The Wickerlight

by Mary Watson

  All I see is Oisín, bewildered. Laughed at.

  ‘Please,’ I beg Cassa. ‘I’ll bring him in tomorrow. Let me take him home. Please.’

  For a long moment she just looks at me. I work for Cassa, here at the Harkness Foundation, on the security team supposedly guarding the many valuable artworks and antiques. But really, I’m on her personal guard, doing the two-year placement required by soldier school. And she never goes easy on me. So I’m expecting her to say no. To have the whole humiliating interrogation here tonight.

  To my surprise, she gives a quick nod.

  I step down from the dais, holding up my brother who was once the War Scythe, the strongest, most heroic soldier of our generation.

  Passing Wren, Oisín stops. He turns to her. If I could yank him away without drawing comment, I would.

  He holds out a closed fist. There’s no disdain or pity on her face, and she raises her hand at his unspoken question. He presses something inside, furling her fingers over it, then gives her a bow.

  ‘Keeper of the Forest.’ The words are breathed in awe as he straightens up. He leans forward and says something too quiet for anyone else to hear.

  The mutters increase. I place a hand on his arm and steer Oisín away. I feel like a cartoon character with steam blowing out my ears, but I heed my internalised instructions: back straight, face clear. Don’t let them know what you’re feeling. On one hand, it’s exhausting having been brought up to believe that everyone is out to get you. On the other, my family have prepared me well for my life.

  We leave the white room side by side, shoulders squared. We are watched, we are shamed. Taunted and jeered at. But we walk like the princes Lucia and Mamó always told us we were. The only thing they’ve ever agreed on.

  There’s often blood at Rose parties. I just hadn’t realised that tonight it would be ours.

  We drive home in silence.

  I have so many questions. Where is the Eye? How in the name of all that’s sacred could you forget to pack it? Why would it even be out of the box when there are rules for how it should be stored? But those aren’t the questions I really want to ask.

  What I want to know is, what happened during those missing days? What could be that bad it could break you?

  Oisín had always been ruthless, even as a child. Not the blunt cruelty of kicking puppies, but something more subtle. Oisín knew how to salt wounds, he knew how to hurt without leaving marks. He knew intuitively that psychological damage was more lasting than physical. But I yearn to have him back, the big brother who knew how to make me turn a blade to my own skin and still have me worship him.

  ‘What did you give to Wren?’ I say at last.

  ‘A coin.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  ‘That its name is Promise.’

  I jerk my head to him, my jaw dropping. ‘You gave her a word? Why?’

  We never, ever give our words away. We need them to form laws because that’s how our magic works.

  Oisín is back to gazing out of the window, preferring the night to me.

  I want to jolt him out of whatever fug has enveloped him.

  ‘Remember how we used to race down by the quarry,’ I say, picking up speed and edging too close to the kerb because Oisín doesn’t like it when I do that. I want to make him angry. Or afraid. Anything but this vacant brokenness. I want to put the pedal down, to go too fast on this quiet village road.

  I want to make him feel.

  But then my elusive word veers up, sharp and painful, like talons grabbing my throat. It’s unusually vicious. I clutch the steering wheel, trying to keep from crying out. My foot is down on the accelerator but all I know is the clutch at my throat.

  ‘Watch out,’ Oisín says. ‘The girl.’

  Just beside the village green, a girl suddenly appears in the headlights, one hand held out in front of her. I’m breathing heavily as the car screeches to an abrupt stop. Oisín is rigid. I know what he is thinking. That it’s the dead girl, the one found right there on the village green the morning after Cassa’s ritual with Wren back in March. Like some kind of weird footnote to that night.

  Her picture had been all over the local rags: brown eyes, delicate features. A nice girl. One who played sport, did her homework and listened to her parents. It was a studio photograph that didn’t capture the amusement that lingered at the sides of her mouth. That inclination to mischief that was written all over her face.

  Tonight she’s dressed all in black, like a vengeful spirit. More angular than I remember, she throws a heated glare at the car. Her hair is crazy and loose.

  I shut my eyes, my hands clasping the steering wheel. When it comes, the word floods me.

