Darcy and O'Mara (a short story)

   Darcy heard about a river where the fish could whistle, and if you put your head into the water you could hear the beautiful harmonies they created. Darcy was too refined to put his head into anything. He set out for the river one morning with his fishing rod. O'Mara stayed behind. He had fallen in love with a beautiful woman who used to walk through the woodland and meadows, talking to the wild flowers and birds. He was going to spend the day following her, waiting for a chance to meet her.

   After she left the woods she came to a hole in the ground. She couldn't see the bottom of it, so she knelt at the edge of the hole to look down into it. As soon as she peered over the edge, her head felt weightless. She put her hands over it, and they felt as light as feathers. She dived into the hole, but instead of going down, she went up, floating away, heading for the sky.

   It was a beautiful feeling at first, but then the thought crossed her mind that she wouldn't stop, that she'd disappear into the sky, just like the earth that had once filled the hole. She longed for gravity, and she tried swimming through the air to get out of the glare of the hole with its anti-gravitational force. She was exhausted by the time she returned to the safe arms of gravity, but she was happy. This feeling lasted until she realised that she was falling at an alarming speed.

   O'Mara saw her falling, and he knew he had to act quickly. There was a French man on the road nearby. He was leading a pony who was pulling a cart, and on the back of the cart there was a mattress. The mattress had been specially made for a woman who could throw her own hands away. Her arms would always follow the hands and then retract to return the hands to her side, like a dog fetching a stick. She spoke in extravagant gestures, unwittingly throwing her hands away. She was always accidentally hitting people who stood too near. She used to talk in her sleep, and her hands would be thrown all around the room. She had often hurt them when they hit the wall or the floor, so she started sleeping in the centre of a huge room with a soft carpet. This protected her hands, but she thought there was something living in the carpet and in the mattress. Whatever it was, it used to steal the rings from her fingers. She demanded that the carpet and the mattress be destroyed, and her French servant was taking the mattress to a cliff to throw it into the sea.

   When O'Mara asked him if he could use the mattress to save a woman's life, the French servant said he'd have to get his mistress's permission. He took a small cage from the back of the cart, and from the cage he took a pigeon. He said to the bird, "I need you to go back to the castle. This is very, very important. You need to ask if I can give the mattress to a young man who desires to save a lady's life. Do not laugh. You must try to remember this. Do you understand me?" The pigeon stared back at him. "Good. You must try to express this using the system of blinks I taught you."

   The pigeon left for the castle. O'Mara and the French servant sat by the side of the road as they awaited its return. They smoked pipes and spoke about strange growths they'd seen on people's heads.

   It was nearly dark when the bird returned with a note. The servant unfolded the paper. "It says 'The pigeon said something about camels'." He turned to the pigeon and said, "You stupid bird!" He read the rest of the note. "'The mistress agrees to your request'. Ah! I knew you would not let me down." He kissed the pigeon.

   O'Mara and the servant took the mattress from the cart and ran to the edge of the hole. They put the mattress on the ground just before the woman landed on that spot, but she just bounced back over the hole and started floating away again. O'Mara reached out and caught her foot, but he floated away with her. The servant caught O'Mara's foot, and he was four feet in the air before he realised he was floating away with them.

   It was at this point that Darcy returned from his fishing trip. He saw the three of them rising to the sky. He cast his fishing line into the air and the hook caught the boot of the servant. He reeled them in, and the three of them landed on the mattress. Something in the mattress said 'ow!'. When they got to their feet, the woman went straight to Darcy and kissed him on the cheek. O'Mara wasn't happy with the way she was giving him all the credit for her rescue. The pigeon didn't like it either.

