Page 62 of Heart of the Wren
“Come with me.” Her voice was clear as a struck crystal goblet. “I can save you from the Wrenboys. Come home with me.”
“No,” I said as loud as I dared. “No.”
Lorcan wept into his hands. “Mairead.” He reached out to her. “Why did you stay away all this time?” He glanced around at the Wrenboys.
I moved slowly towards him. “Lorcan, no. That’s not your sister, remember?”
“But what if it is? You’ve been wrong about so much. What if it is my Mairead, come back to me?” Tears streamed down Lorcan’s face, beading on his beard. “She wants me to go with her. She’s going to take me away from here.” He nodded to the farm below. “Away from this place. For good.”
The closer I got, the harder I found it to move. My feet were like lead. “You have to get away from her, Lorcan.”
“There’s nothing left for me here. I don’t want to be here anymore.” He took her outstretched hand.
“It’s not her!” I said. “Mairead died, Lorcan. She died.”
“And I’m to blame,” Lorcan said.
I flinched. “How are you to blame?”
“I killed her! I was only nine… We were outside, playing… I’d been left to look after her, as always. It was autumn. There were orange leaves everywhere and she was throwing them in the air. She was giggling. She was always giggling at something or other. One of the leaves would catch the wind and she’d waddle after it. I was waving a stick around, pretending I was the Lone Ranger. I didn’t notice how far she’d gotten away from me.”
I covered my mouth with my hands.
“I should have been watching her but I was too busy playing and she drowned! She drowned because of me!”
“You were a child, Lorcan. A child. What happened was an accident. A terrible, awful, horrible accident but still an accident. You have to forgive yourself.”
He shook his head violently. “I don’t deserve it.”
“You do,” I said. “Of course you do. For your kindness, if nothing else. I've seen it in action. You towed my van into your farm and gave me a job because I needed it. You gave straw to the school because they needed it. You gave Carol shelter because she needed it. And you did it all without hesitation. Because you don't know how to be any other way. You have a good heart, Lorcan. A kind heart.”
Lorcan’s brow furrowed.
“I didn’t come here — right when all this was starting — just by chance,” I said. “There are no coincidences, remember? I could have been driving anywhere, down any lane in Ireland, but I just so happened to bedriving down the one you live on. I was meant to be here so I could stop you from making a mistake. We need you here, Lorcan Fitzgerald. I need you here.”
“Mairead needs me as well.”
“That's not her!” Carol found her voice and shouted. “It’s a trick; she’s trying to trick you! Look at her, Lorcan. Look!”
He turned to face not a girl but a woman. Statuesque, baleful, cold, with three small birds on her arm. A robin, a sparrow, and a goldfinch. Her nose thin, her lips full, and her hair long and fair, rippling like the sea in a storm. The goddess Clíona gazed down on him.
Lorcan let go of her hand. “You're not her. You’re not my sister. I want you to be, but it’s a lie.” He sank back on his heels. “I’m sorry I disturbed your brooch but I put it back. I didn’t mean any harm. It was a mistake. It was an accident. It was all… It was all an accident.”
The goddess Clíona, eyes black as pitch, reached out and put a fingertip under Lorcan’s chin. “Come away with me, mortal. Be my groom. I can be anything you desire.” Her features shifted and Lorcan flinched as Pat Lynch stood before him. Without a word, Pat’s face blurred and became mine.
Every fibre of my being screamed at the unnatural doppelganger before me.
Then my double smiled and shifted, becoming Clíona once again. “I can save you from the Wrenboys.”
The Wrenboys shook their cudgels and hollered to the sky.
Lorcan rose to his feet. Behind Clíona, the hole in the trunk of theholly tree widened to become a gaping cave mouth. She backed towards it, still with her finger under Lorcan’s chin. He followed.
“No, no, please, no.” My fingers tapped as I cast every spell I could think of. I clamped my hand on one tattoo after the next, channelling each one, casting them out, into the ether. I whispered incantations, I shouted ageless names — names revealed to me in dreams and meditations, secret names no one else alive knew. None of it made a blind bit of difference.
“I demand a dowry!” Carol flung the poker to the snow-covered grass. “For this man, as close to me as my own blood, I demand a dowry of…this hill!” She pointed to the ground. “This hill, named for you, and everything on it.”
The goddess Clíona stopped at the tree. She took her finger from Lorcan’s chin. “No mortal man is worth so much.”
