The Wickerlight

by Mary Watson

  Unexpectedly, my parents are home.

  Down the passage, low, urgent voices are going at it. Fighting voices, doing their best to destroy the other person in an even-pitched, slightly hissing tone.

  ‘You don’t get to walk away from me,’ Mom says.

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘We’re having a conversation here.’ Mom sounds thin and desperate.

  ‘A conversation?’ Dad hisses. ‘You call this a conversation? I don’t hear any sense out of you, Naz. You just say the same thing over and over again.’

  ‘Do you hear me now?’ There’s a loud crash, like Mom’s thrown something against a wall. ‘Do you hear that?’

  In these moments, I don’t know how my parents ever loved each other. I don’t know how they got married, defying their parents, who tugged them in different religious directions which only confirmed their position as diehard atheists. I don’t know how they decided to leave their home countries, both of them, and start again where they knew no one. I have no idea how they thought they’d have enough love to fuel that.

  I’m rooted to the floor as their voices continue the endless circle of accusations. David is behind me, and I am so very embarrassed. I can’t face him.

  ‘I can’t take this any more.’ Mom’s voice is rasping. She’s close to tears.

  ‘And you think running away will solve things?’ Dad.

  ‘We need a clean start.’ Mom.

  ‘They need stability right now.’ Dad. He punctuates ‘stability’ in a particularly arsehole-ish way. Not clever. He’s goading Mom.

  I don’t expect her to storm out of the kitchen and into the dining room, where I stand with David. She’s startled when she sees me.

  ‘Zara.’ She can barely look at us. ‘I didn’t realise you were here.’

  ‘Apparently not.’ My cheeks are hot.

  ‘And you brought a friend.’ She’s livid David’s here. That he’s caught a glimpse of how dysfunctional we are, that her perfect doctor facade has snagged.

  ‘You’ve met David.’ I still can’t turn to look at him, but I can feel him behind me. ‘He’s here to fix the window.’

  ‘I’ll come back.’ David sounds so stiff, it’s almost endearing.

  Fast, angry footsteps sound down the passage to the front hall. The door opens, and bangs shut. Dad’s gone out.

  ‘Please excuse me.’ Mom sounds watery. ‘I have a headache.’ She disappears up the stairs, and I’m left alone with David.

  ‘Zara.’ David sounds tentative. I’ve turned to stone as I watch the door where Mom has just left. I want him to shut up. There’s nothing he could say that won’t have me in tears.

  I wish Adam would appear so I could pretend this never happened and I wouldn’t have to see pity or judgement or disdain on David’s face. I couldn’t bear it if he were kind.

  I wait a few seconds but no one comes to save me. I turn reluctantly to him.

  ‘Dads suck.’ His words are wooden, like he knows, and there’s a sandpaper-rough scrape to my heart. He forces a grim little smile and I let out a choked laugh-sob.

  ‘Sure do.’

  What is it about this boy, his awkwardness and discomfort, that draws him to me? I think it’s because we’re both jagged, we’re the people who fit in wrong. We need to be a little uneasy, it’s how we are.

  ‘Thank you.’ The words are so quiet I’m not sure he hears them.

  After a moment, he opens the door and leaves.

  Someone else witnessing a family fight is unpleasantly definitive. It takes the horrible out of the realm of nightmares and into the real. It brings our ugly that bit closer to the surface.

  Upstairs, Mom is on Laila’s bed. She’s lying on her side, watching out of the window. She knows I’m there, but she doesn’t move.

  I’m worried. They haven’t had one of these rows in weeks. I’d thought Mom and Dad were finding their way back to each other.

  Later, when Mom’s shut herself up for the night, I go down to the small room Dad uses as a study. I type in the password to his desktop – he uses the same three for everything – and check up on him.

  There’s nothing dodgy with his email, just boring work things. Nothing in the private account he thinks we don’t know about; it hasn’t been used since last year. It doesn’t look like there’s a new Lindy, but I’ll probably need to go through his phone to be sure. Before I put the computer to sleep, I check his recent tabs.

