by Mary Watson
Praise for The Wren Hunt
NOMINATED FOR THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS
YOUNG ADULT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
‘The most superb collection of character and fantasy and love and landscape I have read since Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights’
Hilary McKay
‘A modern-day fairytale … Throwing romance, magical visions and gruesome rituals into the pot, this is a thrilling and otherworldly depiction of Irish culture’
Sunday Times
‘Beautiful, eerie, dark and dreamy … An absolutely stunning mix of myth and legend and family saga. I haven’t stopped thinking about it’
Melinda Salisbury
‘Fantasy and reality meet in contemporary Ireland infused with ancient magic … Variously described as folklore, fantasy and mystery, The Wren Hunt wears its labels lightly, shedding one genre for another with a sort of slippery grace’
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
‘Beautiful … Heartfelt, deeply spiritual; we look forward to seeing more books from Mary Watson in the years to come’
SFX
‘The tentacles of this story reach deep into Ireland’s mythological past, in a haunting tale … Riveting’
Irish Examiner
‘Magical … For fans of The Call and The Shannara Chronicles’
BuzzFeed
‘Gripping and romantic, it shares the idea of violent adolescent initiation into adult life’
New Statesman
‘The Wren Hunt rings with ancient, subtle magic, masterfully transmuted into words. A tale that gets into your bones’
Samantha Shannon
‘The Wren Hunt has a dreamy folk-horror sense about it from the outset: the drubbing of an underlying war drum … A story that unfurls and peels apart like a flower-human hybrid, bleeding as it blooms’
Times Literary Supplement
‘A beautifully written story and unlike anything I have read … Magical and real’
Jenny McLachlan
‘Folklore, secrets, betrayal, magic, forbidden love and dark discoveries. Eerie, atmospheric, seductive and completely captivating’
Katherine Webber
‘A beautiful mix of myth and magic and discovering the path you want to tread’
Karen Gregory
For my boys. Stay free.
CONTENTS
Before the Beginning: An apostrophe
One: For Laila
Two: The spying
Three: Stabbed
Four: Its name is Promise
Five: You need to be a little Horrible
Six: I can keep a secret
Seven: Fix that too
Eight: Each time he is destroyed
Nine: You’ll just have to suffer
Ten: I never understand
Eleven: Get out of here
Twelve: Beloved
Thirteen: The school road
Fourteen: A little different
Fifteen: Death wish
Sixteen: A variation
Seventeen: Welcome
Eighteen: Fixing things
Nineteen: The ugliest thing I’d ever seen
Twenty: Full of surprises
Twenty-One: Wishmaker
Twenty-Two: Sorry
Twenty-Three: Love to have you
Twenty-Four: The wounded soldier
Twenty-Five: Keeping tabs
Twenty-Six: You will be held
Twenty-Seven: Not going to make it
Twenty-Eight: Answer her
Twenty-Nine: Infestation
Thirty: Made you Horrible
Thirty-One: Nothing to do with curses and magic
Thirty-Two: Tell me their names
Thirty-Three: So much I’m not telling you
Thirty-Four: Use them wisely
Thirty-Five: Patrick’s cousin
Thirty-Six: Make this right
Thirty-Seven: The woven room
Thirty-Eight: Keep
Thirty-Nine: Never choose you
Forty: The only beneficiary
Forty-One: Like attracts like
Forty-Two: First duty
Forty-Three: No
Forty-Four: On the birch
Forty-Five: Thief and spy
Forty-Six: Warning signs
Forty-Seven: Follow or you’ll be left behind
Forty-Eight: Invisible battles
Forty-Nine: The back room
Fifty: Son of the rook
Fifty-One: Where Laila was
After the End
Glossary
Acknowledgements
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
An apostrophe
Ten years earlier
David
She doesn’t remember that first time we met, down our field where she played her game of sticks and stones. How she squatted on the mulched leaves, dark hair falling over her shoulders.
