The Changeling (19 page)

Looking at the butterfly and frowning, Caitlin said, ‘So I’m wondering . . .’

Throwing the butterfly into the air, Shay said, ‘And I’m wondering, how long are you going to keep poking that damn knife in my friend’s face?’

Caitlin’s eyes narrowed; she turned her shoulder to him and leaned even further forward on her stool so that it tilted under her, and held the blade even closer to Aoife’s eyes. ‘So I’m wondering . . .’

Aoife fought the instinct to pull back her head. Keeping her voice low and steady, she said, ‘Wondering
what
?’

Ultan said warningly, ‘Caitlin.’

‘I’m wondering, are the pair of ye changelings at all, or just a couple of filthy, spying, dirty hu—’

Shay stood up and slapped the knife out of Caitlin’s hand so hard that it flew across the courtyard and straight out of the same narrow aperture through which he’d flicked the bone.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘
Humans!
’ The girl was on her feet, pointing at both Aoife and Shay. ‘
Humans!
’ Her hands were shimmering with violet flame, and Ultan was yelling at her, ‘Don’t do it!’ and Shay was shouting, ‘Not her, me – just me!’

Aoife’s veins were flooding with cold acid – not slowly, like when the cat was savaging Donal, but very fast – and a moment later it discharged from her fingertips and rushed across the courtyard so that the space between her and the changeling girl became for a split second a dark watery blur.

Caitlin flew into the air so high that only the net prevented her from continuing over the wall and down the face of the pyramid. ‘Aargh!’ She crashed down again, striking her forehead on the bronze fountain, and lay slumped with her face in the bubbling water, hands still fluttering with blue flame.

Ultan yelped, ‘Jesus . . . Danu . . .’ He rushed to lift her out of the water. ‘You all right, Cait?’

As soon as she got her breath, she shoved him fiercely aside – ‘I’m
grand
. Don’t be
mithering
me . . .’ – and clambered to her feet, spitting out water like it was poison, furiously drying her hair with her fiery hands – the water steaming, as if she were using heated straighteners – before finally calming down and announcing to Aoife with impressive nonchalance, ‘Grand so. Not too shabby. You’re one of us for sure.’ But then she snarled at Shay: ‘But
you
 . . .’

Aoife pushed in front of him; she was shaking from the explosive discharge of physical energy, exhilarated to have experienced such natural power. To find she could knock someone flying so hard, without even laying a finger on them . . . A dark joy filled her. ‘Don’t you touch him, or you’ll have me to deal with!’

‘I’ll do my own fighting, thanks all the same.’ Rolling up his sleeves, Shay moved out from behind her into view of the changeling girl. ‘And I have some serious powers, psycho-girl, so if I was you, I’d back off now.’

‘Yeah? Then why didn’t you use them on me, hey?’

‘Didn’t seem right, two against one. Plus I wasn’t anxious to turn you into a wrinkled old crone if I didn’t have to.’

Ultan flinched. ‘Oh, by Jesus . . .’

‘
Danu.
’ The girl’s already pale skin went slightly whiter, so that her coppery freckles darkened. She said quickly to Aoife, ‘He can do that?’

Aoife lied as convincingly as she could: ‘He surely can. You want him to show you?’

‘No, God . . . Danu . . . I’ll manage without that particular transformation, thanks.’ Caitlin drew back and looked Shay up and down, with something between doubt and reluctant awe. Then she smiled – a black gap where her right canine tooth should have been. ‘Grand so. Sorry I doubted ye. Let’s start over. Fact, it’s good we ran into ye. Me and Ultan, Donal and Trish, we were a team. Now it’s just me and Ultan. You two can join up with us.’

She stuck out her hand to Aoife, who hesitated then shook it, but only for a split second – ‘
Ow!
’ – because it was still shockingly hot from having been gloved in fire.

‘Sorry – forgot about my power.’ Laughing, Caitlin went to get three of the four leather bags from the corner. ‘Now we’ve captured that cat-beast we can buy our way into Falias for a few days. Can’t wait to be in a proper city again – the craic there is mighty.’ She tossed one of the bags to Shay. ‘Donal won’t mind you borrowing his kit until he’s reborn.’ She plumped down on her stool and started pulling out the contents of one of the other bags to show to Aoife. There was a bronze knife, some silver wire, a long coil of rope with a hook tied to one end, a small purple blanket and a leather flask. ‘You can have Trisha’s kit. Everyone gets mostly the same stuff. Hey, what’s this . . .?’ She gave the bag a last frowning shake upside down, and two old pre-decimal coins fell out – a sixpence and a halfpenny; also a lipstick and a black-and-white photo. ‘Didn’t know Trish was still carrying around her bits of human trash. No wonder she had bad luck.’

