Yes, that was it. It was the bag of horseshoes over her shoulder. The iron was blocking her fairy magic. Crap.
It was like she was riding with a rusted-up chain.
A small engine puttered up behind her – Killian, on his very small 75cc motorbike. He smiled at her, cruising alongside, looking her up and down in her breeze-fluttered lace dress. ‘I’ve decided to give you a lift anyway.’
Aoife kept cycling as hard as she could, eyes on the road. ‘Thanks, but it’s fine – I’ll manage. Go away.’
He continued to ride alongside, throwing her amused glances. ‘You should oil that bike. Carla says you’re a fairy queen. Can’t you fix it with magic?’
Aoife glared at him as she struggled onwards. The sunlight behind him was shadowing his hollow cheeks beneath the high, cutting cheekbones. Ugh. She had to stop thinking how much he reminded her of—
‘Killian, go back to the meeting.’
He said brightly, ‘No thanks. Carla was wanting me to help her nan set up a Facebook page. Boring!’
Anger sparked through her. ‘It wasn’t “boring” when Carla risked her life to save yours, was it? Which you didn’t deserve, after running off with that filthy demon.’
He smirked. ‘Hey, you seduced me!’
‘That wasn’t me!’ (Aargh: why did she always let Killian get to her like this? Now he was going to act even more annoying.)
He did – laughing at her – clearly delighted to have got under her skin. ‘OK, OK, don’t get your knickers in a twist! All I’m saying is, it wasn’t my fault. Even Carla admits I was under a spell.’
Pedalling harder, Aoife gasped, ‘You’re lucky she’s so damn forgiving.’
‘I know it. It’s why I like her. She’s always nice to me. Unlike you. Although …’ His voice tailed off; a sly, lingering look.
She came to a halt, panting. Exhausted. Glaring at him. ‘Although what?’
He also stopped, putting one foot to the ground, turning the front wheel of the little motorbike towards her. Grinning. ‘The other Aoife was pretty nice as well. She said I was really special and different from all the other boring, normal teenagers in Kilduff.’
Aoife rolled her eyes in disbelief. ‘Yeah, right – so special she was going to bite your head off.’
He stayed grinning. ‘Not only that – according to Carla, she was going to feed me to another pooka so I would be reborn as a shape-shifter in the fairy world! Which would have been quite an adventure.’
‘Quite an adventure? Are you out of your tiny mind?’
‘I’m just saying, it might have been kind of cool.’
‘Humans don’t get reborn! Didn’t Carla tell you that as well?’
His grin widened. ‘But maybe I’m a changeling like you. I look nothing like my so-called parents, do I? No more than you do, Ginger.’
‘Aargh! You’re a complete—’ The word ‘eejit’ died in her throat. Because what he’d said was true – he did look nothing like a Doherty. The strangest thought came into her mind …
No.
She shook it off.
No.
Changelings were children of the people of Danu, and had red hair and green eyes.
She said, ‘Come into any magic powers since you turned sixteen, Killian? Fire? Smoke? Invisibility? No? I didn’t think so. I know Carla once told me you could tell if Sinead was texting you without looking at your phone, but I don’t imagine that counts …’
The grin was wiped off his face, and he went red with annoyance. ‘Grand. I hear you. I’m not special and different. I’m just a boring, normal teenager living his boring, normal little life in a boring, normal little town.’
She sighed. What a spoilt brat, he was – the richest kid in town, looks to die for, Carla for a girlfriend, and still feeling sorry for himself. ‘Get over yourself, Killian. Your life is just grand.’
‘Is it?’ His voice grew cold and bitter; he jerked his chin towards the new estate. ‘Take a look at that. My future – right there. All planned out for me by my dear old dad from the day I was born.’
Aoife glanced to where he was pointing. A large orange van was parked at the near end of the estate – the side of it emblazoned in black: Doherty and Son. Despite her dislike for him, she couldn’t help feeling sudden sympathy for the builder’s son. It must be hard to be pushed in the wrong direction, against your true self. Not to be who you are, but who your parents think you are. Her own parents had got it horribly wrong about the pooka, but at least that was because they’d been trying to respect who she was, whatever way she wanted to turn out. ‘OK, so what do you want to do with your life instead?’
