The Wren Hunt

by Mary Watson

  ‘A Daragishka stone?’

  I nodded. The one she’d stolen. Smith turned away. He bent over the old cake tin as if he were looking for something inside it. Something that could cure heartbreak.

  ‘It happened quickly. She was,’ I paused while trying to find a delicate way to put it, ‘laid out on a table wearing the stone. A bunch of people around her. But it was like they were using her to get to the stone. They cut into her body and served it up. And then they ate her.’ So much for delicacy.

  Smith snapped the lid of the cake tin down, his long fingers on the rim, carefully sealing it. I could see his mind working. He was figuring how this affected the plan. Just how ominous it really was. I didn’t tell him that for the briefest flash I’d seen myself on the table. Now that I was home, I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all.

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  He picked up his whiskey, swirling the melting ice.

  ‘It means we have to find those stones. Soon.’

  From when I was little, Smith had taught me that it wasn’t answers that mattered but knowing the right questions to ask. Which made questions seem very important. So the words rasped against my throat: ‘What happens if we don’t?’

  Smith gestured to the TV. ‘You saw the news. Calista Harkness owns the Lucas Archive now. If we don’t get into it and find Lucas’s map of the Daragishka stones, they will.’

  ‘Would that be so bad?’ I hated how timid I sounded.

  ‘The stones are our only hope. If we don’t get them, it’s the beginning of the end for us. It happened to the bards, don’t think it won’t happen to us.’

  Smith drained the glass and set it on top of the tin. No one liked thinking about the bards, the third group of draoithe, who’d wanted no part in the fight between the judges and augurs. No one liked to talk about how, after losing their nemeta, the bards’ songs and poems lost their magic. Their numbers dwindled and then they were no more. Not with a bang but a whimper.

  ‘And the internship is the only way.’

  Smith had ensured the internship would go to one of his girls. Someone either owed him a favour or wanted to keep a secret. That was how things were done in Kilshamble. I dreaded the thought of me or Aisling going undercover at Harkness House. The place where David and the wrenboys worked. All of them, whether it was David or Calista Harkness or any other judge, had a burning hostility towards us.

  ‘I can’t tell the future,’ Smith said, his face soft with concern and perhaps remorse. He didn’t need to touch or hug me, his face was unguarded in that moment and I felt loved, cared for. ‘But from mapping the situation, the possible options and outcomes, this is really our best chance.’

  ‘Then we do it.’

  He turned to the kitchen, clearly in search of more whiskey.

  ‘Who do you think they were?’ I stopped him. ‘The people. Who fed on her.’ Those hands, grabbing at Sorcha. At me.

  Smith paused in the wide squared frame leading to the kitchen. He turned slightly. ‘Why, the judges. Of course.’

  Before I reached the stairs, he spoke again, still framed by the square. ‘That was a blood vision, Wren.’

  I gave a short nod. There would be consequences, I knew that. There were always consequences, usually teeny tiny consequences that you hardly noticed. But the small things added up over time, until eventually they formed one big thing that could crush you beneath its weight.

  FOUR

  Ritual at dawn

  When I observe the flowers I draw, it is as though I can see beyond them. The details reveal themselves to me as a perfect design.

  AdC

  We left at sunrise. The morning was clear and dry after a night drawn so deep inside my dreams that waking felt like surviving.

  Maeve was waiting in the kitchen. I smiled at Aisling’s golden head resting on the kitchen table. She was not a morning person, and especially not before breakfast. Mrs Lacey and her daughter had gone ahead, they told me. Mrs Lacey’s hip was sticky again, so we’d catch up easily.

  ‘Where’s Sibéal?’ I said. I reached for the juice carton in the fridge, trying to shake off the sleep fug that lingered.

  ‘Finding her best ritual-at-dawn outfit.’ Maeve took the carton from my hand and shut it back inside the fridge. ‘Later. You can have some later.’

  I should have remembered: first the trees, then food and drink.

  We went out in the cold morning, our feet crunching the stones beneath. The front gate was hanging off its hinge and I stopped to hook it up to the rotting wood post. A useless gesture to protect Smith, who was sleeping inside. Like a closed gate would keep the monsters in my head at bay. My dreams had left me wary.

