The Raven Queen (22 page)

‘Pray tell,' said the Morrighan.

‘I know what the Hounds have always known,' said Maddy. ‘I've figured out how this place works. All these years you've been telling people that you are all-powerful, our natural masters, our gods. The truth is, you need us more than we need you. In fact, you're pretty disposable as far as humans are concerned.'

The Tuatha began to mutter among themselves, but the Morrighan gave nothing away. ‘You have no idea what you are talking about, child,' she said.

‘I reckon I do,' said Maddy. ‘Our imaginations make us pretty amazing. Since you were banished beneath the mounds we've grown as a species in so many ways. Yet you've stayed exactly the same. As a race, you know all you are ever going to know. That's why you lost the war in the first place, despite your powers – you could never out-think us. Now look at you, stuck underground, needing human imaginations to keep
your world going, to keep you fed. And you still can't control it.

‘The truth is, this place is ours,' Maddy went on. ‘Roisin showed me that. With enough imagination, a human can make this place do pretty much whatever they want. Watch this.' Maddy waved her hand at the water in the river and it rushed away, leaving a pebbled bed bare beneath the evening sun and a few fish flopping on the stones as they gasped for air.

‘Isn't that amazing?' said Maddy, smiling with mock innocence as the Tuatha began to panic and mutter among themselves. ‘But you did find our biggest weakness. Us humans, we always have to believe in something bigger than ourselves; we've always needed gods for comfort. You exploited that.'

‘Archers!' called the Morrighan. A group of Tuatha ran up behind the monarchs and began to notch silver-tipped arrows into bows. Maddy felt her stomach clench.
I have to do it now
.

‘But if I want to have a god, I can pick whoever I like in here – it doesn't have to be you lot,' she said, as the ground began to rumble beneath her feet.

The Tuatha cried out in panic and looked upstream, where a huge wall of water was bearing down on them as the river rushed to fill its natural place.

‘Archers, take aim,' said the Morrighan.

‘Here's one I quite fancy the look of!' yelled Maddy over the sound of the tsunami. ‘Poseidon, god of the sea and horses, thunder-roarer, earth-shaker!'

The Tuatha screamed as the wall of water loomed above them, casting a shadow before it. The foam at its crest writhed and turned into horses, but they didn't stay white. They turned black, as black as night, and their red eyes burned with rage as the wave began to fall.

‘See, Meabh?' screamed Maddy over the roar of the water as the Autumn Queen looked at her in terror. ‘There's your hate, there's your rage! I HOPE YOU CHOKE ON IT!'

‘FIRE!' screamed the Morrighan as the archers loosed their bows. A deadly cloud of arrows arced through the air and then began to fall toward Maddy, singing as they came. She spread her arms wide to welcome them as the wave collapsed and the black horses raced on. Just before it went dark, she thought,
Why isn't Una singing?

Granda sat by the fire and listened to the rain gust at the window. It was a light and fragile spray, a soft autumn rain that would only mist against the skin. The wind sighed gently around the little cottage, the season too early to give it the strength to howl. George, the little black and white terrier, lay in front of the fire. His muzzle was nearly completely grey now, and when Granda stood up and walked across the room, the little dog merely lifted his sad brown eyes to follow him. He didn't have the energy to jump up and run after him any more.

Granda walked quietly to the door of his bedroom and cracked it open slightly. He could hear his wife's deep, even breathing and see the bottle of pills that sat on her bedside table. Three months on, and she was still taking pills to help her sleep, to stop her from roaming the house or sitting in Maddy's bedroom, crying.

He did that for her now.

Granda closed the door gently. His shoulders slumped and he aged twenty years in two seconds as he opened a door to another bedroom. He sat down on the bed and smoothed the quilt with one gnarled hand and let a tear trickle through the grey stubble on his face.

Maddy wouldn't recognize the room now. The heavy dark brown furniture was still there – their pensions couldn't stretch to getting it replaced – but the shiny embossed wallpaper Maddy had hated so much was gone. The walls were stripped back to the plaster and painted a pale pink and the bed linen he sat on was striped in pink and green. Everything Maddy owned had been unpacked and displayed neatly on shelves. The room was full of her life: her photographs in frames showing her parents and her friends in London, laughing, her books, her worn teddy bear, the trinkets she had taken a shine to. Scatter cushions were propped up against plump pillows and Fionnula had even paid for a leather tub chair and pretty Venetian mirror. It was the perfect girl's room.

‘She'll like it, won't she, Bat?' Granny had asked, twisting a hanky between her hands, tears making tracks on her cheeks as they flowed silently and relentlessly. ‘Isn't it just what she always wanted?' It was as if she hoped that the perfect bedroom would be a
siren call to the missing child, that Maddy would walk back through the door and lay her head down on the pillow, a smile on her lips.

Granda wasn't sure that they had ever really known what Maddy had wanted, but he had told his wife that the room she had worked so hard on was beautiful, that when Maddy came home she would love it. That she would stay this time and she would be happy, just as her mother once had been. And then he guided his wife out with a hand on her elbow, her fingers still strangling her handkerchief, helped her into their bed and poured her a glass of water for her tablets. He sat and watched while she drifted into sleep, her face still creased by grief.

He touched his face and wondered what he looked like. He remembered how Danny and Roisin had looked, their eyes red and teary from the solar flare as they had stumbled from the mound, sobbing that Maddy was gone, that the mound was locked, that there was no way to reach her. Although their eyes had healed, the haunted look never left them. Even Fionnula's face was marked with guilt. What had Maddy's face looked like, he wondered, as she faced the Tuatha? Had they run her to ground, crouched and sobbing, her back to the mound, or had she stood and faced them? He smiled. He was willing to bet everything he had that his granddaughter had stood straight and proud at the end.

