-patterned pyjama bottoms, which she dragged on over her pants. Then she flung open the window and threw herself out.

  She failed to fly – only glided about fifty metres before landing halfway up the field behind the house and racing on up the moonlit road in her bare feet. As she sprang over the high bank, the hem of her pyjama bottoms caught on a trail of brambles and she crashed headfirst into the next field. ‘Crap. Crap.’ Landing on all fours, she scanned the dark field and couldn’t find him. But then she picked him out, disappearing over the next gate. ‘Killian!’

  She leaped up and streamed across the field, certain she’d be able to reach him before …

  He was gone.

  No, all was good, he was still there – racing across the dark grass towards the moonlit surface of the water. She took a breath to shout his name again, but he was moving so fast that he had reached the flood already, and was already ploughing into it, his feet throwing up a trail of silver splashes behind him in the moonlight. Saving her breath, she sprinted after him, bracing herself to dive into the cold water.

  He reached the other side.

  She came to a halt on the near bank, staring after him.

  His dark figure grew smaller as he disappeared over the next gate, and disappeared.

  What the—?

  No.

  Killian was only human – he couldn’t have run across a deep stream without sinking. Obviously the flood had drained away, leaving only a skim of water on the grass. She needn’t have bothered herself about him after all. She could go home now. Yet, in a daze, she found herself stepping into the water herself. This time, without the lightness of Shay’s kiss, her feet sank in; and the next moment she was up to her ankles. Her knees. Her waist. Swimming …

  Killian ran across the water?

  Impossible.

  She scrambled out onto the far bank, and looked back. Maybe she’d crossed in a different place. Maybe he’d found a ford. She turned again to look after him. He had disappeared. The path ahead was a brilliant stripe, like the swipe of a brush dipped in whitewash. From under the ground, a faint strumming was rising up through her bare feet, trickling up around her ankles, up the inside of her calves, tingling her knees. Lyrics bubbled up into her consciousness, surging from that deep, unknown world where songs are made:

  He ran across the blood-red water …

  Stop! She didn’t want a song about Killian running through her head.

  He ran across …

  Was it possible Killian had turned into a changeling? Had she somehow granted his wish, without even realizing it? And if she could grant one extra wish, then …

  Maybe she’d granted Shay’s wish as well?

  Her eyes welled with warm tears. An impossible but haunting image came to her: her mother sitting by the hawthorn pool, waiting for her.

  She combs her hair

  beside

  the blood-red water …

  She hurried on. Silent music poured upwards through the grass: strong, pulsing, exhilarating. A heavy throbbing pulse from the fairy world beneath.

  She combs her hair …

  She broke into a faster run; sprang over the next gate, and the next. And the last, out onto the Clonbarra road.

  On the far side of the road, Lois Munnelly’s house sat facing her in a sea of bare earth. The frame of the new extension, instead of slanting towards the house wall, was now pointed in the middle like a pyramid, reaching higher than the roof of the bungalow. Some of the windows had yellow protective tape still criss-crossing the glass. Crossing the road and then the mud, Aoife pushed open the doors of the sun room. And flinched back.

  Lois was standing in the middle of the extension with her back to Aoife, still wearing the white lacy top and white shorts from that morning. The television was on beside her, but Lois was focused on the doors on the far side of the sun room, which were wide open. The ones behind Aoife slammed sharply in the chilly through-draught, and Lois turned with a gasp, her hand pressed dramatically to her heart. ‘You two have to stop bursting in on me like this!’

  Aoife hurried across the tiles towards the far doors. ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘Are you two playing some sort of a game?’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘Over the wall and up the field. I’m so glad you two are back together. Sinead said she’d sort it all out. People who love each other should always be together …’

  Aoife stepped out through the far doors. A wide track of pale stones had been uncovered by Joseph Doherty’s machines – a digger stood by the back wall, with DOHERTY AND SON emblazoned on the side. The stone track led across the sea of mud, out between the encircling fir trees and on across the field. A fresh heathery breeze swept down from the mountains …

  A small black shadow was running up the moonlit hill.