  The last three are job adverts. Two chairs in English Literature and the director of some institute. Two in Australia, one in the States. Dad is looking for a way out.

  I walk out of the study and lean against a wall, breathless.

  How little I can trust my parents. How they lie and sneak around with their secrets. Secrets that affect us, that threaten to uproot me and Adam. That take us away from Laila.

  The door to the hall closet is slightly ajar. My denim jacket hangs there. In the top pocket is John Canty’s love chant. If they can’t sort themselves out, I’m going to do it for them.

  Even sticking my fingers into the tight pocket, I don’t believe it. I don’t buy that a love charm will magic them back together.

  But I want to bend them to my will. I want to hiss at them, Just behave like my goddamned parents. Just do what you’re supposed to do. I want so badly to make them do what I need them to do, to be as I want them to be.

  I want to take away their agency the way they’re taking away mine.

  I want to be horrible.

  I dig into the brown paper bag and pull out John Canty’s ring with its black stone. It’s pretty, so I slip it on. I take the grassy oil from the hand-holding ceremony and, before I can second-guess myself, decant it into Dad’s empty shaving oil bottle. It’s rubbish and desperate. But if there is even the smallest chance I can get Dad to stay with Mom, I’m going to try.

  EIGHTEEN

  Fixing things

  David

  I really wish Zara hadn’t taken my key because climbing into their house through the back window is further down the wrong side of shady.

  I leave the tools in the back kitchen so if they come home, I have an excuse. A weak one, but it’s better than nothing.

  Coming out of the back kitchen, I see a figure in the doorway, watching.

  ‘Oisín,’ I say, playing it cool. Like I’m not surprised he followed me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Fixing things.’

  Oisín watches while I search the kitchen drawers. At Birchwood, we spent a few weeks learning to search houses, supposedly to be able to find magical artefacts hidden in augur homes. I’m systematic, leaving no trace. After a few minutes Oisín joins in.

  ‘It would help if I knew what I’m searching for,’ he says.

  ‘Information about a secret shrine. And maybe a metal box.’ My voice is gruff. ‘Should be locked.’

  The only indication that Oisín is aware of the significance of what I lost is the way he doesn’t react.

  ‘I’ve been called in,’ he says, searching through a pile of recipe books. ‘Cassa wants to question me. Seems like there’s new information.’

  I frown. I’ve heard nothing about this.

  ‘Did she say who’ll be questioning you?’

  ‘Three commanders.’ He throws away the words like it’s nothing, but it’s not.

  This is a tribunal, and Cassa wouldn’t call Oisín before a tribunal without good reason. Like having cause to believe that Oisín was somehow complicit, that the Eye is lost because he allowed someone to have it.

  I hide my worry.

  I leave for the den, and beelining to the shelves, I hear a light scratching from the side console.

  ‘Jaysus.’ A pair of eyes are locked on mine.

  A rat, in a cage.

  It watches as I search the shelves. I have a cousin in the city whose guide is squirrel. With silver magic, she could quiz the rodent. Like a scientist in a lab, using
objects and movements, she could ask the damn thing questions and give us some idea of whether the Eye had been in this room. But my cousin really fucking hates us, she’d sooner stab herself in her eye than help me, and silver magic remains elusive.

  As I’m checking the skirting in Laila’s room, Oisín appears. ‘We’d better make tracks.’

  I am, unusually, enjoying the idea of Oisín and me as ‘we’. Even though we’re breaking and entering, so wrong, I know, there’s some satisfaction in our shared purpose here. That Oisín is helping me. I don’t think he’s ever done that before.

  ‘Just a minute.’ I go to Zara’s room. I’ve remembered the knee-wall door part hidden behind a chest of drawers. I pull it open and crawl into the attic space. Nothing.

  ‘In sight,’ Oisín calls from the hall window as I move the chest back in place.

  Leaving Zara’s room, the card in a shallow box on the desk stops me in my tracks. THE SCAVENGER HUNT. I look inside the box. There are several objects in it: the picture of Laila outside the Rookery, the red purse we found in the hot press.

