Rosie said, “Ciara is Danu’s daughter. The highest clan. We are of the En, also among the highest. I doubt you will ever go to Tír na nÓg, Jay, until the time comes to pass over and you leave this world. But back there, you are a powerful prince. Always remember that. And you’re not here by any accident. You have a purpose. Humanity is coming of age, and it is time they learned to love the Mother, and we learn to live in peace with each other. If they don’t, Ar En and his friends will triumph, and that will be a dreadful tragedy.”
I sat, stunned, and thought about it. “So, the bow and the sword… That wasn’t Gorm. That was you.” She nodded. “And when we came out of the underground river…”
Ciara was shaking her head. “No, that was me. I knew that if we were going to deal with Ar En, it had to be in our world, where we could call on the help of my mother. And while we were there, you could get a glimpse of who you were and what it was all about. I used the tunnel to open a portal.”
I thought more then turned to Rosie again. “But if you’re my mother, I am not a changeling. I’m half-elf, half-human.”
Rosie—Mom—laughed. “It was one of the many things Gorm got wrong. You aren’t the changeling, Ciara is.”
Ciara gazed and said, “I am the daughter of the moon, Danu. I was sent here to help you against Ar En. Ar means, The Bringer of Fire. Jay is the Bringer of Peace. You and I have a lot of work to do together, my prince…” and she grinned from ear to ear.
Above our heads, the September sun continued on its lazy way toward the west, and on the chimney pot, a black silhouette against the autumn sky, the blackbird sang out its long, complicated song into the gathering evening.
Also available from Finch Books:
The Pathfinders: Abomination
Jane Dougherty
Excerpt
Chapter One
Tully raked his fingers through his thick black hair, an expression of disgust on his face. Even his head was sweating! The window blinds stuck out like stubby black wings, keeping off the glare, but doing nothing to prevent the scorching heat radiating up from the bare asphalt outside the building. The air throbbed with the same rhythm as the whirring fan on the teacher’s desk. Teacher? Yeah, right, he was in school. He almost remembered it was a physics class, but it was too tiring to drag out the information, so he let it fall back into the pit of magma that the heat had made of his brain.
A crash and the sound of brittle laughter from the building site of the new sports complex nudged at his attention. Men in hardhats wiped streams of sweat from their faces and glared up at the searing brilliance of the sky before scuttling into the relative cool of their portacabins for lunch. The crane operator had already knocked off, and the metal monster was still, steel against pewter, pulsing in the dull heat.
Tully shifted in his chair as an oppressive feeling formed and squirmed in the pit of his stomach. Had he forgotten something important? Homework? Had he locked one of the cats in his room? Couldn’t remember—too damn hot. His unease focused on the silent metallic struts of the crane that hung practically overhead, like a giant predator, waiting.
The interminable lesson ended, and Tully rocked back in his chair, stretching arms and legs. A pen jabbed him in the back. He winced and turned his head. Carla grinned at him from the desk behind, and the nagging unease in his gut curled up and went to sleep.
“You are awake then. I couldn’t decide if you were asleep or you’d had a stroke.”
“Whose warped brain did it come out of anyway, the idea to have classes on a Saturday morning?” he asked, stifling a yawn.
“Somebody-or-other Stalin,” Carla replied. “Benito, I think.”
Together they walked out onto the quadrangle, the rather pretentious name given to the tree-bordered lawn that formed the geographical center of the school. The heat hit them like a blast from a baker’s oven as soon as the doors slid open.
Tully cringed. “We could stay inside.”
Carla raised her eyebrows. “It’s traditional.”
“Traditionally, it’s not like the Gobi Desert out here,” Tully muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Honestly, though, this weather is getting weirder. Don’t you think?” He looked at Carla. “It isn’t just me, is it? I mean, you remember summers that were just sorta normal hot, don’t you? There’s something funny going on. Something they’re not telling us.”
Carla raised an amused eyebrow again. “They? Is this one of your conspiracy theories?”
“Yeah, how about this one—all those billions of Chinese leaping about for the New Year celebrations have knocked the world off its axis, and we’re falling into the sun?”
“It could just be a global conspiracy of soda manufacturers to boost sales,” Carla said brightly.
Tully grinned back. Carla was probably right. She usually was. Usually.
* * * *
The lawn of the quadrangle was as brown and dry as a Middle Eastern hillside after a tribe of desert nomads had pastured their goats on it. Groups of students picnicked in the shade of the wilted plane trees that cast welcome shadows and shed a faint leafy odor that was almost healthy, unlike the less attractive city smells of car exhaust and junk food.
Sitting with his back resting more or less comfortably against a mottled tree trunk, Tully unwrapped his lunch. He spread the greaseproof paper package on the grass and, with a soft sigh that was mainly affection and only a tiny bit exasperation, picked up the large wedge of leek quiche. As he flicked his dark hair out of his eyes, he caught Carla looking at him. She grinned. She was always grinning. Tully had never met anyone else of such unflappable good humor.
“What’s so funny?”
