Twig of Thorn (The Blackthorn Cycle Book 1)

by L. M. Hawke

  “But what of it, really?” Una resisted the urge to cross herself. She wasn’t religious, yet still it seemed a wise course of action just then, with ripples of fear shivering along her limbs. “I was tired, as I told you—absolutely knackered. Your mind plays tricks on you when you’re so worn out. And of course I’d go to the crossroads; it’s the most interesting place within walking distance of my house, though that’s not saying much.”

  “No, Una… no. Crossroads are places of real magic.”

  “Maybe you believe that, with your pagan ways and the influence of old, dusty Kylebeg all around you. But what reason have I to believe?”

  “You ought to believe, because it’s true, Una,” Kathleen said, rather sternly. “It’s all true. Why do you think we keep the old ways here, after so very long? It’s not because we’re daft. It’s because we know things here in Kylebeg. We’ve seen; we’ve felt. We’ve experienced the truth of the world, out here in the hills where the Fair Folk dwell. Once you’ve seen magic at work in the world—really at work, altering reality around you—then you can’t pretend it’s just a fancy from a children’s tale any longer.”

  “You’re scaring me,” Una admitted. Her voice sounded tiny, weak. She remembered the strange trips she’d taken through time, walking from one era of Kylebeg’s history to the next, turning down paths to find the world remade around her. Una wrapped her arms tightly around herself to quell her shivers, but they fought their way out all the same. She trembled, and Kathleen smiled gently at her.

  “Don’t be afraid, Una. This is nothing to fear. It’s great—wonderful—amazing!”

  Una said nothing. She only licked her dry lips, frowning at her glowing friend, waiting for Kathleen to go on.

  “Crossroads,” Kathleen continued, “are places of potent magic. Just think what they represent—what they are. A place in the world where two different ways converge, where two different currents meet and mingle and send themselves off in new directions.”

  “A place where different realities intersect,” Una said faintly. That would explain the trips through time she’d taken—why each turn she took away from the crossroads seemed to carry her into a new reality.

  “Exactly,” Kathleen said. “And where two realities meet—where two ways join together—the forces that shape the world are at their strongest. It’s not only ways that converge at a crossroads, Una. It’s worlds, too.

  “You remember when we talked about the Seelie, don’t you?” Kathleen went on.

  Una nodded wordlessly. She remembered, all right. She remembered, too, just how often she’d read that name—Seelie—in her grandmother’s journal.

  “The Seelie Court seems to have a particular use for crossroads,” Kathleen said. “An affinity, I guess you can call it. Over the past few years, their activity at various crossroads around Kylebeg has been increasing.”

  “Increasing? What do you mean? What do they do, exactly?”

  “So you do believe, after all,” Kathleen said, a twinkle in her eye.

  Una was by no means certain she believed, but she thought it better not to argue.

  “I used to find evidence of Seelie magic just about everywhere,” Kathleen said. “Out in the pastures, on hiking trails, inside the town itself…”

  “What is evidence of their magic, though? How can you be sure what you found was the… the Fair Folk, and not something ordinary?”

  “You can tell, Una. When the Seelie are involved, nothing is quite as it ought to be. Leaves turn color outside their season. Patterns of the earth and weather change. Food spoils too fast, or doesn’t spoil when it should.”

  Una pressed her lips together, thinking of the unwilting blackthorn flowers.

  “Sometimes the evidence is nice, and rather sweet,” Kathleen said, “like plaits appearing in a horse’s tail overnight while she’s shut up in her stall. Sometimes the evidence is more sinister: someone falls ill with a sickness no doctor can explain, or cure.”

  “But wouldn’t something like that be… bad?” Una said. “When you told me about these creatures, you said they were good. I thought only the Unseelie—”

  “Hush” Kathleen said quickly. She glanced out into the garden, but nothing stirred among the flower beds but song birds and butterflies. The wind remained placid and calm.

  After a moment, Kathleen resumed: “Usually the Seelie are perfectly pleasant. Sometimes they’re even kind or generous. But not always. As long as we don’t encroach on their world or hamper their designs, then we are of no real importance to them… most of us, anyway. But they might choose to toy with us if it pleases them, like a child jabbing an ant hill with a stick.”

