 
The Secret of Witch Hazel

by James Comins

Published on Smashwords

Copyright 2018 James Comins

This eBook may not be excerpted or used for commercial or noncommercial purposes without written permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

Other books by this author

Lenna and the Last Dragon

Lenna's Fimbulsummer

Lenna at the All Thing

The Stone Shepherd's Son

Casey Jones is Still a Virgin (for older readers)

13 Stories to Scare You to Death

My Dad is a Secret Agent

Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears

The Dark Crystal: Plague of Light

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Table of Contents

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Epilogue

Acknowlogies and Apoledgements

About the Author

for Sloane

**Part I**

In the town of Calumny Colony, on the day of winter's end, the youngest lads and gels of able body take themselves to the frosty village green, keeping back from the flock of glaring sheep and the four derelict neats and the hairy ring-nosed bull that tends the neats, and they form a line.

I'm in the line.

It isn't really so long a line. Right now there's twelve of us, although I know for a fact Phelim O'Hara will show up late and I know Junie Edwards hasn't finished her workdress. A raunch hoar-mist is up from the mounds of the oldgraves--the newgraves are up on a hill you can't see from the flatland village, unless you're crazy Dacy Jack and live in the hills yourself. Mother Gibbet always says it's death breath. Never smiles, Mother Gibbet. Never smiles.

Tom John is swatting the air with a withy branch, and in the hoar-mist, Thorntown's daughter chucks a well-aimed pebble and it lands on Tom John's ear. Tom goes fury and switches Boad beside him. It takes Boad the better part of a minute to convince Tom he hadn't done it. Eventually Tom John hears the Thorntown girl laughing her clop off some spots down the line, hiding in the mist, and he tries to jab her with the withy switch. Funny thing is, there's a bit of an unwritten rule amongst the kids in the line at winter's end. No one says it, but you don't swap places with the ones beside you. It's rules. Once the line is formed, you stay. So when Tom John realizes his withy won't reach, he doesn't slide over a place for better poking. He'd rather, I'm not guffing, break the line and dash to find a longer branch. When he returns, Taverner the taverner takes it from him and swats him on the breech once and breaks the new longer branch in half over his knee. And that's how things are right now.

A bit of tinder like Tom John might have the guts to break the line, but I don't. I'm staying still, I'm not looking at Chuff to one side nor the Butterfield girl to the other, and in the hoar-mist I wouldn't see much anyhow. In my pockets I've got a luckdoll my sister braided for me before she died. You're allowed to have your hands in your pockets here, it's one of the rules, and I'm running a thumb over the big button on the doll, three times around one way, three times the other, and each time round I say a prayer to my personal saint, I've named him Saint Glimmer the Frog in the Tree, and he's a frog I once saw in a tree and it was night and I made him a saint when I went to pray, and he's my saint, and all he needs to do is shine his eyes at night and all your troubles are lifted from your breast and taken to the God-in-heaven to deal with. That's how saints do it.

It's more than an hour, and the sun comes to the clouds and the clouds are bright white and start to boil and it's day. The of-the-village who care at all turn out in second best frocks and black hats that look either like anthills or like buckets on a well, and they gather on the green with their hands up their sleeves and the mist is melting and now it's just cloud wisps and Wool saunters through the crowd and it's begun.

"Hiring, hiring, lad and hen,

It's morning now, and it's morn we begin.

First day of spring to the last day of fall,

Show your good worth or nothing at all."

Henry Wool is a good half-century, and he's led the line for half that. Built like a crooked piling, his neck is long, tallwise, and sunken-in, inwise, like a waterbird's, and his head's always backbent like he's a rooster calling cookaroo at dawn through a clipped hay-colored beard. Everyone likes him. Likes him so much they call him in from his fields to settle law claims when the ealdor can't sort things out, and after the claim is settled Henry Wool takes both sides drinking and singing till they're friends again. That's the sort he is.

"Yan is the farmer who prospers the plough

Tan is the husband who suckles the sow

Tether's the miller who blisters the grain

Mether's the brewer who waters the lane."

It _is_ always boys first, it's the way of it. I'm not strong enough to bale hay or lift tuns. My arms didn't turn out. That's what my old man tells people. Mam likes to tell people it isn't rickets. She says that first. I've got arms and legs, she says, they're just made for going up, not over. I think I've got limbs like a gel's, softened and skin-and-boney and reluctant. I've got the belly of a lass, too. But in the line, arm strength is first and chiefest of virtues. When I was young I'd watch the farmers bending their arms for the lads, telling them to grip their hairy fists and pull their clenched arms open. If you can't grip to their liking--and I know I can't--then you'll wait down the way to who needs you next. No gel can grip strong enough to lift a tun except Lady Miss Hays. She's worked at the Duck Stout since I was wee.

"Pumpf is the blacksmith who toils the heat

Sether's the butcher who hangs up the meat

Lether's the whitesmith who crowns the king's head

Dove's the good carpenter, keeps snow off our bed."

It's true, by the way. Marysbourne Tenancy's south to us, they've got silver, and they specialize in dredging it out and carting it up to us. Our Jew, White, buys it and works it. Long time since King Charles commissioned a new crown, but he did once. Came from Calumny Colony, although they sent it to Belfast to be gilded in gold, too. Still called the Calumny Crown.

Now it's the song of the women's turn to pick.

"First of the fair are the shearers, raking in the barn

Next are the spinners and carders, pulling wool to yarn

Then the mortars and dyers, making bobbins to glow

And last the goddess-weavers, warping blankets for the snow."

They don't let line-hired weavers make the patterns, so there isn't a need for them to be the most skilled or have any proficiency. They just run shuttles for the patterners. It's arm strength for the gels too, so, and patience, and once in a maker's moon the women choose a boy who's missed the first pass of the men but has got enough patience and not too much pride and who'll card for them. It's not fancy, but it's work. I imagine myself there, and it's not too much shame for me really. Really it's not.

"A town needs a midwife, and she'll have her pick

The abbess needs wailers to keep out Old Nick

The singer and storyer, to keep up the town's will."

Henry Wool seems to sing a bit gasta at the last line:

"And the old fair-woman lives under the hill.

Now that's our song, I've sung it fine

Now choosing be! It's me for a pin'."

And with that, the skelly-town frame of tall good Henry Wool bows and tosses a wave to the colonists (and those who might not always have been so) and saunters off toward the Duck Stout.

Now it's a matter of who picks whom.

Three farmers pass me by. Cuthman's the oldest of them, and his gray chest hair drifts in the carven sunlight and he ignores me and I'm not surprised. About ten more my age have filled out the line by now, and that will be all of us. Junie's dress has some ratty wide stitches, and I guess she's done the last of it while the rest of us were standing in the hoar-mist. She's pulled it on quick and run out and she'll soon see what a half-made workdress will become at day's end.

Billy Tremble asks Tom John to step out and grip his hand. Tom John takes the hand and hefts, and Tremble squeezes right back, and there's a mighty struggle, and at last Tom John roars and snorts and lets out a mighty curse and Billy Tremble slaps him for blasphemy and pushes him back in line.

Boad leaves with Cuthman. Billy Tremble circles back up the line, snapping half an eyeful at my small misshapen body before trundling on to Chuff, tucking a finger around the boy's leathery full muscles, and gesturing him to follow away.

The third farmer, Hagee, lets a thick waterfall of oily saliva leave his mouth in a foul stream and stalks away empty-handed. Sometimes there aren't enough who're strong in arm.

Phelim O'Hara leaves with the husband, but he doesn't want to go. Out loud he says, "It's me for Taverner," but Taverner's here and he says O'Hara goes with the husband or with no one at all, and that's how it is with the spring line. Phelim mutters somewhat about mucking out pigs, taking an overtone of distaste, and the husband calls it indecent cheek to complain at honest toil, and sure and maybe he wouldn't have Phelim O'Hara after all, and O'Hara shuts his gnashers and follows off toward the big barns.

The miller is Brammy Gordon, and Gordon's a sour man whose wife is buried, and the vicar says Gordon now sees skulls under faces, and I can't see skulls even if I try, and the vicar says Gordon's built himself dusty bones from the dusty old mill, and I'm of a loose fear he'll pick me.

Brammy Gordon smells not of bones but of licorice. He's got a tin of the stuff from far parts, and stuffs it into his mouth sooner than let it get away from him. His teeth are fair black, but you can't tell if it's natural or if it's the licorice. The smell surrounds him for ten foot each way, and my mind makes it the smell of a boneyard, only that's foolish.

Gordon stops before Deane Tanner and takes him by the chin and moves his face around. Pouting gruesome, the miller pinches Deane under the eye, tugs an earlobe, lifts the lad's upper lip to see his teeth like a soldier buying a gee, till you'd half think he's hiring an embalmer. Tanner seems hot to rebel, but he'll have O'Hara's scolding in mind, so he takes it. The probing continues to the neck, where Gordon seems to be testing Tanner's glands, as if he's apt for a goiter. Then the nose, and a dark smirk is on the thin man as he peels open Tanner's nostrils, looking for bats up there.

Brammy Gordon takes his time, turning Tanner's face to pudding, and gets to slapping when Taverner steps up once again and pushes the miller away from the line with both hands. And now all is revealed: the miller slips on the melting frost and like a lace-doll lands, body aflail, on his arse and all his limbs fall evenly in each direction, somewhat crooked, like they're not completely his anymore, and his tin of licorice soars like a well-kicked football bladder and all the candies, if you want to call them that, go each way, and the miller begins moaning like the mantlepiece of a drafty topchimney and Taverner is over him and he says, "Not much cover for the smell, was it?" and he kicks the tin out of Gordon's reach.

I've not seen any man on Henry Wool's list struck off it for misbehavior before. Boys, sure. Everyone knows an obstreperous foal needs breaking. Only, bothered with wine as the miller may be, it's fair strange for a public man to be such an intemperate menace. We're all breathing better as Taverner and Hagee drag the miller out of the green.

And Taverner returns. He faces Deane and says, "You've a raw spine, haven't you? You stood where you were."

Deane rubs his nostrils and nods.

"Will you work for me?" Taverner asks. "Lady Miss Hays needs a cart-driver to the coast, one who'll not drink up on the way."

And Deane says, "I can drive," and Taverner says he damn well knows he can drive, but will he do it without cracking open a whisky-barrel? Deane says he will, and off he's sent. Only this time Taverner doesn't leave the green, he's still the hand of reason here; for Henry Wool won't strike lad nor man. So Taverner stays, and the pumpf in line steps forward. The blacksmith.

Again there's not a feather's chance in a barn fire I'd be picked by Mate Graham. Shame, actually. Mate Graham is one of the jolliest men I know. He's the sort who begins his day at the baxter's, where he'll buy a whole row of sugarcakes with molasses that came on a ship from Port Royal, and he'll take the tray to the furnace and roll up his sleeves and strap on his big apron and begin singing, and as he hammers he stuffs his face cheerful, and if you've got an order he'll trade you a sugarcake for your order, and you get to stay and watch him bend oregrounds black to horseshoes and turn out posts and stretch doorpins. So for cakes I'd beg Mam and the old man to reshod Pan's Piper our gelding, and once a year they'd do it. You'd take their scratch and Pan's Piper to Mate Graham, stand Pan's Piper in the cross-stall and steady him by the bridle as Graham and his boy tap in clean shoes, and he'd give you a molasses sugarcake to eat, and you'd get to hear him sing.

I'd like to be Graham's boy.

You might imagine that blacksmiths need to start strong in the arm, but it's not that way really. Smithing starts out with bellows, and one who works the bellows long enough and shovels in enough bog coal from south market will build arms.

I hope that's true and not a lie I'm telling myself.

Mate Graham is going down the line, recognizing faces he knows and greeting them. "Martha Ferguson, hallo, you'll be a wife and a half someday. Brighton Graves' lad, is that me belt buckle? Fine work if I admit it, stay humble afore the Good Book as I do. Ah, there's Blanche Suj'John, I finished your da's gate yesterforeday, hinges good as Scottish. And Lucy Eggy."

"It's Agee." She's gone cross.

"My, little miss, that's a face to crack an Ag!" and he laughs and laughs and Lucy Agee goes red.

"And Francis Mansfield." That's me, now. He's skipped a few he doesn't have trice to say to, but he knows me. He's beardless, with a big face both English and Irish, it's got jolly wrinkles and a smile that lasts for miles with clean teeth inside, his skin is dark as a peach from the heat, and he folds his great arms and he'll craic with me, and I smile and I want him to laugh, I do love Mate Graham in his way, and so I leap forward and hold up my bit of a bicep and I roar like a lion, and it works, he gives me a great duck-laugh and a hug and then I feel a bit girlish and embarrassed and I'm faintly joyed that Chuff wasn't there to give me grief afterward.

And Mate Graham moves on.

"Dooley, you're chipper. Mind the heat, do you?"

"Nossir," says Dooley. And that's Mate Graham.

The butcher is--I don't know his name. Funny. Mam and Da call him the butcher, and our neighbor Don Edwards calls him the butcher, and Taverner calls him the butcher, and that's the butcher's name, is the butcher. He's not Irish, not Scottish, not of the Pale or Wexford, and no one knows him. He keeps, is how we say it. That's what we say, the old lad is a loner, he keeps. It's our way of talking.

Four boys are left in the line as the butcher approaches: There's me, Tom John, Younger McCraigh, although we call him Fitz because his black hair and round face look naught like his White Irish father, and a boy who got named Abednego Born-in-the-House-of-the-Christ Cullough because his daft father went to seminary for a year.

The butcher advances. I'll try to describe him. He's a quiet man, the sort who makes others quiet in kind as soon as you see him. Sometimes you feel cold before you know he's in the room. When he's in your space, you freeze like a beaten dog, waiting to see what comes next. His hair is loose and straight brown, his lips are sour, and while he's not exactly the dusty gravedigger that Brammy Gordon is, he's of a pair of eyes that hunt, and fingers that flex very slowly, as if they're reaching for a knife to cut off heads with. He's tall as a tree, too.

Smells of man's power, the butcher.

A hand like a ham lands not on Fitz, whom he stands before, but on the Butterfield girl. She squeaks.

"Miss," he rumbles. "You've an eye for animals."

The Butterfield girl can be seen most days in the open pasture, working with the calico shepherd dogs in rounding the sheep. Wears no shoes. Carefree thing, the Butterfield girl. Her eyes travel up to the butcher. Bet she's not so carefree now. She nods; an eye for animals. The man must have as much an eye for human beings as for the animals he cuts up.

"Then you can steady them for me," he says, and the Butterfield girl falls to tears where she stands. The butcher shows no expression, but he says, "Tomorrow sharp at dawn."

Sounds of weeping run far from the line as she flees. The girl who loves animals will slaughter them now. I see the sense in it, from a butcher's perspective, but it wasn't kindly done.

White's next. The Jew is thin and his beard is wide and he smiles but not affably. His arms are not enormous, they're sleeved in black cloth like a priest's, but his fingers show decades of diligence in jewelrymaking. My family never once bought silver. It's not our place.

"Catch," he says to me. A coin tumbles in sunlight and lands. I don't move, it would be strange. White stoops and moves to Tom John and snaps the coin. He leaps for it and misses. White sniffs. "Mac?" he says in a family-familiar way. How does the Jew know Fitz? The McCraighs were ancient chieftains once, and I suppose they might have sent for some Gaedelic idolatry piece made of silver. I wouldn't know about Gael affairs. Both my parents came from east of the sea and south of the wall.

The day is open and the crowd wakes and chatters. The lowing of neats rolls over the green, and I badly want someone to tell me I'm theirs. I'm not allowed to make them pick me, but I want them to.

Mac finds the coin on the ground and returns it. White moves on.

"What's your name?" he asks the boy whose father went to seminary. The boy's name is Abednego, he says. White smiles, doesn't throw the coin, and gestures Abednego to follow.

This is it. Me, Tom John, and Fitz, and there's one man left to choose us. Suddenly I'm self-conscious of the shape of my body, my pale stick-arms and stick-legs and skin-ribs and that thing I can do where I make my belly fold up like a vertical kiss by squeezing in my belly muscles. I want for the carpenter, Stub McDougall, to choose me. I could be a carpenter. I can carry wood. I can strike a nail and fit a joist or roof beam. I could do that. My hand grasps my sister's luckdoll and I pray for the correct job and there's cuts and abrasions on my mind to think I'm not for being a man at all and that I'd have to stand in my own humiliation like a very old dog who's lost control of his peeing while women choose me. And then there's the End of the Line, where the one or two most worthless of all wait for the soildrivers and small farmers to claim us, and if there's naught who'll take you in Calumny they send you to Marysbourne Tenancy without telling anyone, only everyone knows everyone in every town, and if you see a stranger in the colony line it's always someone who's failed in another. It's the way.

Stub McDougall points to me. I practically die of happiness, I run toward him and I'm chosen.

He points to Fitz. We're both going, we'll be together. Fitz is right puny but at least he's not a brute. It'll be nice to have company.

Stub points with his missing fingers to Tom John. All of us.

"Stand straight, put your dexter arm out."

The three of us stand together and roll up our white sleeves and make a fist.

I'm going to lose this one, aren't I?

A stump of a thumb touches my bicep and starts to squeeze. Nasty feeling, you can see where they sewed his thumb closed, there's knobs of skin. I try to fight the pressure but I've got naught to fight it with. He presses down to the bone, leaving a hard print that looks near blue from old blood. Blue blood's thought to be English, and I'm Anglian, and that's not best admired by anyone.

For all his vain fury, Tom John's got a flop of fat for arms, but he fights off the Stub-stump anyway.

Fitz has normal arms. Everyone knows he's not a real child, he's ill-born, so no one wants him, but Stub McDougall couldn't give his left stub for birthright. A rude man. Fitz has a chance. I find goodwill enough to muster a good wish for Fitz, who's as hard up as I am to be chosen. Still, I wish the carpenter would choose me, so I'd have a man's profession.

"Lean? McCraigh?" the carpenter says. They come forward, and I drift back. "Have you steady hands?"

They hold up their hands and try not to show how loose with fear they're shaking. Anticipation. McDougall sniffs through a sandy mustache and nods. The villagers part as Lean and McCraigh follow him out from the line where I am condemned to stand my whole life forever.

There's another rule that says once you've found your place in line you stay no matter how you feel. It isn't done for a boy to leave the line early and accept poverty and unemployment as his lot. You find your place and you stay. It's not until midnight that losers like me get to leave.

And that was all the men.

Sun and field. Warmer; no mist. Shops are daubed white and brown, all diagonals and pebbly roofs. They wait for new occupants. The grass is long and new and not yet trimmed by the brutish teeth of ewes. The hiring goes on.

Women.

The first thing you notice, sinking into the melting muddy frost that wibbles under your feet, is that women have a smell. When it's one woman you might not notice, but in the nature of things all of the village women drift closer to form a community. They're wearing blue cloth bonnets or tall Welsh bucket-shaped hats with brims or round wool hats that come around the ear. They surround the gels, giggling and chattering and talking and talking. Mary Butterfield's name comes up, alongside much ill-favored words regarding animals and butchers, although with their hands to their mouths you can hardly make out what the women say. Mam's not one of these gadfly-who-stung-the-sheep types. Sinful, she calls women's voices. Mam stays silent if she's not teaching.

Nanny Hutcheson organizes, she calls out what's what. The women in their starch muslins and bustles and hoops gather to her, jostling elbows and chittering under tall hats. A clap signals the start to the women's choosing.

In fluty voice and elbows-out vibrance, Nanny Hutcheson summons the shearers forward. I know rather few of the women. Mam knows all names, but she's the schoolteacher and probably taught them when they were wee. I know the men, that's easy, but most women are hidden in name to me. All but Mother Gibbet.

The shearers look for those good with animals. I'm sure it's what the Butterfield girl wanted to be, shearing the wool rather than the throat. Poor thing, she'll not have a happy life. Two gels are chosen for shearing and hug each other and the line shrinks. Nanny Hutcheson claps and declares that the line should squeeze together for easier choosing. Women sprint to break rules, even unwritten ones. Out of my mudpuddle I sidestep, sidestep and find myself next to Junie Edwards and the Thorntown girl. Neither were fit shearers, it takes a by-sunlight gel to work in the sun that way. Junie's a by-moonlight lass, a sewer or a spinner. The Thorntown girl is neither for sun nor for moon. She's a madwoman.

Carders, spindlers, corders all have at us. Lasses leave the line. My breath is shame. I'll be chosen of the women. It'll be wool in my fingers instead of wood or wheat. I'm shamed.

Junie watches each pass of choosers with increasing concern, and circles of tears begin to ring her eyes. She catches my gaze and whispers, "We're both for the muck-carts, Frank." I want to impress her as a man should, so I say, "I won't be. If it's the muck-carts, I'll tell them no like Phelim did, and I'll stand in the way if they're for choosing you," but it doesn't make her feel impressed. She just bursts to wailing and weeping and it's gone, I've lost her and said the wrong thing and I'll not now marry Junie Edwards. Just as well, she's a sad little by-moonlight gel.

The goddess-weavers are two. I know them, it's Missus Mercy and Missus Yorkie and they're always together and they wear grand patterned quilts instead of simple hoop dresses, like they're a pair of tapestries from Buckingham walking around. Everyone knows the goddess-weavers are the highest of the working-women, they're not called goddess-weavers for nothing.

Mercy and Yorkie have sly eyes and they're always looking at each other, marching side by side with their hands hidden in their odd priestly quilted tube-sleeves, as if they were twins. They walk in harmony; their footfalls are drumhoofbeats. They take more than one pass at us, drawing their eyes over the shrinking violets who remain. The Thorntown girl spits when they're not looking.

The weavers stride past us again. What are they looking for?

"Not much hand for sewing, have you, Junie?" Missus Yorkie whispers as they pass. Her hand lifts Junie's stitches, which pull out. The dress separates and she's got bloomers on and a plain white corset and ten petticoats you can just see through the loose stitches. The goddess-weavers laugh to each other. Junie has gone stiller than a dead stoat and her workdress is decoupled, she knows she's not to leave the line to fix it and mayhap she's learned about finishing things proper but it wasn't charity to tear her dress. The weavers ignore her. They tell Susan McKeefe to follow them and something has died in Junie's breast, which by the way you can almost see.

I take Junie's hand. It doesn't respond to me. Corpse cold.

That's the end of textile. We're not for sewing. Just as well, says I. Last is the odd ones. These are the outcasts, the peculiars, the rogue's gallery.

Miss Starnlowe is a petite thing with wayward-weary eyes like circles cut in earth. Smiling's not for her, nor chatting, only she's not prim and pious like Mam. The midwife's a worker who gets the job done, and the job is to make sure there's life and not death, and good health and not sickness, and to look after all of women's matters. Not a woman gives birth in Calumny only Starnlowe sees it through. The matter isn't spoken of, but modern prudery comes second after life. Life comes first. Marriage comes before life, and then life, if you understand what I mean. Sometimes we talk around a matter.

With her mouth clam-shut and her lips a pair of bulbs down to her chin, Starnlowe's not pretty and hasn't got a husband, maybe never will, but she's got respect and an underneath-love in the colony in a way that only a lifebringer truly can have. People smile to see her, and lift their hats, and it's few women who receive that from men unless they're gentry.

"Junie."

A kind hand reaches out and shuts the rip in Junie's workdress. The girl shudders and comes to. Her eyes meet Starnlowe's and Starnlowe attempts a smile.

"It's a chill world we have, Junie Edwards. Will you ease the way for others, in and out of it?"

Yes, I forget that. People who die on Sunday see Starnlowe first, then the priest. And she'll doctor to those who can't afford to call out to Belfast or see the prebend.

Junie can't smile, but she manages to meet Starnlowe's eye and nods, chewing her lip.

"I've not had an apprentice for half a dozen years, since Ellen sailed away. I'd welcome the help."

From Junie, the faintest "aye." And it's settled.

It warms me to see the lass employed, even clutching her poor bit of dress. I'd not wish to see her on the muck-carts. Only, attending birth won't always be by-moonlight, there'll be much of marching through ice and wind for her, only she'll be strengthened. Junie'll be more human now, and less of a soggy oatmeal bowl.

Again the rest of us step closer together, only I'm the anchor and don't move. It's because I'm a boy.

And now.

Past noon.

No one will have me.

We're coming to the End of the Line.

Weeping begins to catch at my eyes. Inside my pocket I squeeze my dead sister's luckdoll, and it bursts in my hand, the button comes off the straw. I've killed her again.

What's to be my life?

Some days my life is the hand of the Lord reaching down and flicking me in the ear, but the Lord shouldn't act so much like a ten-year-old in boy's pants with a slingshot hidden in His breeches. But some days that's all He is, to me. He's flicking me.

Other days I'm dead ready to sail off to other parts like Starnlowe's old apprentice did.

And some days I'm just standing in mud and am a mannish little scrawn-pig. That's today.

I hope one day I'll see a home war. I'll fight just to prove I'm not a gel. I'll fight. I'll fight Gael or English or both together, if only someone would see me and be impressed and know that this is what men like to do. Shooting off a musket at other men. That's what men are for. And carpentry and things.

I'll do it. I really will.

I won't.

Next is wailers.

Strictly speaking, Mother Gibbet is abbess, but she's not for tromping like billygoats and poppotams through mud. So for some years she's enlisted Sister Molly the shaggy-haired young spinster turned nun, and Molly's enlisted the help of a tall sturdy pair of boots and her not-needed-for-walking iron walking-cane (she's not forty) and her very tall special nun's hat. She's come down past the abbey wall to mingle with laity. There's eight Sisters to run the Abbey plus a few lay-assistants like Mam and a postulant or two each year. The Abbess calls for flock folk at the line and once they choose you they'll encourage you to enlist in the episcopacy proper. And by encourage I mean they insist. If you refuse to volunteer, because you use the Common Book or because you aim to marry, then word will spread and right folk won't marry you or hire you and you'll have to travel. They say Gibbet speaks God's will in choosing who's to marry and who's for nunning, only one look at Molly and you'd think God and Gibbet both got it wrong. Molly is plump and seems a marrying woman, only she's kirk now.

The line's five. Me and four sorry lasses, none of whom want to be chosen, let alone have their future weddings taken from them. Bells and garlands are in each of their ears. The Abbey doesn't take men, so I've got nothing to fear. It's more properly Mother Mary Convent only it was a Catholic abbey before the Reformation of John Knox and King James, and the Irish still call it the Abbey and so do we.

Sister Molly leans on her iron cane, spots a patch of green grass that's not muddy and flings the cane into it so it sticks, pointing up at God.

Don't know if I've said this yet, but Molly's a born bitch.

Clasping her gloved hands, wearing a black habit with no piece of white in it, the habit's dress rather more womanly than a laywoman would dare wear, Miss Molly Sister-Smirks-for-Jesus addresses us.

"What a patronage!" she says. No, the word doesn't make any sense to me either. "What a little steeplery we have. Ah, new sinners upon the world. What place do you have under God? For as I'm sure you know, it is not man but God who chooses our lot in life--"

"It ain't, it's Hank Wool and the gang," snaps the Thorntown girl.

Molly's jaw does that thing it does when she's proper ragin'.

"And man under God does naught but carry out God's word on earth. And here in Calumny Colony," the good good sister says in a particular voice, moving to stand before the Thorntown girl, "here in Calumny Colony it is God's word that the most slatternly and ruthful of little girls shall be taken into His heavenly bosom at Mother Mary's to be _reformed_."

This word means hitting.

"And at the blessed feet of the Mother of God _such promising young duchesses_ will be reborn in the faith."

I can see Thorntown's face. It's right beside my own.

I see realization. Pitfall. Drench. Decimation.

She knows Molly will take her.

Hot with rebellion, the Thorntown girl finally sees what she's up against and her face shoots flame off the front and burns till there is only skull and skirt. It doesn't really, it's just what I mean.

So it's not Junie for the muckcarts of life after all, it's Thorntown's daughter. Molly will hit her till she's naught but powdered bone. Wee pliable things can survive under Molly and Gibbet and the iron cane, and the true-born pious like Mam seem not to wither, although Mam's probably grown more hardened than she'd be if she'd been a seamstress. But for this, our wild horse? The Thorntown girl will probably throw herself down a well. I don't like her, but I should probably say goodbye before she's buried.

"I won't," says the Thorntown girl, and even my enthusiasm to see another fight in the line doesn't overwhelm the sense of tragedy. If she runs away, the whole country will hear of it and give her no quarter. She'll need to stow away to Virginia. But if she stays, she'll go to the Abbey and be destroyed.

Molly smiles in the bad way.

"What was that?" she says.

But none of us are expecting the Thorntown girl to be so quick. She's not one to stand defiantly and get beaten until she relents. No, she's already darted forward to where the iron cane stands like corn, and she plucks it. Together, gel and cane sprint like two rebellious dragonflies and no one runs after them, not even Taverner.

"See you well, my piglets," Sister Molly says, scowling at the remaining girls and managing to find a pointless scathing look for me too, "how the wages of sin are awarded. She will come around and bow. Watch how God's eye follows those who try to elude it, finding you _even unto death I mean it_." Her hands grasp for a cane that's not there, and she turns militarily and stalks off through the crowd, plotting heaven can't even imagine what.

She stops midway as the women part for her like the sea for Moses, spins on a heel and marches back to us. Her sour eye glides over the three shrinking missies and myself.

"Failed to find a proper place in our colony, you lot? Hard work is God's privilege to Man, and if you aren't fit for it, then there's only one place for you. All of you, follow me."

A trio of groans.

"What was that?" snaps Molly.

There's not a few suppressed sobs from the three gels, and not a few from the women in the audience. Uncertainly I follow too, but Molly pushes me in the chest and says, "Not you, thickhead." And three girls slump away to the convent to sweep floors. There's a reason the abbess is third to last in Henry Wool's song. Once Gibbet has you, it's the end.

Now I am truly alone.

Most of the women retreat, chattering, conflicted between anger at Molly and disgust at the wild Thorntown gel. I see Mam standing in the back. Hopeless, ashamed. Her son, her twig-armed spindleboy, has turned to dust and is worth nothing to the town. No one will take him. He is worthless. Even a dead leaf can feed the soil for a farmer. Even dung has worth. At best I'll be allowed to carry the dung and be of equal worth to it. That is my future. Perhaps I'll sail to Ameriga. Perhaps I'll cross the Pale. Perhaps I'll throw myself into the sea.

Mam turns away and walks home without me.

I catch Taverner's eye, and for all his hardness he's not a bad man and sets his jaw in sympathy. Still won't offer me a job, though. I can't lift a tun. I'll never lift a tun. I can barely lift a full mug.

The storyer is named Mary Wheat. She wears a red scarf and a tartan dress and gives me half a look and she's away again toward town.

Midnight. I must stay until midnight.

The crowd fades away. It's only just past noon yet. The town green becomes deserted and forgotten.

Ah, look at him. He's a single stalk of grass sticking out of the mud. He wears proper brown shoes with buckles, a plain overshirt with two buttons, a thin undershirt, a belt so long around a waist so small, breeches no fancier than a muck-cart-driver's, and English stockings. In his mind he grabs a saint frog off a tree and cuts it and cuts it until frog blood comes out and then saint's blood comes out and then he hurts it and hurts it and calls it worthless, he calls it a worthless frog in his mind and then he throws it down a well where it damn well belongs. And pees on it. He says damn to the frog. He says that. He hasn't got a saint now. In place of the frog he invents a secret tree and in the secret tree is a magic hollow and in the hollow is a Pavee eeshi and the eeshi hates everyone and everything and wants to see God fail and for the world to spit and split and she just sits and fusses all the time and it wasn't even a very good frog anyway.

The town green is empty now except for me. Telltale tracks of mud remain, shorn of grass where nervous kids' toes twisted back and forth. The four trees of no particular design stay put where they've always been, with no low branches to climb and shadows too skinny for shade. Not a soul stands with me. You'd almost call the one-person line peaceful, if it didn't symbolize a life demolished. I wonder if the other boys didn't spend all day lifting heavy things instead of memorizing Mam's Reformist verse and inventing saints. To me that's cheating, lifting heavy things. You should work with what God's provided. That's all it is, everyone else is cheaters and I'm never to blame for anything.

When will the muck-carts get here? In my mind I desire to find a reason to accept a life as a muck-cart driver but there's no reason ever to do that, it's filthy and for all my shame I'll never be so low as that, only it would be easier just to slip like a seal off a rock into a local way of life, however filthy, only I know I won't do it I'll run off with the Thorntown girl and we'll move across the Pale and master the language and mingle with the Irish and raise a family of crazy shiftless fitzies.

I won't. I know I won't. I won't do any of that. I'll stand in the line in Marysbourne and go through this whole humiliation again and then I'll just keep going west around the county and maybe I'll just try again next year.

Time dies. Luncheon is over now. Nobody's brought me so much as a biscuit.

And here comes the muck-cart.

The draydriver's just visible if you squint. Brown rags layered and hooded, to hide his face, making him look like a poorly-made doll. Thinking this, my hand withdraws the broken luckdolly my sister made me. The straw is crushed and so is the ribbon and the button's gone and I want to throw it away but all these straw braids were soaked in my sister's spittle and it's the last spittle she'll ever make, unless a spittle bug crawls through the earth into her rotting mouth. But it didn't bring me any luck. It's a bad luckdolly. A badluck dolly.

Sister had fever. If she'd died in winter I could have saved her with a piece of ice, but she died in summer. It's my fault for not being cold enough to freeze water with my bare hands. I'm responsible. They must have run out of luck up in the heaven and that's why she couldn't give me any, and why I couldn't give her any, either.

The cart is taller than you might think, and it's covered with canvas, not arched but flat. From this distance it doesn't smell. The mules are short and speedy, carrying their heads low in shame. The muck-cart--

It's painted black as tar. This one hasn't got mules, I was just imagining them. They're goats, and the goats wear a priest's cassock over each, only they're white, not a priest's usual black, which means they're bishops. Their cloven hooves are shod with tiny silver horseshoes. And the rag-man who drives the cart has long pale fingers.

I name him the Stinking Hell Drover and his four goats Utter Deathless, Miller's Licorice, Dungbasket and Urban XV.

The cart doesn't stop at the edge of the common like it's supposed to. It drives over the lip of the grass like a chisel into the center of the wide square, coming straight for me. There's nothing but four inadequate trees and a flock of frumpy sheep and grumpy neats to defend me. Nobody's watching.

Four cross-eyed goats canter reluctantly up to me.

The Stinking Hell Drover is only a pile of filthy rags. In my mind I make this true. He is a swept-away piece of high city refuse curled around a street corner somewhere dirty like Glasgow, cast-offs of the dark destitute who hide beneath drains. He is a nothing-man, a shabby wisp, and his brown hood hangs over his face like bucked meat from a hook. The hood turns, but there is no face underneath. There is not yet a smell from the back of the cart, but I imagine it's coming.

A voice like clotted sand:

"Climb in, so."

It's a woman. A woman muck-cart driver driving a deathblack cart led by silver bishop goats.

It's the spring line. When you're chosen, you go.

I guess I've been chosen.

I go.

Ten stiff emotionless steps take me to the cart. I touch a goat; it's real and not some phantasm of mine. It's gray and looks at me with misshapen goat eyes and shakes its head in disapproval. It's the one I named Miller's Licorice.

In the row houses overlooking the green, shutters are open but nobody's at the windows. The town's life has been sucked up till it's shut of eyes. It's me and Missy Stinking Hell Drover.

Another four steps and I'm at the feet of the rag lady. Her long fingerbones tap the dashboard and I put a foot on one of Mate Graham's good iron carriage steps and I expect a smell of midden and mire but there's no smell at all. Just rags and wood. I've awoke of fear, now, for I don't know who this person is or what work I've been enlisted for. A gravedigger would smell of grave, and a Pavee would paint her wagon. Perhaps she's a widow who needs a housekeeper and isn't picky? I don't know.

After I position myself on the driver's board as far from the rags as I can but not so far as to insult this my new employer, the rags flick reins and the goats take off. I dassn't ask where we're going or indeed anything else. I keep my eyes strictly down at the white cassocks of the goats, which rumple over their thin backs as they walk, claybags on a potter's sweaty back. Surprising that four of them could pull the tall cart. And mustn't their hooves spark off the soft silver too quick?

The burlap hood beside me has several stitched layers and seems merely to be the top of a single great rag robe. She doesn't stink, so she can't be the Stinking Hell Drover. That's rules by rights. I'll call her Old Hell Rag-missy for now.

Our road is brown at first, then we veer away through Cuthman's field, driving over a stony streambed of near-cobbles until it's only the clear fallow avenue between two fields, one of dry-looking wheat and one of a new root plant from Ameriga called tatties. The fields are little more than green sprouts through yellow now, in April, and the winter was hard and long and didn't leave enough time for much planting. The Rag-missy won't plow them under, she steers around the young shoots. Shortly we're into the fieldways, green checks bounded by mason walls. We hew to a wall and travel. Here now, between stands of bramble, is a wide gate. When we're close to the gap in the thorny bramble, Rag-missy beckons at the wicker-wood gate, and I jump down and unlatch it. The black high wall of the cart trundles through the wall and waits on the other side. I latch the gate behind me, climb back up, and we drive out of the tended fields into the wild.

There's no hills yet, but there's valleys, here. We take much of an hour crossing a wide way where badgers and mice live, then up a dirt track not too far from where the Catholic camp used to be. There's a rumple of rock, nothing that compares to the old Roman Wall that Mam's spoken of, but a generous Englishman might call it hills. Mad old Dacy Jack lives here somewhere, and if you follow the hills it'll take you to the newgraves, if the fair don't have you first.

Off from the main rumple is one big mast of rock. It's not a place I've visited, and no towns come very close to it, nor are there roads. It's called Finn's Giant's Barrow in Gael, and in English we just pretend it's not there.

Rag-missy makes for it.

There's a spinney of scabby trees at the base of the hill and immense gorse brambles around it. From the tallest tree, a knotted manky noose hangs. This must be the Catholic boot hill.

"Down now," Rag-missy says as we pass the noose. I step off the cart. "Pull as hard as you can, and don't let up."

I turn and look at her, but all I see are a nest of rags.

The noose is some way above me, and jumping in place won't do it. Instead I set my hands on the elm's coarse bark and slide upward. Climbing's easy for me, Mam says I'm a marten at heart. It's not so far to leap, sideways, and I kick off halfway up and get my hands around the noose and simply hang by my hands as the hemp knot slithers down.

The brambles part. They seem to be planted on top of trapdoors, and the noose and hidden pulleys pull the trapdoors open. The mechanism must be very good and the roots strong, for the brambles stay attached and I don't need more than my own small weight to open the way.

Reins flick, and the cart is through. Dropping to the ground I hear the trapdoors thump shut, and I squeeze through nigh-impassible branches to the rock sanctum within. The cart waits at the heel of the hill.

Ivy like a wide waterfall covers the east side of Giant's Barrow.

"The one on the right, near the toadstool," Rag-missy says.

On the right of the ivy is a large brown mushroom. Above it is more ivy. Looking closer, I find one strand of ivy thicker than the others. It's rope with leaves sewn on. When I pull, the ivy parts like curtains and the cart drives in.

The ivy shuts swiftly as I release the camouflaged rope. I hurry in to some sort of cave.

"Light a candle," Rag-missy says.

There are piles of fat yellow candles along a ledge barely visible, and there's a scratch-tinder and flint hanging from a hook. I worry I'll ignite Old Hell's rags, but in two minutes of scratching the only thing caught by a spark is my fingertip. I add dry straw from the floor and try again. The thick short frayed wick lights at last, and I take the shaking flame alongside the braying goats into a narrow sort of carriage-cave. There's still not much light.

"Unharness our fine nephews."

There are simple belt-straps under the cassocks, and I set the candle stump on the ledge and free the four goats, who bray with neither joy nor weariness. Goats lack gratitude.

"Take them to the pen."

I see no pen. Walking around this narrow cave, touching the lightly chiseled walls, I find nothing, only a pair of iron rings set in the wall.

Only--

Pulling on a ring, the cave wall swings on good hinges you can't see when it's closed, and there's a tunnel carved in rock. I'd have to duck to get through it.

"Next one," she says. Her voice seems less raspy now, I don't know why.

An odor of manure comes through the next door, only it's not foul, it's farm. The air behind it is fresh.

"Have the droppings out first. Bucket and spade."

I'm not a lad for animals, not like the Butterfield girl, but I know my place in an apprenticeship. Behind the second hidden stone is a straw field on a rock floor. A water trough in the back is full of clammy water with a few straw stalks floating. Bites are missing from a bale of old hay, and a few bags of oats hang like boy's dangles from the wall. The goats have left droppings here and there, and I finish the task and return to the carriage.

"Droppings are for charcoal. Light them with a straw and blow them out again, please," she says.

The straw catches, the fire stays low with a farm odor wafting out, and when there is enough fire I puff, and it's just smoke.

"And oats."

I take some handfuls and lay them in a dry trough. The goats wander in of their own desire and eat. There is, I see, a gap in the ceiling of this chamber and the faintest shine of sunlight. That's where the fresh air is from.

"Close them in. We'll be back daily to tend them. Then help me down."

The door shuts nicely. Long pale fingers reach down from the driving board and I reluctantly put up both my hands and help the brown hunch of rags down the steps like fragile glass.

Rag-missy reveals her face. I try not to stare.

"Are you consumptive?" I whisper.

"Once. When I was younger than you. It passed when I was old enough to court, but my face didn't grow evenly. I've had no illness since, and I'll share no illness with you."

"Yes'm."

She's younger than Mam, who had me late. Older than me by probably two decades, maybe three. She surely looks a score of years older than she is.

"Bring the new charcoal and come inside."

Leaving the black cart where it is, she opens the leftward ring-door and scuppers inside. I follow and pull the door shut behind.

The tunnel's not much larger than an Edwardian castle's toilet. It's been hacked out by a competent mason and has something resembling steps down and through and back up, with clay at the bottommost. The whole way is not more than the length of the cart and goats together.

At the other end of the tunnel is a stone wall. No, a door. Rag-missy pushes through it, revealing a dark room beyond. I still have the lit candle, and I hold it up as we enter a small house. The roof is flat, and there are no windows--no, there's a window in the roof, but without glass.

"Are we underground?" I ask.

Rag-missy makes it clear I'm not to ask so many questions. I set down the bucket.

"Make up a fire. Your bed is in the back room. Tomorrow we'll bury your predecessor."

And now I'm employed, apprenticed. I still have no idea what profession I've been recruited for.

**Part II**

To dreams of old voices I wake. Tweed and straw envelop me. Lightless, no window and no candle. Into the dark, a single spark of light. A heady sleepwake lull. And with a delicate twist of mind, I am drawn to motion.

From pillow I rise as if enchanted. No, I am not rising but descending. I slither on my chest and shoulders to the floor and crawl like a babby toward the spark. I have returned to an ancient womb of consciousness. A sound emerges around me, a decree, a rhythm of horns and viols of distant shores, a heartbeat of tiny bells, and I see that the low spark does not vanish when I cross the doorway but remains. The other side of the small room. I crawl the way I have not crawled since I was an infant.

My eyes accept the dark. A cornucopia of dried flowers on the wall. A chair of woven reeds and rough wood. Baskets piled, full of forgotten brown raspberry and currant leaves from a lost gathering-day. Spare blankets, a crosshatch of dyed green and nearly white. The loom on which they were made is here too, backed against the far wall. A pleasurable odor of lived-in-ness and old quilts and broomcorn bundle-brooms and the ways of one who lives alone. Cachets of herbs line walls, and a top shelf of crockery makes the room a sense of tipping over.

Upon the low reed chair is the spark. Not a firefly, nor a candle ember. It is as large as my palm, and it makes light. As an infant I pull myself onto the chair and straddle the spark and lift it and it's a card, made of strong thin paper, like shingle. On it is painted a picture of a woman pouring water from one pitcher to another over her head. The card shines.

My mind does not question why the card is lit. It is lit. There is no fire. It seems more like golden moonlight.

Turning, I expect to see Rag-missy, but she's not there.

Through the doorway is the second room, the one with a pitched window in the ceiling. It is the only other light aside from the strange card. A sturdy dining table gives me the height I need in order to climb onto the thatch-sodden wood frame of the hole in the ceiling and pull myself out of the house. I desire to breathe sky air.

The roof is grass and sod. It disguises the house hidden within the rock. A rook would see only a meadow. It's constructed, not dug out, and seems not too old. Around the sod roof is the stony hill, crater-like with a slight saddling; the house is inside a shelter of the outcropping of Finn's Giant's Barrow. You'd need to climb bare rock to reach it from the outside, except for the ivy, which wouldn't hold. The night is blue and bright.

Nestled in the corner of the grass roof is another spark of light. I don't know if I'm meant to take it, but I do. The eight of bells.

The next spark is over the saddle of the rock, on the slope of the peak. I follow it down the cliff, skidding on my hands, and it's the ace of acorns, only the wind puffs and I don't grab it. I stumble after it down the hill.

There is a trail. You can see it, a dozen windows of light shining up at the new moon. They lead from Finn's Giant's Barrow down across the heath and toward the old Catholic camp. I don't see Rag-missy anywhere.

The ace of acorns escapes me and flies not down but up and becomes a star.

The rest of the deck I collect as I follow the trail. The heath grows mist out of its back. For more than a mile I walk, picking up cards that now seem to await the day when they can also rise and become stars, stars of staves and kings and suns.

The Catholic camp is made of canvas and rope and a few stone bothies. It reminds me of Robin Hood's merry men. There is no fire in the iron firepit. Approaching, I keep my footfalls silent, for I am not alone.

Two men, Irish and angry, stand in wool leenies and plentiful fur mantles, shivering. It's outside the nature of the natives to gather without fire, but fire is how James would root them out. Da's first lesson to me when I was wee was to stay far from fires on the heath, it's a mark of war.

The last of the shining cards glows from up a tree. Takes only seconds to climb the branch, silent and alone, and then I reach for the card and it rises and it's in Rag-missy's hand. She wears a black cloak over her rags; only her white hands show. The cards stop glowing at once, and she takes them from my hand and tucks them into her cloak.

Voices from the two men. They speak Irish, not English, but luckily Fitz and Phelim both spoke it around me growing up and I can work out what I don't know.

". . . fight for the English against the Spanish, or the Episcopals against the Covenant, when there are invaders in our own lands? For no amount of money will I travel away from my home to fight men who want only to be left alone to serve the Lord the way they choose."

