Holiday Magick (20 page)

But I stay wide awake until the sun brims on the horizon, because when I squint toward the forest, I know something darker than the night itself is looking back at me.

Heat sears my cheeks as I spin around the bonfire, my calloused feet thumping to the beat of the drums over my shoulder. I've tied my hair into a long braid and threaded it with the silver ribbon Mother gave me for my tenth birthday, and my best dress brushes my calves with each step. The terrors at the edge of the fence are Fagan's problem tonight.

I see Gabriel on the other side of the fire. His face is swirling and distorted through the mass of flames and branches we scavenged from the forest's edges, but I can tell he's laughing, his expression a mirror of my own. When he looks at me, his green eyes widen, as does his smile.

Suddenly it's not just the fire that warms me.

The drums slow, allowing the handful of fiddles and woodwinds to end the song with a flourish, and we dancers slow into panting stillness. Mother calls me to the edge of the dance square, where she twirls my stray hairs around her finger before tucking them back into place. This far from the fire, there's a chill in the air, and without thinking I draw my sleeves over my hands.

Her eyes linger on the ribbon pinned to my chest, and she grins. “You won the knife-throwing competition.”

I nod, but before I can muster up the breath to reply, her eyes flit over my shoulder. When I turn, I see Gabriel approaching, one hand rubbing at his jaw.

“Gabriel Quillan,” she says, raising her voice enough for him to hear. “Are you enjoying yourself this evening?”

Gabriel swallows hard and stares at the ground. “I-I am, Lady Bray. If it's no trouble, could I have a moment with Eileen?”

Mother's smile becomes small and knowing. She stands with a swirl of rustling skirts and the smell of lavender. “Of course.”

I watch her disappear in the crowd, sure she's headed to check up on one of my brothers or Papa. When I turn back to Gabriel, he's sitting on the straw mat my mother had left vacant. Slowly, I settle beside him, tucking my legs beneath me so my dirty feet are hidden from view. In the semi-darkness, his skin looks soft and pale. He opens and closes his mouth several times, as if he wants to speak but can't find the words to say. At the bonfire, the music starts again and the dancers leap into position.

I try to be discreet about it, but I use the time he focuses on the ground to study him, like I always seem to these days, looking from his unruly dark hair to the way he twists a bit of hem between his fingers. It takes me a moment to realize he's blushing.

Finally, I break the silence. “We'll have four new lambs within the week, I wager.”

“Six at ours,” he says, relief evident in his voice.

“And Fagan has an eye on your cousin. The blond one, what was her name…”

“Brigid?”

“That's it.” I smile. “He has a pile of letters from her, hidden under a mat in his bedroom. I saw him adding another to it last week. He's saving up from his work at the smithy to buy a ring, he told me.”

The tension eases like a loosed arrow. Weddings, while scarce in Cillian, are almost as welcome a distraction as our spring bonfire. Even the most unknown of couples find themselves reciting their vows before hundreds of happy spectators, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in Cillian's tiny chapel. And the feasts have been known to last for days.

Gabriel's looking past me, and I know his eyes are on the forest. We might not talk about it, and we might do our best to ignore it, but the trees are never far from anyone's mind in Cillian.

But before I can try to move the conversation along, Gabriel's brow furrows.

“There's someone coming.”

“What?” I straighten, peering into the darkness and willing my eyes to adjust so I can see more than the outlines of hills and the ever-present black wall of trees. It takes a moment, but I finally see what Gabriel is talking about—a tall, thin figure is scrambling away from the forest and toward the fire, arms waving. I can't make out what he's shouting, but I don't need to.

We're on our feet in an instant. Gabriel darts away, and I know he's going to alert his father, Cillian's self-appointed lawkeeper. Papa will be with him. I doubt it will be more than a few minutes before they arrive.

I'm still staring at the figure when he stumbles forward, careening to the ground with a high-pitched cry. Before I can stop to think, I'm sprinting toward him. It's not until I'm a few yards away that I hesitate, slowing to a stop and taking several steps back. Papa's favorite cautionary tale echoes through my head—it is a story of a man who escaped the forest, but whose family learned he'd been driven mad by it when they caught him killing their livestock and eating it raw.

The figure draws closer, and I recognize my brother's wiry frame. He limps, nursing a badly skinned shin. I breathe a sigh, but a moment later a new shot of horror rushes through me. Had he actually gone inside the tree line?

I'm close enough for him to notice now. He looks up at me. “Eileen.”

“Papa and Conn Quillan are on the way,” I reply, fighting the urge to draw back another step. “What happened?”

“The trees…they got the Murray boy.”

An image shudders into focus in my mind. Twelve-year-old Owen Murray, son of Cillian's baker, all knees and elbows. The fear for my brother shifts to dread.

“I saw him,” Fagan says. “I was tending the sheep, and Brigid—I mean, I got out of the paddock and started walking the grounds, and I saw him chasing that awful goat of his. It was running toward the forest. He got just past the first trees, and then he just…he disappeared. And all I could hear was him screaming.”

Heavy footsteps sound behind me, followed by the ragged breathing of a dozen winded men. When I look, I see the group of elders who make up Cillian's council, their red faces painted with differing degrees of anxiety. They listen, their expressions grim, as Fagan retells his story. When he finishes, it's Gabriel's father, Conn Quillan, who speaks, and his words are soft.

