Page 172 of A Winding Wave of Magic
The two of them bristled at each other for a full minute, and for a moment, I wondered if both might transform into seals right here in the office just so they could wallop each other properly. It was clear now what was responsible for their feverish support of living openly as fae. Doing so killed Aoife’s father. My great-uncle.
Above the door, a clock chimed three.
I stood up. “I should get back. The last ferry to Inis Oírr leaves in thirty minutes.”
Aoife nodded and stood too, along with Caomhán. They walked me to the door of the house and opened it. Children’s laughter floated through the air—the sounds of a raucous family unit, built mostly on strong women.
Something else we had in common. Or once had.
“Thank you for having me,” I said honestly. “I hope to come again.”
“You’re welcome next week for lunch,” Aoife said. “And whenever you need to talk. About anything at all.”
“I—” I stopped, unsure of what to say. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sure I could trust them—that doubt was completely gone at this point. But I didn’t want to endanger them anymore than anyone else involved in this strange plight of mine.
“Thank you,” I said again. “I appreciate it.”
“The thing aboutmurúcha, we’re clannish creatures,” Aoife said. “Once you’re in, it’s for life. There’s no one you can trust more than family.”
She set a thick paw on my shoulder. Certainty and knowledge flooded my system, along with the memories of a girl on the knee of a dark-haired man I recognized as her uncle. My grandfather.
She squeezed and let go. “Welcome to the family, cousin. You need anything—anything at all, mind—don’t hesitate to ask.”
49
ST. JOHN’S EVE
Why, Girl, did you come to my door?
Or why could you not be stopping?
— ANONYMOUS POET, “THE STARS STAND UP”
“I’d take a jumper. It’ll get cold once the sun sets.”
Caitlin was waiting in the living room of Gran’s cottage when I came out of the bedroom, smoothly a summer dress patterned with irises that I’d found at a thrift shop in Kilronan. I was charmed by its pattern as well as the cheery disposition of the woman who had made it sometime in the early nineties, judging by her haircut. She’d taken it on a first date, based on the memory, and the optimism of that night was something I’d been happy to take with me for all of five euros.
Caitlin held out the sweater, one of Gran’s that I kept on a hook near the door. As soon as the wool settled over my shoulders, several memories converged, talking over each other like clucking chickens. I walked to the table in the kitchen, where the bowl of water I’d taken to keeping in the center was waiting.A quick dip of two fingers split the memories, and at my urging, they all faded back into the wool, leaving me in peace.
Caitlin watched with the expression I’d come to recognize over the last few weeks: dubious but begrudgingly respectful. Though initially, she was against the idea of me spending one afternoon a week in Kilronan (“Sure, and a house full of merrows will spirit you away!”), she couldn’t deny the success of Aoife’s advice.
It seemed there was something to a shifter’s ideas about elemental power. With access to even a little bit of water, overlapping visions could more often be distilled into a linear stream. Histories to only two or three stories instead of an infinite garble. Yesterday, I had even kept Caitlin out of my mind for a solid minute before she found a way in.
“You’ve a long way to go, but you deserve a night off for all your progress,” Caitlin had said.
And so I was wearing a dress and preparing to attend my first party...ever.
It was St. John’s Eve, a nominally Christian holiday papering over a much older pagan tradition, which people all over Ireland commemorated with bonfire parties, music, dancing, and general merriment until the wee hours of the morning. We started at the local church, where a short evening Mass was held in Irish honoring the eponymous saint. I had been raised nominally Catholic—more for the sake of history than because anyone in my family gave a hoot about religion. Gran’s relationship with the church seemed mostly a product of nostalgia, as though the occasional Mass reminded her of a person she used to be, a life she used to live.
As we entered the little kirk, I wondered, and not for the first time, why Gran or the Connollys bothered with religion at all, considering the theory that most deities were actually fae who made their powers evident to plain folk. And then there was thefact that many who had done so were persecuted, hunted, and killed by institutions like the Catholic Church for a better part of two thousand years.
“I think you just answered your own question,” Caitlin murmured next to me with a wry lift of one brow. “Better the devil you know, isn’t it?”
I looked around the pews at the crowd assembled for the night’s merriment. Although I doubted all of them could fit into the church, there were less than a few hundred people who actually lived on the island, and most were rooted in families that went back several generations. This was the twenty-first century, but the air of provincialism was thick. It wasn’t hard to imagine the difficulty a small town like this hundreds of years ago would have with a fae family who refused to abide by local customs.
And the truth was, most of us, fae or plain, just wanted to fit in no matter where we were. Even if we couldn’t.
After the priest finished the Mass, everyone followed him down the hill to the beach, where a house-sized bonfire had just been lit. Several others could be seen around the island as the sky began to darken, either in front of larger houses or perhaps in the center of a circled hamlet. A few pinpricks of light glowed on the shores of Clare, just across the water, as well as the neighboring island of Inis Meáin.
