Up, up, up …
Under the hawthorns
beside the blood-red water
I run to her –
I am the fairy’s daughter …
The hawthorn circle did not resist her, even though it was supposed to be surrounded by iron horseshoes. In fact, it gave way easily as she pressed through – thorns bending away from her, white flowers falling. In the centre of the circle, moonlight filtered down through the thick roof of blossom, creating a pale, glowing dome of beauty. The broken funeral coach lay half in the pool – Paddy Duffy’s stolen property. And the skeletons of the two huge horses.
Nothing else. Only these two grim guardians of death.
No beautiful woman waiting by the water, eager to embrace her fairy daughter. No ripple on the surface of the black pool to signify anyone rising from below.
Or sinking down …
Suddenly alarmed, she cried, ‘Killian? Are you here?’ She’d completely forgotten about him. The door to the coach was closed; maybe he was hiding from her, in his sulk. Bracing herself, she slipped into the freezing water and opened the door. Empty.
Mounting anxiety. Had he tried to make his way down through the pool? Even if he was a changeling, he would drown, because Dorocha had sealed this road.
‘Killian?’
Taking a deep breath against the cold, she squatted in the water, crawling around, crouching, feeling for the bottom of the pool. Nothing – only a deep, soft layer of rotting hawthorn leaves and blossoms, coming up in squidgy handfuls.
‘Aoife! Ouch … Ouch!’ Lois was pushing her way through the hawthorns, complaining shrilly, ‘How could you run off on me like that? I thought you liked me! I thought we were friends!’ Her reedy voice shot up into an ear-splitting scream: ‘Oh my God, he’s drowned, he’s dead!’
Aoife surged to her feet in the water, staring around her, trembling with terror. ‘Where? Where did you see him?’
‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ shrieked Lois, falling to her knees on the bank, clutching her black curls. ‘That’s why he never came back! He crashed the coach! He’s drowned!’
Weak with relief, Aoife instantly realized who Lois was weeping for: not Killian, but Dorocha. ‘Lois, it’s OK, he’s not here. See – look – he’s gone, he’s nowhere. Forget him.’
‘What if he’s under the water?’
‘I promise you he’s alive, wherever he is.’
‘You don’t know that!’
‘I do. I’m sorry. He’s the devil.’
Lois howled furiously, ‘He’s not a devil! He’s not! Why are you being such a bitch to me suddenly …? Oh my God, oh my God …’ Now she was cowering, staring in white-faced terror over Aoife’s shoulder.
Once more, Aoife spun to look. A wave was swelling across the pool, rippling against her chest. Hairs pricked on the back of her neck, and she took a step back against the bank. Another wave followed, the quiet power of the water making the wheels of the coach creak round a half-turn. The horse-skulls lifted grinning on the swell, and their leg bones – massive shadows in the moonlit water – wafted back and forth beneath the surface, as if walking. Between the two horses, a hooded figure was rising to its feet, the pool water running from its head and shoulders.
‘Help, help!’ screamed Lois, running in mindless terror around the hawthorn circle, desperately seeking the way out, and not finding it – the thorns locked tightly together. ‘Let me out! Let me out!’
Aoife stood trembling, both arms extended, fingers spread like stars, blood pounding through her veins. The icy power was flooding down her arms, ready to blast this demon that was rising from the deep …
It was a woman.
Very tall, in a long deep crimson cloak – the hood pulled down over her face, which was turned aside. Escaping from under the hood were curling locks of deep red hair, and a glimpse of skin so milky-white and fair.
‘Oh …’ Aoife took a step forward through the water, tears rising into her eyes. The power in her hands faded to nothing and she was a little girl again, as she had been all those thousands of years ago, when the stars were young. And the woman was turning her head to her; her hood beginning to slip back.
With a deep eager sob, Aoife stood waist-deep in the water, waiting. Heart beating like a trapped bird in her throat. Waiting to see the woman’s beautiful face. Her fairy mother’s turquoise eyes.
I am the fairy’s daughter …
The hood slipped back.
And the woman was indeed beautiful beyond imagining.
Apart from her eyes.
Her empty eyes.
Holes.