  Keep.

  It’s a strong one and I need to know where to put it. I search around the word, sensing its texture and feel. Hard? No. Not rough. There’s a familiar smell that reminds me of Dad’s study. Leather. I’m relieved that it’s not something like paper or ash. Last year at Birchwood, in the middle of a hand-to-hand combat skills practical exam, I received a word that could only be encased in a feather. Affinity. I lost that one.

  The seat or steering wheel? Again, it pushes out at me and I grip the wheel tight between two fingers and my thumb and squeeze. Focusing hard, I encase the word in the leather there. I’ll have to cut out that patch from the steering wheel later.

  For once I’m relieved that Oisín is so absent. We guard our words. We don’t share any information about them.

  When I look up, Oisín is still gazing out of the window. The dead girl stares back. The walking dead observing each other.

  Oisín turns to me and yawns. ‘Chicken.’

  It’s a challenge.

  So I edge up to where the road widens, revving hard so that the wheels spin beneath us. Then we fly, going round in a circle, casting light and shadow on to the girl. And again and again until I know I’ve burned rings in the road.

  When I come to a stop, there’s an almost-smile on Oisín’s face.

  ‘Because I wanted to welcome her.’ His near smile is grim in the dim light as he finally answers my earlier question. ‘Wren’s one of us now.’

  He makes it sound like a punishment.

  ‘She will bring on silver magic.’

  I look at him curiously. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  He’s silent a moment. ‘I can see it. Smell it. That girl belongs to the woods.’

  FIVE

  You need to be a little Horrible

  I met a man in the village and he told me he was a scavenger hunter. His name is John Canty.

  LAS

  Zara

  Once upon a time, there was a horrible little girl called Horrible Zara and she had a horrible sister and a horrible brother. They lived in a horrible ditch down the bottom of the garden and ate leaf stew and boiled dirt for dinner. Filthy rag clothes just about covered their mud-streaked skin. Their hair was matted and mucky, their teeth crumbed with soil.

  They were Horrible, not cruel or mean or hurtful, and needed only each other. But Horrible Laila began to realise that the world was bigger than their ditch down the bottom of the garden. She wanted to find other ditches, she longed for bogs and pits and swamps.

  ‘There is such delicious nastiness out there,’ Horrible Laila would dream.

  ‘No, Horrible sister,’ Horrible Zara would cry. ‘If you venture too far, the Inky Black will get you. Stay here in our damp little ditch.’

  Horrible Zara spilt tears into her dirt-leaf soup because she needed Horrible Laila with her. And then one day Horrible Laila ventured too far and the Inky Black drew her into its terrible embrace.

  She died. The end.

  I first made up the Horribles, but it became Laila’s thing. She told stories about Horrible Zara and Horrible Laila and Horrible Adam in a raspy horrible voice until we begged her to stop, unnerved by our shadow family who lived down in the ditch.

  ‘Zara.’

  I can hear Laila’s horrible voice as if she
were there with me: Why did you shut me out? Why wouldn’t you let me talk?

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What?’ I register that Mom’s been calling me.

  She gives me a look. I know what she wants to say: don’t sit there. Do something. Mom is a doer. Idleness bothers her. Get up and move. Pretend to be busy.

  And there I am, just sitting at the sash window with the purple-blue skies, dank black boughs beyond. A solitary magpie on the grass. In the distance, dark clouds promise rain.

  ‘Playing a game.’ I wave my phone and lie. The summer holiday, starting next week, is going to be a blast.

  ‘What game?’

  ‘WordSpat.’ Because WordSpat is zero points. Chess is two and Piggy Run minus two. Not that Mom still keeps score. But it is there, so deeply ingrained from my childhood, where the things we did were scored and rated. Top marks in class? Five points forward. There you go, up the ladder. A strop outside the Spar? Oops, down a snake.

  I put my phone face down to hide the lie. I can’t play WordSpat. Not since Laila died. Even after Laila started disappearing, living her secret life, we’d play WordSpat, her words appearing on my screen when I least expected.