"Funny, isn't it, how we're arguing Church versus Kirk when England's sent their truest Reformists across the ocean to the New World already?"

"Not much for me to laugh at. They've come here as well. Are we to die in Spain or are we to live in Eire?"

"If we won't hail the king and raise his army, it'll be Eire in his sights next."

"Charles wouldn't dare. Not with Scotland rebelling against the crown, too. Not with Parliament roaring. Not with the Dutch at open war. No, there'll be no war against Ireland."

"My hands are growing icicles. Let's start a fire."

"Well, this place may be unwatched tonight, but a fire would change that. If we're to gather a rebellion, this must be our gathering-place; so no fire."

"There's always the old rock."

They both look out at Finn's Giant's Barrow.

"There's eeshi afoot in that place, bless them and their gentle kin. This place has Aine's eyes over it, and the eeshi won't bother us here."

"Fine. I'm satisfied. We'll talk further another day. The remaining O'Neills will not fight on behalf of the Crown, but they won't risk their necks _against_ the Crown without a sign of unity about the clans."

"The O'Donnells will fight the Spanish, but we'll fight the Scotch here first, and then go abroad."

"A week then, and bring the traitor."

The two men in their tartan green leenies and wool shawls grasp hands and separate, stalking away into the night. Now there is nothing but early spring and the sullen past-midnight gloam, and I feel very cold and strangely alone, even as Rag-missy scrambles lightly to the ground. There isn't even woodsmoke, no light, nothing. Just a long-abandoned campsite.

"You're later than I was expecting, but you got here," Rag-missy tells me, approaching the Catholic camp and testing a knotted rope with a cloaked hand. "Tell me what you heard them say."

I'm not dressed for night. My undershirt is thin and I have no stockings to cover my breeches, which only go down to the knee. I wrap my arms around myself.

"They spoke of war, and King Charles, and the Three Kingdoms of England and Scotland and here. I didn't understand all of it."

I think I'll shiver now. There, I just did.

"Ah, your Irish isn't too bad. Good, you'll need it. It's no trouble to get only part the story, often it's all you have to work with. Yes, the men spoke of war against you colonists. Do you know why?"

Calumny Colony hardly seems like a place for war. War happens in barbarian France, or ancient Greece, or on the high seas.

"I really don't," I say. "Have we offended them somehow?"

Rag-missy laughs. "Would you be offended if someone stole everything you had and drove you penniless into the wild to forage for berries?"

"I might be. Are they good berries?"

"Shouldn't think so."

"Then yes, I'd probably be cross."

"Look around you at this place. English soldiers drove the Irish out of the village they'd lived in for centuries. The ones who hadn't a mind to travel or wealth to buy new land to the south, camped here. Look at it. Mud scratched out between two good trees. Rough posts. Canvas to keep rain off, a pit for fire, stumps to sit on, rolls of plain wool and leather for a bed. They camped here for more than three years, watching from afar until they were invited in to the land of a neighboring tribe. Three years without medicine, without a true and honest home, without privacy or doorways or shutters to hold the wind. Wouldn't you be angry?"

"Dunno. I've never slept outdoors."

Under her black cloak, under the rag robe, Rag-missy smiles.

"Then let's try it and you can tell me in the morning. There's wool blankets left here. Take your pick and wrap up warm."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"In the morning."

With no more sense or understanding than I had before, I curl up on a ruined pallet and fall instantly to sleep.

΅

Now I am covered with water. I imagine that the goats have been licking me all night long, but it's just dew, it's grown out of my skin somehow and I'm soppy.

Rag-missy's up, sitting against a post, stretching in the sun. She holds out her hands to me like pinching claws, I don't understand what this gesture means, but she clambers behind me and squeezes my shoulders and I suddenly realize that my entire body's stiff as a poppet full of pins. I let out a gasp as my shoulders work free from the clenching.

"Now," she says as I stand and attempt to move without doubling over in aching, "You had a question."

There are so many really. My mind is a passel of fishermen, all reeling in the pieces.

"Would you help me find a new saint?" I say. "I used to have a frog in my mind only I turned him into blood jelly. Then there was a cursing Pavee but she wasn't an actual saint, she was only a way for me to hate everything without not-being-proper. And I have this--" only I don't have the strawdolly, it's in my overshirt, and that's in the peculiar underground overground house, if there ever was such a house truly. "Well, I haven't got it but my sister made me a doll, but it's sore drained of power and brought me bad things. My sister's a corpse with fever."

Rag-missy gives me a world-whale of a look. Taking my hand, she begins walking back toward her spire of rock.

"I thought you'd do. And you will."

"You thought I'd do what?"

"How do you feel?" she asks me.

"I don't blame the Irish for wanting proper beds. And walls."

"Walls," she repeats. "I'd say they're after wanting fewer walls in the north of Ireland. Why do you want saints? Saints are for Catholics."

"Mam says I'm to be humble before the Lord and not talk so much, 'cause He's got better things to do than listen to me. So who else do I tell my problems to?"

"Tell them to me. But only if I've given you permission. Some places need for silence, and some places can carry talk."

"The Abbey's a good place not to talk," I say.

"I say nubbins to that. The Abbey's a place to hoot like a daw and squawk like a cockerel and Sister Molly knows it and the prebend knows it and all the ruddy little girls know it and the only thing that stops them is the iron cane."

"And Mother Gi--"

" _Shhhh_. That's a name not to say anywhere. Honestly."

"How'd you know I'd wake up and find the card?"

"I don't come to the hiring line every year. Did you know that?"

"I'd never seen you there before," I say.

"Nor nobody else. I come when I want to or when I need to, and I'm seen by whom I choose. Let's bury poor Mary Alice."

The black cloak falls away and she twirls it into a ribbon and carries it over her shoulder like a soldier with a musket. In her burlap she looks like a walking haystack. I'm still in pajamas and dusty stocking feet. It's usual for an employer to provide not just room and board, but clothes as well, which is why you don't bring your own in a bag to the spring line. If my predecessor of some years was named Mary Alice, then there won't be boy's clothes here and we'll need to go into town for some. Rag-missy doesn't seem a town sort. I don't ask about it.

Back at the far end of the Giant's Barrow, I can hardly make out the path I took down from the rocks and through the briars. It looks sheer, but looking closer I see there is a slight trail of green down the rocks. As I watch, the green disappears and the briars close.

"Get dressed, give the goats their oats, take out the droppings, and bring the shovel with you as you go."

The way through the brambles from this side of the hill is even more twisty and overgrown than near the trapdoors. Clearly it's meant to be that way. In some places I'd swear she's moved the gray thornbushes on purpose, dug them up and relocated them to form a perfect barrier.

Ah, that's better. Breeches and topshirt over stockings and blouse, now. I've taken care of the goats and brought out the shovel. There's an odd simplicity to having your goats in a cave and a door on the cave. They're always where they should be. I wonder if they won't go blind, as bats and dragons do.

"Have you seen death?" Rag-missy asks as I push through dense claws of dead-looking gorse to where she waits outside the perimeter of vegetable talons.

"Yes'm. My sister--"

"Oh I see." Rag-missy nods as if she understands me and doesn't let me finish.

Nobody understands me, people are just bags of dead fish with legs and noses and they don't understand my things. Frustrated at the brambles and at the missy, I set the shovel on a hard piece of dry earth and use it as a lever to vault myself over the last of the thorns. I land safe and pull the shovel after.

"Died of fever, you said?" she asks me.

"Yes'm. Once she told me she dreamed she'd sail seas before she could die. She never did. The saint of dreams lied to her."

"Was it a happy lie?" she asks, leading me around toward the hills nearer the colony.

"I don't answer questions like that."

She stops and touches my chin. "I lie sometimes," she goes on, taking the shovel from me and cleaning it swiftly on the grass. "For example, my mother was a pair of ravens and my father was a ripe red berry."

"I didn't say you shouldn't lie. I said I won't answer because I don't know whether she was ever happy about that or anything else."

The shovel handle tickles me, and I push it away. "Don't push me away, I haven't let you," she says, and tickles me again. I laugh but it's imposed on me and I don't mean it.

Around the far end of the hill I meet an old tree with a wide hollow that looks like the hollow of the hood from which Rag-missy peeks. Inside the tree is the body of a dead girl. A piece of black cloth is tied over her face like a highwayman's mask. This Mary Alice was older than my sister when she died. About my age.

Obviously I've got questions.

"Is she going to be buried in tartan?" is my first question.

"No, she followed the Common Book. Help her out."

My hands refuse to touch the tree or anything near it. It's a grave-tree, and there's tiny creatures called Not-to-Knows who will pour Mary into my mind if I touch her.

"I can't," I say.

"Then I'll do it. Take the shovel to the newgraves and find the English loyalist section. Make sure no one sees you. Make sure Dacy Jack isn't come calling either, he'd spoil it. Dig a grave deeper than you can stand up in. I'll be there before you've hit clay."

That's a task I understand. She waves me off, and I take the shovel and I'm running like the devil's army is behind me. Around battered quiltfields, up hillocks, through miles of wildflowers, over clouds and down mornings, traveling so far that the noons come and the line of hills is ahead and then they're beneath me and I am a flying scarecrow on a spit, my arms flailing like lashes of seawind and this is Dacy Jack's wild roaming land and Calumny and farther towns are not so far from here, I can see distant steeples like thorns, and the newgraves don't face the town and I am safe from all eyes in a circle of hills with a consecrated graveyard in the middle.

Stones and crosses form a sleeping bed made of chimneys. There aren't so many newgraves, only three rows yet. Calumny's only been here thirty-five years. Normally graves are next to the church, but our church is the old Catholic one with the decorations torn out and we are not so rude as to desecrate the Catholic graves. I can see which direction they're been filling them out here, and I pick a spot in the other direction. The English section has crosses, while the Scots think them improper. The shovel's sharp, the soil's loose, and the digging's easy.

"There's a dark rain coming," says Dacy Jack.

He's sitting on a headstone in his greatcoat. An iron cross hangs around his neck on a length of bully thick rope. His hat is round and wide, like a Catholic cardinal's, but rich dark green instead of cardinal's red, as befits a wildman. His hands rest on his knee, one over the other, and he looks at me.

"I'd best get back," I say.

"Bad luck to leave a grave half-dug," Dacy Jack says. "Some see it as an invitation."

". . . I was just looking for buried treasure," I lie.

"That's called graverobbing, if it were true. Is it?"

"Nossir."

Powerful stocky legs swing down to earth.

"Did she tell you the story, lad?" he asks. "Of what happened to young Mary Alice?"

I shake my head. Dacy Jack strokes his natty whiskers.

"Adored plants, did Mary. Gardens. Liked to chew on everything green she could find. She'd pull living leaves off trees and flowers. Chewed them. Didn't even know what they were. Said she liked the taste. So I took her with me to observe the plants. Thought I could educate her. Good from bad, and how to take a leaf without harming the tree. I was busy instructing her on the nature of mushrooms and didn't notice that she was chewing wild hemlock. Isn't the worst death of plants. She could've been taken by a destroying angel, but I taught her where they grow. I like to think she died knowing she was safe from mushrooms."

"She'll be plants herself, when she's buried," I say. "That'll please her."

"Perhaps it will. Take a lesson, lad. Too much fondness for anything ends in tears. Draw yourself back, it'll save you. Now for the grave. You look like the work would do you good, or I'd take the spade from you. Would a song speed the task?"

"Aye."

And Dacy Jack sings for me as I dig.

"There's a great road leads up from Inishmacjordan

A low road runs down from Ballymaccann.

But no road will lead to my heart's destination,

The ship that my true love is traveling on.

Ochon, ochon.

I've drank at the houses of many fine cities

I've fought in the fields that were blistered by war

I've walked every road that crosses our island

Every road that my true love and I walked before.

Ochon, ochon.

But the road always ends where the land meets the ocean

The fields always finish where cliffs meet the sky

And my true love she sails the ship of the angels

And I can't come after without wings to fly."

Ochon, ochon.

Killed by flowers. That's what happened to Mary Alice. That's not a fair death.

My arms aren't made for handling a shovel, even a small one like this, but maybe he's right and work will temper them. Clouds keep the day from cooking, but I still sweat as I dig. It's a few more songs before the hole's deep enough to climb into, and Dacy Jack finally goes quiet and watches as I step into the grave and dig deeper than I can stand in.

Before I hit clay, I hear a scrape and stand on my toes to look over the top and the scrape was Rag-missy cresting a knoll not too far away, dragging the masked corpse over the hills on her black cloak.

"I'd best get back," Dacy Jack says before Rag-missy comes all the way into sight. He lends me a wink and slopes away. I lay down my shovel and run to help my mistress with the weight, and when we've pulled Mary Alice within sight of the newgraves together, Dacy Jack is gone.

"Must have been so sad, for her to die like that," I say.

Rag-missy lifts her hood and nods.

"Let's put her where she belongs," she says.

"I wish she'd been more wise," I say.

Rag-missy scowls. "I've already said prayers for her, so there's no need for ceremony," she says.

"At least she knew about mushrooms when she died."

"What in the fires of hell are you talking about?" Rag-missy says finally.

"Nothing."

"Tell me."

"Dacy Jack said--"

"Thought I told you to stay away from him. Can't imagine what he said to you. Mushrooms? Mary Alice died of pneumonia. Help her in."

Unceremoniously we pull the black cloak up and the girl rolls down into her new home.

"Why don't you just leave her in the tree?" I ask.

Rag-missy takes me by the cheek and looks me in the eye. "If you disobey again I'll be angry," she says. "Dacy Jack spoils things."

"I didn't see him. He was hiding under a coat."

"Some men are hiding, child. Others are lost entirely. Learn the difference."

She flicks me in the forehead and thrusts the shovel at me. I cover Mary Alice.

It's finished, I've done it.

The dark rain begins as we walk back to the Giant's Barrow. It falls and the grass fills and our feet sink in as we walk. Rag-missy begins to wrap her filthy black cloak over her rags, but changes her mind.

"What's the worst thing you've ever seen?" Rag-missy asks as her rags soak to a deeper brown. The rain is a washout and I'm steadily growing colder and then the chill breaks through and I strip off both my shirts and hold them above me. It's the wet that brings the cold. Rag-missy doesn't object to my body.

"Once I watched Tom John pour oil and spice on a kitten, so it couldn't clean itself without tasting spice."

"That's hardly the worst, I imagine."

"There was the time the henhouse caught fire and all the hens flew out, only none of the chickens died, only the eggs, and Da ate the burnt-up baby eggs anyways."

"Still not the worst. Try again." I see that her rags aren't drenching her, they're soaking but she's not getting entirely wet. There's a trick to it I don't see. Perhaps she pours candle wax onto the inside.

"There was trouble at the line yesterday. No more than usual, only it meant more to me this time because I was part of it."

"Oh yes?" she says.

I tell of the Thorntown girl running from Molly, and of the miller and Phelim and the Butterfield girl and how the weavers treated Junie. Rag-missy merely listens.

"And is that the worst thing?" she asks when I finish.

"No, the worst thing I ever saw was the birth of my sister Emma."

"The birth? Not the death?" Rag-missy asks.

"Mm-hm. Her death was peaceable."

Her scarred face examines me. "Yes, I think I believe you. That's wise. After all, who'd want to go from God's bosom and a warm quiet womb to this noisy stinking place?"

"Is it always so bad here on Earth, do you think, Miss?"

"Hazel," she says. "Hazel Rebecca MacLochlan."

"Is it so bad on Earth, Miss MacLochlan?"

I see the whole country has gone simple gray, and torrents follow shouts of thunder. At times it's a deep unendurable rain and at other times a shakey, tiring patter. My shirt tent of linen is insufficient, and the walk back is much longer with the ground swelling up with mud.

"Miss MacLochlan, what have I been hired to do?"

"Thought you'd never ask. I'll tell you a story, it'll start to make things clearer.

"There was once a man named Devlin who didn't know he was the great-great-great grandson of the old Irish kings. Blood had been forgotten across the ways, which was unusual among the Irish, but it was true. A queen mother had died in childbirth, perhaps, or an uncle had left for war, or some long-gone prince had been driven out by his subjects. It doesn't matter why.

"Devlin hadn't made much of his life. He'd been wasteful with money and unkind to friends. The time we're talking of, an evening of drinking had gone sour for Devlin, and his friends had said jokes at his expense, and he became angry and said a great deal that was on his mind, it doesn't matter what. He stumbled out into the night. It was then his troubles began.

"For the sky had grown angry, not so different from this sky really, and the fields he knew seemed to pitch and turn with sheets of water, roiling with some ancestral rage. Devlin didn't know that the storm had come for him.

"As he pushed through the storm, unprotected, it was a hoopoe began calling. The hoopoe has bright feathers and a mighty orange crest that can be seen through a storm, and she has a clear voice like one of the shy. The hoopoe called out and in Devlin's mind he half-imagined that it was his name the hoopoe was calling. And it was. Quite deep in his cups, Devlin stumbled away from the town and into the moors, and everyone knows that walking in the moors on a night will lead you astray, and lead you to the good ones."

That's a word for eeshi or shy. You're supposed to say nice things to them, or they'll take you. Everyone knows it.

"The first sign that the hoopoe was a creature of harm to him was the fact that, after he followed the bird for leagues across the rain-bled moors, it flew away altogether. A true guide would have stayed until he was home again, but the hoopoe abandoned him. But Devlin wasn't alone. He found himself in a field cut for autumn, a field without fence nor wall as far as could be seen, nor were there sheep nor neats within, but lights came from the ground. Lights. Devlin went with caution to see what were the lights? And it was the roots of bitter plants, turnips and swedes and wurzen, and the roots had all pressed to the surface, and each root was in the shape of a head, and on each, a face was carved. Inside the eyes were candles, and they shone a bitter light through the storm.

"Devlin tried talking to them, but they weren't for speaking nor moving.

"The rain left then, but the sky stayed black as iron. The hoopoe returned, and from it came a call that sounded like 'follow, follow.' Still reeling from his bottles, Devlin followed the hoopoe, even though it had proved false to him. The hoopoe landed atop the highest twig of the highest branch of the highest limb of the highest tree on a high hill, and Devlin climbed the tree to the top to reach it. He asked the hoopoe would it not tell him its name? And the hoopoe said 'Jack I am, Jack I am.' And it happened that Devlin reached the highest branch of the highest limb and could go no higher. And he asked, would Jack the hoopoe not tell him why he'd climbed the tree, and the hoopoe answered, 'forgot your blood, forgot your blood.' And the hoopoe flew down and took a stone in a claw and used it to carve the harp of Ireland into the trunk of the tree. And the hoopoe left Devlin there.

"Weary, Devlin tried to climb down the tree, but the closer he came to the image of the harp, the more his mind reeled and seemed to fill with dread, as if the land had turned against him. And it had. So Devlin stayed in the tree all that night, and he began calling for anyone to help, but upon the moors right folk don't venture at night, least of all for a voice from afar calling for help. Hours passed, and mayhap some in the town or in the village heard his voice, and mayhap they didn't, but no one dared venture out to pursue it. So it was that a woman of the good folk came to him instead.

"She heard his call and took on the form of an Englishwoman and asked in English what was he doing in a tree? Devlin gave her cheek and asked what was an Englishwoman doing on the moors at night, and what was an Englishwoman doing in Ireland at all? And the woman went away. He realized he'd been impertinent and had spoken with haste, not really far different from the way he'd spoken at the public house with his misbegotten mates, and he asked for the woman to come back and to get him down from the cursed tree. But the good one changed her way and returned to Devlin in the form of an Irishwoman. He didn't yet realize she was shy and good. The Irishwoman asked what was he doing in the tree, and Devlin said he needn't tell her, for no Irishwoman would believe he'd been chasing after fairies.

"But it's a poor Irishwoman to doubt either the power of the good or the foolishness of men, and before Devlin could say that he couldn't find his way down the tree, the woman went away again. And Devlin realized he'd again spoken without thought, and cursed his thick wit, and resolved to speak with forthrightness and sense to whoever came next.

"It was that the goodwoman returned dressed as an Englishwoman again, only this time she wore the face of the hoopoe, for she'd been the hoopoe herself not so long before--"

"You said the hoopoe meant to do him some harm," I say.

"I did. Good, you're listening. Yes, the hoopoe who was a goodwoman meant to do him the greatest harm a woman can do to a man. She meant to marry him and make him honest and true, which all men fear.

"She came to him and spoke to him in plain English and asked what was he doing in a tree. Now Devlin's tobies were wearing off with the long night, and his eyes were clear, and he saw that the woman had the face of a bird. Now he knew he was in the presence of the good and shy. He looked out, and it was dark before dawn, and a field of faces lit by candles leered up at him, and in the center of the candles was a woman with the face of a bird, and her orange crest shone in the light of candles. And this is what he said.

"He said, 'Good woman, forgive me, I've been used poorly by my friends and by drink, and I've spoken outside of what was right to say. My name is Devlin Carrick MacLochlan--' "

"MacLochlan's your name," I say.

"Don't interrupt. 'My name is Devlin Carrick MacLochlan, and I greet you on this night. I've been imprisoned by--' only now the drink had left him the rest of the way and he realized it was the hoopoe who had imprisoned him. And he said, 'Good lady, unless my wit has failed me I see that you're the same one whose voice I've followed. Is it so?' And the hoopoe said it was. Devlin asked had she not also carved the harp into the tree? And she admitted she had. Devlin asked was this field of haunted roots and spectral candles her own field? And she said it was. He asked was it her intention to keep him in the cursed tree until he died, and would he become one of the very lights he feared and dreaded, and she looked up at him and asked him plainly would he not come down? And again he tried, but the sight of the carven harp was enough to drive him back up.

"And he asked the woman in what way had he forgot his blood, as she'd said, and she shed the Englishwoman's skin and flew up to him as a hoopoe and circled the tree, and she grew larger until her wings circled him on every side, blocking Ireland from his sight, and feathers fell like the rain at night, and she was all around him. She looked him in the eye and asked him who he was. And Devlin saw a vision in which he wore the crown of the king, and he asked was he a prince really? The hoopoe said he was, and that he was the only prince of the Gaels, and that he was a stringy sort of prince, and that she'd only marry a prince who stood upon Ireland as his rightful land, but not one who spoke indecently about the people and forgot the old right ways and drank himself to an early grave. And she said the Lanterns-o'-Jack were the souls of Gael princes who'd lost their blood and died without a throne to their name. And she asked would Devlin stay in the tree, fearing his rightful place on the land? And Devlin said he wouldn't, and as he began climbing down, it was an Englishwoman was there where the trunk met the root and she held a crown. But the Englishwoman said she wouldn't give him the crown, for James owned it.

"And Devlin swore he'd kill James and take the crown. And the goodwoman said for this oath she would marry him."

We reach Giant's Barrow and Miss Hazel lifts a single briar branch out of her way and I see it's on a hinge, and it's one of Mate Graham's hinges, and I wonder about that. With the branch out of the way, there's a clear path through the thorns to the cave and the house hidden inside.

"But James died of ague, in bed."

"Know your history, do you? Good, you must have had a scrupulous teacher."

"My mam."

"Oh, you're hers, are you?"

"Is my mam that bad?"

Indoors, through the cave and again invisible to the outside world, Miss Hazel lifts her rag hood up to cover her head and begins washing her black cloak in a tin basin filled with rainwater.

"She's Abbey, is what your mam is," she says at last. I sit beside her, but she doesn't order me to do washing for her. "No, you're right, Devlin didn't go to England to kill James. He didn't even become king here. Didn't claim Ireland. He didn't do any of it."

"Why not?" I ask.

"A man's nature is his own, and having a sharp and witly wife doesn't make him into an honest man if he isn't one."

"Why've you got Devlin's name?" I ask.

She gives me half a look as she scrubs.

"He was my dad. Here, hang this on the post upstairs. Don't get it dirtier than it was before. The grass will be sludgy."

The rain's stopped now and looks like it won't come back. Both Miss Hazel and Dacy Jack seem always to know what the weather will be. I know Hazel lies about things, she said so, and she probably lied about the story and about being Devlin's daughter, but she and Dacy Jack are both honest strange ones. I still don't know what work I've been hired for.

On the grassmuddy pitched roof, in the crater between the rock spires, I find a turned branch with pegs on and hang the cloak high above the mud. Out of curiosity I look for the green path that led me down to the Catholic camp, and I see an army coming. It's not a great army, it's no more than eighty Irish with pikes and thin javelin and giant swords, different from English weapons. They have no muskets that I can see, they're kerns; it's gallowglass who carry muskets. I also see they're not playing pipes or drums, they're staying quiet.

Swinging frantic down through the trapdoor in the roof, I tell Miss Hazel. I say there's an army and they're probably coming to kill the colonists forever. I tell her there's not too many but they're armed and they're staying quiet and they'll kill mam and da and it'll be war. And she says it won't, and she touches me on the forehead and tells me not to touch iron or to speak and we go out to see the army.

The road doesn't pass by Giant's Barrow, it's almost a league off, and it's quite a walk through muddy ground, although the sky's gone blue as water. I wring out my shirts as we go, though there's little to be done about my breeches and stockings, squeezing only takes it so far. My shoes are muddy up to the buckles, and my nose wants to sneeze but I don't know if this is talking, so I hold on.

You can see nothing of the army for the first few lengths. Then we hear it. The drums, starting up. They aren't the English rat-a-tat, it's more of a steady pound, like an executioner's drums.

"Waited for the rain to stop," Miss Hazel says. "Good sense. Keeps the drumheads from stretching."

I'm not to speak, so I don't. It's a rule I've been given. If you disobey the rules, it's a sin and God sends earthworms after you and they crawl into your shoe and then you step on them. It happened to me once, that's how I know.

Upon a rise, we see them. Kerns. They're dressed in the same sort of great leenies as the two men I saw in the camp, and they don't wear armor at all. Their boots are fine and tall and muddy, and the men are soaked utterly. Some of them are still trying to dry their claymores off on the linings of their green wool kilts.

"I am an old woman," Miss Hazel tells me. "I've come to tell their fortunes. Stay behind me."

Down the hill are an old rag woman and a boy shaped like sticks, both dashing just fast enough to keep from slipping.

"Ah, my lovelies, my fine young men, spare a moment from your marching and allow an old woman to bend your ear." She speaks in English, and does a convincing old woman croak. The men don't halt or give her a moment of their time. She repeats the words in Irish, and they turn to her and speak to each other, I catch the words for crone and crow and bat and poverty among the muttering. I walk alongside her, and she hunches in her burlap and minces along, keeping pace with the march and the now-steady drums. I'm dead nervous, but I'm also pleased to see war weapons up close; the javelin shine and the hilts of the swords seem almost as long as the swords themselves. The Irish wear swords mostly on the back, although a few bold tall folk seem proud to wear them at hip, like the English do. I walk closer, and they don't see me. They just look past.

"I'm here to tell fortunes to you lusty men," she says in Irish. Trimmed beards smile and laugh at her, the way men do. God drew Man in lines of open cruelty and bent them toward godly ends. It's a rare man whose meaner self never breaks out into the open.

After a few more attempts, Miss Hazel has had enough of being dismissed and ignored and she claps twice. At once the men begin shouting and I see that the iron shafts of their weapons are all glowing hot red. Javelin are dropped like steaming coals and the kerns say curse words and unload their weapons onto the ground. The company halts in pain and confusion.

All eyes are on Miss Hazel. I've not seen her ragin' before. She stands taller, though without compromising her old-lady disguise. She keeps her hood covering her face and waits. I can tell she's not best pleased to be ignored when she's not after being ignored.

A man with black whiskers steps forward to her and strikes her with full fist.

The sound of her face hit by a man's fist is the sound of dropping a hammer on a plank floor.

I'm not to speak, nor to touch iron, but they don't seem to see me, so there's naught to prevent me from tying his bootlaces together. They're braided, and there's only leather in the boots, no iron rings. Also I take mud and begin drawing on his fine wool outfit with my fingertip, I draw a picture of a duck on a lake, and a face, and then just circles. The man makes no response at all to me. He and Hazel are both nearly frozen, I think they're both shocked at the strike. The company seems befuddled and anxious until they see there are mud pictures on him. No one says that there is a boy-- _byoka_ \--only they shout that there is a eeshi and a witch and that the man has wronged her, which he has.

The man who struck her hears there are pictures drawn on him, and he spins and his bootlaces are tied and he falls, and at once he is hidden under Hazel's yellow-brown rag dress. She sits on his chest and her rags cover them both and I can't see what's happening, but I can hear what she says in Irish.

"A hairpin is all I hold, stupid man. Why then do you not stand on your feet?"

A moan of fear is the reply.

"Think you your weapons burnt you without my will heating them?"

The men back away, whispering _kelik_ , witch.

"I said I desired to tell your fortune, and so I shall. First I'll say who you are. Your name is Ian Tyrone Mulally. You've come up from Galway at the request of the old barons. You've come to fight for Charles, which is an act neither good nor is it bad. But you've wronged me, and I see that you'll die at the end of a Scotsman's lance before you see April return, and your death will mean naught for Ireland or for England, but will be for nothing. And the song they sing at the wake will be "Galway Rose" as they bury you in the lows of Scotland, for the English think nothing of bringing your corpse to home. And your Mary Mulally whom you married on Christmas will see your face never the more, and will marry Brendan O'Hara and will grow to love him."

Heavy breath. The man knows his error now, and I believe Miss Hazel is telling him the truth.

"Will you lift the curse for me?" the man Ian murmurs.

"I've not cursed you, stupid man, I've only said what is to be seen of you. I say this as well: there is a child in Mary's womb, and he'll die at age three. Have a pleasant war."

And Miss Hazel snaps her fingers and she is no longer atop the man but is to her feet. I follow her away, feeling pleased I neither touched iron nor spoke. We rove around the hill we first stumbled down. She walks with care; I imagine she desires not to slip and fall within sight of the men. She's made quite an impression on them.

Out of sight and hearing, across an acre of rolling land, she turns to me and pushes her hood back and shakes out her rather sweaty hair. She smiles through a small red bruise.

"They've come to fight for our side, I see, ah--"

"Francis," I say. Weird we've gone so long and she's never asked my name. I guess it wasn't needed.

"Good good. Though if we're in Irish company, I'll call you a different name. Don't argue."

I don't.

"Yes, the king's called for more wars, Lord only knows where," she says. "Wars and killing to no purpose. Those who call for a war rarely live to see any benefit for the survivors. Hey now, Francis, you've lost something that belongs to me."

"Will my da be sent to fight in the war?" I ask.

"One of my cards went missing. Do you know where?" she says.

"They wouldn't send a teacher's husband to war, would they? She's Abbey."

"It was the ace of acorns," she says.

"Are you and Dacy Jack brother and sister? He's got his mother's name."

"Let's walk back. Yes we are, you're bright."

"It flew away."

"My ace of acorns did?"

"Yes'm. It went to be a star, and that's where it is now."

"Spiffy. No, they won't ask you planters to fight. We've got other problems for ourselves. Our world is not a clean world, and we have work to do."

I think about this web of words.

"Are we cleaners of the world, Miss Hazel? Is that what I'm hired for?"

"Follow me. Let's see where this goes."

And she plucks a catsear puff and blows on it and one great fluffy seed sets off toward some destination and we follow the puff as it floats. It never touches the ground, but stays a few paces ahead of us, swaying to and thither across the fields beneath our feet. The grass is a shade of green that angels would paint in an angelic painting of green grass and I feel like a courtly rainbow-man and I wish Hazel would sing, the way her brother Dacy Jack does, but she doesn't. Her eyes attend the leadership of the catsear puff and we are its followers.

For leagues we follow it. The seed at the bottom of the puff is a fine dancer and spins as a Protestant may never do. I know dancing's a sin, but there can be no harm in a dancer who's a seed. I think this job I've been given will have more walking for me in a day than Junie Edwards will see in a week. At least she'll get to stay mostly within Calumny. I seem to be hired as a professional Pavee, wandering Ireland, and I wonder if we shouldn't dance after all. I spin after the puff, just for fun really, and Hazel doesn't object and so I begin a great dance of my own invention, a dance that involves much of prancing and loping and also involves a lot of running to catch up with Hazel, and also a certain amount of weary aching legs, but my small body is made for dance and for endurance, and I hardly even notice that the puff is now a cloud of puffs like a cotton storm, they've all come with us to follow our one puff, and Miss Hazel doesn't seem to lose track of it, and now the puffs are coming through as great clouds, a gale of white, and I dance within a cloud that sticks to my topshirt and tickles my nose, and I laugh out loud happily at the invisibility of the world within the endless white of the seedpuffs, and there's a scuffle and Miss Hazel is a straw-colored hunch and she's caught someone.

Is it an eeshi? Is it an eeshi who blows catsear like toads blow bubbles?

"Get off me! Get bloody off me! God's blood, let me go I won't I won't I WON'T YOU CAN'T MAKE ME" and the long drawn-out scream of a girl who's meant to do something she hates.

"Francis, who is she?" says Hazel.

I look and see who she is.

"It's the Thorntown girl. She's from up-a-market."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Her father wouldn't pay tax, and they traveled."

"Blind me, Francis, tell her everything, why don't you?" the Thorntown gel says to me, still kicking.

"Sorry Anne," which is her true name, "only she's master."

"Who is she?" Anne of Thorntown says.

"What I am, is _wondering_ why you were hiding in the mud at the bottom of Nemain Creek. Sweet mother of God, you are _filthy_ ," Miss Hazel says.

As the puffs finally dissipate, I see exactly what she means.

The Thorntown girl has been hiding in the mud between two banks of neck-high rushes. I do mean in the mud; it coats her, chin to foot, and only her face isn't brown. She has blue eyes. Her long dress is just mud, the plaits in her long hair are mud, and in her hand is a reed she'd cut so she could breathe underwater. It's full of mud too.

"And just how long were you planning to spend being a turtle?"

"Long as it took." Anne pulls grassy lumps off her mouth and ears. "Not really so bad, once you get used to it."

"Nubbins. There's clear water not ten feet away. Wash yourself and then tell me why you're pretending to be invisible."

The Thorntown girl grins and dives into the cold water, splashing like a slim tiny seal, and brown mud flows down the struth, and when she emerges she's only got mud in her hair and the rest of her is clean and her clothes are stuck to her and it looks like she's got a naked body under her clothes, you can't actually see but it's just a hint.

"Your story," instructs Miss Hazel. We're all standing in water, it's getting into my boot and going up my stockings very slowly.

"Francis, you like blabbing. You tell it."

"Right," I say. "There were goblins in tall hats, and they grew out of the ground one night like mushrooms and they drank up the moonlight and said they'd spit it at all the crazy gels and so Anne had to flee. It was a very sad situation. Junie Edwards died of moonlight, and the worst part was the sun was up and she didn't even get to enjoy it."

Hazel smiles. Anne's eyebrows are too skeptical, I want them to go back down to where they should be.

"Well, that explains it," says Miss Hazel.

"Tell her the truth, mustard-brains."

"You."

"I will. They were going to enlist me," says Anne.

"They were going to--for the war--oh, you mean Molly?" says Hazel, puzzling.

"Aye."

"Molly was going to enlist you in the Abbey," repeats Hazel.

"Aye."

Hazel has a thinking look that means plans. Wicked, sly plans.

"Well then you'll have to enlist in the Abbey," she says.

Anne scrabbles back into the water with a splash and pushes herself into the cattails until only her feet can be seen. Molly's stolen iron cane suddenly sticks out from the rushes and whips back and forth defensively.

"Miss Hazel, it's not--" I say, but she touches my lips with a fingertip.

"Do you want to go to the Abbey and become a nun?" Hazel asks Anne.

The iron cane swings a few more times like a dog's tail.

"Well, why not?" Hazel says sweetly.

"She--" but again I'm shushed.

"What if I could give you a way to hurt Molly really, really badly?" Hazel whispers to Anne Thorntown.

"Don't want to hurt her. I just want to raise horses and bloody marry someone and have the kirk leave me right alone."

"Well," says Hazel, "I _do_ want to hurt her. I want to hurt her very much a lot. And if you help me to hurt Molly, then I will find you an acre of land beyond the Pale, and you'll have your choice of marrying, and I'll buy you a stud and mare, and you'll never know more of the habit or the oath of chastity at all. A week at the Abbey and it'll be over, and I'll find you passage to Connacht."

". . . or I could just run to Connacht meself," the reeds say, bristling.

"Not three leagues from here are a dozen men walking in a dozen directions, telling the beacon-tenders to be on the watch for a runaway who looks just like you. Are you certain you'd make it? Are you certain that a week from now you won't be dragged back and turned into Molly's snivelling creature?"

"Anne Forntin don't snivel," the reeds say.

"Molly's already got a replacement cane," says Hazel.

"Nobody who goes in there comes out again. Everyone knows that. It's a prison for gels."

"I'll get you out. I'm the only one who can."

"How?"

"I'll send Francis in with you."

"Boys don't go in. Gels go in. And how's he--"

"We'll put him in a habit. He's got the build for it," says Hazel.

"Miss Hazel," I say, "they know me there. Molly knows me. Even, um, the Mother knows me. Mam's there too."

A hand extends from under the rags and touches my forehead again.

"Now don't touch iron, okay?" she says. "Go on and say hello to Anne Thorntown, Francis."

The voice that comes out as I say hello Anne is not my own voice. It's a voice of a very small lass who's shy and delicate and wishes she were somewhere else. A nun's voice.

"Not bad, young lady, I'm hardly more feminine myself," Hazel says, curtseying to me. I scowl and say couldn't you just make me invisible? in the same voice. And Hazel gives me a nice pat on the head and I want to bite her hand off.

The Thorntown girl peeks her head out and shrieks with laughter.

"Blind me, Francis, you look like sugar," she says. "How long will he stay a gel, Miss?"

"Till he touches iron. Open doors for him, he can't touch the handle. And Francis? Do watch out for the iron cane. Don't anger the women. Just pretend you're stupid and do what you're told."

"Shouldn't be a problem for him," says Anne. I scowl at them and then I curtsey just to make them both laugh.

΅

Miss Hazel has stolen a habit for me, a real one. I don't know how. Dressing in it takes rather more time than dressing in breeches and stockings. There's knickers and several underskirts, thicker and starchier than petticoats and made of dun linen. Next is a black tunic that's weightier than any of Mam's dresses. Sleeves gaudy and baggy and ridiculous. A skinny black apron. A thick rope belt. A twisty white cornette on my head that looks like a king's folded napkin setting. A white neckerchief that buttons uncomfortably. A second black apron. As per our instructions, Anne waits behind a thicket on the longroad to the Abbey, and I put on my habit behind a tree, hurrying so she doesn't peek at me; that would be fair rude. We're to walk, rather than ride in the cart, so that it looks like I've been taking in Anne from a long distance. I've dressed and Hazel's straightened out my cornette, which makes my head look like a pure white Satan with outstretched wings and makes me feels like I've been wrapped for early burial. She calls for Anne to come out. Nervously the girl comes up on me and wipes a single line of white latex across my black habit from a thistle stem, then smirks. Madwoman.

Miss Hazel touches Anne's forehead.

"Francis, slap Anne across the cheek, would you?"

So I do.

My face goes flying. My cheek burns, quickened with a slap. Anne is unmoved.

"Now remember. You're from Grace of God Convent in Longshank Colony. You were sent to Mother Mary's to request a copy of the _Demonologie_ of James and you will stay until a copy is located. Your name is Margaret McCloud. You found this girl hiding in the mud beside the longroad and she matched the description going around. Got it?"

I nod. I'm uncomfortable with my new voice and don't want to say any of these words, but I remember that Mam speaks highly of silence and she's kirk, so I'll speak quick and be silent and I won't worry too much about it.

"And . . . ?"

"No iron," I say.

"Now Anne. You cannot touch willow, it'll put you in magnificent trouble. Now off, just as I've told you."

Anne looks at me and takes my hand and has me latch it around her upper arm like I've been dragging her along. Oddly, I feel my own hand around my own upper arm. It's strange. Miss Hazel hides her face under her hood and fades into the thicket like a forest scarecrow made of dead men's fingers. Now I nod to Anne and we march proper down the road.

"You'll not run off," says Anne to me. "You've got to get me out. That's why I agreed."

"Master's rules," I say. "She's told me to, so I will."

"She's a wonder. Wish I could do those things."

The road has dried since we found Anne Thorntown. It's clods and cobbles and clobbles and kicking and chunks and crisp crust. Cartruts divide it, they're not sensibly-straight, they cut up the road in all different places and overlap and look generally like rough driving. The iron cane is still back in the rushes. Anne's got wit enough to know not to have iron when I'm near. I think perhaps gloves would be wise for my hands. I could touch more things with gloves.

"You're not to say any of those things you say," Anne whispers close to my ear. "It'll wreck it, everyone will recognize you."

"Don't know what you mean. I've got nothing but sense," I say.

"Keep that up and you'll fool even me." She leans in and looks me square in the eye and asks, "Do you fake all the things you say? Are ye touched in the head, or do you just make out you are?"

I turn my eyes back to the hill of the road we're climbing. "Repent, harlot," I say piously. "For the Lord has no place in his mansion for such slatternly lasses."

"That's sharp, you're good at nunning. You should perform that at the Globe."

"My mam says things like that. In private."

"Does she? Whereas I fink mine is the slatternly lass your mam is privately gossiping about."

"My mam does _not_ gossip. She," I say, "is a woman of the Lord. And I love my mam, and that is why I'm a nun. Obviously."

"You're not the cowslip I fought you were, Margaret McCloud."

"What's your mam do that's so slatternly?"

"Ask me again." Anne stops and twists and grabs my cornette like she's going to rip it off. "Go on. Ask. Me. Again."

"Sorry."

"You're right sorry," she snaps, and we walk on and I feel strange.

Struggling fields surround us, a wilt of too-long-wintered barley and native grasses and new foreign corns that I don't know so well, no one does, they came from Ameriga. They've begun to bring them across the sea, and Ireland is being planted with foreign elements. Once they take root they'll never leave, and soon my home country will look just as altered and jungled as the New World where the extremists went, the ones who say that even the Common Book isn't rough and dry and prudish enough for them.

"D'you think there'll be more of these brought over?" I ask Anne, pointing out the fields.

"Weeds. It's just weeds and poison," she says. "They're not fit for planting in this land."

A man ambles into sight and looks at us and away and looks at us again, as if he couldn't see us the first time. Anne freezes. I think she's genuinely planning out a running escape, and I tap my forefinger against her upper arm and feel the tapping against my own and Anne breathes like she's competing in running at the Olympics and I imagine she's talking to herself about why she needs to see this through and thinking about the cowslip she calls Margaret who is me and about the weird lady in the rags. I wonder what else she's thinking. Does she know whom she'll marry and where she'll go if this weird plan all goes right, and has she got emergency plans, too? I know I would. What if the bed is willowwood? Only I bet Molly will find some worse place for her to sleep, like a bed of nails.

The man is as far away from us as ten thousand ants carrying clovers in a line as they walk. And closer. And now the man speaks to us. It's Farmer Hagee.

"That's her, is it?" says Farmer Hagee, pointing with a sausage-pinkie. His face is a sour mound of dough. He's a Redneck and a Scot and a bold simple man.

". . ." I say and nod.

Whereas Anne says, "This dove-head's taken an oath of silence, but that di'n't stop her from grabbing my arm and dragging me here contrary to my rights."

"Oath of silence? Wish more of them would," Hagee laughs. "Taking her to the Abbey, are you?"

Anne starts struggling, and I don't know if she's faking, but I put both hands on her and we struggle and my arm is twisting twice, once from Anne trying to get away and again from Miss Hazel's influential touch.

Hagee wears red and white and has slippers for shoes and like all Scots he won't wear stockings while working and his hairy treetrunklegs are showing and he takes Anne's thrashing hand and says he'll not see a gel taken to the Abbey against her own mind.

Well.

Those words stop Anne thrashing. She stares at him and gives the old man a suspicious look up and down. There's no one else on the road, and from atop the rise you can see for a league. No one; just we three.

Hagee spits. "Well, Anne. You're in a real fix, aren't you? But I've a thought. If you'll live in my house," he says, "I'll be father to yeh, and mother to yeh, and I'll treat you as you were my own daughter. And no one will need know where are yeh." He touches and pulls on her arm. I don't know if he feels it too.

Anne is no longer hyperventilating. She's stopped breathing altogether and is looking up at the Scot's face. His brow is heavy and his eyebrows are black and his hair is black and his hat is simple and his eyes are large and his hands are wide and strong. In his nudie-legged Scots garb he looks to me like unbearded Goliath aching to fight whole tribes of Eastern men with his grotesque bare fists. I don't know him well, he farms outside Calumny. He's the sort who might stumble to the spring line once every few years.

"And what would become of me when I'm ready to marry?" she asks him.

"My wife fell to the fever this last summer," he says. "The matter of marrying has been on my mind. If you'll live with me, then while you're my daughter I'll teach you the ways I keep, and when you're at marrying age, I'll marry ye, and you'll be my wife."

Anne's breath is slow as she considers his words. They seem folk words to me, a way of talking in colchie places, the sort of words that people use with tight-mouthed delicacy when they know that a child's hair matches his mother's brother instead of the child's father. I didn't know Hagee's wife was dead. She must have died the same season as my sister and Brammy Gordon's wife.

"I've got need of a wife," Hagee repeats. His large hands surround Anne's small arm. It's like a tugging-war between us, with Anne as the rope. I'm tempted to speak, to intervene, but I've taken a pretend oath of silence.

Anne decides.

"What've you got to offer me that's so much better than the Abbey? Look at you. You'll not have silver and you'll not have money. You're not wellborn and you're not groomed. I'll not have a penniless husband."

Hagee rears back in anger. "So you'd rather go kirk and marry never, than marry me," he growls through his shaven wide mouth. "You've shamed me. Shamed me before a kirkwoman. I'll neh let you shame me without a shaming of your own, you unclean woman. I'll send yeh to the Abbey without your privacy or your tidy virtue--"

Large hands flex and touch Anne, they reach for the neckline of her dried and no longer muddy blue dress and they grasp the muslin and they tear it so Anne's white bodice shows through. Miss Hazel's talent does not protect the cloth. I can imagine no greater shame for a woman than to be presented to the Abbey with her dress torn. The cloth rips loudly, and he proceeds to her navel, if women have navels. She's weeping now, silent, but she matches the Scotsman's eye. She's wise enough not to act hastily before a man who could snap her neck and claim it was godly that he did so. Shuddering with fear, she allows large hands to brush her hair aside.

