Chapter 2

Pearse Station

AT FIRST, Oisín didn’t notice the ravens in Pearse Station. He was far too busy looking furtively at the Book of Magic. He turned it over and over in his hands like a pebble, waiting for it to do something. Maybe the Book would make him fly. Or turn Stephen into a rhinoceros. Or maybe it would just flip through its pages again. Instead, it remained perfectly still in his hands, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

It wasn’t, though. The Book was special and he was its Keeper. Oisín could feel its magic like a small pulse coming from its pages. He wasn’t sure what being a keeper meant, but he liked the sound of it. It made him feel that it was OK to hold the Book, even when a small pang of guilt in his chest told him that he really should tell Granny Keane about it. She had said they could keep any book they wanted, so technically he wasn’t stealing it.

Oisín had meant to tell her. But first Granny Keane had been very busy bundling her books together so she could sell them in town. Then they had been traipsing across Dublin looking for a second-hand bookshop that might want some of Granny Keane’s unique selection. Even when they were having lunch in the Powerscourt Centre, it hadn’t seemed like the right time. Now they were sitting on a bench in Pearse Station, waiting to take the DART home to Raheny. Oisín thought that he should say something. But something kept his mouth shut, some sense of a secret that was his alone.

Oisín was trying to decide what to do when he noticed a raven with green eyes. The Book of Magic shifted slightly, and something clicked in Oisín’s brain: it wasn’t the first raven he’d seen that day. There had been one staring in the window in Eason’s bookshop on O’Connell Street. He’d seen several ravens perched on Daniel O’Connell’s statue across the road and even more sitting on the steps of the Ha’penny Bridge. He’d even seen one by the piano in the Powerscourt Centre, as if it had every right to be there amongst the pots of tea and lemon squares. Now that he thought about it, all of them had the same eyes, as green as grass, which he was sure ravens weren’t supposed to have. A strange feeling came over him, as if somehow they knew about the Book.

‘I think I might give my sandwich to the birdie,’ said Sorcha. ‘He looks hungry.’

Oisín turned to his sister. Sorcha was not a big fan of Granny Keane’s banana curry and chickpea sandwiches.

‘I don’t know if he’ll be able to eat that,’ Oisín said quietly. ‘Why don’t you have a few more bites and then I’ll finish it?’

It seemed like the sort of thing an older brother should say, even if the sandwiches weren’t exactly his favourite kind either.

‘No, the birdie looks hungry! Here you go, little birdie. Ow! He pecked me!’

Oisín sprang to his feet but the raven had already gone. Sorcha looked down at her ankle where the raven had pecked her. Her face faltered as if she couldn’t decide whether or not to cry.

‘Don’t worry, Sorcha,’ Oisín said, putting his hand on her shoulder. He hadn’t read a book about comforting little sisters, but this was always what his mother did.

Sorcha’s lip was still trembling, though, and Oisín knew he only had seconds.

‘Here, why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you some Maltesers?’

Maltesers were Sorcha’s favourite sweets, so she nodded her head and limped back to the bench. Oisín was sure his mother would have been fretting about tetanus shots if she’d been there, but Granny Keane didn’t seem too bothered. She was staring into space, a box of books that nobody wanted to buy on the bench beside her. Stephen was playing a game on his mobile phone, hoping that none of his friends had seen him walking around town with his granny.

Oisín’s hands shook as he put the coins into the vending machine. The next DART train was twenty minutes away, according to the electronic display. Oisín wished it was coming sooner. He was feeling strangely uneasy, as if somebody was watching him. Yet the train station was almost completely empty. There were a few workers, newspapers twitching in their hands. Spanish tourists leant against the wall and gazed up at the glass roof, hoping that the sun would reach them. Everybody looked quite normal.

It was the Book of Magic. That was why he was feeling so strange. He’d have to tell Granny Keane about it before they went home.

When he got back to the bench, Stephen and Sorcha were in the middle of an argument.

‘Ravens don’t have green eyes,’ Stephen said, not looking up from his game.

‘This one did,’ Sorcha protested.

‘It couldn’t have.’

‘It did.’

‘What kind of bird did you say pecked you?’ Granny Keane said, sitting forward suddenly on the bench, as if she was waking from a dream.

Usually Granny Keane’s voice was quite light and airy, as if it belonged to somebody much younger than a lady in her eighties. People who saw her long wispy hair and bright turquoise beads sometimes thought she might be a little odd in the head and so she was always able to get a discount at the market or to convince the police that she could never have been speeding. Every now and then, though, her voice had a sudden sharpness, as if she was all too alert. This was the quality her voice had now.

‘What kind of bird was it?’ she repeated.

‘A raven,’ Oisín answered in a small voice.

‘And what colour did you say its eyes were?’

‘Green,’ Oisín and Sorcha said at the same time.

