The Wren Hunt

by Mary Watson

  ‘So I guess I’ll have to confess,’ I said.

  ‘Confess?’

  ‘My reward after Leaving Cert.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I lifted my shirt to reveal my belly button. The rose-gold stud was delicate and small.

  ‘It’s …’ He was looking down at my skin. ‘Quaint.’

  He smirked, and then snuck another peek before I covered it up. He liked it all right. And just like that, the prickly mood changed into something else.

  ‘You like working for Cassa?’ I said, to fill the silence.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘When I start university in September, I’ll stay on part-time.’

  ‘Why does Cassa need five big strong bodyguards?’ I knew the First Cleave of Ireland would have personal security. But even so, that was some excess of testosterone at Harkness House.

  ‘There’s been a bit of trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Harassment. A few threats. There was damage to her place in Connemara,’ he said. ‘And before the security was updated at Harkness House, there was a break-in in the middle of the night.’

  I suspected that this trouble was exaggerated. That Cassa rather liked having a bunch of big, strong boys to protect her delicate little self. I was pretty certain that ‘security’ was a euphemism for judge-boy gap year. The thing to do after axe-throwing at Birchwood.

  Tarc turned into the main street of Kilshamble. ‘Which way?’

  I gave directions and after a few quiet minutes, we arrived outside the cottage. Smith had left a light burning. Maeve’s house was in darkness.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, getting out of the car. But before I’d shut my door, Tarc was out and striding towards me.

  ‘I’ll see you in.’ There was mischief in the way he said it. Like he’d put up with all my nosy-parker questions and now it was his turn.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘You’re not my bodyguard.’ I didn’t want him in the cottage.

  ‘Sure, but since you have one handy, you may as well use me.’ He smiled.

  ‘Really, I’m OK.’

  ‘What are you hiding, Wren?’ Tarc opened the gate. ‘Are your childhood photos that bad?’

  ‘Terrifying.’ I walked down the path, my mind checking over the living room to see if there was anything in the house that could give us away.

  Opening the door, I saw the room through Tarc’s eyes. It was tidy enough, but clearly hadn’t been hoovered since I last ran through it two weeks ago. The war table covered by an old canvas. Clutter on the overstacked bookshelves. The unfashionable rug and the shabby couch. I could see his eyes running over the titles of the books. The empty plate and coffee mug. I felt defensive. There was something meagre, something so thin about it all. Not the cheap fabrics and the worn patches on the couch, but the idea of it as home. It looked like a gentleman’s quarters in a retirement village, not the place where a child grew up.

  Tarc stepped over the threshold and I watched in quiet horror. The first time a draoi entered another draoi’s home was significant. There was an implicit offering by both, an exchange between the two. Probably out of habit, Tarc touched the door frame as he entered, just missing the small hand-drawn spider that marked this as the house of an augur. An unconscious gesture, but one that reminded me how similar and how different we were. Eyes on me, he didn’t see the spider. Touching the door frame of a house you visited was meant to bring luck to that household. I couldn’t count the number of times Simon had done the same thing. It jolted me to see Tarc doing something so ordinary. I hadn’t realised that judges did it too.

  ‘Wren?’ he dipped his head so I would look at him.

  ‘Right.’ I breathed out. ‘Everything’s fine. I want to get to bed.’

  It was half eight on a Friday night.

  ‘Yeah?’ He seemed to find it funny that I was so eager to get rid of him. There was a smile playing about his lips. Which were pretty nice lips. And it lit up his marble eyes. Which were staring at me too intently.

  He stepped closer. ‘No wild night out for you?’

  ‘Wild in Kilshamble is a little different from how you might understand it.’

  ‘How is that?’ And closer. He put his hands on my shoulders.

  ‘It’s …’ I trailed off as Tarc bent his head in front of mine. This close I could see the detail of the swirling colours in his eyes.

  ‘Unbridled. Dangerous,’ I sounded breathless. ‘You should be careful here. It’s not like other places.’

  In that moment I could almost believe that tree men prowled the woods. That they looked for girls to lure to them. To kiss, to touch. I could almost hear them whispering to me.

