Chapter Two
The walk to my cottage takes under twenty minutes, and in all that time neither of us makes a sound.
His boots fall nearly silent on the mud; the horse pads behind us with the same unnatural quiet, no jingle of tack, no blowing of breath.
My lantern bobs in my free hand. His grip on the other does not slacken.
I think, as we walk, about every story my grandmother ever told me.
The Dullahan is a king who was punished for his pride.
The Dullahan is a god the new church called a devil because it could not kill him.
The Dullahan is the soul of a Norman knight who lost his head at a crossing and rides, still looking for it.
The Dullahan is the night itself, gathered into a shape, riding through the world to call the dead to him.
The Dullahan is what the priests will not name, because to name it is to invite it.
My grandmother did not pretend to know which version was true.
It did not matter, she said. What mattered was that the rules were old and the rules held.
A woman of our line did not run from the night, because she belonged to the night more than to the day.
And one day the night would come asking, and when it came, what she did was hers to choose.
She did not tell me what she would have chosen.
I think she was telling me anyway.
We reach the bend by the bent yew where the track turns off, and I lead him down it.
My cottage sits in a small clearing at the track’s end, the kitchen garden run wild on the west side, the rowan my great-grandmother planted on the east. The rowan is bare now.
The berries are gone; the crows have had them.
I stop at the door. He stops behind me.
I do not look back. I open the door and step into the kitchen, setting my lantern on the long oak table that runs the length of the room.
The hearth is banked but not cold. I swing the kettle hook aside, add wood to the embers, and crouch to blow on them until the flame catches and the kitchen fills with light.
When I straighten and turn, he is standing in my doorway.
He has to duck to come in. Once inside, he straightens to his full height.
The horse stays outside. I hear it shift under the rowan. It does not move otherwise.
He closes the door behind him with one hand and turns the latch.
I stand at the hearth with my hands clasped at my waist, and watch him.
He crosses the kitchen and sets his head down on the oak, turning it so the dark eyes face me.
The mouth is closed. The hair falls dark across the brow.
The face is that of a man perhaps thirty when he died: a strong nose, a hard mouth, a small scar through the left eyebrow that I find myself staring at longer than I should.
He sets his hands on the table on either side of the head and stands there, regarding me with both attentions at once.
“What do I call you?” I ask.
He does not answer.
“I am Ailish,” I say. “If you did not know.”
The black eyes regard me, without flicker, without shift. Only a steadiness so absolute that I feel watched in my bones.
I move.
I do it because if I do not, I will stand at the hearth all night. At the small basin by the door I pour water from the ewer and wash my hands. I dry them on the hanging cloth, take off my shawl and hang it on the peg, and set my satchel down beside the basin.
When I turn back to him, he has not moved.
I cross to the table and stand opposite him, the head between us, and look at him.
“What do you want from me?”
A long pause.
Then he lifts one hand from the table and extends it across the wood, palm open. He does not reach for me; he simply opens his palm, the way he did on the road. An offer.
I look at his palm, then at the head between us, at the black eyes.
I walk around the table to his side.
He turns to face me without lowering his hand. I am close now, close enough to smell him for the first time, and the smell is not what I expected: cold earth, leather long-cured, something sweet and dark beneath it, like the inside of a hawthorn flower. No rot in it. No death.
I place my hand in his.
He has not asked me a question I can answer with words, but I am Ailish, daughter of Maeve. I know what is being asked.
I draw my hand out of his. He lets it go.
I lift my own hands to the laces of my dress.