by Mary Watson
They came up from the river, flitting through the trees. His face now hidden by a mummer’s mask, David prowled closer. There were two figures behind him and one coming along the slope. Using hand signals, they conferred. One continued on the slope, the two behind split up, one retracing his steps and the other pressing forward with David. They moved quietly, surefooted on the uneven ground. One last look back from David, the fixed smile on his masked face turned in my direction. Then they were gone.
Out of my hiding place, I sprinted uphill, away from the boys. Steep, the ground loose, I slipped a few times as I scrabbled forward. The woods were thinner and brighter here. There were fewer places to hide.
The beginnings of a cramp started in my side and I breathed through the pain. In the distance, the grey road appeared. The sound of a car nearby. The trees at the edge lit up, and the car passed. I ran, nearly falling over a broken tricycle that had been dumped behind a tree, its glittery pink streamers lifting in the wind. Pushing on, I went towards the road, hating the chase, hating that this still happened. Every year, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
I heard nothing, saw nothing until I was down. I knew only the slam of bone against bone, hard, gritty ground on my face. David’s head cracked against mine and we fell together. My cheek scraped stones and twigs and dirt; something sharp cut the skin on my temple. Pain strobed through my skull. Dazed, nonsense words echoed inside: Wren has left the building! And in my mind’s eye, I saw the mesmerising swing of a stone pendant on a worn gold chain moving sweetly from side to side.
I felt David’s weight on me, crushing the air from my lungs. His mask scraped my cheek. Fear throbbed through me. I was caught.
I tried to twist out from under him, my terror lending me strength. I crept forward, first one inch, then another. But he tightened his grip, holding me still. Along with earth and wood, I smelled the whiskey and cigarette smoke that clung to his clothes and hair.
‘Gotcha.’ He sat up to his knees.
He pushed the mask off his face and smiled. ‘Just a bit of fun, eh, Wren? No real harm done.’ The bruises faded, the cuts healed. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when it had shifted from a game that I didn’t enjoy but could tolerate, into this. My heartbeat was loud and fast and I struggled to catch my breath. I repeated Maeve’s words like they were a charm or a prayer: this ends today. But how?
David pulled me up, gripping my arms. In passing him on the streets, I might have noticed the bit of stubble, the gradual change from solid boy to thickset teen. I saw it properly now, facing all four of them, unnervingly no longer boys but not yet adults. They were bulked out, big arms and thick thighs. With shorn hair and underage tattoos, they were terrifying.
They won’t hurt me, I told myself. But it didn’t stop the fear.
‘We’re not really going to bury you,’ David said.
He was every inch the village princeling. Most of our neighbours wouldn’t understand the significance of his position in the hierarchy of judges, that as nephew of Calista Harkness he was as good as royal. But they understood that David was rich. That his family owned much of the land in and around Kilshamble.
The other three boys looked on, smiling.
‘What do you want?’ I tried to sound bored.
Whenever they caught me, they took a trophy. Maybe a button from my dress, a thread of unravelled wool. Last year, it was a lace from my shoe. This time, I wore a cheap string of charms around my wrist, feather earrings from the Saturday market. I worried that these useless objects could whisper my secrets. That if David listened hard enough, he’d know the truth that eluded him so.
‘Do you know, in the old tradition, why they chased the wren?’ David said. He pushed his hand into my hair and then twisted it around his fingers. My ear scraped the tree as he pulled me towards him.
‘Because it’s so strong and manly to hunt a small defenceless bird?’ I said.
But it didn’t sound as glib as I intended. My eyes were stinging from my pulled hair. I could feel every bang and scrape from when they first started chasing me. My temple hurt like buggery. I was not in the mood to play Q&A.
‘The knife,’ David said to Cillian. His hand tightened around my hair. The flowery bag fell to the ground.
‘They chased her because the wren is a treacherous creature who betrays those that trust her.’ He took the knife from Cillian.
‘How can I betray you if I’m not on your side?’ I said, feeling his fist against my scalp. Pulling hair was such a dirty trick.
