The Wren Hunt

by Mary Watson

  Too quickly, Laney ended with, ‘So I’m sending in the muscle.’

  She tilted her head at Tarc and turned away, her high heels loud on the marble.

  ‘Did you get any of that?’ I said to Tarc. His face was grazed, the skin on his temple a rich shade of mottled purple. So beautifully textured, it called to me, saying, Read me.

  ‘No.’

  We went downstairs and he entered the code for the archive, the clicks beeping a little tune.

  ‘You know that it’s daft to have a keypad with key clicks that make different sounds, right? It’s like the keypad sings a tune.’

  ‘That would be daft,’ Tarc agreed amiably. ‘But this keypad doesn’t sing a tune. The key clicks are completely tuneless.’

  ‘It totally sings a tune.’

  Tarc looked at me with exaggerated patience. He pulled the door shut and entered the code again.

  ‘See,’ he said, completely satisfied, as if there hadn’t been a distinct little tune to the clicks. I looked at him carefully to see if he was having me on.

  ‘I’ll do it.’ I pressed out the first line to ‘Mary Had a little Lamb’. Smug, I stepped back. ‘See?’ I mimicked him. Then looking at him sideways, ‘Unless, of course, you’re tone deaf?’

  Tarc’s lips were twitching into a smile and he shook his head, the laugh escaping.

  ‘Is this your party trick? Do you hear voices beneath the microwave hum? The washing machine?’

  ‘You know, I haven’t tried them,’ I said, wondering. ‘But you heard this tune, right?’

  ‘You’re funny,’ he said, and I realised that he thought I was being playful. He hadn’t heard the tune. He couldn’t.

  ‘Right. Funny,’ I said, backtracking. I’d heard a tune as plain as day. ‘I’m hilarious.’

  But I felt unexpectedly crushed. Just another wonky spiderweb. The key clicks all made exactly the same sound. Except to me. It was my spinny eye, but in audio.

  ‘So we change the code every week,’ Tarc was saying as we went inside.

  Working in silence, I inventoried the unsealed boxes while Tarc stacked the high shelves. I wanted to ask him about totems. About magic and trees behaving strangely. But I knew he was avoiding that.

  ‘Are you here because I don’t have security clearance for the archive?’ I watched him wince as he reached up.

  ‘I think you might be getting upgraded soon.’ He laughed. ‘Cassa likes you. Here, let me get that.’

  Wouldn’t that be nice, I thought. Upgrade to Wren 2.01. Eliminate the wonky.

  He reached for the box I was pulling down but I swatted him away. As much as he was trying to hide it, he’d been hurt at the Huntsman.

  ‘I can manage,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  How? I wanted to say. You barely know me at all. And then I realised that I had said it aloud. Just the last part: you barely know me at all.

  He looked up from the table where he stood. He seemed so unsure of himself.

  ‘Sometimes you get to know people in small, quiet ways. Like when they fidget with their hair. From the things they don’t say.’

  And his words made me stop, my hands half opening the cardboard box. He looked back at the shelves he’d been stacking and continued. ‘If you watch, listen carefully. If you’re still enough. Then the sense of them is there.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So, keeping my hands busy, I went for glib: ‘Well, that sounds just a teeny bit creepy. Bet you say that to all the girls.’ I picked up a large hardback book and opened it.

  ‘Not all the girls, no.’

  His gaze was intense and I wanted to turn away. But I made myself accept it, the something that was being offered in that look. It went on longer than it should, until I noticed the word just beyond his head. The label on the box: Maps.

  Could it be that simple? That the document we were searching for was neatly packed and labelled in this otherwise unholy mess? But I doubted I had the right security clearance to start pulling down boxes and rummaging through them just yet.

  ‘So.’ Girls. ‘Was Cillian right? About the Kilshamble girls?’ I wanted it to be true. ‘Were you at the Huntsman looking for girls?’

  I wanted him as callous as Cillian, so I would like him less.

  I wasn’t sure if my heart was thudding away because of the maps, or because of what was lurking beneath our conversation. Smith was right; sometimes questions mattered more than answers. Because by saying those words, I’d admitted that I cared.

