Child of the Prophecy (10 page)

"Who's been here?" the woman asked the children. "Tinker lads playing tricks? I'll have something to say to your sister when she gets back, make no doubt of that. Leaving the two of you alone with a tub

of wash water, that's asking for trouble. Still, this'll go down well with a bit of cabbage and a dumpling or two." She made a quick movement with her hand, the one that held the knife, and then, only then, she half-turned, and I saw the fish hanging limp in her grip, indeed transformed into no more than a welcome treat for a hungry family's table. I was powerless. It was too late. The greatest sorcerer in the world cannot bestow the gift of life. A freezing terror ran through me. It was not just that I had done the unforgivable. It was something far worse. Had I not just proved my grandmother right? I bore the blood of a cursed line, a line of sorcerers and outcasts. It seemed I could not fight that; it would manifest itself as it chose. Were not my steps set inevitably toward darkness? I turned and fled in silence, and the woman never saw me.

Later we heard news from the settlement of the girl's disappearance. A search was mounted; they looked for her everywhere. But nobody mentioned the dead fish, and the children were too little to tell a tale. The incident became old news. They never found the girl. The best they could hope for her was that she'd run off with some sweetheart, and made a life elsewhere. Odd, though; she'd been such a good lass.

After that, it became more difficult to get to sleep. Riona stayed in the chest. I could imagine her small eyes looking at me, looking in the darkness, telling me truths about myself with never a word spoken. I did not want to hear what she might have to say. I did not want to think about anything in particular. I knew a lot of mind games, tricks Father had shown me for focusing the concentration, strategies for shutting out what was not wanted. But now, none of them seemed to work. Instead, my mind repeated three things, over and over. My grandmother's voice saying, Scruples, Fainne? Darragh, watching as I made the fire with my pointing finger. Darragh frowning. You're a danger to yourself. And a little image of a red-haired girl, weeping and weeping, frenzied with grief, eyes squeezed shut, hands clutching her head, nose streaming, voice hoarse and ragged with sobbing. She, of them all, I wanted out of my mind. I could not bear to witness so wild a display of anguish. It made me want to scream. It made me want to cry, I could feel the tears building up in me. But our kind do not weep. Stop it! Stop it! I hissed, willing her away. Then she raised her blotched and tragic face to me, and the girl was myself.

After an endless winter and a chill spring, summer came and the traveling folk returned to the cove. I passed my fifteenth birthday. This year, when I might have roamed abroad free of Father's restrictions, I did not climb the hill to see the long shadows mark out the day of Darragh's arrival. But I heard the sweet, sad voice of the pipes piercing the soft stillness of dusk, and I knew he was here. Part of me still longed to escape, to make my way up to the secret place and sit by my friend, looking out over the sea, talking, or not talking as the mood took us. But it was easy, this time, to find reasons not to go. Most of them were reasons I did not want to think about, but they were there, hidden away somewhere inside me. There was that girl, and what I had done. It didn't seem to matter that my grandmother had made me do it; it didn't seem to make a difference that I had intended only to scare her, that I had been prevented from changing her back in time. It was still I who had done it, and that made me a murderer. I knew what I had done was an abuse of the craft. And yet, all that I had, all that I was, I owed to my father. To save him, I must be prepared to do the unthinkable. I had shown myself strong enough. But I did not want anyone to ask me about it. Particularly Darragh. And there was another, even more compelling reason: something my grandmother had said one day.

"There's a further step," she'd told me. "You did well. You did considerably better than I expected, in terms of the end result. But it's easy to tamper when you hate; easy enough, when you don't care. You may need to do more than that. Tell me, Fainne, is there anyone who is a special friend? Anyone you are particularly fond of?"

I thought very quickly, and blessed my grandmother's failure to master the skill of mind-reading.

"Nobody," I said calmly. "Except Father, of course."

Grandmother grimaced. "Are you sure? No friends? No sweetheart? No, I suppose not. Pity. You do need to practice that."

"Why? Why should I? What do you mean?"

She sighed. "Tell me, what things are most important to you?"

I framed my answer with care. "The task I have been set. That's all that is important."

"Mm. Seems easy, doesn't it? You go to Sevenwaters, you insinuate your way into the household, you work your magic, and the task is complete. But what if you become friends with them? What if you like them? It may not be so easy then. That's when the real test of strength begins. These folk are closely tied with the Tuatha De, Fainne. You will not hurt one without wounding the other."

"Like them?" My amazement was quite genuine. "Become friends with the family that destroyed my mother, and took away my father's dreams? How could I?"

"You'd be surprised." Grandmother's tone was dryly amused. "They're not monsters, for all they did. And you've encountered few folk here, shut away with Ciaran at the end of the world. He did you no favors by bringing you to Kerry, child. You'll need to be very canny. You'll need to remember who you are, and why you're there, every moment of every day. You cannot afford to relax your guard, not for an instant. There are dangerous folk at Sevenwaters."

"How will I know who—?"

"Some will be safe. Some are harmless. Some have the power to stop you, if you give yourself away. That's what happened to me. See that it doesn't happen to you, because this is our last chance. You'll need to beware of that fellow with the swan's wing."

"What?" Surely I had not heard her properly.

"He's the danger. He's the one who can cross over and come back when it suits him. Watch out for him."

I was eager to know what she meant. But try as I might, she would tell me no more that afternoon. Indeed, she seemed suddenly in a very ill temper, and started to punish me with sharp wasp-like stings for each small error in the casting of a spell of substitution. It became necessary to concentrate extremely hard; too hard to ask awkward questions.

