The Hawthorn Crown

by Helen Falconer

  The summit was empty. Only the dying hawthorns remained, hunched against the soft dawn breeze. Aoife threw herself into the pool – and hit the floor with her fists.

  Closed.

  With a howl of fury, Aoife knelt, bashing at the crimson tiles, trying to prise them open with her fingernails. She had to get through. Any moment now, the grogoch would be surfacing in that other pool, sniffing the Mayo air; tumbling in disordered joy down the green hill, finding their way down the fairy road, across the bog to Kilduff …

  A laugh rang out. The Deargdue was standing in the doorway to the tower. Leaping to her feet, hands raised in anger, Aoife cried: ‘Get back to your own world, you monster!’

  The Deargdue grinned, showing all her pretty teeth. ‘Beware who you call a “monster”, you monster. This is my world now, and I will stay here with my jewels while my Beloved goes to war and brings back human men for me to love – just as he did for your mother, when she was queen.’

  ‘This is my tower!’ snarled the dark creature that was Aoife. ‘Return to the Land of the Dead! The Land of the Young belongs to me – my crown, my jewels, my cities!’

  The demon girl sneered back, ‘And if I don’t run away, will you murder me, like you murdered my poor pathetic son?’

  ‘Your son lives!’

  The Deargdue laughed. ‘Wrong. He’s dead.’

  ‘No!’ Raging at her own weakness, but unable to fully overcome that softer self within, Aoife launched herself backwards over the edge of the minaret, twisted and swooped, down over the narrow streets and roofs; down towards the city square where she had left him. He was no longer alone: his body was being watched over by a gathering crowd of confused and sleepy child soldiers.

  As Aoife landed under the giant elk, the children gathered around her: ‘The Prince of Donn is dead, Queen Aoibheal! Did he get killed in the battle? Lead us to war, to avenge him!’

  Falling to her knees, she gazed into his white face – stained with the human blood of murdered boys. His pale eyelashes; delicate cheekbones; handsome mouth. All his life and love had been drained from him into her own veins …

  Oh, Killian. Carla loved you so much.

  Old connections of childhood struggled to the surface of her colder, darker fairy self. What was left of the old, humanized Aoife knelt to kiss the demon boy. There came a tug on her blood – unpleasant, like a dead hand jerking at her veins, and she sprang back to her feet, half afraid of what she had done. Killian smiled and stretched out in his sleep.

  ‘Aoife! I mean, Queen Aoibheal!’

  Some youngster must have gone to fetch Caitlin, because here came the big, ugly changeling girl – hurrying down a side road into the square; more children running ahead of her. The newcomers flooded up the steps, gathering around Aoife as if she might tell them a story. ‘Tell us what to do, Queen Aoibheal!’ Most of these brave little soldiers were under twelve; orphans, ripe for killing, barefoot and bold of heart.

  Caitlin came panting after the others to the top of the plinth, and Aoife grasped her arm and drew her behind the vast hind leg of the elk. ‘You are the general of my troops. I need you to lead these children to war.’

  The changeling girl flushed with pride – and even saluted clumsily. ‘At your service, Queen Aoibheal. Will we head for the queen’s pool right away?’

  ‘No. We’re travelling in secret. We’ll take the old smugglers’ road. Follow me with your army.’ With Killian’s power in her veins, she was no longer too soft and squeamish to enlist these child soldiers, who were now pouring into the square from every direction.

  Caitlin drew herself up in proud delight. ‘Yes, Your Majesty! Just tell me the road, and we’ll be right behind you.’

  ‘Go to the smugglers’ bar. You’ll find Mícheál’s boat, which knows its own way to where the pookas live.’

  Caitlin paled: ‘Pookas?’

  Aoife snapped, ‘Be brave. If you die, you die.’

  Caitlin saluted hastily. ‘Yes, Your Majesty! Long live death!’

  ‘Take the right stairway from that ruined city, and you’ll survive.’

  ‘But how will I know the one?’