He reaches back. He hits her. And lightly, as if he were only a cloth doll, he drops unconscious.

Breaking through her tears, Anne says, "Steal his money for me. We'll both become invisible to him in a week, there's no harm."

She's a madwoman, but I don't mind doing it. I bend down and open his pouch and find tobacco and a half-shilling. Tobacco's rare, it's a sign a person wants to be seen as gentry. I hand Anne a pinch of the tobacco but she won't take it. I put it against my cheek and chew, slowly. The flavor is strong and foreign and it makes my mouth numb and makes me feel like I'm Walter Raleigh standing on a slave-wharf in Southern seas. I say so.

"Fine, give it," she murmurs and takes a pinch. Then she chews it once and spits it out and says she shouldn't, Molly will accuse her of stealing it. I take the tobacco out of my cheek and spill the rest of it from the pouch and kick it through the dirt. I take the sixpence.

Each of us gives the prone farmer one kick. Me, then her. Then we hurry down the rise and follow the dirt lane out of sight, until we're both sure Hagee won't see us when he wakes.

Anne stops me. Her small hand holds her torn dress together. Tears fleck the corners of her eyes. "How do I mend it?" she murmurs. "How can I mend it? Someone will see that it's torn. They'll see what my dress has become."

"I can't sew," I say. "Can you?"

"They'll see," she says again.

My hand closes on her arm and I lead her off the rutted lane and over a post fence and into the tall grass, where passing eyes will not see. I can't think of her as the Thorntown girl now, she's Anne, she's become human in my eyes, that's rules. I'll be kind to her and keep her out of sight.

"I'll ask Mam to fix it--" I say.

"You think she won't recognize you? You can fool a man and you can fool a nun but your mam's a woman, Margaret, and woman have sight under their eyes."

"Just walk. I'll think."

The way through the wild is harder and scrabblier and rougher. There's rocks untended through this way, for the fields don't reach the edge of the road, and there's gullies and streams and the odd rare tree with bracken like unfletched arrows underneath in oval patches, as if the bracken grew in the shadow of the tree. We take our way with patience, for neither of us wants to present as dirty when we arrive, and I think about whom can I take Anne to without breaking my cover.

The sun is down. Calumny is now ahead, and I think how enjoyable it is that no one knows me. If I could I would be a stranger everywhere, wear a new face each day, tell everyone but my future-someday-wife that I am a foreigner. They would believe me, welcome me, and never get to know anything about me other than my fine manners. That's all they would know. For who could tell of a man without hearing voice or seeing face?

Miss Starnlowe goes out on callings a few nights a month, and the rest of the time people come to her, asking for simple medicines. There's no apothecary in our colony, nor an educated doctor, although the prebend is known to keep quality medicines brought from England and will sell and administer them if you pay him. But Starnlowe heals in exchange for eggs and milk and corn and whisky, and she'll take on promise of payment, if she thinks you'll follow through.

My task is a small one.

Her house is well-lit, with a lantern on an iron hook beside the door, causing spring night brown fluttermoths to dance. I knock. Junie Edwards calls to wait a minute. Apprentices are always live-in, even if their parents' house is not two lengths from their master's.

The door opens and Junie gasps.

"Anne. How about you?" says Junie.

Anne speaks.

"My--my dress. It's torn. They'll take me to kirk only my dress is torn. Sister McClewey or whatever her name is said I could have it mended first. Only heaven's word, Junie, the tailors will talk and my mum will tear my heart out through my nipple and father will hit me and by blood of Christ I just want it to be over but they've torn my dress and I can't, Junie, I just can't."

"Sister McClewey?" says Junie.

"McCloud," I say with my moral laces as tight as can be. "And I'm not without feeling for her mis-venture. It was not by her own considerable indelicacy that her dress was torn." This version of Margaret McCloud has not taken an oath of silence, I decide.

Junie's hand touches the blue dress and I see her preparing to weep. Yes, I remember, it was Junie's own indelicacy with a sewing needle that prevented her from being chosen by the goddess-weavers. Perhaps it wasn't kind to come to her. Only I have to remember that a nun from Longshank wouldn't know this story, and so I deliberately turn up my nose at Junie's soppiness.

"Junie?" calls Miss Starnlowe. "Who's there?"

Junie doesn't answer. Her hands rest on the rent blue dress and she looks into Anne's eyes and then into mine and she doesn't ask anything. Anne says this to Junie: "It's been torn."

And Junie: "I'll mend it. Come inside. Sister, I'll bring you clover tea."

"Flowers make an immodest drink. Plain boiled water, please. And a simple breadroll." I'm getting good at acting aloof and dismissive.

Junie curtseys, and I can't repress a quick laugh, but I turn it into a cough and a haughty smile.

I walk inside.

There is a large doctoring-room with clean tables and a stove for boiling water. Junie Edwards directs me to Miss Starnlowe's bedroom. The fire is steady, and the too-tall leather chair I'm led to probably doubles as a perch for recuperating patients who need warmth in winter. I'm given water and a butter biscuit and I dip one in the other and am left alone. The gels are not in here. I am patient and I wait.

I wait.

A burnt log drops into the dying fire, exploding with sparks. I jolt awake, rise, intending to lift a new log in, but my fingers shy from the iron handle and the iron poker.

"I know of you," says Miss Starnlowe. She's in here with me, within the log walls and the outer darkness, standing not far from the fire. Her arms are crossed over her skinny body, and her narrow plum-mouth smacks. I see that in her folded arms is a dead cat, which she pets as if it were alive. "You're down from the city to try witches."

I don't reply to this, although I fear I should.

"How did you happen to find Thorntown's daughter?" she asks, pacing the room, her wooden shoesteps tapping like horseshoes. The cat is nestled under her arm.

"I heard it from the watch," I say quietly, "that there was a young woman meant for kirk. I myself have embraced service, but I considered where I would be hiding if I had resisted the calling."

"And where is that?" asks Starnlowe.

"Near clean water," I say. "The river."

"What river?"

I shake my head. "I don't know the name."

"There isn't a river for miles, Sister. Calumny's water comes from wells."

"We traversed quite a distance, under God." I keep my voice low and try not to say anything weird. Then again, I'm not the one with a dead cat on my arm.

"River." Starnlowe puzzles at this. "Well, you have my gratitude for bringing Thorntown's girl to me. I'd like to keep her here, if it pleases you. I could use the help. I'm sure you have other matters."

"Our destination is Mother Mary's." I add a nunly note in my voice, to make it sound like I will not be turned from taking Anne there. So many people are conspiring to keep her out of the convent. I don't understand it.

Miss Starnlowe sighs and nods. "You've seen inside my house, Sister. You've seen I do only good works, under God. I trust there'll be no need for your inquest in our town."

"Who is that you're holding?" I say. "A familiar, perhaps?"

" _Familiar_?" Miss Starnlowe cries, with an undercurrent of deep fear. "Sister, this is a perfectly ordinary housecat brought to me yesterday by our miller. She had a lump inside her, and it was going to kill her, so I gave her a painless passing. A woman-religious would have done no less."

I have to keep up the act, and I know nuns. "Will you keep any part of the animal? The eye, for instance? Or the claw? For potions?"

"Good _heavens_ ," Miss Starnlowe lets out. "It's just a--no, I'll bury it whole in the miller's garden."

"Very well. I trust the ritual burial of a cat is not part of any _folk matters_ in these parts."

Starnlowe's shaking fearful now, and angry besides, and in a rash burst she throws the cat into the fire.

I nod, satisfied, and stand. The cat's fur catches, and it takes no time before it's sizzling like roast pig, and smells oddly tasty. I put the thought out of my mind. "Has the child's dress been repaired?"

"Child," Starnlowe mutters to herself. It's obvious Anne's still my age, even when I'm altered. "Yes, she's all ready. You can leave in the morning."

"I think not," I say, and stride roughly out of the bedroom and find Anne curled up on a physician's slab. She groans when I shake her, and asks couldn't we wait until light, but I know nuns and they're strict and expected to attend to cleaning and can't do it properly without a bath, and I won't undress in front of people, altered or not. There'll be privacy at the Abbey. It's the only thing I'm looking forward to. A bath.

I feel the cold behind the neck that means it's late and you're still awake. The door is heavy, and I almost make a mistake and take the iron handle in my hand. Anne remembers and opens it for me. The night is wet and frigid. Looking over my shoulder, I see Junie and a horrified Miss Starnlowe backlit by fire.

**Part III**

It's not a long walk, but we stretch it out because neither of us really wants to do this.

"There'll be talk of you," Anne says. "You gave the midwife a dark turn. She spoke of you. There'll be word of a witchhunter here tomorrow. It'll be at the Abbey before we get there, probably."

"I'm not a witchhunter, I'm just--"

"Going for a copy of the _Demonologie_. At the least, they'll say you're a witchhunter's assistant."

"Starnlowe won't spread the word, it wouldn't be wise of her."

"Junie will," says Anne.

"Aye, Junie will."

There's no way to keep secrets in Calumny, gossip will out.

We walk along. The road is dewy and the hemlock trees swing and shake down droplets and there's a sound of animals and a dragonfly lands on my cornette and cleans its wings with vibrations. We take the upper road that overlooks the oldgraves. White fingers of deathbreath are gathered around the mounds the way flies gather together over a dead cat that hasn't been burnt impulsively by a nervous midwife. The old Irish were fine masons, and the oldgraves are marked with admirable Celtic crosses with halo circles in the middle. The oldgraves are circled by a low wall, and the wall ends at the Abbey yard. We push through wet branches and cross the threshold.

The Abbey is a sharp white-gray cross that's darker this night because of the rain. It's hard to see the face of it now, like looking for a black neat among browns at twilight, only when it's dry it's nearly white and you can see the Abbey for miles. It shines like a river. The apse on the far side is a dimpled breast, and the transepts have jagged pointy roof bits that spike out like stabbing Medieval lances. Cells with pinpoint windows line the small garth that overlooks the graves. It all seems to me a building meant to torment women. Mother Mary's was once St. Andrew's. It's older than Calumny by more than two hundred years. Two walls of the apse were taken from a French castle keep built in days of knights in armor, before there were muskets. I've no idea how they've kept it from falling down for so long.

The world is asleep, and the wind is brooms and sweeping, and the trees create their little rains, and I knock upon the great Abbey door. There are two gargoyles above the lintel, and both make faces at me. I make a face back at them and then the door opens with a sound that goes _glonggg_.

At doorstep is Mother Gibbet.

Her cornette tips bend forward across her face like stingers of Scorpio. Why is she dressed at this hour? A restless ghast who doesn't sleep. Her form is buried black. Her face is beyond description. She chills snow.

Nodding once, she bids us enter. No words are spoken at all. We are each led to separate cells and I sleep on a simple pallet. I'm glad Hazel had me practice sleeping rough at the Catholic camp, or my body would have found no comfort here at all.

΅

In the morning I am brought to waking very early and called before Molly. The cloister is chilly but has rather nice decorative stonework and a good painting of the Virgin Mary who's not meant to be a virgin in the Reformation anymore, or maybe she is but she isn't _our_ virgin. The lass who woke me isn't one of the three who got picked from the spring line, she's one of the Sisters who've been there for years. They all look alike in their awful habits. I ask her when we'll bathe and she says she'll boil water for me in the evening. I thank her and set off to find Molly. Anne will have to look out for herself for the day.

I walk down the drafty arcade and into a wide room in a corner of the garth.

"You're the witchhunter." Molly's voice echoes in stone.

Knew it. Gossip. I will never call myself a witchhunter, it's Molly's word for me. It's a rule now.

Molly is plump and ruddy and she sits at the head of a comically long table with two three-legged mahogany chairs at it and more along the wall. Above her is another enormous full-bosomed portrait of the Virgin Mary with red lips. The Virgin's eyes are not at heaven but downward toward earth; from her perch in a frame high above the table, she looks like she's staring straight at me.

Molly is not staring straight at me. She's staring at a pair of red buttocks. The red buttocks belong to a gel with her hands on her head. I am momentarily at a loss for human thought.

It's a lass. Her buttocks are out. It isn't Anne, thank God. I quickly cross my hands over my indecency. I am Margaret.

"Sister?" I manage.

"How did you arrive here so quickly on foot?" asks Molly, her eyes not departing the red buttocks.

"By hurrying," I say.

"And our little duchess? Was she . . . cooperative?"

"I explained her situation to her," I say in my haughty nun voice, "and by God she cooperated."

Molly tears herself away from the sight of the punished child and looks me in the eye. I remain impressed that Hazel's touch doesn't lose its power no matter how long people look at me. There is no iron in this dining room apart from the fireplace. I'm sure my brain will inculcate a fear of hearths that'll last all my life. It's the sort of thing my mind does.

"Did she," Molly intones. "We may have use for someone who can talk that brat into presenting herself to me. Where is it you're from?"

"Longshank, near the Caimbeul lands. I was raised in Derry," I add. My confidence in my voice is increasing.

"My grandmother was born in Derry," Molly exclaims, clapping. "Are you a Hamilton, by chance?"

"It's McCloud on both sides," I say solemnly. Margaret McCloud disdains this sort of gossip; it's one of her rules. Mam showed me how to do it, how to nun, and I'm leveraging it. I'm more worried that the punished red-bottomed gel will report any gossiping to Mother Gibbet. Molly seems unconcerned at the thought.

Witnessing that I'm not here to chatter, she seems to turn on me, as a stag pinned in the brush turns on a wolf.

"And what would possess a young snot-nosed bit of a dress like you to visit us in Calumny?"

She has an iron cane, a new one, only I see it's actually the hearth-poker with the points filed off. Her hand reaches for it, and she wrings it like the neck of an old goose that's fat for frying. One slap with it on my own buttocks and my true face will peer through. Hazel's rules are always so delicate.

"I've been sent by Mother Superior to find a copy of the _Demonologie_ of James--"

But my recitation is interrupted by the Sister who first called me out of bed. She rushes in with mania and derangement in her eyes, her feet apatter.

"The Catholics are coming! The Catholics are coming!" she roars, stamping across the dining room flagstones.

"Bloody hell," says Molly and grabs the buttocks girl by the hand and straightens the girl's clothes so her buttocks aren't showing and the three scurry away into a corridor. I follow. They are confused ducklings, running this way and that without really going anywhere. I stand and watch and feel a cold center inside of me that knows what to do.

"Do you speak of the kerns I passed on the way here?" I say quite loudly. "The ones who're going abroad to fight on behalf of Charles and the crown?"

"Are they?" says the buttocks gel, halting. I recognize her as someone who used to have the name Emily, but who is now only a nameless postulant. Molly slaps her across the face for speaking.

"There was a band of a hundred en route to the coast." I sniff and add: "They were rude men."

From down the hall, I hear: "Rude men indeed."

It's Mother Gibbet. Anne is beside her, backlit, wearing a slim habit. The Sisters line up and press their hands to their standing laps.

"Our burner!" Gibbet exclaims warmly, lifting her cowl from her ankles, stepping toward me, and embracing me.

"Pleased to meet you, in God's grace," I say. My stomach revolts at the sight of Gibbet smiling. It is her first smile, a primordial, unpracticed thing. It makes a shape that her mouth is ill-fitted for. As she withdraws, I discover that through her crooked, spotted lips, she smells of tobacco and ambergris and leftover cooked whitefish and powder. Her teeth are too thin, with black between them. Her arms are bones.

"I have been called away from my studies to request a fresh copy of the _Demonologie_ , in order to make copies and disseminate the wisdom within."

Mother Gibbet lifts a single finger to Molly.

"Right. There's a copy and a scribe in Knockfergus. We'll send away for it; it'll be here in a fortnight," says Molly.

"Then I shall depart and make the request in person--" I say, a risk.

"Not at all, not at all! I should insist that you stay, in order to share your voluptuous stories of the _burning_ of the _devil's children_ ," says Gibbet, dead serious and enthusiastic.

Gibbet breathes gassily through her rotting teeth, the appalling smile waiting upon her oaken lips. I imagine myself to be the first human to witness this terrible smile, and my mind travels to the broken alien spirits who oversee the Mother Superior's nighttime dreams, and my mind constructs such voluptuous dreams as she might have had, of sinners in exquisite misery, curling and diving through stone-bone lava in the uttermost, the sounds thus produced, and I see the Mother and these bent spirits of the outer night smiling foully in union.

"Send Sister Mary to Knockfergus at once. Send eight shillings four for the procurement. We shall sup and pray and our two guests shall be our entertainment," says Molly to an anonymous Sister, one of the other new ones.

Anne's framed face is silent. Her body vibrates inside the tight confines of her new stringent cloth-black vise. She is Gibbet's prisoner, and I must assist in her torment.

΅

For some of the morning, Molly provides a tour to me and to Anne. We are side by side by side, and my hand is on Anne's arm, mostly out of nature, and also because I worry that Molly will notice the odd sensation of a ghostly hand reflecting her grip. Thus I direct Anne, and she lets me. The tour's not too long. I already know most of it from lessons with Mam, which are held in the pews, with slates and chalk. Molly's gone sniffy and aloof from me since I refused to gossip with her. Perhaps she already hates me. But all this changes before the entertainment even commences.

It happens this way.

We have supped. The meal is pig and baked vegetables for the three Sisters in good standing and Gibbet and myself, and ungarnished oats and water for the other seven. The meals are already waiting in the dining room with the lascivious Virgin Mary when the tour ends. There is no speaking during the meal, but I am asked to say Grace, and I realize I know neither correct prayers nor any nunly things beyond what Mam's taught me. It falls upon me to pretend that Longshank's Grace of God Convent does things differently and trust that the Sisters won't have time or inclination to go and check. Reform nuns don't follow the Catholic ways, so they've all got their own ideas anyhow.

I am preparing to say Grace. Anne and I meet eyes across the room and she shakes her head as I am beginning to speak. I lower my head.

I say this:

"May the God in His heaven pour out His penitence upon all the Earth's sinners like clear wise water, that we may drink of His infinite generosity of spirit. Amen."

It is so easy to cater to the needs of people. I say what they desire me to say, and then they believe I am who they say I am.

After this large luncheon, which is held in my honor, the gel once called Emily runs up to the front of the table, kneels, and states that she is requesting a prayer session with me. Molly waves us both away. I follow the buttocks gel and we walk to the garth, where there is an old wise statue of St. Andrew, and we kneel.

"Sister," she hisses, "there is great iniquity in this convent."

For a second I forget myself and say, "Oh, I know." Then I remember myself and have to cover over my foolish words with better ones. So I say: "Why do you think I was sent here, rather than to Knockfergus, where the book resides?"

The girl covers her mouth in awe. "You know . . . ?"

Careful, I don't want to make things up. "We suspect," I say carefully. Yes. I suspect, and would like to hear what Emily has in mind. "We would be grateful for any information you could provide."

"It's the prebend," she says. "He is an _evil_ man."

Huh. That wasn't really the one I was hoping for.

"What--er, what witchcraft exactly does he, uh, practice?" I say.

"It isn't witchcraft that's the problem!" she groans. "Don't be thick! He comes to the cloister almost every week and--"

I hold up a hand. "I am here to investigate witchcraft, Sister. If you're saying there isn't any--"

And the lass gets a facial expression. You know. One of those . . . facial expressions. A large size facial expression. And she looks at me with it. It's a facial expression that Moses would have worn if he were pooping while the Red Sea was parting, but didn't know what pooping was.

"There is," she says. "Yes there is, in the name of God. I'll tell you everything they've done. All of the Satanic summonings. All the midnight dances. It's a regular blood festival here some nights. Yes, there's witches here. Damned witches. And I'll tell you everything."

I had hoped, now that I had parried the accusations against the prebend, which no true witchhunter could even have done anything about (for the prebend is a man), that Emily would lay down accusations against the nuns, I'd parry those, too, and I'd simply wait until it was time to get Anne out and we'd be gone.

Walking back with Emily, I expect her to burst with these invented accusations. Unfortunately, she's patient. She's plotting what to say and when to say it. She's getting revenge, and she's fastidious about it.

Instead it's time for Mother Gibbet to ask me to tell stories.

Suddenly I am aware that I am in a foreign, alien realm, far from safety or sense, and surrounded by kirk women with incredible power to make my life difficult or impossible. If I am found out, I cannot say that I was dressed up as a nun by my employer because no one would believe such a lady as Miss Hazel Rebecca MacLochlan exists. More chance they'd declare me to be mad and send me to Bethlam. A boy with no job, with a body different from other boys', who dresses up as a nun and begins telling stories about burning witches?

"The first whom Sister Goodham and I ever burned," I begin, gathering myself to invent, sitting on the gingerbread railing beside the open Bible of James on its large white stand, "it was on a Sunday and she wouldn't come to church, neither the holy kirk nor the Church of England. The people of the Laggan came to us and said there was a woman who wouldn't observe, and she wasn't a Jew or a foreigner. So we went to her house.

"It was a strange house--not strange in its shape or size, it was a farmhouse. Only it was seen that goats were perched upon the roof, and this seemed a good laugh until it was perceived that the goats were marks of the Devil upon the house. When we came to the door, the woman said she would in no wise open it, but would reject Sister Goodham and myself and refuse to speak to us. Only, the blacksmith was godfearing and came out of church on this Sunday to rouse her and break down the hinges, which he himself had installed. And we blessed him for this, and said that God had rewards for someone who would leave church to assist two women in their religious duties.

"In this way we were admitted to the house. And we found at once that there were signs of iniquity. The woman had a lizard kept on a leash, and she said it had been brought by sailors, and when we asked what reason she had to consort with sailors or lizards she had no answer. And we asked where was her husband? And she would not answer. Only in her attic we found a skull still fresh, and a barrel that was filled with blood that was made into mead with the addition of honey, and its smell was ripe indeed. And we asked whether it was the skull and blood of her husband, and she wouldn't answer. She was dead reluctant in her talking, and said few words. We told her that God had bid her to talk, and if she wouldn't answer to God's word then we would make her speak of her sin through other means."

I look out at the small group of nuns assembled in the front pew, and at Mother Gibbet who stands before the altar as if her legs are built of Greek pillars and will never tire, an immobile nail made of ice, and I see that Molly is squirming in anticipation, here the abused liar Emily is plotting and brooding under her winged white bonnet, and Anne is suppressing a sullen smile at my ingenious storytelling. The other Sisters show no feeling at all, they are a series of speckled sunbruised faces surrounded by black and white, although one is trying to itch her ear through the stiff starched cornette that covers it. Molly takes the Sister's errant hand and shoves it into her lap. The Sister composes herself and flinches at her itchy ear. The railing I sit on is making my butt fall asleep.

"We began with the application of a candleflame to the bare feet. This causes discomfort and anticipation of worse to come, though it does not damage the body. It's important that the body God has given a sinner not be damaged. We entice the sin from the body by assuring it of misfortune if it will not emerge. With the just application of candleflame, enough fear can be generated to induce weeping. But this witch was strong and would not say her crimes yet, and we had to move further. For is it not said that a sinner must admit her guilt for there to be redemption? And thus we induced fear in the second way, through the introduction of an insect to the body--"

"You made her eat a bug?" whispers Molly.

"Hush, let the Sister speak," says Emily, who gets a slap in return. Emily smiles. I think she's very strange, and I wonder what she's plotting.

"It isn't damaging to the body to introduce an insect. Indeed, in far Cathay they are known to eat them by choice." I heard that, actually; Mate Graham told me it once. He loves foreign things. "But if lowered slowly, when the witch is powerless to resist, with our special tongs holding open the mouth--this second stage frequently results in confession."

Several of the Sisters shudder, while Molly squirms in delight and crosses her legs.

"Unfortunately, the keeping of a lizard as a pet had taught this particular witch to resist the fear of horrible segmented creatures, and thus she was able to maintain her innocence, which we knew to be false and a lie. So we moved on to the final stage--"

"A ducking?" exclaims Molly, her hand to her lip.

"We believe that a ducking in water is insufficient to induce the fear and disgust needed to extract the sin. Thus we find it necessary to begin by uprooting an outhouse--"

A satisfying gasp is thereby produced.

"It only took two duckings for this witch to confess her sins. It was indeed her husband's skull, and the blood was not only his but that of neat calves and of stillborns. She admitted she had visited the Devil and they had spoken--"

"Had they . . . consummated?" asks Molly, trembling.

I don't know what this word means. That might be trouble. Molly seems to want me to say yes, so I say no. She picks at the sides of her black cowl, so that it smooths around her knees.

"No, she had . . . planned it," I say, hoping I'm making sense. "Yes, they had planned on a great devilish feast, with much of . . . consummations. Only we called upon her to repent under God and reject this consummation, and be purified through fire, and she declared she would not consent to be burned, and thus it was necessary for the blacksmith to take her to the burning-post. We poured the grease of a rendered pig over her head, and said the prayers of the _Demonologie_ \--"

"Then why do you need a copy?" blurts Molly.

I think about this question.

"Sister Goodham has the book memorized, only she hasn't time to recite it for me to copy down. I'm not a fast writer."

There, that satiated her.

"And we placed the sign of the cross on each side of her, so that she could not help but see it. And when we set her alight, we listened to the cries of purification until we heard her cry her repentance. And as is our delight, once a witch is burnt, and repents, she is seen as cleansed in God's eye, and thus may be buried in consecrated ground. Only those who die without repentance are buried in a witch's copse."

That's true; Mam told me about witch's copses. We haven't got one in the colony, only they had one back in Cumbria and Mam tells stories of Cumbria.

"Your goal," breathes Molly, "is to reconvert them during the burning. So they die _obedient_."

"Yes."

Molly rises and begins pacing in front of the altar under the cold eye of Gibbet.

"I like this," she mutters. "Yes, I like this a lot. What if the witch reconverts prior to the burning?"

"Then she is watched by the community, and is often moved to a cell within the church, where she can be correctly disciplined."

"For the rest of her life," adds Molly hastily, biting a knuckle.

"Yes."

"With the threat of burning upon her at all times."

"Yes."

"Mother Superior," declares Molly. "Just think of the good we could do. We could begin with--"

But Gibbet lifts a wooden hand. Molly nods rapidly.

"Yes, of course, Mother. Better for us to consult in private, where . . . _inexperienced_ ears cannot hear. Sister Margaret, will you accompany us to the Mother's private study? I'll bring our new flower. Perhaps you can elicit a declaration of faith from her?"

Oh, right. _I'm_ Sister Margaret. Took me a second. Anne Thorntown and I lock eyes and she gives me the faintest of nods of agreement.

"Of course," I say, and adjust my posture so that I look as tall as I can. I'm not too tall. I jump off the railing and follow, taking Anne with me along the way.

Molly nestles up beside me as we walk, as if we were regular sisters as well as Sisters.

"What if a witch resists the ducking?" she murmurs. "Is there a fourth step?"

"The witch is placed in a barrel," I invent, "which is then turned on a spit-frame. This is often the messiest of the steps. I have not ever seen a witch resist the first three, actually; I only know the fourth through reputation."

"Wise to have the barrel and spit-frame on hand, though, don't you agree?" says Molly.

Gibbet makes no reply.

We turn a gray corner, whose stone gives echo to our footsteps, and Molly opens an oak door so thick it might be the door that the Lord locks dirty angels behind. We are in Mother Gibbet's large study.

The first thing I notice, to my discomfort, is a human skull. Just like the one in my story, only less bloody. It's real, and quite old, and there are a pair of duckfeather quills sticking out the noseholes. I don't speak of it. The next thing I notice is the black bookstand on which the Bible perches, smaller than the one by the altar. The book is open to Job. Next there is a collection of butterflies pinned to a board, only they are all the same type of butterfly, light blue, except for one brown moth. Several of the wings have fallen off and collected on the windowbox-frame. Somehow I cannot imagine the shrouded frame of Mother Gibbet racing through flowers with a net. I don't speak of it. Aside from an iron bed and a large desk and letter-paper, there is nothing. There are not even books.

There is, however, an iron cane.

"You," says Gibbet, turning, "are young."

I think she is talking to me and not Anne.

"Like a dewy branch, which, in its time, ages and outgrows itself. And drops off." In a mighty voice. "Thus is youth." Gibbet places herself upon a chair. Molly, Anne and I are invited to continue standing. "In you I see a clear instrument of God's correction. It is youth's place to learn, and wisdom's place to watch, and guide, until youth is forgotten, and the child becomes wise in kind. Thus is childhood removed, as a surgeon with a wart. Take the cane, child."

The cane is iron.

"No!" screams Anne, twisting in my and Molly's grasp. "You can't, I'll not stand for it! I've not agreed to be a damned nun, you can't!"

"We can," snarls Molly, grabbing tighter, "and we will. Just you wait. You'll quiet down." The rose-cheeked sister makes a face, and I imagine she feels the strange effect that Miss Hazel has given to Anne. Quickly I say, "Young Miss Thorntown, cease at once," and Anne shares a glance, breathing hard, and glances at the cane, and at me, and I see that she meant to protect me in case I'd forgot the rules.

"If I may," I say, "while this _bit of stuffing_ is clearly wilful, and I have no reason to imagine witchcraft, the techniques Sister Goodham has taught me can be easily repurposed to discipline, with a touch of . . . imagination. It may be educational as well. Sister Molly, would you hand me a lit taper?"

I enjoy that I have called Anne a bit of stuffing.

There are several half-tall candles in sconces.

"It is usual," I say, "for the one who administers the discipline to share in the release of the sin."

The candle is butter-colored and has an uneven meniscus; it had been crooked on the wall. A drip runs onto my hand, and I pretend it doesn't hurt. What I'm about to do is going to hurt a lot worse.

" 'Share in the release of the sin?' " says Molly.

"One imagines one shares the sinner's discomfort. This is common to all witchhunters."

This is the word I have just called myself. I broke one of my rules, which is to not call myself that, but I invent a reason for the God-in-heaven not to be angry with me and say it in my mind. Something bad will happen anyway, I know it.

I sit Anne on a chair and pull her wooden nun's shoe off. The left one. Actually, "The left one is the side where iniquity is stored, thus the left foot is where we begin."

In my right hand I hold the candle. Anne has a look of wicked acceptance of my decision to burn my own foot using hers.

"Sister Margaret McCloud, you better not," she says, and then gives me a wink the others don't see.

I hold her foot by the heel and touch it with the flame.

For a moment, neither of us reacts.

Then I feel my foot burning.

"Repent, sinner!" I bark in order to cover my pain. "Repent!" as my foot begins to wiggle by itself, to get away from a flame that isn't there. "Repent and accept the--ack!--path that the Lord has chosen for you."

Anne takes this as her cue to start acting like she's in pain. She's not ridiculous, she's good at acting, and starts off by blinking like a flinch, then trying to bend her small pink foot away from the flame, then making provocative whining sounds in her throat, before finally turning to Molly and Gibbet for help, where there is none.

All the while, my foot is cooking in an open flame.

The pain steadily grows. If you've never had a burn, then you don't know what it's like, and if you've put a burn under water right away, then you still don't know what it's like. It's different when you can't take the pain away, because you're acting and can't show it.

Every time I can't take the pain and can't hide it anymore, I shout "Repent!" or "Admit your place under God!" and choke back the pain again.

Molly and Gibbet watch with interest.

So does Anne, who, as far as I know, isn't actually feeling anything. Her grimace is utterly pretend, and through it she watches, interested in my pain, which, after all, is self-inflicted.

"Repent!"

"Please," she moans, "it's too bloody much. Ow, Sister Margaret, please!"

She knows perfectly well I can only respond by pushing the flame closer. My teeth grit and shouting "Repent!" is no longer enough to mask the way I feel and I shout "Harlot! Harlot! Harlot!" as if they were cursing words, and Anne nearly laughs, and Molly notices and I poke Anne with the wick and now Anne notices Molly noticing her, and Anne covers it up with a leviathan scream and she makes herself weep and she wails, "Damn you, I'll repent, I'm sorry, it was bloody Tom John and I wanted to marry him, that's all it was, you didn't--" _scream_ "didn't have to hurt me, bloody hell."

I remove the candle and snuff it with a snort out my nose. The pain vanishes as if it never was.

"And this is how the sin is extracted." That's what I say to Molly.

"Our duchess can now be disciplined without fear of escape attempts?" she asks.

"Just like any other new pupil," I say.

My mind is becoming trained to act in linear ways, to speak only when it is wise, and to say nothing I believe to be alarming. I hope it doesn't stick, I'd bore myself to death.

"Tempted though I am to observe the other of your . . . techniques," says Molly, "I'd like to begin her discipline at once. Do you care to watch?"

"I confess it is not my place. I should prefer to retire to a cell for prayer. A glass of warm water would sit well. And, perhaps, a bath in private."

"May I--may I ask whether you really shared in her . . . discomfort, as you purged her sin of lust?" says Molly.

"Naturally. It is the place of the witchhunter to draw out the sin."

Rising, I leave Gibbet's study and retreat, attempting to find my cell from the long line off the arcade.

Even the mighty oak door can't muffle Molly's screams.

I wonder whether this was really all of Miss Hazel's design--go in, spank Sister Molly amusingly, get out again. What a petty little revenge!

This is when the soldiers arrive in town.

The road from Ballymena passes through Calumny alongside the Abbey, although there is a line of old native thornapple budding between the garth and the road, with thin trunks and massive branches and you wonder how they don't topple over or split, only the thornapples have been in Ireland before the Presbyterians.

The drums, heavy tortoise-thumps in steady unyielding beat, come through the line of shrubs and shake my bones. Lesser Sisters, enough of them that I'm pretty sure no one has left for Knockfergus yet, come out of cells, carrying candlemaking things. I only know three of them other than Molly and the Mother: Emily, who's my age, Mary, who helps Mam with lessons, handing out slates and such, and Mary McGillin, who's my age and too tall. The others are mysteries. I join them.

"You said they fight on our side?" says an older nun to me.

"Aye," I say, "that's what they told me."

"It could be a lie," says Mary, the one Molly will send after the book for me. "They could be planning a rebellion."

"Murder us in our beds," says one.

"If they keep moving to the coast, and sail away, then that will be that."

"Just watch them peel away and open our doors and stand over the beds of children with those wicked great swords."

"They won't harm kirk," says Emily. "Nobody's that bad."

"Is that what you think?" says Mary McGillin. "My dad has stories of the old war they fought when he was wee. He told us that the Catholics would break through the shutters of the first Reformers and pour in oil to the houses, on the floor, if they weren't old Catholic-made houses, and set them to fire. Then they'd line up outside the door with muskets, and whoever came out, they'd shoot and rip great holes through with musket balls. Then it was the sword. They'd string up the bodies on poles, and if they were still alive they'd tie them to wagon wheels and hang them in a row on the walls and watch them till they died. Then leave them." Mary McGillin shudders and shades her brow with her hand. "The Irish are monsters. I'll be glad to see them sail away and die in Scotland."

"Charity, Mary," says Emily.

"Well I will. I hate them. I hate that they're so close to our home. I hate that our kirk was once Catholic. Why can't we just get rid of them and have the Scots rule?"

"Have the Scots rule?" I scoff and then I see the odd looks and remember that my name is McCloud and I'm from Longshank and I am a Scottish nun. So I need to say a reason that I'd think that. Quickly, too, or they'll say I'm made of devils and cut me into sausage-tubes to find the devils in me. So I say, "Aren't the Scots rebelling against the Crown?" Everyone knows they are, it's part of what the war is about. I add: "Let Charles rule, and let the Scots farm. It's what we're good at."

"Aye," says Emily, who's English. "Charles hasn't done wrong by me."

"King Charles Stuart is Scottish, you twits. Candles, all of you," snaps Sister Mary, pointing away.

All the Sisters reluctantly disperse, leaving behind little pyramids of tallow where they had stood holding half-finished candles.

I do not disperse. Lacking responsibilities, I move closer to the line of shrubs overlooking the avenue to Knockfergus, aware of my distinctive and distinctly itchy black wool cowl, which doesn't want to move as my legs move. It bunches and feels tight around my legs, and it makes my crotch steam, and I'd rather like to take a bath, and I step off the stone arcade and approach the trees, which are shaped a little like the puffy sugarcakes that Mate Graham buys, and the soldiers notice me and five of them turn off the path.

I withdraw back toward the arcade, peering again at their fine swords and javelin and great beards and fat bellies and treelight-green flat caps and herbal-green kilts. The drums continue, and the remainder of the company marches on, leaving our five behind.

One of the five is a priest.

"Why are you afraid?" the priest says to me in Irish. I step back to the boundary of the garth, hoping they won't follow. They do.

"Do you think we're brutes?" says a soldier, still speaking Irish.

"We're only brutes if you'll have us be them," says another, winking.

I retreat to the arcade. And the four soldiers and the Irish priest surround me, grins on their faces, and my back touches the stone wall and I am their prisoner. The God-in-heaven looks down on me and says to me that I am too pretty and have created five bad ideas. I may get kissed.

"Have the Reformers decided to allow only the pretty girls to become nuns?" a man with trimmed whiskers asks.

Knew it, God told me and now they'll kiss me.

I need to say something convincing. I need them to leave me alone. I want only to rescue Anne when it's time, and I need them not to touch me with iron. Luckily their armor is just wool, and their gloves have only brass studs. Brass hasn't got iron in it, has it?

"In the name of God, this is a church!" I exclaim. That sounds right.

"No it isn't," they laugh. "If you came past Newry preaching from the Common Book, we'd hang you for a heretic."

"We preach from the Bible, as you do," I say.

The men laugh.

One of them touches my arm, and I curl up inside myself and inch down the stone wall and feel more like a gel than I ever really expected to. The priest hisses, "In the name of the father, who is Catholic only, there is no shame in . . . defrocking . . . a worshipper of a false heresy."

"You bloody barbarians bloody get out of my cloister before I add a dozen new nostrils to your face!" screams Molly, brandishing the iron cane as a cudgel. Without hesitation she begins swinging. Her aim is precise from years of beating children, and the sound of Irish heads being struck directly is richer and deeper in turn than the sound of Miss Hazel's face being struck by a mailed fist. None of the men was the one Miss Hazel and I overpowered. The iron cane shudders sonorously in Molly's hand after each blow, and whatever one may say of Molly, she is saving my life right now. Saving my face from getting kissed. Or from getting exposed.

The iron cane swings, going _dang dang dang,_ and she even hits the priest who was giving the men permission to take my clothes off. The men curse and run, saying something about all the crazy women in Ulster.

When I uncover my eyes, Molly and Gibbet peer down at me. I feel like a flea whose dog was rescued from the ocean.

"Rude men," rumbles Mother Gibbet. She herself has no cane, but I cannot imagine the man who could strike her without his arm freezing off.

"You hurt?" says Molly, giving me a hand up.

And she hands me the filed-down poker, and I take it.

My hand touches cold iron.

And the spell is broken.

"Margaret? They've beaten you," says Molly, touching my face. I don't have a mirror, but I imagine I look different. I imagine I look like a boy. Like me. I may have to give myself bruises later, so that it winds up looking realistic.

And my voice.

My voice.

I make myself cough. And cough and cough and wheeze and point to my throat. Molly and Gibbet share a look, and I spit up into my hand and rub my spit between hands and cough some more. Cough till I cry. The crying'll make it all believable.

"I was struck," and my voice sounds boyish, "in the throat." Yes, they can all hear it, for they recoil from the sound of my voice.

"Monsters," whispers Molly. "They're not human. They're less than wolves. Look what they've done. Your face will be green from bruises in a day. It's all sunken. God's tears, look what a mess."

What I want is a hot bath and some privacy. I say so.

"Of course. I'll call the prebend, too, he'll have curatives--"

"No," I say quickly, "I need only a hot bath and bed rest."

"Nonsense, you need a doctor, you look completely unlike yourself. And you sound terrible."

"Just fear, I pray," I tell her.

"And a wallop in the throat. I'll . . . send for him," and Molly's tone of voice makes me suspect that "sending for the prebend" is something suspicious, as Emily had hinted.

Luckily it's Anne they send to draw my bath, and I'm given privacy to pretend to recover.

She's smiling, a warmer and more complete smile than I've ever seen from her or possibly anyone. Like all of us little nuns, she's just a face floating in the black and white nun's outfit that's supposed to represent a light in the darkness. Her light in the darkness has got freckles on it, and it has a pink-red smile that goes from side to side. Not even my stupid predicament slows down her smile.

"Almost didn't believe it," she says as we walk slowly up the arcade and through the grassy yard in the middle. I'm leaning on her arm as if I've been beaten up.

"I know. I'm so stupid," I say, aware that we're still nearly in earshot.

"She's a real witch. The proper kind. The kind my mam told stories about. Only she isn't a bad one. Didn't know there was wonderful witches too." She's keeping her voice down, and the Sisters are on the far side of the cloister, but even so it makes me nervous. Madgirl.

"How will we cover it up?" I say. Here's the room with the bath. The cooper-tub has iron bands around it and a round copper bottom and is empty of water. She'll need to carry water in, and I'm supposed to be too injured to help.

"A real witch, can you imagine?" she says, taking up the bucket.

"Anne, quick, punch me in the face as hard as you can. And the throat. That'll make it look right."

Obviously, it takes her no time at all to land hard smacks to either cheek and to my throat. Heat like shame wells up. I half expect her blows to rebound back to her, but Miss Hazel is subtle in her touch, and they don't.

"I'll tell you all about it later," she whispers, then knocks the bucket into my cheekbone as hard as she can by the tin handle and runs to the well. I think of men and shiver.

Exhausted and cross at having been hit, I wait as Anne fills up the tub. As it fills, I start a fire in the brick oven beneath it, scratching the tinderbox (its steel unable to hurt me further) until the straw flares, moving the flaring straw to stringy shaggy wood from a wall of split logs. That's always been one of Mam's punishments for acting up in class, is having to split wood for the Sisters. The water goes from cold to luke, I stoke the fire, and as Anne fills it I become ready to undress the rest of the way and then it's full and Anne closes the door but she stays inside. I am a boy standing in petticoats and a gel is in the room with me.

"Anne Thorntown," I say.

"It's expected," she says. "If I stand outside the room they'll start ordering me around again. Anyway, I haven't told you what happened yet. It was magnific, Franc--Margaret. First she--"

"Anne. Thanks for pouring the bath. Go away."

"Did your witch master change all of you, or only your face?" she leers.

"Go away. You're not going to see me with less clothes than this." I grab my loose cowl and pull it around myself.

"I'll turn around, if it'll make you act less of a girl, Margaret McCloud. I amn't going out, though. Not to Molly, I've got to give her time to figure out what's happened to her."

I can't believe this. I want Anne to evaporate like an old puddle and her eyes to go first.

She turns around and covers them.

There's a temptation to plunge into the steaming tub in my full habit, but that would not go well in the eyes of the Sisters, whom I must continue to fool.

"Look, I'm turning around. See? Turned around. Can't see nuthin'. Go to it."

"You're really not going to leave," I say.

"Got a story to tell you. Hurry, they'll start poking their pig-snouts in."

The madgirl really isn't looking. I skin down and slip into the tub, which is hot on the bottom but not too hot to sit in. The smoke from the brick oven manages to escape from the open front as well as the chimney, scenting the windowless room.

"Ha, can't believe you actually did it, Maggie. Thought you'd just sit in the corner in your clothes like an old turd and tell everyone you'd bathed, and everyone would smell you." She comes over and I frantically try to hide, but she doesn't care about seeing me; she sits on the floor beside the roaring fire, beneath eye level, but where she can whisper without an eavesdropper hearing.

"You're going to smell like boys," she whispers.

"Did Miss Hazel tell you when we'd be getting out?"

"She said a week. Long bloody week. Relax, we can cover this up. Listen. It worked brilliantly. I pretended the cane hurt like blazes, and Molly near blasted her bum off her hips, and the whole time she believed it was what she was supposed to be feeling. Beyond beautiful. Could you hear us roaring and screaming together?"

"Yeh."

"Did you burn your foot too bad?"

"The pain stopped as soon as I stopped." It's odd. Talking to Anne makes me feel more of a sensible person and less like myself. I don't know if I'll be able to handle a week of this.

"It was utterly satisfying. Hope she keeps going on me, but I bet she won't. Mags, can I ask you something?"

" 'Course," I say, and I hear myself imitating her way of talking. It's one of my rules, you talk like those you're talking to, so they won't hear who you are underneath. I'm good at it, it's one of my secrets. I have more, too.

"Do you think that Gibbet is up to something? I feel like there's another side we're not seeing. What does she want? She hardly even seems to pray, or to have faith, or anything. Who is she?"

"She wants to burn witches. I think that's who she is."

"Molly cares for the burning a whole lot more than Gibbet. Think the bat's old enough to remember before the Reformation?" Anne asks.

"Probably."

"Think she was a Catholic before she became kirk?"

"Probably."

"God, it's like I'm talking to myself. They're going to make me sit through prayers before they teach me to participate, so that's nice, I won't have to do it myself. I'll give you privacy. Once more into the breach."

Rising, she leaves my naked body with her bit of Shaksper and exits the bathing-room.

For two hours at least I allow the hot water into my mind, so to speak, until my mind boils with fear of getting out of the tub. Twice I hurriedly drip onto the bricks when I climb out to add more wood, and twice the drips snarl as they turn to steam.

There is a small dollop of gratitude in me that the Sisters give me the privacy I asked them for.

In the end I rise with deep wrinkles on my fingers and sit on the floor before the red coals to keep my warmth while I'm drying. I have reasons not to leave. There is a terrible plague outside and I'm trapped in here for my health. The men from the Catholic South have returned with long pikes and are skewering anyone who isn't in a bathhouse. Moonmen have fallen from the sky and they eat only nuns. Then I'm dry and have no more excuses to invent and I put the underskirts and the tunic and all the aprons and the white stole and the sinister white cornette onto my body and leave the room.

In the chilly cloudy garth, I pull my cornette tighter around my face, so no one notices that I am Francis Mansfield. My greatest fear is being asked to attend my mother. Sister Mary-without-the-surname, who normally attends her, is being sent to fetch my book from Knockfergus. I hope one of the new gels replaces her. Maybe they'll choose Anne, even. That would be fine. Just not me.

