Authors: Helen Falconer
The Changeling
Contents
About the Book
‘I am here for your little girl,’ said the woman. A banshee. A woman of the fairy hills.
Aoife knows something is wrong when she spots a small child alone, out on the heather. A child no one else can see.
After that, everything changes.
Her parents make a strange confession.
They believe their human child was stolen by the fairies, and that Aoife is the changeling left behind in her place.
Shocked by their story, Aoife turns to quiet mysterious Shay. Together, they embark on a dangerous journey which overturns everything they thought they knew about fairies.
A story dedicated to Alana Quinn
9th March 2001 –
6th July 2005
BOOK ONE
PROLOGUE
T
HOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO,
IN THE WEST OF
I
RELAND
. . .
He was a handsome boy of seventeen when he chanced on her, washing her red-gold hair in the soft water of a pool surrounded by hawthorns. She looked up at him and smiled as she wrung the water from her hair – and that was the end of everything for him. He forgot his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, his duties as a young warrior of the Fianna. And when the girl slipped feet first into the pool, he threw aside his cloak and sword and followed her.
At first the water only came to his knees, but very soon it was up to his waist and then to his shoulders. It was as cold as ice. The hawthorn blossoms floating on the surface gave off a sweet, dizzying scent. The girl smiled back at him, her red-gold hair floating out around her on the surface of the water. He held out his hand but she took another step further into the pool and the freezing water closed over her head. And, a moment later, over his.
Wahu
: Greeting used in the west of Ireland,
possibly derived from the Irish
Ádh-thu
(luck be with you).
CHAPTER ONE
Aoife was texting while picking her bike out of the flowerbed, when the phone slipped from her grip, skittered across the dry-stone garden wall and disappeared. She climbed after it into the field behind the house and poked around in the nettles with a stick, finding first the main part of the phone, and then the casing off the back. It was while she was trying to get at the battery without being stung that she found the tiny heart locket half buried in the earth.
She fixed her phone, then rubbed the heart clean. The dirt was hard to shift, as if the locket had been lost for a long time. Scraping with her thumbnail, she found that the gold underneath was engraved:
Eva
. Interesting. Aoife was ‘Eva’ on her birth certificate, although everyone, including her parents, called her by the softer version of the name. She flicked the heart open and found two portraits – one of her parents looking ridiculously young and the other of a pink-faced baby. Even more interesting. Her parents had lost all their photos in the move from Dublin, so this was the first time she had ever seen a picture of herself under the age of four – there had been no Facebook then, keeping its eternal record.
She tried the locket on. She had a slender neck, but the fine gold chain was meant for a little girl and she could only just fasten the clasp. As it clicked into place, an image sprang into her mind – two little girls with glittering wings, wandering hand in hand through the long grass of this field. Herself and Carla, years ago, playing at ‘follow the fairy road’. She turned to see if the ‘road’ was still there, and it was – a narrow stripe of paler green that ran straight from where she was standing, up the steep slope, then over the high bank at the top of the field. A badger run, perhaps, or the sign of a stream hidden underground? As little girls, they had never made it over that thorny bank. Now Aoife was filled with a desire she had long forgotten: to see if the road continued on through the next field, and if so, where did it—
Her phone beeped. Then beeped again and again – incoming texts, stacked up while she was hunting for the battery. All from Carla:
orange too tight
Im so fat
where are u
u there?
help
WHERE ARE U
Aoife texted:
not fatwear the orange, dropped fone, ON WAY 20 mins
Carla texted:
HURRYUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Aoife scrambled back over the wall into her garden, ran the bike down the side of the small house and out of the front gate, threw her leg over the crossbar and set the stopwatch on her Nokia. Her record to Carla’s: nine minutes, thirteen seconds. She hit
START
and shot down the narrow flowery lane. The potholes had got deeper in the last two weeks of solid rain, and she was forced to swerve or risk her wheels. Two kilometres on, she came up behind Declan Sweeney’s tractor and had to wait for him to turn left onto the Clonbarra road before herself heading right for Kilduff. She picked up speed, past the garage, the empty estate, left at the shop. A steep sweaty climb in the sun, standing on the pedals, up past the GAA pitch where a game of Gaelic football was in noisy progress, past the builder’s huge three-storey house, the secondary school, then downhill all the way to the Heffernans’, skittering to a halt outside the yellow dormer. She dropped her bike on the step, checked her time – nine minutes, fourteen seconds – ‘
Aargh!
’ – took the stairs three at a time into Carla’s room and collapsed, panting, full-length on the bed. ‘
What
are you on about? That dress is pure gorgeous on you.’
Carla was contorting herself in front of her wardrobe mirror, judging herself from every angle in the close-fitting orange dress. ‘It’s not. I’m a pig. Nothing fits me any more. I wish I was beautiful like you.’
‘Don’t talk crap. You’re gorgeous, everyone says it.’
‘Ha ha. Sinead admired my curves?’
‘Carl, she’s just jealous of your boobs. And that dress is perfect for showing them off.’
For a moment Carla brightened – ‘You really think?’ – then she checked the mirror again and her freckled face fell. ‘No. My arse is way too—’ A faint beep, and she stopped to scrabble through a pile of clothes like a dog after a rat, emerging triumphant with her phone. Then panicked. ‘Jessica says what are we wearing to the cinema? What will I tell her?’
‘Snapchat her what you’ve got on, ’cos that’s what you’re going in.’
Aoife’s phone also vibrated. It was Killian, asking was she going on Sinead’s birthday trip – like he’d ‘forgotten’ the whole class was invited.
‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’
‘Vodafone top-up reminder.’
She never lied to Carla, but Killian Doherty, with his ridiculously pretty looks, was Carla’s crush. Not only Carla’s, unfortunately. Half the girls in their year – and the years above and below – had already gone out with him, yet every time he dumped the latest one (by text) Carla prayed (literally, in church, to God) that it would be her turn next. Which was why Aoife had also lied – or at least, not told – about the builder’s son trying to chat her up at last month’s Easter disco. (She had ignored him then, the same way she’d pretty much ignored his texts ever since, but still he failed to get the hint. Did he imagine she was
shy
around him like the other girls still waiting their turn? Good joke. Maybe he was one of those boys who was only interested in what he couldn’t get.) ‘Come on, Carla, let me do your face, I’ll make you irresistible.’