Screaming in terror, Aoife turned to clamber out of the pool, to flee. Too late – the banshee had seized her from behind, locking her powerful arms around Aoife’s waist, dragging her backwards into the freezing water.
‘No! No! Let me go!’
Down.
‘Mam! Mam!’ howled Aoife as the water rose over her head and rushed into her mouth and lungs. ‘Mam! Mam!’ Her human mother’s face filling her childish mind – Maeve’s plain round face – so ordinary and so mortal, with anxious lines around her eyes. ‘Mam! Mam!’
As the banshee and the fairy girl sank together …
CHAPTER EIGHT
She was dragged back to sudden consciousness by the sharp pain of cramp in her neck. But when she tried to turn her head, she was unable to move because …
Because there was a dead weight on her neck and shoulders, breathing and furry and stinking, like some filthy creature was using her for a bed. A disgusting smell of urine filled her nostrils.
She tried to move her head the other way. Still immobilized. She was trapped, face down in piss-wet straw.
Where was she?
Her stomach clenched as she remembered what had happened to her.
Down.
Drowning in the banshee’s arms.
Sweat broke out on her forehead. She tried to move her arms. Her hands were tied behind her back. She tried to kick with her legs. Also tied, at ankle and knee.
Pulling in her chin, she thrust her forehead down into the foul straw, tensed her shoulders, arched her back, and jack-knifed with her whole body. The animal sprang off with a shrill, high shriek. Dropping flat onto her stomach, Aoife turned her head to one side and found a child-sized being crouched beside her, breathing rapidly, small red nostrils flaring, glaring at her with tiny brown eyes – a wizened little creature, entirely naked, its scant orange fur matted with leaves. It was wearing Aoife’s hawthorn crown at a jaunty angle, and was holding a long stick in one thin-fingered hand.
Grogoch.
The beast was inspecting her now, pushing its hideous little face close to hers, lips pulled back and tongue lolling out. Unexpectedly, it gave her face a quick, rough lick.
She snarled, ‘Get away from me!’
With an angry screech, it leaped back and brought the stick down hard on Aoife’s cheek, sending a spasm of pain up her jaw and catching her in the mouth. For a moment she was breathless with shock. Silver shining liquid leaked onto the straw – fairy blood, dribbling from her burst lip. Shining. So she must be in the Land of the Young. Which meant the banshee had captured her and brought her …
Down.
To where exactly?
Caged, tied hand and foot on a bed of filthy straw.
A deep, terrified shiver stabbed down through Aoife’s stomach to her toes. She could hear the zookeeper’s voice in her mind – his smarmy, unpleasant old man’s voice – informing the headless dullahan on the bridge:
‘I have a special cage set aside for her … We’ll tie her hand and foot and keep her bedded in straw with a grogoch to watch over her and keep her as hungry as her dogs until the Beloved returns from whatever dark secret place he’s retired to while Morfesa gets over his rage. Ah, but when the Beloved returns it will be a mighty celebration, and we’ll all wear cooshee fur and drink and dance.’
Was the zookeeper even still alive? The last time she’d seen him was in
the temple, when the cooshee fur he’d been so proud of had come alive and started eating his face.
Licking the blood from her mouth, Aoife turned her head the other way. Right up against her face were ramshackle wooden bars fixed together with sugán rope. Outside, a muddy pathway was lit by one flickering tar-dipped torch stabbed into the ground. In the cage opposite, a cat-sidhe lay gazing at her, its vast head on its paws, its dirty fur grey in the gathering dusk – an outsized domestic cat, four metres long from its nose to the tip of its tail. As she caught the monster’s eye, it purred at her, making the noise of a lorry’s engine, idling. Along the path, more cages; more cat-sidhes. And through a gap in the distance burned the golden fires of Falias – that massive crystal pyramid city, rising against the marble cliffs, ringed at its feet by the broad crimson belt of its moat; its bronze gates decorated with the warriors of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Night was falling, and the high stone bridge was already set along its parapets with the watchful heads of the dullahans, which appeared at this distance like strings of orange paper lanterns. And high above the city, seeming to float above the lenanshee quarters and the dullahan stables, the crystal minaret was a silver pencil in the moonlight.
For the first time, gazing up at the minaret, Aoife felt a deep surge of ownership, of possession. Of being within sight of home. That was her tower. Her mother was dead, and she was the queen.