  “It’s not a matter of good versus evil, then,” Una said.

  “Nothing in our world is as black-and-white as that, is it? Of course not. Then why would he hold such an impossible standard to a realm we can barely comprehend?”

  Una had no good answer for Kathleen’s question. If this fairy realm were real, then she didn’t fancy it waiting just beyond some unseen border, like a bored lad with a stick in his hand, ready to jab into this helpless and ordinary world. She preferred to cling to a more appealing noting of fairies: pretty little ladies the size of her thumb, with dragonfly wings and dazzling gowns. At least that sort of fairy was small enough to squash underfoot if their magic got out of hand.

  “Anyway,” Kathleen went on briskly, untroubled by the dark thoughts that now plagued Una, “for the last several years, no one has seen much evidence of the Seelie about Kylebeg. Magical incidents sort of shrank up and concentrated themselves around the crossroads—yours down the hill there, and a few others scattered around the hills. No one can explain it, though all of us who pay close attention have noted the same thing.”

  “Maybe the Fair Folk have finally decided to leave our world alone,” Una suggested.

  “Maybe,” Kathleen said, but she didn’t sound convinced. “Why, though? After hundreds of years of interactions with humans—after hundreds of years of the Seelie making free use of our world—why would they curtail it now? Something is happening, Una. Something important. Their world is changing. Their magic doesn’t reach as far as it used to, but it still functions well enough at the crossroads… or near the crossroads.”

  Una bit her lip. The cottage was certainly near to the crossroads. Too near, now, for Una’s comfort.

  “All of these writings in your gran’s journal,” Kathleen said, “about the inheritance, the blood. I think it means that Nessa Teig knew who she was—what she was. I think she understood full well that she was related to the Seelie. I guess that explains why she preferred to live out here alone, rather than with you in the city, or even closer to town as she got older. Here in the cottage, she lived as close as she could get to the most potent source of the Fair Folk’s magic. She must have drawn some kind of strength from it. Strength or comfort.”

  “Do you think she truly knew?” Una asked, mystified. Then she frowned and shook her head sternly. “It’s impossible, Kathleen. This is all rubbish. It has to be.”

  “I think Nessa knew, oh, yes,” Kathleen said, ignoring Una’s accusation of rubbish. “She must have guarded the secret carefully, for nearly her whole life, from the time she first learned the truth until the day she died. And if she knew that she carried Seelie blood, then she knew you carry the blood, too, of course.”

  “But I’m not some magical creature,” Una protested with sudden, loud vehemence. “Whatever my grandmother may have believed about herself and the damnable crossroads, those were just her beliefs. Her private thoughts. They have no basis in reality, Kathleen. How can they? I’m not some… some winged little fairy. Look at me! I’m just like you!”

  “There’s more,” Kathleen said, again reacting as if Una hadn’t spoken at all.

  She pulled the journal from her bag, along with a glass paperweight-like object about the size of her fist. Kathleen flipped the book open to a page she had marked with a length of ribbon. She passed the
half-dome of glass over the page; Una peeked over her friend’s arm, watching as the magnifier glided along the lines of text. The dome of glass raised and bent words along its convex surface, magnifying the tiny handwriting enough that it could be read clearly.

  Una read along while Kathleen recited the words aloud. “My kin in the Otherworld have finally lost their hold on power. The Seelie Court has fallen; the Unseelie are unleashed, and without the good Seelie to prevent them, I fear Unseelie strength will overflow into the world of men. I might have helped my cousins once, when I was younger. But I am too old. There is nothing I can do for them now.”

  Una glanced anxiously at the journal entry’s date. Nessa had written it a few weeks ago, shortly before her death, and mere days before she would have written to Una, calling her back to Kylebeg to claim her inheritance.

  My cousins. Una recalled, with sudden, shocking force, the vivid memory of the ethereal man in her dream. He had walked parallel to her own path along the crossroads lane, calling desperately through the forest: “Cousin! Where are you?”