When Molly spots me limping provocatively across the grass, she rushes forward and grasps my shoulders and peers into the pupils of my eyes. "Henry Wool's sent a missive to Newry and one to Bangor requesting a king's sanction on the soldiers. He's asked for an overseer to march alongside all the Catholic brigades, so they don't _perpetuate_ any more atrocities. And I've sent a letter calling for the excommunication of the priest. I heard what he said about heretics. Go and rest, Sister Margaret, you must, you look just awful, I can hardly--oo! The bruises have started. Rest, we'll look after you."

Lucky that Anne's got a stiff violent arm. We pass a mirror, and it's true, my face is blooming.

΅

The next two days I'm not summoned for prayers or anything. I make a point to be found praying when they bring me food on a tray, and Anne stops in to smirk at the bruises she's provided me, and when I am alone there is much of sitting and thinking, and in the absence of unfamiliar company I return to myself.

First I create a new saint. That's most important. His name is Angus and his face starts on Earth and goes up to the heaven. He knows me because I once went up to heaven part two of the seven heavens in a dream, on the back of a horse with six mighty wings, and I looked down upon Earth and he was halfway up. His special power is that he's never wrong about anything, he knows things that are secrets to everyone but him, only the other special power is that he never says anything to anybody. He's so tall because he stores all the secrets in the world in his cloud brain and it goes all the way up. His feet are on the ground but his chin is resting on the Earth so he's a bit twisted in his body, but it doesn't concern him because he's always thinking of what is going to be born in the world, whether war or new faith or second Christ or a new continent across the sea, that was always one of his secrets and then Columbus found it and told the secret to everyone and so really Columbus stole it from my saint, only Angus doesn't mind because afterward he put a power in the world that makes lemons taste of raspberry if you have the power, but it's a secret how to get it.

On the third day I decide I and Saint Angus of the Head-Heaven must face up to the rest of the week as a boy disguised as a girl. First I conceive to ask for some kind of wandering task where I could be out of the cloister. Then I imagine I might go a-witch-burning, but that's a lie I invented and not real. Perhaps I could say there's a great medical problem and could I be sent with money to Belfast for a physician, only I remember it would be the evil prebend they'd send me to first. I'm pleased he hasn't come; Molly must have forgot about it, or took me at my word, or didn't want to pay him for medicine. Next I think perhaps I'd go looking down the road for Sister Goodham whom I invented, but they'll be chary of letting me since the kerns got at me.

I can't invent the right lie to fix things right now, so I get out the door with the nasty chamber pot and take it to the midden and dump it and carry the white pot to the well and wash it with well water and bring it back and as I re-emerge there is the night-in-the-dark that is named Gibbet and she makes a shape with her claws that means I should go with her.

At her side I walk, just we two, a pair of black pillows stuffed with pious humanity, two damaged faces, although not as damaged as Miss Hazel's. Silence drifts like elder shrouds, the sky mourns without weeping, and we leave the ponderous white Abbey for the road. Gibbet follows it strictly as a cart in cartruts and we take the right fork away from Ballymena and around to the back of Calumny Colony.

Now the road becomes so familiar that my feet follow themselves, with native toes. This is my town. I know it. Where is Gibbet taking me? Does she want me to recount my story to Hank Wool?

But we turn down the way to the far outskirts, and ahead is Starnlowe's house. It looks different in the day, but I feel it is somehow darker.

With Gibbet's own iron cane, the door is rapped upon.

A call from inside, and, "Who is it?"

Gibbet makes no reply as she stands at the door like a gentleman calling upon a lady.

I make no reply. It is necessary that I put on a face that seems like I know what I'm doing and have done this many times before, but my face is Francis Mansfield's face, and Junie will know it. I maneuver behind the Mother Superior.

Junie opens the door to the midwife's lodge. She does not see me, but she sees Mother Gibbet.

Terrified, anguished, and despairing, Junie's voice wails, "It's them!"

In the back of the house, a clobber of footsteps, a window opening, a jump. The midwife is not at home.

From an inner pocket, Gibbet withdraws a rolled-up piece of thick paper tied with a beige ribbon. Junie Edwards slides the ribbon off and reads. Her eyes move back and forth, and her horror is complete.

Her voice shakes, and she shakes, but she takes each word with more anger than fear.

"Miss. Starnlowe. Isn't. A witch."

Turning her attention to me, she blinks several times and raises a finger, as if to ask a question about me, then changes it to this: "You're the one the Catholics tried to insult."

I nod.

"Were--were you the one who came in, the other night?"

Glancing briefly at Gibbet, I nod again. Junie bursts to weeping in her eyes and heart.

"But you saw perfectly well that we weren't--I mean _she_ wasn't--"

And Gibbet opens her black mouth and speaks:

"Language is so treacherous, isn't it, child? With words we betray ourselves."

"Betray ourselves?" chokes Junie. "You--you think I--?"

"Sister Mary has gone to the coast to ask for a ducking stool and other equipment. Soon we will learn what secrets you store in your wicked bedroom."

Junie has lost words altogether, although her mouth forms round shapes beyond her control. "I was chosen _two days ago_ \--"

"She has permitted you into her garden," says Gibbet. "Once Sister Mary returns, you will let us into yours. Come, Margaret. We will return when the best tools are in our hands."

Gibbet places a hand in the small of my back and leads me away.

In no version of our world can I leave this notion unchallenged.

"Mother--Mother Superior," I begin, consciously pitching my voice up an octave. "It's true we stopped briefly at this house. I saw no signs of . . . witchery, there. It might be a grave misdeed to rob this town of its midwife."

"The prebend has expressed his willingness to take on this responsibility."

". . ." I say. Then: "Yes'm."

Inside I know that this will not result in any good things for Calumny Colony. It will yield the worst things. But the Mother has it all planned out, and she has made decisions, and not even Angus the Secret-Dreamer will be able to influence her. I imagine a secret that can change people's minds so that they do just what you say, it's a stone, smoothed by rivers and seas, and if you hold it, people will listen to you and their minds will mold like clay to match yours, only the stone is being kept in a curiosity shop in a far foreign city that disappears if you even find it, and the shopkeeper wouldn't give me such a stone anyway. It would be unwise to mold minds to match my own.

Gibbet takes a new direction, opposite to the Abbey, and crosses a small mason wall beneath a large spinney of trees in a direction the townsfolk don't go. She crosses the wall this way: First she sits her brutal body upon the mortared surface, as a woman riding sidesaddle, then she lifts her cowled legs together and turns and she is on the far side of the barrier, which has no gate and leads only into trees.

Imitating her, I cross to her side and look up into her unsmiling face.

"There are hours in which I doubt," she says. Black and unknown, she stands beside me. "Days of peering into the walls that men have built, trying to renew the fountain from which women drink. I believe that there are few who possess a wellspring deep enough to lead them above, to the heaven where God waits. Most die. Most die before their feet leave the ground. Most die dry, unslaked. I search for a fountain. It is in my heart that a fountain of faith may be cut from blood. Come. See the place where I search."

Brushing aside branches, she leads me into the trees. They are sparse a few feet above our heads, but dense below our feet, with fallen limbs and brush and leaves deep enough to reach my ankles, green and brown and shadowed in the spiderweb-lace shadows that leaves cast. My steps are short as I step over wood and through native plants. The spinney seemed far smaller on the outside; already the stone wall and the colony are invisible to us and we to them, and we have vanished. Almost girlishly, Mother Gibbet skips through the growth, certain of her steps.

The ground gives way to a surprise slope. There is a valley within these trees. I can picture that this is past the edge of town, but in the fields outside the trees you don't appreciate the closeness of the undergrowth or the deep land hidden within, like a cherry with the pit pulled out.

There is a nest dug into the valley. Blue slate stones are stairs down, spiral and shallow. Roofed in by green, we descend into a pit. Dirt forms a wall beside me, and I imagine that this circular well wall will cave in and bury us together, Mother Superior and Child Inferior. The dirt holds. It's been there before I was born and will be there when today becomes ancient days.

"Skulls," says Gibbet, reaching down and picking one up, "are the ashes of dead minds. When I was young I painted them with currant juice. There."

From a corner of the pit, she shows me a skull that she painted when she was a child. The faded burgundy patterns are not patterns I would have devised.

"The oldgraves are the rest for dead Catholics. The newgraves are Reformist. But here." And her ugly hand pushes against the dirt of the wall of the pit, and a piece of stone dislodges, and a door opens into the earth.

"Here are beds for ignorant pagans who had the misfortune to die too early. Their souls were ill-equipped for the death that comes. They are men drawn from coarser meal than Christians who know God. In death their souls are locked within the land. Listen. Listen to the breath that is drawn from the restless. Smell the human blight. Hear the voices."

I listen, but the pit and the deathlifeblack barrow are silent to me.

"Do you hear, Sister? They call out their own names. Their last memory. Do you hear the names?"

Gibbet places her claw to her ear. I say I hear nothing.

"Torna mac Ailill, he says to me. Torna, Torna, calling from within a skull."

Her root-shaped hand pushes the stone door further open, and there are more bones, a thousand bones stretching all the way back and it goes into Ireland deeply and it is a cave. The old nun makes no effort to enter, for which I am grateful, but there are bones stacked and they are too near.

"What life did you lead, Torna mac Ailill?" she murmurs, sitting upon a blue step and crossing her legs within the black of her cowl. "How did you die? And where did you go, not knowing God? Did you arrive in the city of Dis, as the Catholic Italians would have it? Did you stand at the lip of Hell and oversee those whose sins were deeper than your own? Or did you disappear into the bosom of Christ upon His death? Did you feel the sore spot where the Lord should have been? Or were you blind entirely?"

A skull sits on her palm.

"I see the wars and blood that came before civilized people arrived in Ireland. I see the way the natives destroyed each other. And I see God's hand in moving Britons here to pacify the wild natives. I see God's hand in the dead skulls that fill the land beneath the land. I see God's hand in my witness to the death of the pagans. And my small, humble well of faith is renewed."

Placing the skull back into the pit, she rummages into the barrow door and pulls out another.

"Do you hear the voice, Sister Margaret?"

Once again I listen, but there is nothing.

"Ah, but the voice is so clear. Angus mac Dagh, he says, Angus mac Dagh, and upon his head is a dream of youth, but the dream is a secret and cannot be found. Too much of age and the dream dies, he says. And perhaps he's right. And--" Mother Gibbet tilts her head, though I am frozen with chills and impossibility. She has heard my Saint Angus say his name. He's delivering his secrets to me through her. "And another secret. Angus speaks of a traitor, a secret traitor. Probably the one who caused his skull to wind up here, I imagine. Words on the tops of trees. Ah, but the blood of the ancients has seeped deeply into the land, and the blood is gone from these bodies, and only skulls and voices remain."

Mother Gibbet rises and ascends the stair. "Tomorrow we shall issue a proclamation of a hunt for the practice of witchery. I shall need your expertise, Sister Margaret."

She does not ask me to accompany her back to the Abbey. I take her words to mean that I have no further responsibilities until tomorrow, when she will set Junie and Miss Starnlowe on the path to being burned or drowned. I sit within the pit of the barrow until Mother Superior is out of sight.

Mother Gibbet also sees skulls, just like the drunken miller. Only, hers are real. Or at least proper dead.

And I think: My saint is a true saint. He placed words within the mouth of the Mother. That much is unavoidable. Again the traitor has been mentioned, and I'd like to ask Miss Hazel about this, and whether the Irishmen who met at the Catholic camp are really planning a war against Calumny. But those words . . . The blood of the ancients, seeping deeply. Does it mean an old war, or perhaps a new war? Perhaps all Irish are ancient. Then what? Blood is gone from these bodies. Skulls and voices. I peer into the barrow, but it's too narrow and stuffed with bones. I could shove them aside, but I am not one to so lightly disinter the dead. What was the other thing Angus said? Something about trees?

Shutting the door to the barrow, my eyes turn treeward. There is a root-wild evergreen whose outer feelers hang over me and whose feet clutch the barrow's top; I passed under its boughs when I descended the blue stair.

Words on the tops of trees. That's what it was.

Taking my aprons and white cowl off, I begin climbing, wearing only underskirts and knickers. We are so far from the eyes of civilization that I do not fear being spotted. Gibbet won't return, she said her piece. This is true in my mind. There's no way to climb trees in a nun's habit.

Sticky patches ooze out of the trunk, collecting on my petticoats as if I had been wearing a beehive. The branches are sticky too, and by the time I'm within reaching distance of the upper branches my hands and bare elbows are coated and make a _slick_ sound each time I pull them off. But I know that my saint is not leading me out of my way for no reason. There's blood in the land and it's coming out. I remember Hazel's story and hope I can get down again.

The rough bark has small spiders in it, and I puff a breath out of my cheeks and they run over each other to leave me alone.

Here is the top of the pine. I am here. My hand knocks something down, but it isn't a cone. It's a card, and it falls to the bottom and my climb hasn't been useless but it has ended unsatisfactorily, and I hurriedly climb back down, piercing my hand on spines more than once. I drop and stick myself with more prickles on the ground.

I am a mess. With wellwater and soap I'll be able to get much of it off, but the petticoats will not clean properly, sap never comes all the way out. So I'll need to keep my cowl on all the time, and discard the petticoats when I leave. Maybe I'll burn them like a dead cat.

There is a tickle, and it's a small spider on me. Another puff and it departs, and I wonder whether it's cruel to kill spiders, whether cruel Mother Gibbet kills spiders like her butterflies. I don't know.

Like a message written to humans of the future, the card I knocked down lies unburied on tidy pine needles and sticks out as if the very rocks around it have spread to reveal it.

Yellow and off-white and painted with black block-prints, it is the ace of acorns. Sunlight breaks through trees as wind blows, and it reflects the skull inside the pit, only for a moment, and then the branches move on. Lacking pockets, I slide the card between my skin and the gluey petticoats and reluctantly don my nun disguise. One cheek burns from the bruises every time the wind blows, but it blows not too often.

Rubbing sticky off my hands, I vault the low wall in an unladylike way, remember myself, and walk more demurely back from the edge of town to the Abbey.

People walk about; people I know. There's White the Jew, there's two women I don't know well, and there's Mam.

God, I say in my mind, permit her not to notice me. Permit her to fill her mind with Latin and the need for butter from the milker's, permit my mother to stub her toe and fall and I will run past her and return to the Abbey and there will be no need to--

"Is that Emily McCann?" Mam says.

I am not Emily McCann, and I hurry forward toward the Abbey, which is a white sad hedgehog not half a furlong away.

Mam is not one to shout across the square, but she is certainly in a hurry as she crosses toward me through the scant people mulling about at midday. Once she is not so far as to need to shout, she says, "Sister!" and there is no evading it, she means me. Turning, I match eyes with my mother.

Perhaps if I do not speak she will not recognize.

She recognizes. Now rushing, she takes me by my arm and leads me without a word through the square and toward the house. Da will be in the field.

But Mam.

I can hardly keep pace in my sticky petticoats, and my cowl has leaves stuck to it. Even if it were right for a boy to wear a nun's habit I'd look a mess. Closing my eyes, I pretend that no one can see me, and that everyone who does thinks I'm also Emily McCann, but it doesn't work. It's my mam. Across the green and between the row houses of the butcher and a seamstress, I am marched. Dust scuffs up now that the storms have passed, and my wooden shoes are unfamiliar to my feet, and I hate the way I can't control them or where I'm going, it's the worst thing Mam does, pulling on my arm. Normally I can tell what to expect from my mother, but she's never caught me unemployed in nun's clothes before. Briefly I wonder whether Miss Hazel is real or just one of my mental constructions, and really I'm not sure, not until we get through the alley and out to the open fields and I see more Catholic soldiers crossing the distant green, accompanied by the too-somber form of Henry Wool. He's a good man, and doesn't look pleased to have heard of the incident. A second wonder: Does Henry Wool believe the story? Has the story been exaggerated past the truth? I don't know.

These are the fields I know. Once again I am within the invisible borders that limit my old childhood world. Nowhere is there an unfamiliar twig. Here is the same knotted clump of witchnested bracken where once I tripped and skinned my arm open to the elbow when I was running in the dark. I forgave the witchnest later, and made it my friend, the friend who hurt me first, so no other friend would be the first to hurt me. Not that I ever had friends. Tom John had friends. Phelim did. And the gels all had each other. Boad didn't hate me. None of this matters.

Phelim once told me he could see the future, so I asked him what was about to happen and he said I was about to have a black eye. I did, too. He also said I'd have an ache in my shins, and that I'd wake up a coward tomorrow, and both of those were true. Perhaps he really could see the future.

Unlike the witchnest, I never found forgiveness for Phelim O'Hara. I did tell the minister he did it, and he told me I was sinful not to forgive, so I told the minister I forgave Phelim and pretended I wasn't lying about it.

"What in the wounds of the Lord are you after?"

The door slams behind Mam and I am in my house. The old home smell of roasting dripped fat in a pan, for Mam's fried sausage and oatmeal breakfast, and the waft of far sawdust from where Da shapes dowels to fill termite-holes is so familiar I burst into tears, although it's not the only reason. My bruises ache as I cry, making my face pinch and giving me headache. Mam isn't sympathetic, and not for the first time I wish she hadn't become kirk and a cold-hearted teacher, but had been a jolly carder or spinner like Boad's mam.

"She sent me. She t-told me."

"Who?" she interrupts. "Who? I came at midnight but you weren't there."

"You--" I moan, "you weren't there--you didn't stay--"

"Haven't got all day for a son no one wants--"

And I pull the door open and I run.

That was always my fear. That was at the center of the hole inside me. It wasn't the fear that no one would want to hire me or to marry me or anything. It was Mam and Da. They never wanted me. They _never_ wanted me. They're lucky to be rid of me and the only reason Mam noticed me or cared in the market square was out of fear that I'd embarrass her more than I already do. But now she'll tell the town I was dressing as a nun in disguise at the Abbey to hide the fact that no one chose me at the line, and the town will know and the Abbey will shame me and I'll go home to be sent to the Marysbourne line and all of Miss Hazel's plans will erupt in tormented failure, and Anne will be prisoner forever and throw herself down a well, and I will get picked for the Marysbourne muck-carts. Picked last. Again.

My arms aren't strong. They are whiter than bone dipped in milk, if you ever felt like dipping bones in milk, and you can see my two armbones through the skin and all the veins are clustered close on top. My hands dip around the wrists, like I just took off tight bracelets. My fingers have little veins forming squares around them. My knuckles have a purple oval that you can see. My belly folds up under my ribs, and the skin of my chest sometimes gets caught on my ribs until I poke at it.

I can't lift tuns or swing a sickle or build a barn.

But I can run.

I could outrun winged Mercury.

And for my whole life I've been able to outrun Mam. Mam has always relied on words to get me to obey. She'd scold, scoff, call, doubt, shout, reprimand, disapprove, and above all, hurt. She could hurt a true perfect saint with her words. She could wound Jesus from an acre's line off. She's an ifreet.

For all my life, Mam would say stop and I'd stop.

Mam says stop.

I go.

A black arrow shaped like a nun takes off across the field behind my house. Da is far off and blessedly unaware, and I blast past him and then there is the outer wall and the tuft of green like a paintbrush and six low powder-brushes and then I'm beyond and no one can see and no one can know and I am black in the ocean of green and I pull off the apron and cowl and now I am white and I am become Earth's cloud and then my mind closes off from its own shame and abandonment and I disappear completely, an absence upon man's mind under the Lord, and gravel and ruts are my personal home, and nothing else nothing else nothing just nothing I am running and it is what I can do, hugging a squishy plush animal friend shaped like a woollen nun's cowl, and the sky is my friend, too, the blue and clouds and birds, but it's true what she said, no one wants me, and I realize that the sky and birds don't want me and they are not my friend and even the cowl-animal hates me and now I am truly alone.

I run.

Back along the fenced lane over which I brought Anne, past Hagee's farm, furlongs upon furlongs, the land of Ireland stretching out ahead of me like a baxter's kneaded dough, up the pebbleslope toward the newgraves, and Dacy Jack isn't there, and exhaustion nears but I push farther until Finn's Giant's Barrow is visible in the outer distance and it's evening now and it's just as much more to walk as the story Miss Hazel told me about Devlin MacLochlan, but in my blurry fury I cannot reach it.

The Catholic camp is only slightly off the way, and there is easy shelter and wool pallets there, and after a rest I will find Miss Hazel and tell her how I failed.

That is my plan. Like all my plans, it is thwarted at once.

A fire is lit on the heath.

For a strange moment I imagine it is winter, and these are Norsemen gathered with their elderly bearded axes and their beer-sodden axe-shaped beards, but it's worse, it's the Irish. They're armed not for the king, not marching to Bangor to sail across to Scotland or Spain or wherever the war is, but for shooting colonists. I don't actually know this; but I feel it.

The cowl under my arm is black. The evening is black. Drape; hip-wiggle; I am black. Black as a black wandering dog. Black as a stormcloud. Black as a warning.

There are no flights of my mind, no illusions, no inventions. War is coming to Calumny Colony, and the fighters will kill my family. My family that disowned me and is spreading lies in town at this very moment. Mam doesn't gossip, but Mam will tell Da and then Da will spread the story like an infection.

For a moment I fill with wrong blood and I consider just letting the Irish overrun the plantations and the colonies and the tenancies and the Covenanters and all the people in Ireland who came over across the sea and shouldn't be here. Why shouldn't I let the Irish kill everyone? Why should I care? Who do I have to care about, or to care for?

But I need to save Junie and Miss Starnlowe. I'd save Henry Wool. Myself. Even the little nuns who've been chosen by Molly. The Irish can kill Molly and Gibbet. They can kill Phelim O'Hara, although he's half Irish and they'll probably spare him. They can kill lots of people, but not Junie. I'll not marry her, but I'll give her the life she deserves.

What I have now is a way to overhear the plans of the Irish. Approaching, I once again climb the tree overlooking the camp. This time there is only one card from the deck to lead me here, but it's the ace of acorns and it didn't become a star, it just told me I'm meant to be here in a tree above the Catholic war camp, only I don't know whether Miss Hazel made it this way or whether the God-in-heaven did through my Angus.

Below me there are only half so many men as came through down the lane from Ballymena, but these have guns. They also have dice. Well, one die. They sit in a halfcircle, eight men, with more standing and watching, and there's a ninth, a whitebeard who solemnly displays the six sides, he does it each time, holds up an empty brown cup, he does something tricky with his fingertips and the die spins ten feet into the air and he catches it with the cup and somehow the cup lands on the solid ground, covering the die, every time.

I wait for hours. Lying atop the tree costs me no stamina, and I nearly fall asleep, but there are risks to being in a tree directly above an army that hates your people and your religion. A tumble and they'd skewer me and roast me, nun's habit and all.

What I'm waiting for is for someone to declare, "Tomorrow we'll kill all the colonists!" or something, but I only hear the sound of gambling and belching. That's all I hear. Either these men are very good at keeping their plans secret, or I am a terrible spy.

Light.

There is light in my petticoats.

Light is lighting up in the tree. A rectangle of light, shining out the top and bottom of my habit, shining so bright it exits the black fabric altogether.

First there are casual remarks in Irish regarding the moonlight. But the light grows until it's blinding, it even blinds me through the high neck of the robes, and the men playing dice can no longer ignore it.

They see.

They say there's an animal in the tree, and I cover my face and pull my hands up inside my sleeves, and they say it's too big to be a marten, perhaps it's a cat, but they say it's too big to be a cat, too, perhaps it's a bear, and then they say they'll take turns shooting it down with muskets, and I slide further down to the crook of the branch, and I don't believe they'll waste the black powder, but then there's a machine blast so terrible I nearly fall from the sound and I can't avoid shouting "Don't shoot!"

And now the light fades, and now I put on my cornette upside down and become a postulant nun named Margaret McCloud.

A weed garden of musket barrels bristles up at me as I climb down.

"Who are you?" shouts a man in Irish.

The bark of the tree is smooth and papery. There are no men pointing guns at me, I tell myself this again and again, they are figments, but I touch ground and am pushed up against the tree and a musket barrel presses against my throat and they repeat the question, still speaking only Irish. I pitch my voice as high as it can go, it's much like a girl's anyways, and introduce myself as Sister Margaret McCloud of Longshank and I am visiting the Abbey. I say it in English.

There is no priest here to tell them it's okay to take my clothes off. Also, these men are much older than the impetuous young kerns. I hope they don't hurt me. Also I hate the deck of cards. They're filled with bad.

" _Ban raltoo_ ," says one.

"Please," I say in English. "I'm just here in town to hunt witches." I say the Irish word for witch: _kelik_.

A slender giant with a faint old beard steps forward from the crowd. He hadn't been playing dice, he was just watching. The man who was dealing the die is still sitting, left behind. The slender giant crosses his lanky arms and speaks English with a deep accent:

"Fair expecting to see witches from upon your branch, were you, Sister?"

"There was a fire," I say. "My Da always says fires mean war." I'm still pitching my voice higher. I don't know whether they're fooled.

After speaking a few words to the men in Irish and making them laugh, the man says, "It does, Sister. War there will be."

They're going to kill Calumny. They're going to kill Mam and Da.

My cornette slips down my ears, and a great roar goes up, and I stoop to put it back on and the men say, "Short hair!" and I tell them Mother Superior cut my hair off as penance. And as I'm saying this, and as the tall man who speaks English repeats the words in Irish, I remember that I am a nun, who thinks and speaks as a nun, and I'll have no burly warriors cresting in warlike rage around my person.

"Remove this musket at once!" I remark, sounding just like Mam when a kid's misbehaving. "I have every right to sit in trees in my town when I think a war is coming and watch for those with wrath upon their hearts. What right have you to make war? What right--"

The slender giant grabs the barrel of the musket and pushes it away from my throat. However, the intimidation of the gun is replaced by the wrathy heart of the man himself. The rest of the Catholic brigade gathers around him, forming an arrowhead. The man's huge finger points.

"Ye stole our lands," he says. "Ye ousted our priests. Ye burned our fields when we fought ye, and then ye grew foreign grains in place of barley and oats. Ye live in houses made by Catholic hands and pray in churches built of Catholic stone. Ye threw our altars into ditches and pulled Iesus down from the cross. I'd say we have every right."

The mob behind him have no idea what he just said, but they show their teeth menacingly and growl.

Then I say: "You can speak English because you're a Redneck."

Blasting into laughter, the slender giant loses his wrath in a second. "Aye, Sister, I married in. I'm John Caimbeul, the Dark Lady's great-nephew. Ye've got a bit of Redneck in you, too, haven't you?"

I'm one hundred percent Cumbrian Angle and not a drop Scottish, so I'm going to have to lie to him with agility.

"Aye," I say, "my name is Margaret" but quick as a flash I say, "Hagee" instead of McCloud, and my lack of a clever plan is dissipating. I know now what I'm going to do. I'm going to punish Hagee for tearing Anne's dress. "I've come down from Laggan Longshank to see my mother's brother, he's got a farm uptown. Will you tell me the story of how you married in?" and John Caimbeul's turned all the way about and is now thoroughly on my side. My voice is piping, and I can fake a gel's voice reliably now.

The Scotsman speaks to the assembled Irish thugs, and their fear and rage fades and they part like water and John Caimbeul lets me in closer to the fire.

Now large armed men surround me, and yet I feel Caimbeul will not permit them to harm me. If I speak well, I can stop the war. Angus gave me the card in the tree, and Hazel turned the card into light, and now it's my turn to fulfill the role I've been given.

"You married in," I say, still a nun. I sit cross-legged on the packed and burnt earth beside the bonfire, out of the smoke. My cornette is bothering my ear, but I can do no more than adjust it. Nuns must wear cornettes, it's rules.

"It's a story," says Caimbeul, sitting beside me. "It begins in the High Country, in Aberdeen, where I was Mormaer. When the Reformation came, my great-grandmother declared herself a Catholic and moved to France, leaving her husband, who chose the Reformer side. It split many families, but the departure of my great-grandmother destroyed the faith of my grandfather. He traveled from kirk to kirk, looking for someone who could rekindle his faith and restore him to God. He was not twenty years old. These are all things I heard from my father, by the way.

"So the story goes that my grandfather moved to Edinburgh to meet John Knox, the great man himself, in hopes that Knox would rekindle his faith. Knox was quite an old man at this time, gray from crown to chin, and had grown into himself, with a high opinion of his influence. The Queen Regent was nearly off her throne, and the people were raging and ready to throw off the French yoke. My grandfather came to Knox and asked to hear a sermon. It was in a kirk called St. Giles', and the crowds were spilling out the door, and the sermon was mighty in its way, and it moved through the crowd as a pig through grass, and the crowd moved, and ran violently, and took to the Catholic abbeys, where my grandfather watched them destroy the art, beauty and craftsmanship of all Scotland's history, throwing it to the floor and burning it. Cries of 'Savonarola!' and 'God's word of the 95 Theses!' could be heard. Paintings by the Masters, relics from the saints, fine sculpture and Italian marble and good ironwork, destroyed by the mania of Puritanism. And my grandfather found in his heart a great love for the art and the poetry of Catholicism, the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, and he personally sought out Knox and thanked him for relighting the fire for Christ in his breast. He didn't mention it was relit for the Holy Mother Church. And he traveled to the nearest country with a common tongue, which was Ireland.

"So," says Caimbeul. "How comes it a sensible lass should sin so deep they cut your hair all off?" he asks me.

Remembering I am a proper little nun, I say, "That, Mormaer Caimbeul, is a matter of some privacy."

His jolly smile fades, and he says, "You aren't really a Redneck, are ye? No Redneck can resist telling the tale."

His eyes are bright, but they are touched with a long sorrow. He knows I'm a liar, he just doesn't know how deep of one.

"It's embarrassing," I say. And I add: "Not to me. It's embarrassing to the one who punished me. It's in me to be loyal to those who keep me. And to tell the story is to speak ill of Sister Goodham, who has otherwise been so kind to me." I'm starting to forget that Sister Goodham doesn't exist. I've made her exist.

The men have settled in around us. Two or three are still playing at dice, but they've moved away from the snapping fire and are indulging silently. The white ivory cube flies into the air across the sparking red feathers and lands in the cup with a bonerattle, but the rest of the men are gathered, listening to the slender giant and the boyish little nun speaking a tongue they cannot interpret.

"Now I begin to understand. You can keep your peace, Sister, but if you share the story none of us will think the less of your loyalty, for you'd but be doing a favor, sharing one story for another."

I say aye. I figure I'd better prove I'm a real Redneck. So I say: "Sister Goodham knows much on the subject of what is expected of witches, at least prior to the burning of them. She expects that a witch will deny their sins at first, even when they're obvious. She expects a witch to confess the sin when urged to do so by our hunters' means. And she expects them to fight being burned, and so she takes steps to be certain they are burned fully, without any of the witch escaping to continue the witch's perfidy."

"Pieces of a witch can escape?" exclaims John Caimbeul.

"A hand, perhaps, or just a finger. The area must be cleared before the burning, in order to watch for Satan in the guise of the witch's body. One time I witnessed a witch's heart press through her burnt ribcage and roll away. One can only imagine what the Devil could have done with it if the heart had burrowed into the ground and taken root, what kind of tree would have grown."

"Saints preserve us," says John. "And Sister Goodham?"

"Yes. This witch was named Nola, and she had spoken with the Devil, and killed calves from a distance, and danced a-midnight. Only, when Sister Goodham pressed her to renounce her commitment to devilish things, like--" and I say _consummation_ even though I'm still not sure what it means, "Nola did."

"She did? She renounced the Devil?" roars John Caimbeul.

"Aye. In a trice. She said she had bad sins before the Lord, and that she hadn't liked the dancing, and she knew it was wrong as soon as she did it." This is what I say. John gives the men around him a brief translation, and they make remarks on how remarkable the story is so far. This is the story of how I lost my hair, I remind myself. "Well, Sister Goodham was stumped. That had never happened before. We left Nola inside weeping, and we conferred and prayed. It was my view that a full confession, without even having any . . . techniques applied, was sufficient to prove that the Devil had not gotten his claws in her, and she should be released. But it was Sister Goodham's view that once the Devil's found you, only fire can cleanse the sin altogether. When I tried to speak on the subject of compassion, Sister Goodham declared that the Devil was afoot in my words, trying to keep his creature Nola alive in the face of admitted evidence of her iniquity." My mouth is flying with great lies and great precision now.

"And she cut your hair off in penance," says John Caimbeul.

"I still believe I was right. The Devil certainly hadn't gotten into me," I say.

"Have ye burned many witches?" Caimbeul asks.

I hold out my fingers and count. "Seven," I decide. That sounds a strong number. A holy number, even, everyone knows there are seven heavens.

"Only one of them confessed?"

"They all confess. It's a matter of applying the right technique, to draw out the sin."

Nodding, the tall Scotsman touches his black whiskers. The fire belches a piece of smoke, and we shift out of the wind, scootching along the ground. It's dark. "Ye've come to town to see your uncle, but also to search for witches?"

"Yessir. Rumors have circulated. I've worked with the nuns of Mother Mary to locate the source of the hellfire that's been flicking in and out of the area. We believe it to come from the house of a midwife who has been seen treating dead animals as living, and exercising forbidden knowledge of the human body, and taking on young women, and other matters of suspicion."

"An officious young lass, aren't ye? Well, I've no doubt ye've the know-how to root out the Devil from the town."

Once again, John takes the time to translate a little of the story. There is talk in Irish.

"Lass, I may not be tay-shack here, but I see there is good and wisdom enough in this town to satisfy one Scotsman at least. We'll not be menacing your home today, you can tell the men and tell your Mother Superior that we'll stray aside from a town that has decent folk from Scotland living in it."

He repeats this to the crowd, and they murmur acceptance.

"I shall tell them the good news, Mormaer Caimbeul."

Standing, I hurry out of the firelight and begin shaking and begin fearing and begin running. As I break into the open, I sprint as if my heart should burst. I drive my legs through torn-stubble-rippled field and stony gulch and creaking brush until I reach the standing spire of Finn's Giant's Barrow. Sidling through the thorns, I press through the disguising ivy into the cave, past the closeted carriage, pull open the stone door and crawl through the narrow passage into Miss Hazel's house.

"Francis," she says in mild surprise.

"The Irish have assembled and they aren't going to kill Calumny but they mean to kill everyone else," I breathe.

"How do you know?"

"I found your card again, but it became a star when it shouldn't have. Here it is."

The ace of acorns is gently curved from being pressed against my leg. She gives it a puff from her cheeks and shuffles it into the deck, which she's withdrawn from a blue cupboard with white roses painted on.

Breathing hard, I tell her the story of the men on the heath. She sits me in a firm chair with three chunky legs and hands me a cup with pictures of willow trees beside a lake painted on it and pours out goat's buttermilk from a small brown jug. It tastes spicy and wild and animalic, like just-picked berries do.

After I finish the story, Hazel takes my palm and gives the back of my hand a soft slap. Scowling, I say, "I didn't mean to touch iron. It was offered to me."

"Life is full of offers. Most are one-way. It sounds like you're quite an actor, however, and I'm sending you back to witness what I have done. You may cause lives to be saved, if you're as quick in the head and brave upon the ribs as I think you are."

"You're sending me back?"

"Tonight," she tells me. "But you're weary, and we'll take the carriage, and I'll tell you a story."

"But the habit--it's torn and it's got sap in it and stuff--"

"Perfect, tell them you ran back as fast as you could, to spread the news. Come, let's take the goats out and harness them."

Words cannot express the undying weariness in my breast, but my master has told me to harness goats, and I lift myself off the chair, wishing I could be given the night to sleep in. The tunnel to the cave has moisture at the very bottom, a footlong patch where the stone gives way to clay, and I wonder whether there's a well in here or, in my foggy mind, whether there is rain, but the window in the ceiling has been open and there is no sound but the gentle wind through the ivy.

Stench erupts as I open the goat door. In the tar dark I stumble to the tinderbox and strike a candle, lending a pleasant cut to the awful odor.

A goat is sprawled unnaturally with its belly touching the ground and its legs bent like crooked staves and its hooves flopping like the flippers on a great froglike fish.

As the rag hood enters, I say that one of the goats is ill and looks apt to die or to give birth, which are almost the same thing.

"Nope," says Hazel, and climbs up the back of her great black carriage and returns a minute later with metal implements. "Hold Donegal's head, Francis. Keep her very still."

Rough fur feels like brushtwigs, and the animal makes a moan of disenchantment with her circumstances. Poorly controlled hooves thrash and grapple for purchase. I straddle her back and hold her head but she gets the better of me and I ride Utter Deathless or Donegal as she rises and lunges and rams Miss Hazel and knocks her plop off her feet. Groaning, Hazel swats the goat and tells me to hold her by the back hooves this time. Now hobbled, Utter Deathless bleats as Hazel pins her head and applies a metal thing to her face. The task, whatever it may be, is completed with a snap.

"Did she have toothache?" I ask.

"Come see."

An implement props open the goat's mouth. I lift the small candlestick and peer in.

The teeth are undamaged, as goat teeth go. The tongue is blackish-pink, but this, too, is ordinary.

"Down the throat." In Hazel's hands are a pair of tongs, which she lifts. "They do this sort of thing."

Reaching through the propped-open mouth and past the extended bleating tongue with the tongs, Hazel pulls out a long thing, so long it must have stretched through the goat's guts. Many pairs of wings unfold, shaking off puke juices. Twitching in Hazel's tongs are a pair of pincers at the end.

"Nastiest insect I've ever seen. Did the goat eat it? Or its eggs?"

"Not an insect, hasn't got eggs. I'll take it outside. Harness Donegal last. Give her time to catch her breath."

In the manner of goats, Urban XV and Miller's Licorice and Dungbasket haven't even noticed anything's happened. They trot reluctantly as I tug gently on their bishop's robes, they try brief halfhearted escape attempts I fight by taking a twist of fur. Animals never obey strangers the way they obey their owners, if they obey their owners. Donegal trots with more enthusiasm than the others, and I wonder whether she holds gratitude after all.

The night is starless and absolute as I hold the ivy gate open. The carriage backs out slowly, a black box, and I switch places, running to the old noose and dangling from it like a highwayman, only from my wrists, not my neck. The carriage trundles through. I drop to the ground in my black cowl like a black owl and we are underway.

"I've changed my mind," says Hazel. "I'd rather have you tell me a story. It'll keep you awake."

"Don't want to be awake," I reply, bouncing on the driver's board and listening to the stupefying creak of the wagon wheels.

"Nubbins. Tell me a story about your sister. A good one."

This is going to be an eternity. I can feel it. I ask what's in the big black box that is the carriage, but Hazel claps her hands like a whipcrack in response.

"Udsblud. All right, here. My sister went through a phase where she loved everything. She'd say it. 'Love toads,' she'd say. Or, 'I love pickles, they're my favorite.' Dogs, chickens, people. She loved them. Without hesitation she loved everything.

"Once me and all the boys were running around after lunch, and Boad said he'd have us race, and to Emma it was the greatest moment of all time, or she acted that way, and she ran to each one of us as we were lining up and putting our right foot on a line Boad made, and she told each and every one of us that she hoped we'd win. Didn't even pick me first; she just told each of us in order, running past with her hair going frantic beneath her bonnet. 'I hope you win, Phelim! I hope you win, Boad!'

"And I won that race. It's one of the only things I ever did win. I can run faster than wind blows. And she thought I was a hero for a moment. She never learned I wasn't."

"And?"

"And for weeks she'd ask whether I'd race her. And she was a girl, so I said no every time. I'd tell her Mam wouldn't approve, or that I was busy, even if I wasn't, and other times I'd just tell her to shove off, as if she didn't matter. After a month or so she stopped asking. And she never said she loved anything again. Not till the day she died."

"What did you learn?" Hazel asks me.

"I learned people die. I learned sisters are gullible and you can't expect them to know the truth about people. Learned I wasn't a hero. Learned not to trust what human beings say, they've got not a drop of truth to the bottom of their souls. Spirits get it right sometimes, but not people."

"But your sister is a spirit now," says Hazel, flicking the reins with one hand.

"If I say nubbins back to you, would you slap me?"

"Yes."

"Nubbins."

The slap is more like a pat on my cheek.

"Now tell me a story. You said you would."

We're plunging through a valley deep enough and sloughy enough that I imagine the black carriage could leave its high wheels behind in mire. In this our night, black mud spits up from the silver hooves of the goats and is dashed against the dashboard, sticky clods that occasionally fly high enough to cover the toes of my scuffed wooden nun shoes. Nightbirds are up, calling like candle ghosts through the mouths of rotting lanterns-o-jack, and I feel as though on just such a night a crested hoopoe might lead an unwary Irishman astray. There is no rain but no sky, either, and the black carriage creaks as if a madman were driving it over bones in a fairytale in the mind of the Satan.

"Why've they got silver goatshoes?" I ask before she's finished deciding whether she'll tell me a story. We're not halfway to Calumny.

"They're not goatshoes, they're horseshoes, no matter who's wearing them. You should know that."

"Have it your way," I say. "Why do they wear them?"

"Keeps the wrong ones away," says Hazel. "Sometimes." Her hood is up and I can't see her.

"Who're the right ones?"

"I am. You are. With whom else need the goats concern themselves?"

"Tell a story," I say. "You've got better stories than I do."

"Say please."

"Nubbins." She slaps my face freehand without looking, and I say please.

"Say please Miss Hazel," she instructs.

"Oh please, my most gracious maestro, the esteemed and exulted queen of--"

Instead of a slap I get a tickle, and she keeps tickling even after I say no quit it.

"Not till I'm satisfied you've been tickled," she says, and a bolt of lightning shocks the sky and the goats stop short jolt bang in fear on a rocky uphill hillock and I tumble forward over the dashboard and land on rocks and the cart rolls backward, the goats scrabbling over the muddy ground, avoiding my body, but how can hill ground be muddy if it didn't rain? And now in the starless void eight demented eyes with square pupils are all I can see, fading back down, and Miss Hazel calls but I don't catch the words, and she is lost to me.

Without light I can't see. The cart has no lantern. There is no more lightning. I am blind.

I expect the cart to rove back into view, expect to hear the strained whickering and tongue-sticking-out blares of goats struggling back up the ravine, but instead there is a filthy lake ahead, where the hillock was, and I am standing ankle-deep on a treelimb, a treelimb with a filthy lake on it, afleck of mosquitos and even stranger insects, swatted by swinging cattails, buzzed by bluebottles, crept up by crawling beetles, swarmed by gnats, and the depth of mud in the lake bottom is stickier than quicksand.

Firelight ahead.

Trying my feet, I discover the lake never extends deeper than ankle-depth, and I push through the hideous swarms, my wooden shoes sucking north and descending south, and with anticipation of light to see by, I proceed.

A tall arched hollow like a cave mouth has been made of mud and reeds and segmented wood. Hanging emblems are tied to long strands of hair, figures are carved into the backs of shells, and stars of many points are made of woven-together sticks.

Crouching in muck is a shape less than human, muttering. It wears a skirt of duckbills strung together like scales and no other clothes, so that it's got orange-yellow over a stringy body made of absolute disgust.

"Stenching bile, guttering guck, misering mire, flatulent garbage."

"You're my Pavee eeshi," I say.

"Neither yours nor my own, my miss, my snotting lass, or are you so selfish as to think you make things? Mastersome mumps and moral depravity, my one."

" 'm not a lass," I say, coming nearer to the blazing bundles of oiled stems bracing the hollow with a sadist's fires. The eeshi is stained with black mud and moves its fingers in ways I don't understand. "I made you," I add.

"Didn't, precious snortbag, I promise you utterly. Scratched away the piece of your mind that kept me away, didn't we? That's all."

Her back is facing me, and she scuttles her hands over something on a small table, but I can't see what.

"The God-in-heaven scratched it away, maybe. I just stood there," I say, still keeping a fair distance away. There's beetles in my shoe, I can feel their crawlers and feelers touching my stockings.

"Doesn't mean a trice to me, sour cherry. A miserable old snapdragon, is the God-in-heaven, doesn't count a penny's worth in my accounting. Scratching up minds seems the sort of silliness He'd come up with, anyway."

Feeling like a dream speaker, I say, "He came up with all of it. Everything. It's all His."

"Is that what you think? I was there when He yawned and bawled as a babe, and the rest of Us were there, and we'll be here when He travels away from your moss-covered rock, no mistaking that. All I hope for is a little less mud. That's what's needed. Wish I had a tidy roof, but look where I'm stuck."

"What're you doing?" I say blurrily. "With your hands?"

And the Pavee eeshi turns her head closer toward me and turns it and turns it and it keeps going and I imagine it'll turn until doomsday, her head goes on so far before I can make the face out properly in the light of the plant torches, and when I do, when I finally see what face is behind the rotten skin and skirt of duck beaks, her face bowls me over into the slopping swamp with its appearance. The Pavee eeshi makes Miss Hazel's consumption-damaged face look almost angelic. I push myself back to my feet and she murmurs, "Puddling pudding, my toad missy, needles and cornstacks, shall we see what her liver looks like? Gather the pins, needles and pins, needles and pins, my soggy lady."

Pushing through my revulsion, I see that on her little table is Saint Glimmer the Frog in the Tree. He's been cut open down the front from nose to buttocks and his skin is pinned open against the table like Mother Gibbet's butterflies. The Pavee's pinned him open and he's still alive.

"I was always there for you," says Saint Glimmer, and the tears can't help but fall.

I approach. He twitches.

"You weren't!" I shout, weeping. "You weren't there! You were never there! I wanted not to be picked last! I wanted to be picked by a man proper, and instead I wasn't picked and none of it happened and Miss Hazel isn't even real, she's like you, she's fair pretend and she'll be swatting my face for saying it when I wake but I don't care, it's bleeding true." Air comes in tight busting bursts. "You abandoned me the only time in my life it mattered," I tell him.

The Pavee has a slimy hammer and hands it to me. I can't look at her face.

"You abandoned me," I tell the treefrog. "I needed you. I needed my sister."

"We were working together, she and I," says Saint Glimmer. "We gave you the best job there was. But you couldn't wait. You wouldn't wait. You wouldn't trust us. You didn't believe us."

"Nubbins," but that word isn't enough, and I say damn you, I say it aloud, I say damn you Saint Glimmer, you abandoned me and didn't get me anything.

My slimy hammer rises.

"We were always there for you, but you wouldn't believe."

I hit Saint Glimmer with the hammer, again and again, and Saint Glimmer dies.

"I'll be seeing you again, my dilly-bird," says the wrong-faced Pavee, and my feet skitter down rocks until I am hugging Urban XV around the neck. She bleats but does not bite.

