They’ve a big square of tough plastic with two loops of rope at the front, and they put Cillian on the plastic, and then two banshees each take a loop and they drag him along after them. I follow on. They do it easily; the banshees take turns, working to some invisible schedule they all know of.
I watch Cillian, and Agata watches me.
It is dark. The rains are past now and the cold is settling down, but it doesn’t slow them. The pain I have, the vicious shout of it to the side of my head makes my knees weak and my stomach gurgle. It’s all I can do to keep up with them.
They move with a purpose. I try not to think, only walk at the back of the group, keeping my eyes on Cillian’s face, his blank expression and soaked hair.
The banshees make camp a little off to the north of the big road that leads back to Phoenix City. I could not say how long it takes to get there. I’m so tired, I’m dropping. There’s a fire with a small blue flame giving heat, and I am put in front of it and given water and then some food, which I cannot eat. I draw my knees up to my chin and wrap my arms around my legs. I close my eyes in the warmth.
When I wake, it’s light and the camp is empty except for all their gear. A blanket has been put over me, woolly on one side and plastic on the other, and the fire is still going; I’m warm, I’m mostly dry. Gingerly I touch the side of my face, and then Agata is at my side. She has brought me water and I drink some. Next she takes my unresisting hands in hers and ties them together tightly.
“Just in case,” she tells me. “Probably you’re grand, but a bite is a bite, huh?”
She holds my head carefully, tipping it to one side tenderly, and it feels good, it feels nice to be touched softly like that, till she fingers the wound. I flinch.
“Go easy,” she says, and it’s so good to have someone there, to have a person who’ll tell me what the best thing is to do. “Hurts like a shitter and the next few days you won’t feel great. Probably you’ll be grand after that.” She daubs something on me and the flesh stings and then gets warmer and begins to itch.
“Where’s Cillian?”
She nods her chin toward one of the little ruins of stone buildings. I drink her in now that I’ve a chance to see her in the full light of day, while her eyes are busy elsewhere. Her skin is a deep brown, so unblemished it nearly looks like it’s moist.
I imagine Cillian, his slight, pale body curled over, his arms drawn up to his face. I wonder how cold he was last night while I slept comfortable near the fire.
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“You don’t know that guy, okay?” She’s taken my jaw and pointed it toward her, so we’re staring straight at each other. It’s uncomfortable, we’re so close, and I try to ease back, but she doesn’t let me, she holds on tight. Her voice is low and urgent. “If anyone asks do you know what happened to the women he was with, you don’t know that either.” She keeps working on her knife, though it’s shining already. “You understand me?”
I glance toward the ruins.
“Blink if you do,” she says, and I blink, nearly accidentally.
“Walk with me today, steer clear of him.”
“Where are the others?”
“Morning exercises.”
“Not you?”
“I’m to guard you,” she says, pulling gently on the rope binding my hands together.
The other banshees are heading back our way. I can hear their voices, the sounds of human feet moving through shrubs and trees.
“And Cillian?”
“You don’t know him; you don’t know his name.” She’s speaking quickly, getting the words out before the rest of them get back to the camp. She sighs, glances over her shoulder. “He’ll come with us.”
“What will happen to him?” I ask, but the other banshees are moving around the fire, talking loudly, joking, and Agata says no more.
I sit back. I watch them. This will be my role, my strategy: to watch quietly, to listen, to do what I am told. I can be safe now that I have what I want—to have people, to be on the way to the city.
I can do nothing for Cillian with Agata watching me. I could do nothing for him anyway.
The banshees and Cillian and me, we move east toward the city. My third time walking this hungry road.
We move so fast. My legs can keep up, but my thinking is overrun. It is too much for me, the losses, my wounds, the banshees’ great, confident presence, walking the road as if they’ve every right to be there. The load of them moving in pairs, all except Agata who stays with me. They talk, they sing, they light their small, blue fires. They kill whatever they happen across, which is mostly skrake. They take joy in it.
Quiet your whisht, girl, only listen, Maeve tells me, and I do, I stay quiet.