  Una trembled. She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself, trying to hold back the tremor of fear it. This time Kathleen took note of her reaction.

  “The inheritance,” Una muttered.

  “Not the cottage at all,” said Kathleen. “It’s something more than that, Una—much more.”

  Una shook her head in violent denial. “No! This is mad, Kathleen—totally mad! You’re talking about fairy tales—literally, fairy tales! These stories can’t be true.”

  “They are,” Kathleen said softly. Her eyes shone with wonder as she gazed at Una, as if Una were a saint or a miracle. “It’s all true, every word of it. You’ve forgotten the old ways out there in the cities, but here in the small, old places—here, we still remember.”

  “Well, I won’t be a part of these small, old places any longer,” Una said crossly. She stormed into the kitchen, just to get away from Kathleen’s expectant, almost worshipful eyes. “I’m leaving. This is no place for me; I’ve finally decided that much. I’ll go back to the city, where nobody thinks about fairies and Sidhe and the Seelie Court. I’ll go back there and—”

  A thunderous crash nearly made Una leap out of her skin. The wind howled with a sudden, wild gust, and Una, whirling to stare back toward the parlor, saw that the door had flung itself open. A great drift of whirling white—snow? In May?—poured into the cottage, blown on the violent wind. Una and Kathleen both shrieked in surprise at the crash, Una’s scream turned at once to a laugh of pure, mindless hysteria when she realized what the wind carried.

  No, it was not snow. The white clouds that swirled and eddied around the cottage—around Una herself—were made from thousands of blackthorn flowers.

  15

  Una’s laughter filled the cottage, rising over the howl of the wind. Kathleen sprang forward, trying to wrestle the door closed, but each time she nearly had the thing latched, the wind seemed to blow all the harder, and the door was torn from her grasp again. Una watched Kathleen’s struggle, paralyzed by shock and dread. It seemed to her that every force of nature was determined to keep the open, to clear the way into Una’s life—to reach into her sanctuary and ensure that she could hide no longer.

  “This is mad!” Una finally found her voice, and shouted over the wind. She reeled in its powerful gusts, batting the whirling white flowers away from her mouth and eyes. But she fought her way through the storm of blossoms to the wide-open door, and Kathleen’s side. “This is mad; do you hear me?” she yelled at Kathleen. “There are no fairies! There are no Sidhe!”

  Kathleen seized Una’s arm, pleading with terrified eyes for Una to be silent.

  But Una shook off Kathleen’s grip.

  “Please,” Kathleen cried. “Don’t anger them! You don’t understand what might happen if you do!”

  “What might happen? Oh, will they no longer dance about my garden, making the flowers bloom?”

  Kathleen indicated the wild swirl of blackthorn with a desperate sweep of her hand. “Look what’s happening, Una. How can you see this with your own eyes, and still not believe?”

  “There is nothing to the old ways,” Una insisted. “Nothing but a lot of superstition. Look; I’ll prove it to you.”

  She braced her hands against the door frame, leaning head and shoulders out into the garden. She shouted into the teeth of the gale, “Come on, then, you silly little fairies! If you want me so badly, come and get me! If you think I’m your blood kin, then at last have the bollocks to call on me like a civilized person, instead of messing about with the wind and trying to trap me in the crossroads! Didn’t your mothers teach you any manners?” She scooped a fistful of the flowers from her floor and hurled them out into the garden, but the wind instantly buffeted them back inside.

  Kathleen was properly horrified now. She had both hands pressed tight to her mouth, and seemed on the verge of tears. But she pulled herself together enough to take Una’s arm again. She tried in vain to drag her back into the cottage. “Mother of mercy, Una! You don’t know what you’ve said. You can’t ask the Fair Folk to come and take you; they will!”

  “Good!” Una shrieked, dangerously close to another fit of hysterical laughter. “Maybe Fairyland is better than Kylebeg. Or Dublin. Maybe I’ll find a place to fit in there! They’re welcome to spirit me off!”

