After rummaging around for what seemed to Fionn like an eternity, he finally unearthed the box he was searching for. It had been hidden under a broken beach parasol and wedged between a collection of old music records. He carried it back to the workbench, setting it down with a satisfying thud. On one side of the box, in black felt-tip pen, it read: Candle-making for beginners.
On the other side, names were scrawled in different handwriting, most of them blurry and faded by time. Fionn recognised his grandfather’s name nestled between Maggie Patton and Ferdia McCauley. There were other Boyles too, and Cannons and McCauleys and Pattons, but it took Fionn almost a full minute to find a Beasley entry – a woman called Bridget – which was scrawled along the other side.
Fionn peered over the lip of the box. It was mostly full of candle moulds – stars and spheres and squares and hearts – and old whittling knives. There were half-used bags of wax chippings and wax pebbles piled along the bottom, bits of branches and strips of seaweed strewn haphazardly on top. Nothing to suggest how his grandfather got all the right ingredients jumbled together, how he distilled the smell of a storm or the scent of lightning at sea.
His grandfather pushed his glasses up on to the bridge of his nose. ‘You once asked me why I chose to record the weather.’
‘Yeah,’ said Fionn.
His grandfather placed the metal pot on the grid over the burner. ‘Our weather is raw elemental magic, Fionn. It runs in the Storm Keeper’s veins just as sure as our skies. It is the source of the Storm Keeper’s power. To store it is to store magic.’
Fionn blinked in surprise. ‘So you’re saving it?’
‘Aye.’ His grandfather dangled the bag of wax pebbles. ‘We keep the magic behind a flame, so that we can use it against Morrigan’s darkness if she returns.’
Fionn took the bag of wax, his hands trembling a little. This moment was bigger than it first appeared – the simple rattle of wax on metal, a flame hissing in the wind – it might one day be his legacy. ‘Does that mean there’s a way to use it?’ he asked as he poured the wax. ‘To get it out?’
His grandfather held a wick between them – a long, thin rope ending in a round silver disc. He flicked the disc with his finger, then pressed it against the bottom of a mould, rolling the wick back and forth between his fingers until it stuck straight up. ‘We haven’t even put it in yet and you’re asking me how to get it out.’
Fionn set the bag back into the cardboard box without taking his eyes from the chippings in the pot … watching, waiting …
‘You –’ His grandfather went rigid in his seat. He sniffed the air, licked his bottom lip. ‘Oh,’ he said, frowning into the melting wax, instead of up at the sun, like it was inconsequential to the matter when he said, ‘The storm is coming in a little earlier than I expected.’
Fionn went very still. ‘How do you know?’
‘I can feel the shifting inside me,’ he said, shifting on his stool just the same. The wax in the little pan was bleeding into a creamy white puddle and his grandfather’s eyes were glistening. He looked at Fionn. ‘The new Keeper is rising.’
‘Now?’ Fionn pulled his sleeves down as a cloud appeared from thin air and moved in front of the sun. Shadows danced across the workbench. There was a flock of birds circling them, appearing as if from nowhere. Not just seagulls and ravens but swallows and finches and thrushes, all jumbled together. The longer he stared, the more appeared, watching over them with rapt curiosity. Waiting. ‘Are you sure?’
His grandfather nodded grimly. ‘Believe me, lad. You know when the magic is dribbling out of you, just as sure as you know when it’s thrumming inside you, beating your heart like a drum.’
‘Do you feel OK?’
‘I feel very full and very empty.’ His grandfather’s spectacles inched down his nose as he dipped his chin to examine him. ‘Do you feel OK?’
‘I don’t feel anything,’ said Fionn, discounting the dread that was hopscotching over the notches in his spine. ‘What if it isn’t me? What if it’s someone else?’
His grandfather set the pot down on the bench and turned the burner off. ‘Fionn, the day you stepped off the ferry, the island woke up. It has been more restless these last few weeks than I have ever known it to be.’
Fionn stared at him.
