“They grow so fast,” Miracle said, the northern accent in her voice still strong. “They were much smaller when I came, weren’t they?”
Shannon looked out at the children and smiled. “The sea air grows them fast here,” she said.
“It grows roses well,” Miracle said. “I have twice the response from them here as I do in Fjordland, and with half the work.”
“You have a special touch with the roses,” Shannon said. “I’m sure they’ve never bloomed so early before.”
“Children and roses,” Miracle said. “Both will grow for a hand that loves them.” She smiled up at Shannon. “I’m sure that’s why the children grow so well here.”
“Aye,” Shannon said. “The O’Roarkes have always loved their children. And now we have Michael and Stocky home to protect them, and Kris to spoil them, and you to make the little boys go weak at the knees when you smile.”
Miracle laughed. “No, they don’t,” she said.
A barking dog launched itself up the hill into Shannon’s lap, and a dark-haired boy, eleven years old but small for his age, limped up to Miracle and brought a handful of purple flowers out from behind his back. He held them out.
“Are these for me, Kieran?” Miracle asked.
“Aye,” Kieran said softly, with his eyes turned down. “I picked them for you.”
“Thank you,” Miracle said. She pried his fingers from the prickly stems with one hand, taking the flowers in the other. “They’re beautiful.”
Kieran opened his mouth to say something, but turned and ran instead. Shannon laughed merrily.
“I told you,” she said.
Miracle watched the boy as he hobbled back down the hill with the dog on his heels. The white wolf loped up to greet him, and the boy stumbled and fell, rolling until the wolf stopped him.
“Why does he limp, Shannon?” Miracle asked.
“He fell under a carriage when he was learning to walk,” Shannon said. “The driver tried to stop, but it was too late—the wheels only rolled back over his leg when the driver pulled back on the reins.”
“I’m sorry,” Miracle said.
“Eh, so am I,” Shannon said. “I was there. I should have been watching him, but I was distracted. It nearly killed his mother when she saw him. She thought her baby had been crushed. That was the worst of it all—knowing how she felt.” Shannon’s eyes grew distant.
“But he lived,” Miracle said.
Shannon nodded. “He did that. And his mother knew that he would live, before she died herself.” Abruptly, she stood and whistled. The children, far down the hillside, turned their heads to look at her. She waved for them to come up.
“Archer!” she called. “Take back your crook. I resign.”
Archer, the oldest of the children, was a handsome, golden-haired boy of thirteen years. He took the staff from Shannon while the others crowded around him.
“Cannot you stay a little longer, Shannon?” one of the boys, a red-headed scamp called Seamus, asked.
“Only if you don’t want any dinner,” Shannon answered, shaking her skirt as she stood. Bits of grass rained down. “Get along with you. Archer, bring the sheep in before dark. There’s rain blowing in from the sea.”
“Yes, Shannon,” Archer said. He turned and ambled down the hillside. The other children reluctantly followed him.
Miracle stood and walked with Shannon. Stocky waved at them from the middle of a field he was ploughing. The air was beginning to smell like rain.
They smelled the roses before they reached the cottage. Shannon left Miracle in the garden. She brought a bucket of water in from the pump and poured it into a pot on the stove. As she bent over to stoke the fire, a pair of fingers poked into her sides.
Shannon jumped and whirled around, nearly smacking Michael in the head. “Are you trying to frighten me out of my wits, Michael?” she demanded.
He grinned. “Never.”
Shannon turned back to her soup pot. “How went the day?” she asked.
“Well enough,” Michael answered.
“Did the old man agree to up Archer’s wages?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
Shannon turned around and shook her wooden spoon reprovingly. “Michael…”
“He wasn’t in a good mood. I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
“Where’s Kris?”
“Walking.”
“Miracle’s in the garden.” Shannon took a cutting board from a peg on the wall and slapped it onto the counter. “Give me those potatoes, and go talk to her.”