  ‘As you leave Falias, the river passes close to the zoo. Wee Peter is there – reborn as a cooshee pup. Tell him you come from me. Tell him to order the boat to go as fast as it can. It’s a smugglers’ boat – it will listen to him. And from the pookas’ city, he’ll show you the way straight into the heart of Kilduff. I’ll be ahead of you. I’ll have the way open. I heard it’s closed with iron, but iron can’t stop me now.’

  ‘So this is an ambush!’ The changeling girl’s eyes shone with joy. ‘We’re going to attack the town from within and murder everyone in their beds!’

  Aoife frowned at her. ‘We’re not going to attack the town. We’re going to protect it.’

  ‘No!’ Caitlin reeled in horror. ‘No – what? We can’t … I can’t! I’ve pledged to lead these children against their parents!’

  ‘Then tell them you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘I can’t change my mind! My moth— Mary McGreevey never even bought me a birthday cake, because she said I was an ugly, stupid fairy child and her “real” daughter that got stolen by the banshee was this wonderful, beautiful, precious …’ Caitlin roared in agony: ‘I want my mother to see me shoot fire from my hands before I kill her.’

  Aoife answered brutally, ‘Your mother is dead.’ She had never been able to say this to Caitlin before, for fear of hurting her. Yet there was an evil satisfaction in cutting straight to the truth, without caring how much pain it caused.

  Caitlin flinched, sheet-white under her freckles, her stone-green eyes flooding with tears. ‘What?’

  ‘And the same goes for the parents of all these changelings – they’re dead and buried in the human world, and nobody hates them any more except for you.’

  ‘But how? What happened?’ Sobbing, Caitlin grasped for the only explanation that made sense to her. ‘Were they killed by the sluagh in the first battle?’

  ‘You’re a fool, Caitlin,’ said the ancient, cold-hearted fairy queen – who was thousands of years old herself, in human time. ‘You think you’ve only been here for six months, but you’ve been here for over fifty years. You only want to go to war to show your mother you’re better than her human child could ever have been, but your mother is above in the graveyard in Ballinadeen, and has been for years. Ultan’s mother is dead as well, and his father is an old, old man who hardly knows himself. Time goes a hundred times faster in the human world. Everyone you were angry with is in the grave. You’ve all been lied to and used by the druids and their worship of death, and I should have told you the truth long ago, but I didn’t have the heart, which makes me as big a fool as you are. Don’t cry, there’s no time.’

  ‘I’m not crying!’ sobbed the changeling girl.

  ‘I order you to follow me.’ Aoife ran to the edge of the plinth.

  ‘Wait!’ Still weeping, Caitlin grabbed Aoife’s dress before she could throw herself into the air. ‘What will I do with the Prince of Donn? Will I bring him to the tower, to his mother, to take care of him?’

  Aoife hesitated, her childhood self battling with the ancient creature that was also her. Killian had tried to murder her. He deserved nothing from her. It was good enough that she had let him live. So let his demon mother kill him or keep him, love him or torture him, whichever she chose. ‘Bring him …’

  Yet once he had been a little boy with white-blond curls.

  ‘Bring him in the boat.’ Before she could regret her decision, Aoife sprang, spreading her arms wide, swooping across the cobbled square and out through the open bronze gates of the city, over the stone bridge. Rising steeply now, above the wide green plain and barley fields gold in the light of dawn; rising, rising, into the misty rainbow-crossed sky; passing over the zoo. Far below, in the clutter of cages on the plain, the cooshees raised their voices in hungry barking, and the murderous cat-sidhes screeched their mayhem.

 
; Oh, Lois. Poor murdered Lois.

  At the thought of Lois’s dying screams, Aoife’s flight faltered. In shock, she scrabbled with her fingers at empty air, rapidly losing height, just as she had when Killian’s body was in her arms.

  Harden your heart.

  Lois isn’t a poor murdered girl, she’s …

  Bitchy-McBitchy!

  The cold, ancient creature spread its wings again, sliding them gleefully through her arms.

  Bitchy-McBitchy!

