Chapter 4
Chapter four
RORY
The first time that Rory ó Conchúir killed someone, she was not quite seven years old, and she had not been the least bit regretful after the deed was done – mostly because Ionatán was a vicious little bully and had thoroughly deserved it.
It had begun a fortnight before the actual killing happened.
She slipped down into her grandmother’s hall, six years old, silent as a shadow, to eat her breakfast, eyes down, shoulders stiff.
She had long since learned that the most efficient way to avoid engaging with others was to make herself as still and sullen as possible, and most of the time – princess or not – the gazes and greetings of the many persons who scurried about the castle never seemed to land on her as a result.
Except, of course, for Nora.
Rory did not look up when she heard the clatter of a bowl across from her, keeping her eyes fixed on her plate of sausages and black pudding. “Nora,” she said in a simple greeting, not rude but not welcoming either.
“I saw three blackcaps and a flock of firecrests this morning.” Nora’s brow scrunched as she proceeded to drown her porridge with salt. “And a bean goose.”
It was said with all the bright-eyed wonder of a small child teetering on the edge of the cliffs that towered over the sea far below, ignorant of all peril, only seeing the wild, wondrous beauty of it all.
But Nora was not a child, at least not in years – she was two-and-twenty.
Rory’s mother had warned her, after the first time Nora had spent the morning following Rory through the halls of her grandmother’s castle like an unwanted, too-loud shadow, that while Nora’s body had grown, the rest of her had not caught up.
It had been a rare moment of sternness from her mother, that she be unfailingly patient with this girl who had taken such an innocent liking to Rory’s taciturn company.
“You should have come with me.” Nora slurped at her spoon, and Rory scowled on the inside, keeping her features bland as she watched Nora dig into her breakfast. “It was magical.”
“Geese are not magical. They are dirty, and mean.”
“I fed it bits of soda bread that Sorcha gave me. I fed the pigs too.”
“You’ve been busy this morning.”
“The firecrests were the best part of the day.” She licked her lips happily. “What has been the best part of your day?”
“By the harp, Nora, I don’t know. It’s an hour past the sunrise.” Nora waited expectantly, eyes round, and Rory bit back a sigh. “Sorcha fried my sausages extra crisp, just as I like them. That has been the best part of my day.”
“I don’t like sausages.” A shadow darkened Nora’s face. “They kill the pigs to make them. I like the pigs. I feed them every morning.”
Before Rory could murmur an excuse and slip away, there was another clatter a little ways down the table.
Ionatán, the son of one her grandmother’s soldiers, his stoat-like face smirking with undisguised malice.
“Little piggies have a date with the butcher today, Nora,” he said, biting into a sausage with relish, and Rory’s spine stiffened as the color leeched out of Nora’s face.
“It’s Lughnasa tomorrow, and you know what that means.
” He smacked his lips slowly, deliberately.
“Platters full of fresh-cooked piggies.”
Nora whimpered, and Rory’s fingers tightened around her fork. “Leave her alone, Ionatán.”
His attention flickered over to her. “It speaks,” he said. “Didn’t think you knew how, princess. Thought you were too stupid to talk.”
“No,” she said. “Too clever to waste my breath talking to those who have nothing worth saying.”
His face twisted into a petulant sneer. “Well then, you shouldn’t spend so much time talking to that one.” He gestured contemptuously in Nora’s direction, and her pale blue eyes, a smidge too round, a bit too far apart, grew shiny with tears.
Something dark and ominous rumbled within Rory at the sight of those tears.
It was there, then – that vague-shaped knowing, a portrait with blurred edges and opaque colors – a seeing of what had not yet come to pass, a shattered window and a stumble and a flash of crimson on a shard of glass.
She could feel the truth of it humming in the back of her throat, burning along her tongue, aching to speak it, to give it voice to take shape and form and texture, something tangible and true birthed from the shadowy corners of her mind.
It would happen, and soon, if she wished it to.
She said nothing however, only watched as Ionatán’s smirk faded under the weight of her unblinking stare, until the rush of ice and fog faded back down her throat to settle into the pit of her belly, a slow-brewing storm of knowing.