Cillian is quiet too. I see him when the banshees are packing up. We don’t look at each other, and I can feel Agata watching me. I go with her to the top of the walking column that the banshees make, and he stays toward the back of it. I’ve seen enough, though. They’ve his feet tied as well as his hands. I see the way he has crumpled under the weight of whatever it is that’ll happen to him in Phoenix City. To these banshees, he is nothing.
We move, the banshees walking ahead and behind me as if they belong here. As if this world is theirs.
I work hard to keep up. My mother was a banshee, and I’ve been trained as a banshee, and I can walk any road as fast as them, with a hole in the side of my head or not. This is it, I keep thinking.
Before we moved out, there were a lot of questions about where I came from and how long I’ve been out here. I don’t know how to answer them; I stay on being quiet. To put words together is to make sense of a thing, and I’ve no shapes to put to the world around me. The banshees make a point of shoving me around, and the one they all look to, Mare, loses her patience. She hits a belter, and she doesn’t shy off from the injured side of my head. I feel the pain all the way to my toes, all the way into my bones. She hits like a rock—it’s like being hit by Maeve nearly—and the place where my ear used to be rings all day after it.
“Don’t take it personally,” Agata tells me quietly, later, and I nod a little to show her I understand. I do as well. They must know I know something about their runaways. They stare at me a lot, there’s an anger coming off them, but nobody hits me again. The banshees—Ciara, Lin, Anna, Sene, Niamh, more as well; I listen thirstily for their names—they talk a lot, quiet between themselves but nearly constant. It’s hard to understand their accents, and anyway, when I get snatches, it’s only about people I don’t know or things that happened I don’t have any knowledge of, about people in the city, about other banshees. They train: stretches and exercises in the morning. Push-ups, the last few on the knuckles. There’ll be sparring in the evening.
It’s the way they move through the land I like about them; it’s that I can’t stop watching. It’s unapologetic. The hunger they have for the country around us is familiar to me. We’ll stop to rest and drink water, and a pair of them will leave the group to climb a hill or investigate a building or go chasing after tracks I never noticed on the ground. The way they walk is casual and easy and full of power. I want to get a bit of that.
I mourn Maeve in those long silences on the road when the banshees are quiet. I try to imagine Nic and Aodh rowing west through the mist while we move east. Finding home, the two of them, together, safe. In my head, though, they keep transforming into Mam, pregnant with me, and Maeve, loving her, and the two of them safe and happy with years ahead of them still.
In the quiet in my own head, the roaring silence heals over and I begin to think again. I watch the banshees closely, and, with hands left untied now, I move a bit more like them. I practice it. I practice being bold on the road. I pretend that I am powerful too.
It is night. If I don’t do it now, there won’t be much point in doing it, and I’ve to do it so. There it is.
I asked for water after dinner, which was a small bit of a salty, crumbly hard thing and a few bites off one of the rabbits Sene had killed in the morning. I kept the canten after Agata gave it to me, hid it under my bit of blanket so she wouldn’t think of it, and she didn’t.
They’re asleep now, except for the one on watch, and she’s nodding even as she stands, facing away from me at the other side of the fire. I watched where they’d put Cillian, and he’s on his own, tied up under a shelter fifty paces off. It’s cruel, so it is, not to let him have the heat of the fire at night.
I move as if it’s all going to go okay, with confidence and speed and silence. Like one of them. The banshees sleep close around the fire, some of them curled up against each other. There’s the noise of breathing and scratching and a half-snore from Mare. There was coming and going as people go off into the bushes to shit after dinner, but not now. Now it’s quiet and everyone, nearly everyone, is properly out.
Now is good. Now is the time.
As I’m moving away from the campfire, the one on duty shifts in her stance, and I freeze against the blackness before moving again, not straight out to where Cillian is tied up but backward, farther into the gloom so that if she turns the whole way around, she wouldn’t see me. She won’t miss my body in the mess of the group on the ground, I’d say.
I’m away, and though I can still see not so much the fire as the soft blue glaze it puts on the things around it, the blankets and bodies of the banshees and the rocks, they won’t see me, not from here.
They have him tied in such a way that it’s hard to lie down, and he’s sitting instead with his back against a crumbling concrete wall. He’s asleep, as asleep as he can be; he can’t put his arms around himself, they’re tied too tight, but he has tried. The first thing I do is put my blanket over him, and when I do, his eyes open. I put my hand over his mouth till he’s more awake, till I know he sees me properly.
