A Rush of Wings, page 25
Mairead stood at their head, as the wind had shown her, with Cam a few steps behind. At the sight of Rowenna, Cam’s eyes went wide and his face pale, but he stayed where he was, as if rooted to the spot. Alone among the village’s residents, Mairead seemed healthy and well, all gold and cream and blush pink, though a look of fury twisted her beautiful face. Those at her back were sallow-skinned and hollow-eyed, with a haunted air about them.
“So she returns,” Mairead said, her voice sweet and clear. “Having set the devil loose among us, she would look on her handiwork, and put an end to you all.”
“Gawen, go to my father,” Rowenna said quietly. “If anyone comes near him, put a knife in them.”
At once he was off, and Rowenna stood alone save for the wind, facing the monster in her mother’s skin.
“Hello, Màthair,” Rowenna said, the words devoid of emotion. She recalled what Torr had told her in the menagerie—that the touch of a cailleach could strip a fuath of its glamour and reveal its true form. “Won’t you come and give your own daughter a kiss?”
With a smirk, Mairead stepped forward.
“Kiss me if you will, child.”
Still holding fast to the blade Gawen had given her, Rowenna took one of Mairead’s hands in her own and pressed a kiss to her cheek.
Nothing. No slip of the glamour the fuath wore. No frowns or gasps rippling through the gathered villagers as they caught a glimpse of the monster beneath Mairead’s skin.
“You’ve grown stronger,” Mairead murmured. “But did you not think I would spend the time growing stronger too, and in securing the good faith of the people you left behind?”
Pivoting on her heel, Mairead turned to the gathered villagers. She smiled at them, fair and golden and reasonable, and to a one they fixed their eyes on her. Only Gawen watched Rowenna steadfastly, and Cam’s eyes flickered back and forth in agonized uncertainty, between his daughter and the semblance of his wife. Rowenna could see him trying to fight off Mairead’s insidious glamour, and it tore at her.
“It’s been a hard spring in Neadeala,” Mairead said. There was understanding and pity in her words, and a stomach-turning tendril of dark craft. “A spring of unaccountable deaths and works of evil. And where, my lambs, did it begin?”
“When she left,” George Groom shouted, pointing at Rowenna. He was as ready now to level accusations at her as he had been to taunt her true mother. No fuath’s craft was needed for that.
Mairead’s smile grew sadder. “Not when she left. Go back further. Father Osric, I think you’ve discerned it.”
The priest stepped forward. He clasped his hands piously, but his eyes when he glanced at Rowenna were blank, and he spoke as if by rote. “The night this witch claimed her mother died our troubles began. Her brother Liam confided in me—said his sister swore she’d seen a devil. That was the first evil to come to our shores, witnessed only by her. And she claimed it had killed her mother, but here Mairead stands. So what congress did the girl have with that demon? What is it she wanted to hide?”
“I saw her,” Mairead answered, voice low and sorrowful. “I saw her that night, dancing on the cliff tops with the devil himself, both of them in an ecstasy. And when she realized she’d been seen, Rowenna herself pushed me to what she hoped would be my death.”
But Rowenna, standing by and seething, was weak and voiceless no longer. Mairead’s attempts to render her powerless, both in life and after death, had failed. And she would not suffer accusations any longer.
“Enough,” Rowenna snapped, taking a step toward Mairead, who had walked away from her to address the villagers gathered on the shingle. “You’ve slandered me for the last time. And those gathered here may not be able to see you for who you are, but they will before the end. They’ll know you for the demon you claim I’ve had congress with—for a liar and a monster and murderer, who crawled onto these shores to make a meal of my people. We’ll have no more of you, beast. It’s time to drag yourself back into the darkness that spawned you.”
Mairead tossed her gleaming hair, disdain twisting her mouth.
“For a daughter to speak to her mother so,” she said, a hurt note creeping into her voice. “I’ll give you one last chance to leave us, Rowenna Winthrop. Your very presence here is a plague and a curse. You’re not wanted, and if you stay, I’ll be forced to use my old power on God’s behalf. To end you, before you can do more damage.”