Rory rose from the bench and reached for Nora, who still sat crying across from her, tears sliding down her cheeks and hands clasped in her lap.
“Come along, Nora,” she said. “I’ll take you to find your mamaí. ”
But it lingered, that blood-smeared image, remained in Rory’s mouth, an intangible taste of brittle glass and copper-tinged death, the taste of something dark and simmering and inevitable, something foreign – yet familiar.
Rory knew things, things that a six-year-old child should not know.
She knew them in the way that one knows that clouds billowing on the northwestern horizon bring an early autumn rain, that the falcon slicing its way down across the amber twilight sky signals the doom of some luckless creature below, yet more eerie, unsettling.
The falcon and the storm were natural-born things, but these flashes of knowledge that swirled within her – they were not natural.
They were knowings without namings, impossible to put to words, but if she were only to stretch out a hand and trace their whisperings in the air before her, they would take form beneath the swoop of her finger, thoughts taken shape, a potter crafting an urn from nothing but mud.
She knew them with a hazy kind of certainty, the irrevocable knowledge of what could one day come, but she did not understand them.
Her mother knew them too. Rory was certain of it, even if Mamaí would never acknowledge this shared bond of fog-ridden truths which idled between them, waiting, watchful, poised to take shape at the merest whisper.
This though – this was the clearest it had ever been, and for the first time, she allowed it to fester, to grow wild and unwieldy within her, more and more inevitable every time she passed Ionatán in the hall and encountered that insufferable smirk.
It exploded a fortnight after Lughnasa, when she stumbled upon Nora, crouched in a corner, sobbing as Ionatán danced above her, waggling his berry-stained hands in her face.
“Look at all the piggies’ blood,” she heard him sneer through Nora’s wails of terror, of distress.
“Maybe it’ll be yours next time – you spend enough time with the hogs, you start to look like one.
Maybe one of these nights, I’ll creep up to your bed with my knife and press it to your throat and –”
Rory inhaled sharply, her mother’s words echoing in her ears – have a care of Nora, a pheata – and let it loose, that diamond-bright knowing.
“Ionatán,” she said in a voice that was not her own, and as he spun around to face her, a fog-laden chill as merciless as the darkest winter night rolled into the room, and a stream of dark verses flowed forth from Rory’s tongue, in a language that was not of this world.
It gave voice to Ionatán’s doom.
His eyes widened as he stepped away from where Nora still huddled on the floor, stifling her cries against her knees.
“I didn’t touch her,” he said, high and afraid at whatever unknowable thing he saw churning in her eyes, the unnatural fog that swirled around her, reaching out for him with hungry, searching fingers. “I didn’t touch her – I didn’t –”
Rory’s gaze never left his face, but she saw it, somehow, with this otherworldly vision that had settled over her – the rough edge of the stones by the window.
She saw it, how his foot would catch and he would stumble, arms flailing, crashing through the window, the dagger-sharp shards slicing into his skin as he shrieked, tumbling to the hard-packed earth far below.
She saw him, twisted and mangled, lying on the ground, his face slashed and bloody, mouth ajar, eyes empty.
He was still backing away as she saw it, how it would unfold, this willing she had brought into being.
“Goodbye, Ionatán,” she said, in her own voice again, in her native tongue, as her shadows wrapped their ethereal fingers around his short legs, as the back of his heel caught on that fateful raised edge.
She watched, expressionless, as the glass shattered and blood sprayed and Ionatán screamed as he disappeared, as the sound of his agony was abruptly cut off with a dull thud far below.
A tumult of horrified voices arose from outside the broken window.
Rory wiped her clammy palms against the silk of her skirt – clammy, she knew, not from seeing a boy she had known since birth fall to his death, but from whatever icy magic she had called forth to allow it to happen – and turned toward where Nora still crouched on the floor.
Rory touched her shoulder gently, and Nora looked up, her flushed face marred with tears and snot. “Come along, Nora,” she said as the shouting grew strident beneath her, a crowd forming around Ionatán lying lifeless in her grandmother’s courtyard. “How would you like a biscuit?”
It was worth it, she had thought then, becoming a murderess, to see the light come back into Nora’s pale eyes.
Though she never confirmed it, Rory knew that her mother knew the truth about Ionatán.