‘The wrenboys would punish her by taking her feathers.’
They did so love to go on about punishment, the judges.
Then David lined the knife on my hair and I realised what he meant to do. I reached for the flowery bag but he had me at an awkward angle. Should have put the letter opener in my pocket.
‘Just one dark chunk,’ David said, working the blade through my hair. ‘You won’t even miss it.’
I didn’t want him taking my hair. This year’s trophy was different. David had intent, which I’d never seen before. This wasn’t a useless object to be tossed into a drawer and forgotten. By taking my hair, David would take a part of me. An augur could never allow a judge to own a piece of her. Who knew what dark magic he might do with my hair?
I brushed the fabric of the bag. The tip of the letter opener was between my left fore and middle fingers. I pulled it up a little more until I had a better grip. David’s knife pressed against the hair twisted in his hand. The blade sawed through a few more strands.
I jabbed the sharpened edge of the letter opener deep into his hand. It was an awkward, messy stab. David snarled as he dropped the knife and let go his hold. Long, blunt ribs of hair were wrapped around his fingers.
‘What the hell, Wren?’ he spat. As if in slow motion, I saw his blood fall. In the dim light, I thought I saw three drops hit the dirty leaves, then a more steady stream. David slipped my hair into his pocket.
As the first drop touched the ground, I felt it coming in a powerful wave. Then a second drop seeped into the dirt and mulch. The skin on my palms began to prick ever so slightly. I was transfixed by the pretty pattern. It was like a lens coming into focus. Just a little more, then I would see.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ I heard one of them say.
‘She’s having convulsions, man.’
‘I’m out of here.’ Brian’s words were muffled, as though he had already turned away. I barely registered the sound of the other boys following.
When the third drop hit, the pattern was complete. The dirt, the mulch, the exposed root of the tree and the blood. The soft edges of a sweet kind of bliss. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t. I focused on the pattern of blood against the leaves. The lines blurred, and suddenly I could see the secret picture inside. And with it came the head rush. This was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before. My eyes rolled back in my head as I heard the last set of footsteps running off.
As I fell, I saw a large table made of solid wood, laden with ripe fruit. Pitchers of wine and bowls of rich gravy and sauce. A crowd gathered around a large, roasted animal, tearing chunks of meat. I couldn’t tell who it was that stuffed food into their mouths with both hands, barely chewing. Someone shifted and then I saw her.
Sorcha.
My long-lost mother.
Laid out on the table, adorned with slices of orange. Cocktail umbrellas in her hair. And, at her heart, a stone pendant on a worn gold chain, like an unseeing third eye. She was missing chunks from her legs and arms. A large bite mark on her shoulder. I heard cartilage tear as her arm came off the socket. A large hand reached towards the stone. The image of Sorcha fuzzed over, and for a brief moment I thought I saw her hair change from red to dark waves. For a second, it wasn’t Sorcha on the table. It was me.
The hand closed over the stone and pulled. But as it pulled, the stone splintered into a thousand shards. And then I lost consciousness.
THREE
And then they ate
her
The Gallagher boys have left to defend the Rose. My beloved Elizabeth longs to follow her brothers as they subdue the brutish Grovers who wreak havoc across the country.
AdC
I sat in the growing dark. The chase had left me utterly drained. There was blood on my shirt, and my scalp still ached from where David had pulled my hair. I touched my temple, feeling the graze where I’d hit the ground. Troubled by the vision of Sorcha, I began the slow walk home. I didn’t know how to begin explaining it to Smith. I didn’t want to tell him at all. Seventeen years, and Sorcha still caused him pain.
When Sorcha ran away, she’d stolen jewellery from the house. All I had of my mother was a list of things we no longer owned: a man’s watch with a leather strap, two rose-gold ladybird earrings (wings aflutter) and an old necklace with an unpolished stone. The necklace I’d seen in the vision. Smith had tried to find her, but I was a sickly baby and demanded all his attention. He never said, but I guessed my failure to thrive came from Sorcha’s addiction.