He said peevishly, ‘What does it matter what I want? As far as Dad’s concerned, nothing could be better than stepping into his shoes – the shoes of the biggest man in town, so he keeps telling me. Big deal in Kilduff. He’s a cock crowing on a pile of shit.’
‘Ah, Killian, come on …’
His cheeks were still patched with angry red. ‘Look, just get on the bike and let’s go to this stupid hawthorn circle. Allow me to have one adventure at least, before everything in Kilduff is all safe and boring and cosy again, and the ways to the fairy world all blocked off, and there’s nothing left to do but settle down and build stupid houses and get married and make babies to carry on our family names.’
They rode on the motorbike along the Clonbarra road. Past Ferguson’s garage. Past the turning to her own house; past the Munnellys’ bungalow, which sat in a sea of bare earth – its garden dug up to make way for a new sun room, even larger and more lavish than the one Dorocha had demolished last Halloween, because it had stood in the way of the fairy road.
(Poor, infatuated Lois. She’d been so in love with Dorocha that she would have followed him anywhere – even after he’d smashed a stolen funeral coach and horses right through her parents’ extension. And even though he’d openly told her he was bringing her to the druids to be sacrificed at the Festival of the Dead. Luckily – as soon as Aoife had pushed the stupid girl out of the coach – the two brave horses had bolted. And Lois had run home in despair, weeping for the loss of her adorable boyfriend.)
If Aoife had been on foot, she might have cut round the bungalow, and followed the fairy road straight across the fields and up the mountainside onto the bog, the way the horses had bolted. But the motorbike puttered on, and after a while they passed the – now massive – hawthorn tree, wrapped around with mistletoe, which had sprung from where she’d dumped her crown.
‘Killian, stop a moment.’ Maybe she could fashion a second crown, to boost her power and give her the strength to carry the iron.
He didn’t stop. ‘I thought we were in a hurry?’ Ten minutes later, he swung right, up the long, pale, dusty road to the bog. The gorse bushes were bright on either side, and the green fields gave way to an empty orange land, tipped with white bog cotton. Then on and on, over the high back of the bog until they could see a sliver of distant sea, a bright streak in the noonday sun. A grey rocky outcrop and a small green hill.
She shouted over the noise of the engine: ‘Stop!’
He was already drawing up on the sheep-cropped verge. ‘Isn’t this where you saw that leprechaun last May on Sinead’s birthday, when we were on the bus?’
She slid off the back, stretching her limbs – weak and stiff, as if she was only a normal human girl. ‘That was Eva. Didn’t Carla explain?’
‘Maybe. I might not have been listening. Want me to carry your bag, miss?’
She nearly said no, but then she said yes, and – freed of the iron’s weight – she ran out easily across the bog, sprinting over its soft surface like she was running across water, her feet barely grazing the heather, her heart lifting as she left him far behind. Reaching the small green hill, she raced eagerly up its steep slope to the hawthorn circle that crowned the summit – its blossoming branches locked together like barbed wire. She touched it and the branches opened, and she pressed through …
(Thinking sudde
nly:
This is the way home. This is where my fairy mother—)
And then all such thoughts went out of her head, because a broken funeral coach lay half sunken in the pool, still fastened by its shafts to the grey grinning skeletons of two massive horses.
CHAPTER FIVE
Killian was enthralled by the skeletons – as if their death appealed to him. He kicked off his trainers and rolled up his jeans, stepped into the pool and paddled around them in the water. He stroked the massive skulls as if they were still alive, peering into the huge sad sockets of their eyes, through which the pool water ebbed and flowed like tears, the water stained a dark red-black by the minerals of the bog. As red as a fairy woman’s hair …
As Killian paddled, Aoife stood on the bank, ankle-deep in last year’s rotting blossoms, lost in a whirl of memory.
