The Wren Hunt

by Mary Watson

  ‘Guilty.’ David’s voice was barely audible.

  ‘You’ll be fined. I give you the choice to pay in blood or coin.’

  ‘Blood.’ The word was a whisper.

  ‘A blood fine it is.’ Her coat rustled. ‘Look at me, David. There is honour in a blood punishment. You chose right.’

  If he responded, I didn’t hear it.

  ‘Reparation is set for seven thirty tonight. You’re dismissed.’

  I hightailed away from the doors, nearly running to the bathroom. Once inside, I put my back to the wall, trying to stop the trembling.

  Had Cassa meant that David should have killed the Abbyvale augurs? Isn’t that what ‘taken care of them’ meant? And a blood fine? Working at the Foundation, with all its emphasis on art and beauty, had made me forget how brutal the judges could be. We loved to whisper stories about the judges and their punishments. But I hadn’t fully believed them. I’d thought the stories were exaggerated. It sickened me to hear Cassa demand punishment in blood.

  And even though it was David’s blood on the line, I couldn’t shake the fear of retribution if they discovered how I’d deceived them.

  Going home that evening I was filled with anxiety. Because of the conversation I’d overheard. Because of my recklessness with the Ogham sheet. I should have known Laney would have checked the journals before handing them to me.

  At home, Smith and Maeve were in the kitchen, reading the newspaper.

  ‘You’re late,’ Maeve said, her attention on the paper. ‘Dinner’s in the oven.’

  I thought about the rearranged trefoil, the coiled knot of stones, and it felt like there was a similar tangle inside my head. Inside my heart.

  ‘The stones are named.’

  I just stood there, still in my coat. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. But I couldn’t tell them about the Ogham sheet, it was too late for that. And I was afraid to tell them about the conversation I’d overheard about offing augurs and blood punishments. What if they took it as a threat and acted first?

  It was bloody hard work trying to prevent a war.

  ‘What was that, honey?’ Maeve didn’t look up from the paper.

  ‘Tarc told me the stones are named. Sacrifice, Betrayal and Surrender. What does that mean?’

  ‘Hy-Breasil is not easily found. And when it is, there’s always a cost.’ Smith took my coat and hung it on a hook. ‘When Ruairí Ó Cróinín landed on its shores after being shipwrecked, he lost everything. One stone marks this sacrifice, given through the seven years he lived there.’

  Smith tipped the teapot, hot brown liquid filling the mug. ‘Another stone for the betrayal he suffered, by his wife and family. The third, the strength stone, is his surrender to the island and its treasures.’

  He slid the mug to the edge of the table.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Come over to the stove.’

  ‘Tarc told me some story about a girl who needed help.’

  ‘It’s natural that we have different myths attached to draoi practice. How you understand the Daragishka Knot depends on who you are. If you’re a judge, it’s something potentially dark and dangerous. If you’re one of us, it’s redemptive.’

  ‘Because what could be more redemptive than sacrifice?’ Maeve said. ‘What can prove love more than giving someone up for a greater good?’

  And still I stood there with my fists clenched at my sides. It was all too much.

  Who bloody cares, I wanted to shout. I might have blown my cover by trying to do the right thing, if I knew what that was any more. What about the woman in the yellow raincoat? And what does a blood fine even mean? Was it a small, symbolic gesture or something more sinister? And why the hell was I so worried? I didn’t like David. It shouldn’t bother me. I didn’t want it to bother me.

  At that moment, the weight of the last weeks was unbearable.

  Smith reached his hand out to me, his long, strong fingers on my arms. ‘I know we’ve put you in a difficult position, I know you’re struggling against the pull of the pattern you’re forming by coming and going between the two houses. But you’re strong enough to resist it. You’ve always managed to fight off wickerings. This is the same thing.’

  I’d always managed to fight off benign wickerings. I wasn’t sure this was the same thing.

  ‘Tomorrow is my last day,’ I said. ‘So it doesn’t matter any more.’

  But that wasn’t true. Harkness House would still draw me to it. It would be a long time before I wouldn’t feel its pull.