I do not tell Miss Hazel about any of it. I do say I'd rather not have a story after all, I say I'm tired, and she looks and appraises me and does not speak further. I wonder whether she knows.

Now is the Abbey. After I make my way down the iron steps of the cart, Hazel reaches down and touches my forehead with a finger and tells me to be more careful this time. I run to the door and knock without touching the iron gargoylehead. When I look back, Miss Hazel Rebecca MacLochlan is gone.

΅

"Thy habit is filthy!" exclaims Sister Mary McGillin as I wake. "Take it off at once. I'll launder it."

Rising, I don't know what she sees, whether my body is completely a gel's, so I say I'll do it myself, and would she bring me a change. I remember I don't know whether Mam's word of mad little Francis Mansfield playing dress-up has reached the ears of the Abbey, but when it does they'll probably shame me publicly. Mary McGillin doesn't leave, she fusses over me and I tell her that the story is long and I should tell it to Molly and Gibbet first, before I gossip. Her hands examine my black cowl like mice hands reaching after forgotten grain, and I tell her I've slept poorly and would she please bring clean clothes and then show me where a basin is that I can wash my clothes in.

"Where _have_ you been?" Mary chitters, lifting my sleeve and peering in at my underarm.

"Sister Mary McGillin!" I exclaim in the same tone of voice I used to scold the midwife, back when I brought Anne in to have her dress mended.

" _Where_?"

Crossly, I look away and then I decide to tell her, so that there's good gossip about me and so that I seem brave.

"Can you keep a secret?" I say.

Changing from a scolder to a co-conspirator, Mary sits beside me on the pallet and attends to what I say, as if I were going to tell her I had met the God-in-heaven Himself.

"I went for a walk," I say, "and saw a fire upon the heath."

For several counts she is shocked beyond her words.

"Is it war?"

"Might be. I got close as I dared, climbed a tree, and watched. They were gallowglass. They had muskets and swords and they were playing at dice."

"Gambling before a war? Might as well be gambling with lives. Were they going to fight abroad, or . . . or were they . . . ?" she asks.

"I heard them say they weren't staying, I think they'll move on, but they seemed to hold anger at the English. I didn't understand all they said."

"You should tell the bailiff. Actually, have Molly do it, she can convince him to arm the people. We need to be prepared, Sister Margaret." She says my name as if it's one big word.

Wondering whether I shouldn't have told the story to Mary McGillin after all, I start to say that we mustn't antagonize them, that they're dangerous, and Mary touches my still-healing bruises with a finger's edge and says she knows they're dangerous. She says she'll attend everything, and forcibly pulls my cowl off over my head and rushes off to do laundry. There are no words to my fear that she'll ask to see me naked. It's only an illusion, not truth, my appearance, although I'm grateful to be back under Miss Hazel's spell.

Now there is Anne. She's heard that I am back, and she follows Mary into my room. Mary hands me a fresh folded tunic to put over my filthy underskirts, rather thoughtlessly, as she didn't bring me fresh underclothes, and I resolve to do proper laundry so I don't feel so sticky--

"Sister Mary, do you mind if I address our new Sister in private?" I say in the hard nun voice. Mary skitters off like a frightened puppy menaced by an especially cruel rooster.

Anne's eyes are deeply fearful. She sits next to me on the loose blue wool of the pallet and picks at straw.

"She's caught on," Anne whispers.

"So touch willow. Then it'll stop and she'll have spanked herself with the cane and we'll both slip out at midnight."

"You don't understand." Tears of fear begin in her eyes, leaking nervously. "Molly says it's a spell. She's got Gibbet believing I'm a witch. Even though I'm not feeling the pain--well, look."

Anne lifts her habit and tugs down the pile of petticoats--which are red and brown and black as well as pure white--and shows me her buttocks. They're ripped apart like a drowned man's lungs, and blood is everywhere.

"I don't feel it, Francis. I didn't even know. There was a mirror. Listen. I can only pretend so far. She's caught on, and I'm not much keen to touch willow and feel it myself, and I'm not at all keen on being burnt. Margaret, I meant to say."

"Have we got a plan?" I ask.

"Let's just go. I don't know what your tow-haired lady had in mind when she told us to punish them, but it's gone on enough. Margaret, they'll kill me. I'll burn. My hair will go up first, I know it will, and then my toes, it'll be my toes."

A laugh comes out of me, and Anne jabs me and tells me she's serious.

"All right, listen to me. So far everything Hazel's done has had purpose. She's not crazy, she knows what she's doing." Once again I slip into talking good sense when I'm around sensible types. "It's been what, three days? Give it another four. I'll tell Molly that I'll punish you myself, and then you'll need to be obedient and not make a fuss. Please don't run until Hazel's plan is clear. I know it's worth it. I know it is."

"Just don't have her burn me, I won't have it," says Anne. Rising, she marches out to prayers and washing and whatever business other people are expected to do in this place.

Life as a guest in Mother Mary Convent is simple: don't get caught doing anything other than praying. I make a point to kneel before St. Andrew and before the lascivious painting of Mary and before each meal as if I knew all the words. It's evening before I can corner the simpering shape of Molly and tell her my plan.

The hall is deserted, with a long purple-maroon carpet and an unlit fireplace halfway down. Cool wind blows through unglassed medieval windows and there is a dragonfly waiting on a narrow sill.

"How is the new recruit?" I begin.

Molly's breath is deep and persistent, drawing from the pain of Anne's torn-up bloodied buttocks.

"A trice difficult," she manages.

"How? Have you disciplined her sufficiently?" I ask sweetly.

Molly grows angry but isn't sure at whom. "That, in a word, is the difficulty."

"She's not responding?"

"Quite the opposite! She responds--she responds like--she _obeys_ ," gasps Molly, rubbing her rear passionately, "but she--"

"Then what is the difficulty?"

I am as innocent as two doves in love.

"You--you said that it's common for witchhunters to share in the pain of witches."

Oh dear. Now I see where she's going. She's going to use that as proof that Anne's a witch.

"Always," I say.

"Well I've disciplined _many a lass_ and I am here to tell you that it's unheard-of for me to feel anything other than satisfaction at their discipline. Which leads me to suspect . . ."

"That she is . . ." I add.

"Yes. Would you inquire, using your own techniques?"

"Of course. There are many preliminary steps before moving directly to inquisition, of course. Other than--did you say you felt something other than satisfaction?"

"It bloody hurts to spank her! Just as you said."

"Are there other signs? Dead animals? Control over elements? Sightings in the night? Um, consummations? Dancing?" I ask.

Molly grits her teeth and growls and nearly admits the truth no, but she says, "There _might_ have been."

"Very well, I'll inquire. Put her in my care for a day and a night, for observation."

Agreeing hastily, Molly hurries off, grasping her end.

Thus begins the Grand Inquisition of Anne Thorntown.

΅

"What d'you think of Boad?" she says.

I've brought in a second pallet to the cell, and we're sitting across from each other with the door closed as if we're girlfriends. We're whispering, and I check the door now and then for eavesdroppers.

"He's a sack of beans with a biscuit for a brain. You should scream now," I say.

Anne lets out a terrible groan and then a bigger one and then a nasty gurgle.

"D'you think he'd be good to marry?" she asks.

"He's to be a farmer, so he'll be no richer than Hagee, although Boad's less coarse."

"Don't mention Hagee. Boad had eyes for the Butterfield lass, the older one."

"Has she got a sister?" I say.

I never know who's siblings with whom.

"Course she has, Deb, though I call her Deb-Rat 'cause she looks like one."

"I like rats."

"Bet you do. You could marry one, just court Deb."

"Butterfield girl'l be different now. Wonder how she's fared with the butcher."

"He's cut her into chops and sold her by the pound. I hear miller bought her arse, to cook and taste."

"Anne Thorntown, thy mouth is filthy. Give them a good one."

Anne lets out one of those high-pitched shrieks only girls can make.

"Haven't heard from Betty Butterfield, actually. Gone to ground. Not like Judith Hemsworth, her mother picked her for hemming and she's absolutely stars about it. Pity her brother Andrew's such a fat brute, he hits his brother and broke his leg once, but he won't hit Judith. Fancies his sister."

"That's foul," I say.

"Happens, you know. Happened to Fitz."

"Didn't," I say.

"Prove it. Prove it in a court. The McCraighs are narcissists, they used to be chieftains."

"I know they used to be chieftains, doesn't mean they're--"

"Check the door, Lucy McAdoo knows them," she says.

"All right, look tortured."

Anne throws herself at my feet and makes a funny face, and I peek out the door and no one's there.

"How does Lucy know the McCraighs?" I ask.

"Word has it," Anne says, lowering her voice just in case, "Lucy's dadda and Missus Big Bustle Wife-of-the-Chieftain McCraigh were close, if you know what I mean."

"Their parents courted?" Now I match her sotto tone. "Maybe that's where Fitz came from."

"Hardly so romantic. I think that--"

"Nubbins to what you think, Anne Thorntown."

Big sharp pointed pink tongue sticks out at me.

"I have to um. You know," I say.

"Pee?" she says. "Just pee."

"Anne, you can't. You can't be in. It isn't. No. Anne."

"Seen your backside once, hain't I?"

"You looked," I say. My pride and privacy and trust are getting shredded.

"Showed you mine."

"You had a reason. Anne, you little--"

"Go on, call me names."

"Scream."

She gives them a well-imagined noise of perfect agony.

"That was a mighty 'un. I have to pee," I tell her.

"I promise not to look."

"Said that last time, too, Anne Thorntown."

"Then bleedin' let me look, who'll know?"

"I'll bleedin' know. God-in-heaven will know. Your knowledge of the shape of my buttocks will leach out into the universe like mud at the edge of a stream and repopulate the disgust reservoirs the world's got until everyone's making loose nasty faces at each other for imagining how it looked."

Leaning over to the other end of the cell, Anne scrapes the wagging covered clay chamberpot toward her.

The door opens.

"How _does_ your investigation go?" Molly asks in the brightest and heartlessest of tones, gripping her hands together within the black sleeves of her cowl.

Anne and I match eyes. Quickly she arranges her face in a cringing reception of my terrormalice.

Think fast, Francis Margaret McSister.

". . . and pour it over your head. And confess you're a witch."

Anne blanches stark white.

"Bloody--you can't! It isn't--it's not--bloody--I'M NOT A WITCH."

Sister Molly preserves her near open smile, canning it into a twist of the lip.

"Margaret!" calls Anne. Her eyes plead for real, but we must both play our roles convincingly. My role is inquisitor. " _Sister Margaret_!"

"A witch would be afeared to do it before proper eyes, for awareness that the body's dirt is the Devil's domain, and they would bask in it as a contented cat in the sun--"

"A _black_ cat," adds Molly like a wide bird.

". . . yes."

"If--if I don't--oh Christ--if I don't bask in it, it means I'm not a witch at all?" moans Anne, looking at the lid of the not-empty chamber pot.

"That's right."

Anne's hands grip the porcelain handle. As it is drawn further out of its hiding place under the washbasin-stand, the smell, which is normally mild, grows stonger. Molly turns up her nose, and Anne begins weeping and looking at me and weeping. She lifts the lid, and to me it looks like a great bellicose drinking cup for a moment. Then the smell is revealed fully and Anne shivers from head to toe.

"Sister Molly, her revulsion at the thought of this is quite sufficient to convince me that--"

"She's faking. I swear she's faking. She'll fake it until it's done, the little viper."

"Sister Margaret," moans Anne. "Make her stop."

I take a deep breath and say, "Do as Sister Molly says, Anne."

The bowl shakes as Anne lifts it. This was not part of my plan but it is happening.

The white near-sphere is above her head, held just like that image in the first glowing card that woke me inside Miss Hazel's mountainhouse.

Yellow pours over Anne. She does not hesitate, she is a madwoman and braver than heroes.

Brown lumps slither out and follow.

Screaming unwords beyond what human language can express, Anne grabs the water basin and dunks her head. I hand her cotton towels, which she sullies and ruins, and when the washwater is spilled foully to the floor, I rush out and take the washbasin from Emily's cell and carry it lurching and slopping into the room and Anne plunges into it without even permitting me time to set it down and Molly looks more cross than amused and I tell her this:

"There can be no doubt: Anne Thorntown is not a witch and never has been."

΅

"How could it be that I should feel the blows that I deliver?" roars Molly, ragin'.

Molly and I sit on stone benches before Mister St. Andrew. Anne has been given a bath by a nauseated Mary McGillin.

"My suspicion is confirmed: Anne is not _a_ witch, but _be_ witched. There is something I haven't mentioned. Mother Gi--Superior knows, she's probably made mention of the return visit, but. On the way here, Anne and I stopped at the house of the midwife for . . . directions to the Abbey. She could easily--"

"BLOODY SARAH STARNLOWE! Always! 'Course it was. We'll hang her today."

"It must be on a Sunday, and it must be done with fire, and with confession before death, or her soul is lost. What is today?" I ask.

"Bloody just Thursday," sourly.

"Then we should begin the interrogation tomorrow. Hopefully Sister Mary will return soon with the things we need."

Peeved, the ruddy stout face lets out a hiss of breath. Molly is the only snake in Ireland.

"Won't be back from 'fergus before Sunday. We'll need to make do."

"Without the mechanism, it'd be wiser to duck in water than that way," I say, pointing toward the cell where body filth still splatters the floor.

Another rattling sigh. "Nothing ever goes the way I want," Molly mutters.

I pat her hand. "Life only goes the way the Lord directs, according to our place and worth," I say. It's the sort of thing Mam says.

Molly take my hand and shoots me an expression of purest, deepest hatred disguised as sororal friendship.

΅

Turns out the process of interrogating Miss Starnlowe has been complicated. She's gone to ground and no one in town has seen her. Gibbet and I are now walking toward the prebendary with the mission of inspiring a religious fervor in the hundreds council, thereby acquiring a bounty hunting party without paying anyone to do it. The prebend is known to speak with influence. I've never met the man. Perhaps he is evil, as Emily said, and will do what we want.

"Life is humanity's great tragedy," sighs Gibbet, her footsteps built of a life with gray hair covered up. "We are born pure, save but for the sins of Adam and Eve, and upon exposure to the air we begin to decay into these fallen forms, until at death we have all but wasted into the wash of Satan and his red ocean. So deep does sin take us."

The prebend has a proper English manor built not within town, nor within sight of the Abbey, but alongside a stagnant pond. The house buzzes with marshflies and dragonflies and every kind of fly, as if the pond were the font from which the Lord God invented the first urine and the pissants that sprawled forth from it. There is a pulsing of sick in the way the flies surround you. The flies are not individuals but a mind made of the group, like a team of baby ducklings that never lands from flying. Paving stones are too far apart to stride, what with wooden clogs and the hobbled legs of fully equipped nuns, and my feet sink deep into the marshy lawn. Already I don't like the prebend.

Gibbet strikes the door with her cane, lending an echo, and we wait what seems a quarter of an hour in silence before the door opens. The prebend has a face rudded with drunken veins, splotchy, and his smile is a false English affront. A small fur coat hugs his clerical shoulders, it's made from Quebec beavers, making him look like an aspiring outdoorsman and man of leisure.

"And who is this, Mother Superior?" he enquires, observing my bruised face.

"She's come to burn the midwife," says Gibbet.

"I should like very much to speak with her," says the prebend, whose eyes don't leave my face, "after dinner. I insist she stay. It's past noon, I'll not be myself until I've eaten. Will you prefer to stay as well, Mother?"

Puzzling at his inquisitive tone, I look up at Mother Gibbet. Her teeth show, although it is not intended as a smile, and she says, "We've come to burn the midwife, Peter."

The prebend nods from the hip and leads both of us inside. We remove our shoes like proper women. The scent of ham pervades, I see it's in a pan over the fire, glazed with molasses and some foreign fruit. Like Mate Graham, this minister man must love all things foreign.

"Please don't hesitate to remove your cowl, my young Sister; I keep it quite stuffy in here."

Nuns don't remove their cowls except for bathing and sleep. I content myself to pretend I have no idea what he just said. The man now has an enormous knife and a long wide-pronged fork and bends over the ham and for a second I realize he's my Pavee eeshi made flesh, his pond is the lake in the tree, the flies are the flies, and the ham is Saint Glimmer, and I will need to take a bite out of courtesy. The vision was of this, and the prebend contains within him something that existed before the God-in-heaven, something rotten and eternal, but I don't know what.

Plating some ham and adding spiced carrots and breadbuns and curls of butter, the prebend feeds us. I eat with my fingertips and sup on my discomfort. It tastes raw and salty. I don't want to eat his food.

Now it is time to talk.

"Peter." Familiar as Gibbet's speech is, I can't escape the feeling she merely tolerates him, as an aunt with a detested child. "The midwife has escaped. I must ask you to--"

"Old Starnlowe, is it?" he interrupts. "What's she done to raise Molly's ire this time?"

"An enchantment of Satan's own fist has been placed upon one of the gels," says Gibbet. "Sister Molly swears--"

"Yes, I imagine she does. Berthilda, I should not need to explain this, but when I mentioned my interest in the birthing of infants I was merely--"

"Margaret has witnessed the perfidy, Peter."

"The perfidy? Ah, has she? Oh, I see. Isn't she rather young for an Inquisitor?" says the prebend, reaching over the table to pour out watered wine.

"She comes with the expert recommendation of Sister Goodham," Gibbet says, nodding serely.

"Does she, then?" Hurriedly the prebend sips his wine. "Well, naturally I'd take _her_ word for it."

"Then the matter is settled. Peter, you will go before the court and request a search party. Iniquity must be purged, that our town be purified."

Sighing profoundly, he says he'll begin the search first thing in the morning. Gibbet rises, as do I, and we are thanking him for the food when he lifts a finger and says, "Childbirth is, ah, rather a _delicate_ procedure, is it not? A matter of some, ah, _intimacy_?"

"I'm sure I wouldn't know, Peter."

As the Mother Superior bustles toward the door, the prebend says, "I should very much like to speak with young Sister Margaret privily, if I may."

Gazing with a stony gaze at the prebend and I, Gibbet sweeps out.

I am left behind.

"So, my dear," the prebend says, steepling his fingers awkwardly.

I say: "What was so private that it couldn't be said before the Mother Superior?"

My hand is taken in both of his.

"Eh, don't we all have things we don't say before others?" he replies.

I knew it, he's my Pavee eeshi and now my saint is dead and Angus won't talk to me and now I need a new one. Miss Hazel is my saint, she said so, only I don't desire to ruin her wonderful spell a second time, and she's given me nothing else, and I'm not feeling lucky or clever or wise.

"Have you, eh, attended childbirth, Sister . . . ?"

"Margaret. I was in the next room when my sister was born," I say, regretting that I must share private stories with this man.

"It was, ah, _messy_ , was it? In an intimate sense."

Miss Hazel had me practice storytelling. That was her saintly contribution. She taught me, briefly, how to describe something when I don't feel like describing anything. I adopt Anne Thorntown's voice to make it convincing.

"Stank to highest heaven, I'd say. Not a pleasant task in the least. Didn't see it myself, but smelled it from a room away. Yes, I'd call it a messy business." I don't know the prebend's last name, so I can't address him correctly.

"Would--would you say there's a need to, ah, observe the intimacies _in person_ , would you say, Miss Margaret? Or could a midhusband call out appropriate instruction from, perhaps, the next room, as you yourself did?"

"I'd say there were gouts from inside the body that come outside, and if you can't find it in you to look, and to clean it, you're apt to kill the child as it comes out." That's more or less what Starnlowe said when Emma was born.

"Gouts? I say, did you say gouts?" he murmurs. I assent. "From inside--inside the body? It's not just a baby on its own? It has . . . accompaniment?"

His hands move from my hand up my cloaked arm and grip me with a mild frenzy.

"Yessir," I reply, looking at his grip.

Releasing his hold as suddenly as it began, he plunges a knuckle against his teeth and begins pacing before the snapping fire and the ham drippings in the pan. "Sister." That's what he says. "Sister, I believe I need your assistance in a way that is entirely surprising to me. I need you to dissuade Ber--that is, our Mother--against this course of action. I cannot tell her this myself of course--it wouldn't, it wouldn't, wouldn't be--"

"Correct?" I suggest.

"Correct," he swiftly agrees. "Yes, the matter of witchhunting . . ." The prebend makes a sound in his throat. "I understand your passion for it, but I must say I've seen no sign of any witchery . . . dare I say, our community seems quite happy to worship under God . . . not certain what Starnlowe's done to . . . and of course, there's history with her and Molly, I suppose . . ."

"What history do they have?" I ask. "Not to be improper."

"No, no, not at all." The prebend nervously sits and fumbles out a clay pipe and loose tobacco from a cube-shaped tin. "Over a man, of course. You're a stranger to town, so I shouldn't think you'd know the local gossip. Yes, his name is Abraham Gordon--"

"The miller?" I exclaim, then realize my mistake.

"Now how'd you know that?" he says without suspicion, lighting his pipe with a straw from the fire.

I put on a face without expression and speak: "He was perfectly unkind to me on the road here. He said he wanted no foreigners from beyond the county on his land. He was eating licorice and smelled of drink."

Yes, that even convinced me.

"Shame you met him lately. Well. The story goes that Sarah had love for him, as did Molly, and both spent quite some time fighting and squabbling over him. Quite dashing, in the auld days, was Bram. They courted him madly, you see, while he was enamored with another--one Elizabeth Cunningham--"

I don't notice the rest of his sentence, because that's Mam's maiden name.

"But she rejected him," the prebend continues presently, "and he took it hard indeed. He confided in me, did ole Bram--we were boys together, he was the younger--told me he'd never love again, not after Elizabeth. When he married, he stayed true to her and couldn't find it in him to love his wife, Abby. She died childless, while he's stayed a widower and probably will stay a widower till the end of his time on Earth."

That explains about a dozen things that are important to me.

"I--I see. And Sister Molly and the midwife have feuded since?"

Puffing deeply, the prebend mutters that there was probably more to it, but that was what he knew.

"Do you suppose this midwife could have turned to witchery to punish Molly?" I ask.

"Is that what they've come to?" muses the prebend, sucking on the briar-end.

"It's--well, Molly has told me of some strange . . . conditions," I say.

"Hope it will all blow over soon. Rather not deliver a baby with accompaniment, actually. You will try to dissuade Molly and Gibbet, won't you? Find a countervailing theory?"

"I shall find out the bottommost truth of the matter, neither more nor less," I say.

"Well, don't let me keep you," the prebend says. So I don't.

΅

"You said he was evil."

Emily and I are inside the garth grounds, walking side by side, and no one is around. Emily has made excuses and will make candles later, while the others are eating.

"You aren't under Gibbet, not by kirk law. He'll not take chances," she tells me.

"Sister Emily, I'm not even certain what it is you think he's done, or why it's witchhunting business."

And I watch her collapse just a little.

"It's not--it isn't _witchcraft_ , Mags, it's--do you know who he is?"

I don't know who he is. I say so. He doesn't come to Mam's lessons. I don't say that.

The gentle, bruise-wrinkle face of Andrew Scotus and the enthusiastic wolfhound at his feet peer at us reassuringly. Birds have turned Andrew's robed shoulders white, while the rest of him is a pale green. The grass is soft but not wet, and Emily is despairing and impatient.

"Who is the prebend, Sister?" I oblige.

" _He's Gibbet's husband_."

A forefinger flies to her lips, silencing me, and a good thing, too. In my mind Angus opens his chubby wide lips and purple steam pours out. I'd missed him, to be honest.

"It's--" I say.

"It's a small town, is what it is. Filled with secrets, is Calumny. Gibbet's a married nun. It's all against the rules. Everything they do is against the rules. Mother Mary's is against the rules altogether. But no one's going to tell them. The Archbishop doesn't know, and so Gibbet and the prebend have absolute power. The whole town is theirs if they call for it. And now Molly's off against Starnlowe, who hasn't even _done_ anything--"

"Can you be sure?" I ask. "Molly seems very certain that she's being bewitched when she disciplines Anne--"

"It's lies," says Emily.

"Like when you said that Molly was a witch herself."

"Bloody Christ on an elm tree. You never _were_ going to prosecute her."

"Sister Emily, I've seen that something is afoot between Anne and Molly. I don't think Molly's lying, she hasn't got the knack. But Anne--"

"Anne's not a witch. You said so yourself."

"Well, let's perform a simple experiment," I tell Emily. "Slap her and see how it feels."

"Can I?" Emily says brightly.

"I'll vouch for it personally. Let's do it now." And I lead the gel out of the cloister and into the communal room, where candle buckets are being tiresomely dipped by the entire nunning crowd.

"Finished with your private confession?" Molly says with malice. Her fingers itch for the filed-down poker.

Sister Emily ignores this, walks over to Anne, and gives her a mighty slap that sounds like a face falling into mud.

Emily's breath goes sideways and she gargles an _ouch_.

"Yes, I think that settles it," I say. Anne scowls and rolls her eyes, and Emily is shocked to silence by the reality of the witchcraft.

The day passes.

It's on the following day that Starnlowe is found.

΅

". . . for the high crime of putting False and Ungodly Spelles upon the Innocent Browe of a Woman Religious, and a Gel to Boot, we, the citizens of Calumny Colony and Tenanted Territ'ries, being of a Unified Mind, do hereby task Sarah Starnlowe with undergoing such Procedures as shall ascertain whether or not she is in fact At Fault and Possessed of Unnatch'ral Powers contrary to the Mind of God. In pursuit of which the Convent of Mother Mary, under the auspices of Prebend Peter Gibbet, has required of Sister Margaret McCloud to pursue said Procedures as given to her under the Directive of Sister Mary Goodham of Longshank. Lacking the Beste Equipment, she shall make appropriate Allowances to Extract The Truth from Starnlowe and Be Done With It. Blessed under our Lord God, amen."

Henry Wool is here, his blonde eyebrows heavy with the sadness of losing Starnlowe, his narrow body akin to a disattached pegleg stuck into topsoil, and his long lion fingers wringing behind his back. The prebend is here, wearing a small hat. Four men of the hundreds council are here, and about twenty women, most of whom are plain townsfolk and are here in the great hall to gawk. Mam and Da are not here, thank God. Junie is not here for some reason, perhaps she will be brought later. No one my age is here. I am largely alone. I am always alone.

Starnlowe wears chains forged long ago. Forged long before Mate Graham swung his first hammer. Forged, I suspect but do not know, before the true Scotsman who folded this iron into chains ever put a foot on Eire soil. In Calumny, justice has always been ceremonial, gaols are not known. A prisoner is placed in irons, and the irons are attached to something heavy. They can hobble about at their liberty, unless there's a risk of harm, like that of an angry mob, and then they're kept in Henry Wool's house. No angry mob surrounds Starnlowe, no one jeers, and I suspect no one old enough to have seen a birth will be apt to do so. I know that witches are often hated and feared, but the crowd makes no darker motion than to bow their heads in respect.

Molly takes no notice. She thrills to Starnlowe's pitiable shackles.

"Sister Margaret, if you would?

Clearing my throat, I assume the mantle of virtuous sadist and pace before Starnlowe, who is nearly twice my height. I am an infant tyrant.

"You are the midwife in this town," I say.

The worn, unpretty face and hollow, saggy eyesockets seem well-carved for the purpose of defending their humanity stoically from my upcoming allegations.

"I am."

"Do you recollect my visit to your house?"

"I was perfectly hospitable."

"So it seemed."

I am attentive not to touch the iron shackles.

"Would you say you felt threatened by the presence of a witchfinder and miraculist in town?" I ask.

"You're not from our community," Starnlowe says, turning her eyes helplessly to Henry Wool, who is impassive.

Oh, but I am, I don't say.

"Answer her!" roars Molly.

"Yes," murmurs Starnlowe, her arms limp within their prisons, "yes, I was afeared that you'd bring a load of silly ideas to town."

"One who is innocent of ungodly ways need not fear me," I say, "nor my mentor."

"Who is where?" she asks.

"Donegal," I say. Donegal is wide and far away. "I expect her to catch me up soon."

"And so I must accept that you, a child, are the sole arbiter of my fate."

It _is_ frankly somewhat absurd. "I have the full confidence of Mother Gibbet and the prebend of the parish," I say.

"Her word is mine," snaps Molly.

"Bring the candle," I say.

And the candle is brought.

"Sit," I say authoritatively.

As the midwife reclines, I hold the candle nearer. I have to remind myself that I'm not actually a witchhunter and have no idea what I'm doing. Luckily I practiced pain via candleflame with Anne and Hazel's enchantment, so I know how deep a hurt it will be for her. Starnlowe grimaces, mostly in anticipation, I think. I remove her shoe, which, if they knew I was a lad, would be entirely indecent.

"Have you a knowledge of herbs beyond what mortals are meant to understand?" I begin, menacing her sole with the flame.

"What kind of a question is that?" and I hold the candle nearer and she growls "ah" like someone who's nearly fallen down a well. "I've a simple knowledge of plants! The Lord bled for better than this," and I ask what was that, and she says it wasn't anything.

"Do animals show a willingness to do as you request of them?" I ask.

"Give 'em a pat and a saucer and they'll do flips for you," says Starnlowe.

"Even after they've died?"

"Don't you start harping on that now," Starnlowe snips. "You walked in at a funny time. I was just burying her."

"Why could the miller not kill his own cat?" I ask.

"He'd not meant it to die. I'd've given the puss back to him alive if I knew you'd dwell so on it."

"Have you brought death to other animals in service to your master?"

"Haven't got a m--OUCH! God's own name, child. I give animals the best life I can, and if their life is closing, I give them the best death I can."

"So you admit to an unnatural knowledge of death?"

"Nothing unnatural-- _stop_!"

"A knowledge of death?"

". . . yes," she says.

"You understand these are mere pieces of the puzzle?" I say.

" _There's no puzzle_! I'm at church any Sunday unless there's been a death--"

"So you avoid the kirk on days someone's died?"

"Only a madwoman could build such a case--"

"Can you tell me how it was that Anne Thornton came to be enchanted?"

Miss Starnlowe stops protesting and licks her lips and bites them. I hold the candle no nearer than what she can feel.

"This is only about that wild one, is it?"

"Yes."

"She came in with her dress torn. Wouldn't say where she'd torn it. Perhaps the ones who did are the ones you're looking for. Junie did the mending."

Molly breaks through our interrogation and grabs Starnlowe by the mouth and says, "What dress? Who done it?"

Starnlowe's sallow eyes bore into me like termites. "Sister Margaret," she says measuredly, "came to me before she came to you, in order to have Junie Edwards mend Thorntown's daughter's dress. Since I know for a perfect fact that I put no damn spells on anyone, perhaps you'd have better luck retracing your steps to find who did, if you're so sure."

Red sour cheeks turn to me. "Who?" Molly demands. "What did that slattern do? Who'd she do it with?"

I take a breath and decide how to approach this matter, especially the matter of why I didn't mention it before.

"As we traveled together, we came upon an unruly farmer," I say. "A Redneck in tartan'n'sporran. He proposed marriage to Anne. Anne turned him down, saying she knew now the Lord had chosen her for kirk. And the farmer began to rend her clothes in his passion. I took her hand and we outran him."

"A large man?" says Henry Wool with a sad note. "Bushy old hair and a cleanshorn face?"

"Yes," I say. "Outside the town, beside the road."

"That'll be Hagee," says a councilman. "We'll rouse him." He slaps a hand like a cudgel.

"Sister Margaret," says Molly frantically, "did Anne have the bewitchment before she arrived at Sarah's house?"

Thinking of the prebend's request and of Sarah Starnlowe, I say, "It's possible. I have no way of knowing."

Molly bangs on the table and barely restrains herself from cursing. She wanted to watch Starnlowe burn.

"There's doubt now, and I can't say I'm sorry for it," says Wool. "We're no longer certain this strange condition has afflicted her by Starnlowe's will. Are we in agreement?"

A murmur of yes.

"Wait," says a councilman whose name I think is William McCullough. "Hagee's wife passed on from the fever last summer. Sarah, didn't you attend him?"

Barefoot, sitting in chains in her white blouse and blue dress on the floor, the midwife nods. My candle touches wet wax against my thumb, and I blow it out.

"What're you getting at, Bill?" asks Henry Wool.

"And Mansfield's daughter? You were there?" Bill McCullough asks.

"I was," she answers.

"Mansfield, who married Elizabeth instead of yourself?" Bill adds.

"Ronald Mansfield is married to Elizabeth," she confirms. Ronald's my da's name.

"And auld Bram lost his wife, too, that summer. Were you there at her bedside?"

Suddenly Sarah Starnlowe is no longer looking relieved.

"Yes, of course. I'm a healer. I did everything I could--"

But Bill McCullough interrupts her. "The wife of the man you courted, back-a-day?"

"Yes," hurriedly.

"And it's hardly the first time Hagee's wronged a lass who didn't want him, is it?" McCullough says. "There was a time when he 'n I were the little Sister's age, eh? He courted you."

"Did he, Sarah?" asks Henry Wool, looking under brow at the midwife. "Hagee? How'd he do you wrong?"

"Struck me," gutters out of her throat. "Such a blow I'd never thought to receive. Lost a tooth to him."

"My only question," finishes Bill McCullough, "is what wrong Anne Thorntown's done to you."

"I can answer that," says Molly. "She didn't. You and I were rivals, weren't we, Sarah? Remember you getting mud in my hair in the spring line, just so Brammy'd think you were clever? Before the Lord called for me. Well. Since she couldn't fit fever under the Abbey door, she sent a sweet and innocent serpent through, knowing I'd give her right proper discipline. Petty witchcraft," Molly spits. "Sending a bewildered little girl to spank me. What a waste of Satan's power. Sold your soul for three deaths and a spanking. Pitiful. Hank, if you would?"

Miss Starnlowe declines the opportunity to defend herself, won't speak, has nothing to say to anyone, her eyes are to the wall. And that's when the hundreds council decides.

The burning is for Sunday.

΅

Sunday.

Before the burning begins, I spy a speck on the hills, a brown cloak and a huge hat and a long shape that resolves into an arquebus' iron barrel as it draws near.

The stake is cut not from a tree, whose fresh pillar wouldn't quickly combust, but from the roofbeam of the old Catholic school. The school was wood and daub and was pushed over by age a decade ago, and the wood's rotten but dry. Molly said good when it was suggested. A short pit is dug, and the large beam upended into it, and boys have gone to Gibbet's skull forest to collect kindling, and the unlit bonefire is heaping higher, minute by each. Starnlowe is screaming for them to let her say goodbye to Junie, but Henry Wool tells her it can't be allowed, and he's sorry it's so. She won't stop, she says it's important. Just screaming.

I've joined the kindling-gatherers. I have a plan. Angus told me. He pointed with his lips, and made shapes with his great hands, and he told me where to go.

I go.

Into the wee wood where the pagan dead survive, I go.

Here it is. By a pool a single willow grows. Unseen by the rambling men, I as a nunwoman pluck a branch with waterfall leaves and morning-tiptoe-firstly-day spring buds waking upon it. I take a piece longer than my forearm and hide it in my sleeve.

Then I return.

When I return, Dacy Jack has reached the meadow where Starnlowe will be burned. The arquebus is laid over both his shoulders. Henry Wool ambles along beside me, carrying kindling, and says to Dacy Jack, "Ho there, friend. What've you seen?"

"Fires on the heath," he says. "Long away, but closer than Ballymena."

"Are they for sailing abroad, friend Jack?"

Everyone's delicate in talking to the wild woodman, and they call him "friend" the way you'd say it to someone whom you weren't certain was one.

"Hard to tell. Thought it best you had a ready hand when the flames are lit. We Irish are drawn to 'em. Like moths."

No one's sure if Dacy's insulted by us or insulting us or whether it's his way of being friendly.

"You know the story of it?" Wool asks, gesturing at Starnlowe, still screaming.

"Stories don't change, Hank. Nothing really does."

Perturbed, Henry Wool shields his eyes and looks up at cloud. "Think it'll rain?" he asks.

"Not until the bones burn. Then the rain'll start," says Jack.

An old lion facing down a placid bullock, Henry Wool says, "We're to see it done, Jack," and Jack says, "That's what you're here to do."

Sarah Starnlowe is saying they should let Junie talk to her, so Junie will be ready when things need doing. She tells whoever's near that they should send for Doreen Agee in Marysbourne to show Junie the practice of wifing for a year, but the people of Calumny have at last ceased to notice Sarah Starnlowe in any way. They avert their eyes. They bow their heads. They watch to see when the sun will break through. Only it won't, it will wait until the bones burn, and after.

The kindling is assembled and the priest is reading a late prayer to the fully assembled town when hoofbeats are heard. Dacy Jack shoulders his arquebus but does not yet fire. The sound comes from the eastroad, toward the sea. The hoofbeats are not at full gallop, but are faster than you'd ride if you didn't have news. There is only one horse.

As the priest, Father Wallace Healey, recites a speech on the subject of the sin of revenge, his narrow vulture shoulders flanked by Gibbet and Molly and the prebend and myself, Sister Mary returns. She falls to a canter and then reins in the large bay beside the priest. Delicate though he is, Father Healey is conscientious and does not falter in his words. He tells us how the Devil searches for a hole in our hearts torn by envy and rank green jealousy, and crawls inside, working like an excavator, making the hole larger until we are split.

When his sermon is completed, he raises his eyebrows to Sister Mary, who is sidesaddle and breathless. She shakes her head and hands down a parchment roll with an ecclesiastical seal to Mother Gibbet.

Splitting the seal and pulling the white roll apart, Mother Gibbet reads, then wails.

"What? Mother Superior--what is it?" and Molly fairly snatches the scroll away, reads it, hands it back.

Mother Gibbet turns to the men religious and shows them.

"Be in known," reads Father Healey in his mild voice, "that under the wisdom of the ecclesiastical Church of Ireland and England, the act of seclusion from the world under the ancient Catholic practice of the mendicant life is declared contrary to the true teachings of Martin Luther and thus will no longer be tolerated within the Church's purview."

"We've been abolished."

Stricken utterly, Gibbet clutches her heart in consternation.

Molly itches her cornette irritably. "That won't stop us from preventing the spread of arrant wickedness in this town!" she roars. She has a torch and--

"Sister Molly, please permit Henry Wool to test the spell that's on Anne first," I say.

Anne has faded into the group of postulants, a white-winged face in black, but I pull her forward. We share a look. I pull out the willow switch, scrape it down with my bare hand until there are leaves and buds on my shoes and a slinky sharp switch in my hands, and present the gel and the switch to Molly.

"Sister Anne, your bottom, please," I say.

The entire crowd gets an obscene view of petticoats and lifted cowl and broken skin.

A quick swish. Molly yelps and Anne curses. "It's a dastardly thing," Molly scowls.

I take Henry Wool's hand and lead him forward.

"You agree that there is a new mark on Anne?"

Henry Wool agrees.

"Molly, please show your left hip," I say.

"But I--"

I wave my hand in direction. Shocked, Molly complies, turning redder than blood on snow in her embarrassment. Plain white skin between cowl and petticoats.

"There is no such line?" I say. Henry Wool agrees.

I give him the switch and take Anne by the hand. To my relief, I feel only her hand, not my own.

A swish of switch.

"I feel nothing," admits Henry Wool.

"Liar!" but instantly Molly realizes this is wrong, that Henry Wool is the one man who cannot be impeached on goodness or wisdom. "I mean--I bloody well felt it! And I'd swear she didn't. I'd swear."

"Give me a turn at it," calls out Taverner from the crowd. Pushing through, he swats Anne and shakes his head.

"Bloody Sarah Starnlowe! This is her joke! Too bad we've got an authenticated burner from Longshank here, under the auspices of the renowned Sister Goodham--"

But I grab ahold of Molly's filed-down iron poker and begin taking my clothes off.

Words begin. Inside the crowd. Hushed words. Shocked words. Worried words. Wonderful words.

I undress quickly until I am completely naked except for shoes and I jump around and my willy wags and everyone can see that I have been nothing more than deformed little Francis Mansfield this entire time.

A cannonshot deafens all. Anne now wears petticoats and corset only, the better to sprint. Taking hands, we run away, followed by the rough hollow-thump kick-em-up coarse base animalbrained boots of Dacy Jack and his hand cannon.

**Part IV**

Miss Hazel sits on a three-legged stool with her back to the noose tree. Her shoes lay across a second footstool. A musket lays across her lap.

I've outpaced Anne and Jack by more than a furlong, I think. Haven't looked back. I doubt the villagers are following, there's no need, they know I'll not return. Never return. Mam knows. She knows she won't see me again. Honestly I don't mind. I don't. It's a lie I tell myself, but thinking it makes the fact more bearable.

Likewise, I'm sure Anne knows Molly would practically flay the flesh off her rump if she ever returned. She won't ever go back to town, and her father up in whatever town he lives in won't make her. Anne's already completed the task Hazel gave her, and now Hazel will provide passage to the West and that's where the hellion'll be from now on.

The rain has not yet broken. Sarah Starnlowe's bones haven't been burnt, so maybe it will never rain again, or maybe it will wait until midnight.

"You did it!" calls Hazel through the loudhailer of her hands. She doesn't rise, but she waves to me in simple delight. I am still naked.

As I arrive at the wall of bracken and tangled brush, she rises and scoops me up unhesitatingly and swings me around and kisses me on the forehead. Pulling off a cardigan, she wraps me in it and takes me in her arms and she's my mother now, I've chosen her. I've done right by her, and she's given me a chance to wreck all bad things and she's given me a reason to leave town.

I say:

"I did it."

I say:

"What was the reason you wanted me to do it?"

Anne and Jack are arriving in view in the distance. I have been thinking about many things.

"You didn't learn why?" she asks.

"To stop the spankings?" I say.

"Childish. Why would I go to such trouble to stop spankings?"

"That's what I was wondering."

It's cold, and I shiver, and she holds me in her arms.

"You're young," she says. "There's things the elders didn't share, isn't there?"

"I don't know."

"Content yourself with the assurance that there were reasons far more than sufficient to have the Abbey abolished for all time. Sometimes I'll need to be mysterious with you, but that's so you don't turn ordinary too fast. You will do, someday. Everyone does."

"It had to do with the prebend--"

"A great many things have to do with the prebend. Don't speak his name, I won't hear it on my hallowed land."

"Why's it hallowed here? Is it hallowed by eeshi?" I ask.

"It's hallowed by the rope above your head. That's a great secret, Francis. When a man dies, his deathspot becomes a place where a remnant of the God's mind remains. Where the God once dwelt, there's holiness. The fact that it was outlaws whose eyes were shut here matters less than a twig, in God's eyes."

"A Pavee once told me that the God-in-heaven hasn't been around for so long, and there are people who are older."

"That's true. But we're not speaking of the God-in-heaven. We're speaking of the God-on-Earth."

"Is that different?"

"Nubbins. 'Course it is."

"Bloody hell!"

These last words were spoken by Anne, who, beyond breathless, pulls the stool from Hazel's feet and collapses onto it, then leaps up to her feet with a groan of misery, grasping her buttocks, and lays on her belly on the grass like a great slug. Dacy Jack puffs through, by and by, and we form a circle on the hard ground under the berry-dark sky.

"No substitute for experience," murmurs Hazel indifferently, although the twinkle in her eye suggests she's only pretending to be indifferent to Anne's pain.

"Bloody GodChrist singing hymns, my arse hurts. All at once, too!" Anne moans, clutching her behind in real pain.

"It will pass, love. Wait here, I'll bring cream."

Miss Hazel vanishes through secret ways into her thorn world.

"Thought you and Miss Hazel didn't get on," I say to Dacy Jack.

"Surely 'tis cheek to talk so to your betters, lad," he rumbles.

"Sorry, sir."

"A fact, though. Too much alike, in our way. There's nothing I can say that she hasn't thought before. She'll even sing along to songs I've written, afore she's heard them."

"That's impossible," says Anne.

"Tell it to her," he replies.

"Your story was a lie," I say. "About the gel who worked for Hazel before me." I cross my legs under the large cardigan and tuck it around me.

"Was it a happy lie?" he asks. "Did it makes the truth seem less rude?"

I don't answer that question. I still have burning bones on my mind. Instead I say this:

"What happens when you die?"

Dacy Jack ponders this.

"There is a land on the other side of the sea," he begins.

"Virginia?" asks Anne.

"Well, yes, that's the name for it--"

"And that's where you go?" she asks.

"Have I said so?" wonders Jack irritably. "No, heed me. On the other side of a sea full of fishes is a land with different ways, different men, different fruits and flowers. Isn't it so?"

We agree.

"But you've seen birds soaring above us, like fishes in sky. It's on the other side of this sky that we travel when we leave this world. For to cross the sea you've got to be lighter than water, but to cross the sky you must be lighter than air, as our souls are. And beyond the sky that we see, there is a land more cunning yet than even Virginia, and in that land we dwell forever, and never grow old. And if you live long enough to die, you're sure to see it, for without skin and bone to hold you back, you'll fly, as you do in dreams. Only all the dreams will be done, for they will all be fulfilled, and what remains is the good within all of us. And you'll see the ones you love again, and can dwell beside them forever, if you choose. And that will be a fine thing."

"Is it--it's--" says Anne.

"It's a lie," I finish.

"But a happy lie," she murmurs.

"Here's a dress, hope it fits."

We look up. Hazel has a small dress of burgundy linen. Unselfconsciously she pulls my cardigan off, holds my arms up and skins the dress on me. Anne giggles as a stack of petticoats slide up my legs--this part is not too different from the nun's outfit. Now I am wearing a burgundy dress.

"Couldn't you have brought my breeches?"

"I think this suits you much better."

"Do you really think I'm a gel, Miss Hazel?"

"If you were," she replies, "what would you call yourself?"

"What's a word for the assistant to a fairy who's a daughter of a hoopoe and a forgotten Irish king?"

Hazel flicks her eyes to Anne, but if she's going to put me in a dress she'd better be willing to have her own privacy paid in the open air as well.

"Have to be crowned to be a king," says Hazel.

". . . of a hoopoe and a forgotten Irish prince, then?"

"There isn't one."

"Then you'll have to bring me my breeches and call me a boy, won't you?"

"I think I'll call you Aisling, since you're a dreamer."

"Aisling doesn't mean dreamer, it means dream," I say.

"And who's to say we don't dream ourselves into being? I've decided to call you Aisling, and I've put you in a fine dress, and that's how things are today."

