Page 186

That unsettles me more than it ought to.

In the end, I leave a letter with Maeve. Nothing overblown. Only that I hadn’t wished to leave without a word, and that silence won’t serve for what’s passed between us. I write no accusation, though my hand is near enough to one.

I will have the truth from her.

By the time I come back to the hall, tears have given way to the ragged, practical business of going.

At last, there’s nothing for it.

We step out into the morning.

The horses breathe steam into the cold. Behind us, the women stand together under the paling sky—Maeve with one arm round Ellen, Róisín with her face set hard against whatever it’s doing to her inside. Taskill stands with them like an old tree in bad weather.

Before we turn away, I take one final look at all of us together, as though the sight might be asked of me later and I should like to have it by heart. At the house that sheltered me. At the yard that has known our laughter as well as our grief. At James and Alex beside me, and at those I have come to think of as my own, whether or not blood made them so.

I let the sight of it sink deep, as a man might warm his hands at a fire before going out into the cold.

We take the track south toward Wick Harbour, where the plan is to secure outward passage and part there—Mannie, Amelia, and I eventually onward for Lisbon, while James and Alex make for Dublin. The morning drags itself slowly into day around us. The sea keeps pace on our left for a time, grey and iron-cold. The wind smells of salt and heather and rainfall.

My fingers grow stiff on the reins. Cold keeps finding the gap at my throat no matter how I pull my coat close, and the taste of salt settles on my lips whenever the wind shifts hard off the water.

For the first hour, we say little. The silence between us isn’t an empty one; there’s fellowship in it, and for that stretch of road, it’s enough.

By the second hour, the light has strengthened, though it has not warmed. It’s a thin, colourless sort of light, the kind that reveals everything and softens nothing. Low clouds drag across the sky in bruised swathes, so heavy they almost lean on the land. The road narrows where it skirts a stand of black pines, then bends inland, the cliff path giving way to rougher ground, root-lifted earth, and a stretch of woodland that always looks too dark for the hour, no matter the season.

Even at midday, it can appear like dusk beneath those trees. This morning, with the sea wind cut off, and the sky hung low above us, it looks like the mouth of something waiting to swallow.

It’s there the horses feel it first.

Every instinct in me comes alive, and some part of me that belongs more to prey than man rises screaming before I have a name for why.

Mannie feels it too. I know he does, if only because the easy nonchalance leaves his posture in a single breath.

Then something stirs in the trees.

Not the harmless rush of a bird startled from a branch, nor the quick, furtive scurry of fox or hare through undergrowth. This is heavier than that. Branches shift with a drag and a weight that makes my stomach drop. The sound is wrong not only for its size, but for the confidence of it, as though whatever moves in there has no reason to hide and no expectation of challenge.

Alex and James are off their horses before I have fully turned in the saddle to dismount. Their boots hit the ground almost together. Steel flashes. By the time my hand finds the pommel, they have their weapons drawn and their bodies angled toward the trees.

I look at Amelia at once.

“Stay mounted.”

Her face has gone pale enough to make the freckles stand stark across her nose, but she gives a quick, sharp nod. Her lips part as if she might ask a question, then press together again.

“And if this turns,” I say, “you go straight back to Keiss. No hesitation.”

She draws in a breath that trembles only at the end and answers aloud, “I promise.”

Mannie dismounts without a word. He crosses to her and briefly covers her clenched hands where they bunch tight on the reins. I don’t know what passes in that small touch, only that I watch some of the terror loosen in her face, as though his calm has gone into her by way of his hand.

Then he leaves her there and comes to stand beside me, his attention fixed wholly on the trees.

The unease reaches me a heartbeat before the sound goes. A prickling rush moves over my skin, sharp and instinctive, and in an instant I’m no longer only here. I’m back in those woods fighting the Cú Cídhe. Back before horror stepped out and made this world feel so much smaller.

Then the woods go deadly silent.

It feels as though we are standing inside some sealed chamber, some invisible bubble where sound has no business reaching us.