  “Stop!” Kathleen clapped a hand over Una’s mouth. “Listen to me, you fool! They’ll take you to the Otherworld. But you can’t go there, Una—you can’t! Everything is different there. Time moves differently, don’t you see? People who have gone to the Otherworld have come back years later, thinking only hours had passed. You mustn’t—”

  Una jerked her head away from her friend’s hand. She stared boldly into Kathleen’s pleading eyes as she said, “I wouldn’t care if they did show up, and carried me away to this Otherworld. At least then the decision would be made for me—where to go, what to do. Let whatever will be, be!”

  In that moment, the wind died abruptly, so Una’s last shouted words hung ringing in the air. The blackthorn petals drifted placidly to the floor, a carpet of purest white. Una and Kathleen gaped at each other, both of them pale and trembling with shock at the sudden, perfect silence.

  Then a smooth male voice said, “Cousin. We have found you at last.”

  Una and Kathleen turned to stare, disbelieving, into the parlor. A tall man stood alone beside the hearth. He bore some resemblance to Ailill—slender yet strong-looking, with the same distinctly angular face and stunning, deep-colored eyes. But this man was definitely not Ailill. His long hair was such a pale shade of blond that it seemed almost silver, and instead of Ailill’s blue eyes, his were a shade of green as vibrant and shining as emeralds. He wore a robe-like garment of a soft, silvery violet color. The cloth flowed and rippled like water with the slightest shift of his weight. His smile was satisfied, but somehow rather cold. And as he stood easily, confidently beside the hearth, he never took his eyes from Una’s face.

  16

  “Seelie,” Kathleen whispered. She sank into an awkward and hasty bow, as if she stood in the presence of the Queen.

  Una did not bow. She stared defiantly at the man—the creature—and prayed her feelings didn’t show on her face. A sickening combination of terror, awe, and… Una could hardly credit the feeling… total acceptance had settled over her, sinking deep into her soul. She knew this being. She had seen him before in a dream. But he was no dream, after all, for there he stood in her parlor, watching her with cool detachment. He was real—as real as Una’s own flesh. As real as her blood.

  “It is true,” she said simply. “You are real.”

  The Sidhe nodded once, calm and knowing. He was as regal as a king, even in his simple, almost shapeless garb and without a crown on his pale brow.

  “And what Kathleen said—what she found out about me—that’s true, too? I’ve Sidhe blood?”

  Kathleen straightened abruptly from her bow. She took Una by the ar
m again, but this time her grip was even fiercer than before; her fingers bit into Una’s flesh “Now will you listen to me?” She was quiet but urgent, leaning in close beside Una’s ear. “I would have told you everything you needed to know about the Fair Folk, and about their world, too… if you’d only listened instead of flying off like that.”

  Una grabbed Kathleen’s hand and squeezed it. She had no idea if she was offering comfort or seeking some for herself; she simply didn’t know what else to do. She never took her eyes off the Fair man, though. The Sidhe stood expectantly in the parlor, his eyes locked with Una’s in a commanding gaze. That bright-green stare pulled at her with a force she knew she’d felt before.

  “So I have been called,” she said to the Sidhe, curling her toes in her shoes to resist the urge to walk toward him.

  “We would not have called you, Cousin, if our need was not great.” His voice was like a whisper of wind, soft and murmuring. Pleasant as it was, still the sound of it sent a shudder up Una’s spine. “You are one of us, Una,” the Sidhe said, “one of our own. You carry the royal blood of the Seelie Court. And now you must come home, if there is to be any hope for us at all.”

  “Home?” The word sent a throb of warmth into Una’s chest. Home—what she had longed for, searched for, for so many years. Had she found it at last… the place where she belonged?

  Or was this feeling only a bit of fairy magic, a deception to make her forget who she was and where she ought to be?

  Una didn’t want to trust in the Sidhe… and yet she did want to trust him, wanted the home his whispering voice promised. She took one step toward him, then another.

  “Don’t go with him!” Ailill’s sudden shout tore Una’s attention from the Sidhe. She turned, gaping in shock as Ailill barged out of the garden and into the cottage.