  ‘Come.’ Mom touches my shoulder. ‘You haven’t had breakfast.’

  Mom’s off again, scuttling to the kitchen, then outside, doing small jobs like moving this thing here and that thing there. Pointless jobs. Mom wants to fix things. It’s why she’s a doctor. And she can’t fix this. Worse, she doesn’t even know how it all broke. It bothers her that she can’t know why Laila died, just that she did. There were no signs of injury or trauma. There is no logical reason for Laila to have died. It shouldn’t have happened. It’s an impossible thing.

  And again that twist, like someone has reached into my chest and given me a snake bite, that burn of forearm skin, but in my heart. Laila always hoped for six impossible things before breakfast.

  I’m surprised to see Dad at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He usually leaves home before seven. An impossible thing.

  ‘Home office?’ I sound foolishly hopeful. But he’s looking at his phone with a big smile. I freeze.

  ‘Hmm?’ He looks up, distracted, reaching for his mug. ‘No, late start today.’

  Adam is slouched over his breakfast cereal. He’s a slobbery eater and it grosses me out. And then that fist to the gut: Laila was too. Those wet crunches always made me want to kill her. Ha ha.

  I pour hot water into a mug with a squeeze of lemon, a habit I picked up from Laila.

  ‘What you looking at, Dad?’ Adam says, and I want to hit him.

  ‘Dad?’ Adam persists. I hold on to my water so I don’t accidentally throw it at him.

  ‘What?’ Dad puts his phone beside his cup. He’s still looking at the screen. ‘Just Steve from work.’

  Mom moves to the utility room. I don’t think she needs anything.

  ‘Your bus,’ Mom calls. Through the door, she’s reaching above the sink, trying to open the window. That window has never opened. It’s been stuck since the day we moved here. But, teeth gritted, Mom is determined that this morning the damned window will open.

  ‘I’m ready.’ I cast an eye over Adam’s pinstriped pyjama bottoms. ‘Get dressed.’ I chuck a dish towel at him. ‘The bus won’t wait for you.’

  On his way out, Adam leans over Dad’s shoulder. ‘That looks boring.’

  Dad laughs. ‘It wasn’t a wild night out.’

  ‘This from last night? Where did you go?’

  Mom kneels on the counter in the utility, pushing at the window. She mutters something under her breath.

  ‘A talk on Byronic heroes in twenty-first-century popular literature.’

  ‘Crazy times, Dad.’ Adam clamps a hand on Dad’s shoulder. The phone swerves on the table and I see cable-knit jumpers and grey thinning hair.

  Not a Lindy then.

  I turn to the sink, relieved. Dad really was at a work thing last night. Another impossible thing.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ I hear Mom breathe beneath a soft thud.

  Dad’s up, moving to the door. ‘Naz?’

  ‘Just my hand.’ I hear her voice muted through the door. Dad moves to the utility room, where Mom holds her hand over the sink, blood dripping. He takes her hand. Their eyes are locked on each other’s. Three impossible things.

  ‘I’ll call Jarlath Creagh.’ Mom’s flustered, and starts blabbing about our landlord. ‘There are some other things that need fixing and it’s time he …’

  ‘C’mon, Zara,’ Adam sings from the hall, voice muffled as he pulls a T-shirt over his head. ‘The bus won’t wait for you.’

  I leave quietly. Opening the hall closet, I can’t see my summer raincoat among the many hanging jackets. I call to Mom, and she yells that she’s put it in the wash. I grab an old parka, even though it smells musty, and step into the morning, a small hard bud of hope tight inside.

  It’s the last days before the long summer break, and we’re mostly biding our time at school. After the final bell goes, I get on the school bus, an old Mercedes twenty-four-seater that weaves through small outlying villages before finally reaching Kilshamble. Without Laila, I sit alone near the back. Adam almost always has music or sport or goes over to his friend Patrick’s.

  Again, I’m lost to the pain. It’s a living thing that crawls around inside my skin, moving to different parts of my body. Today it lies in a straight line on the inside of my forearm. A sharp, tingling thing. Yesterday it was curled up in the centre of my hands. Next it might be an ache in my throat, a thud in my gut, a burn in my cheekbones. My grief. Even in those brief moments when I forget that Laila is dead, it’s always there, this unyielding strain in my body.