  The darkness powered her on through the hazy blue sky, over the surrounding cliffs. Higher and higher, the land opening out beneath her. Poisonous forests of yew trees, dotted with clearings and ruined houses, including the one in which she had found Eva – the human child for whom she’d been swapped out. Dazzling marble mountains. Powder-blue waterfalls crashing hundreds of metres into bubbling milky pools. A swallow-filled gorge cutting a steep line through the range. The flowering fruit-forests of Gorias in which Donal’s body once lay buried. A white frothing vista of blossom, criss-crossed by azure rivers.

  Far, far away, the quartz city of Gorias.

  Circling higher.

  To the south, another range of mountains and, far off, a pyramid city she had never seen before – a tiny triangle, glittering as if cut from diamond …

  Too bright to look at!

  She veered across the hot, glorious sky. To the north were the oak woods through which Mícheál Costello’s boat had carried herself and Carla as they rushed to Falias. And there rose the ruined limestone city.

  She swept up the narrow bright line of a river far below. There was the lake in which she and Carla had sunk Mícheál’s wounded body, after he’d been killed by the pooka. Tiny and white, a swan tracked her flight; in seconds, she had left it behind, turning up a sapphire stream – stooping ever lower as she approached the city. Rushing through wild orchards of blossom. Ahead was the entrance through which the green phosphorescent river exited the underground cavern.

  She stooped again; drew in her elbows, stretched back her toes. Focusing hard, she flashed through the entrance, up the long, low tunnel. The roof was so low she had to skim along the surface of the river, cutting a wide shining track over the phosphorescent water; she stretched out her arms again, grazing the walls with her fingertips. Then, moments later, she burst from under the low rocky shelf where the river met the cavern, and where she and Carla and Mícheál Costello had slaughtered the pooka that had taken on the shape of Carla’s young sister Zoe. On she flew, through the vast cathedral-like space, swerving between its wasp-waisted pillars of limestone that rose into the dark roof. A ghostly green mist rolled across the floor, evaporating from the surface of the river.

  She slowed and landed, staring anxiously around her. All along the walls on either side, the bright green mist ebbed in and out of low arches, within which staircase after staircase ascended and descended. As she’d warned Caitlin, only one of these rose to the surface in Kilduff’s graveyard.

  Think, look, take your time, don’t rush.

  There it was. She remembered it well – directly across from where Mícheál Costello had tied up his boat. She hurried towards the archway.

  Behind her, there was a sudden fierce commotion – stones rolling noisily across the cavern floor …

  Pooka! Aoife spun in a circle, hands filling with power, as ready as Mícheál Costello had ever been to kill the thing she loved.

  The culprit was an otter – very large, brown and plump, with heavy paws and a wide long tail, which had just scrambled up out of the river onto the rocky bank, dragging a dead fish after it. After shaking itself busily, it headed straight for Aoife and – with a quick glance of small bright eyes – passed her by, the fish dangling from its mouth, before disappearing into the knee-deep mist, leaving only a long v-shaped disturbance behind it like a wake spreading back across green water.

  Aoife followed the trail. The otter was going the same way as she intended to go, which seemed a good sign.

  Yet at the last moment the otter’s wake verged left and passed under a different archway; one that was much lower than she remembered, and further along the wall. For a moment Aoife stood frozen by indecision – and then the dark creature that controlled her rapped its knuckles impatiently on her heart, and she pulled herself together and laughed at herself for her own childishness. Who was she going to trust? Herself, as a powerful fairy queen who had been this way before, or a small, humble animal on its way to a nest full of babies, bringing them a dead fish?

  Crouching down into the brilliant mist, Aoife crept on all fours under the archway she had chosen and up the sandy passage inside. The stairs, when she found them, were very steep; she dragged herself upwards into the dark, using her hands as well as her feet. Small claws came pattering down, and the next moment a rat squeezed between her and the wall, its scaly tail whipping her leg.

  Shuddering – recalled for a moment to her old childish self – she climbed on. A thought came to that childish self:

  Fish are living things.

  A strange thought to be having. The only fish she’d seen recently was dead – carried by the otter.

  Fish are living things.

  Spoken in the voice of an old friend. A true friend. A human.

  Fish are living things.

