The Serendipity of Flightless Things

by Fiadhnait Moser

  If Oliver could talk, I knew he’d take Nuala’s side, even if he secretly agreed with me. After all, he always had. But that was the thing about talking with trees—unless you were completely off your nut, they didn’t talk back.

  I used to believe they did.

  I snapped a leaf from Oliver and let Deirdre crawl onto it. I placed the leaf in the grass and began to gather some wildflowers—forget-me-nots, daisies, and foxgloves. I edged over to the knothole at Oliver’s roots and laid the flowers there, just as Nuala had laid his ashes five years ago. “Now,” I said, “if the swans come a-visitin’ tonight, leave their tracks and leave their feathers. I s’pose I’ll come by in the morning.”

  I stood, kissed my finger, and then laid the kiss on Oliver’s bark, just like the flesh-and-bones Oliver used to do to my forehead. “See you,” I whispered, and turned to leave.

  “Who’re you talkin’ to?” The voice came from the tree. The tree.

  My hand leapt for my chest, and I jumped back—fumbled, stumbled, tumbled—splash. Into the creek I fell. Well, I thought bitterly, splashing about in the water, wasn’t today just a festival of Finn Falling into Things.

  “Are you okay?” A rustling of leaves and branches sounded, and as I groped for the creek’s edge, a freckled hand caught my own. I spluttered for breath as the hand yanked me to shore.

  I spat a mouthful of creek water and coughed, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fi—Darcy?”

  The child cast a bashful gaze to her feet—bare—and then knelt beside me. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean to—to startle you or anythin’.”

  I wrung out my hair and said, “No, I just thought you were—er—someone else. Never mind that—what’re you doing here, hiding up in a tree? You should be back home with Sean and Mary. Weren’t they s’posed to be looking out for you today? It en’t always safe in the glades, you know. You could get lost, or slip on a rock and snap your ankle clean in two.”

  Darcy’s mouth twitched. “So could you.”

  “Aye, but I’m twelve, and you’re six, seven?”

  “Seven and a quarter,” said Darcy, tipping up her chin.

  I peeled a string of seaweed off my jeans and said, “Matters not. Point is, you’re just a little ’un, which means you’ve got to do like you’re told. Understand?”

  Darcy sighed. “Yes, Finn.”

  There was a familiar longing in Darcy’s voice, and I realized perhaps I had inherited more of Nuala than her lily-pale hair and big feet. “Now, don’t be down on yourself.” I stood, sneakers slopping, and took Darcy’s hand and pulled her up. “We’ll walk home together. What were you doing in the glade anyway?”

  “Lookin’ for faery,” said Darcy. She brushed off her skirt and added, “They say in the village, no one knows the faery better ’n you, Finn. ’Sides Nuala, of course. You were talking to one just then, weren’t you? Have you seen ’em? Heard ’em?”

  “No, Darcy.”

  Her face fell. “Oh.”

  I knelt down to Darcy’s ear level and whispered, “I’ve felt ’em.” Darcy’s eyes ballooned. “Felt ’em in my own thumpin’ heart, strong as the beat of a bodhrán drum.”

  We ducked under Oliver’s waterfall of leaves and began to saunter through the glade, one squelching footstep after the next.

  “Mary says I’m wasting me time out here,” said Darcy. “She says they en’t real, the faery.”

  I half smiled. “Neither are stories.” But I leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” It was something Nuala had told me time and time again growing up. “And if you make a wish with all your heart and soul and do just as your da and Nanny Hurley and Father Cooley say, a faery’ll come when you’re ’specting it least and grant that wish for you. Did you know that?”

  Darcy shook her head no.

  Faery, of course, were not wish granters. They had their own troubles to deal with and their own wishes to tend to. But Darcy didn’t know that, and the way I saw it, everyone deserved something to believe in, even if it wasn’t real. I wanted to believe. I didn’t have to, and I knew I was too old, but Darcy, Darcy of all people, needed that scrap of belief. She was, after all, the only other kid I knew whose father also worked for the Irish Republican Army in Belfast, and who didn’t have a mother to boot. No one else could really understand what it was like to get used to the feeling of longing, always, for someone you didn’t know would return or not.

  “You know,” I said, “these stones tell stories. Look here.”