Anne's amused, and I show her my tongue and she calls me Aisling in return and I say I'll spank her and she tells me I won't if I value my nose. Hazel pulls the gel's pettis down and puts her over her knee and salves her buttocks with cream.

"Before I let you rest, I've made a promise to Anne, and I mean to discharge it sooner, rather than later, before search parties start out. We'll need to cross the Pale tonight, Miss Aisling, and Anne will stay behind with Jack until next morning."

"A long drive," Jack says.

"Yes, yes it is, but we'll be south of Newry before night. The rain will cover us."

"But Jack said it wouldn't rain until the bones burned," I say.

"Never said _whose_ bones, did I?" says Jack, and winks.

"Who are they burning, then?" Anne says.

"They aren't burning anyone. But me? I'll burn the miller's wife. She'll not mind, and neither will Gordon."

"It will take a whale's worth of heat to burn bones," muses Miss Hazel.

"Lucky thing there's a bonefire all prepared. I'll light it. I'll say it's a shame to let it go to waste. There may be aftereffects," Jack tells to his sister.

"Yes, well, I've no desire to be caught at Newry, or to be seen anywhere. Do what's doing, Jack."

"Aye. Well, lassie, if we're to be graverobbing, we'll need black coats and shovels. Hope you don't mind seeing death."

Anne is delighted. "This is proper witchcraft, isn't it?"

"I've no idea what you mean," and he sits her soothed bottom on his shoulder and saunters away.

΅

"Are you going to tell me why Anne isn't coming with us to the Pale?" I ask as the goats trot up to the cart and are harnessed. The goats have no strange things inside them, as far as I know.

"Are you angry that I've put a dress on you?" she replies.

"You aren't, are you?" I say.

"Aisling, I'm your master and I asked you a question."

"Must not have heard you," and I look up at her and she pretends to be peeved.

"There'll be no haircuts for you for quite a while. Here's a hat," and she takes a red bonnet from her burlap sleeve and affixes it over my ears.

"I'm mad at you for not explaining."

"Not for putting petticoats on you?"

"I saw Mam, Miss Hazel. When I was in nun's clothes. She saw me, too."

This attracts Hazel's attention, and she asks for the story.

"We didn't say much. But I know. All Mam ever wanted," I say, "was a son with bull arms who'd be a fine farmer or carpenter. Who'd do good work for good money."

"I haven't hardly got any gold or silver," says Hazel, "and certainly not enough to pay you for your work for me."

"Mam thinks I snuck into the convent out of shame, because no one would hire me. For awhile I wasn't sure I hadn't. I'm sure she's wondering why she never spotted me when she was teaching, and it's because Molly never had me help out, since I was a guest."

"Doesn't lack hospitality, anyhow, that Molly. Heee-up."

The goats push through the ivy, but Hazel doesn't have me get out and raise the bramble plank for her. Instead she hands me the dirty cut-leather reins, brown with white at the edge, and tells me to flick them once the thorns are out of the way. Leaping down in her shapeless rags, she takes a long cant-hook from the side of the cart and draws down the noose. The goats seem to anticipate my command and comply with my flick. Hazel skips like a child and leaps up the iron step, and we're underway.

"I don't think you fear shame," she says, adjusting the blooming sleeve of my dress. It's comfortable and not too long, although the material's too thin and I miss wearing proper boy's breeches. The linen bunches around my shoulders and makes me chill with draft. "I think you like it."

"Didn't mind Mam seeing me in a habit. It was just, I want her to be proud of me. She doesn't even know you chose me. She thinks I'm unemployed."

"What if I told you," Miss Hazel says, "that nothing you ever do will be good enough to make your Abbey mam proud of you?"

I don't answer. Neither Hazel nor I have anything much to say after that.

The sky is a wine-dark sea that no one is weightless enough to sail. Ireland is underneath us. We are riding Ireland as a seagull rides updrafts. The black cart must look strange, like a shadow of a small house a few feet off the ground, yet no one is on the road and no one sees us. I wonder, had there been an audience, whether we could be seen at all. The ride is far from smooth, it jumbles my guts, but it beats horseback by a mile. The goats scurry faster than you'd think, their legs are spider legs nearly. I am homesick.

Finally Hazel says something:

"Did you say you weren't sure whether you were in the Abbey because you were unemployed?"

". . . yes."

"Where'd you think the habit came from, silly lass?"

"What if I'd have snuck in through the cloister, late at night, stole it off a line, put it on--"

"And Little Miss Anne? And the midwife? And the fact no one recognized you? Your voice? Your reflection in the mirror?" says Hazel.

"There are moments I'm still not sure I'm not dreaming," I say.

"And your name is Aisling. So perhaps you are dreaming. Perhaps we've been riding to Newry since the day you were born, Aisling, and perhaps you've no other name, and perhaps I'm your mam and raised you, and perhaps your father is wild oats, and perhaps your life will end a thousand thousand years from now, and perhaps you won't even reach Newry in all that time, even if we ride steady for a thousand thousand years."

"None of that is true," I say.

She flicks my ear. "Your name is Aisling so. Say it."

"Fine, maybe it's all true. Maybe you're a dream, too."

"Am not. Say it now."

"Maybe I'm asleep and the spring line is tomorrow."

"What did I tell you to do?"

"My name is Aisling and I've not had any other name ever," I say.

"That'll do. Introduce yourself."

"Hullo, my name is Aisling--"

"Aisling what?" she asks.

"You haven't given me a surname."

"Which means?"

"Which means I haven't got one."

"Good," she finishes. "I think you've a handle on how your life goes from now on. Have I told you the story of the unicorn?"

"You haven't."

"My and well. Let's begin it by saying the shape of the unicorn is not so much like a horse's. That's a myth. It's far more like a wolfhound, with a body so spindly you'd wonder how it shits, but legs and face so thick and sinewy it could strike down a bullock without using its horn. And its horn grows not through its forehead, like a deer's. Instead it grows up through its snout--have you ever seen a narwhal?--because it's really an overgrown tooth. And it only has one horn its whole life, and blood and marrow flow through it, and if you were to cut it off, the beast would die. A unicorn lives not in caves but in thick forest, and Ireland's forests aren't near thick enough for them to be plentiful, and it's mightily difficult to find a unicorn in this country. But they're the one creature who can step between this world and the next, save only the fox, who travels in secret and alone."

"Dacy Jack said when we die we fly."

"Nubbins. The next world is here around us, but the one step is too far to walk. But on the back of a unicorn, you can travel clear across to the far land, and once you set foot there, you live and never grow old. And this is much to be desired, young Aisling, as soon you'll learn. For it's in this land that the good men and their kin abide, and if you are a lass of kind and obedient disposition, you'll do well among them, far better than you will in the walks of men. For men are prone to direly hurt that which is innocent, while the good men cherish it. But one of sullied mind who's crossed the white threshold would find them ruinous, and you'll hear of that, too."

"Are they angels?" I ask. "The good folk? Are they of the God in His heaven?"

Miss Hazel peers at me from under her great hood. I can't see whether she's smiling or scowling.

"Was a women named Deirdre McCuill had never seen a man but her father, and was kept in a tower since she was wee, and had only seen sunlight through a window. She was grown now, and it came over her that she'd like to leave the tower she was shut up in. Can you imagine? Well, her father'd hear none of it. So she devised a way to leave. The bars of the tower's windows were too narrow to squeeze through for a healthy gel, but she figured she'd get smaller if she didn't eat. Eighty days and nights she took only a sip of goat's milk alone, brought in each day along with three hearty meals. The meals wound up poured in a quiet heap out the window, so no one would grow suspicious when she handed back her dish. At the end of the time, she waited for nightfall, then slid her shriveled, starving body out through the narrow bars and threw herself off the window ledge. Sure and she landed on a big heap of rotting meat and meal. Half her bones were broken besides. But she was free, and who's to say it wasn't worth it?

"Crawling away across the meadows and thickets that surrounded the lonely tower, Deirdre realized that she'd made a miscalculation. Her legs were broken, and there were bones cutting into her blood vessels. She was plighted to die. It was still evening, and she'd never seen the sun, except through bars, and it was what she wanted.

"But she was going to die."

"Did she?" I ask.

"I haven't said. Hush, I'm telling the story.

"With blood seeping into her legs in places blood isn't meant to be, she hardly noticed as a dark shape stole over her."

"A unicorn, come to save her?" I say.

"Don't be ridiculous. What would a unicorn be doing in Ireland? No, the dark shape was a dog, and the dog belonged to her father, who was out looking for deer to murder and rip apart and feed parts of to this selfsame hound, who didn't even like venison anyway. For that's what men do. The hound led Deirdre's father to her limp body, and the man shouted at the gel for nigh half an hour, and then set her bones and dragged her back in through the tower's door and into the high room and nailed the windows shut entirely and then the door. He cut a tiny slot in the bottom, far too small for even a starved girl to slide through, the better to push through a dish of food. And he cut a peephole, the better to see if she wasn't eating. Then he left her there.

"What he didn't notice was, she'd stolen his hunting knife from his hip as she was being carried in, splints and all."

"And she used it to shinny the nails out of the window, and tried jumping again?" I say.

"Nonsense. She turned the knife to her own neck and bled out. Can you imagine the pain of having your legs broken, and starving yourself for eighty days, and being alone in a tiny box, and more than that, only to fail?"

"I unsocketed my shoulder once," I say.

"Hardly compares, I'm afraid. Five times as much pain, young Aisling, at the leastest." She touches my nose. "But her miserable little death wasn't the end of the story, my gel. It was the beginning."

The night is thick. Rain still threatens, but it holds, like an old burlap bag too full of onions and you know it'll rip loose by the end. I've grown accustomed to the shaking of the cartwheels, the vibrations cause a buzz in my legs, but the cold in the air is steep and elaborate and the feeling is like getting warm by the fire in reverse. Like there is a fire made of cold, and I'm curled up beside it. I ask whether there's something warmer for me to wear, but she shakes her head.

Hazel doesn't finish the story just then. Instead she tends to the reins, and the wind, and after too long she shivers herself, and says she would have brought a mantle for us to share if she'd thought ahead. I ask doesn't she always think ahead? She planned out the abolition of the Abbey. And she replies she was otherwise occupied. And I say wasn't she just sitting with the gun in her lap, waiting? And she says there were things on her mind. I ask what, but she only shakes her head. This is more of a response than I was expecting and seems different to the way she normally acts. There must really be something on her mind.

We crest a rise of dried grass that hasn't properly regrown from the winter yet. You can see, through the dark of the stormclouds, more of Ireland than I'd ever properly seen at once, with nary a wood or glen or wall but you can see over the top of it. The goats shy and bleat unexpectedly, and the cart comes roughly to a stop, only because the goats seem fearful of going on. Flicks of rein have no effect, and I'm reminded of my meeting with the Pavee eeshi when I fell from the cart and was in another place, but this is different. Something far deeper waits.

This is where we are when it happens.

The storm comes down. Not as rain but as lightning. Flashes one upon the other, a tempest of levin not really so far away. The goats are oddly unfazed by the sight, as if they fear something else, but Hazel makes a sound of breath and takes my body under her arm and heaves, throwing me down from the cart and tumbling after.

"Under the knoll! Move light and swift, my Aisling!" she calls from over the echoing drum-knife-peals, pushing me, throwing off my balance as I try to rise, skittering to her feet and pushing me and pushing and I throw myself down the still-dry slope to the lowest point of land.

My eardrums fairly burst and the cart lights up like Christmas candles with a light so blue it hurts. Ringing in the vale.

"The goats!"

A smell of burnt hair.

"Oh Jesus, the goats."

Miss Hazel crawls upon the land stiffly back up the way we had come. I hear a shine that's a nasty bell, and my arms and knees feel hot, and the smell is cruel in the air.

The rain breaks.

"It's Munster," Hazel murmurs. "She's taken Munster. That's her toll. I shouldn't have gone the Ardmagh road. I should've gone the White Road, or the backroad, or sailed round the Island of the Glens, before I came this way. Munster."

Blinking, I return to the rise and stand upon it, my new dress' starch sopping away in the rain. The cart is whole, I don't know how, and three goats cry within steaming harnesses.

Hazel cradles the fourth and weeps for him.

I stand nearby, unable to share her grief. I feel nothing special for a goat. I've seen goats slaughtered, it isn't much.

Then I see a light coiled upon the seat of the wagon. Neglecting Hazel, who's hardly there, I mount the step and approach the coiled light.

"The goat," says the light, "cannot be returned to body."

"I know," I say to the light, which isn't so big and looks like a very skinny cat.

"But if you put me inside the goat, she'll think it's come back."

"She'll know I put you there," I say to the light.

"Yes," the light tells me, "but she won't care. I'll maneuver the goat, it'll look like it's alive again. I've had practice with goats."

"She pulled you out of Donegal once," I say.

"That's where I got the practice."

Setting out a hand, I permit the light to tickle my fingers. It feels like a bug walking on my hand. I don't like the feeling very much. Carefully I descend the iron step and push Hazel from where she huddles and I put my hand up to the mouth of the goat. The light slithers in, and then the goat stands and bleats.

"He's--"

The goat's legs are shakey. The goat's shoulders bend and stretch. The goat's head turns nearly all the way around, one way, then the other, like an owl's.

"It's--"

The goat stands and sits, stands and sits. Practicing.

"It isn't Munster, is it," says Hazel, pushing her hood away and taking my cheek in her palm, neither kindly nor roughly. Water flows between us, from the sky, from the burnt bones of the miller's wife. Hazel's eyes are heavy and her scars still shock me, she keeps them covered so much I've haven't grown accustomed fully.

"No, it isn't," I say, "but it's better than dead, isn't it?"

"Thought I told it to keep away from my goats." And a laugh burps out of her and then a cry buries it.

"Just as well it didn't," I say, feeling sensible rather than mad. I become sensible as a gel. Being a lad burns my mind.

She covers me with herself and I don't know how she feels.

She takes my hand. She leads me back to the cart and we sit on the drover's board. She rests her head against my shoulder, the burlap rough against the neck of my dress. Then she gets down from the cart and says she'd better look to the other three.

After, she returns to the cart and hugs me and says she thinks Aisling is wiser at living and better for hugs than Francis was, and I blush and find a smile for her.

"I'd better tell you," she says.

She says: "Macha. Macha," she says, "is brutal in her envy. It's her word in Ardmagh, although you'll find few who remember. I'd thought her to be sleeping, but she's woken. If you bring her one of a few certain things, she'll let you pass in peace. I--I should have--"

A long snort of snot and Hazel lets out a sob and then rests her heart from the pain and doesn't speak or act.

"If you don't give," says Hazel finally, "she takes. She might have--but then she--it might have been--"

"She might have taken me, you mean," I say.

"I was distracted," says Hazel. "Busy. Thinking. I was busy thinking."

"What about?"

My master rubs her nose and her eyes are red.

"Aisling," she says, "they're going to kill everybody. It's war. It's always been war. It's been coming. Didn't it trouble you that I've been carrying a musket?"

She points to where it rests like a third passenger to our right.

"Queer, didn't you think? Smacks of fear, doesn't it? Me, who lives inside a mountain? With all my hidden rooms? A gun?" She sniffs hard. "Why do you think, my one? Men are hard, Aisling, their souls have blades all over the outside, and no matter how careful we are, their razors cut us. All it takes for my ways to be found is an army of rascals. They'll chop my trees and burn my bracken and rape my mountain and find my--my goats," she sniffs, "and then I'll be homeless, and all I've built will be sundered, and I'll have nothing. I can protect myself from a village, my sweet Aisling, but an army will kill for the delights of ruin and of being a man, and I won't allow it. Don't imagine you've guessed."

I shake my head.

"We aren't crossing the Pale for dear Anne. Oh, we'll get her safe passage through to Irish lands, Jack will take her and she'll have a place to live, if she can manage the language. But she'll not be living near the Pale. That isn't it at all.

"But all I've done. All I've arranged. All I've neglected, my lass. It's not been planned well en-enough," she manages, touching her tear ducts. "But it's been planned. We've a job to do, you and I, and we'll start tonight, and continue till it's over."

She catches my face.

"We're going to stop a war."

΅

The Pale is a ditch, at first. It's too deep to cross by cart, which is the point, but the boundary line is close to the sea, far closer to the sea than Calumny Colony is, and we drive alongside it. You can't see the ocean from where we are, but you can hear it. Night is long fallen and the rain is spent.

Hazel won't speak of the unicorn. I've asked her but she won't. She says nothing, brooding like a rooster so old it knows it will die soon. War is coming after all. Mormaer Caimbeul and his Irishmen were ahead of the times, marauding too soon, and we must stop the main assault. We're not heading to Irish lands, though. We're crossing from Irish lands. Into the Pale.

The Pale protects the old English settlers from long ago, from back in the medieval wars. They were the ones who came in order to ensure the English owned the island. Didn't work, of course. These early old colonists have chosen not to blend and adopt the language. What's odd about the Pale, though, is that these residents across this deep gutted ditch are English Catholics. They've stayed Catholic and won't adopt the Common Book. I don't know what's so hard about following a better book. It's even written in English instead of Latin.

An armed crossing. The men aren't standing to attention but are playing at cards on the grass. Piles of coins with James and Charles and Elizabeth on them balance precariously. I wonder at how cards should seem so much more wholesome than dice. Something in the pictures, I suspect. Dice are bald numerology. Only natives would play at dice.

"Ho there, grandmother!" the guardsmen cry good-naturedly. Hazel bows her head carefully and lets her reins twist in one hand and the goats trot up to the card game. She nudges me with her shoe, and I don't know what she wants, but she nods in the direction of the men and I shout God keep you and I stand and wave. Hazel pats my head.

"Whither came you, grandmother, and what news?"

Hazel pitches her voice higher and creaky and false Irishy. "The colonists grow suspicious," she murmurs. "Fires on the heath, they say. Horns in the night. A mass of infantry was seen passing through. Kerns only, traveling abroad. But there's worried talk."

"You aren't a colonist yourself, missus," says an Englishman with a brown mustache.

"No sir, can't claim I am, my husband's a Pavee trader, though I've none in the blood, sir. I'm to meet him in Dundalk, if it troubles you not."

"May we look inside your cart, grandmother?" says another man, rising.

"Bad luck, to look inside a Traveler's cart. Seven years of ill, though I mean no offense in saying so."

"Then we'll have to charge you the toll," roars a bearded man in a green vest and black tunic, and lifts me up bodily from the driving board. "Look not so frightened, child, the toll's naught but a kiss on the lips." And his beard plunges against my face directly and crackled lips press against mine.

A chorus of who'll be next begins. I'm passed around like a fresh shipment of tobacco, my lips assaulted by beards and mustaches and cleanshaven faces, all delighted to take part and noticing me not a bit.

I am handed back.

"Well, my sirs, seems you've taken your toll. Now it's well for you to open the gates for me." A firm note touches her tone. It reminds me of how she spoke to the Irish kern who struck her.

" 'tis tuppence as well, God keep us," says the man with the brown mustache.

"A fine thing, then, taking a toll twice for one crossing," Hazel says without moving.

"It's our pay," the Englishman says.

"You've _had_ your pay," she replies.

The bearded man pulls himself to his full height, pats himself on the belly, and places himself broadside us. In a moment Hazel's pulled the musket from out of his reach and turned the barrel toward him.

"You pull another of your English tricks and you'll see what it means to cross a Pavee," she snaps.

In the precise way you would expect, the men share a slow, knowing smirk and a sound of amusement. Then they begin crowding around the cart, moving slowly, as if humoring Hazel's threat to pull the trigger.

Hooded, Hazel makes no indication whether she planned this part of our trip or whether this is another surprise. The gunbarrel swings from one smiling Englishman to the next. They lean on the dashboard and put strident feet on the iron step and play with the goats and the mustached man says, "Let's have a look in that cart after all. I'll risk a little luck for my tuppence."

"Touch it and I'll take your head off," my master growls.

And my foot itches. Angus is tickling me. His terrific eyes prowl down their sockets and now I know what to do.

"Please, sirs," I say. "It's all I have. It was from Christmas last, and I was saving it for to buy a new dress in Dundalk, sirs, but I want you to have it, since you were so kind as to kiss me."

And Hagee's sixpence, hidden in my sole, is in my hand. Then it is in their hand.

"That's very fine of you, lass. Have 'em through, then, Benedick, would you?" says the bearded man.

"Give her the fourpence back, now," whispers Hazel.

"Ah, but each of us gave her a kiss, didn't we?" says a quiet man with eyes like the butcher's. "So really, she's tuppence short. We'll see you through, this time, but she'll owe us the more when you return. And if she accepts another kiss from me and can't pay a second time, then she'll owe me a high lot more still, eh?" and the men roar mightily and slap the goats on the rump and we cross the bridge and pass through the spiked stockade into English Ireland proper.

A few furlongs down the track, I find Hazel's hand and it's shaking.

"Should have let me shoot them," she says, looking straight ahead. "I wanted to do it. That's what would have been right." And I find that she sounds less like a prim lady who knows what she's doing, and more like a little child who's been hurt, and I wrap myself around her arm and let her talk. She wants to talk, and she does talk.

"I've been practicing," she says. "At reloading. I'm quick, I could have stopped two of them dead before they could have done anything about it," and she reaches for a powder horn and realizes she hasn't got one. "Where's it about?" she murmurs, searching frantically around the perfectly empty driving board. There's nothing there to find. It's just me, her, and the musket. And the goats. "I could have," she says. "If I'd--it's beside the stools. I've left it. The shot and powder. I'll--perhaps I'll buy some. Yes. No, it doesn't matter. We're through the wall. We'll take the southroad home. Not home, Jack'll meet us at the loch. That's right. Anne'll be with him, that'll simplify things. Poor gel, she took quite a beating. Molly."

I ask a question:

"Did you and Molly--"

"I didn't mean for them to touch you," she interrupts. She sits on that thought, then she says: "They were ordinary, weren't they? Ordinary Englishmen, doing what any English would do in their shoes." She says: "Any ordinary Englishman." She says: "The rain's gone, that's a fair thing to see. It won't come back this time. It'll stay up, where rain belongs." She says: "Yes, Molly and I were in the line together, back then."

"How old are you?" I ask.

"Forty-six, I think," she says, and I see that she'd like to talk about harmless things.

And I say: "What's it like, being forty-six?"

She says: "Not too bad. One has acquired a mind, by that point. Even dullards get a mind eventually, even if they haven't wit to use it. I'm no dullard, now, you. That's not what I meant," and I give her a crafty smile, only in play, and she slaps my cheek too hard and then says sorry and wraps me in her arms and then breaks a weep into my hair. Weeps deeply, the sort of gasping weep where something's ripping in your breast and you can't hold on to it hard enough to stop holding on to it, if you understand. I put my arms around her, and she only weeps harder, torn inside.

Her burlap rags are stiff and scratchy and have not too much give. I don't know what's happening.

Shuddering, breaking, a scuttled ship in a fiery sea, she weeps.

The goats plod on, driven by sense. One of them is dead. All of them plod on.

The road crosses small towns, and between the towns, houses of stone and houses of wattle shine firelight out of unshuttered windows in the middle distance. There are fewer cows within the Pale, the English don't obsess over their neats the way the Irish do, but the cows that there are seem very to prance at the outdoors. They have young calves already, some a year or two old, and in the late, the cows seem to find hearths of their own imagination, huddling and lowing in gathered groups, content in each other's company. I've never seen a cow reject another, or shame her, or put her to the outside of the group. Cows never travel long distances too soon, not if there's grazing. Cows never dodge the slaughter. Cows are the Lord's own painting of contentment. It's a rule, for cows, and you've got to follow rules. I wonder whether cows are happy. You know a human is a fool when they're happy. Happy men act like cows, while unhappy ones are normal.

That's rules.

"There's still such a distance to travel, Aisling," sighs Hazel. "It never ends, life, till it does. I'll not stop at a house, not an English house. Newry, perhaps. I could tell fortunes for cost of a room. Such a distance to travel."

I pipe up. "I could tell you a story," I say. "It won't be a nice story, I haven't got one of those, but I could tell you one."

A hand draws aside a rag hood like a countess drawing a curtain. Hazel is raw, you can see it in her, and I still feel like she's not got her feelings in order.

"Nothing real," she murmurs, and kisses me on the forehead. Her scars feel funny when she kisses me, but I've come to love them. They're her as much as the rest of her is.

"It was the year 1740," I say. "The world had grown wiser but had turned bitter in its wisdom, in all its wars and its kings. The kings were shaped like iron poker rods, hard and cold and apt to stir up fires. The world had not just three Christianities, but twenty. And all over, they were trying to sell each other their specially written books. And they'd make up new languages to teach people, just so they could write new prayer books in each of them, and no one could understand each other. And they found new worlds beyond Virginia, and each one had a religion of its own, and some of those new religions didn't know of God, but worshipped each other instead, or the lochs and oceans, or perhaps they grew gods on plant stems and hung them on trees, like the pagans did.

"And in those lands across the sea were men who had created wings from the seeds of trees, that let them meet with the birds, and tails from the scales of serpents, that let them follow the fishes, and furry shoes that let them walk in northern snow like a bobcat. And the men decided they wanted to visit the God-in-heaven, and they began to build a ladder. The Christians, I mean. The ones who were visiting. And the natives believed there was no need, because God was themselves, or could be grown in the ground. But the Christians began building.

"They used a pair of great trees, to start. Built steps from the branches, cleared off the bark and drained the sap. And they were closer to God. But not close enough.

"They cut down other trees and wove them on top, tip to tip, so they grew together, and put ladder steps between, and when the wind blew, the ladder waved unsteadily in the wind. But they built it higher. And the natives said it was unwise, that the God-in-heaven would come down if He meant us to meet Him. But the Christians wanted to see God's face, so they kept building. They put treetrunks on top of the other, crossing through the clouds until they came to where the night is. Still it wasn't enough, though the trees shivered with the weight. And men scuttled up and down the ladder quick as spiders on a windowframe, bringing new crossbars and new logs to reach above the night. And the natives said it wouldn't do to challenge the Lord in this way, and it would be better to build a smaller god closer to the ground, and that the Christians were apt to fall. The Christians maintained that they were close to where the God-in-heaven lives, and would it not be better to continue? And they took down forests and made them into smaller ladders, and brought them up whole, and competing groups had spindle-stacks of ladders reaching up in different directions. And they brought in fine carpenters to tidy up the tops with fine carvings and decoration, so when they reached the God-in-heaven He would not be displeased that the ladders were less of glory than they might be, for only through glorious things can you properly reach Him. And in their many crooked paths, the men of the new world pursued the God-in-heaven."

"And they fell?" asks Hazel.

"I haven't said," I reply.

I've intrigued her. Hazel wants to know how my story goes.

"Well, say," she says.

"Tell me what happens after Deirdre dies."

Hazel sighs and kisses me just under the bonnet and says she will, she promises, but it's not in her to do it now.

"Fine," I sigh. "what happens is that the--" but she says no, just let there be silence while we drive, it's very late now and there's a league more to go.

And there is.

And the moon is above us, peering like God's precious milky eyeball upon a black cart and burlap hood and burgundy bonnet and four cantering albed goats and a single musket ball in a single iron musket. The ground is muddy, but the road's cartruts have been packed down over four hundred years and you'd hardly notice. As the clouds swallow the moon and the darkness fills in to the point the goats can't see their way, Hazel brings the cart to a halt.

"Well, my Aisling, I'll need to show you what I carry around with me, won't I?"

I nod.

Dismounting, we trudge to the back of the cart. Hazel tells me to keep watch. I think she doesn't want the English to see, and I wonder whether she hates them and whether she remembers I'm English. Or whether I'm to be Irish now, like her. How deeply she'll ask me to change.

A flash of a key on a chain, and the back of the great two-story-tall cart swings to one side and reveals.

There is light.

From within, there is light. She withdraws a crooked lantern, more bulbous than square, and within it is something that is bright. The interior of the--but she closes the door and I can see no more. In Hazel's other hand is a bag of oats with a thick handle. It's made from the same burlap as her cloak.

"You said you'd show me what you carry around," I say.

"But I didn't," she says, and that's true. "Hang this over the seat. There's a hook if you can find it."

I look inside the lantern. The light has a face, though not a large one.

"What is it?"

"It's a lantern, silly. Hang it up."

The hook is Mate Graham's style. I'd like to ask about it, but Hazel doesn't seem in a mood for talk anymore. A pale orange light radiates, enough that you can spot the road and see the shadows of the cartruts. There's no heat from it, however, and I'm growing to need warmth. I say so.

"Feed the goats, and I'll bundle up beside you and that'll be enough," though I know it shan't.

Three of the goats use their lips to draw oats from my hand hungrily. The last, Munster, stands at attention, playing with its tongue. It takes no oats and makes no sound. I hand the lighter sack to Hazel, who tucks it against the musket.

"You're not to talk until dawn. Fall asleep now, Aisling, for I've a thing to do and it needs for space and quietude."

Curled up in my dress, my head finding an adequate comfort on her hip, positioning my bonnet to keep the burlap from scratching me, I

΅

Light and standstill.

Honey. Yes, honey and eggs and buns and blackcurrant jam.

There's a thick comforter over me, two layers of proper wool in gray and green.

"Dreamyknickers," says Miss Hazel. I'm poked. "Break your fast now, it's more than dawn and less than morning."

I look around me and we're on the road still. There's no farmhouse and there's no town. Open country.

"Where'd you get all this?"

"World's full of things, if you know where to look. Goats'll need feeding, you need feeding first. There's no utensils."

The clay plate is large, and I set it on the dashboard and find that the dashboard's too far from the seat and I kneel instead and shake jellied currants onto buns and drip honey and turn the jar very carefully so the honey settles inside the rim. I push my little sleeves farther up, so I don't get mess on them, and eat with my hands. It's just right. It's filling and there are six buns and two eggs and it's just for me and Hazel tells me to eat all of it. After licking butter off my fingers, I hand Hazel my plate and jump down over the ridge past her view and take care of myself and then come back and feed the goats again from the bag and I look and all the nice things are gone, even the blanket, and Hazel looks extraordinarily tired and hands the reins to me and tells me to drive east until we reach Rostrevor. She curls up on the floor, hugs my nun shoes and I drive with captive, warm feet and a freezing soul.

The cartruts give out a distance before Rostrevor. Hazel's still sleeping, so I follow the coast and before too long the city comes into sight. The goats give me not the least trouble, and you couldn't tell that Munster's dead.

The River Newry is a fine-looking snake, a lazy draught with no bridges over and no boats upon. Astonishing fields are filled with mighty sprouts in tight lines. Hills of trees coat the far bank. I locate a dell under a field of corn that has trees blocking view of the river, and I bring the cart to a stop, out of sight of the road. I'll wait for Hazel to wake.

Immediately Munster collapses into a corpse and a series of small wings flitter and fluff and the light unwinds and floats before me.

"I've only volunteered," it says. "You'll let me go swimming, won't you?"

"Of course," I say to it. "Only you'd best be back before she wakes. She'll resent you if you abandon the goat forever."

"Who's abandoning? I'll be back before she wakes. In fact--" and the light extends its tail into Hazel's nose briefly before zipping away to play in the river.

It takes Hazel well over an hour, cuddling with my clogs, to wake. I wonder whether the light enchanted her. I need to pee again, and she is still, and I must sit with my discomfort. Just as she stirs, the goat stands upon its legs and says what I swear was the word _refreshing_ in human sound.

"Where am I? Oh. There I am," she says, tickling my leg and pushing herself upright. "Are we there yet?"

"The sea," I say, pointing.

"Good."

"Are you going to say where we're going to?" I ask.

"To catch a unicorn, obviously. Thought you'd've guessed. There are only a few forests thick enough to hide a unicorn," she says, "and Carrickbawn Wood's nearest, and safest. Only Travelers live here; they'll not bother us. Not the last unicorn in Ireland, but they're fewer as the woods are taken for kindling. Used to be one living near the loch, but a baron led a hunt for it and it's gone now."

"Did the baron catch it, then?"

" 'Course not, I'd never allow such a thing."

"So," and I'm thinking, "there was a unicorn by the loch within the last forty-six years?"

"That's how long I've been alive."

"Miss Hazel," I say, "was this baron Deirdre's da? The one with the dog?"

She touches my nose and smiles.

"Got brains, lass, haven't you?" she says. Then she says: " 'Course not," again. "I wasn't alive when Deirdre's da was alive."

"Then--"

"The baron was Deirdre's brother," she says.

"You didn't mention she had a brother."

"He hadn't been born yet. She was only thirteen when she fell, after all."

"She's not your mam. Jack is, right?"

Hazel waits.

"Deirdre's your gran, isn't she? Even though she died."

And Hazel brushes my cheek with the back of her fingers and drives on.

At long last, the sun begins a thaw within my bones. The day is growing hot and the world is survivable and we're off to kidnap a unicorn.

It's a distance still to reach the forest, and it takes all day. It looks like an upturned hairbrush. It's hardly a mighty sight, but it's warming to see, a piece of untrammelled sylvania in a country built like a green chip of driftwood, hairless and flat.

Just before we enter the forest, Hazel turns the cart and we skirt the boundary of trees and rove down vast step-like knolls and, on the seashore, there is a church made of round stones and gray mortar with a fallen-in black roof and a very stubby rectangular steeple with broadarrows at the corners.

"Is it Sunday?" I ask.

"The burning would have been Sunday, remember?" she says, pulling up alongside a depleted woodpile. "That was yesterday." We dismount.

"Who's the priest here?" I ask.

"No one has prayed in this church in a century."

Hazel wanders the perimeter, dreamily touching the antique forgotten church with her fingertips. Behind it is a sensation of a view, the ocean rushing and crashing, slashing and gushing. The forest is a breadroll's throw away to my right. And there is the churchyard.

The Catholics have not buried their dead in tight prissy lines, like we English have in our newgraves. The emerald yard is rangy, planted with great crosses, each aspiring to be a slightly different portrait of Jesus' own cross and not quite succeeding. A few dead people aren't marked with crosses, but are aboveground in granite luggage-trunks. Some have only small steeple-shaped stones above them. Few have been carved with names; most are almost entirely anonymous, moreso even than Mother Gibbet's skulls, which at least have a face. Brown moss covers the taller stelas, and the forest impinges at one corner, where a single great upthrusting root has risen graves and gravestones like an ocean wave.

"Where is she?" says Hazel in Irish, sniffing.

"Here I be!" exclaims a corpse in an open grave.

"Well there you are. Thought you'd be about."

The corpse is eyeless, blackened, with its teeth showing through twisted lips. It wears an Irish woman's faded green leeny and a great woolen scarf trailing down its shoulders.

"How goes the death business?" asks Hazel.

"Terrible! Haven't made a sale to a two-legged soul in sixty years. It's as if they aren't even looking forward to it. I've been selling cutrate tickets to the mice, and their credit's always bad from a lifetime of luck evading the foxen."

"I hate to suggest it," says Hazel, "but have you thought about moving house? There are some very fine graves in Rostrevor Town. Practically a stench of death in the air, Pavee dropping down like cups in a drunken bartender's hand . . ."

"No use trying to cheer me up, Cuill my dear, you know we're bound to the yard we were buried in. Sacral ground. No, love, without a lift there's nothing for it but to wait for the humans to move back. There's a fine church here, they'll need it someday. Churches can't go empty forever, not with the God-on-Earth on the move, starting up new religions every third Tuesday. Count your blessings, celebrate the good. I found a very attractive package deal for a vole just yesterday. She even took time out of her eternal blessings to thank me."

"Bonnie, have a look at this one. She's very kind and pleasant to talk to. Got a mind like an arrow, too."

The corpse pushes herself upright on her ligaments and leans over the side of the grave. "Who're you meant to be, my one?" she asks.

I lower myself on a leg and draw out the sides of my dress, the way my sister would. "I'm meant to be Aisling, Missus."

"Daresay you are at that. Who's your _sparvan_ , then? but that's for later. Well, Cuill, but my bones are stiff and still indeed. My soul's not for lying about, it's I for cavorting. Shall we cavort before you tell me why you're here?"

"Aisling, cavort with dear Bonnie, would you?"

A hand reaches up at me out of the grave. Disguising my reluctance, I take the withered bones, ignoring the slime that coats the blackened skin, and Bonnie rises from the grave and steps out. A second hand grasps my hip in a too-familiar way, and I let my hand rest on her knobby shoulderbone and look into the eyeless face and she whispers, "It's a sin, you know, dancing. Will you sin with me? I've naught more to fear of the hereafter, meself, but will you let me draw you into perdition? Do me some good. All I'm to do all day is give passes to heaven to those deserving. It'd be nice to push someone in the other direction for once."

Hazel gives me a wicked smile and tells Bonnie that I delight in dancing, she's seen me go.

"Will you? For me?" asks the blackened corpse.

Demurely, I say I will. But for her.

"I'll lead," she replies.

And away we're off, twirling and galloping and laughing and stamping and I let myself get swept away into the finest and most frantic dance Ireland's ever seen. She spins me by the fingertips and embraces me around the waist and we follow the stone wall of the yard and climb up over gravestones on tiptoe and rush to the wall at the edge of land and look out over the sea, hand in hand. Hazel claps and I dazzle myself with my footwork and Bonnie's rotting lips crack open into a broad smile. At the end, she wraps herself around my neck in a great, horrifying hug and tells me I'm a fine 'un for dancing so. And she'll give Hazel a boon for bringing her such a dancing lassie.

"It's a big favor, Bon. One you'd rather I wouldn't ask for."

"Sure and you wouldn't be wandering the County Down if you hadn't a big favor you needed. Think no offense in it, for there is none. I'm glad enough for the company."

"We need to find him, Bon."

The black corpse cricks her neck like a curious dog.

"You don't mean--"

"I do," Hazel says, nodding toward the dense wall of trees not so far from the churchyard.

The corpse equivalent of a weary sigh exhales from Bonnie. The two women, one alive and one who-knows-what, share their eyes and their no-eyes, and Bonnie nods.

"Won't be easy, you understand. I'll need to come with you. And your lovely carriage won't have use in there. The paths have been lost for generations."

"They weren't lost the last time I was down," Hazel says.

"You weren't yourself when you did," Bonnie replies, puzzlingly.

"Then we'll carry you. You can't weigh more than fifty pounds at the most. Aisling, pick her up in your arms, would you?"

An arm at her back and an arm at her knees, and the corpse is dead weight in my arms. I hold her for a moment, then set her back down and shake my head.

"No?" says Hazel.

"My arms didn't turn out," I say.

"On your back, then," says Hazel, and the corpse's sweet breath is beside me as she wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist.

"No more dignified for me than it is for you, love," she whispers. "Just don't set me down, an eeshi like me can't set foot outside a churchyard, or I'll never-have-been."

"I'm scared," I say. "I'm scared I'll forget. I'm no good at rules, unless they're my rules."

"If you care for others, you'll follow their rules for them, instead of your own rules for yourself," she says.

"Just hand her over if it gets too much, Aisling. Now. What will we need, Bonnie?"

"Feather, of course. A good one, goosedown won't do. Need a white dress. Red such as that won't speak of purity. Pinch of snuff. Unicorns go wild for it. And you'll need a bargain, but for that you can rely on me myself. I'm full of bargains, I'd sell you a twelve get-out-of-purgatory-free tickets for the price of one. Cheaper by the dozen, you know. You'll need to cross the Divide for a time, before he'll willingly visit the world of men. And for that you'll need a path and a key, but you knew that."

"I've got the path," says Hazel.

"Then that's one piece paid for. Of course, all this could be avoided if you'd follow the fox."

"I don't trust the fox," says Hazel.

"Neither do the mice, bless their fast-beating little hearts. But if you see a fox, follow it before it gets away. That'll cross you over with a minimum of tears. Have you got a bridle?"

"Aisling will ride, so there won't be a need."

"She's nimble enough. That'll amount to more than naught. Will you warn her?" says Bonnie.

"Now must I?"

"She'll come to tears if you don't give her the warning."

Hazel and the corpse peer into each other's eye sockets again. Bonnie sighs.

"Well, tears it is, then. I'll not be told I didn't do enough. I fancy I won't get a chance to cry, quick as it might be. But then, you'll not be needing a ticket to the hereafter yourself, will you, my fair one?"

Hazel glances from Bonnie to me and looks down in what I'd call shame.

"It'll do so much good in the world," she says without raising her eyes, "with so very little sacrifice."

"Speak for yourself," says Bonnie, and Hazel takes my hand and we walk into the wood with Bonnie on my back.

"Owls will call out at night, and sleep in the day," says Hazel. "They'll not do for feathers. Gift of feathers should be freely given."

"There was a lost seagull came up the sea loch," says Bonnie from over my shoulder. I don't love her smell, though I know she can't help it. "Might grant a primary for directions home."

"Too proud, seagulls," says Hazel. "Too self-reliant. Would never agree to my help."

"Ravens and daws love a good riddle," Bonnie says.

"Ooh, I'm not much for riddles. Jack would have one," says Hazel.

"Jack?" exclaims Bonnie. "She's--"

"My brother," says Hazel quickly. "Mam left this world ages ago."

"Didn't know your kind could have siblings," murmurs Bonnie.

"Twins, of course. That's all."

"Ash, have you got any good riddles?" asks Hazel.

"I'll think about it," I say. "Where will you get a white dress?"

"Doesn't need to be white, just needs to look white to a unicorn," Hazel replies.

"And the pinch of snuff?"

"Pavees, probably. We'll ride back to Rostrevor for it, if need be."

"Wouldn't they have a feather, too?" I ask.

Hazel sighs and gives me a loud slap and I inhale and Bonnie is shocked and slips and I drop Bonnie and she vanishes.

That's what happens.

It's just happened.

And it's happened.

No trace of decayed slime remains on my hands or back.

And Hazel realizes.

The eeshi never-has-been. But Hazel and I both somehow remember her. I'm not sure I understand how. Perhaps you can remember things that never-have-been. Maybe it's dreams.

"You little bitch," murmurs Hazel. And instead of hugging me and forgiving me, she strikes me with full fist, expressionless and dry of anger. Miss Hazel's small fists fall upon me like shingles from an old roof, they burn with bruises, they hit everywhere, my face, my shoulders, my arms rise to defend my face, she slaps my hands away and strikes my face and blacks my eyes far beyond what Anne did and nearly breaks my nose.

"One of my dearest friends," she says.

And she leaves.

The wood is all around me, a sphere of trunks and undergrowth. We'd walked away from the sea and I can't hear it to get direction by. I have no vision in one eye.

Hazel is gone.

So I sit and wait for the forest to consume me.

΅

His face reaches from the forest floor to the sky, so far above that no bird could locate the top of it. It's taller than the ladders that the Christian men of 1740 will build. His chin rests on a sog of prickly-looking oak leaves, and his body is crouched to accommodate his head with all the world's secrets inside it.

"The tree to your righthand side is eight hundred years old and has no children anywhere on earth."

"I won't walk back," I say. "I'll just sit."

"Inside the sun is a solidified gemstone made of crystallized helium. More than a mile across."

"I didn't even do it."

"There is a man in Brighton born with four legs. He grew up with them, and cut all four off with a penknife when he was seventeen. He is ninety-four today."

"She'll come back and say she's sorry."

"No one alive today has experienced the truest love humans can feel."

"We had a war we needed to stop. It'll happen now. The Irish will kill everyone I know."

"The knee is capable of growing a new ligament under certain duress. This has never yet been observed to happen."

"I want them to. I want the Irish to kill everyone."

"You don't want the Irish to kill everyone," says Angus.

I look at his face. I cannot find his eyes, only his bottom lip, the rest is too far above.

"I want to hate them enough to want that," I say.

Angus is gone, but he isn't never-has-been.

And a dart of red appears in the undergrowth. Rising, I run after it. It's the least I can do for Bonnie.

It would be useless to call out for it to stop, and I'm not useless, only a failure. I cannot find it in myself to sympathize with myself, only I know the eeshi named Bonnie said I should follow foxes into the Otherworld so that I can bring back a unicorn and save Anne Thorntown and then everyone else I know. I don't know where I'll get a feather, a white dress, or a bargain, let alone a pinch of snuff, and I don't even know where unicorns might be, but I'm running through underbrush and between the lumpy outsized bases of trees, pushing through cedar, ducking from branches, and always ahead is a sweep of white and red and brown. I am full of feelings. I ignore them, running in my sweeping, tangled-up dress and clunky nun shoes. I am a winged bird in red.

Abruptly the red shape twists and leaps. Tumbling me backwards against the moss, the fox stands on my chest and looks me eye to eye. I am flat on my back.

"I saw everything," the fox tells me in a voice.

"I've murdered a bonshi," I say.

"If you had, she would have cried for her death," says the fox. "But she didn't die. She never-has-been."

"That's worse," I say.

"Much worse," the fox agrees.

"Will you take me to the Otherworld? I have no white dress," I say.

"You seek a path with costs," the fox says. "Will you pay them?"

"Will it save the lives of people I care about?" I ask.

"Would you give up your life to save theirs?" the fox says.

And I think about Mam, and Da, and their disgust at me, and would I give my life for theirs? And I think of my sister, who was silly and hated me by the end, and would I give my life for hers? And Junie and Anne and the others. And Phelim and Boad. And the men: the butcher, Mate Graham, Henry Wool.

"No, I don't think I actually would," I say.

"Would you give up your death to save them from theirs?"

"Make it so I never grow old, you mean?"

"Different things, to stay young and to stay alive. Wisdom, young one, to recognize the difference."

"If I save them, I'll never die, then?"

The fox raises its eyebrows at me.

"Yes, I'll do that," I say.

"Take my tail, and do not let go."

My hand brushes the swishing tail, but I say I'm not good at following rules.

"Then don't follow them, and see what happens."

My fingers tighten on the fur, and we walk forwards.

Step by step, the world changes.

It's not that the forest departs, nor is it that there are things that could not be. It is, perhaps, more a quality of the light, or perhaps a layer of dreaming that overlays the forest as I see it to be. Shadows have feelings, now, and trees have names and stories. Each glowering gap in the underbrush is a path leading to a special place. It's gone from noon to twilight, now, and I wonder if it isn't always twilight, here. The moon makes a sea of pearls in droplets hanging from branches, and there is the smell of hay and the smell of meadow and the smell of old wood cut by handsaw. I feel myself to be a doll in a Mother Goose rhyme, clumsy and jointed. It is a world beneath the world. Rooks and daws are scolding, scolding, and I can hear the sea again as we walk, and only the fox has not changed in any way at all. His tail is soft and plush, with a hint of vertebrae.