  Tarc drew closer.

  ‘The rules are different here.’ My words were barely audible.

  He leaned into me and I couldn’t move. Gently, sweetly, he kissed my cheek. A barely there brush of his lips on my skin. Then he stepped back.

  ‘Night, Wren.’

  And Tarc was gone. I could feel the echo of his kiss. The call of the woods. I stood in the living room, still rooted to the worn rug. The room exactly as it was before, yet something had changed. Something unnameable. It felt almost like Tarc’s sweet kiss was the opposite of a kill mark. A promise of something. But with the same power to destroy.

  When Smith returned to the cottage, I was pulling my hi-vis raincoat over my running clothes.

  ‘He came inside.’

  Smith wasn’t happy.

  ‘Just to the door.’

  He eyed the living room, checking that everything was in place. That Tarc hadn’t nicked the silverware. Even though we didn’t have any silverware.

  ‘I found out what Birchwood is,’ I said, while Smith sniffed around suspiciously. ‘It’s the school David and Tarc went to.’

  Smith was at the war table, pulling the canvas from it.

  ‘David’s school? Wasn’t that called St Barnaby’s?’ He absent-mindedly picked up a soldier.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t a clue.

  He closed his fist over the soldier. Smith was deep in thought.

  ‘Tarc said Birchwood is a nickname.’ I went over to the war table and stood beside him. ‘Why’s it so important?’

  Smith exhaled. ‘Of course it is. Of course, you clever girl. Good work.’

  He slung an arm around me in a sideways hug. So slight, that extra pressure, that tightness with which he held me. As a child, my clothes were often a little grubby, my bed never made. I’d gone to school with greasy hair, and sometimes made myself peanut butter bread for dinner.

  But I’d never wanted for attention. I’d learned maths at Smith’s war table as he explained equations using soldiers, and geometry through battle trajectories. I’d learned history as we analysed myths. And I learned geography by walking outside with him. I didn’t have parents who cared for me with hot meals and clean-washed clothes. But Smith showed his love by teaching me his passion, and in this we had forged a deep bond.

  I released myself from his hold. Strapping on my reflectors, I ran out into the rain, into the night. While I ran, I wondered why Smith hadn’t answered my question. Birchwood meant something, but he was reluctant to tell me.

  ELEVEN

  Romeo and Juliet

  Elizabeth made her brother show me his secret mark.

  AdC

  We were in a meadow down on the Lacey farm, three miles from Kilshamble. Once a month, I went with Smith to check our nemeta. Sometimes they prickled with new energy, perhaps after a storm or else an inexplicable gift from nature. But we hadn’t had one of these surges in a long time.

  ‘Smith, why did you want to know about Birchwood?’

  He continued walking. ‘Thought it meant something. But it doesn’t matter.’

  I hung back, lost in thought, while he continued ahead. I wasn’t convinced by his answer. It reeked of that mindless mollification he dished out whenever he didn’t want me worried.

  ‘Bastards,’ Smith said, stopping suddenly. He didn’t have
a quota. He didn’t need one. For a man who loved stories of war, he was exceptionally mild-mannered and rarely moved to curse.

  From his stiff shoulders, it was clear he wasn’t happy. On the other side of him, just out of my line of vision, was a standing stone, the tall, narrow rock we used for seasonal rituals. Only last Samhain, after the autumn rites, I’d kissed Simon, pressed up against the red rosehips entwined in the whitethorn hedge. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  I looked up, not seeing the problem. Only as he stepped aside did I see the large smiley face drawn with black spray-paint.

  He went up to the stone, tracing his hand over the desecrated surface. I couldn’t tell whether it was sadness or anger that filled Smith’s eyes.

  ‘We’ll wash it out,’ I said.

  That was the trouble with small villages. Kids got bored. Kids found spray-paint. The black eyes stared out at me, the inane grin an offence.

  ‘Come on.’ I steered him away. ‘We’ll fix it.’

  But I knew why he was upset: when nemeta were vandalised, they didn’t work as well.