  Was Killian really a changeling now? Had he always been one? The bare stones of the road trembled beneath her. Music rising through the mud, like voices calling.

  She combs her hair

  beside

  the blood-red water …

  I am the fairy’s daughter.

  How strange, if Killian Doherty was leading her to her fairy mother.

  Beyond the fir trees was a low dry-stone wall, recently rebuilt from where Dorocha had driven his stolen coach straight through it. Aoife ran across the mud and jumped up on the wall – then sprang back with a shocked cry.

  Coming up behind her, now wearing a purple Superdry jacket over her white top and shorts, Lois chuckled sympathetically, ‘Barbed wire? Ouch.’

  Yet when Aoife looked, it wasn’t barbed wire that had hurt her, but horseshoes tucked among the stones – the iron circle laid by Teresa Gilvarry to protect Kilduff from the fairy world. The darker creature stirred beneath her skin. Alert. Anxious. Trapped? Cautiously, she touched the wall again. The horseshoes sparked back at her, jolting her like an electric fence.

  Among the fir trees were rapidly growing saplings of hawthorn wrapped around in mistletoe – also planted by Teresa. Hawthorn-mistletoe was Aoife’s crown; her sword. Her mother was the daughter of a lenanshee, but also of the Tuatha Dé Danann. She pulled at the thorns and blossoms and mistletoe berries with her bare hands and the slender branches broke off easily; she twisted the green and white strands around her head, pinning back her long red-golden hair. And immediately she felt a strange, vivid sense of being … of being … what? Herself. Why had she ever tossed her crown away, as if it meant nothing to her? A strange, careless impulse.

  With a rush of fresh energy, she stepped up on the wall again. A brief, agonizing pain as she walked on iron, like walking on knives …

  She
leaped down, gasping, into the field beyond.

  Out of the circle!

  Within her, the wings of that darker, colder creature rustled, sensing freedom.

  I am the fairy’s daughter.

  Lois caught up with her at the top of the field, panting heavily. ‘Wait! Wait for me!’

  (Run on, urged that other being within Aoife. Find freedom. The freedom of being yourself, alone. Don’t turn back.)

  ‘Ow! Ow! Aoife, I’ve fallen in the ditch! Help me!’

  Sighing, Aoife turned back to help her old enemy out of the brambles into which she’d fallen. And once she’d done that, Lois grabbed her arm and clung to it like a limpet, refusing to let her go as they climbed on up the thistled hill towards the bog.

  Gently Aoife tried to free herself. ‘Lois, why don’t you go back home?’

  ‘Nope!’ The girl clung tighter. ‘I’m your friend, and I’m not letting you go wandering around in the dark by yourself!’

  ‘I promise, I’m not going far.’

  ‘Good, because I’m knackered already.’

  ‘You could wait here?’ They were passing a low boulder, a grey hump in the moonlight.

  Lois squealed, ‘You can’t leave me! I’ll be scared by myself.’

  And so the two girls continued together, up the ancient road of mossy stones – sometimes hidden, sometimes visible through the heather – as it ran straight up the long sweep of fields then over the low mountains, between deep pools and heaps of granite. It wasn’t that far, as the crow flies. Only half an hour brought them to the summit, and there the starlit land spread out before them.

  Lois, who had been panting too hard to speak, found her breath again as they headed downhill. ‘I thought you said it wasn’t far … Hey, come back!’

  But a scent of hawthorns had swept towards Aoife on the wind, and the night was suddenly alive with magic, and she was that small girl again, and her mother had never died, and nothing about this landscape had ever changed, and even the stars were young …

  ‘Aoife, come back! I thought you were my friend!’

  Lois’s panicking cries became fainter and fainter as Aoife raced onwards across the scented land, through the purple night, under the golden stars, as once, thousands of years ago, as an immortal child, she had run to her fairy mother’s arms. The black hill rose before her, with its bright summit of thorns. She raced headlong up the steep slope, faster than she ever had run.