Twig of Thorn (The Blackthorn Cycle Book 1)

by L. M. Hawke

  “Well,” she said briskly, “now you know everything there is to know about the cottage… and nearly everything there is to know about me. So what do you think? Are you interested?”

  Her unintentionally flirtatious comment drew him out of his moody reverie. He turned to her with a mischievous smile.

  “I didn’t mean,” Una stammered. “Er, that is… the house.”

  Ailill tilted his head and looked at her curiously. The gesture, combined with the searching stare from those brilliant blue eyes, seemed somehow otherish, not-quite-human. “You’d really consider selling this place?” He sounded incredulous, as if he’d thought all her talk of selling was one big joke, until now.

  Una sat up straighter. “Yes, I would,” she said rather defiantly. In fact, after last night, I’d be very pleased to sell it straight away, and never see this place again. “I could use the money to set myself up in the city again. Or if I decided not to return to Dublin after all, I could use it to—”

  “You can’t leave this place, Una.” He didn’t say it plaintively. He said it as a matter of fact.

  The shiver that crawled up Una’s spine made her want to jump up and run screaming from the cottage, but she forced herself to remain still. “Of course I can. Don’t be divvy.”

  Ailill’s no-nonsense manner softened a little. He said in a coaxing tone, “But you belong here. This place was your grandmother’s. You can’t just give it up, can you? …That connection to the land?”

  Una frowned. “It was my gran who had the connection to the land, not me.”

  “You don’t feel anything by being here? Nothing at all?”

  Una was feeling a lot of things in that moment—frustration, fear, stubborn conviction, and a longing to snuggle up close to Ailill, maybe even to kiss him, that grew stronger with each passing moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said vaguely.

  “Don’t you feel a… a pull, Una? An attraction?”

  She blushed at that, but Ailill went on as if he hadn’t noticed.

  “Don’t you feel as if the land is calling to you? Can’t you feel that at all?”

  Calling to me. It was too much for her, too close an allusion to the voices she’d heard whispering through the trees the night before. Una stood abruptly and headed toward the house. “Nah,” she said over her shoulder, with a laugh she hoped sounded confident enough to come off as casual and unconcerned. “I suppose I’m a city girl after all.”

  Ailill followed her into the house. She didn’t know what she ought to do, but she had to do something, so she set about making tea.

  “Well, if you do want to sell the place after all,” Ailill said, rather sadly, “then I will consider it. It’s time I had a place of my own, and now that I’ve got a bit of extra money from the tour, I can—”

  Ailill fell silent. Una looked up from the old, burl-wood caddy, where she was rummaging for some tea that didn’t seem too terribly old or stale. Ailill was facing the cottage’s front door, staring at it fixedly, his face frozen in a still, wide-eyed expression that might have been fear.

  No, Una realized slowly… he wasn’t staring at the door. He was staring at the small shelf that hung on the wall beside it. Una hurried toward him, wondering what was wrong. When she reached his side, she saw the blackthorn twig lying on the shelf, exactly where she had deposited it.

  She’d forgotten all about the twig, but now, as she looked at it, fear and awe raced through her veins at equal speed. Although the flowers had sat unwatered on the shelf since the wee hours of morning, the white blossoms hadn’t wilted… no, not one bit. Nor had any petals fallen away. The flowers looked as robust and healthy as if they were still attached to the blackthorn tree.

  Ailill reached out slowly, cautiously, and picked up the little bundle of flowers. “Una, do you know what this is?” His voice was light, as if it didn’t matter to him. But his fixed expression told Una it did matter—very much indeed.

  “Blackthorn,” she said. “Why?”

  Ailill licked his lips and swallowed hard. Una pretended not to notice. “You don’t have a blackthorn tree growing out there in your garden,” he said. “Where did you get it from?”

  Una took a deep breath before answering. Somehow she knew Ailill wouldn’t like the answer. “I got it down at the crossroads. Last night.”

  He dropped the twig back onto the shelf, so quickly it almost seemed as if the thing had burned his fingers. Unconsciously, he wiped his hand on his jeans as if trying to clean them of some clinging substance.