  ‘Yes.’ He fidgeted. ‘No. It’s not what you think.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a multiple-choice question. A, yes. B, maybe. C, only if they were redheads. It’s more like true or false.’

  A long-settled dust clung to the covers of the book I was holding and in between the pages. It sat thick on my fingers, in my throat, and it felt like sadness.

  ‘True or false?’ I said.

  ‘True.’

  I shut the book, dust billowing up to my face.

  ‘But false.’

  Over the next days, I continued to spend mornings in the archive. Usually Laney accompanied me, occasionally Tarc. I was never alone. The box of maps remained untouched.

  I’d tried a few times to resume the conversation from the hazel hedge, but Tarc always, gently, firmly closed down all talk of judges and their totems. So I was surprised when one morning, on a page, I saw the symbol for the Daragishka Knot, the rearranged trefoil that Sibéal had drawn on Smith’s roadmap of the plan.

  I must have stared at it longer than I thought, because Tarc was behind me, looking at what had caught my attention.

  ‘That’s the Daragishka Knot,’ he said.

  ‘What does it mean?’ As if I didn’t know.

  ‘Legend says that each of these loops,’ he traced the outline of the knot, ‘was once filled with a power stone. And of course, Basil Lucas was obsessed with anything to do with stone.’

  ‘Lucas obsessed with stone?’ I gestured to the room filled with containers of stones, geodes, rocks, gems. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘His totem was rock.’ Tarc smiled.

  ‘Where are they?’ I said. ‘The stones that belong in the knot?’

  ‘That’s a slightly tricky question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a story about a girl whose lover had been fatally wounded in a battle. Desperate, she took three stones and placed them inside the Knot. She named the stones, marking each with a promise.’

  ‘She’d have been better off learning basic first aid.’

  Tarc pointed to the empty space in the top loop. ‘She named the first stone Betrayal.’ Then he moved his finger down to the second space. ‘The second Sacrifice.’ And with his finger on the third: ‘Surrender.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I turned to look at him. ‘She played with stones while her lover died?’ Judges were weird.

  Tarc laughed. ‘It’s a story. Legends are deliberately deceptive. I’ve heard at least three variations. Lucas was fascinated by the Daragishka Knot because of how the stones were infused with an intent and acquired power.’

  ‘Did she get help? That desperate girl?’

  ‘Open up, Gallagher,’ David shouted, pounding on the archive door.

  ‘So the story goes.’ Tarc was moving to the door. ‘But the price was high.’

  He opened the door and I heard David, low and fraught. Listening in, I heard him say something about a breach in the south garden wall.

  ‘I’ve got to run,’ Tarc said. He was tense.

  Heading to the door, he paused and turned. ‘Laney doesn’t trust anyone,’ he said. ‘So she’ll most likely be down soon.’

  ‘And you do? Trust me?’ Reckless, Wren.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. But as he walked through the door he added, ‘Except perhaps at night. Beneath the trees.’

  Then he was gone. I was finally alone in the archive.

  I lined up the ladder to the shelf and climbed until I could reach the box. Open
ing it, I saw a heap of maps. I searched through them. Most of the maps were old; Smith would go mad for them. There were maps of Hy-Breasil, and detailed descriptions of the island’s terrain. But I didn’t have time to study them. I flicked faster.

  Then I found something. It wasn’t labelled, no words of description. Just a printout of a map of the country across several A3 pages dotted with red Sharpie. It might be something else entirely, but it looked like the map Smith had described. Lucas’s map of the locations of the Daragishka stones. I grabbed my phone and took photographs, then returned the box as I found it.

  Laney strolled in several minutes later, and I realised that Tarc was wrong. She did trust me. And that made me feel a hundred times worse. It would have been easier if she hadn’t. But it was disloyal to feel guilty about helping my grove.

  ‘It’s a gorgeous day out,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing a brilliant job. Take the afternoon off. Sunshine pass.’

  On the way back to the office, I sent the photos to Smith. My mission was complete. I’d found the map. But instead of the elation I’d expected, I felt a strange kind of numb.