Looking into his eyes, I feel nearly giddy.
He’s alive, I’m alive.
“Hi,” I say, and I take away the palm of my hand from his lips.
His lip is swollen, and when he opens his mouth to talk, his voice is slurred. Of course they’d questions for him as well.
“What are you doing here?”
I shush him, then whisper, “Setting you free.”
He’s silent, shivering into the blanket, while I reach for the knife with the golden handle, my mam’s knife, strapped in its place at my ankle. It doesn’t take long to get through the ropes, but it takes ages to get him to be able to stand, he’s so stiff with hurt and cold.
“Will you be all right?”
He doesn’t answer for a long moment, and I wonder again am I doing the right thing.
“I’m okay,” he says. I don’t believe him.
“Come on,” I say, and we walk a little along the road together, farther away from the banshees. He begins to stand straighter, to move quicker. He’ll be okay.
“Do you know where you are?”
He looks up and down the road in the black night.
“It’s the same road,” I say, “just keep going that way. You remember how to get there, how to find the beach again?”
There’ll be no boat for him; he’ll have to find a way, to manage somehow.
Cillian doesn’t answer for a long time, and I want to shake him.
“You’re not coming?” he says.
I’ve no answer for him that he doesn’t know already.
“Here, you’ve water and a blanket. If you start now, you’ve half a night’s start. You’ll make it.”
“Why aren’t you coming? They’ll know it was you. They won’t believe I got away on my own.”
He’s right, I’d say.
“Here,” I say, and I hand him, hilt-first, my mother’s knife. “Now you’ve a knife as well.”
“Orpen, I don’t know how to—”
“It belongs on the island,” I tell him. “Hold on to it for me there.”
He’s more awake now, he’s alert. He pushes the blanket back at me. “If this is gone, they’ll know for sure it was you. I’ll be all right.”
I don’t take it, but he thrusts it at me, and then the water as well.
“Okay,” I say.
He doesn’t move, only stays staring at me.
“Go, Cillian,” I tell him.
“I wish you’d come with me.”
There’s another silence.
“Cillian—”
I’m glancing back toward the camp when he does it, taking my face in his hands and putting his swollen mouth to mine. His fingers hold my battered face so tenderly, so carefully, I could cry. He kisses me. It’s done and finished before I know what’s happening even.
I think about it for the whole rest of my life.
“Thank you,” he says, and then he’s gone, shuffling into the night, holding my knife, Mam’s knife, and nothing else.
I steal back to where he was kept, feeling along the road till I have what I want, and then I kneel down where his frayed ropes are on the ground. I take the sharp stone I found and put it down next to them.
I come back round the fire again, back toward where my sleeping place is, the canten slung on my shoulder, the blanket that Cillian wouldn’t take around my shoulders. I go quiet and slow, and I adjust my front in case anyone’s looking so it’ll look like I’m only back from a piss.
I settle down in the cozy warmth of the fire, and I look about and I could nearly smile, cuddling up again underneath my blanket.
My eyes meet Agata’s.
Hers are wide open, staring at me, speculative and unblinking.
We wake before the dawn and rise together, all of us.
After I turned from Agata and lay down again, I waited. It wasn’t till the change of the watch Cillian was missed. There is talk of going after him, but it’s subdued. The banshees are tired, but a handful of them go off jogging into the night to see can they find him. I lie very still, as if I am not there, not daring to so much as breathe in Agata’s direction. She stays quiet too. After a long time, I fall back to sleep.
When the banshees get up, I get up, and when they go off for morning exercises together, I don’t stay beside the heat of the fire. I am my mother’s daughter. I am Maeve’s as well.
Agata shadows me, and when the banshees begin to go through their exercises, I keep after them. We get into the push-ups, and the banshees, they watch me out of the corners of their eyes. I work hard, though I’m stiff and out of condition, till their eyes move on.
“Will we spar this evening?” I ask Agata. I’m loosened up, I’m ready for it. I want to see what she’s like, and what I’m like now.
We pack up the camp then, and on we go, on toward the city. We move once more through the bloodied road under angry skies.