Aoife picked up the photo. It was of a girl of about eighteen in a flared skirt, and a boy of the same age in a parka jacket; they were standing under the eaves of a thatched cottage with their arms around each other. On the back of the photo was written in pencil,
David and me
, with a shaky heart drawn around the words. ‘What happened to her?’

‘Ran after a pooka – thought it was some human boy she remembered from the surface world. I yelled at her to be careful but she flung her arms around it, and of course it shape-shifted and went for her throat.’

Ultan made a noise like he was going to be sick and went to stare out of one of the long narrow slits in the wall.

Caitlin was busy opening the third kitbag. She said cheerfully, ‘My own kit came with this extra yoke in it – very useful if you want to know anything about anything.’ She pulled out a book about thirty centimetres square and several thick. A pattern of gold hawthorn blossoms was pressed into the cover, and what looked like beads of red glass were stitched in bunches to the leather, clearly representing berries. She passed it over to Aoife. ‘You can read it if you like.’

‘Thanks.’ But when Aoife opened it, the pages were covered in crude lines grouped in different patterns. ‘Is this actual writing?’

‘You can’t read Ogham? It’s the old druid language.’

‘Can
you
read it?’

‘Yeah, course, the druids showed me.’

Ultan snorted without turning round from the window.

Caitlin snapped, ‘I
can
so read Ogham!’

‘Sure you can – that’s why we’re always getting in such a mess. Like when you told Tricia all shape-shifters were female.’

‘I still warned her to be careful, didn’t I? Anyway, it’s a really old book – of course it’s going to be wrong some of the time.’ She said brightly to Aoife, ‘Want me to read some of it to you?’

‘Please.’

‘The recent stuff is the most interesting.’ Caitlin opened the book near the end, cleared her throat importantly, and began in a sing-song story-telling voice, her eyes travelling back and forth across the page, ‘One day this big fat ugly human priest saw the queen of the underworld riding a white horse across the bog and he fell in mad love with her even though he wasn’t supposed to because he was a priest, and he followed her to Tír na nÓg and tried to kiss her. She told him to get lost because she was going to marry the Beloved the next day, and that pig of a priest got in a lunatic rage and stabbed her loads of times with an iron knife . . .’ Aoife was beginning to suspect that Ultan was right – the girl couldn’t read but was just repeating in her own plain-speaking way something she’d been told. ‘And then the people of Danu brought the queen’s body off to the islands, and they pulled the tunnels down behind them, so never again could a filthy human pig enter this land. And the beasts went wild, and things got a bit out of hand. So the queen’s Beloved, who the people of Danu had left behind to look after the place, sent the queen’s precious baby daughter away for safety. And then he called back the changelings from the surface world to help him sort everything out with their amazing powers.’

Leaning forward, very interested, Aoife said, ‘I did feel like I was being pulled here. I felt so sure I had to go down.’

Caitlin closed the book and shoved it back into her bag. ‘And now you can join us. We’re using our powers to capture the beasts. And when we’ve caught enough of them and trained them to fight, there’ll be a war against the humans.’

‘
What?
’

Ultan sighed heavily. ‘Don’t worry, she’s making that last part up entirely.’

‘Am not! I heard the druid talking about it.’ Caitlin flicked back her bright red plait, the beads around her neck rattling. ‘And I’m not scared of going to war – I’ve killed a human already!’

Aoife stared at her. ‘You’ve killed . . .’

‘I set fire to a priest!’ She was grinning boastfully. ‘Oh, good God—’

‘Good God nothing. It was absolutely brilliant. My mam . . . I mean, the woman who brought me up, Mary McGreevey, she used to tell me I was an evil, ugly child swapped out at birth for her real baby, but I never believed her. I thought she was just being pure mean because I was this big lump of a thing. But the day I turned sixteen I saw a tiny girl running past my house and I had this really strong urge to chase after her, and she ran into the priest’s garden and his dog went for her, and I threw a stone at the dog and it burst into flames. Then I was really confused, and I went home and said nothing. But Father Hugh came to the house screaming that I was a devil child from hell, and my mam . . . Mary McGreevey, I mean . . . she screamed at me as well, and the stupid man got out his cross like we were in the Dracula film and started praying over me, so I pointed at him to see what would happen and he went up in flames.’