The Fire

   Darcy and O'Mara were stuck at a wedding. The groom was the most boring man in the country. This had been scientifically proven in an experiment conducted by a man with no eyebrows. He was conducting tests on the bride to see what she was. She must have been the ___est woman in the country if she agreed to marry such a bore, and the man with no eyebrows was determined to fill in the blank. The other option was that she wasn't really a woman.
   The wedding ceremony took place in a woodland clearing. It was conducted by a druid who hid in the trees. The reception took place in a field next to the river. Just as the groom began his speech, a huge ball of fire emerged from the river in a deafening noise, the sort of sound you'd expect a living being to make as it breaks free from its antithesis. Relief gripped the wedding guests when the groom's speech was cut short, but they soon began to wonder if they were facing a greater danger.
   The ball of flame flew over their heads and landed in a tree. The tree exploded in flames, and within seconds it fell over, scattering the wedding guests in the field. When it landed on the ground a cloud of smoke and ashes rose from it. A man emerged from the cloud. He was coughing and his clothes were singed. The man with no eyebrows would have regarded him as the luckiest man in Ireland for emerging from such an ordeal with both of his eyebrows still intact.
   Most of the guests considered him to be lucky too, because they thought he must have been in the tree when the fire struck it. But he told them that he had been in the river, and they started to wonder if he was the fire. This interpretation seemed to be confirmed when a mouse caught fire (the mouse emitted a sound of relief when its fire came into contact with water). But he insisted that he had nothing to do with the mouse's misfortune. "I'd never hurt a living creature," he said.
   "Well then why are you holding a stick and creeping up behind that rabbit?" O'Mara said.
   He suddenly realised what he was doing. He dropped the stick and backed away from it.
   "It seems to me as if you're possessed by something that has an aversion to animals," Darcy said. The man threw an apple at the bride. "And to all forms of life," Darcy added.
   The man's name was Thomas. After he had apologised to the bride, Darcy and O'Mara led him away. They said they knew someone who could help him, and they were glad to get away before the groom recommenced his speech.
   Thomas killed two birds and a squirrel on the way. He cried after killing the squirrel. They reached their destination before sunset that evening. The man they wanted to meet was called Peter. He was smoking his pipe in front of his cottage when they arrived. Darcy said, "We have another patient for you. He's having trouble with animals. Or they're having trouble with him. He's developed a knack for killing them."
   "What's the problem with that?" Peter said. "He'll never go hungry."
   "He doesn't want to kill them at all. There was a squirrel..."
   Thomas started crying again. The tears began to dry up as he choked a magpie, until he realised what he was doing.
   "I think I see the problem," Peter said.
   "And do you see a solution?" O'Mara said.
   "I see something. We'll try something, and whether or not it's a solution, we'll just have to wait and see."
   Peter's idea was to tempt whatever was possessing him back outside, and if he was full of fire, they'd need something highly flammable to tempt it out. "The spirit seems to have an antagonism towards animals," O'Mara said. "What's the most highly flammable animal?"
   "We'll need something much bigger than an animal," Peter said. "The library in the monastery would be just the thing to tempt an evil spirit."
   Darcy, O'Mara and Peter went to see the monks. Before they left, they locked Thomas in a room in Peter's cottage. He wanted to be locked up so he wouldn't harm anything, but when they returned a few hours later he was cooking a pig on a spit and crying. "I'm so sorry," he said to the pig as he turned it around.
   "You can dry your tears," Peter said. "Soon you'll be rid of the thing that's taken up residency inside you. We're taking you to the library in the monastery."
   "What happens if it burns all the books?"
   "Obviously the monks weren't too keen on that. That's why we'll have to break in there at night."
   "I can't burn down a library in a monastery."
   "It's the only way. Do you want to be hurting animals for the rest of your life?"
   Thomas reluctantly agreed. They took him to the monastery after midnight, and they broke a window in the library to get in. As soon as Thomas stepped inside, the fire emerged and covered all of the shelves in flames. The monks arrived shortly afterwards. They doused the flames in holy water, and they could hear the spirit dying a painful death. It started as a deafening noise that faded to silence. The fire was gone, but all of the books had been burned, and for Thomas it felt worse than what he had done to the squirrel, but they explained to him that it was just a fake library. The real library was underground. Invaders would arrive every few years with a need to burn books, and the fake library satisfied that need.
   Thomas was delighted to be free of the spirit. He felt at one with nature after this, and he became a monk. He helped the other monks re-build the fake library for the next attack.