During those months, in and out of hospital, we’d met Maeve, then a nurse. By the time I was on the mend, any trail Sorcha had left was cold. So Smith and I had settled in the cottage at the edge of the village, surrounded by the sprawling wood and farmland. Further up, the old abandoned quarry.
Moving here was an act of defiance; the judges didn’t want augurs in Kilshamble. A few, like the Laceys, who were more than a little fearless, might settle in the townlands right outside. But the village, from the quarry to the lake, was judge territory. It hadn’t always been like that, not in the days when augurs divined through blood and guts on the old green.
Most people in the village didn’t realise we were different. There was a lazy, half-awareness of something a little other. Like it was in the wind or the soil or the water, that sense of a different kind of normal, living alongside them. It leached through, like the taint of copper coins on a wet sink. We were an infection that the rest of the body didn’t quite know what to make of, so they closed around as if nothing were otherwise.
For years, Smith presented himself as the amiable geography teacher, now retired. Keeping our identity secret, we were able to watch them. To keep an eye on our enemy in this sleeping war. Smith, who knew such things, had found the best place where we could observe without being seen. When the house next door became free, Maeve and her two girls moved in.
Sometimes I envied the judge children, especially when I saw how close they were; how they distanced themselves from the other village children, that air of secrecy around them. I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t just an ordinary village child who knew nothing of draoithe and their nemeta and rituals. I wanted to remind them that judges and augurs, for all our differences, were once united. That despite our conflict, we all needed nemeta to preserve the old ways and feed the rituals that had been passed through the generations. I longed to tell the judge kids that I was like them. Kind of. Apart from the enemy thing.
But Smith had forbidden it. And even though I felt lonely, we weren’t alone. Far beyond the dark fields and distant lights, other augurs were spread out over the neighbouring townlands and into the surrounding villages. Our grove. Fifteen families, and we were tight.
‘You OK, honey?’ Maeve’s voice came from the bench in her garden. She always went overboard with the fairy lights at the winter solstice. ‘Did you talk to them?’
Through the window, I saw Smith in his armchair. I buttoned my jacket, hiding streaks of muck and blood, and turned to Maeve.
‘Yeah, we talked.’ No lies there. ‘What you doing out in the cold?’
‘Looking at stars.’ She gestured above. Maeve always had an eye on the sky. ‘Watching for you.’
I should have known she would be waiting. From my earliest memories, Maeve was there. Her relationship with Smith was for a long time platonic, until one day it wasn’t. It was Maeve who’d stood in Sorcha’s place at my coming-of-age ceremony when I turned sixteen, who’d guided me through the ritual while I stared at my inner forearm in dismay.
Maeve had shown me the old ways, the secret traditions passed down through generations. Some of them so old they came from the time when draoithe were one, with no division, no hostility. A time when we worked together as the prophets, poets, arbiters and advisers to kings.
But that was before we began dividing among ourselves, distinguishing between draoithe who worked patterns, the astrologers, healers, architects, metal-workers and alchemists, and the draoithe who upheld the law. The augurs and the judges. That was before we started fighting each other.
‘I’m grand, Maeve. Go on in. You’ll catch a cold,’ I scolded, grateful for the dimly lit path.
My hand on the doorknob, I glanced up but could see no stars.
Just inside, I could hear the singsong voice of the newsreader: ‘And in other news, Basil Lucas, prize-winning geologist and media personality, died unexpectedly at his home in Galway.’ Smith was watching intently and I used his distraction to cross the living room.
‘Wren,’ he said, holding out a hand like a traffic officer on a wet Monday morning. ‘You should listen to this.’
I paused, not turning round. If I hugged the shadows, maybe he wouldn’t see the dirt, the blood and grazes. But I got as far as the passage before my curiosity about Lucas won out.
‘Earlier this year, Basil Lucas bequeathed his archive, valued in excess of five million euros, to the Harkness Foundation, effective upon his death. Calista Harkness, director of the Harkness Foundation, expressed her sympathy to the Lucas family.’