"Taken where e'er you go

Cuts through mud and snow

Flat as a winter sled

With five men marching ahead," I say aloud.

A black bird drops closer. It's a daw.

"Man's riddle. Thing for men," the daw says. The fox plods forward, paying no mind to either of us.

"Yes," I say.

"Men take knives to cut. Knives flat. No men marching ahead."

"No," I say.

"Men make spades to cut through snow or mud. Spades flat. No men marching ahead," says the daw.

"No," I say, pushing aside a witchbroom. The fox merely walks underneath.

"Men have five fingers," says the daw. "Hand flat. Goes with men. Not for cutting. Not sharp!"

"Not sharp," I say.

"Do men have five talons?" asks the daw. "Answer! Answer!"

"Men do," I say.

"Cut through mud and snow! Sharp from shoes! Men's footstep, flat as sled!"

"That's it," I say.

"Let her guess two more! Let her guess two more!"

I peer up at the charcoal eyes glaring from a cocked head.

"Home for a worm

Comes from loam

Hair in a comb

Worm of its own," I say.

"Ground is home for worm, grass hair, roots are worm, but is loam! Not fitting! Not consistent!"

"No," I say.

"Tree has worms. I find worms in bark. Tree comes from loam. Hair is roots! Roots are worm! Is tree!"

"No comb," I say.

"No comb! No comb!"

We walk on as the bird thinks.

"Fruit always has worm. Fruit grows on plant on loam! What fruit has hair? Is kiwifruit!"

"What's a kiwifruit?" I ask.

"Is Irish girl! Kiwi is far off across big water!"

"Might be," I say. "Has it got a worm of its own?"

"No worm! No worm! Is fruit in Ireland anyway. Irish girl never crossed water. Not tell riddle about flying places. Is apple! Worm is stem! Comb is calyx! All fits!"

"It's an apple," I say.

"One more! Give one more!"

"Deader than death

Hasn't had breath

Given no name

Remembered in shame," I say.

"Too easy! Too easy! What is deader than death? Someone who never-has-been! Hasn't breath. No name! But who has shame? Who has shame?" the daw calls.

Over his shoulder, the fox says, "the one who made her so."

"Great crime! Great crime! Who has done this? Who? Who?"

"I have," I say. "To a bonshi. It wasn't on purpose."

"Worse than death! Worse than death! Great crime!"

The daw screams and shrieks and wheels away into the gloaming sky.

"Will everyone speak about me this way?" I ask the fox.

"We are arrived," says the fox. "I will take you no further, and you'll need to take the White Road back."

"Who do I speak to, to find the unicorn?" I ask.

But the fox has spotted a vole, leaps out of my grasp, and vanishes.

"Mr. Daw?" I say.

"Worse than death! Never forgive!"

I have no feather.

There is a glade ahead, and on the far end you can see where the ocean is. I decide I want to look over the sea and think about throwing myself in. Through the shimmering faelights and foxfire I plod, eager to commit suicide and be-no-more.

It's overdue, it really is. I've no man's employment, I've committed worse than murder, I can never return home to my parents again, I've got no friends who like me, I'm sure Junie's heard the whole story by now and has decided I'm beyond mad and never to be forgiven for bringing Starnlowe so close to death, the whole town has seen my willy, and I'm sure this is just the sort of gossip that will spread across all of Ireland and I'll be given no quarter for my bizarre behavior. They'll send me off to Bethlam House for a doctor and a straitjacket. And Hazel--oh Hazel. She's clearly got so few friends. She doesn't even like her brother that much. And then I--

So there's nothing for me.

As I cross the clearing, I wait for some eeshi or chaun to pop up from the ground and make me a special offer that will make life worth living. Perhaps they will trade me mile-a-minute shoes for my burgundy bonnet, or perhaps I will tell a better riddle and they will be delighted and give me a nice primary wingfeather so that I can restart my quest for a unicorn.

The wood of the Otherworld is as silent and lonely as the wood of the real world.

Crosslegged I sit in the center of the glade, waiting for something to happen.

Life is worthless. It has no use. Everyone is going to get killed in the war anyway. If I went back the Irish would kill me when they parade through. And until then, Mam would shut me up in a cupboard so I don't do anything else crazy. It'd be just like the story Hazel told me. The gel shut up in the tower, and she threw herself out the window, and that's where the story really starts.

I wait. Minutes pass, then an hour, then more than an hour. The Otherworld is not any better than ours, it just looks different, and what's that worth? You can travel all over the world, and it'll look different, and people will be just as beastly, and you'll still be the same worthless person. I'm sure even Virginia is full of rotten men. For all its tomatoes and peppers and squash and corn, it's still infested with humans.

Standing, I walk to the edge of the sea. What does it mean, to die in the Otherworld? Where would I go? Is there a second Otherworld for dead eeshi and me?

The sea is shallow, and the cliff by the church was not so high that you could throw yourself off and be sure to die. I'd need to travel some way to find a cliff that'd kill me. There's cliffs along the west coast, but that's a hundred leagues hence.

But I am me. I'm made for going up, not over.

My legs clutch the trunk of the tallest tree, and I glide up and up like it was nothing, and the tree bends like a forefinger and I am a cliff's height above the water. The water of the sealoch is a year's fall below, and shallow, with stones. They will kill me if I land on them.

For a brief moment, it will feel like I'm flying.

Waiting, I think to myself that Hazel needs to come save me from what I'm about to do. Or a little man making shoes that have magical powers might do it. Or a unicorn. But the unicorn didn't save Deirdre. It let her die. Maybe it didn't even know she existed.

I realize I did this. When I killed Saint Glimmer I did this. He was working so hard for me. Along with my sister. I killed him. In my way I killed her, too.

Now I can make amends. I will join them, and punish myself by doing so. Mam and Da will finally be rid of me. I can never be good enough to give them pride. Never. Hazel said, and she should know. I can't even give _her_ any pride.

There's no hurry, though. The sea is pleasant, and I can watch it, so my last memories can be pleasant, too.

I wait, and I think over my life. It comes back in a rush. Scenes.

Mam got me a pet bird once. It had fallen out of the nest. Brown wings, feathers just beginning, bright red mouth and wide yellow beak always open. We put it in a cup and set it on my bedstead. Took hours to get a bed ready for it, ready for a long life of convalescence, infancy to adolescence till it learns to fly, and flies away. The bed had Amerigan cotton and bits of ripped-up cloth, very comfortable, and I lifted it from the cup and set it to bed, watching its crazy beak stretch wide to receive worms. I lit a candle, not too close, for warmth and for light. And I fed it porridge in little handfuls. Then I went to bed, listening to the chirping of my new best friend, someone who would love me unconditionally. The next day it was dead, covered with diarrhea.

When I was eight I learned to do handstands. I'd walk all over the house on my hands. I could even pick up things with my feet, more or less, if it was lightweight. But I was dissatisfied with this, and I decided I wanted to learn to pick up with my feet anything I could with my hands. I'd be Upside-Down Boy. Brilliantly clever. The thing I chose to pick up was the boiling kettle. Honestly I could only just lift it with my hands, and it wasn't even a very large one. I got my toe under the wooden handle, poured scalding water down my back, with my belly hanging out because my undershirt had dropped around my underarms, and my arms gave out and I dropped the wrong way and my shoulder cracked the tendons and popped out. Mam called for Starnlowe, and I was literally motionless, scared to right myself from upside-down, for more than two hours while she finished what she was doing elsewhere and came to the house. A quick slap and my shoulder was back in; I could have done it myself. Then she splinted my whole arm to my body and rubbed ointment on the bubbling burn and scolded me good-naturedly and I had the splint on for a month before my cords were safe to release from the splint.

And then my sister.

We had separate rooms--my parents always planned for many kids, and there were five slim rooms in a row on our side of the house, Da built it that way. But there were only two of us, and Mam never had more kids. There were problems with Emma's birth, that's what Starnlowe said. So it was me and Emma. She loved creeping into my room to see what I was doing, but I was never doing anything interesting. Mostly I'd be sitting and thinking--honestly, it's what I do, it's all I do--and she'd ask what I was doing, and I'd say nothing. And she'd be disappointed every time. And she'd ask why was I doing nothing? And I'd say there was nothing I liked to do. And that disappointed her more.

I was twelve when she got sick. Chuff and Boad and I were playing at ball--I was mainly catching, while they swung--and Da came racing over the green, between the neats and the sheep, I still remember where they stood, the sheep making sheep noises and the neats elderly and placid, chewing cud mercilessly, one white with a dusting of brown spots, one solid brown with blonde hair, I don't remember the others--and Da sweeps in and picks me up under the arm without speaking and Chuff makes a goat sound after me, as if I were a daddy's boy instead of a helpless victim of circumstance. I never played ball with Chuff after that, it just didn't wind up happening. When we reached home Da set me on the threshold and set a hand on my shoulder and I was angry he interrupted the game and he told me to go in to say goodbye to my sister. It was the fever you don't come back from, he told me. And it was.

Her death was quick. It was in her sleep, a fever so hot that washcloths dried out before they could cool her. The summer was roasting, even the wellwater came up warm, and there was no way to cool the water down. To cool her down. Her brain cooked.

It was my fault. For not being cold enough.

Leaning. Leaning over the sea. Looking. Looking down at the shallow water below.

I brace one foot on the trunk. I want it to be quick. I want to fly. Then we'll see whether Dacy Jack or Hazel had it right. About what happens.

I look behind me. No one has come to save me.

Pushing off.

For just a moment, I fly.

**Part V**

I wake up underwater.

It's been hours. My lungs are full of water and I can't open my eyes. Yes I can, it hurts from the blacked bruises from Hazel, but it makes no difference really, it's dark as the inside of a body down here. Nighttime. There are fish in my nose, eating.

Am I dead? Do you just stay put after death? Are graveyards full of waiting souls? Do they have to dig their way out through coffin and dirt in order to reach the Otherworld?

One thing's for sure: I didn't get lighter than air and fly to the God-in-heaven. I have weight and I'm still inside my clothes.

My body isn't broken. Not really.

Walking is hopeless, I can't see the shore, I've drifted. My hands can't reach the surface; I can't tell how deep I am. Shooing the fish away, I consider what to do. Swimming upward seems wise, but I find that my entire body is waterlogged and won't respond. I can barely swing my arms and legs. And the weight on me is profound.

Screaming just forces water out of my lungs, but they fill up again.

Thrashing barely moves water.

There's nothing I can do to escape.

So I sit on the seabottom, shoo fish away, and wait for someone to find me.

And I remember: I've traded my death for the opportunity to save everyone and stop the war and find a unicorn.

How that could happen down here, buried underwater in a sealoch next to absolutely no one, furlongs from Rostrevor and in a place no fishermen trawl, I don't know.

Hazel and Bonnie didn't trust the fox. Maybe the fox lied. Maybe this is my grave and I will spend every hour of eternity feeling the crushing weight, being nibbled by fish until I lose the will to swat them away. And what becomes of me when all my flesh is eaten away? Will I still control my bones? Or will they sink while the rest of me floats? Will I finally be able to fly to the God-in-heaven, or is He lost to me forever? Or will I walk Earth as a ghost, able to change nothing, fit only to observe as the war destroys Calumny?

After hours more, I begin walking. There isn't anything else to do. Eels and strange fishes brush my body like affectionate cats, as if I were a piling or a coral reef.

The moon will not come out. It refuses. The way is lost before me. It's all dark.

My woman's shoes are gone, and my feet are cut on barnacles and tiny mussels. I cannot notice. I can only walk.

I walk for leagues in whatever direction I am facing. Maybe it's out toward the sea, and I'll drop into a crevasse you can't come back from.

Then I hear it.

A voice like dust upon a baby's brow, like dancing moths, like stars that have given up.

The sound carries better through water than I could have imagined it through air, clear as high philosophy and far more mournful.

Singing.

A creature not human, for humans cannot sing underwater. Another eeshi, I imagine. Drawing closer, I see a white light within gossamer raiment, delicate cloth drifting with the tide. I expect it to be a fish, but it's a woman.

Pushing my body hard onward, in case she should swim away, I try to make myself as visible as I can. I'm far more worried about not being noticed than I am about scaring her away.

She notices.

The white light vanishes, and there is a blur of brown and now I am being catapulted by a heavy shape knocking me in the back and I tip sidewards and I am ascending the waters with great speed and burst through the surface and the heavy thing jolts me violently forward and water begins squeezing out from every orifice in my body, my nose most of all, it shoots a pair of squirts from my nostrils and my lungs cough like bellows and they just don't stop and I'm midair now and I've lost my bonnet and cannot now exchange it for a nice feather and with a gravelly thump I hit the land and it's a small rocky beach and I'm on the softest part of it and I lay forward on the rocks and something large and intimidating lurches up beside me.

It takes fifteen minutes of snotting and wheezing with tremendous violence to eliminate the water from my lungs. Then puking, to get the water out of my stomach. Other things too. Only then can I open my eyes, my body in consummate pain, my sinuses stinging from the salt and from my innards being wrenched so.

I see the woman.

Tiny as a ten-year-old, glowing with inner light, with legs and arms exposed indecently in a sodden pure-colored garment, the very kind I need for the unicorn, she stands and cups my chin and examines me with elfin eyes.

"I need--" _cough_ "a white dress like yours. Will you exchange it?" I manage.

"There is talk of you," she says. "You've taken a bonshi from us."

Everywhere I go, they know. They plunge my shame deeper down my throat. I can't get away from it.

I can't even kill myself right.

"If you know, then why save me?" I ask. "Why not let me rot away forever?"

The voice is a piccolo: "A shi does not give herself gone for less than a mighty cause," she says.

"Does not--what do you mean, give herself?" I ask. "I dropped her. She fell onto non-consecrated ground. It was my fault."

"A shi does not fall," the woman says.

"Are you saying--" and my mind is circling like moons spun around suns, "that she did it on purpose?"

"A shi only acts to purpose," she says, scolding as a teacher.

"But she could have come with me to this place," I say. "Why would she commit suicide? We were already partway there."

"A shi does not share her intentions."

No, I suppose they don't. Hazel didn't.

"Thank you for saving me," I say.

"You've been given gifts," she says, slipping down the rocks toward the ebbing waterline without offering her garment. "A poor thing it is, to waste a gift."

With that, she turns color and vanishes beneath the waves.

It's a matter of more than an hour to pull myself over the rocks and onto grass. I'm freezing. My body is not dying, but it isn't living, either. The red dress dries salty and crusted and clingy, and I have no shoes, and there is still no light, and it's at least an hour till dawn.

There is nothing to do except walk.

I know that Rostrevor is down the coast, and I walk toward it.

Stopping to pee miserably, I pull down my petticoats and discover the last news of the evening.

My willy is gone.

The fish nibbled it off.

And with that I pee all over my petticoats in an uncontrollable spray and pass out at the side of the road.

That is how I'm found when the Irish arrive.

΅

There are five of them. All men. Oddly enough, Hazel's the only proper Irishwoman I've ever met. I wonder whether all Irishwomen are hidden. Funny how your mind goes elsewhere when you're ashamed. A thin bearded man picks me up with my soiled petticoats around my ankles. Shame. You try to escape from thinking about what's happening. I am floating above, outside of myself where it all can't hurt me anymore. I accept what is. I'll need to lie to the Irish, though, so I think up a likely version of what happened.

"A small one, to be found with such drink in her," a man says in Irish, propping my head up on his hand and examining my blacked eyes with a thumb.

Yes, drink. That'll do.

"Looks English," says another. "And isn't it like them to let their children run wild?"

"She's for waking. Set her on her feet and leave her."

The man who said that gets slapped by the thin bearded man. "She's been bathing in the sea. Probably near-dead from cold." A heavy woollen mantle surrounds me, smelling of man, and I curl up inside of it almost involuntarily. They don't even know I'm a boy. Or was. If ever I was one.

"Speak thee?" a redhead says in English. My petticoats have been tucked up under my dress now, but I didn't do it. There are hands all over me.

"Please, sir," I say in broken Irish, and my voice is high, soprano, a gel's. It's the same as it was at the Abbey.

What's happened?

"My dear aunt and I shared a bottle a-night, and I woke here. Have you seen a Pavee in a black cart? We had just passed Rostrevor."

"She's no Pavee," sniffs the man who was slapped. "Fair little liar." He gets another one, and snarls.

"Rostrevor's twenty miles hence," he says. "You've come a long way a-night."

"That's impossible. Twenty miles is two days' ride. And we stopped together to look over the sea," I say, still astonished at my changed voice.

"The rocks can be treacherous," is said to me.

Thumbs examine my blacked eyes and battered face.

Acting well enough for one of Shakspere's players, I draw my dress to either side and gawp at its salt-starched stiffness. "I must have fallen in. And I have bruises. But why'd she drive on? Abandoned me on the road without a farthing?"

"Curious, the ways we take when the bottle reaches us," the redhead says solemnly. "You're far from shelter, missus, and I think it would be well if we keep you company. You may be Pavee or you may not, but not all who travel such a road are apt to treat a wee thing with the courtesy she deserves."

He holds out his hands.

And I think of the Catholic priest who told soldiers it isn't a sin to mistreat a gel. And I think of the English Catholics who stole kisses, and clearly wanted to steal more than that. And I wish I'd have had a man's arms and legs that are such cudgels that one need carry no other defense. I've always been one who can be struck without much cost to the one doing the beating. I can't even kick. I can run, but not in bare feet on stony path, and I know too well that Irish grass hides sharp bracken that can rend your foot in a second.

Will these men rape me?

I can't stop him if they would.

I put my hands out to the redhead, and he lifts me about the waist and sets me on his shoulders, my crusted dress bunching and my legs out to the open, hanging down his chest. The great mantle hangs down either side, but even with its weight, he hardly notices me.

Steadying me with a hand on my exposed ankles, he and the Irishmen begin down the road.

They converse wittily in Irish on the subject of Pavees who leave their daughters behind, and on the subject of lunch, and on the subject of war. They talk about a man called Tyrone, and a man called The O'Neill, and a man called The O'Donnell. I gather that this band is from none of those clans. There is talk of a call to arms against the English crown, and that sounds a lot like what the two men on the frigid heath were talking about, and what Mormaer Caimbeul was about. And I wonder whether I can still do some good in the world. And I decide I am an innocent child who eavesdrops, this is a fair decent character for me to play. And I interrupt.

"My aunt says there's talk in the North of a traitor," I say.

The men stop walking. All eyes on me.

"I've heard no such thing," says the thin one with the black beard.

"They've asked for tight lip," Redbeard replies. "If the Covenant English learn of it, a great many plans will be sundered."

"Plans to kill the English?" I ask.

"I've not met an Englishman didn't deserve it," growls the man who gets slapped upside the head. He gets another.

"The miss strikes me as English herself," Blackbeard says.

"My father was. He lived in the Pale," I lie.

"Were you going to see him, then?" Blackbeard asks.

"I've never met him," I say. "Mam says he's no better than he should have been. Auntie says Mam was no better than she should have been, either."

The men chuckle.

"Yes, missy, there's talk of a fight. The time is right and England can't afford to fight us at the same time they're fighting the rest of Europe. We've a chance to drive them out and have Ireland for the Irish once again."

And I ask: "What's so bad about having English in Ireland?"

And Redbeard says: "Does the name Mountjoy mean anything to you?"

"You can't tell her the story," says Blackbeard. "It'd break her poor heart."

"There's to be a war against her father's people," another man says, "and she ought to know why we fight it."

"Tell her, then," growls Slappy.

"Was not so long ago," Redbeard begins. We are walking again, and I feel his collarbone beneath my thighs, and I feel the mantle swaying in seabreeze. The scent of urine lingers on me. "I was a boy, then. There was a war, and it was a war at a time when all the other wars were over, and it was only us against the Crown. The shield of Spain was shattered, Holland was acquiescent, and no one drew swords but England and we. So it was a poor time to start a war. England wanted to tame Ireland, to make us their boys, as if we were children. So we fought.

"It was a man named Hugh Mór, Chieftain of the O'Neills, who finally called everyone together. Through the influence of his mother, the Dark Lady, he united the clans and became Prince in Ireland. His armies began to rout the English, and it looked like we'd finally rule our own country.

"But their foul queen, Elizabeth, found the cruelest man she could find, as blind in his hatred for fellow-man as Satan's own spurs, and sent him to us to fight anew. Again, had we waited until the Spanish or the Dutch were to-war again, the English might not have had the treasure to afford to pay a new army. But we were hasty.

"The man Elizabeth sent was Mountjoy. And while we had fought with the English many times before, and found them meet and fair in their warring, Mountjoy was built of ancienter material. For instead of killing with sword or gun, Mountjoy killed with fire and famine. When Mountjoy found a cow, he killed it and burnt its corpse till it was char. When he came to a field of corn, he burnt it and washed the field away so that we couldn't use the ash to fertilize next season. And he sailed round and round our island and sank the boats of fishermen till there was no way to gain food from the sea. For a man may fish from the shore only so many times before there is nothing left.

"And as Mountjoy passed across the face of our land, the land grew blighted, and only crooked bracken and sickening grasses remained. And sure and didn't we boil those still to make a thin broth, and feed that to our children? And can't I still taste of the bracken broth, drawing what meager sustenance my mam and da could bring? The taste is yet in my mouth, and always will be. And when Mountjoy found we were turning to grass and herb for repast, he burnt the grass until the sky was choked with smoke. And we shot the birds of trees, and skinned them for a taste of meat, and Mountjoy saw this, and had his men kill birds, while they themselves supped from supply wagons sailed across the sea. And we fished from the loch, and they poisoned the loch. And when he found a dog or a cat, he burnt it, so we could not, in our desperation, eat our own ones-of-the-family.

"And it was that in the end, the lowest men of Ulster ate each other. Children would bury their parents, and if you looked inside the coffin, you'd find only bones, for the parents had--"

But Redbeard ceases. I cannot see his face from where I sit, but the men around us bow their heads.

"Did you--" I say.

"You cannot ask this question," Redbeard says up to me from between my legs. "Nor can you ask how it is I survived those years. This you cannot ask.

"But if you should ask whether it's an immoral thing to pay out war against the English, I say to you it is never wrong to kill an Englishman. In their urge to dominate all life, the English will murder anyone who opposes them. For the fighters of both sides will live, the warriors will live, and it's the women and the children will perish, with ribs like wicker baskets. And that's the way it was, and the way it will be. No, I've never stayed my hand for an Englishman, though I've fought side by side with Scots without qualm."

"What makes them different?" I ask.

Blackbeard answers: "Underneath our sinful bodies, Celtic souls tend love. Love is Catholic," he says. "Underneath the English gentility is a hate."

"My father was an English Catholic," I say, even though it isn't true.

Nobody has a useful answer to that.

We traverse ten miles at a steady pace, passing nobody. While the Pale crosses through Rostrevor to the West, it has not so well-defined an Eastern boundary. The sun sinks. With a sudden twist Slappy takes a musket from where it hangs from his shoulder and looses a shot. A stag screams and bolts, bleeding and scrabbling. Redbeard waits as Slappy skids through the brush; the stag is dragged back forthwith, and, after checking the lane a furlong ahead and behind, the men gather and light a fire upon the heath.

Slappy begins by slitting the stag's throat and gathering the blood in a waterskin, for blood pudding. Once the stag has died, they slit the belly, moving the knife carefully, so as not to pierce the inner lining of its viscera. Deftly the men take the still-bleeding hide off and tie it tightly in a certain way. Carefully they tug open a hole in the knotted-together deerskin, untie their breeches, and pee inside it, to cure it. If they were in town, I imagine they'd use lime. Next they hold up the skinned body and cut the peritoneum, allowing the guts out onto the grass. They reserve the liver and kidneys and discard the rest. Taking stiff branches, they prepare a simple hood to smoke the greater portion of the meat, spits to cook up the liver and kidneys to eat right away, and cut open a mighty rump for boiling. After preparing the bulk of the meat to smoke for the night, they discard a sinewy white shape with attached skeleton and settle in for more good talk.

The meat boils merrily, and will boil for an hour more before eating. What's especially strange is that, despite all the salt water that had been flowing through my stomach, assuming it even happened, I'm hungry as I've ever been. Hungrier than a man who's lost blood. The men chop up the offal and share it, but don't offer me any. Offal is considered hearty, and a delicate gel like me wouldn't want any. But I do. But I wouldn't ask for any, it isn't done. I stay quiet, waiting for the roast to finish. I am a gel.

"Brion, a tale," says Redbeard.

There are two men who have not spoken at much length yet. I take a closer look at the one called Brion. His beard is light brown and curly and has a tuft at the chin. His eyes are deeperset and tired, not from walking but from the world. There is a fleur-de-lys holding his cloak shut, the brooch old enough that it probably was passed down by Norman settlers from long ago. His hands are small and he keeps them in fists. He sits too close to the fire, you wonder he doesn't get burned or cough from smoke. He lights a small brown clay pipe with a simple peasant face carved on it, but never lifts it to his lips, and the tobacco slowly burns away and goes out. I think he just likes to have something to hold.

"For that we have entered Ulaid, and make our way herein, well we should speak of the queen of Ard Macha, who this land tends. Macha came unto the land of the Ultons from the south, and she told no one who was she or why she had come. It was a secret, back then, that all of her people possessed uncommon talents; she was known for crossing the country at a run so swift that not even a horse at gallop could match her stride, for this was her delight. Upon her journeys through the country, she met a man, no more than a farmer, though with a fair visage and admiration for her keen skill of swiftness. The farmer didn't know she was more than a woman. His name was Crunch, and she told him her name was Macha, and it was.

"It passed that the King of Ulaid, Cruar, called a great fair at which mighty deeds would be demonstrated--feats of strength, and mock battles, and races. Excitement was all through the kingdom, and Crunch asked his wife would she go with him to see the fair? But by then her belly was full of baby, and she told him he could go alone, while she reclined at home. There was only one thing she asked of him, and that was to make no mention of her, for that was her wish.

"But it's a fine tongue indeed that won't set to wag after a few mugs. Crunch was no finer a man than any, and as he sat and watched the mighty deeds from the safety of the beer tent, he felt a surge of husbandly pride and wanted to speak of the extraordinary knack his wife had for running. It happened that the king himself, Cruar, was the sort of man who'd rather come down to sup with the men, than have his meal brought to a private room of finery. The king was in his cups beside the farmer, and the king waxed with admiration on the subject of horses, and that his own could not be outrun by anyone or anything in all Ireland, and that a man would need thousand-league boots to meet their stride.

"Well. Crunch, being both a man of competition and a husband proud of his wife, could not but mention the woman's unusual grace in the leg, and her unworldly way of running faster than could be matched by the eye. Intrigued, the king asked who was this woman, and Crunch obeyed Macha in word if not spirit, and would say only it was his wife, and that she could outrun the king's horses.

"Incensed, the king slapped his mug upon the bar and demanded that Crunch's wife be brought, so that this brag might be tested. Crunch, aware now he'd spoken from the shoulder, asked that the king wait until he might apologize to her, for he'd not meant to put upon her so. Only the king was roaring and raging a-bottle, and itching to see a great sight, and the king's men went to Crunch's house and brought Macha to the king.

"And the king demanded she run for him, and she showed him her distended womb and said it would mean death for the baby. But Cruar was a hard man and roared that he would see the race at once. And Crunch pleaded that the race be postponed till the birth, but the king sent him home and set Macha before horses and said if she would not run, then she would be trampled."

And I've fallen asleep before the roast, and the story, has finished.

There's smoked venison in the morning, and Redbeard doesn't mind when I eat sitting on his shoulders. It tastes, somehow, like burnt currant pudding. It's a silent morning of packing and then we're off again.

It seems far, but in reality Ireland is not vast. You could walk from Derry to Wexford in a week, if you hurried.

I ask Brion how the story ended, and Redbeard sets me down beside him and Brion kneels and tells me it's a sad ending, and he won't repeat it, but that Macha placed a curse upon the people of Ulster, that as long as there were Irish in Ulster, there would be a cost to all that was done by the Irish, and that the Irish would always fail at the end, hard though they strive.

Then Redbeard picks me up again and we set off.

Around the east horn of Ireland the track proper gives out, but the sea isn't too far, and the men navigate north along it. Much of the grass is still dead from the hard winter. From here Blackbeard says it would only be a few miles to Bangor.

Before Bangor, though, we turn off toward inland and make our way over field and farm to a settlement of twelve or so stone houses gathered around a Catholic church. It's some ways from Calumny, four days' walk or three days' ride, and the English undertakers haven't planted settlers this far south. Isolated. No roads. No signs. I'd be surprised if an Englishman had ever been this way before. There's only Irish here.

The thing you notice, though, is that most of the people don't seem to live in the square stone houses. There are at least five hundred people living in constructed shelters not dissimilar to the Catholic camp. Neats by the hundred moo and meander, largely untended and without brand nor mark. Most are calves still, and many are yearlings. The natives of this land are known to slaughter cattle by the hundredhead every winter. They eat beef for every meal, all year round. It's how Phelim's father still does it, even though the O'Haras have a barn. Phelim says it's to strengthen the herd, but I don't see how killing the herd every year strengthens it.

Also there's no fields of grain. Grasses grow thick and wild, full of abstruse native herbs and women picking them in thick armfuls and carrying them in wicker baskets. They're picking herbs I've trod in the dirt daily without noticing them. Who knew you could eat them? Or are they for medicine?

"A genteel company has arrived!" a voice calls in Irish. A bull man with a neck like a sweaty pig's approaches from the cluster of cowhide tents, bringing a jug with him.

"The O'Carolans, my friend, answering the muster," Blackbeard says, putting on a bit of a mannish air.

"Good! The O'Neill will want to speak with you." He spies me. "And who's this?"

"Abandoned on the roadside. Give her to the women," says Slappy.

"But bring her in for vespers, I'd have her hear another story," says the man Brion.

And I am given to a clot-haired gran bearing a big smile, and the men depart for a tent.

΅

In my mind I still desire to do as Hazel said. I'd like to stop the war. Not for Calumny, not for Hazel, but because in my mind I will see my sister in the heaven someday, and I desire to tell her that I've had worth in this world, that I've done something. Then I remember I've given my death away to the Otherworld and I'll never leave this world for heaven.

I still want my sister to look down and think well of me.

The woman is called Carol, and she doesn't notice I can hardly understand her. Nothing, it seems, could bring her more delight than to have a child on her knee. First she dresses me, gasping at my soiled petticoats and paying not the least mind to my shame as she pulls them off and takes a washtowel and slippery soap and a kettle of water and bathes me. I wait for her to notice that I'm not a gel, that I'm a boy whose willy has been eaten by fish, but she soaps and lathers every part of me without expressing surprise at what's between my legs. And I wonder: is this what gels have always got between their legs? At the Abbey, it was only an illusion, but now, I'm becoming certain it's not. Perhaps it wasn't bitten off. Perhaps it's spiritual.

A small muslin dress of ridiculous yellow is found, it's indecently short but no one minds, plus new petticoats and stockings and bonnet. She's leading me to a pile of wool and a carder's comb beside a smoky unvented fire when the shouts are heard.

The words are: "Hear this! Hear this!"

Much like Sister Mary returning from Knockfergus, there is an uncourteous urgency to the tone. Hoofbeats storm toward the village.

Carol doesn't object when I run to the window, then the door. I want to hear this.

The O'Carolans and the bullnecked greeter are followed by over a hundred Irishmen, most tall and bearded, except the women.

"I am David Malone," the rider announces in a thick accent, very different from Phelim O'Hara's Northern Irish. "I ride from Waterford, for the earl has called for the word to be spread. The English have drawn and quartered fifty men and ten women for demanding the king's graces on land they already own. This land has been seized by force, and more men are being butchered, having raised no hand against England." The man dismounts neatly and takes Redbeard's hand in two of his. "The savagery," he says, "is beyond imagining."

Redbeard licks his lips and grimaces. "My imagining of English savagery is deeper than you think. The O'Neill will want to hear it--"

"I'm here!" a man from the crowd roars. Since I'm a gel, I'm expected to venture no farther than the doorway, although I desire to get closer. Carol draws close behind me and puts an arm across my collarline.

The man pushing through the still-growing assembly is dressed not in a leeny but in a red velvet tunic and old-fashioned breeches and hose of fine cloth. On his head is a hat with an ostrich feather. I don't think I've ever met a lord before.

"What will the earl have of the O'Neills and kin?" the lord O'Neill asks.

Malone dismounts and sweeps off his hat and kneels once, then rises. "No request is given, for there is no recourse to be found by courts or by audience. It is only given me to share the information."

"Your meaning is understood, friend." The O'Neill turns to the crowd and spreads his arms, a great embrace. "See what has happened. The English deny us Irish law, and now they deny us English law as well. They may best us in battle," he crows, "they may starve our wives and children. We may submit to their ownership, for a time. But the Reformist heart will settle for nothing less than the absolute enslavement of our society. Each time we give in to their indignities they concoct new ones. Each time we relinquish one of our customs they ask for two more. Ever does the English heart yearn to twist the world to its ways. They will cease never, until we bend at the knee each time they pass, until we pour our gold into their heretic coffers, until all trace of our tongue is forgotten and every man on Earth speaks their soulless German language. And they lecture us that our ways are less than theirs, and then they commit bald murder and claim that their crown stands for right. I say there is no right in England. I say there is no justice in English rule. And I say we take back this land for the people who know it. For the people who love it."

The murmur of appreciation is passionate and hearty.

"I will gladly suffer a thousand years of Mountjoy's starvations if I may live as a man in my own country!" the O'Neill adds.

A roar from the crowd. The woman Carol holds me close and tells me there's no need to fear, in the special tone adults reserve for their deepest lies. I see two of the O'Carolans, Blackbeard and Redbeard, approaching. Of the men, they alone do not cheer.

"Friend," says Blackbeard to the messenger, "you are welcome, though your news be dire." He turns to the O'Neill. "The rebel ways of auld will not avail us anything of worth. For though we degrade the English armies, it is as you have said--they will not cease in their efforts to enslave us. They will never cease. The ways of aggression and warfare pay only death, to us and to our families."

The O'Neill ponders this, then speaks: "Fodell O'Carolan," he begins. Blackbeard's name. "You have been a friend of my family for many years."

"One hundred forty years have our families been kin, since our great-great-grandparents married," replies Fodell.

"You cannot ask me to stand and do nothing in the face of tyranny," the O'Neill says.

"Offer us a plan worthy of our dedication. Worthy of our blades and muskets. For we will not see Mountjoy's kind return."

The men follow each other into one of the few stone houses to talk, and Carol turns me away, back to the knitting.

"Men's ways are hard ways," Carol says. "Know ye aught of yarn? Most lasses would have taken up the needles ere they set down, and had at."

"My aunt's a Pavee. She works at copper." That's a famous occupation for the Travelers. "I'm yet to tap a pan myself, but she says I'll make a fine little smith. If I ever see her again," I say, adding tragedy to my voice.

"How came you to be abandoned?" she asks, beginning to unroll a skein.

"The bottle," I reply.

We talk somewhat, and I have bad enough Irish that she's convinced I'm a Traveler. She teaches me the essence of knitting, but my fingers are clumsy and the loops keep coming undone. She is patient, and adjusts my hands, and I have no bad things to say of her.

As the evening wears on, and the darkness begins to stream through the window of the sitting room, a drink of boiled milk and herbs is passed around by a boy who smiles at me. The drink tastes exactly of the wild rushes I used to suck on when I was small. Reassuring to know that plant wasn't poisonous. I imagine Dacy Jack would be pleased.

"Mum," I say to Carol, "there was an English village my mam and I used to visit. Da's brother lived there. They were different, but they were kind and sensible and I wouldn't like to think the men will go to war there."

"Not our place to decide where the men go, luv."

I've produced about eight inches of cloth.

"Can't we speak to them? Tell them not to fight so?" I ask.

"Dove, when men find ire in their hearts, they go to war on one or another. If they don't go to war on the English, they'll war on us, instead. Remember that."

"What do you mean, war on us?"

"Have you never had a man angry at you?" she asks.

I don't respond, and she says no more.

Brion raps on the door and peeks within. "Would you hear another story, Miss? I'll make it a fine one."

Carol sets aside her knitting and sends me off to hear a story.

"The war, far back when," begins Brion, seating himself outdoors on a halved log bench before a smoking flame in night-dark and visited upon by five hundred Irishmen and I, "began with a pair of swineherds, if you'd believe it. Fergus of the house of Yokade kept a capable herdsman with a capable herd. The lad's name was Gristle. And when there was mast in the north, Fergus would send Gristle to forage the pigs there. And when the mast was in the south, Gristle would return to Fergus' land in Tara. And the king in the north, who was Cruar, would send along his own pigman named Brunt to forage in the same spot. Now it happened that these two boys both owned druid rods, and a'winter they'd change their shape and travel with the herds as stags, or as hawks, or as sea creatures, if the herd was near the river. At first, they were great friends, for they shared the fruits of the forest and the clear water of the river, and they'd play at assuming complementary shapes. They never quarreled. Then a time was, it came that the best mast was to be found in Tara, beside the halls of Yokade, and this is how they fell out.

"For Clotra, the daughter of Yokade, was very handsome, and bore a knack for wicked play. A princess like her would surely never marry a swineherd, you understand, but she delighted in coming out to watch them and tease them, for her father had no worry that a swineherd would dare insult a princess. Thus she would wear promising gowns and strut before the two, speaking toying words, or ask for daring deeds she knew they would not refuse, to see who was more eager to hurry at her voice. How did the herders come to blows? Not hard to say. Clotra came to them upon a morning and said she wondered which of them had the greater pagan powers? Brunt made clear he could ape any creature in appearance. Gristle said he could do this too, and also that he could transform other creatures. Brunt said he could do it too, and the lass watched with a cruel smile as the two boys declared power after power they could perform.

" 'Show me,' she said at last. 'Could you not make each other's pigs smaller? Would this not be a fine show of your power over the other?'

"And it was done quickly, and the pigs whom these lads were meant to watch grew sleek and thin and bony and short and finally, after much arguing and cursing and waving of rods, vanished altogether.

"Satisfied with her wicked performance, Clotra skipped back to the house of her father.

"When the two swineherds discovered they could not transform empty space back to the pigs they had been--for, if they could make fat pigs from nothing, there'd be no need to be a swineherd at all--they returned emptyhanded to their masters, one in Tara and one at Ulaid at the place called Emain Macha, and knelt before their respective kings and said that in their haste to prove their greater power they brought the herds to ruin. When asked who compelled them to act this way, they professed there was a gel nimble and dire in words, and of great beauty, though neither would speak the gel's name. And both of the swineherds were dismissed from the courts in shame."

It is now, halfway through the story, when I meet Lorcán.

At first he is not Lorcán. At first he is the Irish boy who brought me milk, very thin but not underfed, with black hair down his back like the tail of a wolverine. He looks not at all like Boad or Chuff or even Phelim O'Hara. He is different. He sits down next to me.

"Now auld Yokade was quick to his passions, but he was nobody's fool. It was that he watched his daughter's ways with men, and in his jealous wardenship he knew she was apt to try their love and loyalty. Thus when he and Fergus brought in Gristle and asked who was the lady who had drawn him to destroy the herd, Yokade took no time in deducing it was his own daughter. Now the herd was of middling importance to the survival of the clan, for there were neats aplenty and ewes besides. But Yokade had a strong taste for rashers and was wroth. He sought a way to teach his daughter not to deceive in love, nor to harass his men so. He had a druid at court and related the problem and asked for a way to do it."

Sitting up, the Irish boy who will become Lorcán offers me a hand. When I pretend not to notice his open palm, he lifts up my fingers and pushes his through mine, woven, and holds on.

"It happened that Cruar had a son famous for his mighty deeds, named Cormac. The boy was handsome and daring, just the sort whom Clotra would drive to Bethlam with her mad ways. It was thought that the body of Cormac should be imitated, to turn the tables. The druid told the king that only Gristle knew the way to make such a fine form for himself. The druid summoned Gristle and tapped him with a druid rod, so that he took the shape of the famous warrior Cormac. Then Yokade announced to his court that Cruar had sent his son to visit, and waited to see what would happen.

"Gristle had practice pretending to be something he was not; he could imitate the ways of an otter, or a kestrel, or a salmon, and it took him little time to manage the bravado of a vainglorious and rash fighting man. Soon he was inventing stories of mighty battles over mugs of ale and wrestling recklessly with the men.

"It took Clotra little time to notice. She flitted past him once, twice, but Gristle had learnt his lesson and refused to approach her. So it was that she went to him and spoke teases to him, daring him to this or to that, but the disguised swineherd brushed her aside as if she were a peasant aspiring after a king. For Gristle had realized her knack, and hated her for ruining his job and his life.

"In her fury, Clotra began to spread rumors across the court that the warrior Cormac had insulted her by force. After a week of gossip that led nowhere for her, the gel threw herself before her father and demanded he take Cormac's head for this injustice. Yokade laughed at her and told her that no warrior as great in battle as the son of Cruar would commit such an act, and that the word of a woman could not be believed.

"Clotra had surety in her will to get revenge, and slipped out of the manor and travelled north to Emain Macha to tell Cruar of the crimes she imagined of his son. The king gave her an audience, and she curtsied and told him she'd been taken by his son. The king turned grave and asked where was this, that his son should have raped Yokade's only daughter? For if it were true, he'd take his own son's head. And it was then that Clotra knew the terrible majesty of what she was doing. But it was not in her to turn from her pride, and she said it was at the court of her father. At this Cruar laughed and clapped and Cormac stepped from a room and said was it him she was accusing? She went white but said it was. And Cruar said Cormac had been injured in battle not two days before, and had been asleep those two days in the house of convalescence, and when had it happened? And she said it must be druid's magic. At this Cruar fell drawn once again and asked was it that a druid in the shape of Cormac insulted her person? And she said yes. Cruar called his druids and asked who could have done it? And they said it was either Gristle or Brunt. But Brunt had been away in exile and hadn't done it, while Gristle had been seen at the court of Yokade. So this is how the war began."

I look at the Irish boy whose hand was still in mine. "Of course it was the gel who started the war," I say in Irish. "You never hear stories about the gels who _don't_ cause trouble."

"That's because there aren't any," the boy says.

Brion is not far, and he's listening.

"Brion," I say, "what if Gristle really had insulted her, as revenge for losing him his job and his pride, only nobody saw?"

"If you told me Gristle had done it, I'd believe you," the storyteller says, "for it was in his rambunctious character to do it. Only the story isn't told this way."

"No, I wouldn't think so," I say.

"All lasses cause trouble till they become mums," says the boy who's holding my hand.

"And has no man caused trouble? Mountjoy wasn't a woman," I say.

"No, he was a monster. The one who found him and sent him to us was a woman," he replies. "Queen Elizabeth. That's why there're no Irish queens. Only kings."

"The Dark Lady--"

"She's a Scot by blood, and an invader. We'll have the Reformists and Common Prayer out of this land before long. You'll see. It'll be better when they're gone."

"You have a lot on your mind, for a boy. I'm called Aisling."

"Lorcán," he replies.

The O'Neill comes before the fire and thumps a cup on a bench for attention.

"The consideration is complete," he announces. "It is Dublin where the English hold is strongest. Thus it must be Dublin we retake, to wrench our lands back from those who have stolen them. I will lead a squad to Dublin Castle, and we will lift it from their hands. As for the rest of you--do what you think best. Someday Ulster will be free of all Protestants. Mark me."

I look into Lorcán's dark eyes. "Will you go with them to Dublin?" I ask.

"He's only taking experienced soldiers. I've not fought the English before. But I mean to. There's talk among the men of raiding the English plantations in the North. They've looted our wealth, so why not loot theirs?"

"They're not the ones who've done it," I say. "That was in the south, in Waterford. They're innocent up there."

"Whose side are you on? Look. It's just like a gel to defend everyone and plead for peace, but pleas won't bring the fifty men of Munster back. We've got to do something. We've got to have a just revenge."

"There isn't one," I say.

"If you're to be my gel you'll need to follow my word, regardless of your feelings about it," Lorcán says.

"I haven't said I'm your girl."

"You're mine, or do you want me to show you?" His thumb touches my bruises, and a strange look comes into his eye.

I think he means to hit me, and I think of Carol's word on men, and I shake my head.

"That's better. I'm going to go North and prove myself. You'll support me."

I look him in the eye and tell him I'm going with him. I say I'll not be his by his word, but mine, I've chosen him. I say I want to see if he's as brave as he declares himself to be. Really I want to stop him from hurting Calumny. The only thing I'm really worried about is seeing Hazel. I remember she wanted me to stop the war, and I remember she hates me forever and is the one who beat me about the face, and I wonder whether I'm really meant to stop anyone from doing anything. And I wonder whether I'm to marry Lorcán and live out my life as an Irish gel. I can manage the language, that isn't a problem.

I have no home. I have no place. I have no saint, although Angus has been there for me when I really needed him. I decide I have no sister, too, it's too much for me. I'm just a boy whose arms didn't turn out, although am I really? Have I been a gel since birth? I can never return to Mam and Da. They've changed my nappies when I was wee and wouldn't believe my willy's gone into the Otherworld forever. They'd think I cut it off, and they'd send me to Bethlam.

"Dress me like a boy," I say. "Don't tell Carol or the men. I'll volunteer beside you, quietly. They won't know."

A mischievous grin spreads on his face and he nods.

He kisses me before running off to bed.

΅

Carol makes a large bed up with great quilts and there are two other gels who've been cleaning the men's dishes while we were knitting. We undress to our petticoats and dress in nightdresses and I see much more of gels than I'd ever thought to. All four of us crawl into the same bed and find it in us to fall asleep.

The morning is grinding hot and summery beneath the clouds. The gels have names I don't remember, and I can't seem to find any words to say to them. Carol provides me a green dress, and I vanish outdoors in it before she can stop me.

The sun is up and the sky is blue and I imagine blood pouring from the sky and the dead walking the earth and realize I'm one of them. Dead. I truly am a ghost. I vanish from the Irish tribe and go speeding off into the middle place where the Devil cannot reach because the heaven draws too close and I need to pee and there is an outbuilding and I want a chance to examine the missing pieces between my legs.