Darcy and O'Mara - Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter One.

Darcy and O’Mara were walking along the banks of a river one afternoon when they came across a woman who was crying. They asked her what was wrong and she told them a story about a man who had called to her house earlier that day. One of the maids let him in. He wore a dark green cloak, and he brought his own breeze to keep the cloak flowing behind him, even as he stood still. He introduced himself as one of her distant cousins, Corcran ‘Cloudy’ Mac Giolla Mo Chuda. He gave her a card and he bowed. On the card his name was written in gold letters, just above the word ‘Historian’.

His breeze went all over the house. It confused her dog, who ran around in circles. The servants didn’t know what to do. One of them was setting a fire in a bedroom when the breeze entered through the open door. He lay on his back and pretended to be dead. This was what he always did when he was confused. He thought it made him look cool-headed.

The woman, whose name was Aishling, didn’t know if she should trust this man who claimed to be her cousin. She decided to go to sleep to consult the committee that appeared in her dreams because they always gave her sound advice. After falling asleep on an armchair she asked the committee about her visitor. The chairman of the committee, who was trying to ignore the crow on his head, told her to wake up. The crow nodded to indicate his approval of the chairman’s advice. When she woke, Corcran ‘Cloudy’ Mac Giolla Mo Chuda was gone. She immediately thought of the ring. She went upstairs to the bedroom where the servant was still pretending to be dead. She went to the chest of drawers and she opened the bottom drawer. The fake back to the drawer had been removed and the ring was gone.

The ring had been in her family for generations. Her father once told her a story about how one of their ancestors was amongst a group of men out hunting with a king on an afternoon in August. They were hunting a famous stag that had evaded capture for years. After hours of searching for it, they saw the stag on top of a hill. An archer was about to fire an arrow at it when a hawk landed on the stag’s antlers. The men were transfixed by the sight. They stared at the hawk as they walked towards it, but when they got to the top of the hill they realised that the hawk was perched on a branch of a bare tree. They looked back and they saw the stag in the valley below them, where they had just been. The stag ran away. Between the roots of the tree they found a red bag full of gold brooches, rings and bracelets. The king divided these amongst his men, and the stag was never hunted again.

When Aishling saw that the ring had been taken she went outside and looked for her so-called cousin. She ran as far as the river, but she couldn’t find him, and she feared the ring was gone for good.

Darcy and O’Mara promised to find Corcran and return the ring to its rightful owner. They went back to her house, and they questioned the servant who had been playing dead. He said, “I saw the man looking through the drawers and I knew exactly what he was looking for.”

“Why didn’t you stop him?” Darcy said.

“I formed a plan. I pretended to be dead. My father used to do it every Saturday night when he was courting my mother. She didn’t know he was courting her at the time, but that’s another story. I thought that by pretending to be dead he’d do whatever he planned to do and I’d be able to observe him. And he did. When I saw him searching for something I thought he must be looking for the ring, and I knew he’d find it eventually.”

“When you saw what he was doing, why didn’t you stop him?”

“Because he’d have known I wasn’t dead and he’d have stopped doing it.”

“I can’t fault your logic.”

Aishling showed them the card. The only two people who had touched the card were Aishling and Corcran. They went to see a man called Brendan who had a dog with an exceptional sense of smell. The dog’s name was Mullins. They got him to sniff the card, but he went straight to Aishling and started wagging his tail.

“He always goes for the easy option first,” Brendan said, and then he said to Mullins, “No, not her. The other one. The other one.”

Mullins ran off, then slowed to a canter that became a walk, and then he stopped. He lay down on the ground and he fell asleep.

Darcy said, “That option wasn’t much more difficult.”

“Just keep heading in that direction and ye’ll find him,” Brendan said.