Michael obediently lugged the bag of potatoes from the corner to Shannon’s side. “Why should I go talk to her?” he asked. “It’s nice in here.”
Shannon shot him a withering glare. “Because you can’t drag a girl here from halfway round the world and ignore her,” she said.
“I haven’t ignored her,” Michael answered.
“I’ve noticed,” Shannon said. “So go talk to her.”
“And what do you want me to say?” Michael asked.
“How about, ‘Will you marry me?’” Shannon said, chucking a board-load of potatoes into the pot and splashing hot water in all directions.
There was a long silence. Then, “That’s not funny, Shannon.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” she said. She turned and looked at her brother. “What did you bring her here for, if it wasn’t because you love her?”
“I’ve never said that,” Michael said. “I brought her here because she needed help.”
“And because you love her,” Shannon said. “Anyone can see that. Miracle especially. It’s not fair to pretend you don’t.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” Michael said. “It’s not that simple.”
“What’s so complicated?” Shannon asked. She moved closer and sat down, wiping her hands on her apron. “You and Kris and Stocky have been hiding the truth from me—all of us—since you got here. And if I start to hint at what happened in Fjordland, Miracle gets a look in her eyes that makes me afraid to ask further. But you’ve never kept secrets from me, Michael. Tell me what happened.”
Michael looked away for a long time. “I can’t,” he said finally.
Shannon stood and returned to her soup pot. “All right,” she said.
* * *
“The soup’s getting cold.” Jenna, a teenaged girl of the clann, placed the lid back on the pot and looked at Shannon. Rain pattered on the dark windows.
“Let it,” Shannon said. She closed her eyes. “Where are they?”
An old woman, grey hair piled on her head, stood from her rocking chair with a creak and began to pace the room.
“Sit down, Grandmother,” Jenna said, approaching the old woman. The woman called Grandmother—the only surviving member of the older generation of O’Roarkes—shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “Let me walk it out. It’s so much like…”
“Hush,” Shannon said sharply. “Don’t say it.”
Thunder crashed, and all of the women jumped. Jenna’s older sister Cali let out a long breath of air and rubbed her pale cheek.
“Grandmother, do sit down,” Cali pleaded. “You’re making me nervous.”
Grandmother O’Roarke stopped for the moment and jerked the door open. Rain blew into the cottage in a cold blast.
“Do you see anything?” Grandmother called out, shielding her eyes with a hand. A voice called back from the yard. “Nothing.”
“I wish she’d come in,” Shannon muttered.
“She’s in a tree,” Jenna said. “The rain won’t pelt her so hard under the leaves.”
“I know she’s in a tree,” Shannon answered. “Safest place to be in a lightning storm.”
“Oh…” Jenna paled under her freckles.
Grandmother O’Roarke shut the door and sat back down in her rocking chair. She lowered a wrinkled hand and smoothed Miracle’s hair away from her face. The northerner was on the floor beside the rocking chair, knees hugged to her chest, staring away
at nothing.
“Well,” Jenna quavered, “I’m going to eat something.”
No one answered her.
Jenna had just succeeded in maneuvering across the crowded floor with a bowl of soup in her hands when the door blew open and a flash of lightning outlined a dripping figure. Cali screamed, and Shannon leapt to her feet, only to sink back into the rocking chair an instant later, breathing in fast, shivering breaths.
“Don’t scare us like that, Lilac,” she said.
Lilac O’Roarke wrung out her skirt on the doorstep and brushed a lock of dark, curly hair out of her eyes. “Someone’s coming,” she said. Her face was pale.
“Is it Michael?” Shannon asked. “Has he got the children?”
“No and no,” Lilac said. Stark fear lit her eyes, though courage tried to rise up and meet it. “It’s a man in black, on horseback. I wouldn’t have seen him if it weren’t for the lightning.”