  Sibéal tumbled out of Maeve’s house. Her coat was undone and her hair flew wild. A dress that resembled a curtain peeked out beneath her coat.

  ‘Party time,’ she shouted. Sibéal loved rituals. We didn’t do them nearly enough to keep her satisfied. But we couldn’t. Rituals drew from the nemeta and we were on rations. This morning’s ritual was small, with only a handful of us taking part. I guessed that’s how Maeve justified doing one when we could so ill afford it.

  ‘Shhh,’ Aisling said. A knee-jerk, sisterly impulse to argue. ‘You don’t have to scream it to the whole village.’

  ‘Do you see anyone around here?’ Sibéal was incredulous as she gestured to the empty fields. ‘I could shout a load of filth and no one would hear.’ She looked like she was about to prove it.

  ‘Don’t.’ Maeve put a lot of weight into the single word and went a few steps ahead, her long puffy coat flaring out like a cape. She pulled herself up to her full height, all five feet one inch of it, and in her bearing I could see the ard-draoi of the Whitethorn Grove about to lead a ritual.

  Following Maeve, we set off down the road, heading away from the village. We cut across Brannigan’s field and up the hill. In the soft dawn light, Ruth Lacey laboured up the steep slope. Annie walked slowly beside her like a restrained terrier. I felt sorry for Mrs Lacey with her gammy hip, out so early when it was so cold. Really, they were only there to make up the numbers. For an Ask, there had to be six of us on the sixth day of the new moon.

  We walked up the hill. We were headed towards the copse above the old abandoned quarry to perform the Ask. They didn’t happen often, Asks, only when we found ourselves stuck.

  And we were stuck. Aisling and I were locked in a battle of wills about who would risk the internship with Calista Harkness, and neither would back down. Maeve had decided to resolve it the traditional way. We were going to ask nature.

  There wasn’t much to set us aside from people who weren’t draoithe. We augurs lived normal lives with mainly our talents, our way with patterns, to distinguish us. We had our secret history, the stories of ourselves that had been passed down the generations. And our groves, the communities where we observed the old ways, where we performed the old rituals.

  At the top of the hill, I went beyond the copse, where Maeve was unpacking stones from her flowery bag, and stood at the edge, looking down into the quarry. As always, I felt that familiar rush. Maeve would say it was because the hill was a nemeton, one of those places where the threshold between this world and the unknown was worn thin. Where magic leaked through. Or at least it had been, before half the hill had been eaten away by greedy machines. That crackle or spark or buzz that always zinged through nemeta was faint, the hill wasn’t as strong as it had once been. It wasn’t as strong as we needed it to be. Later in the morning, once the ritual was complete, that buzz and zing would be even further diminished. But still, those bare stone walls below. They’d always stirred something in me.

  ‘It should be me, Wren,’ Aisling said. ‘Let me go to Harkness House.’

  I wasn’t sure if it was the morning shadows, or if her face really was that pinched. Almost cross.

  ‘You’re too nice.’ I shrugged, keeping it light. ‘The nastier girl has to do it. And that’s me. The Ask will confirm. Just you see.’


  ‘I’m infinitely more terrible than you.’ And she was. But her terribleness was grand and beautiful. I was meaner, baser and more selfish. Which meant I was better suited to blending in with judges and maintaining deception. Because if they found out, the wrath of the judges would be unleashed. Not only would they target the one who deceived them, but they would act against our grove.

  ‘It’s out of our hands now.’ I gestured to the stones that Maeve was placing in the centre of the ring of trees. But I worried. It had to be me. Three months among judges, among Calista Harkness and David and his wrenboys, would damage Aisling far more than it would me.

  Aisling looked down into the quarry, at the deep pools of water and the brown ragged walls. Her anxiety was marked in her shoulders, her eyes, the set of her mouth.

  ‘Wren, draw the circle, there’s a good girl,’ Maeve called from the trees.

  ‘You’ll have to face David every day.’ Aisling seemed defeated, like she knew how the Ask would play out.