O’Mara patted the dog on the head as they walked past him.

They spent the rest of the day walking in that direction. They met a man who was fishing at a lake, and he said he’d seen a man in a dark green cloak go around the lake about half an hour earlier.

When the sun reached the horizon they stopped before a field full of rocks and gorse. Beyond the field there was a hill.

“Is there any point in going on?” O’Mara said. “He might have set off in this direction, and we know he stuck to this route as far as the lake, but he could have gone left or right at any point after it.”

“He wouldn’t have gone too far left or right. He’d have a destination in mind, and he’d take the quickest route to it.”

A woman with long golden hair appeared on top of the hill. Her face was illuminated by the last of the evening sun. A gust of wind blew in her direction.

Darcy and O’Mara saw a dark green cloak rise out of the field, revealing a crouching man who had been hiding beneath it. When he saw his cloak flying away he ran after it. Darcy and O’Mara ran after him.

As Corcran ran up the hill he tried to control his breeze with a series of commands and whistles, but the breeze seemed intent on running away with the wind. The woman waved at him as he ran past her on top of the hill. Darcy and O’Mara followed him shortly afterwards. She smiled at O’Mara.

Corcran was looking up at his cloak as he ran down the other side of the hill. He tripped and fell, and he rolled to the bottom of the hill. He came to a halt in a stream, and before he got out of it, Darcy and O’Mara caught up with him.

“Give us the ring,” Darcy said.

“What ring?”

O’Mara held up his spear and said, “Maybe a hole in your head would help jog your memory.”

“Here,” Corcran said, and he threw the ring to Darcy. The cloak landed on his head.

Darcy and O’Mara walked back the way they came, and they returned the ring to Aishling late that night. She was overjoyed. She felt that the occasion called for a celebration that would burn brightly in people’s minds for months to come. Within minutes, all of her friends and neighbours had arrived and they were well on their way to burning holes in their minds. Music and laughter filled the rooms. Mullins slept soundly through the whole thing.

On the following day, Darcy and O’Mara went back to the hill where they had caught Corcran on the previous day. O’Mara wanted to meet the woman with the long golden hair. There was a village called Kilforrinne near the hill. When O’Mara told the villagers about the woman with the long hair they knew exactly who he was talking about, but no one could say where she was. She had been kidnapped during the night.

 

 

 

Chapter Two.

The woman’s name was Gráinne. When Darcy and O’Mara had seen her on top of the hill, it was her hair that was controlling the wind. She could move her hair by the power of thought, and then the wind would follow her hair. Her hair was never blown across her face, except when she wanted to hide behind it.

Her father, Sean, always told her to hide her power because he knew there would be people who’d try to use it for their own advantage if they knew what she could do. When she was twelve, someone called out her name on a windy day and she turned around suddenly. The wind changed direction with her, and twenty-seven people fell over. They had all been leaning into the wind at the time (leaning into the wind was a popular local past-time). One of the women who fell over made the realisation that Gráinne had caused the sudden change of direction in the wind. News of her ability spread through the village, but her father warned people not to let the news stray too far from its home.

When she was sixteen she created a tornado by accident. It left her grandfather in a tree, but he said he enjoyed it, and he wanted her to do it again. Her parents wouldn’t let her do it again. They were always warning her against public demonstrations of her ability. But someone must have found out about it, someone who could see a potential use for being able to control the wind, someone who was willing to kidnap a woman to acquire that power.

After she disappeared, the wind was coming from the east, so they thought she must be heading in that direction. Darcy and O’Mara promised to help get her back.

Her father went to a man called Doyle who lived in an ancient oak tree on top of a hill. It had once been a fairy meeting place. Doyle used to travel all around the country, playing his flute. He was walking down a road one evening when he heard the fairies singing. He got out his flute and played along. He played until the following morning, while the fairies sang and danced with cats and drank from cups that never ran dry. To demonstrate their gratitude they showed him how to get into the tree, and he’d been living there ever since.