Miracle was on her feet before anyone else had time to react. She threw her dark cloak around her shoulders and flung the door open. She was too late. The horse outside the door neighed, and the man in black looked down through the open door into the firelit room. Miracle stood frozen in the doorway.
Shannon appeared on one side of Miracle, and Lilac stood on the other. “Leave us alone,” Shannon said. “You have no business here.”
The man declined to answer, instead throwing back his hood. Miracle gasped slightly. “Christopher?” she said.
“That is my name,” he answered. His face held no expression. “I’ve come to tell you to run. All of you. Where are your men?”
“Searching for the children,” Miracle said.
“They won’t find them,” Christopher answered.
“Where are they?” Shannon demanded.
“Did you hear what I said?” Christopher asked. “Run. Get out now.”
“We can’t leave until we know what’s happened to the children,” Miracle answered.
Christopher pounded his horse’s neck in frustration, and the animal stamped its foot. “I will come to you later,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you need to know then. For now you have no time.”
Miracle turned to Shannon. “We can trust him,” she said.
“The sea-caves,” Shannon said, looking bravely up at Christopher. “Come to us there.”
Christopher nodded and drove his heels into the horse’s side. Thunder rolled as horse and rider disappeared into the black night. When Shannon, Miracle, and Lilac turned back to the room, Grandmother O’Roarke had Cali in her arms. Both were crying.
“Is it happening all over again?” Cali sobbed.
Shannon wiped a tear from her own eye. “Get up,” she said. “Bring cloaks, blankets—a little food. Nothing else. We’ll come back for the rest.”
The wind had increased to a gale when they quitted the cabin. It blew against them as they trudged over the fields toward the sea. A flash of lightning illuminated a hillside to the left, outlining the silhouettes of ten men. Shannon waved and jumped, shouting through the wind.
“Michael! Here! Come to us here!”
It was doubtful whether the men could have heard her voice through the storm, but the lightning that had revealed the men to the women also revealed the women to them. They ran down the hillside. Michael gripped Shannon’s hand with one hand and Miracle’s with the other.
“What are you doing?” Michael shouted through the lashing rain. Another flash of lightning etched the pale faces in the darkness.
“The Order is here,” Miracle answered. “Christopher warned us to get out.”
“To the sea-caves, Michael!” Shannon said.
Michael opened his mouth to say more, but a thunderclap drowned him out. He nodded and waved for the men to follow. Together, the rain-drenched group of refugees headed for the shore.
* * *
The fire crackled brightly inside the dry cave. Shannon held her hands over it as she listened to Michael speak.
“The black-cloaked men—the Order of the Spider—were in Fjordland when I arrived. They were looking for a Gifted one. Miracle.” Michael closed his eyes. “I know I should have turned for home the moment I saw them there, but I couldn’t come back and tell you I had failed. I went out to retrace Father’s footsteps—to find his hope for myself, and perhaps his power.” He grimaced. “But I was a fool. I fell and broke my back. I should have died.”
Michael looked up and met Shannon’s eyes, though he spoke to them all. “Miracle came to me in a tavern and healed me. When she left the tavern, the Order was waiting for her. I couldn’t let them take her without trying to help. Kris and Stocky and I followed them to the fortress of Ordna, and we got her away. The man who came to our door is one of the Order, but he helped us for Miracle’s sake. He betrayed his own kind to do it.”
“And now he has come to rescue her again,” Shannon said. “Or does his benevolence reach all who are Gifted?”
Michael hung his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
“We have to tell her, Michael,” Shannon said. “Our secrets have not kept anyone safe.”
Michael said nothing. It was Grandmother O’Roarke who took up the tale of her clann, addressing herself to Miracle.
“We were always a small clann,” she said. “But a special one. And there was no more special man than my nephew—Thomas O’Roarke, the father of Michael and Shannon. He was what some call ‘Gifted.’ Some said he worked magic, but we knew it was a Gift given to him. He married a beautiful girl.”
“Molly Sullivan,” Kris said.
