Stone Song

Chapter 1

“W
e’ve got Gentry in the audience tonight.”

Sorcha Kavanaugh felt the hair on the back of her neck rise and her fingers curl instinctively around the iron strings of her harp.

“How many?” she asked.

“Dunno,” said Tommy, perching his lanky frame against the dressing table and beginning to tune his fiddle. “Could be just the one I saw, but it felt like more.”

Tommy Carrell didn’t sound worried but, unlike Sorcha, Tommy didn’t have any special reasons to fear the Fae.

“What did the one you saw look like?” she asked.

“Tall and pretty,” he said.

“They’re all tall and pretty,” said Sorcha.

“So they are,” said Tommy. “And it doesn’t do to be caught staring at them. They come for the music, Sorcha. You know that. We play what they ask and pay them no mind, and in return they leave us alone.”

Except, of course, when they didn’t.

Tommy was mostly right, though. When the Fae turned up at the bar, the strange immortal creatures usually sat quietly and listened, but only because it suited them to do so. Music was one of their pleasures, and there were almost none among them who could make it now.

Occasionally the Fae sent a note—and a drink—to the stage and asked to hear the old music.
Sean nós.
“Unaccompanied singing.”

That was the dangerous part.

“They’ll come for you.”
Sorcha could hear her grandmother’s voice in her head—musical as a bell—though the woman was dead these five years.
“If they hear that voice, they’ll come for you.”

She resisted the urge to peer out the green room door and search the crowd just yet. It wasn’t smart to be seen looking for
them
.

After her parents had been killed when she was just six, Sorcha had been sent to Gran’s with nothing but a pink suitcase and her father’s beloved fiddle.

The woman from social services, who had picked her up in a car smelling of juice boxes and Cheerios and driven her to the rambling old farmhouse in Jamaica Plain, had explained to Sorcha how lucky she was. Sorcha had family to take her in. A grandmother. Someone to love her. Unlike most kids in the system, Sorcha wouldn’t have to go into foster care and live with strangers.

But Gran was a stranger to Sorcha. Her parents had never spoken of her, never taken Sorcha to visit the peculiar house in JP, which had once sat on acres of land but was now tucked at the end of a quiet suburban street.

It was so different from the home Sorcha had shared with her parents that it felt like another planet. There was never any music in Gran’s house. No instruments, no radio, no television, and certainly no singing. Gran had confiscated Sorcha’s fiddle the day she’d arrived, hiding it away in the attic where she thought Sorcha wouldn’t find it.

But Sorcha had always been able to feel the fiddle’s presence, and whenever Gran was out, Sorcha crept up to the hot dusty space under the eaves and practiced as her father had taught her. When Sorcha was away from the house and chanced to hear some tune, she’d commit it to memory in her head and then find it again on the fiddle’s strings, as though it had always been there, waiting for her.

Gran never found out. But once, when Sorcha was twelve, Gran caught her humming while raking leaves. Sorcha hadn’t even realized she’d been doing it. The day had been crisp and still with the first bite of autumn chill in the air. Sorcha had been alone in the big yard that surrounded the house, the remnant of the farm it had once been, when she’d felt a stirring that came from deep in the ground. There was no one around to hear her, and the tune had risen up out of her throat like a spring.

The leaves had danced to it, swirling into piles around her knees, until she was encircled by a high wall of autumn gold. Faster and faster they’d spun, drawing all the fall color from the yard into a vortex, a maelstrom, with Sorcha at the center.

She hadn’t heard Gran yelling, hadn’t seen her running across the lawn, screaming at Sorcha to stop. But she’d felt the long wooden spoon when Gran struck her with it, hard across the shoulders. And she’d felt the music fall away from her and back into the earth like the death of all joy.

That’s when Gran had told her about the Good Neighbors, the Fair Folk, the Gentry. It was bad luck to call the Fae what they truly were: ancient, bored, tricksy, and cruel. The unfeeling race that had once ruled over man and made war on Sorcha’s ancestors, the Druids.

Gran said the Druids had won that war long, long ago, had freed humanity from the yoke of the Fae’s tyranny. But then the remaining free Fae had allied with the Romans and over the centuries, with malice and spite, had hunted the Druids to near extinction. A few had escaped and gone underground, while those who were able to suppress and hide their power blended in with ordinary men. It was easier for some than for others. And if it turned out to be hard for Sorcha, if she could not contain her voice, the Fae would find her, and kill her.

Just as they had her parents.

Fairy tales and nonsense. Sorcha hadn’t believed a word of it. Her parents had died in a car accident. There were no such things as fairies.

But Gran’s wooden spoon was real enough, and Sorcha learned to fear it, if not the Fair Folk.

After that Gran forbade her to sing in the choir at school, because it might attract
them.
There were no concerts for Sorcha either, because
they
liked such gatherings, and if she was foolish enough to sing along, the Beautiful People might hear her.

The other children at school thought Sorcha’s gran was some kind of Bible thumper. She wrote notes to the principal forbidding Sorcha from attending school concerts and told other parents that Sorcha couldn’t visit their homes or ride in their cars if they listened to the radio or turned on the TV.

Sorcha didn’t bother to correct their impression of Gran. It would only make her seem stranger to have it known that Gran didn’t own a Bible and never went to church. That she piled stones in strange patterns and spoke to them and whispered to the trees, when she thought Sorcha wasn’t listening.

There was another reason Sorcha didn’t tell anyone else about the Good Neighbors: doubt. If Gran was right, and Sorcha was wrong, then there really
was
something to fear, and she’d heard often enough that names had power. If Sorcha spoke of the Fair Folk, she might conjure them to appear, and they would take her away to fairyland, which, according to Gran, had nothing to do with laughter or winged sprites and everything to do with cruelty, torture, and death.

Sorcha tried to make Gran happy, tried to swallow the voice that rose in her when she hiked the Arborway or rowed down the Charles River, but when she was finally out of Gran’s house and away at college, she couldn’t deny the force inside her.

There was music everywhere at the university, calling to her, and there was music inside Sorcha that wanted out. She could feel it trembling at the tips of her fingers, rustling in the back of her throat. Sometimes her whole body seemed to be a sounding board for any music that happened to wash her way.

When Sorcha changed her major from English to performance, Gran cut her off without a penny. So Sorcha put herself through school. First, she transferred from her liberal arts college to a conservatory in Boston, and when she surpassed her teachers on the fiddle and the
cláirseach,
the Irish wire-stringed harp that had called to her the first time she’d seen it, she went abroad to seek more advanced instruction.

She’d slept on the floors of bars and played in public houses across the length and breadth of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, anywhere the old music still lived. She’d played for bed and board and lived cut off from the digital age, with no cell phone, no computer, and no GPS. She’d hiked on foot to secluded cottages where old men taught her forgotten lore—and sent her away with the same warnings as Gran: keep her voice hidden from the Fair Folk.

She hadn’t believed them, either. Not until she ran into the Fae herself, in a bar on New York’s Lower East Side. The encounter had cost her dearly, and she had been lucky to escape with her life.