Sean went to the tree and knocked on the trunk. Doyle emerged from a small door amongst the roots and he invited Sean in. It was much bigger inside. They climbed a spiral staircase to a room amongst the branches. This room was invisible from the outside. There were windows on all sides, and Sean could see for miles. He told Doyle about Gráinne’s disappearance. Doyle got out a telescope that the fairies had constructed, and Sean used it to scan the horizon to the east. He found what he was looking for. He saw the back of a woman who was wearing a light-blue cloak, just like the one Gráinne had been wearing. The hood was up, but he could see strands of long golden hair. She was walking quickly, and she was accompanied by two men, one at either side of her.

While Sean was visiting Doyle in the tree, Gráinne’s brother and sister, Dara and Aoife, were busy organising search parties. Darcy and O’Mara would be one group. The other groups were made up of relatives and local people. Sean returned and told them which way to go. Some of the search parties set off straightaway.

Darcy and O’Mara travelled on foot. Whenever they met someone they’d inquire about the woman in the blue cloak with the two men. Most people hadn’t seen them. Some people thought they’d seen something, but they weren’t sure. It could have been nothing at all, because in the past they’d seen things and thought, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely something.’ And then on the following day it would be proved beyond all reasonable doubt that in fact it was nothing at all, and they’d be laughed at by their friends and family, and even animals would look as if they know how stupid it is to confuse nothing for something, because there are people who talk to the animals at night and tell them all the local news. The animals know everything about everyone. They try to express their knowledge in long stares, to make people feel guilty and nervous, and when the animals learn how to stand on their hind legs and talk they’ll have enough information to make everyone dig holes to hide in, and live in the ground while the animals live in houses, wearing our shoes and clothes, smoking pipes, and cleaning their ears with our spoons.

Darcy and O’Mara got stuck in some very long conversations when they asked about Gráinne, but one man said he had seen a woman go by with two men. “This was less than ten minutes ago,” he said, “but ye can catch up with them easily enough by taking a shortcut on the path through the trees.”

Darcy and O’Mara thanked him, and they took the shortcut. It was a well-trodden path through lush green grass. There was a golden glow to the sun-drenched earth at their feet. “I don’t like this,” Darcy said.

“What more could you want? Someone to carry you or to light your pipe, or a woman to faint at your feet?”

“It’s a bit too perfect for my liking. There’s something unreal about this.”

A fawn looked at them as they entered the woodland. Amongst the shadows of the leaves they saw patches of sunlight on the silvery white bark of the birch trees. When they emerged at the other side of the woodland the path led them into a field. They listened to the sound of birds singing, but the summer day’s song was brought to an end by the sound of a woman calling for help. They looked to their left and saw her. She was about a hundred yards away from them. They walked towards her, but before they got to her, lightning shattered the blue sky and they heard the sound of thunder. They stopped and looked at the lightning. When they looked back towards the woman she was gone. They saw the man they had met on the road. He was lying on his back on a rock. He was laughing and his legs were flailing in the air. This was when Darcy and O’Mara noticed that he had hooves.

“I knew there was something wrong,” Darcy said. “It’s a pooka.”

“What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. You never know what to expect from a pooka. He won’t be satisfied until he’s had his fill of mischief.”

“He looks happy enough to me. Let’s try and sneak away while he’s still laughing.”

“We can try anyway.”

As soon as they tried, it started raining heavily. The pooka stopped laughing. He put up an umbrella and smiled at them as they walked away. The field turned into a bog very quickly. They could hardly move because their feet kept sinking. O’Mara was wondering if he’d ever see his feet again, and then he disappeared completely down a hole. Darcy was wondering if he’d ever see O’Mara again, but then he heard O’Mara’s voice from down the hole. “Sorry for barging in like this.”

Darcy went down the hole, and he landed in the living room of a house. He was standing next to O’Mara. There were eight people in the room, and they were all drinking tea. The man by the fireplace said, “I take it ye met our good friend Mr. Maltingill.”