‘The candles react to you in an entirely different way,’ he went on. ‘Unburnable wax burns for you. The wind chaperones you wherever you go. It’s as though Arranmore recognises you, not just in this layer, but in all of them …’ He grew very quiet then, his chin resting on his chest like he was talking more to himself than to Fionn. ‘I believe it has been expecting you for quite some time.’
There was such enormity to his grandfather’s statement, more than enough wonder and impossibility to drown in, and yet he seemed not intrigued or surprised … but resigned. And it stoked the uneasiness that had long been kindling inside Fionn.
Fionn stared at the melted wax. ‘What will happen to you when the storm comes?’
To this, his grandfather said nothing.
In the sudden absence of birdsong and breeze, Fionn could hear his own ragged breathing.
‘You should hold on to the gift. Tell the island you’re not ready to give it up yet.’ He pushed his stool back from the bench and got to his feet. ‘I can wait. Bartley can wait. We can all wait.’
‘Fionn,’ his grandfather said.
‘No, honestly, I’m fine.’
‘Fionn.’
‘I’m cold. I’m going to just go inside and –’
‘Sit down.’
Fionn sat down.
His grandfather stirred the wax. ‘I can’t do it any more, Fionn. My memory is fading.’
‘No,’ said Fionn softly, but he couldn’t say anything else. The lie was too big to push past his tongue.
‘I have spent my whole life remembering, Fionn. It stands to reason that at some point, I would reach capacity. That I would start to forget.’
The sky was growing dark; thick clouds of grey and black had rolled in from nowhere and had stubbornly hung themselves in front of the sun. It felt exactly like what was happening inside Fionn. He stared at the wax in the little pot and felt the insignificance of a thousand sunsets and snowstorms rise up between them. His grandfather had spent so many years capturing the island’s magic, toiling with red-wired eyes and tired fingers, that he had forgotten to record himself. Now he was slipping away, like sand through splayed fingers. Who cared about magic if this was where it ended?
‘Then stop putting the weather in the wax, and find some way to put yourself in it instead.’
‘I already have, Fionn.’
The clouds sank lower, and another layer emerged behind them, yawning across the sky in great pockets of grey. Darkness crept across the workbench, cloaked hands and faces and arms and fingers and understanding crawled over Fionn. It had been there all along – the edges of it, but he could never make sense of it. ‘The candle on the mantelpiece. The memory … it’s you.’
His grandfather’s answering smile was small and true. ‘The Storm Keeper’s secret.’
Fionn looked a little closer at his grandfather, this man who lived with the island inside him. This man who had somehow found a way to record his own conditions so that he might anchor himself to the world. For a little while at least. ‘What happens when it runs out? Can you make another one?’
‘I am already changed, Fionn. When the candle goes out, I will forget, for good.’
Fionn slammed his teeth into his bottom lip to stop it from shaking. ‘But that’s not fair.’
And that was the truth of it: heavy and full and dark as the rain clouds hanging over their heads. It wasn’t fair at all.
His grandfather continued to stir the wax, anticlockwise, then clockwise, back and forth, back and forth. ‘There are worse things to fear, Fionn. A life without love. A path without meaning. A heart without courage.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘No, Fionn. I am not a
fraid.’
Somewhere in the distance, a lone crow weaved its caw between the sinking clouds. ‘The sky is falling,’ said Fionn.
‘The sun will break through again,’ his grandfather replied, and there was much more in those two sentences than there had been in everything else that came before them.
Fionn wanted to say something more; he wanted to say that he loved his grandfather fiercely, that he was the only person in the world who made him feel better about living in his own skin, that he was the brightest star in Fionn’s sky, that he couldn’t bear to see him forget a single thing or to find that in all of the forgetting, he would come to forget him too. The words crowded together on his tongue until he felt too full to speak at all.
‘Don’t feel sorry for me, lad,’ his grandfather said softly. ‘I have filled my head with adventure and laughter and love, and all the stories of those who have gone before me …’ He leaned towards Fionn so all he could see was the roiling sea in his eyes, not the storm clouds sweeping in above them. ‘In truth, I’ve been quite greedy about the whole thing.’
Fionn couldn’t summon a smile.
His grandfather sighed. ‘If you insist on pity, then really you must pity yourself. Your head is still very empty.’