  ‘Leave. Now,’ Oisín calls.

  And it’s almost like old times.

  I turn over the card and see ‘nemeta’ scribbled and circled in red. How the hell did Laila know about nemeta? And then I see the damning words: Badb Eye is a Knot.

  Oisín, who’s sidled up behind my shoulder, sees them too.

  His face falls as he sees the confirmation: Laila knew about the Eye, that it isn’t just an antique family heirloom. There’s no way she didn’t steal it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I put the card down, but not before making a note of the last line. Find Meadowsweet on School. I know this, but I can’t get it. It’s there in my mind, just out of reach.

  Oisín has visibly wilted. I hear the sound of something dropping on the front path. Grabbing Oisín by the arm, we scramble down the stairs, two at a time. The key turns in the door when I grab the tools, and she’s inside the front passage as we climb out of the window.

  I yank Oisín up the garden stairs and through the hollow. Once he’s in our field, I go back, slip around the house and to the front door.

  I knock at the door and wait. Zara opens, she’s wearing that skirt again, and there’s an old scar on her knee, and a mole on her thigh, a bruise on her shin.

  I forget about judges and totems, Cassa and Dad. I forget that I’ve just broken into her house, and I stand there, looking at those eyes. Her ponytail falls over her shoulder, half undone. I look at her cheekbones, full mouth, her waist. The way she holds herself together so carefully. Her forehead creases at my scrutiny but I don’t, can’t let her go.

  I am so very, very distracted.

  ‘David?’ Zara sounds worried. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Come to fix the window.’ I hold up the toolbox.

  Wickerlight. Threshold time. Like nemeta are threshold places. Wickerlight is when time cracks, when magic gets in. It’s a rare star alignment, or maybe a blue or blood moon. Equinoxes, solstices, dawn, twilight and midnight, all of these are favourable for wickerlight. But sometimes, without rhyme or reason, wickerlight just happens. Sometimes, for a few intense seconds, you know time feels different. Like you’ve stepped into pure magic.

  I feel that right now as I step towards Zara.

  Brushing up to her, closer than I should, the word pushes up, surprisingly delicate. It’s a leap from a high place on to the squashiest feather cushion.

  Save.

  I cast around to see what it wants to be encased in. It wants something soft, but a little scratchy. Not the awful stiffened silk flower on the window sill, this word wants to be swaddled. A thick, stretchy fabric.

  Zara is puzzled as I hover just inside the doorway, trying to place this word before I lose it.

  Then I know what it wants.

  ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way,’ I say, though I probably do mean it the wrong way, just not right now.

  And I reach for her skirt.

  NINETEEN

  The ugliest thing I’d ever seen

  The woman with the flower dress, Maeve, asked me if I want to earn a little extra money.

  LAS

  Zara

  David is more than a little odd today. He’s bent over, physically uncomfortable. I’m beginning to think that I draw it out, this uneasiness with the world around him.

  ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way,’ he says, and reaches for my sport skirt. He lifts the bottom of the clinging fabric and squeezes, rough knuckles brushing my skin. It feels nice.

  Maybe I want to take it the wrong way.

  ‘Would you mind very much if I borrow this?’ he says. And it is so utterly strange, his perfect manners, the bizarre interest in my camogie gear, and those fingers against my leg.

  ‘You want to borrow my skort?’ Stupid word, skort. My cheeks are hot.

  ‘Just a small part.’ He’s holding the edge of it tightly between his fingers. ‘Have. Not borrow.’

  ‘Why?’ I say.

  ‘Please?’

  But that’s no answer.

  ‘And if I say no?’

  ‘Then you say no.’

  He releases the fabric.

  ‘You can have it,’ I say and he picks up the edge again. ‘Anything else you’d like? A button? Some thread from a jacket? Maybe a shoelace?’

  And when he looks up, he is so pained, so tormented.

  ‘David?’ I say, worried. But he shakes his head. And takes out a knife from his waistband. I should be alarmed, but I’m not. I’m not alarmed by any of this. I think of boys turning the fresh earth beneath the moon. I think of the Horribles waking up in their ditch.