  ‘There’s been a new development,’ Smith said. He sounded reluctant. ‘I’ve got locations for the stones. One is Cassa’s place in Connemara. Another is somewhere in Kerry, and it’s likely that’s Sorcha’s stone.’

  He hesitated and I knew I wasn’t going to like what came next.

  ‘The third stone is at Harkness House,’ he said.

  I hadn’t realised how much I needed to get out of that place. How much I wanted things to return to normal. To immerse myself in augur life. How I feared that continuing to move between the two houses would make it impossible to extract myself.

  ‘I have to search the house?’ I said, thinking how impossibly big it was.

  ‘We can get a location by finding specific things around it,’ Smith said. ‘Maeve will consult the clouds, and we should be able get you close. Just a few more days. A week at most.’

  ‘Why on earth could we not have just done that in the first place?’

  ‘Because objects like a desk or chest of drawers or a hairbrush mean nothing if you don’t know where they are.’

  I hesitated. If Maeve still hadn’t seen anything since last May, this wouldn’t work. But I wasn’t sure what she’d told Smith and I didn’t want to betray her confidence.

  ‘I can do it, Wren.’ Maeve spoke gently from where she sat at the kitchen table. ‘Go wash your hands. Let’s get a hot meal into you.’

  I hadn’t realised I’d been shivering. But I was glad to hear Maeve’s dry patch was over.

  Up in the attic, I stopped in the doorway. The brídeog was sitting on my desk. For a brief second I was overwhelmed by an awful, unsettled feeling, that cold pricking. There was an earworm in my head, a song that I didn’t realise I knew: Beneath the oak my love does lie. A sword through his heart, an arrow in his eye.

  And as I washed my hands I remembered. It was the tune that had drawn Cassa out of the garden at the Huntsman. It must have stuck in my mind, and my warped unconscious provided the lyrics.

  While Smith heated my dinner I wolfed down two bananas. I’d developed a taste for the skins, must be some kind of deficiency. Zinc, probably. Or magnesium.

  ‘Ah, Wren,’ Maeve said, ‘you’ll ruin your appetite.’

  I picked up the folded newspaper. I’d caught a glimpse of something earlier and I wanted a second look.

  I flicked through, ignoring the plate that Smith set beside me. And there it was, a small article with a picture. A three-hundred-year-old beech tree in Wicklow had been partially chopped. Looking at the picture of the damaged tree, I knew it was a nemeton.

  ‘I told you you’d wreck your appetite,’ Maeve scolded, looking at my untouched food. And then she saw the news article.

  ‘Who did this?’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t want you seeing that,’ Maeve said.

  ‘Is someone damaging nemeta?’ I said, remembering the smiley face on the standing stone in the meadow.

  ‘This doesn’t look good.’ She sat beside me.

  ‘Is it our nemeton or theirs?’ I dreaded asking the question. There was no grove of augurs who could afford to lose a nemeton.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maeve said.

  But I saw the look that passed between her and Smith, the look that made me certain she was lying. It had to be an augur tree.

  Which meant that the likely culprits were judges. Not Tarc; my gut told me he couldn’t do that to a tree. Not hacking it with an axe.

  It must have been David. David who was so k
een for retaliation. David who wanted blood.

  Blood.

  I noticed the time. Seven thirty-five. The broken tree a desecrated temple.

  Maybe he deserved to be punished.

  Smith was quiet, standing in the square arch. He turned to the living room and went to his war table. His silence and the set of his shoulders spoke volumes.

  ‘I’m going for a run,’ I said.

  I needed to work away the knot inside. The thought of even a few more days at Harkness House made me sick. I hated what had happened to the tree. I hated that for a few seconds I’d entertained the idea that a blood punishment was deserved.

  I went to Smith and put my arms around him, when really I wanted him to put his around me.

  But Smith was distracted. Briefly squeezing my hand, he went back to positioning his soldiers in their endless war.

  NINETEEN

  Trees are just not sexy

  Another injury to my arm today. Lady Catherine says I need to be watched carefully while outdoors.