She had been here so many times before. Not just last May. Not just last October. But thousands of years ago in human time, as a little child. Many, many times. Running and playing around the pale circle of stones, dancing light-footed on the small green hill while her mother washed her hair in the pool. The hawthorn circle had been so young then – feathering up between the stones with delicate leaves. And the velvet sky had spread its dark wings above them: a wondrous roof, burning with golden stars – a gateway to another unimaginable world – while her fairy mother sat on a stone in the golden starlight, wringing the soft bog water from her long red hair. Her face turned away as the child Aoife ran towards her.
Killian said, ‘Lois isn’t going to believe this when I tell her. I might not tell her. She’s going to totally panic if she knows about it. She’ll think her old boyfriend is dead somewhere. Maybe he is. Maybe the foxes dragged him away, bone by bone.’
‘Foxes?’ Drifting back to the present, Aoife stared again at the wreckage of the carriage, which Dorocha had stolen from Paddy Duffy’s funeral home. Wheels bent; one shaft snapped in two. Door open; the interior flooded with the black bog water. The shafts still lashed to the skeletons of Paddy Duffy’s heroic horses, who had bolted when Aoife hurled herself and Lois from the coach. In revenge, the headless coachman must have driven them down through the water, and then abandoned them to float back to the surface, drowned, pulling the coach with them up from the depths. One last funeral procession – their own.
Killian climbed in through the open door of the carriage and sat inside, the water up to his waist, looking out, his silvery eyes glinting from the shadows. ‘Or do you think her boyfriend was from the other world? Maybe he came down the fairy road. Lois said he turned up at her back door, didn’t she? After walking down off the bog. And her house was in the way of the road. And he asked her to let him in, and left by the front door, then came back the same way …’
Dorocha the Beloved.
The devil at the back door.
Let me in, let me in.
‘Aoife,’ Killian said, louder, leaning out of the coach and clicking his fingers to get her attention, ‘was he from the fairy world? I spoke to him, you know. About the tickets he was selling on Halloween to the Festival of the Dead. Buy one, get one free! Was that a real thing? He looked at me like he knew me. I almost felt like I knew him. Did I?’
Aoife found her voice. ‘No, and you don’t want to.’
‘Why? Is he that bad? He seemed pretty ordinary, for a fairy. Mind you, so did that leprechaun, Ultan McNeal. And you – not even able to fix your bike. I think all this is a load of bullshite, to be honest.’
The devil at the door.
Ignoring him, Aoife crouched on the bank and slipped her own fairy hand into the water. Pale fingers, floating like blossoms. Freezing. How could Killian wade around up to his waist in this ice-bath, as if it were warm?
The builder’s son had climbed out of the coach again and was trying to push one of the massive wheels back onto the axle. ‘Lois told me how her boyfriend drove this straight through her parents’ sun room. Poor old Lo. She was so into that man. She pined after him for ages, and she was so angry at you for throwing her out of the coach and not letting her follow him to wherever he was going. But I guess she’s told you all that – you two seem to have worked it all through.’
Aoife glanced up in surprise, shaking the cold from her hand. ‘Why would Lois tell me anything? She never talks to me.’
He looked equally surprised. ‘But you and her and Sinead are always hanging out together, listening to music?’
‘What?’
Now he seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Oh, come on, Aoife. They’ve even put together a playlist especially for your birthday in case you came back in time.’
‘What?’ Then – finally – she understood her meeting with Sinead and Lois in the square. So her old enemies hadn’t been mocking her. They’d really thought they were friends. ‘Oh, good God.’ Disgusted at what the pooka had done to her, Aoife stalked out of the circle. The heavy bag of iron lay open on the summit of the hill, and she set about placing the horseshoes, one by one, around the outside of the trees, crouching to tuck them out of sight under dead leaves and last year’s rotting blossoms. Trying to leave no gaps. Feeling the energy of the iron sparking at her – tingling painfully in her fingers, like blood returning after being numb, even though she wasn’t trying to break it or force it to do her will.
The fairies who hated iron were more ancient and aggressive than the Tuatha Dé Danann – and some of that darker blood ran through her veins. Maybe that side of her was getting stronger as she neared her sixteenth birthday, in two days’ time.