  Ailill turned and stared at Una. His eyes were earnest and concerned, yet his expression and voice were both forceful. “Be careful,” he said.

  “Of… of what?”

  Ailill squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. It seemed to Una that he was trying to block out some vision or memory, some image that haunted him. “Just… be careful,” he said in a choked whisper. “You must be careful.”

  With that, Ailill strode out the door and up the garden path. He took to the main road and hurried down it—down the hill, down toward the crossroads—and out of Una’s sight. He didn’t even cast her or the cottage a single backward glance.

  6

  Una reached back into the depths of the closet, stretching out her hands to feel for any remaining artifacts that might be hiding in the darkness. The top of her head bumped the now-empty wooden and metal hangers; they clattered noisily as she cursed under her breath. Unnerve by Ailill’s strange appearance and even stranger leave-taking, she’d decided to distract herself from her anxious thoughts by clearing her gran’s old things out of the bedroom. Una still had no intention of staying in Kylebeg forever—or even for another night, if she could find some way to avoid it—but sooner or later the house would have to be cleared of Nessa Teig’s belongings, when Una finally sold the place and gratefully moved on. She might as well start cleaning now.

  A heap of old dresses, blouses, skirts, and shoes lay piled on the bed and the room’s single chair. Una had decided that she would wash whatever needed laundering, then fold everything up neatly and alert Michael O’Malley that she needed the whole lot hauled away. If Kylebeg didn’t have a charity shop to which Una could donate all her grandmother’s old clothes, surely the next town over did. O’Malley would know how to get everything to its final destination. Maybe Una could even hitch a ride along with her donation, make her way to a different town, and forget about Kylebeg forever.

  Just when she had convinced herself that there was nothing left in the closet, Una’s fingertips brushed something blocky and hard, far in the back of the closet. She patted it in the dark. It felt like a travel trunk—the old-fashioned kind, with wooden ribs and pressed tin nailed to its sides. She groped along the trunk’s side until she found a handle, then pulled it out of the closet and into the room’s dim light.

  Una straightened, bracing her hands in the small of her back to stretch the cramps and aches from her muscles. She looked down at the trunk, half expectant, half afraid. It was very old, darkened by many years, its hasp broken and hanging at a funny angle. The trunk only sat there in front of the closet doors, exactly where Una had left it, but still she felt a twinge of suspicion, which grew in strength the longer she stared at it. As odd as the past twenty-four hours had been, Una expected the trunk to sprout legs, get up, and dance a jig right there on the tufted rug.

  Finally, with an air of resignation, Una lifted the trunk’s lid. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find inside the thing—more clothes, maybe, smelling of ancient lavender and cedar chips, or perhaps a few forgotten quilts, for the rest of the contents of Nessa’s closet had been reassuringly ordinary. The trunk, however, contained a trove of articles both fascinating and alarming.

  There were braided garlands of flowers, black with age, long-dried and so old they nearly crumbled to dust when Una touched them. There were musty-smelling fur garments, not unlike the hoods some of the men had worn at the Beltane festival. She found a brittle little human-like figure m
ade out of wheat stalks tied together, and below that, a four-pointed, pinwheel-like device fashioned out of corn husks. Una picked up each item gingerly, examined it with a prickle of superstitious fear, and set it aside. Antlers followed, and colored candles, and a small, shallow bronze dish that had been blackened on the inside by char. It gave off a smoky smell of incense.

  Una had no idea what the things in the trunk meant—what the represented, what meaning they had carried for Nessa. But they had a familiar look to them, which Una chalked up to her having seen so many unusual costumes and devices at the parade and the bonfire. Perhaps, then, Nessa had been a pagan, as Kathleen was. Kylebeg certainly seemed a fitting place for a paganish sort to live.

  “What am I going to do with all this?” Una muttered, looking at the pile of oddities. Perhaps someone in Kylebeg would want it. In the meantime, she could store Nessa’s clothing in the trunk. At least that would clear off the bed.