Fionn frowned, indignation jostling the urge to cry for a precious, fleeting second.
His grandfather chuckled. ‘Start filling it up, lad. That is your greatest responsibility. To live a life of breathless wonder, so that when it begins to fade from you, you will feel the shadow of its happiness still inside you and the blissful sense that you laughed the loudest, loved the deepest, and lived fearlessly, even as the specifics of it all melt away.’
A slant of light broke through the gathering dark, tiptoeing across the workbench and sliding into the pot of wax.
‘Is that really how you feel?’
His grandfather withdrew a small leather pouch from the cardboard box and pulled a silver pin from inside it. ‘That is exactly how I feel, Fionn. Which is why I can afford to be so smug about the whole affair.’ He pricked his finger and held it over the pot. The movement knocked all the words right out of Fionn’s head.
There was only wonder now.
Wonder, and an angry sky.
‘Sometimes they come slowly,’ said his grandfather as they both stared at his pricked finger. ‘The more inconsequential ones, the rain and the clouds and the snow you can coax out … but the big ones, oh, the magic-dripping storms and the fiercest blizzards, Fionn, they swell inside you until it feels like a wave and you feel like you might fly if you tried hard enough.’
He tapped his finger on the edge of the jar.
‘What exactly is supposed to happen?’ Just as Fionn said it, a single droplet squeezed itself out of the tip of his grandfather’s index finger and tumbled into the pot of molten wax. It landed with an unmistakeable plink!
Fionn’s eyes grew. ‘That wasn’t blood.’
The truth was simply this: it was the sea. His grandfather had pricked his finger and the sea had come out of it. The droplet was clear; the scent of salt and brine and seaweed climbed into Fionn’s nostrils as it rippled into the wax.
It was a drop of ocean. A drop of magic.
‘The first one is the island,’ said his grandfather, licking the second drop from his finger. This one was blood. ‘And the second drop is you.’
Fionn tried not to think about how much of his grandfather’s blood had gone into that candle on the mantelpiece. He watched the wax change, from white to sunshine yellow, streaks of golden brown threading its way through it like estuaries, until it looked like cracked marble. The wax shimmered and then changed again, as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind. Now it was whorls of red and orange and yellow. Wisps of green and blue bled into indigo and indigo twirled into violet.
The scent changed; instead of the sea, there were other things: warm toast sizzling in a buttery pan, sticky strands of sugary syrup, and slices of fresh grapefruit. No. Not grapefruit – the scent wavered, melon creeping over it. There were aromas of fresh rain and blue skies. Fionn could picture it perfectly: a mild summer sun slanting through two perfectly curved rainbows. And deep down, underneath all of it, the whisper of shared smiles and love at its fiercest.
Fionn found himself grinning like a cat. His grandfather had bottled their picnic.
‘You know, I often wonder whether there is more magic in humanity than a skyful of rainbows.’ He held the wick straight and poured the wax into the side of the jar, the colours swirling and crystallising against the glass.
‘That’s it?’ said, Fionn. ‘That’s all it takes?’
His grandfather dusted his hands. ‘That’s it, Fionn. All it takes is a drop from the island that lives and breathes inside you.’ He snorted. ‘Most people would be impressed by that, you know. I think you play too many video games.’
Fionn looked at his fingertips, waggling them back and forth. ‘I might have the sea inside me?’
‘Now doesn’t it seem silly to be so afraid of it?’
Just as he said it, the heavens opened and the first drop of rain catapulted to earth. It landed on the tip of Fionn’s nose. The next one slid over his ear and down his neck. The third one brought the storm with it.
His grandfather stowed the box in the shed and pulled a blue tarpaulin over his workbench, while Fionn grabbed the candle and shoved the stools under the rain cover. The clouds were skimming the sea and bringing saltwater with them, until it tasted as though the ocean was falling from the sky.
It took three attempts to get the back door open against the sudden raging wind. When they managed it, the direction changed and it nearly swung off its hinges, flattening Fionn against the wall of the cottage.