Carla laughed. “Are you sure that’s your lunch you picked up and not something your dad was planning to fix the bathroom ceiling with?”
Tully pretended to inspect the quiche suspiciously. “Now you mention it, I think it might be part of his relief model of the Paris Basin,” he said sarcastically. “But what the hell? I’m hungry enough to eat his Taj Mahal made out of matchsticks or his life size reconstruction of Champion the Wonder Horse.” He took a large bite—too large—and chewed energetically.
“I’m sorry.” Carla touched his hand contritely, and Tully forgave the grin she couldn’t quite suppress. “I know you don’t like people poking fun at your dad. I love him too. He’s one of the best. But even you can’t pretend he can cook, and don’t be so spiky.”
Carla had put on her most beguiling expression. Her whole face, chestnut hair, golden skin, teeth and bright eyes glowed. Tully could almost hear her purring.
“Prickly.”
“Prickly then. If you give me a piece of that quiche, I’ll share this focaccia with you. Gabriella made a ton of it yesterday in a fit of homesickness, and she’ll be mortally offended if there’s any left by the weekend.”
“As long as you’ve got a good dentist.” Tully broke off a chunk of pastry, and rounds of undercooked leek detached themselves and dropped into the grass. “I think a couple of my premolars have come loose. Sausages he can manage, but Dad’s pastry is the ultimate deterrent. ”
They both laughed, thinking of Jack, Tully’s big, easygoing father, who never wore anything smarter than his best jeans and a clean T-shirt, with his massive hands and farm worker’s arms, his bright blue eyes and dark hair, grizzled at the temples. He imagined him in the untidy kitchen, throwing flour and butter about, searching for the salt, swearing when there weren’t enough eggs.
Tully’s house, four stone walls and red tiled roof, forgotten by time and the developers, sat in a patch of wasteland between industrial estates and sterile farmland. The center of a ramshackle assembly of barns and outhouses, it was the heart of the Community.
Tully didn’t remember life before the Community, like he didn’t remember his mother except as a fuzzy warm presence. When she’d died, his dad hadn’t been able to bear the constant reminders of her—in the house, the walks they took together, the
shops, the town, even the language. When a lorry driver friend had told him about this community of Hairies outside Paris, unreconstructed hippies living on a vacant lot with their own generator, their goats and their allotments, Tully’s dad was all ears. These were people who spoke a language his Molly had never uttered, in a country they had never visited, living a life on the edges of everything they had known together.
It didn’t take long for him to pack up little Tully and everything useful, stick it in a van and leave Liverpool, England, and the ghost of Molly behind. A farm worker’s cottage with a roof that was still intact became Tully’s home. In winter, there was a fire in the hearth and icicles on the bedroom windows. In summer the doors stood open, and cats and the hot breeze drifted in and out.
Tully was going to his fancy international school to learn how to be a Very Important Person and save the planet. Jack was doing his bit in the Community to at least destroy as little of it as possible, to make himself as innocuous and discreet as a squirrel, or a cricket, or a barn owl.
And barn owls make lousy pastry cooks.
Tully could have made that last observation aloud and Carla would have understood, like she understood Euclid and German. She understood him so well. Tully only felt complete when he had his arms around her, her head nestled in the crook of his arm, her hair tickling his chin. In his dad’s favorite cinema that smelled of stale popcorn, feet and a century of dust, she made him feel like the strong, silent hero in old Gary Cooper films. With her slender, almost angular, frame and elfin features, she seemed fragile, vulnerable, but like the wasp-waisted cowgirls, she was really tough as old boots.
“Fancy the cinema this afternoon? The Champo’s showing Casablanca. Again.”
Carla grimaced. “Not in this heat. I don’t know why the owners of that place think you can’t watch an old film without the authentic atmosphere too—sweaty armpits and hair lacquer.”
Tully sighed. “I’m not going around the shops.”
“Let’s just go for a walk in the woods.”
* * * *
The woods was Carla’s name for the brownfield area that was home to the Community. Wild flowers had first colonized the site, followed by saplings. The watercourse that had once been forced underground had broken out of the cracked pipeline and now ran free, bordered by young trees and thick brambles. Tully never really understood Carla’s fascination with the place. She spent her summers with her grandparents in the Dolomites—real, clean countryside, with fresh air and wild animals. In the woods, the soil was thin, full of pebbles and bits of glass, even if it was animated with lizards, field mice and the odd snake. In Tully’s woods, the predators were house cats, their sleek shadows and unblinking eyes often glimpsed as they prowled through the thickets. No savage beauty surrounded the Community, no forests or snow-capped mountains, but it was Tully’s home.
“There’s something sad about this place. Don’t you feel it?” Tully asked once. “Not lifeless concrete, but not countryside either.”
Carla just smiled and popped a blackberry into his mouth. “It’s plucky. Struggling, but not dead. The roses have come back. That’s something to be happy about, isn’t it?”
* * * *
“Let’s just go for a walk,” Carla said as she gathered up the remains of their lunch. Tully flicked the moist, oily crumbs of Gabriella’s focaccia off his shirtfront and settled back against the tree.