“The pooka?” Darcy said.

“The very chap.”

“I hope ye’re not all that friendly with him.”

“No. In fact, this meeting was convened to do something about him. And when I say ‘do something about him’ I don’t mean buy him a cake and organise a surprise party. I mean… Well, that’s what we’re here to decide. That’s why we meet in my house every Tuesday.”

“Is he responsible for the entrance we used?” O’Mara said.

“He is. That’s his revenge.”

“What did you do to him?”

“When I woke up one morning last summer, my garden was gone. It had completely disappeared. Someone told me it was down a badger hole, so I went down the hole, but I just met a badger, and he didn’t believe the story about the garden. The badger has been out to get me ever since. He’s nearly as bad as Maltingill. One day he bit the back of my leg while another badger was distracting me with a dance. I chased him away, but as I was running after him I stood on Maltingill’s head. He was lying in the long grass. So he made an entrance to my house at the bottom of a hole, and he’s always luring people into it.”

Darcy looked out the front window. The sun was shining again, and the birds were singing. “I see you found your garden,” he said.

“Yeah, it was on top of a hill.”

O’Mara said, “Has Maltingill been playing tricks on everyone here?”

“He has. This is our committee. My name is Higgins, by the way.”

Darcy and O’Mara shook hands with him, and he introduced the other committee members. When he came to a man sitting on a stool near the door he said, “And he just fell into the hole a few hours ago. I don’t know who he is. He won’t go away, no matter how many hints I drop.”

The man put his tea cup back on its saucer and smiled at them.

“Maltingill is playing tricks on us all the time,” Higgins said. “He knows we’re out to get him, which only makes him play more tricks on us. But if we get him just once, that’ll make it all worthwhile.”

“Won’t he play even more tricks if ye do get him?” Darcy said. “You could be getting unexpected visitors for years to come.”

“Then we’ll just have to get him twice.”

Higgins offered them a cup of tea, but Darcy and O’Mara said they needed to hurry to make up for lost time. Higgins told them how to get back to the road without falling in a hole or being attacked by a goat. When they found the road again they walked on as quickly as they could. They saw Maltingill sitting in a tree. He was smoking a pipe. He waved at them and he said, “Be sure to come back again. It was a great pleasure to meet ye.”

“I wish we could say the same about our meeting with you,” Darcy said.

“I apologise sincerely if I’ve caused ye any inconvenience.”

“Is there any chance you’ll apologise to those people who’ve formed a committee against you?”

“Causing them inconvenience is the best thing I could do for them. They didn’t have a purpose in life before they met me, and now they have a committee. They haven’t been this alive since the day before the day they were born.”

Darcy and O’Mara walked on. Late that evening they stopped in a tavern to eat, drink and rest. They asked the other drinkers if they’d seen a woman go by with two men, but no one inside the tavern had been outside since the morning, and even then, the only thing that occupied their minds was getting inside the tavern, so they wouldn’t have taken much notice of a phenomenon as mundane as three people.

They left the tavern and walked on again. They wanted to make it to the top of a hill before the land disappeared into darkness.

They made it to the hilltop just as the sun reached the horizon. They could see for miles around. They spent a few minutes scanning the land beneath them, and then O’Mara pointed and said, “Look, on the road just beyond the bridge.”

Darcy looked to where O’Mara was pointing and he saw three people. The one in the centre was hidden beneath a blue cloak.

Darcy and O’Mara started running. It took them half an hour to catch up with the travellers. Those three people didn’t try to run away when they heard the footsteps rapidly approaching behind them. They just turned around and waited for Darcy and O’Mara to arrive. The woman’s face was hidden by the hood of the cloak, but the long golden hair was visible. O’Mara held up his spear and said, “Let her go.”

“Who?” one of the men said.

“My spear is desperate to be left off its leash. Let her go.”