  Aisling skipped class and we went back to Kilshamble, where the grove was gathering in the old abandoned quarry in the almost warm sunshine. It was an impromptu celebration of my success, and spirits were high. Smith played Texas Hold ’Em on a card table, chipping in with the banter. We weren’t a large grove, but we’d known each other forever and we were like family. Maeve and four other women sat on deckchairs, sharing a bottle of Baileys and coleslaw cheese sandwiches. Someone attached their phone to a small portable speaker and music blasted through the large space.

  ‘Wren, come on, have a game,’ called Maeve, holding up a Scrabble box.

  ‘Not a chance. You girls are way too good.’ It was true. They were vicious women and won by inserting words like ‘qat’ in unlikely places.

  ‘You did it,’ Smith said, his eyes shining with pride.

  ‘It makes sense to you?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, showing me the picture. ‘See, connecting all these red dots forms several triangles all over the country. The exact locations will be at the core of three equilateral triangles. It will take a day or two to get these and match them to GPS coordinates.’

  ‘When do I resign?’

  ‘When we know what the three locations are. Say, three days, just to be sure.’

  ‘Three days.’

  I felt relief, huge relief. But also something else. Before I could identify it, Sibéal approached and slipped her arm through mine. Whatever it was, the awkwardness that had stewed between us was gone, and it was just like before.

  We walked further into the quarry, towards the deep pools, talking a load of nonsense. We repeated ‘echo’ over and over, and laughed at our voices bouncing across the high stone walls. We found Simon and the other boys and tried to persuade them it was manly to take a swim. In the freezing water. In their jocks.

  Simon stood at the edge of the pool, lost in thought.

  ‘So you and Ash can stop all the secret service stuff now that we have the map, right?’ I said.

  ‘I wish it were that simple,’ he said.

  ‘It is that simple.’ I smiled at him.

  We stood at one of the dark pools, aiming stones at the mouth of a large, rusted fuel container in the middle of the water. We listened for the loud clanks of the stones hitting the metal, ten points if we got one inside. Simon usually scored the highest, but not this time. When I teased him about losing his touch, he grimaced, holding his shoulder.

  ‘You hurt it?’ I said. ‘Rough game again?’

  I reached for his shoulder, squeezing it gently. Simon was mad into sports and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d hurt himself playing.

  ‘It’s fine.’ He was looking at me strangely, and it made me feel uncomfortable. He could tell, of course, and sighed. I pulled my hand back and turned away.

  ‘Wren, we need to talk.’

  I really didn’t want to. Simon had always been fun, it was never anything more. Talking sounded like not fun.

  ‘Sure.’ My reluctance was more than obvious. He wouldn’t need his talent to see it. ‘But not now, not here.’

  I left him to join a game of hide-and-seek with Aisling and the smaller children, hiding behind inexplicable leftover walls, a dumped fridge and broken equipment whose purpose we couldn’t begin to fathom. Aisling won. She’d always been good at hiding.

  I loved the quarry. It was a guilty love, because my grove mourned the green mound, the powerful nemeton it had once been. But I saw beauty in its sharp face and hidden pools, its brown desolation.

  Just before we left, I stood beneath the irregular rock face of the high quarry wall, black and grey with streaks of brown and topaz running through it. And I let a vision come, strong and hard.

  Something close, something private.

  Something that I both dreamed about and feared.

  Around me, everyone laughed, unaware that I’d taken another step in the wrong direction.

  EIGHTEEN

  Call them by name

  I find myself rather liking the taste of dirt.

  AdC

  In my last days at the Harkness Foundation I wanted to set something right.

  Cassa was at her desk, looking at photographs from the Arabella de Courcy retrospective. In her hand was a picture of Aisling and her schoolfriends.

  She dropped it on the desk and, upside down, I studied it. Aisling was a little off from her friends, talking to David, Ryan, Brian and Cillian. They were looking at her, their faces stupid and utterly riveted. It was nothing new, Aisling did that to boys. I just never thought I’d see it with those boys.