  AdC

  ‘Wren.’ Aisling’s voice drew my attention from my soup. From the restaurant wall behind her, two ugly stone faces stared down at me.

  ‘What?’ I said, squirming beneath her fierce gaze. She looked at me so intently I wanted to cover my face with the paper napkin.

  ‘Don’t play with your soup.’

  ‘You know it’s rude to read your friends without permission.’ I took another slurp but it was disgusting.

  ‘You’re right,’ Aisling said. ‘So rude.’

  But she didn’t avert her gaze. She seemed most fascinated with my head, as if it were circled by a halo of stars.

  ‘What’s the verdict?’ I said, crunching something gross. ‘Healthy, sickly or bonkers?’

  She hesitated. ‘Go easy with the spinny eyes.’

  I shouldn’t tell her that Maeve had asked me to look, then.

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed,’ she added.

  ‘What?’ That now too familiar low-grade anxiety rose.

  ‘You didn’t greet them,’ Aisling said, tilting her head to the gargoyles behind her.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  Looking at her face, the answer was clear.

  ‘All right,’ I sighed, facing the gargoyles on the wall. ‘Hello venerable stone faces, you look dour and pissed off as always.’

  ‘Wren!’ Aisling admonished me. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’ She placated her stone-faced friends.

  Aisling always insisted on greeting the gargoyles that snarled above us. She said it guaranteed they’d keep our secrets. That whatever we spoke about beneath them wouldn’t be whispered to the other gargoyles in the county and beyond.

  ‘Now, what’s the story with what’s-his-name?’

  ‘Who?’ I played dumb.

  ‘Cassa’s right-hand man. Dreamboat.’

  I pulled a face at her ridiculous terminology. Aisling’s knowledge of boys was mostly informed by a five-year addiction to old romance novels.

  ‘Tarc?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.’

  ‘Aisling, he’s the enemy,’ I protested. ‘He has horns hidden in his hair and his feet are cloven hooves.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself.’ Her eyes were sparkling. She was enjoying playing with me. ‘Anyway, villainy adds a certain frisson, don’t you think?’

  ‘No one under forty says “frisson”.’

  I looked down at my soup, trying to determine what flavour it was meant to be. But it was impossible to tell from the reddish-brown murk; I’d more easily tell the future than what it was made of. I half-heartedly dipped my spoon, avoiding the bits and pieces floating in it. An eyeball here, a toenail there.

  ‘You’d tell me if there was something, Wren?’ She was observing me carefully. ‘The way you talk about him, I wonder sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t talk about him.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She was triumphant. ‘If he didn’t affect you, you would. So, talk.’

  I hesitated. Even as she sat there I could still see the other Aisling, the glossy girl at Cassa’s party. The girl with bright eyes at the hotel exhibition, surrounded by judge boys. But I remembered us sitting on the bed, our hands entwined. I needed Aisling.

  ‘You know those stories that Sibéal goes on about?’ I said.

  ‘The numpty prince and the evil, devious, beautiful plant lady who devours him? That kind of thing?’

  ‘Do you ever wonder if they’re true?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘I never, never thought I’d hear that from you.’

  ‘Not in the way that Sibéal tells them,’ I said quickly. ‘Not with all the drama and gore. But something almost like it.’ Something like Tarc’s intent gaze before the tree split in two.

  ‘Are you saying you think Tarc is a tree?’ She shook her head. ‘Why?’

  ‘No, I don’t think he’s a tree.’ I took a deep breath, wondering where to begin with that night at the hotel.

  ‘You think he’s a sexy tree man?’ Aisling leaned forward. ‘Like Groot?’ She preferred Hulk. She liked them green, large and not particularly verbal.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’

  ‘I hate to tell you, but trees are just not sexy. They’re rough and scratchy and you could get your hair all tangled in their branches.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said thinking that, actually, trees were kind of sexy.

  ‘Oh my God, Wren Silke, you have a crush. On a man you think is a tree. Only you would get a crush on a tree man.’ Then she amended: ‘And Sibéal. God, what are ye like?’