The inhabitant of the blue cloak removed the hood. “If you’re referring to me,” he said, “I haven’t been referred to as ‘her’ since I lost my clothes in mysterious circumstances and I had to improvise with a sheet that looked a bit like a dress, and I only wore it so I wouldn’t offend genuine women. Some people said I liked it, but I wore it purely for practical purposes. They said I was wearing it for three weeks, but that’s way off the mark. Three days, more like. Or four. And it wasn’t as if…”

“Shut up,” O’Mara said. “Are you wearing the wig and the cloak because you like it?”

“Well, I can’t say I dislike it, but it’s like with the sheet…”

“Shut up about the sheet.”

“I was paid to look like this. Actually the three of us were paid, and one of us had to dress like this. I drew the short straw.”

The other two tried to hold back laughter.

“Why would someone pay you to dress like that?” Darcy said.

“That’s the very first question I asked. I thought, wait a minute, I had enough of those propositions when I was wearing the sheet. But he insisted there was nothing funny going on.”

“Who’s he?”

“He works for Moya of the Place where the Apples Fall. He told the three of us to walk to Moya’s palace. He paid us half the money he promised, and he said we’d get the other half at Moya’s palace.”

“Didn’t you ask why he wanted ye to do this?” Darcy said.

“He said to ask no questions, and I thought, as long as there isn’t anything funny going on, that’s good enough for me.”

“I think we’ll have to pay Moya a visit as well,” Darcy said to O’Mara. “Gráinne could be anywhere by now, anywhere but here. We’ve been led astray. Our only hope of finding out why is by visiting Moya.”

They walked on again. They had arranged to meet the other search parties on a hill near the banks of the river Nore. Some of the others had already set up camp when Darcy and O’Mara got there. They’d all arrived within the next five hours. There were over thirty people in the camp.

Sean, Aoife and Dara arrived with a man called O’Grady, who was a descendant of Fionn Mac Cumhaill. They had been walking through a village when they overheard him mentioning his famous ancestor as he was trying to buy a chicken. O’Grady wasn’t a giant, but he was over six foot tall, and his lineage made him seem even taller, so they asked him to help in their search for Gráinne.

Darcy told them about the three men and how they were paid to go to Moya’s palace. “This must have been a diversion,” he said. “We were all lured here while Gráinne was taken in a different direction.”

“They could have put her in a cart and faced her backwards,” Aoife said. “So the wind could have been coming from the east and she’d have been going west.”

“Our best chance of finding her is by getting Moya to tell us what’s going on.”

“What if she refuses to meet us?” Sean said.

“Then we’ll have to force our way in,” O’Mara said with a smile. Everyone present stood up and cheered. O’Grady rose above them all and said, “I, O’Grady, descendant of Fionn, the son of Cumhall and Muirne of the White Neck, who fought with Conn the Hundred Fighter, whose fearlessness was so tangible it could tie you to a chair and take off your shoes, am willing to act in a supervisory capacity, overseeing the operation, ready to go in and finish them off should I be needed.”

They all cheered again.

Moya of the Place where the Apples Fall came from a place near an invisible orchard that produced visible apples. She was famous for her beauty. Her husband, Owen, had ruled a kingdom on the banks of the Barrow. He met her when he was twenty-one. He had been out hunting a stag for three days with his men. They crawled through bogs and climbed cliff faces as they stalked it, but it always got away. They were sleeping in the woods one night. As Owen slept he heard the sound of a woman singing. He got up and moved towards the source of the sound, walking for over a mile on rocky ground without ever waking up. The grey light of dawn wasn’t much help to him because his eyes were closed. He stopped when he was nearly close enough to touch her. He saw her in his dream. The vision in his mind was so beautiful it nearly made him want to kill himself or kick a pig or do something to express the profound effect it had on him. She was washing clothes in a stream. She turned around and saw a strange man staring at her from behind closed eyelids. Her scream was an emphatic full stop to her song. He woke up and he was shocked to see the contents of his mind holding wet clothes in front of him. He stumbled and fell, and he hit his head off a rock. He was confined to his mind once more, but just for a few minutes. He opened his eyes and there she was, kneeling at his side and stroking his head, which was much more than the version of her in his mind did. He preferred the real one. He wouldn’t even have to kill himself to show his appreciation for the real one. The pig would prefer the real one too.