  I took Darcy’s hand and led her under an oak branch to a tall stone curtained behind a honeysuckle bush. The rock was worn smooth as the covers of my favorite storybooks; I’d seen many a time wayfarers stopping by just to touch, feel the stone. Liars, some would say the ancient people were. Ignorant, some would say the ancient people were. Imaginative, some would say the ancient people were. Truth tellers, some would say the ancient people were. My own opinion floated like will-o’-the-wisps along the surfaces of those beliefs, hopping like skipping stones between each one. I wished on occasion that if I hung around Darcy enough, my belief would strengthen in the stories I had once so clung to like religion. Those stories were the threads that held Darcy and me together, but also the ones that pulled us apart.

  “Look at the lines,” I told Darcy. The stone was carved with the ancient script of Ogham, a series of scratches and scars, like wrinkles, like stories, like Nuala.

  Darcy ran a muddy fingernail in one of the carved lines. “You can read this?” she breathed.

  I nodded. “You read it bottom to top, like so,” and I placed my finger at the bottom right corner, where the Ogham story started.

  Darcy gazed up at me. “Well, what’s it say? Is it a story? It’s a story, en’t it?”

  “Aye, ’tis a story, but a cursed one.” I plucked a honeysuckle berry and squished it between my fingers, juice splattering down my jeans. “Some say it’s the faery fruit of tales, ensnaring its victims into eternal wandering. I wouldn’t wish such a fate on anyone. Nuala says any ear that catches but a drop of it becomes plagued with an unquenchable thirst to find the swans of—ah, I’ve said too much.”

  Darcy’s eyes glittered bright and wide as the harvest moon. She shook her head of dark curls and gripped my sleeve, begging, “Tell it, Finn, please, please, please.”

  A pang of guilt clutched my stomach tight, but the actress in me could not resist a story, and it hurt the way actress was just another word for liar, but if I thought about it, was I lying? Were we storytellers simply glorified liars? Or underrated truth sayers? I did not know. “Oh, dear,” I said, and sighing theatrically, I took Darcy’s hand and began to meander through the trees again. “I suppose the damage has been done. Not a medicine in the world can cure it. Nothin’ else to do but finish off the story.”

  Darcy beamed, and I began. “Once, in a green glade on a green isle, lived Lir, a man of all the riches in the world, but still, unhappy. He desired family. Madly in love with the daughter of a half faery, he married. In time, Lir’s wife gave birth to three children with hair pale as seafoam, eyes dark as midnight, and lips red as hawthorn berries.”

  Darcy’s eyes began to wander, so from a nearby hawthorn tree, I plucked a berry and dropped it into her palm. “But don’t eat it,” I warned. “For it is said that ever since this story came to close, those berries have remained as cursed as the children themselves, and if I finish, you will find out why. Ah, but I must be boring you with such old and dreary—”

  “No!” piped Darcy. She held the berry at arm’s length as if examining a particularly grumpy hermit crab. “No, I want to hear the rest.”

  “As you wish.” I smiled and continued on. “These children were called Ena, Fiachra, and Conn. But … they came with a price, and that price was Lir’s wife.

  “‘Lir,’ his wife said as she cradled Conn for the first time, ‘take care of ’em. Keep ’em close, always.’ And then she died.”

  Darcy stopped in
her tracks and dropped the hawthorn berry. “No.”

  “Aye. Lir buried his love himself in these very glades. His only comforts rested in his children and his wife’s sister, Aoife, who looked extraordinarily similar to his wife. So soothing was the sight of Aoife that Lir grew drunk with love.”

  “Like Mr. Quigley at the pub last Thursday?”

  “No, Darcy, that’s regular drunkenness. Love-drunkenness is a far worse affliction; but Lir’s love was not for Aoife, rather the mirror of his parted wife he saw in her. Years later, wedding bells went a-ringin’, and Aoife gave birth to a baby girl—Darcy.”

  Darcy’s eyes grew large. It was a storytelling trick I’d learned from Nuala, who had always, forever, put my name in for Aoife’s daughter. “Darcy?” gasped Darcy. “That en’t true—can’t be—is it?”

  “Don’t get your hair in a fluff, now; Darcy’s hardly an uncommon name ’round here. ’Sides, if all’s like the story says, Darcy had hair the color of raven feathers”—I squinted to make out Darcy’s eye color—“and eyes like storm clouds over Connemara—oh my.”