  And now she couldn’t get that stupid sentence out of her head – nor Carla’s firm way of saying it. She remembered now. It was from when she and Carla were debating whether they could bury Mícheál’s body in water instead of earth, and whether he could be reborn if he wasn’t exposed to worms, then plants, then birds. Carla had said, arguing strongly for a watery grave (as being quicker and more efficient), I’m not pretending to be an expert on this, and I know I’ve only just got here – but fish are living things, aren’t they?

  In the steep stairwell, Aoife slowed, then stopped; fingers gripping onto a mossy edge; her stomach pressed to the slippery steps.

  And the otters that ate the fish were also living things.

  And Aoife had kissed poor wounded Mícheál as he lay dying. Just like Wee Peter, maybe he had surged instantly back to life – reborn as a fish, and then again as an otter. Flowering from death to life, from life to death, from death to life. Cycling at reckless speed, like dear sweet Donal after Shay had kissed him – boy, robin, eagle, sluagh, daisy, caterpillar, butterfly …

  Dust.

  Crushed, in Killian’s fist.

  So much for rebirth, mocked her darker heart. Long live death. Death will overcome.

  But still she hesitated. The image of the otter in her mind was taking on a strong resemblance to Mícheál Costello carrying his black plastic sack of human food. The little smuggler never went anywhere without bringing a bite with him to eat.

  More light pattering of claws above her. Rapidly getting louder.

  A split second later, a wave of rats poured over her head, squealing in rodent panic. With a cry of fright herself, Aoife lost her grip on the near-vertical stairs and slid backwards, so fast she was keeping pace with the rats. The grey dress rucked up under her armpits; a layer of skin peeling from her stomach and thighs on the sharp edges of the steps …

  Down.

  Free-falling …

  Down.

  She landed in a heap in the sandy passageway, then jumped up and fled down the narrow tunnel, a fresh wave of rodents at her heels. A harsh echoing roar came from behind her, and a clatter of far mightier claws. Whatever had frightened the rats was close upon them. Falling to her knees, she crawled out under the archway and then – on her feet again – raced for the next opening in the cavern wall. The hysterical rats went streaming on towards the river – the leaders hurling themselves into the fast-flowing water and being swept away, under the rocky shelf out of the cavern. Just as Aoife threw herself to the ground and rolled under the neighbouring archway, a pooka burst out of the stairwell she’d just left and threw itself on the fleeing army – scooping up the laggards in its claws, popping off their heads, crushin
g them like tubes of toothpaste and squeezing their guts into its maw.

  Shaking, panting, crouched on hands and knees in the rolling mist, Aoife watched as the monstrous creature gorged itself. It was the biggest pooka she’d ever seen – at least five metres tall and covered in shaggy, thick, black, oily hair; its arms thickly curved; its eyes a deep, throbbing red. If the rats hadn’t alerted her …

  And maybe she’d got lucky in more ways than one. This was the archway through which the otter had disappeared. Perhaps the funny little creature, with his burden of dead fish, had been going the right way after all.

  As she shuffled backwards, the pooka stiffened, casting a sharp, narrow-eyed glance in her direction, a bundle of three headless rats raised to its mouth. Ducking her head below the level of the mist, Aoife crawled backwards a little further. Then turned and made as quickly and quietly as she could for the stairs. This set of steps started off at an easier angle. And that, she remembered with relief, was how the stairs had been when she’d come down from the graveyard last October: shallower as she’d reached the bottom. And then, as she also remembered, they grew steeper – until again she had to use her hands as well as her feet. Higher and higher, she pulled herself. The green tendrils of mist drifting up the stairwell around her were beginning to thin out …

  GGRRAAAAHHHHHHH …

  AAAHHHHH …

  Aoife froze, every hair on her body on end, animal-like.

  GGRRAAAAHHHHHHH …

  AAAHHHHH …

  Sweating, she cringed against the steps. She had heard that blood-chilling sound before – the death cry of a pooka, its flesh melting in water. What mighty predator had hurled that rat-killing monster into the river?

  GGRRAAA—

  The howling cut off.