  Outside, sunshine dances on leaves and grass and I avoid looking at the empty seat across from me. Grief stirs in the line of my inside forearm. I think of it as a dog. A greyhound reaching out his paws, stretching his back. Laila loved dogs.

  Laila.

  Back in March, I’d found her in the bathroom, the hair scissors in hand.

  ‘You won’t stop me.’ She said it like she was holding the blade to a vein.

  Long chunks of hair had fallen to the tiles. The burnt gold, usually hidden in the brown, was obvious that morning.

  ‘Not here to stop you.’ I leaned against the doorjamb.

  I should have noticed the distress that simmered as her hair fell until only shaggy ends brushed her neck.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘I …’ she started, then broke off. ‘This place.’ With scissors, she gestured to the walls, and I didn’t know if she meant the house or the village.

  ‘This …’ She gestured down to herself. To her neat body, shaped by years of swimming and a mildly dysfunctional relationship with food. She was breathing heavily, her eyes wide with the strength of her feeling. She was willing me to understand, that she felt something big. Something important.

  ‘I meant why didn’t you go to the hairdressers?’

  Stung by my bland response, Laila turned away, dropping her chin to her chest.

  I reached to her. Our old practised dance: one hurts, the other retreats, the first reaches out.

  ‘Mom won’t like your hair.’ A peace offering.

  Her face was grim as she replied, ‘Yeah, well. Mom endures.’

  She ran her fingers through the blunt ends. I waited.

  ‘I need to be more,’ she relented. ‘I need to be different from who I am.’ She was calm, her earlier inarticulation gone. Long honey-brown tresses lay discarded on the floor.

  You already are, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say that I hardly recognised her.

  ‘This village,’ she said. ‘I think it’s possible here.’

  Laila had become obsessed with the village myth of the tuanacul, the beautiful tree people who lured foolish boys and girls into the woods. Laila was certain that she could sense them. That a tree man was watching, ready to step in and save her from deathly ordinari
ness.

  ‘Something is … beginning.’

  I usually tuned Laila out when she started on this. On her mission to become some kind of superhuman. She’d worked through witch, demon summoner, rain princess, moon dragon warrior. Laila was hungry, no, ravenous, for magic.

  ‘… careful.’ Laila was talking to herself while I checked my phone. ‘Like poison in the water. There is an Inky Black, and it’s here.’

  I bit back the impatient words. If I annoyed her again, we’d end up fighting.

  ‘Mind yourself, Zara.’

  I didn’t like how she was looking at me.

  ‘I think to survive here,’ she said, ‘you need to be a little Horrible.’

  But I am a little horrible.

  I fold it up, like a secret written on page. I fold once, twice, ten times until it is a small tight knot.

  It wasn’t only the night she died that I pushed Laila away. I’d been so cold to her in the months before. Laila had been dreamy, nursing something secret. Something happy. Back in the city, I’d waited two years for Nathan to look at me as more than a friend. Our togetherness was new and fragile and fell to pieces when I was forced to move because everyone else had messed up. I was angry and jealous.

  I wouldn’t listen to her. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to be kind. I wanted to feel sore and horrible. So when Laila would look at me like she’d burst if she didn’t tell me her secret, I’d turn away.

  She needed me, and I blanked her. And now she’s dead.

  The bus stop is ahead and I get to my feet. I pass a girl with dark hair and darkness in her eyes who sketches in her notebook. Sue, the driver, will give out to me. She’s like a bear with a sore head if we stand before she’s pulled over. But the memory of Laila slashing her hair, that unbearable guilt, has me breathing in short shallow gasps. I won’t cry. Not here.

  As the bus lurches to a stop, I fall sideways. I catch myself, but not before I’ve stumbled against a girl near the front: Breanna, who’s laughing with the beefy boy beside her. Was laughing, until my heavy school backpack hit her head. The buckle pulls her hair, yanking a chunk from its high ponytail.