  Darcy’s mouth hung broad as the caves down by Maghera Beach. I patted her shoulder and said, “Best to give stories the benefit of the doubt. As I was telling, all was well. Aoife loved Darcy and cared for Lir’s children like her own. But her love was not returned. The children, particularly Ena, were distrustful of Aoife, for they unraveled a most treacherous secret: Lir’s first wife did not die of illness. Aoife killed her with her half-faery power of life.”

  “But … but that’s a good power, en’t it?” said Darcy.

  “One would think. But Aoife did not grow beautiful things like flowers and dragonflies. She grew thornbushes, and one, she grew in her own sister’s heart.”

  Darcy squirmed at the image.

  “Of course,” I continued, “Lir didn’t believe the children, but they knew the truth. So Ena kept Darcy far at bay from Aoife, raising the baby as her own. Jealousy festered in Aoife, for Ena had not only taken her child, but also stolen Lir’s attention. And jealousy, if sits for too long, spoils to bitterness, and bitterness spoils to spite. Well, Lir grew tired of—”

  “Darcy.” The voice came from nowhere, light, bright, and cloyingly sweet; it belonged to the sort of person who flicks fingers through candle flames, makes monkey faces at British guards, taps on lion cages at zoos. “He grew tired of Darcy—that’s how it goes, en’t it, Story Queen?”

  I whirled around. A spidery boy stood there, unkempt sooty hair sticking out at odd angles, and long eyelashes shadowing black-widow eyes. Between his pimpled nose and gangly legs, he could have passed for seventeen—but his pinched face and baby lips gave him away; he was hardly old as me. He tilted up an abnormally pointed chin and taunted, “Lil’ Darcy’s father grew tired of her and abandoned her for the more—ah—venturous life, didn’t he? Go on, love, tell it like it is. The kid can handle it.”

  His spidery legs skirted around Darcy, and I grabbed Darcy’s wrist, yanking her close. “Don’t call me ‘love,’” I spat. I knew he was talking about Darcy’s real father, and I didn’t like it, not one bit, so I added, “And there en’t nothing ‘venturous’ about them riots—” But the boy cut me off.

  “Nothing personal, ’course,” he said. In one swish of a knobby hand, he grabbed a mosquito and crushed it between thumb and forefinger, then added, “Some men just grow bored of the humdrum provincial life. Love grows tired after—”

  I stepped closer to the boy, his scrunched-up nose an inch from the top of my head. I stood on tiptoes to almost meet his eye level and growled, “Don’t you dare—”

  “Children.” A smirk spread across his thin lips, and anger brewed in the pit of my stomach.

  I glanced to Darcy. Tears brimmed in her eyes, and I held her wrist tighter. “Who’re you anyway?” I snapped. “You’re a goer-through, en’t you? Nothin’ but a gypsy boy, here one day, gone the next.”

  I tried to push past him, but he blocked my way. “Aye, you’re right on that one, love—”

  “Don’t—”

  “I never stay in one place.” He skittered around Darcy and me again and added, “Take three guesses why.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not playing games with you. Now let us by.”

  “Ah-ah-ah,” twitted the boy. “I think you’ll be beggin’ me just the opposite when you get a peek at this.” Out from his pocket, he whipped a tarnished oval locket suspended by a thin chain speckled with blood. My hand leapt for my neck, traced the slight cuts the chain had drawn while pulling me up from the abyss of the Slieve League Cliffs. And as I edged closer to the boy, I found I could still smell Nuala’s rosemary soap on the silver, wafting through the air.

  That locket belonged to me.

  Chapter 3

  MY MOUTH DID JUMPING JACKS as I fumbled for the precise words, the majority of which were not suitable for polite company—which wouldn’t have been a problem if not for Darcy. “You sneak!”

  The spidery boy clucked his tongue and chided, “Better watch that mouth, love, if you ever want to see this again,” and he dangled the locket up out of my reach.

  “Where’d you get that?” I demanded.

  “Ah, so now I’m interesting,” the boy sneered. “Well, it en’t your business. S’pose it’s mine now, huh?”

  I put a hand on my hip, but Darcy spoke before I had a chance. “No way. It belongs to Finn, you boghead. Don’t it, Finn? That belongs to you. I’ve seen it ’round old Nuala’s neck.”

