Forwards, then; it is the only way.
* * *
The road rises steadily day by day, and the temperatures drop at night, although the days remain warm. The forest gets thicker the higher we go, the branches meeting above the road to create a canopy. Occasionally a squirrel or fox will dart across our path and the kelpie-horse eyes it speculatively. I’ve asked more than once if he wants to return to his proper shape and go hunting for things more meaty than grassy, but he’s shaken his head. I suspect he’s of the mindset that he might as well continue with this unpleasantness until we reach my goal, rather than flipping in and out of different forms.
On the morning of the fourth day I wake, shivering, to find the fire’s gone out too soon, and the kelpie-horse giving me a reproachful glance; clearly he’s regretting his bargain. He hasn’t moved from the spot he was in last night beneath the tree. I eat in the saddle, aiming us at the road, which is growing narrower and less well-tended, the undergrowth twines and weaves together, fallen logs are covered in a green carpet of moss, and there are bright red and purple berries I know well enough not to eat grow thickly.
The further we go on and the more neglected the thoroughfare becomes, the more I become convinced that very few take this trail. There cannot be carts going to and from Blackwater bring supplies in and taking silver away, at least not this way. Perhaps they do not ship to the places I’ve come from; perhaps they send it elsewhere.
Only then does it occur to me that I do not know what comes after Blackwater. The map is a simple thing, with no sign of what lies on the far boundary of the estate, the northernmost. What is there? What roads lead down the other side of this mountain range?
Perhaps, a voice in my head says, Blackwater does not truly exist.
I’ve also seen no one else for four days, and unlike the earlier part of my trip, it wasn’t because I’d been avoiding people. There just haven’t been any other travellers. This road, I must accept, is the one less travelled by. There’s been no sign of a hedge boundary, nor sign of that tree with face in its bole. I’ve been carefully looking for that.
My nerves, which have held so well until now – burying Óisín and Aoife, escaping Aidan, the deaths of Maura and Malachi, murdering a man – now begin to sing. No, more like harp strings being plucked by cruelly subtle fingers. It is only now that my goal is so close – or is it? – a new life, so many answers to so many questions, that I suppose I have relaxed enough for the fears and yearnings to break out of the box I put them in. Around me there are no sounds, not even the trills of birds or the calls of badgers and foxes to their mates and young. There is no ocean here and, risk of mer notwithstanding, I do miss it terribly. I miss the daily salt breath of it, the crash and roll that was a constant my whole life – it doesn’t matter that I learned to fear it, hated to swim in it. I have been so consumed with flight that this missing, this absence, has been suppressed. But the kelpie’s naming of me as “salt daughter”. The assassin’s tales reminding me of what I left behind at Hob’s Hallow: my grandparents in their cold tomb, and Maura and Malachi too. All these things crash in on me now like a wave, an entire storm.
To distract myself, to make some noise, I dredge up a tale from memory and begin to tell it aloud. The kelpie-horse’s ears prick up at the sound of my voice.
A long time ago, the old people say, there lived a mari-morgan, in a lake that was not too big and not too small … indeed, some argued it was neither big enough to be one, nor small enough to be the other. And yet it was just right for the mari-morgan who suffered not much more than boredom in her long life.
Maidens would come to her pool and beg for boons: beauty, marriage, wealth. And sometimes she granted it and sometimes she did not. They would bring her gifts, these girls, offerings. But only one came who could provide the sole thing the mari-morgan truly desired.
This girl wanted a good husband – oh, she already had one, a husband that is, but he was neither good nor kind. In fact, he was an entirely undesirable sort of husband, yet he was the one she had. He’d displayed none of his worst characteristics, of course, before their wedding for he wasn’t completely stupid. But as time wore on, so his true nature grew stronger and his façade grew thinner until the cruelty entirely broke through and he took a knife to his wife’s face so no man would ever look at her again.
Thus the girl, the woman, the wife came to beg the mari-morgan. She said “Make him kind. Make him love me. Make him a good husband. Make my life better.”
The mari-morgan knew she could do only one of those things, so she asked what the girl would give in return. The girl replied whatever you demand. And what the mari-morgan demanded was a dress.
A dress that did not lose its beauty when submerged, did not become sodden and weighty, that did not drag on the mari-morgan as she swam and dove, danced and darted and looped. A dream of a dress that did not die when deprived of light and air. The creature thought she’d asked too much, that the bargain would remain unfulfilled and she was content with that.
But the girl knew of a book. It wasn’t hers but she could get it. She knew that within were all manner