‘It will get worse before it gets better!’ his grandfather yelled, as Fionn shimmied out from beneath it and darted inside, both of them heaving the door closed behind them.
It slammed shut with a bang, and they rolled backwards, panting. The windows rattled as a fresh onslaught of rain bucketed down on the cottage. They had barely made it into the kitchen when the front door flew open, clanging against the coat-rack and knocking hats and scarves all over the ground. Fionn looked up to find Shelby Beasley standing on the threshold, her long hair stuck to the sides of her face, as though she had just climbed out of a horror film.
‘You have to come with me right now!’ she shouted, as a fork of lightning struck the headland over her shoulder. ‘It’s Tara. The island’s taken her!’
Chapter Twenty-One
THE SEA CAVE
Fionn’s heartbeat roared in his ears. ‘What happened?’
‘She went to the Sea Cave!’
‘No,’ his grandfather said almost at the same time. ‘She wouldn’t have.’
Shelby was nodding furiously. ‘The tides changed. Bartley came home when we were baking and said he’d found some kind of secret cliff steps but he couldn’t go down to the cave alone! Tara went with him!’
‘She promised she would wait for me!’ said Fionn frantically. ‘We were supposed to go together!’
Shelby was sobbing so hard it looked like someone was shaking her by the shoulders. ‘Th-th-the t-tide w-wasn’t l-low e-enough s-so they had to swim inside the –’
‘Is Bartley with her now?’ Fionn’s grandfather interrupted.
Shelby shook her head, silent tears streaming over her cheeks as she tried to gather herself. ‘Bartley said the cave started to swallow them and he wasn’t able to pull Tara out. There were all these birds blocking the way and then the storm began …’
Fionn’s grandfather bit off a curse. He darted from the sitting room, muttering to himself as he disappeared into his bedroom.
Shelby stumbled into the cottage, her teeth chattering furiously in the silence.
His grandfather emerged less than a minute later with an old schoolbag in his hand.
‘We have to be quick about it.’ He pulled a lighter from his pocket and dropped it inside before leaping on to th
e armchair in the sitting room and sweeping some candles from the top shelf into the bag.
He thrust the rucksack into Fionn’s chest. ‘Do you know what you have to do, lad?’
Fionn snatched the bag from him. ‘Can’t you come with me?’
His grandfather glanced at the candle still blazing on the mantelpiece, then at the storm outside. His face crumpled.
‘It’s all right,’ said, Fionn quickly. His grandfather couldn’t leave his anchor – not any more. If he did he would lose himself long before they reached the cave.
Fionn slung the bag of candles on to his back. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, steeling himself. ‘I’ll go.’
His grandfather gripped him by the shoulders. ‘The cave will have buried her somewhere inside. The tide is too high now. You’ll have to enter by a different layer to find your way in. Start with Ebb Tide. It’s the thinnest one. It will pull the ocean out.’ Fionn tried to focus on the words and not the fear gnawing at his bones. He glanced past him, out of the window. The sky was darker than he had ever seen it, the clouds glittering around the edges. ‘No matter what happens, do not let yourself be alone inside that cave, Fionn. When you find Tara, you must stick together, do you understand me?’
Fionn gripped the straps of his schoolbag. ‘I understand.’
They tumbled into the storm, Shelby’s hand finding Fionn’s as the gate swung open for them. His grandfather stood in the doorway, his fingers gripping the frame as he leaned out.
‘Be careful, Fionn!’ he shouted over the roll of thunder. ‘The island will answer to you if you ask the right questions!’
Fionn dragged Shelby out on to the headland before he had time to change his mind. Lightning struck the sea ahead, a crack of fire curling into smoke that beckoned them onwards.
‘I can’t believe Bartley left her in there by herself!’ shouted Fionn.
‘He said it all happened so fast!’
‘I bet he had enough time to make his dumb wish though!’
‘It’s all my grandmother and my uncle go on about,’ Shelby panted. ‘Bartley wants it so badly, he talks about it in his sleep. He can’t think about anything else!’ They cut through the middle of the island, their feet squelching in the long grass, slipping and sliding from field to field as the rain swamped them. ‘I know it doesn’t make it OK.’
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