  At the trees, Maeve stood, shoulders bent as she counted the stones. I knew she was worried; performing rituals was like feeding a hungry family from a diminished pot. Nemeta could replenish, usually through natural events like storms or an eclipse or a solstice. But never enough to get us out of the red.

  ‘I can handle David.’ It almost sounded convincing.

  Aisling said nothing, just looked down at a dumped mattress in the quarry below. There was a large russet stain on it, like someone had bled out there.

  ‘Maybe we should just do a bloody virgin sacrifice,’ I muttered, but it sounded gloomy rather than funny. ‘See if that gets the nemeta going again.’

  ‘A wicker man,’ Aisling said, referring to the old, forbidden practice of stuffing someone inside a giant straw effigy and then burning them alive. ‘I’ve heard they’ve started doing it again, the judges. That’s why they’re getting so strong.’

  ‘Human sacrifice?’ My head jerked towards her.

  Aisling shrugged. ‘That’s what I’ve heard.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Wren,’ Maeve called me again.

  ‘You know what they’re like,’ Aisling continued. ‘They take punishment seriously.’

  Neither of us needed to be reminded how seriously the judges took punishment. Not while we decided who was going to deceive them for three months and then steal something valuable.

  ‘Wren Silke, the circle.’

  Hearing the shrill end of Maeve’s voice, I hurried to her, thinking about Calista Harkness and imagining the smell of charred flesh.

  Sibéal had wrapped her long cotton shawl around her shoulders, dramatically covering her mouth. Shrugging out of my coat, I picked up mine and let it fall loosely over my head. It wasn’t my best look.

  Maeve pushed a carved staff into my hand and I walked around the wide ring of trees, whispering the words I knew so well. I went around a second time, sealing us within the circle of the trees.

  The circle complete, I joined the women beneath the trees. Maeve chanted the words I knew from my earliest childhood. Always, something like peace infused me when I stood inside the circle, listening to the Old Irish. I felt embraced by family, by history.

  When it was time, Maeve spoke: ‘We will use four rounds. If there is a tie, we’ll break it with a fifth. If there is an unbroken run, the matter will be decided after three. The first round is stones in a circle.’

  Maeve gestured to the twelve stones and Aisling chose one. I held my hand over the stones. They were all marked with Ogham symbols on their undersides, each the name of a tree. But only one had the diamond shape with the line running down. Gold.

  I moved my hand to the right and picked up a stone that was neither too big nor too small.

  ‘Iompaigh thart iad,’ Maeve spoke in Irish. Turn them over.

  Aisling turned hers and saw two perpendicular lines: ‘Oak.’ We would keep drawing stones until one of us found gold.

  I held mine, hoping for Ash. Ash was my lucky tree. I turned it over.

  ‘Gold.’ The diamond with the line running down.

  ‘First marker to Wren,’ Maeve said, packing the remaining stones into her flowery bag. ‘Second round is bird in a tree.’

  I didn’t believe that picking stones or placing them at the bottom of the tree meant that we were being whispered secret answers by powers we couldn’t understand. Even as I took my stone and considered the trees, I didn’t think that some nature spirit was choosing between me and Aisling. But it was hard to believe that there wasn’t something. An unnameable, unknowable magic that pulsed, touching lightly and leaving things subtly altered.

  And I could feel it, the changed air, the sense of something other that curled between us like smoke. I looked over at the others: the near rapture on Sibéal’s face and the intense concentration on Aisling’s.

  Whatever it was, this magic pooled in the nemeta. And its expression was our talents.

  The autumn Aisling had turned sixteen, she narrowed her eyes at me and said, ‘Wow, Wren, you’re buzzing.’

  I laughed at her.

  ‘No, seriously, Wren. Your whole body is singing a tune. Except here.’ And she touched my throat. ‘It’s odd here. Wrong.’

  ‘You must be coming down with something. You’re delirious.’

  But it wasn’t Aisling who was sick. The next day, I was in bed with strep throat.

  From early times, divination occurred through the reading of patterns, either in the stars, or in the flight patterns of birds. Or the dance between fire and smoke, the flow of water in a stream. And here was the heart of augur magic: this affinity for patterns.