Even though Rowenna knew it was the fuath speaking and not Mairead, something in her twisted as the words “you’re not wanted” came from her mother’s own mouth. But she squared her shoulders and shook off the pain of it. She’d come through worse. Been called worse. Broken curses and stood bound to a witch’s stake.
“I go nowhere,” Rowenna said, the words low and dangerous. “I’ve come back for one reason and one reason only—to free my father and the rest of these people by casting you into the sea you came from.”
Mairead drew closer. Her eyes gleamed with a deadly, deepwater light. For the first time, she spoke words for Rowenna alone.
“Little fish,” the fuath taunted. “Drive me into the waves and I will only return, again and again. I will bear a grudge against you and this land for all my long years. Your grandchildren’s grandchildren will know the fear of me, and every one of them will die by my hand. Leave me alive and I will be a mad dog at your heels, the shadows on your path, the ice in winter. You will never be free of the fear of my return, just as your mother never was. And yet she could not put an end to me. All she had in her were feeble wards and charms. She was never enough to serve as my end. No witch ever has been, for you are all less in power than you once were.”
In answer, Rowenna called her wind. It roared down the cliff tops, tearing past the gathered villagers with such force that they were driven to their knees. As it came, Rowenna infused it with her own sharp power, honed through pain of the body and anguish of the soul. The strength of that wind was such that when it struck Mairead, she stumbled back a full five paces and had to throw her arms up to shield her face.
The creature in Mairead’s skin let out an inhuman snarl and, with a sudden downward motion of her arms, unleashed her own craft. The smell of cold stone and salt water Rowenna had learned from Torr’s fuath poured out onto the air, and in the harbor the sea churned like boiling water, pulling itself away from the shore and gathering into a devastating wave. It came rushing back in, a wall of dark water bent on swallowing the entire beach—on engulfing every one of the people of Neadeala and sucking them down into the depths, where the fuath might pick at their bones until she grew tired of them.
Panic surged through Rowenna. Tearing her attention and her wind away from Mairead, she sent everything in her out to the harbor, out to the sea, to shove and push and harry the oncoming water, stealing its power drop by drop, stilling its dreadful rush, softening it to no more than a wave.
That wave crashed against the shingle in a foaming surge, breaking into frothing white water around Rowenna and the fuath’s knees. But it stopped just short of the people of Neadeala, who cowered at the edge of the beach, and they were left standing upon dry land. Rowenna caught sight of Alice Sutherland waiting with her family. There was recognition and a desperate plea for help in Alice’s eyes—she, at least, had shaken off Mairead’s glamour and realized the mortal peril facing Neadeala.
Help us, she mouthed silently, and Rowenna nodded.
“Well done, little fish,” the fuath purred. “You have made yourself into an enemy to reckon with.”
The creature circled Rowenna with slow, measured steps, and Rowenna turned as it did, keeping her face toward it at all times.
“How long can you fight, I wonder?” the fuath asked. “And what will it take to break you? You cannot stand against me forever. I am old, witchling—older and more powerful than you can comprehend. I have outlasted far worse than this little sparring match.”
Summoning its craft, the fuath sent a ferocious blast of it at Rowenna, who was forced to set the whirling wind around her as a shield. Sea-foam and pebbles and sand formed a cloud within the maelstrom of joined powers, and for a moment, Rowenna could see nothing else. There was only this—craft matched with craft, the fuath’s ancient and indomitable, but Rowenna’s young and fresh and furious.
Within the whirlwind, Rowenna felt something—a sudden jolt. A sinking of the heart. At once she fought off the fuath’s power and let her wind die so that she might see.
There stood Mairead, among the villagers. A knife wound scored one of her graceful arms, cut clean through the woolen-work of her kirtle, and black blood soaked the fabric, seeping out from the wound. Gawen MacArthur lay on the shingle at her feet, terribly still, with blood trickling from his ears and nose.