A powerful, immortal fairy queen.
Yet here she lay in the dirty zoo at the gates of Falias, tied hand and foot, caged with the wild beasts. And a grogoch was wearing her hawthorn and mistletoe crown …
In a fit of fury, she made a fresh effort to break her bindings, straining at the slender cords that bound her. The grogoch leaped and chattered anxiously around her, lashing at her every time she moved, catching her smartly on her naked shoulders, bare arms. If only she wasn’t just wearing a sleeveless vest … How was she unable to break these bonds? She summoned all her fairy power – it flowed into her blood, pouring down her arms. Yet when it reached her wrists, the power pooled uselessly in her forearms, and drained away painfully back into her shoulders. And the more she tried to fight the ropes, the more they cut at her, sending waves of agony pulsing into her arms and legs. It was as if she was tied by live electric cables …
Exhausted by the pain, she lay still again, flat on her face, waiting for the agony to recede. In the background, over her own harsh panting, a despairing scream arose: ‘It’s not fair!’
Oh God. Lois …
Aoife lifted her head, despite the grogoch delivering a rapid flurry of stinging strokes to her exposed shoulders. ‘Lois! Is that you?’
‘I’m an innocent bystander!’
‘Lois, talk to me! Ow, you little brute! Wait till I have my hands free, I’ll blast you so hard there’ll be nothing left of you but orange fur …’
‘Eeeech! Eeeech!’ chattered the grogoch angrily, baring its teeth, striking at the soles of her bound feet as she writhed around in the straw.
‘Do I hear the dulcet tones of our lovely queen?’
Aoife froze, stomach clenching. Then slowly turned her face to the bars.
The zookeeper’s face was pressed to the other side, grinning. It was an awful, disgusting grin. Seán Burke’s had never been a pretty face – probably not even as a child; probably not even to his own mother – but now it was a truly sickening sight. The cooshee had ripped one wrinkled cheek half off, and it had been stitched back on very roughly with leather string, leaving his left eye looking larger than the other. He had only one eyebrow left. His mouth drooped, and most of his brown teeth had been smashed to stubs. An ear was missing. Yet, in a weird act of defiance, he was still wearing the dark green fur of Aoife’s favourite dog, and still using its head as an over-sized hat. Only now the cooshee’s bone-white eyes had been gouged out and the needle-sharp teeth removed – and for extra safety the muzzle had been lashed together, using the same leather string. As well as that, the cooshee claws he had used as toggles for the coat had been replaced with bronze buttons.
‘Now, my queen,’ the old man said cheerfully. ‘Just to point out, there’s no use calling on this particular dog to do any more harm to me. Don’t even think about it!’ He leaped nimbly backwards from the bars as she made another fierce effort to free herself. ‘And don’t spit at me, my queen – it’s a filthy habit, not worthy of royalty. Although, of course, you’re no longer a queen now our darling Deargdue sits in the queen’s tower …’
‘The Deargdue?’
‘Don’t look so mutinous, my queen! Any crown is a precarious thing. I see the grogoch is wearing yours, but it doesn’t make him royalty. I’m afraid history has moved on while you’ve been lying here unconscious for the last twenty-four hours.’
Twenty-four hours? Three months in the human world!
‘Stop struggling!’ said the zookeeper sharply. ‘Or next time I won’t put a nice little grogoch in with you, I’ll put in a dullahan with his whip made of a human spine, and then instead of piddling little scratches you’ll be after having cuts so deep we’ll be sewing them up all night with leather string just like my poor cheek.’ He poked a finger at his stitched-up cheek, adding sourly, ‘That was a dirty trick – setting a cooshee on an old man.’
She snarled, through gritted teeth, ‘Then you shouldn’t have been using its corpse for a coat, you murderer.’ It still broke her heart that she had left her poor brave dogs in the custody of this evil man, who had promptly slaughtered the youngest and bravest for the protective power of its dark green skin.
Seán Burke’s lopsided eyes widened with outraged innocence. ‘I didn’t murder your dog – I executed it after it was caught trying to escape! An act punishable by being flayed alive, as you’ll soon find out if you try it yourself …’
‘Torturer!’