The report switched to a clip where Calista Harkness tried to contain her glee at acquiring the archive. She had the same pinched nose as her nephew David, whose blood currently stained my shirt.
‘It’s happening,’ Smith said. ‘Just as you said.’
Foretelling Basil Lucas’s death at Christmastime had been one of my better moments as an augur. I’d seen him lying in a coffin. Not an ordinary coffin, one wrapped in Christmas paper and tied up with a bow. Like a dead-man-shaped Christmas present. I’d seen it while staring at the peeling paint on the walls of Dr Kelly’s waiting room, and it took all my control to not shriek like a loon. In the village, they already found me more than a little odd.
‘Wren?’
I turned round. Smith broke off, breathing hard, as he looked at my face.
‘It’s Boxing Day,’ he said. He rubbed his jaw with his hand. ‘Why didn’t you stay in?’
I shook my head, no use rehashing the afternoon. Behind him, the newsreader was smiling: ‘And to end this evening’s broadcast …’
‘I’ll get the tin.’ He raised himself from the large armchair and went into the kitchen.
‘… a round-up of wren hunts from around the country.’ The newscaster beamed and my nausea rose as the song began, ‘The wran, the wran the king of all birds.’
I didn’t want to look, but couldn’t help myself. The swirling colour of the parades, the straw-clad dancers and musicians. Bright ribbons streaming from the fake bird carried on a holly bush by masked boys. The deep, regular drumbeats and laughing flute. A boy explained that they were collecting money for the wren’s funeral. After they’d symbolically killed her and decorated her with ribbons.
I turned off the TV, hitting the button harder than was necessary.
Smith came back, balancing an old cake tin that said First Aid Kit in a faded script with a glass of whiskey and a bowl of steaming water.
He took a piece of cotton wool and dipped it in water. Reaching inside the cake tin, he pulled out a tube of ointment that looked like it had been bought when Sorcha was a girl.
‘How bad?’ Smith dabbed the cuts on my face with the beige stuff.
‘The usual.’ I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Did they hurt you?’ His blue eyes held mine.
‘I’m fine, Smith.’
His eyes flicked to my temple.
‘I fell.’ I touched my hand to the graze, glad he couldn
’t see my shirt. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘You should have stayed home.’ Never had a graze been so thoroughly cleaned.
‘I saw something,’ I said. ‘There was blood.’ And hair. I couldn’t tell Smith that David had taken my hair. What if it meant something? Maeve would fret and Smith would glower. I couldn’t handle their worrying. Or maybe it was that I didn’t want to bring scrutiny to the unwelcome intimacy of it, that David had stolen a part of me.
‘Blood?’ His hand faltered slightly and then dabbed briskly again.
‘Not mine.’ Not most of it, anyway.
‘What happened?’ He took a huge gulp from his tumbler.
This close, I could smell whiskey and a faint scent of mould. He never aired his clothes properly when he washed them. He was always folding them away before they completely dried. Smith stopped his dabbing but kept his eyes on the graze on my forehead.
‘I took the letter opener. Just in case.’ Sharpened down to a stiletto. Because really, no one ever used the wretched thing. Not for opening letters anyway. It was an entirely unnecessary instrument, I thought, shrugging out of my jacket.
‘And what did you do with the letter opener?’
‘Skewered his hand like a kebab.’ Was it bad that I smiled?
Smith sighed. ‘If David tells his dad …’
He turned to pick up another ball of cotton wool soaked with stinky beige ointment, but I saw the small smile. Not every girl had a grandfather who’d be proud of her for stabbing someone in the hand.
‘He’s all right. Ouch.’ I pulled away as Smith started on my shoulder. ‘He’ll live.’
The silence stretched. Smith was trying not to ask but eventually he couldn’t help it. ‘You saw something?’
‘Sorcha.’ I dreaded saying it. ‘With a stone.’
Smith busied himself, throwing the used cotton wool balls in the wastepaper basket. He took his time screwing the cap on the tube of ointment. A useless endeavour, it leaked out of the sides in three different places.