‘Oh, good God.’

‘I’m telling you, it was class. You should have seen his face. And there was my . . . Mary McGreevey . . . going hysterical and throwing her tea over him, but it was no use, he was melting into the lino like butter.’

‘Oh, good God.’

‘Stop saying that! And I ran out of the house and there was that little girl again, and I ran after her, and the next thing I’d fallen in the well at the bottom of our land and I was drowning. And I was sure that I really
was
a devil child and would wake up in hell. But when I woke up I was a fairy and in paradise, and one day I’m going to tell that to Mary McGreevey and see what she has to say to me then about me being ugly and stupid and evil and everything.’

‘Are you from Ballinadeen?’ Shay looked pale and shaken.

Caitlin stared at him. ‘How do you know that? I don’t remember seeing you around.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have—’

‘Why not? Where are you from?’

He hesitated, then said, ‘Further back.’

Ultan said, ‘The Glen?’ with an odd catch to his voice.

‘Thereabouts.’ Shay turned back to Caitlin. ‘I’ve heard that story about the priest. I heard his robes caught on the McGreeveys’ open fire and they couldn’t save him, and the daughter ran off in a fright and drowned.’

Caitlin laughed harshly. ‘Is that the aul lie they’re telling everyone?’

Aoife was astonished. ‘I didn’t hear about that.’

‘Because it was a long time ago.’

‘Not
that
long,’ Caitlin corrected him. And then she registered his expression, and her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you looking at me like that for, like you feel sorry for me or something? Did my mam . . . Mary McGreevey . . . Did she die in the fire?’

He said quickly, ‘You didn’t kill her.’

She stuck out her strong, heavy chin. ‘I don’t care, you know, I don’t worry about it – she’s only human, not my real mam. I’ve cut my human ties.’

‘All the same, you didn’t kill her.’

Moving closer, his thumbs hooked in the elastic of his shell-suit bottoms, Ultan said, ‘If you grew up near the Glen, did you ever hear tell about the McNeal boy who went up the mountain and never came down?’

Shay turned to him, frowning. ‘I did, of course. He would have been the second cousin of our nearest neighbour.’

‘Really? I don’t remember ever meeting you.’

‘But they remember you, if Ultan McNeal from the Glen is who you are.’

The plump youth looked pleased, but at the same time rolled his eyes. ‘Well, I’d hope they would remember me. I haven’t been gone very long.’

Aoife said, ‘Oh . . .’ She had just remembered where she knew Ultan from; where she’d seen his picture. On Carla’s nan’s mantelpiece. On a Mass card, the sort people send out to their friends and neighbours on significant anniversaries of a loved one’s death. And he still looked exactly the same as in his picture. ‘Oh . . .’

Shay shot a glance at her, then said to Ultan, ‘How long did you say you’d been here?’

The youth shrugged. ‘Time slips by here. A few months, maybe? If you really did come by that tunnel, I might see if I can dig through, get back to see them for a while.’

Caitlin snapped, ‘You will not.’

‘Ah, Cait, just for a week or so—’

‘No. And stop dreaming about your so-called family and thinking they might miss you. You might have thought they were your real parents, but they knew all along they were only minding you because the fairies had their real child, and that you were an ugly, stupid devil child from hell.’

Ultan said nothing, kicking out the fire.

Caitlin stood up, swinging the kitbag over her shoulder. ‘Come on, we have to get that filthy cat back to Falias, and it’s a week’s walk.’

On the way back down the ruined city, Aoife kept her distance behind everyone else. She needed space to think, to go over Caitlin’s words. All her life she’d believed her parents loved her – hadn’t even given it a moment’s thought. Had they really only been pretending? Wishing all along that she was the real Eva, their own human child? She pressed her fingers to her eyes to hold back sudden, stupid tears. How could they have acted so kind when they didn’t really want her?

Or maybe, just maybe, they had grown to love her. They
had
gone out looking for her when she ran away. She wished suddenly that she had some way of letting them know that she was all right. How long had she been gone? News travelled fast in a small town. They might have already heard about the red-headed girl who had jumped off the cliff with Shay Foley.