“When Dad’s quiche has settled, then. I can’t face a bus journey until my stomach juices have neutralized it.”
Carla joined him and lay back in his arms. Tully bent to kiss her forehead. Carla, her eyes closed, smiled up at him, sighed and snuggled herself into a more comfortable position. For a while, Tully watched the shadow pattern cast across her face by the gently fluttering leaves. Beyond their patchy canopy, the sky pulsed with a metallic sheen, crisscrossed by the vapor trails of innumerable jets.
Tully peered through the gaps between the leaves. How long had it been since anyone had seen a clear blue sky, he wondered, or the stars in the night sky? He followed the black specks of fighter aircraft as they spun yet more trails across the already encumbered sky and wondered idly where they were going. Jerusalem? Kiev? Teheran? Mexico?
News broadcasts had announced more rioting in Glasgow, that Lombardy was on the point of seceding from the rest of Italy and that the Green Warriors fighting to protect the last few thousand square miles of Amazonian forest from the bulldozers had been massacred by the Brazilian army. There were so many, what the news bulletins referred to laconically as trouble spots, that the holiday industry had more or less folded. Suddenly the misery, held at bay for the tourists beyond those palm-fringed beaches of paradise, was armed and highly dangerous.
Carla opened her eyes with a frown, and Tully shivered. The sky was clouding over. Fast. Thick gray and yellow banks of cloud, like the scum that had to be regularly removed from the surface of the Seine, bubbled up from the south. Gooseflesh prickled his bare arms as sweat cooled. The temperature plummeted. The crowd moved uneasily now. Heads turned skyward, watching the approaching cloud mass with apprehension. Lightning flickered like a faulty light fuse, and they heard the deep rumble of thunder.
“Looks like we’re in for one hell of a storm,” Tully murmured, hoping that was all. But the queasy feeling in his gut uncoiled, reminding him it was still there, and murmured back that it wasn’t.
Everywhere students bent to collect up their belongings or ran for cover beneath clouds that had billowed and swollen to cover the whole sky. Tully grabbed Carla’s hand and they dashed for the cloister. As they reached its cover, the sky rumbled and loosed a barrage of huge hailstones. Instants later, the white iceberg shrapnel turned stone-dark as rocks replaced hail.
A piercing scream ripped from the middle of the quadrangle as a student stumbled to the ground, the side of his head a bloody smear. The air roared with the thunder of falling rocks, some the size of footballs, all steaming and sizzling as they scorched tracks in the grass, and the shrill shriek of exploding glass. The plane trees moaned as branches bent and cracked, and the rising wind whined in fury. They watched as four students grabbed the unconscious boy and ran with him to one of the offices across the other side of the quad.
“This is crazy,” Carla murmured. “Rocks don’t just drop out of the sky.”
“One of the Hairies was bending Dad’s ear the other day about…well, rocks dropping out of the sky,” Tully said in a conversational voice he hoped sounded comforting. “Volcanic stuff raining down on a village in the Vosges. That was weird enough, but even weirder, it was hot! As if it had just been blown out of a volcano.”
He recalled the scene, whiskey bottle and glasses on the table, cat picking her way along the edge of the sink to see if anything interesting was lurking in the bottom. Then his eyes widened as details of the conversation came back to him—the red, thickly bearded face, the heavy red fist slamming down on the table making the glasses jump, the cat falling into the sink.
“Jesus! If he was right, things are going to get a bit bumpy around here.”
For years the hairy, homespun friends of his father’s from the Community had been predicting the end of the world. Their only point of disagreement was which of the many disaster scenarios would hit first.
Carla grabbed Tully’s arm. “The communications room, come on! The satellite pictures will show us what’s going on.”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t mind having a look at the sports channel either.”
Carla stared at him.
“If they didn’t get the covers on the pitch in time, Dad can chuck away those tickets for the match tonight.” Tully realized it sounded as though he was turning everything into a joke, as usual, but if he didn’t laugh, he’d panic. He knew what was causing the squirming, oppressive feeling in the pit of his stomach. At least, his gut knew. His head just refused to accept it.
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About the Author
William Kingshart was born in Lo
ndon but his parents, whom he describes as 'bohemians', moved to Ibiza when he was two. He grew up on the smallest of the Balearic Islands, bare-foot, wild and uncombed. He did not attend school, but for four years had a governess who disappeared one day when William was 12.
In his teens, he moved with his family to Cordoba on the Spanish mainland, where at 16 he got his first job, breaking in wild horses. At 19, still bare-foot, wild and uncombed, William moved to London, via Barcelona and Paris, to become a rock star. He is grateful to whatever gods watch over him for foiling that project. He retains a fond nostalgia for Led Zeppelin and the Eagles.
He flirted with academia in his 30s and became an Incorporated Linguist, a Barrister at the Inner Temple, a psychologist and a Master Practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming.
He has been married twice and has two beautiful daughters.
He thinks he might live in the south of Spain, but he isn't sure.
Email: [email protected]
William loves to hear from readers. You can find his contact information, website and author biography at http://www.finch-books.com.
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