  We’d walked a few steps when Smith stopped and looked back. His usually sharp blue eyes were clouded with worry.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, still holding on to his arm.

  He frowned. ‘I’m probably overthinking this.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ I said.

  ‘What if it isn’t local kids? What if this is the work of Cassa’s boys? David and Tarc and the others?’

  I looked at the smiley face. It seemed to say, ‘Gotcha.’ Just like David. But I couldn’t see why Cassa’s security would be on a small unproductive farm near Kilshamble. This wasn’t judge territory.

  ‘How would they know to come here?’ I said. ‘I just can’t see it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Smith said, and we walked together. But he’d paused, and in that pause, my own worry crept in. Tarc had driven this way the previous night. Did he, after leaving me at the cottage, come here with black spray-paint to desecrate an augur nemeton?

  We left the Lacey farm, then checked the hill above the quarry before heading to the woods. Hidden between the trees were two burial stones, both of them marked with weathered carvings. All three nemeta were weaker than last time.

  Leaving the burial stones, Smith and I walked through the woods. When we reached Arabella’s cottage, I went in.

  This was where Arabella was loved by her tuanacul prince, if you believed the Kilshamble stories. Where she painted her flowers, slowly killed by every kiss she shared until only a husk of a girl remained. I thought of Tarc kissing my cheek and I knew for sure how a kiss could ruin a girl.

  Running my eye over the moss-covered grey, I saw the broken cottage in a new light. The internship had given me a glimpse of the real Arabella, one whose talent had gone ignored.

  My mind on talents, I said to Smith, ‘Was Arabella de Courcy an augur?’

  He took out a flask and poured coffee into the small cup.

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Her mother was an augur, but her father was a judge.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘How unfortunate. Was it all Romeo and Juliet?’

  ‘Only to the point where her mother fell pregnant. Then his undying love died a quick and horrible death. She didn’t survive childbirth, and Arabella was taken from her augur family and raised by distant cousins. She was brought up as a judge and forbidden any contact.’

  ‘So her art was a talent, like ours?’

  Smith nodded.

  ‘Arabella de Courcy is the reason the judges claimed Kilshamble. When she came to live in the woods, the judges wanted to be sure that her augur family wouldn’t get to her. So they moved in here, put a kill mark on any augur who settled. And until us, no augur has.’

  ‘But why would they go to so much trouble for one girl?’ A girl who was pretty unstable, by the looks of it. And at a time when the judges had been weak.

  ‘There’ve been other children who are half judge, half augur. Rarely, because the animosity between us runs too deep, but it has happened. Those children have always been either firmly augur with a talent, or else clearly judge with an affinity to a natural object.’

  ‘Arabella was clearly augur, so why did the judges want her?’

  ‘Because Arabella was both. She was truly both augur and judge. With her combined magic, she could have been a very powerful woman. And you know how the judges are drawn to power.’

  I felt an unwelcome kinship with Arabella. She’d grown up without a mother, had been abandoned by her father before she was even born. I knew what that was like.

  Smith downed his coffee and reached for the flask. As he moved, my eye fell on a bunch of lilies in the corner of the ruin. They looked fresh.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Did you ever meet my father? Was he an augur?’

  ‘I saw him once from a distance. And no, he wasn’t an augur.’ Smith twisted the flask stopper open, and then twisted it closed again. ‘When Sorcha fell for him, it was like she had been infected.’ Twisted it open. ‘She was feverish, lost to the rest of us the moment she met him. I knew she would pick him.’ He twisted the flask shut. ‘I just hadn’t realised that she wouldn’t pick you too.’

  I stared at the moss on the tree, thinking about Smith’s words. About my mother’s passion. I hadn’t known that I was born from such wildness. But it was a sour, curdling ardour that killed rather than kindled. A passion that had left no room for me. I had a secret fantasy where instead of stealing Smith’s watch, my mother chose me. Picked up the quiet, hungry baby and left.