I’d asked the girl what she was doing. I was tired of Oisín’s games, of always playing sidekick to his hero. Oisín’s games that usually involved hard fists on my arms and stomach.
‘Reading.’
‘Leaves aren’t for reading.’
I heard Dad in the mocking tone of my voice. The way Dad spoke when he wasn’t sure of something. When he knew he might be wrong.
‘I read them.’
She moved one of the leaves from a cracked twig as if this made everything clearer.
It was just a child’s game, the muck and leaves and twigs. Just a no one girl from the village who looked like she hadn’t seen a soaped-up washcloth in days. But the way she sat. Her fierce concentration.
‘Tell me,’ I said, crouching beside her. I was bigger, but she acted older. ‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s a story,’ she said. ‘An apostrophe.’
I looked at her in confusion but she was pointing down. ‘This family is broken. That’s the daddy.’ A mottled leaf near a twig. ‘And he’s destroyed. Because of greed.’
‘And the mammy?’
Against my will, I was drawn in. The sticks seemed to take on form. Shadow figures planted in the earth. I could almost hear them whispering, like in the old days when trees and wind and water spoke to us. I examined the girl, curious.
‘Bleeding. But not from cuts.’ The girl ran a finger along a stick lying flat near a mossy rock. ‘She bleeds in her heart and it will kill her quietly and slowly. The mammy will be dead a long time before she knows she is.
‘The brother, also ruined.’ She pointed to the broken twig, ‘After being made to pay for it all.’
‘And this one?’ I touch the only stick standing, planted in the earth.
‘That’s the one who caused it all. That’s the one who, destroyed them.’ She looked at me from beneath her lashes. ‘That’s you.’
I recoiled from the girl. She brushed hair from her eyes, streaking more muck on her face.
Just a game.
But for a second it wasn’t mulch on the lake shoreline and I floundered. It was more like a law where each item had real power. But this child wasn’t one of us, she wasn’t judge. She couldn’t know the power of words or how to form a law.
I kicked at the leaves and sticks and then I stepped on them to be sure. A twig cracked beneath my shoe.
‘Wait,’ she said.
I turned, scrabbling away.
‘I haven’t told you how it all turns out.’
But she had. Ruin and destruction. All my fault.
As I ran, I could hear Dad’s laughter echoing through my head. Running along the lake, I imagined the silent stares of Mamó and Oisín observing my weakness. Afraid of a little girl.
I was out of breath when I crashed through the trees between the shoreline a
nd the Rookery. My knees were bloodied and my face scratched. My palms were grazed, with gravel embedded in the skin.
That day, I swore I would never run from a girl again. How could I, second son of Jarlath Creagh, thirteen generations of fearsome garraíodóirí, be afraid of a skinny child playing in muck?
I ran up behind the house, too close to Mamó’s cottage.
Mistake. I should have gone around, and come in through the front drive. Mamó was outside, examining the flowers on the path.
‘Davey.’ Mamó’s voice was like skidding on small stones.
My feet were rooted to the ground. I wasn’t sure which was worse: Mamó or Dad finding me like this. If I was lucky, it would have been Mammy with her soft pale hair. She would have pulled me into her arms and cooed and lied.
Mamó was a statue. A single disfigured finger crooked to summon me.
‘What’s wrong?’
My feet walked towards her as if compelled. Mamó always said magic, proper magic that was silver and shiny, was stuck. That we made do with grey magic, slow and plodding, or blue magic, rare and hard to come by, because silver was blocked to us.
But sometimes, and for some people, it seemed the silver magic leaked out. That some people had found, mined, stolen, hoarded silver, and for them the usual rules didn’t apply. If anyone had siphoned silver it was Mamó. My father’s mother.
‘What happened?’ she said again as I stared at her black slacks. Mamó always dressed smart, even when she was tending her flower beds. And always in black. To remind everyone that she’s supposed to be descended from the Badb Catha, the Crow-Mother and goddess of battle.
