And sure, as Cat’s da would say, and sure if Caitríona wasn’t still thinking of magic plasters when she reeled off the train early on a Monday after the St Patrick’s craic in Dublin town, and sure if those thoughts didn’t bring her to visit Sheila’s grave first, before going to the Reek herself, as she’d done a dozen times since her aunt’s death.
And sure and if she didn’t pass Joanne Walker on the way, and another woman, calling herself Maeve, who was the tallest thing Caitríona had ever laid eyes on, and sure and if by the end of the maddest three days any mortal had ever known, if Caitríona didn’t know then that her aunt had been the Irish Mage, and that she, Caitríona O’Reilly, the oldest niece of the MacNamarra clan, was meant to take up that mantle now.
Perfect, Caitríona O’Reilly thought, and because Joanne was on her mind, she then heard the word echoed as Joanne would have heard it: pair-fect. And what, Joanne would have wanted to know, was a Pair Fect? Maybe it was two people who were fecked, as if fect might be the past tense of fecked, which was already the past tense of feck, the Irish way of saying a word that puritanical American television always bleeped out. Unless it was an Irishman saying it, because feck slipped by their censors when the more Anglicized version of the word wouldn’t.
Americans and Irish. Separated by a common language. Caitríona put her fingertips against the glass case encompassing the Clonycavan Man, one of the most perfectly conserved bog men to be found in Ireland. His fragile thin skin, sagging over shriveled muscles, his bones, his teeth, they were all stained rich mahogany brown from the ancient peat they’d nested in. Pickled, they were: bog acid pickled the creatures caught in it, and she’d read about each and every circumstance that improved the chances of a body being preserved instead of disintegrating. They were many, and in Ireland, they were easy to come by. Nearly sixty bog men had been found over the years, and that, Caitríona reckoned, was just the ones they’d found. Whole civilizations might be buried in the peat, if only they dug deep enough.
So it wasn’t only herbs Auntie Sheila had been digging for in the bogs. What could be worse than being murdered and thrown into the bogs but to lie in rest for centuries before being dug up by a rumbling peat harvester with teeth so vicious that no one could be sure if the poor mummy had been cut in half before death, or if his lower half had been severed and chewed up by the peat cutter. And the Clonycavan Man, he was one of the lucky ones. He’d only been murdered, his head smashed in and so well-preserved there were still bits of brain inside his perfectly preserved skull, and they knew what his last meals had been as well. And he’d been a bit of a dandy as well, with imported hair gel in the straggly hair that remained on his head. Caitríona hoped he’d died before being chopped in half, but she could feel the poor creature’s spirit still trapped within his body, the agony of his death never leaving him.
Auntie Sheila had searched out lost people like these in the bogs, and laid their spirits to rest. But these ones, the bog men brought to the museum on Kildare Street, they had been separated from their place of death before Sheila had found them, and their spirits cried and clawed at their glass coffins, a torture the anthropologists could never study. It was the memory of bog-tromping, and the thought of these glass-encased bog-men, that had brought Caitríona to Dublin at all.
Joanne, Caitríona thought, would know what to do. She’d dealt with ghosts before, though she said she couldn’t see them herself. Nor could Caitríona, but she felt the captured spirit within the glass regardless, as she’d never felt it before in all the times she’d visited the museum. The bog men had been spectacles then, a breathtaking glimpse at the horror of perfectly preserved death. Now she could hardly understand how she’d missed their cries.
Joanne would start with a power circle, that, at least, Cat knew, and so that was where she was to begin as well. The bog men display was strangely suited for it, with each mummy encapsulated down a winding ramp within a border of taller walkways. She couldn’t quite make a complete circle, at least not in one go, but then, there was more than one lost spirit to attend to, too.
Cat murmured, “Sorry, sorry,” as she stepped around visitors. Most moved easily, more fascinated by the mummies than a living girl, but a few glanced her way in surprise. The spear, she supposed, for there was nothing extraordinary about the rest of her, except perhaps the fire-engine-red hair straight from a bottle. Still, it would be the spear that caught their attention, though in the week and some she’d carried it not a soul had mentioned it as a spear, but as a walking stick. A very tall walking stick, to be sure, but not one of them seemed to see the black ironwood spearhead atop a white wood haft.
Just as well, for there’d be no explaining to the guarda why she was carrying a deadly weapon through the hills of Ireland and the streets of Dublin.
There were places between the circular displays where she could slip through, build a circle that way, though there was nothing elegant about creating a power circle by way of squashing herself. If she hadn’t grown two inches and gotten slimmer with it, she’d have never fit, but as it was she squeezed through, thinking resentfully of Joanne’s height and slender build and the deadly white leather coat that proclaimed her cousin as a hero not to mess with. Cat popped out the other side with a whoosh of breath and stumbled over a child trying to go the way she’d come. They stopped, sharing a guilty, wide-eyed look before Cat bowed to show the boy the way. He beamed and scampered through, and Caitríona wound her way around the displays.
I’ll set it on fire with me mind, she thought, and all but laughed at herself. A few months was no time to learn magic in, not without a teacher. She had no sense of what she ought to do to save captured spirits, but the first magery she had done had been simple: I’ll set it on fire with me mind, she’d said again and again, until she had.
I’ll free them, so, she said to herself again and again. I’ll build a circle to keep them safe as they’re drawn free from their broken bodies, and then I’ll release it and them, so their spirits may go where they will. It had no skill to it, no shape or rhythm to make it a spell, but that was how the magic had been built on Croagh Padraig, and it was how she would make it today. Auntie Sheila would have had an elegance and a form to it, but that would come in time: she was young still, and had long years to learn in.
It wasn’t a circle and it wasn’t a shamrock that she walked. Her purse bumped her hip and the heel of the spear clacked against the ground with each step, a quiet rhythm that helped her trace a shape across the floor. It was something of an infinity loop, a never-ending figure 8. That would do, and more, the idea of it sparked delight in her heart, as if the circle wasn’t the best shape for her magery anyway. As fast as delight came, it slipped away again with a pang of wondering what Auntie Sheila might have taught her, had she lived. Both those things slipped into the circle, making it one of hope and regret, and that felt right to her, for what else was she weaving but a story of that? A story of death, which was always a story of regret even when it was a good death, and a story of hope that she might release the captured spirits of the dead. And stories were the lifeblood of her people, their pride and their joy. Their weaving ran deep in the blood, and that became what she wanted to do: to tell the stories that could only be told through magery.