  But hardly anyone saw the future any more. Some could scry for the past and present through the interpretation of patterns. Maeve, a nephomancer, read through the movement of clouds and their position in the sky; I’d met augurs who interpreted fire and smoke, plant foliage across seasons, eggs, the movement of water, weather patterns. But most, like Smith, whose talent was mapping, didn’t scry. Instead, through their uncanny instinct for a pattern, they became unnaturally good at something. Like a doctor who knew her patient was sick because she could sense an anomaly in the body. Or the explorer who knew a landscape because the sense of it thrummed inside him. Most things, if you looked hard enough, had an underlying pattern, and we had an instinct for it. Rather, most augurs did. Just not me.

  ‘It’s happening to you,’ I’d told Aisling, my voice scratchy. It wasn’t the first time I’d been jealous of her. Everyone always said that Aisling looked like an angel, with her delicate features, her dirty-blonde hair, large brown eyes and flawless skin. And I was her dark reflection, the necessary demon to balance out such light. With eyes as green as envy.

  ‘And it will happen to you,’ Aisling said. But she couldn’t be sure. With our nemeta depleted and unable to do the rituals that fuelled us, more and more augur children remained blank.

  ‘It’s the best, healing,’ I told her. It was my biggest wish: I wanted nothing more than to be a doctor in a hospital, where I could take on the human body like a Rubik’s cube, figure it out, solve it. I wanted to be able to intuit the tumours, the fractures and fissures just by looking at the patient.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. But I knew she’d been hoping for music.

  ‘At least you won’t be a butcher, reading secret messages in sheep guts.’

  We had declared this the worst possible fate. Maeve had tried to tell us that haruspicy, divination through animal entrails, was one of the most respected talents. But we wouldn’t hear it.

  ‘Blood is gross.’ Aisling was squeamish. ‘I won’t get the points for medicine. I don’t even want to study medicine.’ She picked at invisible fluff on her jeans. ‘Mam’s hoping I’ll get into nursing.’ Even though she didn’t practise any more, was Aisling’s unspoken accusation.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I told her. ‘There are other ways to be a healer.’

  ‘It should have been you.’

  ‘It
might be.’ I tried to cheer up. It wasn’t like Aisling had used up healing. I still had a chance. ‘And there are other talents.’ Ruth Lacey’s was weather, Annie Lacey had numbers and wanted to be a cryptographer or an actuary, while her brother Simon had an uncanny ability to read body language. He picked up on physical cues and knew with some certainty how a person was feeling, even what they were thinking. Whatever my talent, I’d find a way to study medicine.

  ‘Wren?’ Aisling’s voice drew me out of my thoughts. I placed my stone beneath the whitethorn and walked back to the centre.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she whispered. Maeve was watching above, searching the sky for birds. When a bird settled in one of the trees above a stone, that was the second marker.

  ‘Our talents,’ I said, keeping an eye on my tree. From this angle it resembled a woman, the trunk a long, thin torso with a slight swelling near the top. Branches like arms held out and the thin, bare twigs were a wild tangle of hair. I glanced at Aisling, and there it was, that sympathetic look I always received.

  More than a year after Aisling’s talent emerged, there had been no sign of mine. March arrived and I was quietly freaking out, trying to ignore those sorry looks from Maeve and Aisling.

  When the daffodils started to wilt, I was ready to take on animal guts. Hell, I wanted animal guts. I could barely wait to get my hands on eviscerated pigs. My birthday was in April, and if my talent didn’t waken before then, it wasn’t going to happen.

  Then, the day before my sixteenth birthday, I was outdoors with Aisling and Smith, clearing weeds from the chip-and-tar drive. I’d spread the poison liberally. I kept my head bent over the drive, transfixed by the small stones. When I saw them shiver, I dropped the jerrycan of weedkiller. The ripple began to form a shape: slithering towards me was a snake made of gold chip. My hands started to hurt, just on the inside, at the centre of my palm.

  ‘Fuck!’ I shouted, recoiling.

  ‘Wren.’ Smith’s reprimand was token. I had an allowance of three dirty words a month. More than that, he said, and I’d get lazy.