It was only a part of her, though.
She took her powers from many ancestors.
Her mother’s father had been of the Tuatha Dé Danann – worshippers of the goddess Danu, who had passed through Connacht while humans still dressed in skins and carried stone spears. Other skills came from Aoife’s long-dead father, a soldier of the Fianna – an ancient hero, who had ridden and fought and hunted when the world was young.
Only a quarter of her blood was lenanshee blood, inherited through her fairy mother.
Beautiful and intoxicating. Dark and dangerous.
(‘A cold-hearted lenanshee, spending all her grá on one poor human man after the other,’ was how Wee Peter had described Aoife’s mother, in a hurt, angry voice. The old smuggler had loved the young queen himself, although he’d never admit it.)
‘Aoife?’ Killian was crouching beside her, watching her as she carefully poked another horseshoe under a pile of leaves. His clean jeans were splashed with the water of the pool; the whiteness of his shirt stained with rusty brown, like old blood. Still irritated that he’d confused her with the pooka, she turned her shoulder to him. He said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. I forgot. It’s easily done. I mean, I know you’ve changed back to your old self.’
Another wave of fury. ‘I haven’t “changed”. Get it through your thick skull, Killian Doherty – that was a demon that you and your friends were hanging around with. And I’m going to make that completely clear to Lois and Sinead when I next see them.’
‘Are you sure you want to tell them?’
She glared. ‘Well, obviously.’
He said casually, ‘Even though you haven’t even told your own parents?’
A rush of deeper anger; and ice-cold power spurted into her blood. In response, the iron of the horseshoe she was holding sparked so hot against her, she dropped it – her palm stinging red like she’d slammed her hand on a stove. She shoved her hand between her thighs, to hide the pain from him, suddenly not wanting him to know that iron could hurt her.
He was still watching her. Amused. Knowing. He said, ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t be mean to them – it’s not Sinead’s and Lois’s fault you’re no longer a nice, friendly, boy-band-loving …’
‘Boy-band-loving?’
The corner of his mouth twitched again. ‘You were devastated when One Direction split up.’
‘Oh, good God.’ Like when she was with her parents, she hardly knew whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity
of it.
Killian himself chose laughter, his eyes lighting up like shards of bright metal. ‘OK, but all I’m saying is, there’s no need to start acting the bitch to Lois and Sinead just because they used to be a bit mean to you and Carla when you were all kids. They were nothing but nice to you after you came back in January, and it’s not their fault you’re not—’
‘Not what?’
‘The same creature as before, under the skin.’
She slammed down another horseshoe. (Ow.) ‘Aargh. Fine. If I see them, I’ll play nice.’
He said very low, as if to himself, ‘And it’s not my fault either.’
She bristled at him. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Turning away, he peered through a narrow gap between the flowering hawthorns, back towards the broken coach and drowned horses. ‘So, have you ever been this way to the fairy world? Down through the pool? Could you bring me through to show me?’
She took out another few horseshoes. ‘No I could not. That way is blocked from the other side, and even if it wasn’t, you’re human. So you wouldn’t last two minutes.’
He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘But Carla survived the trip?’
‘Carla is brave and clever and amazing.’
Killian flushed patchy red – the same as when she’d mocked his aspirations to be a changeling. ‘Unlike me, you mean.’
‘No offence. Are you going to help me here or not?’
Angrily, he grabbed up the leather bag, clattered out half the horseshoes onto the grass for her, and disappeared with the rest round the far side of the circle.
In the soft quiet of the bog – only the hum of insects in the heather, and distant bleat of lambs, and the flute of larks rising – Aoife worked her way on round the circle of thorns, placing the horseshoes side by side, until she found herself in sight of him again. He was tossing the horseshoes carelessly in among the roots of the trees.
She went over to him. ‘You shouldn’t leave gaps.’
He shrugged, still lobbing them like a boy delivering newspapers. ‘Mad old Teresa only did every fence post – there were big gaps between those.’
The Hawthorn Crown Page 15