He got up and closed the door on that perfect room, a room that was cleaned and aired every week, ready for a girl who could not find her way home. As the fire snapped and popped in the grate, Granda took his coat down from a hook by the door, wound a black wool scarf around his neck and pulled a flat cap on to his head. George looked up and wagged his tail half-heartedly as his ears caught the jangle of keys.

‘Stay,' said Granda sternly.

The dog sighed and dropped his head back down on to his paws.

Granda stepped out into the autumn night and eased the door shut behind him. He thrust his gloveless hands into the deep pockets of his coat and walked up the road, in the direction of the castle. As the rain blurred his eyes he thought about what could have happened to Maddy.

Perhaps Danny and Roisin were right. Perhaps Maddy had died on the other side of the mound. They had tried to go back in after her, but the mist of dreams wouldn't let them pass. The split souls were loyal to the Hound and would not break Maddy's rule that no one passed through them, not even Maddy's blood.

Or would they?
Something had
crept from the mound in the three months since it had been sealed. Something had got through, some creature that made the Sighted's collective hairs stand on end, but it wasn't a faerie. It was
a dark thing that roamed the night and haunted dreams and made babies whimper in their sleep. Villagers locked their doors against it, but for different reasons. The Sighted were terrified that the creature belonged to the Tuatha and that it had come to seek revenge for what Maddy had done. The Unsighted locked their doors and windows because locking the night out eased that nameless dread. He had done it too, sick and sore as he was in grief, in fear that he would lose another loved one, another grandchild or perhaps his wife to the thing that stalked the lanes and roads around Blarney.

But it was only when little Stephen Forest was found crying and confused in the middle of the road, half asleep in his pyjamas, claiming he had seen Maddy, that Granda had begun to wonder. The child's mother had shushed the boy and hurried him away, fearful of adding to her neighbours' grief. But no one knew better than Bat that only children tell you what they
know
they have seen, not what they
think
they have seen.

So here he was in the dead of night, walking toward that cursed castle, with only an iron cuff on his wrist to protect him if something went wrong. His heart hammered in his chest and he had to concentrate hard to slow his breathing. His steps rang out, rebounding off the stone wall on his right to bounce and echo across the square. He kept his eyes fixed on the end of the lane,
where it spread into the car park of the castle. As he watched, something stepped from the shadows.

It was a huge black horse, with burning red eyes. The tarmac of the road bubbled beneath its hoofs and steam curled from its flared nostrils. Its rider was small and cloaked from head to foot in black, its face hidden in the dark. It urged the horse on toward Granda at a walk and the rider hissed when he stopped dead. The two of them stood there, facing each other, while the horse fidgeted and steamed in the cool autumn air.

‘Danny and Roisin told me the things that were said to you beneath the mound,' said Granda. ‘They told me about the poison Meabh poured into your ears, what she tried to turn you into. I think she'd be happy if she saw you now, Maddy.'

The rider hissed again and the horse took another step forward, but Granda squared his shoulders and held his ground.

‘If you hadn't run off so quick, Maddy, you could have talked to me about what being the Hound meant,' he said. ‘Meabh was only ever going to tell you what it suited her to have you believe. I never got the chance to tell you what the Hound really is. The Hound is loyal, loving, enduring, steadfast and true. You are the best of us, Maddy. Only the very best mortal, with the most human heart, gets the job of standing vigil on a watch
that lasts their whole life. That's why I know you can't hurt me. You're the best of me and I love you, Maddy, more than I love myself. And you love too, even after everything you have been through. You are a Hound that would make Cü Chulainn weep with shame.'

His words caught in his throat as the rider kicked the horse forward and it bore down on him at a steady canter. ‘I
know
you could never hurt me, pet,' and he put his arms up as the horse collided with him and then passed through him, freezing his heart in his chest as it went, a cold breath of despair. But still he reached up and his warm hands found a child's thin arms and he pulled the rider close to him, the two of them tumbling to the ground. As the horse screamed with rage and began to drift apart on the air, he hugged that thin body close to him and pulled the hood back from its head. The black cloth disintegrated beneath his fingers, no more substantial than a spider's web. Now there were soft brown curls under his fingers and a small white face, the ridge of a scar marring one cheek. The cloak faded away to reveal grubby blue jeans, a torn hoody, scuffed trainers. But he didn't see any of that because he couldn't stop looking into the glass green eyes that stared up at him, wide and confused, filling up with rain and tears. Long fingers clutched at his collar as her mouth gasped and he kissed those fingers, hugging her
close and sobbing with relief as Maddy's eyes closed and she slipped into unconsciousness.

Sleep closed her eyes and stopped her ears, sucking her down into blue velvet coils. She lay cocooned in clean linen that smelt of sunshine, her body wrapped in a thick duvet, her head burrowing into a feather pillow and a mattress that swallowed every angle of her bones until she drifted, weightless. There were no dreams any more, no voices gabbling at her, shredding her peace with sharp words. The rooms in her mind were locked and she knew she would return to them only if she wanted to. Now and then her lids eased open and she was aware of bright lights and worried faces. Sometimes people talked to her, but she didn't know if she talked back. Once, her body had been lifted out of its warm cocoon and soft white bread had been laid on her tongue, and salty soup. But it was too easy to drift back into that still, quiet place that cuddled her close.

It couldn't last. She felt the coils loosen and slip away, pushing her forward, forcing her from the deep velvet blue and back toward cold air, sharp edges and a kaleidoscope of colours. Her eyes opened in her room in Blarney.