They got married, but Owen was killed in battle. He fought a young king who had more ambition than sense. Owen’s men won the battle, but he was killed by a stray arrow. His kingdom was saved, but Moya was left to rule it on her own.

Darcy and O’Mara formed a plan with their companions in the camp on the hillside. They’d attack the palace at night. They’d fight amongst themselves at the edge of the grounds, drawing the guards out. Then they’d fight the guards. O’Mara would break in through the front door.

When darkness fell, they approached the palace. There were two guards at either side of the door, and two more at the gate. The palace was a stone building, two storeys high. A wooden tower emerged from the roof. “Look for her in the tower,” Darcy said to O’Mara. “She’ll probably go there when she hears what’s going on outside.”

The fake fight started when Dara accused one of his cousins of getting his donkey drunk. When the guards at the gate came to see what was going on, they were surrounded by people who emerged from behind a ditch. O’Grady stayed behind the ditch to supervise. The guards called for help. The two guards at the door left their station, and more men emerged from behind the house. O’Mara had been hiding in the garden. This is when he took his chance.

There were stained glass windows at either side of the front door. O’Mara jumped through one of them and he came face to face with the butler. He demanded to see Moya. The butler grew to over twenty foot tall as he inhaled, towering over O’Mara, and then he unleashed his response, which felt surprisingly pleasant on O’Mara’s face: “The lady of the house is currently unavailable.”

O’Mara ran up the stairs, and the butler was too big to follow. He needed to prick his foot with a silver pin to shrink back down to his normal size, but he’d left the pin in his room in the servants’ quarters, and he was too big to fit through the door.

There was a square room at the top of the tower, and there were windows on all four sides. Moya was there, looking out at her guards as they tried to subdue the mob outside the gate.

She was shocked when O’Mara burst in, but she wasn’t at all surprised by his question: “Why did you pay three men to walk towards your palace and get one of them to wear a blue cloak and a wig?”

“You could have knocked,” she said. “Would it hurt you to knock?”

“Answer the question?”

“And you could have said ‘please’. Only the people you pay bother with civilities these days.”

“I’m so uncivilised I have to start fires unless the fire of my curiosity is quenched almost as soon as it’s started.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you why I paid them to come here, seeing as you’ll find out eventually anyway. The woman you’re looking for is now in the hands of a king from the west called Conall. He heard about her power to control the wind and he thought she’d be useful for his plan. He intends to become the High King of Ireland, and he doesn’t just want to title. He wants to rule over every other ruler. He’ll fight anyone who doesn’t join him. I joined him because he promised to destroy the man who killed my husband. I was glad to help create a diversion so he could take Gráinne into the west. So here you are now, after fighting your way into the place in search of a woman who was behind you all along. And she went further and further behind you as time went on.”

“Where is she?”

“Conall has taken over the three Aran islands. He’s built fortresses on each one. He’s virtually immune from attack by sea with her there to control the winds. So as long as the birds don’t turn on him, he’s perfectly safe. He won’t tell anyone which one of the islands she’s on. He wouldn’t even give me a hint.”

“I start fires when I’m angry too,” O’Mara said. He used a candle to set fire to the curtains around three of the windows. He went out through the fourth window, and Moya ran down the stairs.

O’Mara jumped onto the roof and slid down it. Then he jumped onto the roof of the servants quarters at the back, slid down and jumped to the ground.

He ran to the front gate. The guards had run away from the fight when they saw the fire. They went to get buckets of water.

Darcy, O’Mara and their companions from Kilforrinne returned to their campsite.

Three people stood at the edge of the garden and watched the blaze. The one in the centre was wearing a light-blue cloak and he had a wig of long golden hair. “I knew we shouldn’t have stopped to watch that man dancing with the dog,” he said.

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