‘I fell.’
Her bony hand with its twisted fingers clutched my shoulder. It probably hurt her more than it did me.
‘Don’t lie to me.’
I felt tears pricking. But she couldn’t see me cry. I swallowed hard to get rid of the wedge in my throat.
‘You can lie to your soft, spoilt mammy. You can lie to your stronger, meaner brother. Lie to your daddy, if you dare. But don’t even try lying to me.’
‘There was a girl.’ My voice was weak and choked.
‘Speak up, Davey.’
‘There was a girl. I think she is a witch.’
‘No such thing as witches.’ Mamó held on to my shoulder, leaning over me and clutching tighter than those twisted fingers could surely manage. The smell of cigarettes clung to her turtleneck jumper.
‘It was just a stupid girl,’ I said, fighting tears. ‘Playing a game. She pretended she could read things in the mulch.’
‘The mulch?’ Mamó said. ‘What did she say?’
‘That our family was destroyed.’ I shut my big mouth from saying that it was me who destroyed them all. ‘Every one of us dead or ruined. It was like she could tell the future through the stones.’
‘Did the rooks complain?’
‘No.’ I sounded sullen. ‘She was just a stupid girl from the village.’
Mamó let go of my shoulder. She looked out across the garden, thinking.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ she said eventually. ‘But mind that girl.’
‘Yes, Mamó.’ I started walking away.
‘Davey,’ Mamó called me. ‘Remember what I told you. How must you deal with something that threatens you?’
‘Make sure it doesn’t,’ I said, the smell of cigarette smoke and roses making me feel sick. ‘Contain the threat.’
‘What else?’
‘Always turn the threat back on itself.’
‘That’s right. Be sure that you’re the threat, Davey. Never the prey.’
But how, I wanted to ask her.
‘If that little girl likes games so much,’ Mamó said, holding my eye, ‘make sure she plays one with your rules.’
And she was done with me. Mamó turned back to her flowers, checking the roses for signs of disease.
ONE
For Laila
Last night I squeezed through the back hedge and into the field behind.
LAS
Zara
It’s evening and Dad is in the downstairs bathroom. The scrape of his razor against skin is both familiar and strange: it’s been years since I’ve watched him shave. Through the door, the edge of his arm moves in a careful downward stroke. His eyes, dark with grief, appraise his reflection.
‘Dad?’ I push the door open. Rinsing, he startles slightly.
‘Zara.’ He speaks to the me in the mirror. The smell of his shaving oil is thick in the small room.
‘You going out?’ I hate that I sound so afraid.
‘There’s a work thing on.’ He rubs his jaw. I wait a moment, wanting to ask more: what kind of work thing? Who else is going? But these are not my questions to ask.
‘Where’s Mom?’
‘Upstairs. Sorting.’ Dad is cleaning up the sink, packing his things in a little bag which he stashes in the drawer. ‘Tell her I had to run.’ He pulls on a shirt hanging from the door.
He’s halfway to the front door when I summon the nerve. ‘Seriously?’
He doesn’t look back as he pauses at the door. ‘I’m late, Zara.’
He waits a beat, and I’m thinking: late for whom?
I’m thinking: coward, he won’t even tell Mom himself.
The door slams, emphasising the quiet.
I hate this house. I hate that after ten months of living here, it still feels new. I hate its modern cookie-cutter design, replicated by the two houses next door, both abruptly empty since January. I hate how it squats like a trespasser beside the gates to a large estate, the Rookery. I hate how we have become while living in it.
I hate most that it’s where Laila was last with us.
‘Dad gone out?’ Adam appears in the doorway to the kitchen. This is how we live now, scuttling in the shadows from one room to another, hoping we don’t have to engage.
‘Yeah. Work, he said.’