The wood platform of the outhouse smells of pitch and timber and straw and piles and piles of shit, and while it is a clean place, it is not nice. It is not a nice place to examine what's between your legs, but where else can I take off all these petticoats and hose and stockings and the green dress? So midden is in my nose as I latch the door, undress, and begin.

First, there is a patch of hair. The hair is no different from the way it was before, straight and thick with odd miniature knots too small to have been tied by chance. I wonder whether nixies haven't been crossing the frontier from the Otherworld and tying knots in my pubic hair while I sleep. I part the hair to where my willy should be and there is an absence; something that used to be there is gone. I can't feel where it used to be, my feeling stops only a short way from the bone of my hip. There is a gap, and the inside is slick and rubbery, like your underarm when you've started sweating but haven't grown pit hair yet. There isn't enough light to see so far inside, and I wish I'd brought a candle, though I'd be scared to hold a candle too close. From farther away (I can make my vision zoom out from my eyes, as if I'm standing above myself) it looks like there's nothing there, that I'm a blank body with no parts at all. But I run a finger up it, and it sinks inside a crevice and feels very strange. I can wrap my finger around to my butt, and my finger is swallowed completely. It is not natural and I wonder whether this is myself and real. I pee, and it shoots into the smelly wooden circle from inside the strange gap. I wonder whether another fox could lead me back to the land and give me my willy back, and I wonder if I'd let them do it. What is this for? What does the God-in-heaven want from me?

I pat down my place and lick a drop from my finger and pull up my petticoats and such and I see a great red void filling the future before me, the lions and the elder things roaring at each other and tearing their flesh, and the world is taken apart by a number of terrific hands from the sky, and I look out at the archaic universe where all things meet and die and the landscape is changing, roiling, adapting. This is what I see. When I stand and approach the void, my hand closes on the outhouse door and I open it and two men are squirming in pee-concentration on the winter-dead spring grass and I curtsey and walk away.

Under the clouded sun, I go looking for Lorcán.

"The harvest was bad. The grain is low. If they come to starve us, there'll be little enough for us to live on." This is what Fodell O'Carolan, Blackbeard, is saying.

"I've no mind to be starved. The English have it just as bad. These northern colonies have money from the crown and from silverwork, but they have no cattle and no mutton and neither have the English in England. Horses aren't foaling, so their cavalry will be diminished. Animals know, they have senses. This next year we may recover our sustenance, but the English haven't got the money to--"

"After these years of peace, are we certain there's no other way than war? With a hand of luck, you may take a few forts without firing a shot, but will the English never desire revenge for them?" says Fodell.

Lorcán has his knees up, sitting on the grass. I sit beside him, not indelicately close, I know lads and gels are to mingle chastely in Irish company.

"I've sent for my comrade Maguire from the west. He was a tactician in the war, he'll know. After all, if all we're asking for is the graces of lordship, and we've killed no man--"

"Ifs," says Fodell. "Ifs."

Lorcán's eyes meet mine and he rises without losing eye contact. A subtle nod to the fields away. I follow him.

The grasses here are unplowed, with winter's yellow cut by summer green. Small wildflowers are just budding, and the smell is the smell of waking. Somehow the colors seem brighter now than when I wasn't a gel. I see the world as if it had been in the black and white of dry dreams until today. I don't believe I'm in love with Lorcán, but it may be that there is love in the merest of being a woman.

"I've said to the earl I mean to fight," he begins.

"Have you?" I say.

A ghoul crosses his eyes and he says, "You aren't Irish. Your words bear English demeanor."

"Old English, though," I insist, maintaining the lie.

"Then say the Lord's Prayer, can't you? Not hard for one raised Catholic."

"I don't want to."

"Can't, you mean. Because you don't know it. If I dress you like a boy, will you fight the settlers? Will you shoot at them?"

"I don't want to shoot at anyone. I just want to come with you."

"If you're lying and meandering to me, and you're really a Protestant, I'll be the harsher with you, though I won't hate you. And you'll be needing punishing, for deceiving your man."

"What would you do to me? Put me over your knee?"

Lorcán ponders this.

"It would need to begin with a daily switching. Somewhere no one could see. Next--after we're married, of course--I should like to hobble you when you're tending to my food, so that you'd not be able to run off and pray at heretical gods. And you'd wear a ring in your nose like an animal, for that's what Reformists are."

I moo, and I butt his shoulder with my head as an ox would do.

He laughs and puts his arm around me. I wonder whether he truly would hate me if I were an English colonist who speaks a little Irish. Touching my chin, he draws me to him and kisses me on the lips. I let him press his mouth against mine and it feels fine to me.

"I'll not see you with another man," says Lorcán. "I'd kill him, though you'd hate me to do it."

"I've no one else," I say. "I'd just as soon marry you."

"Are you Reformist truly?" he asks.

"Ask me again someday."

He kisses me again. His breath is hot and smells like no breath of an Englishman. Nothing like my breath.

"When will the war be? Are we leaving soon?" I ask.

"Oh aye!" he exclaims. "They're sending a contingent north, secretly, to await orders from the lords. We'll leave just after Baron Maguire comes. You'll come with me. Don't worry, I'll arrange it."

And we hurry back before we are missed.

΅

Two weeks pass. In my foresight I make a passable scarf for Lorcán for the upcoming summer, because I have more enthusiasm than sense. He has worn it daily since.

And Connor Maguire and a contingent of woodkerns and ten armored gallowglass on horseback arrive, bannerless but imposing, and the earl and the baron take over Carol's house of gels as a command headquarters, and we quietly relocate to a tent.

Brion.

"A fair thing, to fall in love."

The man sits, his French Fitzgerald face lined and his beard curly and thin. The tuft is pared.

"Hello and God keep you, Brion," I say, pulling at my dress hem. I'm a natural at being a gel.

"An impetuous youth, fiery and inspired to war," he says. "A heart a musket-wound away from sundering."

I think about what to say to Brion's poetry.

"I wouldn't love him if he were a coward," I decide to say.

"Your heart must be ready to mourn him, then, for that is a natural risk of wargoing."

"If he should die, I will mourn him," I say. And: "I hardly know him, yet."

"Justice, that. Though a hard thing, to be away from the one in your heart."

I glance at Carol, vaguely aware that my absence here will go noticed.

"It's a woman's place to be prepared for her man in war."

"Young," chimes in Carol, "to say such things." She clucks and shakes her head.

"I'd say it speaks of wisdom," says Brion. "For are there not tales of men and saints returning home to find a barren hearth, or a too-full bedroom, or a woman whose mind has departed, leaving only Bethlam? This fiery blade of yours may be gone until winter. Will you withstand?"

"There is little left that can hurt me, Brion," I say. "You've heard some of my story."

He eyes Carol. "I'd hear the rest of it, if you'll tell me. Will you walk beside me, lass?"

I rise. Once we find a steady meadow out of earshot of the others, I permit myself to invent stories that will convince him. In all this time I've lost track of what I told in the beginning, so I take several moments to remember: A drunkard Pavee mother who abandoned me, a violent drunkard Pavee aunt I misplaced, an Old English father who exists far away from me.

"My father worked the river in Drogheda," I begin. This seems promising. "Only he left when I was wee. I remember his--"

"Enough of the shite," growls Brion abruptly. "You've not a drop of the land or its people anywhere in your blood. You're more English than I am. You can make yourself understood well enough in Gael, aye. But the words aren't in you. Are they?"

I don't have anything to say. I wonder, if I were to run, right now, how far I'd get before they tracked me down. I wonder whether I will be cut up before I'm hanged, or will they merely skewer me?

"They all know," says Brion quietly.

"Lorcán doesn't. He doesn't suspect." It's a lie, first. And now I have admitted myself.

"I'm not for rendering you for a turncoat," Brion says. "I'm a storyteller, and I'd like to hear a true story. Just once, a true story from you."

Scowling, I cross my arms around my chest and keep walking.

"Let me try first," he says, "and you can interrupt me if I'm wrong. An English plantation. Father strikes you a'night. You take it in your mind to leave from home. You make it some miles before men find you and insult you. Whether English or Irish--"

"I've not been touched by a man," I say. "Save for Lorcán's kisses."

"High well that it should be so. You are young, as the lady spoke. Does the rest smell of truth?"

"My father's hit me twice," I say. "Far from a'night."

There's a bit of a spiral path in the meadows, and we walk up hillocks of pale sheared wheat and back down them, following the measure of the land.

"So my story's no good, and I don't know why you left or why you were drunk and part-nude by the roadside."

"No, you don't."

Brion fumes and splays his hands in frustration. I look away.

"If I tell you, you'll retell it alongside your stories of Macha and Cruar."

"Ah, is that all? If I tell you I won't, and swear upon the Lord's good word, will you believe me?"

Brion's eyes have a faint green and a faint brown to them, as an old forest will.

"Swear it."

He does.

And I begin. I begin talking to him. I tell him about Hazel, and about the Otherworld, and about the bonshi, and much more than that besides. In my mind I'm sure he'll betray me. I don't trust him. I won't trust anyone. It isn't in me to trust, not after the woman in the sea told me that Bonnie died on purpose, which means Hazel must have known, for she's a bit of a shi herself, which means she beat me and abandoned me without purpose, only. . . .

And it doesn't matter if Brion tells everyone. I'll only run away again. I can run into the sea until my lights fill with salt water and walk along the strand until I come to Bangor, and that way no one could find me. It would hurt, but everything hurts. Everything always hurts.

So I let it all off my chest. Almost everything.

And when it's over I feel terrible, because I believe the story will be spread far and wide over Christendom, and I will be the famous idiot gel who couldn't do anything right, and now Brion knows all my secrets except the one that once I was a boy. That secret I've kept.

Running away from Brion, I seek Lorcán.

Instead, I bump into Taverner.

"Steady there, Missy," he says in English.

Curtseying, I run off. He does not follow, not yet. I'm confident he didn't recognize me.

And now I know who the traitor is.

΅

"Can you figure out which order they go?"

The leeny is folded beneath hose, breeches, and some sort of tunic. I nod.

"Is it indecent for me to tell you to undress for me, just the once?"

"It would be daringly rude for you to ask such a thing," I say, looking away and glancing my eyes back. "But you weren't talking of asking, were you?"

Lorcán smiles.

In the hollow we have found, a furlong from where the raiding party is assembling, I pull the red dress up over my head. Lorcán stares, places a hand on my nearly nude shoulder, then withdraws it again.

Next the pale slip is over my head and onto the grass. A blouse and bustier and a million petticoats and hose are now all that stand between Lorcán and I. I unfasten the knots at my underarms and the knot at the back of my neck and the blouse comes off. Lorcán is looking at my shoulders, which are now naked from one fingertip across to the other fingertip, with my torso held shut in the knots of the bustier. I fiddle with the bottom knot. He is touching one of his hands with the other.

"Untie them," I say, pointing to my hip where the bustier knots are. I wrap myself safe in my arms and turn so he can touch the fibrous twine.

His hands manage to find my slim boyish hips and just stay there. He is breathing fast, the breath of running a race, the breath that Macha would have breathed in the story. I am aware of his legs, thin and deeply toned with muscular calves visible through pale brown hose. He unfolds them and straddles my body, sitting on the grass with one leg up on the incline and the other resting on my legs, which are under me. I go very still.

He peels the knots apart and pulls the whole string away.

"No," I scold, snatching at his hand, "just loosen it. It takes forever to thread it."

He takes my hand and slaps it, once. The bustier comes apart in half and falls away.

And now there is nothing between my upper half and Lorcán except for sky and a pleasant fear which I seem to like.

And he starts to touch me. His hands are not too much larger than mine, slightly scabby, with rough pads on the tips from farm work and soft places between the tip and the sunbaked palms. His leeny gives his narrow shoulders a false but appealing breadth, and his cheeks are as red as a winter sun. His eyes move quick, snapping from view to view, and his legs come together and pin me. I keep my hands still. He lifts my arms, and I have to pose awkwardly with my elbows bent, like some sort of Grecian nymph bathing, or as if I were about to yawn. He pushes my forearms up and I arch my back.

His hands slide into my petticoats along my flanks, keeping chastely far from my privacy, and push the white frills away. Unstraddling, he has me take them off. I am suddenly very aware that there are Irishmen not so different from the brutal gang at the Abbey no farther than a good stone's throw and a half. Now I pull off my hose, fold my garments onto the grass, and I let him look at me.

Touching my chin, he kisses me with one hand on my belly.

Swiftly I pull on the man's hose, breeches, everything. I've never worn a leeny before. It's not different from a dress really, though much heavier and far too hot for spring.

"We'll need to take these back--"

"Leave them," he says, patting the gel's clothes. "If the women were to find them, they'd know something happened. This way, perhaps you've merely run off, vanished into the hills. The clothes must be gone with the lassie, eh?"

"But they're lovely. Someone took all the time to weave them--"

Lorcán takes out a glass phial full of what looks like cosmetics and licks his thumb and picks up some ashy-red substance on his thumbtip.

"Your face is too round and perfect for a boy's, and you've got green bruises they'll recognize. It will take only a day or two before the men are accustomed to you. Then you can be a gel again." Precise fingers paint my chin, cheeks and forehead with what I imagine are wonderfully manly shadows. Streaks down from my eyes to my dimples; a cleft chin; frown marks. Brushing the excess with a clean finger, he is satisfied.

"Remember," he breathes, lip to lip with me. "I've seen your whole self, inside, outside, and there's nothing you can hide from me. I know everything there is to know. You can tell me the truth of it, and you can give me all I want without shame. There can be no shame now, Aisling. Everything about you is mine."

He waits, but I say nothing. Together we rise under the darkening sky, leaving behind the beautiful red dress, the bustier, everything.

΅

The men are at war. We haven't left the camp yet, but I can feel their dismay roiling. The Irish are not happy to go to war; I imagine the memories Redbeard and others have shared are alive in the memories of the older soldiers and are stirring up parents' stories in the younger. Memories and skills skip generations, and there are certainly grandchildren of the auld fighters among these men. And they are not pleased to relive the horrors of Mr. Mountjoy and the others of ancienter days.

Another storm is brewing, the same grimacing black sky that greeted Hazel and I at Emain Macha. I wonder if the curse she placed on the men of Ulaid still stands, if it's the same curse that took Hazel's goat away. I get to thinking of my master as I pass unnoticed among the men. The rain will wash the makeup out, but men attend to their tack and their gear regardless of coming rain and regardless of Lorcán.

I think of Hazel.

Can she see futures? Is that it? She predicted I would wake, would follow her cards--ah, perhaps her cards are all her power. No, that's impossible. Perhaps she sends her power through them. They're all gone from me now, all her little prophecies fulfilled. I'm to stop a war, and she had me kill Bonnie, and I wonder if she meant for me to run away and find the O'Carolan clan, if this was all concocted years ago and has laid itself out just as she predicted. It would mean she doesn't hate me. She was just playing with me the way a cruel child walks a doll through the tortures of Córdoba. I'm on a string and must dance the dance she dictates. It feels slimy, and for a moment I desire to rouse the men to incredible violence, just to show Hazel she's not in control. But they would hear my woman's voice and send me back to the women and then I wouldn't be able to watch Lorcán slaughter Calumny.

I try not to stay too close to him. Soldiers are collegial but solitary at the same time. They hover around gathered piles of man's belongings--packs, mantles, swords, muskets, great belts made of thick leather and iron, which I no longer have to fear touching . . .

I am unnoticed. And now we march.

΅

"The road has small towns all along it. They're built of stone or brick, but they're pitched, so they'll burn. Partway at least. I'd guess there are fifteen small towns from Knockfergus to Ballymena, and another five to Derry. There are no standing armies along this path, and you'd be safe traveling on the road or beside it, or cross-country. Beware a confrontation with the villages; there're plenty of men with swords or cudgels. They'd be happy to break a few heads if it means their children safe in bed."

"And west?"

"The forts are to the west, south of Derry. If they are your goal, you'll need surprise to gain them. It's not likely they'll go down without a fight, if they have time to prepare, and gossip does spread in the plantations. There'll be farmers on the road, bringing in seed; the winter was bad. Outpacing them and saying nothing of your destination will be key to taking these forts."

There are no roads near the Irish village. There are no trees, no walls. There are only six horses, all carrying packs, not riders. The way is straight and we are not seen. We have departed, and the open country is beneath us.

It's been two days' march at quick pace to the longroad. Taverner has been speaking nonstop. He hasn't noticed me.

Now Marysbourne Tenancy and its bog are not far away. We camp on the heath, covered fires roaring, only eight leagues from the Catholic camp, and if we had a spyglass among us we could surely see the Abbey from a rise.

The rain is now cloud, a blanket on the bed of Earth. I have a mantle just like Fodell's, I don't know where Lorcán got it from; a real sword I could probably not draw by myself, which flaps against my back as I walk; and a dagger that I can probably use to menace people inadequately. These are not my own belongings, but there is a pleasant sense of ownership to have Lorcán's spare things hanging off my body.

It is both easier and harder to pretend to be a boy. I was one once, and I know the rhythms: the isolation and aggression and hesitant chumminess that passes for brotherhood among young men. There is also that imposter's best friend, silence. No more words need be exchanged than what a grunt will suffice for. It's an immense relief.

Lorcán seems preoccupied. We can see the steeple of Marysbourne from here, and the men speak of whether to attack or whether to travel past these settlements to the fort west of Ballymena, which is not fifty miles from here. Fear and rage bubble and steam among the men, and there is talk of the slaughter in Munster, but their hearts seem to focus on the illusory plan that has been cooked up to seize forts without bloodshed. Nobody's ever told me any story of this ever happening. I wish Brion or Redbeard or Blackbeard were here to make things easier, to give good advice, but they've gone with Maguire and his gallowglass.

Fires on the heath. Our fires. We have lit them.

"D'you see the one with the Van Dyke beard that looks like a fawn's half-grown tail?" Lorcán asks as we sprawl our belongings over the ground. He points at a boy.

I see the boy.

"Hid a bird's egg in my scabbard, so when I pulled it out to clean it, it came out bloody. Up for craic?"

I nod.

"You speak English better than a Fitz, don't you?"

"I can speak it," I whisper in English.

"We'll give Rooney a fright. Wait'll it gets dark."

We wait.

"Now, run to the hill--don't be seen--and shout, 'The Irish are coming!' in English. Fitz's been going on and on about what if they come to harry us. This'll be a legend to tell. Go, run."

"They'll shoot at me," I say.

"Don't worry about it--it'll be a woman's voice. We'd not shoot a woman. Go."

I hadn't been thinking about the _Irish_ shooting at me. I'm wearing a leeny and am dressed as a soldier.

Lorcán has told me what to do. It's a rule, now.

The dark is ripe with confusion and dishonest footing, the turf neither muddy nor dry, the dells and rises deceptive. I go just beyond a useful ridge, hide, and I shout, as loud as I can, "The Irish are coming! The Irish are coming!"

Then I run.

As I run I throw off the sword, the knife, the mantle and the leeny until I'm in dun-gray underclothes. Lorcán's things fall to the ground and I pay no attention to what sounds may be arising from the war camp or the village which is close to sight ahead of me. I skirt around it, praying the light-colored blouse and breeches don't show up too brightly; I take the hill beside Marysbourne and there's the road toward Ballymena and I am in my element, running away at speeds no one can match. Perhaps it is Macha who guides me, who gives me such speed, or perhaps there is an eternal sort of cowardice that lends me wings.

For miles I run. Miles and miles. There are small stands of trees, and they are the only break to the horizon besides my own self.

I run toward Calumny. I don't even know why.

΅

Henry Wool.

His small furry head sits atop his rooster neck. His eyes are tiny, warm. Above, stiff brows dredge up concern.

"Have--have we met?" he asks. "A familiar face. You're not O'Hara's eldest--no."

"I've come up from Marysbourne," I lie. "Sorry for my state of undress, sir, only the Irish have a raiding band and I didn't have time to prepare. They've come for us, sir, not for Charles--and what's more, I recognized a face among them, one I won't forget in a hurry--Taverner's!"

"Taverner among the Irish? But why? What do they want?"

"There were swords and guns, sir, and war fires, not like the traveling fires, though they hadn't begun shooting yet. Only I don't know how long the quiet'll last, sir." This character is no trouble to play--I'm playing her as a simpleton and that's fair easy.

"And you think Taverner's among them? Well, let's see to him and maybe his wife has word."

Taking me around the shoulder, Wool marches swiftly in his tucked-into-stocking trousers, down the lane and toward the alehouse. In hardly a minute we're knocking on the door. I'm pleased Irish boy's underclothes are a bit of a complete outfit by themselves, or I'd feel naked, being a gel running around town without enough clothes. As a boy I didn't feel that way, although I felt a different way when I did run around without clothes.

"Lady Miss Hays," shouts Wool over the mild din of evening in the tavern. "Is the proprietor in?"

"Gone to Knockfergus for his hops. They're coming in from Flanders, since ours wouldn't grow last season." The giant woman rests mugs of small wine in front of the butcher, alone at one table, and Mate Graham and Dooley and a gel Dooley's age at another.

"Is there any chance he didn't?" asks Wool.

"If he comes back without hops, then you'll know," she replies.

Concerned, Wool pesters his whiskers. "Keen," he says. The butcher spins and looks me in the eye, then in Henry Wool's. I get the distinct feeling that of all the people in Calumny, the one with the greatest chance of knowing my nature is the butcher. He watches people and has an eye for inner things. "Keen, would you and Mate Graham take a cudgel each and stand near to the road? I've an itchy spot in my mind and this would assuage it. Bring someone good at running, to spread the word if things progress sourly."

"Dooley, fetch the hammer and the show knife I keep over the door, would you?" murmurs Mate Graham. His words are cautious and underset by the dismayed cooling of a warm heart. Dooley springs away.

"I'll bring the killing axe," says the butcher, rising.

"Lady Miss Hays, if you'd spread the word to everyone who comes in: all doors barred tonight. Everyone."

"Is it as bad as that?" she asks.

"Night will tell," says good Henry Wool, and slopes out with his arm at my shoulder.

Outside, Henry says, "Best if we each go door to door, spreading the news. Will you?" he asks.

I say I will, and he tells me to go counter-clockwise, while he goes the other way. In fact I don't. I slip out of sight in the gathering dark and cross the town and go and find my way past the borders and climb the way to the newgraves upon the hill. I want to talk to Dacy Jack. He's the one I want to see now.

Dacy Jack is not sitting on the newgraves with his large jacket and green cardinal's cap. He is not there. Wandering the hills that surround the graves, I try to figure where he'd have got to. I can't go to talk to Hazel, but Jack'll know some things about what's going to happen, even if he lies about it.

I walk throughout the highlands, trying to avoid thinking about literally anything. What I'm most trying to avoid is the realization that I've returned to Calumny and am walking through land I'd hoped never to see again. I am not thinking about how glad I am Wool didn't recognize me as the boy who was a nun. That's for one. Another is, I can't go back to rejoin the Irish; they'd have found Lorcán's discarded spare sword and mantle by now and will know I'm a strange traitor. I wonder why I didn't keep his dagger; it was something nice to have at my hip. There are times when I think back on the things I do and don't have any understanding of how they happened at all. If I didn't decide to do those crazy things, if they just happened, then who was doing them?

Above all, I don't think about Lorcán. He's not inside my mind right now. He's not thinking about me--I mean, I'm not thinking about him. After all, he didn't give me any rules after telling me to shout, so there's no more I have to do regarding him. Hazel also left me with no rules. I've got none of the unspoken rules of Calumny to follow; I don't live there anymore. Instead I invent a rule for myself which is that I have to lay down among the newgraves and let the spirits of the lost Protestants touch my body the way Lorcán did. He's Catholic, it's only fair.

And as I am face down with my hands at my sides and the slightly raised mounds of earth against my face, I decide I will never have a reason to leave this exact spot, and I will sleep through whatever disasters are to befall everyone in Calumny. I will sleep through it. I will sleep.

΅

It's the chill that wakes me. Night has consumed the ground, and the sky is gone, and my hand is resting against a stone stela of no shape, though a cross is carved into the surface. There is a dead Reformist embedded into the ground of Ireland. Its ghosthands may or may not have touched my whole body through my underwear. There is no deathbreath here. Protestant corpses don't exhale. And I look and the gravestone says:

Emma Marie Mansfield

1633-1639

The heat took her

Let the cold earth soothe her

And I feel uncomfortable at having imagined her hands touching my body.

I stand, then kneel, and kiss the cross of her grave and whisper that I hadn't meant to kill St. Glimmer or say she hadn't been there for me. I say the tree frog told me she had been, and I believe him. And I ask her to forgive me.

Dacy Jack is still not here. Hadn't he meant to meet us in Rostrevor? Perhaps he did meet Hazel there. Maybe that's where she went after she beat me up. I'm sure that's it, now. They're both far away from this town.

I crest the hill that hides the newgraves to find Calumny on fire.

And something in me urges me to walk down to the flames. My sister is giving me a push.

΅

The fire isn't actually coming from Calumny. It's up from Marysbourne, but the sky is a mirror and the flames shine from every direction. Smoke smell drifts like sailing ships through the streets. The men are gathering at the road, and I just know they'll figure out I'm Sister Margaret even through the makeup Lorcán has applied every day, so I skirt round the side of the road and walk half a field over. What I could do, if I wanted to, is try to reclaim the clothes and things I stripped off. I could suit up, rejoin the Irish, and let the men of Calumny kill me. Then I remember I've given up death and so I couldn't. Still, if I were wearing Irish kit, I'd not be recognized as Sister Margaret. That's a place to start.

The butcher stops me.

"Here, girl," he roars into his cupped hands, waving across the strip of barley stubs. I can't well duck or avoid it, so I trod across, trying not to crush the young stalks, the way Hazel showed me. Winter was hard, and they need all the help they can get.

"Where?" the butcher says without any details.

"I've got to get back to Marysbourne. I've got to know what's happened to Mam and Da," I say breathlessly.

"Why were you walking in the fields?"

I gulp in a dramatic way and say, "I've have thought you men would say it's dangerous and try to stop me. But I've just _got_ to go."

The butcher's fist is wrapped around the saddle-shaped handle of a five-foot axe with blood striped permanently into the wood below the iron head.

"You're not going to Marysbourne," he says to me. "You can paint your face, Mansfield, but I know your ways. I'd even level you brought the Irish here. Didn't you?"

"I'm not Francis Mansfield," I say.

"Knew that name fast, boy," and the butcher licks his thumb and begins rubbing my face. We're a stone's toss from the gathered men. "Too fast. Thought we'd forgotten your stunt, did you?"

He's quicker than me, and my arm is pinned at my side as the makeup is slicked off my face.

The axe rests under his arm. I don't even imagine trying to break away.

"Your ma and pa are standing not forty feet away," he hisses. "Boy."

"I'm not a boy. I heard of Francis Mansfield going mad and taking his knickers off in front of the town--that's how I knew his name. I'd never heard of such a--"

Hard fingers plunge down my belly, finding the gap between undershirt and breeches, sliding between my legs. My knees touch and my back arches without my meaning it, and that funny gap where my willy used to be presses against the rough bony knuckles that cut living things dead. My breath catches, once, again. His hand is between my thighs. If I picked up my feet his massive meat hands could keep me aloft. Wet fills my eyes, and yet I find it in me to look the man in the face.

"I. Saw. You," he snarls. "Your mam saw you. She's meant to send you to Bethlam. The Gibbets say they'll pay for it."

"As you can see, I'm not Francis Mansfield." Then I start crying. Wailing, the deep wail you didn't know you could make until it comes out of you.

Here is Henry Wool, striding up the lip of the field. With him, Da.

"Keen? Auld Ron and I thought we'd advance on Marysbourne and--"

"Emma?"

That was what my father just said.

"Emma, you can't be--"

"Ron, it isn't. She's from Marysbourne--"

My father kneels and takes my hands. He doesn't notice that the butcher's hand is still thrust into my underwear. The hand withdraws and the butcher sniffs it. My underwear still reveals a corner of my belly. My father. My father.

"Is this the girl who--" but I can't. I can't play a role in front of my father. He's a gentle, human soul. He's needy, earnest, hopeful. I can't be anything other than Francis, yet I can't, I just can't let the rest of them know about me.

"I've spoken to Emma Mansfield," I tell my father. I'm tempted to speak of the Pavee eeshi and the frog saint, but they all know the old Francis who said things like that. So I say, "She's with the angels, Mr. Mansfield." Tears make my cheeks cold in the night air. I don't know how late it is. "We were girls together. I saw her when she came down for the harvest fair." That's true, we went together, twice. "She's with the angels." And I realize I have no angel, just saints, and these are different, and I will need to think on this.

"You were girls together," my father says. I haven't adjusted my man's undershirt for fear the butcher will hit me. "Was she--" And he breathes in a heartbending way, a hoping way. "Was she a good girl, Miss?"

I want my father to stop looking at me, so I say, "Once, she told me she loved everything," and I'm right, this sets Da off and I move away to Henry Wool and ask if I could be permitted to see what has become of Marysbourne.

In the darkness as the four of us walk; I manage to run ahead. A few lengths from the group of men, I break into a sprint and there are the fires. In the distance, the glint of metal and the shine of eyes of men, of soldiers. There is no screaming, and I find this a deeper wound than anything else. Something is wrong in the cluster of English houses a mile ahead.

Caught between the advancing Englishmen and the Irish soldiers, I try to locate Lorcán's things in the firelight, but my mind had been flying a'wing and there's no hope. All I can do is find him. . . .

Instead I find Taverner, kneeling with his hands tied and a sword braced at his neck. The swordsman is one of our war band--Lorcán's and mine. He will kill Taverner now.

"Once a traitor," the man growls in extremely bad English, "can man know any other path? Will you speak of charity and ask for it? Is it in you to plead?"

"I have a deal with the earl," Taverner says in Irish. "You would--"

But this is where I begin shouting in my gel's voice, calling the Irish word for stop: "Stop! Stop!" My hands forward, as if I would reach across the distance and bring poor Taverner into my arms, rescue him from the fate of his own making.

The Irishman looks me dead in the eye. "Lorcán will be furious." And I see he's got a pointy little beard. He's the one Lorcán was trying to prank. I guess we succeeded, because he keeps eye contact as the blade snaps down and lodges in Taverner's neck. It doesn't cut clean through. Taverner's eyes blink at an automatic pace. His mouth opens and closes like a stutterer's. His knelt leg moves sideways, the direction knees don't go. As he slips down, his juddering body gets caught on the sword and I can see the quickest glimpse of firelight through his neck.

Whatever Lorcán's rival's name is, he pushes the sword forward the way you unstick a caught handsaw and the man has his head falling, but it's still not cut, and I see the holes inside a man's head and the throat folds over and Taverner is a cut branch and this long branch bends and splits now the cut is enough for the weight to tear it.

Henry Wool is not far now. The butcher has his axe. My father is beside them. The firelight illuminates them, wavy, red.

"Look at it. Keep the sight in your mind, little girl. Lorcán hasn't slain a soul. He's just badgered them for money. The leader set the fires, to show them we meant it. But I." The man advances with his sword runny with blood, dripping like a split egg. "I've killed a man today. I've earned praise. I'll be famous as a killer of traitorous English." He flicks the sword. Blood touches my skin and I scream without meaning it.

Moving with an inexorable certainty, the butcher comes at a run. The rival gloats, his face filthy and coated with sweat. I am a rabbit crouching at the foot of the Irish serpent.

"I want you to remember," he says. Blurry. Slowly. "I want death to be always in your eyes. Your English eyes. I want your heart to carry me in it while you fuck Lorcán. I want you to think of this fear."

Wailing through the air like the bonshi wail Bonnie never got to make for herself, the butcher's axe embeds itself under the arm of the rival. Some uncanny suction steals his breath, and the rival dies standing, his eyes never leaving mine. He had power, but the butcher is more powerful still. I still feel the hard butcher's fingers pressing up between my legs, and my knees clench again in his presence.

"Taverner." Henry Wool stoops and presses the eyelids. "God's peace, and surety of forgiveness. Be shriven."

"We should have brought the whole town," says Da. "Fought. Fought swiftly. We could still--"

"It's not for fighting, Ronald. Look to the gel. She's wanting warmth to still her shivering from this bitter wind."

My father picks me up and I put my arms around his neck and my forehead to his chin and I realize I have never been held by my father. Is this why gels turn out so much more affectionate than boys? Is it their fathers and mothers holding them, kissing them, smiling at them? Or is it that they aren't expected to fight or to work? Or are they for having a different mind?

The four of us wander the ways of Marysbourne. I've been down a few times, it's no bigger than Calumny, but many people here work in the bog, they've got whole industries doing something with lye and potash and I don't know what else. I like to think about what people do for a living. I'm thinking about how men rake out coal and silver and other things that have been buried for generations. I think about economics and profits, of the values of natural goods for trade, and then my body starts shaking and it doesn't stop. I wrestle out from my father's arms and I run toward a house that looks most like it's got deep shadows and I hide and then sprint again, lifting my feet with silence in their soles, and my body is falling over all the time and I do fall, I fall straight through the ground itself and come out the other side, and the Pavee eeshi catches my head around the chin and pours a sour green liquid into my mouth.

"Pilchard's breath and sweaty cobbles, my naked little lass, and aren't you one after all? If you marry the buggeroo, he'll do with you as he told you he would, and other things besides, my limpid butterfrog, oh yes. Every day an adventure."

As before, the words in my mouth are not truly my own: "Hazel made me immortal," I say.

"Didn't, didn't, didn't." A wooden spoon taps my nose as a sort of polite-rude minispanking. "You done that yourself, and wasn't it well done? For had you not, you'd be dead now by your hand."

"She abandoned me, and I'm worthless," come from my mouth. "I ought to be dead."

"Eeshi acts to purpose, my grimling. I love seeing things spoil, so I'll tell you her plan. Ever seen a tragedy turn to comedy? Shackspeer did it. You can, too."

"The future should have ended, for me," my words are.

"Surrender, love. Keep surrendering yourself. That's how we sulking ladies reignite ourselves. For if a woman ain't open for the filth of men to pour into, then what's womens for? Ask the God-on-Earth, he's a man, he'll tell you."

And I'm shat out of my dream.

"Aisling. They've--what's--"

Lorcán's pressed against me. Blood is on me, and some of it has wiped off onto him. He cradles me in his arms and--

"You'll not take her, too." The butcher's statement is definite and cannot be altered by any force on our world. His eyes slash through Lorcán, and the axe raises, ready to do the same. I see it happening. The axe is in the air. There are more of the Irish raiding party watching, and Henry Wool, and my father. The downward sweep has begun now, aiming over my shoulder at Lorcán's neck. All I can do to save his life is to put myself in the way of the butcher's blade.

It cuts my body in half. The man roars in consternation, and Henry Wool utters a wordless sound of horror. I will not to describe the sensation. It cannot be shared. Only there is heat, a wet blaze.

The axe is pried from my torso. It drops. The butcher has let go of it in disgust.

"You love me," whispers Lorcán. In his voice there is a passion and rage. He will now kill the butcher, and Da will kill him, and one of his friends will kill my father, and Henry Wool will summon up Mate Graham to kill him, and this process will weave like a tapestry of recurring death until the end of days.

"Promise me," I wheeze to my love in Irish, "that you won't kill the English. Promise. It's my last word to you, and yours to me."

Fury wets his eyes and he strains to comprehend me. "It wouldn't--but I--"

"Promise me, Lorcán," I say. "Promise, and I'll never tell you what to do ever again."

Something breaks in him, and he promises, over and over, whispering and kissing my face, which is surely going cold.

"What's her name?" murmurs Henry Wool to my Lorcán. " _Ainma_ ," he adds.

I was Aisling.

"Will you let us bury her?" Wool asks.

"I'll do it," I hear the butcher say.

"No," says Lorcán in English. "She's mine. I'll be the one to set her a-rest. And if you'll not kill me, for I had no harm in my mind for her or anyone, then I'll watch over her grave for a night and a day, and visit each year, and remember her for you."

"I'll bring the priest," says the butcher, and he is gone from here. I wonder what's in his mind.

"I'll get Starnlowe," says Da. Likewise, he's gone.

Henry Wool is a good man, and leaves Lorcán room to mourn me.

"I may live," I say, feeling the wet heat turn cold in the light of the fading fires. Two houses are burnt; the rest are stone. "Will you marry a gel with a scar?" My voice has nothing left of it.

"I'd have been your man," he says in Irish. "Till my days were done." And he rocks me in his arms.

΅

"Give us the grace to entrust the child called Aisling to your never-failing care and love, and bring us all to your heavenly kingdom, through Iesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever."

There are mutterings of the fact that no one knows who I am, or where I come from, but these are the gossips of the back of the hand. I can feel the long days rising to the surface, the swimmer who's dived too deep and is spent before breaking into air. My breath is not there yet, there is no air inside me. But I am surfacing.

"I understand," says the Common Book priest in his grandfatherly way, "there is one here who would speak. Your name is Luken, yes?"

Lorcán's voice. The English language conveyed thickly, with words aplace and sounds foreign and beautiful.

"It is out of my heart to say that our war was unjust," he says, "for Englishmen and kings have spent themselves vicious on Ireland's good and innocent heart. But as God be the source of all love on Earth, must I then see God's hand in love's triumph over my hate. For it is this selfsame Aisling who has, with gentleness unsparing, torn from me the limitless fury I felt was right to bear inside me. And I see she was English. How, then, can my hate for you endure? How, then, can I atone for the burning of houses, the beating of the dredger, your Mister Cullough of the place you name Marysbourne? I see my mistake. God placed us not on Earth to judge his works, but to endure them. This we must all do."

The English patter of polite clapping, a sound unchanged from the elder times.

It is now I convulse and feel my lungs take in the dark scent of coffin air. I hope they haven't put me in the ground yet. That would be embarrassing. My fists hammer on the coffin lid, and my legs kick, and one of those sounds you make when you wake anight and your voice hasn't turned all the way on yet comes out of my throat. I feel cold, and there is an unbearable series of punctures in my side; I've been sutured shut.

Shouts, wild and unaccountable, and in time the lid opens and I see sunshine again. Lorcán surrounds me, pulling me out of the coffin, and a haunted look appears; he realizes I was nearly buried alive. Through a blinding pain I press myself to his hot woolen leeny.

"God's reunited us," he tells me. I don't bother to tell him that it was me, that I took a ride on a fox's tail and nothing will ever take me from him.

΅

"We'll need her approval, if we are to marry." I lead him by the fingertips up the hill, past where Dacy Jack met me. Jack's not been seen in town since the bonefire that nearly claimed Starnlowe, and neither has Anne. I imagine they've crossed into Irish lands in the west. I imagine Anne will marry and will raise horses. I don't know.

It's half a league to Finn's Giant's Barrow, and I can't run the way I used to, not with the stitches fresh in my side, and not in a dress. Lorcán's arm circles me; he acts like he's leading the way, though he isn't. He's telling me he wants me to convert, and I tell him I will.

"She'll be so excited to meet you. I know she will. She and I left each other in a tiff, but we'll be friends again in no time." I breathe deeply and say the air is good here.

"Looks foreboding, like a devil's dancing ground," he says, and I give him a push and he grabs my hand and bends my fingers back until I apologize. Then he kisses me.

I press my head to his chest and we walk on.

The stone spire with its funny saddle-cleft on top where I first spied the coming war is just ahead.

Something has changed.

As we approach, I wonder where the gorse has gone.

Small trees I don't recognize dot the piedmont, and the large tree where the noose hung down is currently budding and noose-free. I try to dash forward to check the ivy, but Lorcán won't let me. He holds on to my hair, which by now he knows is the only handhold on my body that doesn't tug at my stitches, and I nervously let him direct me up to the base of the rock.

The rock's side is solid and ivy-free.

"She's here. She lives here. It's--"

Lorcán doesn't judge me. He doesn't call me stupid or say I'm a silly gel. He looks up at the spire and says, "Fairer folk than we abide these halls. It's not for us to stir up their livelihoods, or distract them from their means."

I call "Miss Hazel!" with my hands to my mouth," but the only response is a drop of rain. There are no clouds in the sky.

But as we walk back, I feel my side. I stop Lorcán, lift my dress so he can see my body, and pull the stitches from my flesh, which is healed.

"We're to get married now," says Lorcán. "She's given her blessing. To her I give my love, for she's the stepmother of my bride. Whoever she may be."

**Epilogue**

I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence.

Such lovely poetry. I'm looking forward to America. The Cunard ship is powered by steam, and I cross the gangplank with the crowd of Irish. I have a mauve felt hat, and a feathery Angora muff, and a plain dress in a fashionable postwar beige. Soldier chic. Poor Henry, caught in Turkey by a tank shell. I will miss him.

I chat with a crewman in a well-pressed uniform and stylish black spats which surely aren't regulation. At the captain's call, he turns to go, and I give him a wink. The steamstacks let out a loud whistle. It's time to go.

And yet here at the base of the gangplank is a familiar shape. The rags are the color of autumn hay, cut and stacked, and I am reminded of a vibrant agricultural world I'd left behind long ago.

Pressing through the crowd hurrying up the gangplank, I jump down to the docks, where, at the very edge of land, Miss Hazel McLochlan waits. Beside her is a gel, shy and dressed in blue linen.

"Hallo Hazel," I say.

A hand reaches out and gives me a slap.

"And what was that for?" I ask.

"For never coming to visit," she says. "Not ever, in all this time."

"Thought you'd gone."

Hazel brushes her hair behind an ear.

"Bonnie was born in 1780. Takes a long time to give birth to a rotting corpse, but I managed it."

"Didn't know it worked like that," I say, looking at the pale gel beside my old master.

"Now you do. The church near Rostrevor never did reopen. They've built a new one not ten kilometers away. Just as well, says I, you'd never hear the priest over the sound of the sealoch. How was Lorcán?"

"We had an awful lot of fun. Lived to seventy. Lung cancer, no one was sure why. Still dear to my heart."

"This is Elizabeth, by the by," says Hazel. "Rescued her from the laundry. She was only thirteen."

"Hallo Elizabeth. You've found some luck at last."

The gel curtsies and says no words.

"The ship will be off," says Hazel, fumbling with her handkerchief.

"Wish you'd have told me you'd come back." I feel suddenly cross, and I want to say something rude to Hazel. "Just like you to keep your secrets all this time."

Hazel breaks down and weeps into the handkerchief. "We--we were in town and I overheard the reading of the m-manifest. I'd looked, I _swear_ I looked. Not like I've the knack to find you if you'd not been trying to be found--"

"Hazel. Oh Hazel," and I hold her to me, rags and all. "Silly Hazel. I've never had the slightest idea how it all worked. You never told me."

"Was the gift--" Hazel murmurs into my shoulder. "Was it a good gift?"

I think back. "The stitches? It was very kind indeed."

"Wasn't just the stitches, sweet thing. We swapped. I made it so."

"Made what so, love?" I ask.

Hazel lifts her hood, and I goggle and gasp.

"To be forever young," and I can't bear it, I just can't bear it.

"I'd see you to the gangplank, but I can't leave the land," and I kiss her wrinkled cheek, I kiss her and kiss her and I give little Elizabeth a hug, and I ask how Anne was, but the last whistle blows and I don't hear the answer.

**Acknowledgies and Apoledgements**

My interest in Ireland began when I was very young, with a film called _The Secret of Roan Inish_ , from whence the title probably came. I've already written about the island in my first book, _Lenna and the Last Dragon_ , in which I list many of my sources of knowledge, of which Wikipedia is about half. I am indebted to _The Plantation of Ulster_ by Jonathan Bardon and to the websites ireland.mysteriousworld.com and ulstercycle.wordpress.com in particular for specifics about 17th century Ireland and the arrival of the English settlers.

My original idea for this book was to tell the story of English pilgrims sailing across the sea to a new land in search of religious freedom, finding semihostile natives, and forging a new country out of the fertile soil--the story of the Mayflower, only set in Northern Ireland. However, as is so often the case, as I began writing, other things fell out. In particular, a book called _Mort_ by Terry Pratchett--may he walk gently the black sands to his destination--practically screamed to be revisited as a story source. This is how writing sometimes works, if you don't know; a plot, like a boy picked last for the hiring fair, gets caught up in your mental machinery and squirts out as something else. For me, as George R. R. Martin so eloquently put it, writing is akin to planting seeds: you just set some stuff down and sometimes it grows.

A sharp reader may note that this is the second book that's sprunged forth from a Pratchett book. Terry used to say that there's a well of story, and some people take more than they add, and some add more than they take. I dearly hope to be the latter someday.

The song Henry Wool sings is original, albeit drawn loosely from a song by Gordon Bok titled "And So Will We Yet," but the counting system-- _yan, tan, tethra_ \--is how shepherds used to count sheep in northern England. Perhaps some still do. Henry Wool himself is essentially Pete Seeger.

The butcher is based on a horrible seven foot tall auto mechanic who screwed up my car and intimidated me into not suing him. This is my small revenge.

The goddess-weavers are loosely based on a jerkfaced hippie pastor my parents dragged me to when I was a little kid. She made us sing Cat Stevens songs as devotionals.

Part of the idea of the old woman who lives under the hill probably comes from Nancy Willard's brilliant _The Ballad of Biddy Early_.

My great-great-grandfather Max Comins was a Jewish smith, so I added one.

Boad, Chuff, and Tom John are all renamed guys I went to elementary school with.

Mother Gibbet is inspired by a nun I had music class with in kindergarten. She was French, wildly melodramatic, and referred to sixteenth notes as "teary dearies." Her favorite song was the one that goes, "There was an old woman, skin and bones, oo-woo-woo."

Cuthman is the name of a saint, popularized in Christopher Fry's play, "The Boy With the Cart." It's a pastorale, and seems a good name for an English farmer.

Strawdollies were popular pagan-ish good luck and harvest charms throughout England and much of Europe. It took centuries to stamp out the practice, and wasn't really successful; they're common to see on Christmas trees in New England to this day.

Anne owes a small amount to the razorgirl in _City of Dreams and Nightmare_ , by Ian Whates.

The scene of the cart coming to the green was vaguely inspired by the art of a Magic card called Rag Man.

The scenes of the tarot cards came to me in a dream. Tarot was invented only a century earlier than our story, which is set around 1640.

Hazel's house is probably inspired by the film _Swiss Family Robinson_.

**About the Author**

James Comins is the author of more than a dozen books, including _Fool School_ and _Fool Askew_. He currently lives in New Orleans.