“It's only yet March,” Conn says, searching the faces of the men around them. “We're still weeks from the last frost. It's too early for the forest to wake.”

The other men nod. There must be some mistake, they agree. It's always later in the month or even into April before the forest wakes up and begins creeping, feeling its way into corners of Cillian's borders and minds alike. The boy must have wandered close to the sleeping forest, gotten spooked, and yelled for help. He must still be out there. Fagan doesn't protest, but I can tell by the look on his face that he knows what he saw.

Fagan volunteers to lead the men to the place where the Murray boy disappeared. In all, eighteen men gather at the bonfire and agree to go with my brother and search the forest's border. I find Gabriel's face among the searchers and feel much braver than I should.

“I'll go look, too,” I say, my voice almost lost in the uncertain rumble of the crowd.

Cillian is a lot of things, but its women are valued as much as its men, and though some eyebrows rise, I'm told to grab a lantern and come along.

It's the closest I've come to the forest, closer even than the time my brothers dared me to pass the moss-covered rock that Cillian residents consider the barrier between the forest's domain and ours. The trees loom over me, dark sentinels so tall I have to crane my neck just to see their skeletal branches silhouetted against the moon.

We travel the edge of the forest for what feels like hours, our lanterns sending panes of yellow light through the thick shadows between the trees. Every so often, a runner from Cillian comes to tell us the Murray boy still hasn't been found in the village. On my left, Fagan shakes his head and mutters that we won't find the boy alive. But the men keep searching and reassuring each other that Owen will turn up any minute.

And he does.

I spot it first, my lantern falling on a shock of orange wool that starkly contrasts with the trees. It's clinging to a pointed branch, fluttering in the breeze that swirls through the forest's undergrowth and sends the leaves to spinning.

“Fagan,” I say, jerking my lantern so the light sways and attracts my brother's attention. When he comes closer, I point at the wool, and Fagan's face pales. Slowly, as if he's dreading what he might see, Fagan cranes his lantern as close to the forest as he dares so we can see more.

More shredded bits of Owen's sweater lie beyond the first. And though the light is bad, I can see tramped-down marks in the leaf litter, and dark, wet smears lining the scuffs along the ground.

“Owen,” we whisper in unison.

My stomach rises in my throat as Fagan yells for the others. They thunder toward us, equal parts excited and nervous, but their faces fall when they look where Fagan is pointing. A low moan comes from the back of the crowd, and a man I recognize as Owen's father sinks to his knees in the grass, head in his hands.

Everything's silent, except for the moaning, and a soft, crooning chuckle that comes from the trees.

After that, the attacks come once a week. Two young sisters on their way home from an aunt's house are the forest's next victims, followed by a middle-aged man I know only as one of Cillian's council members. Though it sits, eerily silent, during the day, the forest creeps closer every night, and it takes less than a month for it to halve the distance between the village and the tree line.

But the night watches go on for my family, and the handful of others lucky enough to have livestock. Every fourth night, I bolt down my dinner and hurry out to the paddock, racing the sunset and praying I make it there before the darkness engulfs our hilly patch of land. By the fifth week, the whispering is so close I can almost feel the forest's breath on my neck, and the sheep spend their nights in wide-eyed terror.

The fence is rough at my back. For the hundredth time, I wish we could build with something other than mud or reeds. Cillian's carpenters refuse to work with wood, for obvious reasons.

I take a deep breath and run my fingers over my new throwing knife. Papa gave it to me the week before, after one of our sheep hopped the fence and darted for the forest. It had made it only a few steps into the trees before it was shredded.

“If another one runs, kill it,” Papa had told me, his face grim. “At least then there will be meat to sell.”

I hate the thought of it, but I can see his point. The sheep are no good to us if they're torn to pieces by the trees, their blood feeding any roots in a hundred-foot radius. I just hope I can do it, if the situation calls for it. I might be the best knife thrower in Cillian (better even than Gabriel, even though I've let him win a couple times), but actually killing something makes my stomach churn.

The fence rustles behind me and I tense, slowly turning to look for the source of the noise. I nearly gasp with relief when I see Gabriel, smiling shyly as he drops to the ground on my right. He has a bow in one hand and a quiver of weighted reed arrows in the other.

“I thought you might want some company,” he says. Even in the sinking sun, I can see the blush creeping across his cheeks. He smells like fresh bread and cinnamon and I think I might love him.

I nod toward the bow. “Or protection?”

He shifts and clears his throat. “Mostly company. If I get back early enough no one will miss me.”

We lapse into a silence broken only by the sheep's occasional nervous murmurs. Even the trees are quiet, but I can feel their presence like feather-soft fingers on my skin. In the last few weeks, they've gotten so close I can almost make out the veins in their broad leaves.

“I'm thinking about leaving Cillian,” he says.

I turn to him so fast that it sends pain shooting up my neck. “What?”

“I'm thinking about leaving,” he repeats. “I'll be eighteen next month, and Pa's wanting me to learn how to run the village. But…” He takes a deep breath before he continues. “I don't want to.”