  The boy shrugged. “Catch it if you can,” he said, and then began to juggle the locket with the quick-handedness of a master magician.

  I jumped and grabbed for the locket, but the boy dangled it up out of my reach. “Give it!” I yelped, suddenly regretting quitting my Irish dance lessons five years ago.

  “Fish outa water, are you? What’s that smell?” The boy crinkled his nose, his face becoming distinctly puglike. “Seaweed? Ah—no. River scum. Or is that just your armpits’ scent au naturel? That means ‘natural.’”

  “I know what it means,” I snapped. “And you’re vile.” I gritted my teeth as I jumped one more time, but then surrendered. “What do you want from me?” I searched in my pockets, but found only gum wrappers, a bus ticket from Belfast, and a hawthorn leaf named Grainne.

  A wicked smile skulked in the corner of the boy’s mouth. “A favor.”

  “And what might that be?”

  The boy tipped up his chin precociously and said, “I want in. Take me with you to America.”

  Darcy gasped. “What a positively horrid trade. It en’t hardly fair at all, for such a tiny trinket, an’ Finn’ll never take such an unfair trade, en’t that right, Finn? Wait—America? What’s America have to do with any—”

  I hushed Darcy. I had a feeling the boy could have offered me to trade a bag of crisps for the locket, and Darcy still would have argued it wasn’t fair.

  But how boggling the boy’s proposal was. I had never made plans of traveling to America, or even taken any interest in the idea. Perhaps he had gotten his information from Ciara Cassidy, a pinch-faced girl from school who enjoyed spreading nasty rumors about me. Ciara probably wished more than anyone that I was being shipped off to Boston or perhaps New York City, where they say there swarms so many people they blend together like crayons on hundred-degree pavement. And so I told the boy, “Well, luck’s out. I en’t going to America.”

  “Aye, but you will, love.” He said it like he had a secret—a pickpocketed one at that.

  I flapped my hands about and said, “Fine, whatever. Now, would you give me my locket?”

  The boy complied and dropped Nuala’s locket into my hands. It was unsettlingly warm with the heat of the boy’s hand, and I rubbed it on my jeans to wipe away all traces of the boy. This was my and Nuala’s treasure, no one else’s. “Thanks,” I muttered, and the boy shrugged.

  But I wasn’t stupid. As I clasped the chain around my neck, it occurred to me that the boy might have taken the photog
raph from inside. So, I carefully pinched the tiny door of the locket.

  “Don’t trust me, doll face?” chirped the boy.

  “Not exactly, no,” I said, scowling at him as I opened the locket. The photo was still there, but to my surprise, something else fluttered out from inside—a moth? A maple seed? A feather?

  I caught my breath, my eyes widening as I bent to pick it up from the carpet of willow leaves. As I pinched the corner, however, I realized it was none of those things at all. Rough and brittle, it was a thin scrap of bark from a tree—a hawthorn tree.

  “Not expecting that, were you?” said the boy.

  I pocketed the scrap and stood, trying hard as possible to mask my surprise.

  “I think Finn knows quite well what she keeps in her own locket,” puffed Darcy. “En’t that right, Finn?”

  I nodded vaguely as a dizzying fog drifted through my brain, wobbled my ankles. “R-right, Darcy. Er—time to get you home. C’mon.”

  Darcy’s house was now in view, hardly a flea of a thing in the vastness of the green hills before us. I took her hand and pushed past the boy, but so irritating was he that he stuck out his big, floppy-booted foot in front of me, and I stumbled over it. “What now?”

  “Not even a goodbye? How impeccably rude,” said the boy.

  “Bye,” I said flatly, pushing past him, but he rounded Darcy and me again.

  “I wanted to tell you one last thing, and I daresay you’ll want to hear it.” He waited for dramatic effect as I tapped my toe before continuing on. “Those swans en’t gonna wait around forever,” he said. “They en’t gonna wait for the snow to fall, the grass to grow, the war to end, and they en’t gonna wait for the dead to come home.”

  I shot a glance toward Darcy. Tears welled in her eyes, and for a second, I thought I saw a spidery-legged lough monster reflected in them—but no, it was just the boy. “Wh-what does he mean?” Darcy choked, grabbing my sleeve. “Waitin’ for the dead?”