And before Mairead was Cam, driven to his knees, his graying tawny hair caught in one of Mairead’s fists while she held Gawen’s knife to his throat. His eyes cleared for a brief moment as he fixed them on Rowenna. But it was only an instant before they hazed over again, any trace of recognition fading away.
“Athair,” Rowenna whispered. She could not even look at Gawen after that initial glance—it hurt too much. She could not think on that just yet.
At the word, Cam’s face twisted, as if with pain. But still no spark of recollection resurfaced.
“Athair,” Rowenna said, louder this time. “It’s me. It’s Enna. I’ve come back for you.”
“Yes, good,” the fuath chuckled malevolently. “Coax him into casting off my magic and remembering his failings before he dies. That will be the cruelest cut of all.”
“Athair,” Rowenna repeated. “I’m here, and I love you, and I’m going to save you.”
Slowly the comprehension she longed for lit Cam’s eyes, but with it came raw horror.
“Rowenna?” he rasped. “God in heaven, Rowenna, this is no place for you now. We’re a cursed place and a cursed people. Get out while you can.”
The fuath bent, so that Mairead’s sweet face was next to Cam’s.
“I will kill you,” she murmured to him. “And when I’ve done it, I’ll kill the witchling, too, and lap up her blood. Then I will unbind the memory of every soul here, so that all they remember is darkness and fear, which I will tell them was brought about by your wretched child. They will believe me, and cleave to me, and I will be the wolf among them for generations.”
The intemperate wrath that rose in Rowenna at the sight of Mairead holding her father so set fire blazing in every part of her. Without stopping to think or to doubt, she retreated into that inner part of herself where her craft dwelled. She waded unhesitatingly into its fathomless night-dark sea, until there was nothing but water and emptiness and loneliness on every side. Then she took a breath and dropped like a stone.
As it had been with Gawen’s father, she sank and sank, until the weight of her own power threatened to crush her and it felt as though she would never know the touch of the wind or light again. But this time, Rowenna had not been pushed into an act of desperation. She was not about to undertake the last, most bitter work out of a sense of grief-stricken mercy. This time, she was brimful of righteous anger and the knowledge that if she did not do what was required, there was no other recourse for her family or for the people of Neadeala.
Rowenna Winthrop, for all her darkness and sharp edges and faults, was all they had.
And within her lay the secret Torr’s fuath had imparted in the moments before its death.
You will not overcome the long dark of your craft by wishing for some other help or light, the creature had said, lying on the gravel of the menagerie as its wide pale eyes began to cloud over. You will only manage this last work by becoming that light yourself.
Then it had shown her a vision and a memory of its kind in the ocean’s secret heart, where sunlight never shone. The fuath’s people gleamed with an unearthly luminescence of their own, monstrous but beautiful, unquenched by the depths. Their radiance drew all the creatures of the darkness in—the things that dwelled below flocked to them, enchanted by the light, and met death between the fuathan’s merciless jaws.
Rowenna knew that she did not have it in her to become monstrous. Though it was what her mother had feared, and what Torr had desired, her heart bent to the ordinary. To a life lived freely and gladly, with those she loved at her side.
But she could become light. Hadn’t she been doing so in small ways all her life? By keeping the worst of her temper in check. By cherishing her brothers. By serving as a help and a companion to her mother. By knitting the family together in the wake of Mairead’s death. By holding out hope to Gawen MacArthur. By braving pain day after day after day while breaking her brothers’ curse. And by giving Gawen’s father the mercy of a gentle end.
I am more and less than others have wanted or feared, Rowenna thought, still suspended at the breathless center of her own craft. It tasted of salt on her lips and sounded of silence—not even the faithful wind could reach her, this far into herself.
I am neither witch nor saint, yet both at once. Dark-hearted the wind named me, and dark-hearted I am, yet I will cast a light to drive away the last shadow, and set a fire to burn away the very sea.
In the depths, Rowenna spread her arms wide. She smiled into the darkness and, as she’d done so often with the beloved wind, invited that darkness in.