I learned about pain that summer. My grandmother's earlier tricks were nothing to the punishments she inflicted on me when she thought me defiant or stubborn, when she caught me dreaming instead of applying myself to the task in hand. She could induce a headache that was like the grip of an earth-dragon's jaws, an agony that turned the bowels to water and drained whatever will I might once have summoned to aid me. She could pierce the belly with a thousand long needles, and cause every corner of the skin to itch and burn and fester, so that one screamed for mercy. Almost screamed. She knew I was young, and she would stop just before the torture became unbearable. What she thought of my strength of will she never said. I endured what she did, since there was no choice. My father could not have known she would treat me thus, or he would never have left me to her mercies. I learned, and was afraid.

She showed me, one night, a vision that struck a far deeper terror in me.

"Just in case," she said, "you think to change your mind once you are gone from here. Just to erase that last little glint of defiance from your eyes, Fainne. You think I lied to you, perhaps; that this is all some kind of elaborate fantasy. Look in the coals there, where the flame glows deepest red. Slow your breathing, and shut out all else as you have been taught to do. Look hard and tell me what you see."

But there was no need to put it into words. She must have read in my face the horror I felt as I stared into the fire and saw the tiny image of my father, his strong features contorted, his body twisted with pain, his chest racked with a coughing that seemed fit to split him asunder. Blood dribbled from his gasping mouth, his hands clutched blindly at the air, his dark eyes stared like a madman's. My whole body went cold. I heard myself whispering, "Oh no, oh no." I might have begged her then, if I had had the strength to find words for it.

"Oh, yes," Grandmother said, as the vision faded and I slumped back to crouch on the rug before the hearth. "It matters nothing to me if this is my son or a stranger, Fainne. All that matters is the task in hand."

"M—my father," I stammered. "Is he— ?"

"What you see is not now, it is the future. A possible future. If you want a different picture, it is up to you to ensure you obey my orders and perform what is required of you. Defy me, and he'll die, slowly. You'll do as I tell you, and you'll keep your mouth shut about it. I hope you believe me, child. You'd be a very silly girl if you didn't. Do you believe me, Fainne?"

"Yes, Grandmother," I whispered.

The warm days passed, and the voices of children floated up on the summer breeze and made their way, laughing and shrieking, into the shadowy inner chambers of the Honeycomb. The curraghs sailed out of the cove in the dawn and returned at dusk, laden with their gleaming catch. Women mended nets on the jetty, and brownskinned lads exercised horses along the strand, high-stepping over the mounded seaweed. I lay awake, night after night, listening to the distant lament of the pipes. Though Fiacha came and went, there was no sign at all of Father, and I began to fear I might never see him again. That hurt me terribly; and yet I did not want him to see what I was becoming, to witness my ill-use of the craft, and so in a way his absence was a relief. I hoped he would never have to learn the truth, that in sending me forth he sacrificed his only child to the most foolhardy and impossible of quests, where his own life was the price of failure. As for Grandmother, to her I was no more than a finely tuned weapon, a tool many years in the fashioning, which she would now employ for a purpose of such grandeur I still struggled to come to terms with it.

The summer was nearly ended. Grandmother had made practical preparations of a sort. My small storage chest now held two gowns of a slightly better standard than my usual garb of old working dress and serviceable apron. I had a new pair of indoor shoes as well as my walking boots. A man had made them specially, muttering to himself as he took measure of my misshapen foot. This was a trial. I would have blistered the cobbler's fingers for him; but I needed the shoes.

I had not asked my grandmother how I was to travel to Sevenwaters. It was a long way, I knew that because Darragh had told me; nearly the length and breadth of Erin. But I had no idea how many moons such a journey might take. Perhaps my grandmother would work a spell of transportation, and send me north in an instant with my baggage by my side. In the end there was no need to ask, for one day Grandmother simply announced that it was time to go.

"You'll travel north on Dan Walker's cart," she said, checking the strap which fastened my storage chest. "Very practical, if not altogether stylish."

"Practical?" I echoed in dismay. "What's practical about it?"

"You'll arouse a great deal less suspicion if you turn up with the traveling folk," she said dryly, "than by manifesting yourself in your uncle's hall amidst a shower of sparks. This way nobody'll notice you. What's one more lass among that great gaggle of people? Not nervous, are you? Surely I've worked that out of you by now. Use the Glamour if you must. Be what pleases you, child. These folk are only tinkers, Fainne. They're nothing."

"Yes, Grandmother." Her words did little to settle the nervous churning in my stomach. I knew I must be strong. The task I undertook for my grandmother, her terrible work of vengeance against those who had slighted our kind, must be pursued with the utmost strength of purpose. My father's very life was in my hands. I could not fail. I would not fail. Still, I was barely fifteen years old, tortured by shyness and quite unused to the world at large. It was this, I suppose, that made me such a subtle weapon. I must have seemed as innocuous as some little hedge creature that scuttles for cover at any imagined danger.

I took my leave of Grandmother. If she still harbored any doubts, she kept them to herself.

"I almost wish I was coming with you," she sighed, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of that other manifestation she was fond of, an alluring, curvaceous young creature with auburn hair and pearly skin. "There must be fine men in those parts still, though there'll never be another Colum. And I could still cast my net, make no doubt of it." Then, abruptly, she was herself again. "But I can see it wouldn't do. They'd know me, Glamour or no. The druid would know me. So would that other one. This is your time, child. Remember what I've taught you. Remember what I've told you. Every little thing, Fainne."

"Yes, Grandmother."