  ‘No,’ I objected too fiercely. ‘He’d hate me if he knew what I really was.’

  ‘Keep your guard up.’ Her warning was gentle. ‘Remember who he works for. Who he is. And who his friends are.’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘You and Tarc, you’re the fundamental collision between art and nature. It could never work.’

  Speaking of art: ‘Ash,’ I said and pushed my soup to the side. ‘That night at the hotel. Did you wicker the security boys?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘The way you were when I came in, all bright and electric. And I saw a photo in Cassa’s office. They were utterly transfixed.’

  Aisling paused, like she needed to form her answer carefully. But just as she was about to speak she looked at the door and said, ‘There he is.’

  I turned round and saw Simon walking through the doorway. The restaurant was empty, just us, and suddenly I wished for noise and bustle.

  He came to our table, standing there uncertain. For once, it was easier for me to read his body language, he was so obviously uncomfortable.

  ‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ he said.

  Wary, I glanced at Aisling, who’d clearly set this up. She was studying the dessert menu, even though she always had the sticky toffee pudding.

  ‘It’s been busy.’ Lame. But he was right, I had been avoiding him. I raised an eyebrow. ‘Is this an intervention?’

  Simon slipped into the booth beside Aisling, holding his hands together as if in prayer.

  ‘Wren, there’s something you need to know.’

  Nothing good ever started with ‘there’s something you need to know.’

  I didn’t miss the look between them. But I didn’t need to be sat down and mollycoddled; it had never been like that between Simon and me.

  ‘You’re right,’ Aisling said. ‘I wickered the security boys at the hotel exhibition.’

  ‘I was there that night, Wren.’ Simon looked unhappy. ‘Outside the hotel.’

  ‘You were?’ I was confused.

  ‘With the augurs from Abbyvale. I thought we could make a deal with the judges if we took Cassa.’

  ‘You?’ My mouth fell open. ‘That was you?’

  Horrified, I stared at him. I couldn’t imagine him doing something that awful.

  ‘You could have gone to jail.’ I shut my eyes. ‘And wha
t you did to Cassa … She was traumatised.’

  And David. I had no love for that boy, but I was still troubled about his blood punishment. I’d seen him the next day, his face tight and unhappy. He did his training as usual, but he was pale and stiff and, as much as he’d tried to hide it, his pain was obvious.

  ‘I’m sorry it had to come to that,’ Simon said. ‘But we’re worried.’ His hands were near mine, the tips of our fingers inches apart. ‘Something doesn’t sit right.’

  Across from me, his eyes looked so gentle, the shape of him so painfully familiar.

  ‘Ash and I, we want to find another way.’ He struggled for words. ‘It’s wrong that you’re the only one sticking your neck out.’

  ‘Just trust the plan,’ I said through gritted teeth.

  ‘That’s the problem. I don’t. Sometimes Maeve gets stuck in rigid, outdated ways of thinking and overlooks more innovative answers.’

  ‘Innovative? You kidnapped Cassa because you think this isn’t innovative enough?’ I hissed.

  ‘No,’ Simon burst out. ‘I think they’re making mistakes. I think they’re missing something, because I can’t see how …’ He stopped, rubbing a hand over his jaw.

  ‘So you thought you’d ransom Cassa? What for? What could be worth resorting to kidnapping?’ I was too loud.

  Aisling glanced at the waitresses, but they were too busy gossiping to mind us.

  ‘Nemeta. We wanted them to give us nemeta. Listen, Wren, they’re going about this all wrong. What if the Daragishka Knot doesn’t work? What if it’s just a myth? We need to take more decisive action.’

  ‘And you thought they wouldn’t retaliate?’ I was shaking. ‘You thought ransoming Cassa wouldn’t start an all-out war?’ I couldn’t believe what Simon and Aisling had done. ‘So that’s why you wickered the security boys? So that they couldn’t respond to Tarc’s call for backup?’

  Aisling nodded.

  ‘And that’s how you hurt your shoulder?’ I asked Simon. I wasn’t sure what he knew about the tree. He hadn’t seen Tarc’s intense stare. ‘When the tree fell?’