With a turbulent rush, the sea of her power flooded through Rowenna. It burst the dam of her dark heart and suffused her every part—bone, breath, and spirit. And though it was dark, Rowenna shone with it. She blazed like a ship’s lantern, like a beacon fire, like a lighthouse on a cape.
Opening her eyes, she smiled at the fuath, too, as it stood on the shingle with a knife at her father’s throat.
“If I were you, I would let him go,” Rowenna said sharply, and because the sharpness was a part of her, it was also a part of the light. The words blazed out as an injunction, and reluctantly the fuath dropped the knife and stepped away, unable to withstand the force of Rowenna’s order.
Rowenna went to the creature. She stood before it, with Cam still on his knees beside them. With Gawen still motionless on the shingle.
“You,” she said, “will never wear my mother’s shape again.”
Reaching out, Rowenna set one hand on either side of Mairead’s lovely face. A shock ran through the fuath. Terror and hatred filled its cornflower-blue eyes as they widened, and widened, and became staring deep-sea orbs. Its cherry mouth split and lengthened, lips thinning out to nothing, no longer able to hide rows of fishhook teeth. Limbs elongated, fingers stretched and grew extra joints, and mottled scales broke through as the last of Mairead’s shape sloughed from it like shed skin.
The fuath stood before the villagers unmasked. Their cries and sobs and frantic prayers broke over Rowenna like water over rock. She grasped the creature by the back of one unnatural arm and the nape of the neck and dragged it, hissing and furious, into the sea.
When they were waist deep, Rowenna stopped. Though the fuath writhed in her hands, her power and her grip were sure. She was shot through with light and darkness, altogether beyond the comprehension of those who’d doubted her or sought to pit themselves against her growing craft.
Rowenna knew, in that moment, that she could accomplish what her mother had feared and what many desired. She could end the fuath’s life—kill it with water or air or her raw, flaming touch. How did not particularly matter. Her craft would remain unbroken by the act. She would remain unbroken by it.
But it was not her choice. It never would be. Her sharpness and her love, her darkness and her mercy, were bound up with one another. They were pieces of the ward and the curse that was her own nature, and she could not be other than who she was.
Had Mairead seen her daughter clearly, she would never have been afraid.
“Little fish,” Rowenna hissed at the fuath, bitter and merciful all at once. “So you named me and so you will be. Don’t doubt that I could kill you—I have that strength in me and more. But I choose to put the lie to your words instead. To show that in the end, I am not bound to your will or your certainty. I follow my own path, and I will lay you under the same fate now that you laid out for my brothers.”
The fuath struggled, eyes fixed on Rowenna, its expression frozen in a rictus of fear.
“I curse you,” Rowenna Winthrop snapped, power cutting through the words as the wind and the sea churned about her, joining their craft to her own. “I curse you to become smaller and less. To be bound to a thousand forms, every one of them little and mindless and powerless. Your lives will be short—no more than the span of a year—and during that time, you will be hunted to the ends of the sea as you have hunted my kin. Over and over, you will die in terror, but it will not be by my hand. That one mercy I grant you at the end.”
Drawing the fuath up so that its vicious face was near her own, Rowenna shook her head.
“You never should have touched my mother,” she said, her voice low and fierce.
And with that, her power swelled, forming a curse fit for a monster. The creature in her hands fell apart, disintegrating into a shoal of glistening silver minnows. They fell to the surf like raindrops, inconsequential in their size and fear and desperation.
For a moment they hung in the water about Rowenna, a constellation of insignificant stars. She stirred, and with a few gleams of sun on scales, they panicked and were gone.
Rowenna turned. Everything within her felt weighted with lead, but she forced one foot in front of the other and waded back to shore. The heady power in her was fading, but work still waited to be done. Hurrying across the shingle to where Gawen lay, she dropped to her knees at his side.
“Stray,” Rowenna whispered, cradling his head in her hands. He lay so still, struck down by the fuath’s power, but she had broken that in the end, and surely she could right this very last wrong. “Come back to me. I forbid you to die—you’re my light and my darkness and everything in between. I won’t let you go.”