  I was glad for the noise and madness at Maeve’s house. Aisling was squabbling with her mother while they half watched TV. Through the open door, Simon was beneath the kitchen sink, fixing Maeve’s leaky pipes. Sibéal, talking to no one in particular, explained the newest clay statues she’d made. She was sculpting figures for her film about a stupid prince and a dandelion woman who bled milk sap. It was not going to end well. Not for the stupid prince.

  ‘I’ll never marry her off,’ Maeve, in a sepulchral voice, told a Kardashian.

  ‘I don’t want to get married,’ Sibéal said. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a liaison with a tree man. As long as he’s ripped.’

  Maeve looked up from the TV. ‘Don’t say things like that, Sibéal.’

  I wasn’t sure if she was objecting to the liaison or the tree man.

  ‘It’s just talk, Mam,’ Aisling said, reaching for the bag of Doritos and stuffing a handful in her mouth.

  Maeve’s attention was back on the screen. ‘What is your one wearing?’ she said with gleeful horror. ‘She’ll be awful cold.’

  ‘But, Shibs,’ I said, ‘won’t he suck the life out of you? Steal your oxygen when you sleep? Slowly petrify you? First your feet turn to roots, and then your calves. Your thighs go all barky, and then one day you see your hair has become branches waving ever so slightly in the breeze.’

  Sibéal was smiling at me like I was mad, so I continued.

  ‘Rooted to the ground, you’ll cry resin tears of the most beautiful amber and no one will hear you scream.’

  ‘Yeah? But they’ll be screams of pleasure.’

  ‘Sibéal!’ Maeve reprimanded her.

  ‘Can you imagine how big his –’

  ‘Sibéal!’

  ‘His muscles, Ma, his muscles. Get your mind out of the gutter.’

  Shaking her head, Maeve disappeared into the kitchen.

  Sibéal’s sixteenth birthday was looming and her talent hadn’t wakened. I knew that behind the glib talk, the manic clay modelling and ideas for film scripts, she was anxious. She was running out of time, and I knew what it was like. I remembered too well the weeks before I got my talent, dreading that I would be blank. Then, afterwards, wishing I was.

  I wanted to reach out to her and say, it’s OK to be blank. There are worse things. But I knew that she would see only my broken glimpses of the future and wouldn’t understand. Instead, I f
ollowed Maeve into the kitchen.

  ‘I can’t help thinking that we’re missing something,’ Maeve was saying to Simon. ‘That there must be a faster way to bind to the nemeta. Imagine if it took less than six months.’

  ‘What good is that when we don’t know where the judges’ nemeta are?’ I said as I walked into the room. Simon peered out from under the sink.

  ‘The Abbyvale three found one. It’s always possible.’ Maeve grabbed my arm. ‘Have you seen anything recently?’

  And I wasn’t sure what the right answer was. I wasn’t supposed to encourage the visions, but something about the way Maeve looked at me made me think she hoped I had.

  ‘I’m not supposed to,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ She dropped her hand. Definitely disappointed. Simon stood up, dropping tools into his box.

  ‘Should be fine now, Maeve.’

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Simon.’ But her words lacked her usual vigour. She looked towards me again, biting her bottom lip.

  There was always this push and pull: did you or didn’t you. Don’t chase the vision, don’t stare at your soup, but maybe just a small glance. It was like they couldn’t decide. They couldn’t encourage me to develop my talent the way that they had insisted Aisling study nursing. But they couldn’t forbid me either; it went against their nature.

  ‘Not a bother.’ Simon hesitated, looking towards me.

  I busied myself with filling the dishwasher. I didn’t want to go for a walk with him.

  ‘See ya, Wren,’ he said, also disappointed.

  After Simon shut the door behind him, Maeve turned to me again. What she wanted was clear in her face.

  ‘I haven’t seen anything for a while now,’ she blurted. She wasn’t able to tell the future, but the clouds revealed things about the present that she couldn’t otherwise know.

  ‘It’s been pretty wet,’ I said.

  But I knew it was because our nemeta were running dry. Performing only the barest minimum of the old rites and ceremonies weakened our talents. If this continued, the old ways would fade to a handful of stories whispered beneath the trees.