‘Only within legal limits. And I would like to point out, I have been a positive father figure to the remaining six dogs. Didn’t I feed them our comically named friend, Wee Peter, after he refused to betray you? Vast slabs of flesh and big juicy bones. Yum, yum.’
Her heart broke. ‘You dirty, filthy—’
‘Ooh, ooh, language, my queen as was! And now you’re spitting at me again! Will I call for the dullahan? No, I thought not. In fact, I’m so good to your dogs that I was just about to feed them a nice tasty virgin from the human world that the banshee went back for after it captured you.’
‘It’s not fair! I was only trying to stop her!’ screamed the voice in the background.
Oh God, this monster of a man was planning to kill Lois. Cold sweat burst from Aoife’s skin. She bit down hard on her damaged lip to stop herself screaming more abuse. She turned her face into the piss-soaked straw. OK. Don’t keep reacting like an impulsive fool, the way you always do. Think, as Carla would say. Be more like Carla. Be clever. Convince Seán Burke you have no interest in saving Lois. She turned her face back towards the old man, saying coldly, ‘Have I your word this girl is a filthy, cowardly human, and not a brave, noble changeling? I don’t like you murdering my people.’
‘Nor do I like murdering your people!’ Seán Burke beamed at this delightful meeting of minds, the leather stitches stretching unpleasantly and the remaining stubs of his brown teeth jutting in all directions. ‘I’m one of your people myself, remember! I would only execute a changeling girl like yourself if she tried to escape – but happily this other girl is a bona fide human and deserves everything that’s coming to her even if she’s as good as gold, which she isn’t!’
‘Grand so. Feed her to the dogs.’
(‘Can anyone hear me? It’s Aoife O’Connor you want! I’m an innocent bystander and I want to go home!’ screamed Lois, far off.)
Seán Burke studied Aoife shrewdly, narrowing his lopsided eyes as he drew closer to the bars. ‘Humans are filthy cowards, aren’t they? I’m going to enjoy the look on her face when I let the cooshees into her cage.’
‘I’d like to see them eat her myself,’ said Aoife. She wasn’t th
e best actor in the world – she knew her emotions showed far too easily on her face. But (to her shame) it wasn’t that hard for her to sound mean about Lois. All she had to do was summon into her mind the years of Lois dismissing her as ‘an attention-seeking anorexic who wrote crap songs’; or – worse – joining forces with Sinead to call Carla ‘boring’ and ‘mousy’.
Seán Burke looked even more interested. ‘And there was me thinking you had a soft spot for the inferior race.’
Fury rushed up in her … Stop. Think. Be calm. Turning her face into the filthy straw, Aoife took a deep breath. You despise humans. Let him know you despise humans. She turned back to the zookeeper with a cool cynical smile that lifted only one side of her hurt mouth. Channelling Killian and his bottomless contempt for everyone in Kilduff, including his own family. ‘Humans are more than inferior. Humans are scum. They’re at the bottom of the food chain. I despise them.’
‘Well, well.’ He still looked suspicious. ‘Maybe we could manage you a ringside seat, seeing as we’ve blocked your power … Grogie! Untie her legs!’
The grogoch had retreated to a corner of the cage and was inspecting itself for fleas, but at the zookeeper’s summons it bounded back and very nimbly untied Aoife’s throbbing feet. The blood flowing back into her toes was ten times as painful as any blow inflicted by her little torturer. Suppressing a groan, she raised her arms at a shallow angle behind her, hoping against hope …
Seán Burke thrust his walking stick at her through the bars. ‘Hands stay tied, my queen! We know your little ways, and that’s iron wire threaded through the sugán, in case you’re wondering.’
Iron. That explained it. ‘You nasty little—’
‘Now, now, play nice!’ There was a bronze hook screwed to one end of his stick, and with it he snagged the rope round her wrists and yanked her to her knees. ‘Upsy-daisy! And it’s no use trying to escape, unless you have a masochistic desire to be flayed alive.’ As he opened the cage door, the grogoch made a determined effort to escape itself; Seán Burke beat it back with the hook of his stick, while using his other arm to lift Aoife down. ‘You stay where you are, you piece of orange vermin!’
The Hawthorn Crown Page 19