No girl should think about her father heading into the city like this. No girl should think of her father in a restaurant, his gaze on an unknown woman, probably with red lipstick, on the other side of a candle. Or maybe in a booth in some hip, too-young place, his hand settled on the inside of a thigh. Sheer tights and high heels.
Adam hasn’t yet learned to hide what he’s feeling. His fear makes him look younger than his fifteen years and I wish so hard that Laila were here with us.
‘I’m heading out.’ He’s defiant, but it’s unnecessary. There was a time someone would have stopped him. Checked on his homework. But if Mom’s sorting things, she won’t notice.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ I warn him. ‘You know she’s looking for an excuse.’
He leaves and I’m alone in the passage, thinking about Dad’s work thing.
The door to the room at the top of the stairs is open. Laila’s room. But she’s not there.
We lost Laila long before we buried her ashes. Even in those months before she died, she wasn’t really with us. Laila seemed to fade out slowly, every day a little less present until one day she wasn’t there.
They found her that cold March morning on the village green. I imagine her staring up to the morning sky with unseeing eyes, her cream faux fur spread beneath her.
They’d thought she’d fallen asleep, maybe taken some pills, maybe too much to drink. A fleeting mistake because they knew within seconds that she was dead: the fixed gaze, her right arm bent to touch her heart. No blood, no bruising. And later, doctors searched beneath her skin, examining her from the inside out and finding only a riddle. There is no reason why she should have died that morning. It was like someone had flipped an off switch and Laila just stopped. Then dropped down to the frost-covered grass, eyes to the sky.
Upstairs, Mom’s on Laila’s bed with the contents of the middle drawer dumped on the pale blue covers. But her sorting never achieves anything. Laila’s clothes are still in the wardrobe, her desk stacked with textbooks.
On the wall is a giant corkboard with photographs of
Laila smiling, Laila in the woods. A study plan, in bright colours, for the Leaving Cert exams she’ll never sit.
Mom picks up the charm bracelet she’d bought Laila for her eighteenth birthday.
‘Did Dad get the dinner on?’
‘Dad’s not here.’
‘He went out?’ Mom falters a moment.
‘Work,’ I beg her to play along. ‘Said he was running late.’
We’ll pretend that Dad is at a work thing and there isn’t anything to worry about. We’ve done it so many times, why stop now?
I don’t tell her about the shaving downstairs. I don’t tell her about the pungent oil or the trendy shirt I know cost stupid money.
Mom’s eyes on Laila’s bracelet are wide and fixed. She touches the crow charm.
‘Is this new?’ It’s a black, ugly thing. Two black pearl eyes. Too big for the delicate gold bracelet.
I’d not noticed it before, but then I wasn’t really looking. It doesn’t belong with the gold heart, star and fish. It’s wrong, somehow. It unsettles me in the way of a voodoo doll stuck with pins.
‘Does it matter?’ I say.
I get up from the bed and touch a picture of Laila laughing. The impossibility of it all, that she was here and laughing and now she’s not and never can be, hits me like a fist in the gut. More precisely: it feels like someone has punched right through me, tearing through skin, fat and muscle, to wrench out my organs in their bloodied hand.
The picture is from just before March, because her hair is still long and the trees are beginning to bud. The resemblance between us is too close. Looking at photos of Laila is like looking into a distorted mirror. Her eyes are darker, the honey gold in her brown hair more pronounced.
Behind her is a massive grey house I don’t recognise. How did I miss so much of her life? How is there so much I don’t know?
‘Pearls are for tears,’ Mom says, looking at the crow’s eyes.
Mom is full of weird superstitions I don’t entirely understand. They’re from her childhood, passed down by her mother and aunts like some kind of arcane knowledge. Theirs is a bond formed by stories, by songs and recipes handed down generations. By women with soft cloth covering their hair, and henna-stained fingernails. The early morning call to prayer chanted through the wind. Stories of slave ancestors and curses, of boys who dance with swords, that make me shiver a little when I hear them.