  Una bent to scoop an armful of blouses off the bed, and paused. The unmistakable corner of a book’s spine was peeking out from the folds of one of the animal skins. It had been one of the uppermost pieces in the trunk—one of the first things Una had removed. How had she not felt the book wrapped inside the fur? She stooped and retrieved the book from amid the jumble of dried flowers and corn husks. When she straightened and examined it more closely, she could see that it wasn’t a book—not exactly. It was a leather-bound journal, its cover tooled with swirls of flowers and a great crescent moon that bore a woman’s face.

  Una opened the front cover and read the name written inside, in the same neat, old-fashioned hand as the letter she’d received in Dublin: Vanessa M. Teig.

  Gran’s journal.

  Una bit her lip, riffling quickly through the pages. They released a dusty smell of age, but as she got to the latter pages, a torn-off slip of a newspaper ad fell out and fluttered to the rug. Una examined it. It was just an advert for a sale at the department store in [town], but it was dated to March of that year. So Nessa had been handling the journal—maybe even writing in it—as recently as March.

  Should I read it? Somehow it felt like a terrible invasion of her grandmother’s privacy to even contemplate reading the thing. Which was ridiculous, Una told herself, because her grandmother was dead.

  Quickly, she piled the clothes in the trunk and thumped the lid closed. Then she curled up on the bed and began paging through the diary.

  Despite Nessa’s penchant for neat handwriting, the journal was difficult to decipher, for she had squeezed thousands of words onto each page in perfectly straight but impossibly tiny lines. It was as if Nessa had felt she needed to record her entire life’s doings in just one volume, and so she had conserved space in her journal from the start.

  Una squinted at dates and lines, making very little sense of what she read. Early in the book, from an entry dated 1955, she read, Called on by Seelie at last. Was overjoyed, but didn’t know what to make of… The rest of the entry was beyond Una. Who was Seelie? A friend, a relation? Or perhaps a suitor—Nessa would have been about twenty-four in 1955.

  She paged farther ahead in time. They are growing weaker, one entry read. I don’t know how to help, but help I must. I cannot allow my own kin… Una flipped ahead a few more pages. Seelie besieged. I walk about in a daze, never knowing what I can do to make it better. It cannot come to this, after so long. There was that name again… Seelie.

  Una turned a few more pages and found the early 90s—near the time of her own birth. Nessa had written, At least we can be assured that the blood still flows. Though I fear for her, what it might mean, what the world might be like when she comes of age.

  Finally, Una turned to the most recent entry—Nessa’s last. It was clearer, easier to read, without the cramped lines of the previous pages. Nessa seemed to understand that soon she would have no more need of the book. The last entry read, in whole, I have written to Una. It is time for her to claim her inheritance, to learn of the power and take whatever she can salvage of it. And it will be good to see the girl again. My last living kin… the only carrier of our secret. May she come soon to me.

  Una lowered the journal to her lap slowly, gazing out the bedroom window. The sun was lowering outside, bathing the green hills in ruddy light, tipping with flame the tall banners of hollyhock and foxglove in the garden below.

  The inheritance, Una mused. The power. The two words were linked in Nessa’s journal. With an uneasy glance at the furs, antlers, and flowers piled beside the trunk, Una began to suspect that the Teig inheritance was more than this tiny country estate. Much more.

  * * *

  Dusk found Una at the kitchen table, eating pickles directly from a jar with a long, silver fork, the heel of the rye bread half-eaten on a plate before her, and the night’s sixth cup of tea drained to its dregs.

  The leather-bound journal lay open between pickle jar and teacup. Una’s eyes were sore and watery from squinting at the tiny lines of text. She had pored over the entries for more than two hours, but she was no closer to decoding the mystery of Nessa’s strange writings. It was too difficult to make out the writing in most entries, and in the ones she could decipher, what she read there made no sense to her. The pages were full of references to things Una simply did not understand: rituals and traditions, unfamiliar names, vague descriptions of Nessa’s experiences, which seemed more like dreams than anything that could actually happen in the real world.