“Yes,” Grandmother O’Roarke said, nodding her sage head. “Molly. She looked like you, Shannon.”
Shannon smiled, but did not look up from the fire.
“Thomas left us before his marriage to make a journey to the north,” Grandmother O’Roarke said. “He returned with this grey-haired menace, Kris of the Mountains—and he returned changed. Gifted, as I said. He married and started a business in the town. It went well—those were good days for us. But then, as people came to recognize Thomas’s Gift, they became hostile to us. We could never understand it. True, Thomas could be unnerving. He always seemed to read a person’s thoughts. But he was a good man and never used his gifts to harm anyone. And then one day they came. The black-cloaked ones. They spoke to Thomas, and when he came home that day he was angry. He said they had wanted him, and he refused to join them.”
Grandmother O’Roarke’s voice cracked. Jenna and Cali were quietly crying in a corner. Lilac was stirring the straw around with the end of a stick, a stricken expression on her face. Jack, Andrew, and Patrick, the younger men of the clann, guarded the cave entrance and paced far from the fire. They said nothing.
Grandmother O’Roarke regained control. “One night—during a terrible storm—the villagers came to our homestead. They burned it down, trying to get at Thomas. Our brave men and women would not give him up, so they were killed: every last one of them. Only Michael and the other young boys escaped, with Kris.”
“And you, Grandmother?” Miracle asked.
“I was here,” she said. “In this very cave. With the girls and the babies, the tiny children. When the night was over, Michael had become our chief.”
“We thought it was over then,” Michael said. “Kris and my father had brought roses from the north. We tended them as a memorial, and as a sign that Kris would stand by our family so long as the roses bloomed. They would not die, for Father had planted them—and something of him was in them. Kris told me to come to him in Fjordland if we ever needed help. Then he left us, and we rebuilt our lives.”
“Why did you come to the north again, Michael?” Miracle asked.
“Because our children are Gifted,” Michael said. “All of them, we think. The villagers begin to see it. And for a few days last fall, there were black-cloaked men in the village, asking about them. Asking about Father; about us. We have always believed it was they who caused the villagers to attack us. They left, but I knew it wasn’t ov
er. I went to Fjordland to seek protection. You know what I found there.”
* * *
Rain pelted the window of the train car. The children of Clann O’Roarke huddled together in a corner. The old man who sat across from them, thin hands resting on carved wooden armrests, smiled from under his black hood. But his smile, Archer thought, was as unnatural as a flying serpent.
The man’s eyes were boring into him, but Archer refused to meet the stare. He tightened his arm around Moll. Her face, framed by curly hair, was streaked from crying. She had cried the entire way across the Channel—a weird voyage that Archer remembered in colours of green and grey. The pitching of the waves still thumped in his stomach. The smell—strange, bittersweet, sorcerous smell—was still in his nose. Moll had kept him busy comforting, busy being a leader, so he had not given in to fear during the journey. Fear wanted to overwhelm him, but he kept it at bay. It lay low behind his eyes and gave him a headache. Moll lay curled up against him now. His head still ached. He kept his eyes on the little one’s curly head and avoided the old man.
“Tell me your name, boy,” the old man said. “We should not be strangers.”
Archer met the man’s eyes for an instant. “I am Archer O’Roarke,” he said.
“A strong name,” the old man said. “It suits you. I am Master Skraetock. And now that we know one another’s names, we are friends.”
“I’m Moll,” piped up the little one under Archer’s arm. Archer pinched her, but Skraetock was already nodding.
“Moll,” he said. “Your aunt’s name. They must have named you after her.”
”Did you know her?” Moll asked, awe sketched across her face.
“We were good friends,” Skraetock said.
“You’re a liar,” Archer said, as much to make Moll stop talking to the man as to confront him. “If you were a friend, you wouldn’t have brought us here.”
“There you are wrong,” Skraetock said. “I have brought you here to protect you from those who fear you. They would destroy you if they could.”
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