  ‘I’m sorry, Zara.’ And he looks so sad. I don’t know what he’s apologising for, but he’s sincere.

  ‘I dreamed about you last night,’ I tell him even though I don’t mean to. I hadn’t even remembered the dream until just this moment. It seems like the right thing to say because it feels like he’s showing me something vulnerable too.

  ‘You were standing outside. A field, I think. There were flower bushes behind you. Peonies. You wore a black jacket, the collar turned up at your neck. You were wearing your crown that day, just a thin iron band of … leaves? No, feathers. And your black jeans. Your jacket had a symbol on the sleeve, nothing I’ve seen before. Your cheeks were pink from the wind. You were waiting for the storm, the sky a deep purple, the dark clouds hanging low. There was something on your shoulder, I thought it was a rook, but it was an unnaturally large black bug. The ugliest thing I’d ever seen.’

  And I talk to him while he gently slips the knife into the stretchy navy fabric and then again until a small square has been cut out.

  ‘Thank you.’ He doesn’t look at me as he puts away his knife. He folds the square of skirt into his hand.

  I look down at my ruined skirt, the shorts beneath. Nothing special about it at all. Nothing to warrant that desperate need to have a piece of it. And I remember the cut-out patch on the steering wheel. The precise line of cuts up his side, beneath his ribs. The strange dream. And they feel like pieces of the puzzle that is David.

  But this isn’t the puzzle I’m meant to be solving. David is a distraction that I don’t need right now.

  ‘I’ll be upstairs,’ I tell him, and turn away.

  In my room, I take Laila’s spell from my grey bag.

  I’ve lied to Mom. I’m fed up of her trying to manage my time. So when she told me she’d paid for this week’s camogie camp after I’d asked her not to, I just smiled and dressed in my gear. Left the house, as if going for the bus.

  Instead, I went to Laila’s shrine. To sit there a while, looking at the eclectic collection of symbols; she’d plundered every known magic system and ancient civilisation to create her sacred space. So very Laila.

  Her spell has been bothering me. I thought leaving it at the shrine would make me forget it, but the reverse is true. I wake up at night thinking about it. I have this weird fe
eling like it’s been calling me back. Like it wants me to discover it. When I left the shrine today, I just had to bring it back with me.

  I turn the hairball, wondering what Laila was doing when she made this hideous thing. It reminds me, sort of, of the time she gave me a beautifully made origami horse. There was a faint trail of writing on it, disappearing under the neat folds of the paper.

  ‘What does it say?’ I’d asked Laila. She just shrugged, smiling a secret smile.

  I could make out the C followed by a U, then an R.

  ‘It’s a message for you.’

  ‘I have to know what it says.’ I glanced up from the delicate horse.

  ‘Then do what you must.’

  I followed the letters, slowly unfolding the origami horse. When it was just flat paper again, the exquisitely made animal destroyed, I saw the message: curiosity killed the horse.

  Laila laughed.

  There’s something beneath the hair, I can feel the weight and shape of it, but I can’t see how to get to it without cutting Laila’s hair. Which feels like a violation. Like killing the horse.

  Before I can think too much, I pick up my scissors and do it. As I cut, there’s the edge of something hard pushing through the hair.

  In my hand is a disc, either gold, or maybe gilded silver, with a blackish inlay. About three inches wide, a quarter-inch thick. Intricate loops and knots are carved into the surface. Worn and uneven, it seems very, very old.

  I study it from every direction. Where did Laila get this from? Why would she hide it inside her hair? And what is it?

  TWENTY

  Full of surprises

  David

  The window fixed, I call up to Zara. A minute later, she comes down, still wearing the skirt I vandalised. She looks troubled and I feel bad.

  ‘Zara.’ I say it again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  For breaking into her house. For going into her room without being invited. Because I can’t be honest with her.

  But she thinks I mean the skirt and she shakes her head.

  ‘Don’t.’ A smile breaks through her worried face. ‘I have plenty.’