  The evening had grown blustery. A cover of clouds had moved in just after sunset, and now the wind was picking up, whistling and moaning around the stone house’s chimneys in a mournful, spine-tingling way.

  Una sat back in her chair, pinching the bridge of her nose and rubbing her eyes. Her attempts to read Nessa’s infuriatingly small handwriting had given Una a bit of a headache. She stood, giving vent to a deep sigh, and rubbed the back of her neck to work the kinks and tension out.

  The wind picked up. It pattered some errant drops of rain against the kitchen window. In the rhythmless scatter of the rain, Una thought for a moment that she’d heard something—a hint of chanting voices, or perhaps a soft drift of music.

  “You’re going batty,” she said aloud. “You’ve been reading too long.”

  A fire in the hearth would be pleasant tonight. Una always liked a good fire on a stormy night; nothing made her feel cozier or more secure. She left the kitchen, heading for the parlor where a few pieces of good, dry wood stood waiting on the firedogs.

  But as Una passed the shelf beside the front door, she froze in disbelief.

  The twig of blackthorn. Again, she’d forgotten it was there… hadn’t thought of it at all since Ailill had left earlier that day. She stared at it now from several paces away, but even at that distance, the thing gave her chilly pause.

  It hasn’t… it’s still…

  Una crept a little closer, slowly and cautiously. When she was close enough to see every detail of bark and petal, she knew her first impression had been correct. The cluster of white flowers still had not wilted. The blackthorn bloom looked as fresh as ever.

  Ice sank into Una’s stomach and spread quickly along her limbs. Strange… so strange. And chilling. There was something decidedly wrong about the never-wilting flowers, something otherworldly. Ailill had sensed their wrongness, hadn’t he? Why hadn’t Una realized how eerie those flowers were until now?

  She swallowed the lump in her throat, then reached up to take the twig in her fingers. Just before she touched it, the wind gave a great cry outside, its force tearing at the thatch roof and shuddering the walls of the cottage.

  Again, Una thought she heard voices in the wind. No… this time she didn’t think it. This time she knew it.

  With her hand still poised above the blackthorn and her heart pounding in her ears, Una listened intently to the wind. It groaned and clamored and wailed, and below its noise she heard words—distinctly, as clearly as if the voice spoke to her from within the same room.

  Wear the thorn, my blood, my
kin. Don the crown and see.

  Blood—kin. How many times that night had she read those words, and others like them, in Nessa’s journal? The voice terrified Una, but she had never been one to give in to her fears. With a scowl of determination, she plucked up the blackthorn twig and threw open her front door.

  She stepped out into the storm. The wind whipped around her, tangling her hair about her face and whistling cold in her ears.

  “Get out,” Una shouted at the wind. “Leave me alone! And take this back, you pest!”

  She threw the cluster of white flowers out into the garden with all her strength. But the wind caught the twig and blew it back toward her, as if nature itself taunted her. Una gasped and tried to dodge the flowers, but they skittered along her body, brushing her breast just above her heart, then flying up toward her face, where they brushed softly against one closed eye and then traced a path across her forehead. She lifted her hands and covered her face, but the twig was already gone, caught in the teeth of the wind.

  Una peeked through her fingers and watched the white flowers as they whirled up above her, dancing in the storm. Then the wind took them and blew them up into the black thatch of her roof.

  The flowers wedged themselves up on the roof… where Una couldn’t reach them. She stood for a moment, staring in shock and dismay at the tiny patch of gleaming white blossoms embedded in the thatch. Then, stifling a sob of fear, she staggered back inside, locked her front door, and slammed her grandmother’s journal closed.

  7

  When Una stepped into Michael O’Malley’s office the next morning, she entered by its front door instead of by the alley. The door opened smoothly, without the key-wrestling and squealing of hinges Una had witnessed on her first visit. O’Malley’s bald, shining head was the first thing Una saw, as he was bent over his desk, examining the papers spread before him. But he looked up with a curious glance that turned to a broad smile when he saw that it was Una who stood before him.