  Cassa looked peeved, and I guess she’d just confirmed that her security team had been flirting while the enemy tried to run off with her.

  ‘I found something,’ I said. ‘In the garden book.’

  I held out the folded Ogham sheet that I’d stolen from the archive.

  ‘What is it, Wren?’ she said, and her kind tone made me feel ashamed. But I couldn’t confess that I’d broken into the archive and found it in the puzzle box.

  Cassa took the sheet from me, keeping curious eyes on my face. Only once the creased page was unfolded did she look down at it. One quick glance and a sharp intake of breath.

  The Definitive Traits of the :

  Almost an orphan.

  Grows where the last trod.

  Steals the love [lost to the fold of the page] from the garden.

  Marked by the garden.

  Wakens the doll.

  Sees what isn’t [lost to the fold of the page].

  From the line of the judges.

  Brings the golden time.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ Cassa sounded almost breathless. Her mouth was round with surprise. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’

  Her careful guard had fallen, reminding me of the day I’d seen her rummaging through the archive.

  ‘Lady Catherine’s garden journal. Volume two, I think. Laney said that you hadn’t had a chance to read it?’ The lie burned my cheeks.

  She stared at the sheet. Her pale face was now so white that I thought she’d faint. From the way she looked at it I could tell she didn’t need help interpreting the marks.

  ‘Cassa, you’re due at Trinity in thirty minutes,’ Laney came into the room, followed by David. ‘There’s awful traffic …’

  ‘Wren found it,’ Cassa said. ‘The list was in the archive.’

  ‘Wren found it?’ Laney frowned. ‘And removed it from the archive?’

  ‘It was in one of Lady Catherine’s garden books.’

  ‘Really?’ Laney’s frown deepened. ‘I looked through those.’

  David leaned forward, his interest piqued.

  ‘You must have missed it.’

  I was hot beneath Laney’s gaze.

  ‘Seems like it,’ Laney said doubtfully, but her face said, I never miss things.

  ‘I was right
,’ Cassa said, holding up the page. ‘The list is real.’ She looked at me. ‘And Wren found it.’

  The third time those words were uttered, and this time I heard the strange emphasis.

  All three of them examined me like I’d grown an extra head.

  Laney was still looking pensive; she just wasn’t convinced.

  ‘Those journals aren’t going to index themselves, Wren,’ she spoke sharply. She seemed troubled. But from the way she watched Cassa, I suspected she was more worried about her than me.

  Leaving the room, I heard Cassa saying, ‘… find the girl, I’ll be the one who brings on the third.’

  I leaned against the wall outside her office. I’d been careless. I’d made Laney question me.

  ‘I can confirm the identity of three of the Huntsman assailants.’ I heard David through the open sliver between the double doors.

  It was lunchtime, and the office was empty but for Ledger Man, who sat at the kitchen table with his sandwich. Immersed in his book, he was oblivious to me eavesdropping at Cassa’s door.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re from Abbyvale.’

  ‘You tell me this like it’s news, David.’ Cassa sounded irritated.

  Laney murmured, ‘Your coat.’ Silence, and a small snapping sound.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ Cassa said a few seconds later.

  ‘I’m requesting permission to retaliate.’

  ‘Remember your place, David.’ The bite in her words should have warned him to back off.

  ‘These men tried to kidnap you.’ He spoke too fast when he was upset. ‘They stole a nemeton. They hurt my brother, your nephew.’

  ‘You had your chance to fix this at Abbyvale months ago. You should have taken care of them then. Now you do it my way.’

  ‘Cassa, we have to act before –’

  ‘Enough,’ Cassa almost shouted. She paused, then said with acid calm, ‘There will be penalties for insubordination.’

  I heard her move around the desk, most likely to stand in front of him.

  ‘David Creagh, you have attempted to act beyond your rank and status. You have spoken inappropriately. You failed in your duty at the Huntsman, allowing yourself to be distracted. Your failure to secure the situation in Abbyvale with adequate action against rogue augurs has endangered your Cleave and Magistrate. How do you plead?’