Nobody could fail to notice the effect these words had on Granny Keane. A shadow flickered across her face, as if she was remembering some deep, forgotten sorrow. Her own big green eyes pulsed with a strange emotion, and Oisín thought he had never seen her look fiercer.

Are you OK, Gran?’ he asked as she looked far into the distance.

It took a moment for Granny Keane’s eyes to return from the place in the past where they had been. When they did, they focused on Oisín as if seeing him for the first time. She stared not at the packet of Maltesers in his right hand, but at the little book sticking out of his hoodie pocket.

Oisín pushed it out of view and sat down on the bench, handing Sorcha the Maltesers. Lots of feelings were tugging at his insides, but he couldn’t give up the Book. Not yet.

When Granny Keane eventually spoke, it wasn’t what Oisín expected to hear.

‘Have any of you heard of the Morrígan?’

None of them had.

‘Don’t they teach you the old Celtic stories in school?’

‘Some of them,’ Oisín replied.

‘Just the boring ones,’ Stephen added. ‘They’re all about silly swans turning into children or old guys falling off horses. I don’t know why we bother with them. Dad says that Irish will be obsolete in a few years – that means extinct.’

‘Thanks, Dictionary-dot-com,’ Oisín said under his breath.

‘Remind me to thump you later,’ Stephen growled.

Granny Keane ignored the pair of them.

‘They never teach you anything useful at school,’ she fussed, sounding a lot more like a regular granny than usual. ‘Of course you haven’t heard of the Morrígan.’

‘What is this Morrígan thing?’ Sorcha asked.

‘She is the Great Queen of Battle Madness,’ Granny Keane said.

‘Is she a giant?’ Sorcha asked.

‘It’s not her size that you need to worry about,’ Granny Keane said. ‘Something as small as a pea can hold all the trouble in the world.’ She looked back towards Oisín and he had a strange feeling that she was looking right at the Book of Magic.

‘What is she like?’ Sorcha asked, her small eyes huge.

‘She’s the Queen of Shadows,’ Granny Keane said and, once again, something strange and sad seemed to shift across her face. ‘She feeds off all the despair of the world: all the bad thoughts and broken promises, all the little lies and unkind truths that make our world go round. She skulks in the shadows of the world, and when somebody is feeling at their lowest, she creeps over and makes them feel worse.’

Oisín shivered, thinking of some of the times he had felt sad. The day when Stephen’s friends shoved him into the hedge at the bus stop and everybody laughed hadn’t been great. Or when his best friend Jack had moved to the country three years ago, that had been a hard one. Or the day when Jack came back to visit last year, and was full of stories of his new friends and seemed like the kind of person Oisín would never have been friends with anyway, that day had been even worse. Oisín pulled down the sleeves of his hoodie, starting to feel cold all over. He couldn’t imagine the kind of creature that would want to make you feel worse on your lowest day.

‘Where did she come from?’ Sorcha asked, captivated.

Sorcha usually loved to suck all the chocolate off Maltesers before eating them, but she hadn’t even opened the packet yet.

‘Have you heard of the Tuatha Dé Danann?’ Granny Keane asked.

Oisín answered when Sorcha shook her head: ‘The fairy people. The first people in Ireland.’

‘Yes,’ said Granny Keane. ‘The Morrígan was one of them. A beautiful young girl. But then something turned her heart hard and she moved to a far-off mountain. During the great wars of Ireland, she swooped around the battle field as a crow, with her two bitter sisters, Macha and Badb. The three of them perched on the shoulders of soldiers and gave them the courage to fight on. The Morrígan cheered on both sides. She didn’t care who won. All she minded was getting enough skulls to decorate her room with.’

‘So she’s a bird?’ Sorcha asked.

‘It’s just a silly story,’ Stephen said quickly. He shot Granny Keane a sharp glance, but nothing could stop her once she had started.

‘She can look like a bird sometimes. She’s a shape-shifter. Sometimes she looks like a wrinkled old lady. Sometimes she looks like a little girl. Sometimes she looks like the most beautiful woman in Ireland. No matter what she changes to, you can always recognise her by three things: the ravens that follow her, a terrible chill in the air around her and those green eyes of hers that will drown you in sadness.’

Even Stephen shuddered slightly. Oisín couldn’t blame him. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees, as if the weather had decided that fine summer days weren’t to be wasted on such stories.

‘Does that mean you’re the Morrígan?’ Sorcha said, gazing into Granny Keane’s green eyes with fascination.

A smile returned to Granny Keane’s face and she gave a little laugh. ‘Oh, no, dear. If I had all the power of the Morrígan, I wouldn’t be trying to sell my books around Dublin.’

‘What about you? Why aren’t your eyes blue like mine and Stephen’s?’ Sorcha said, swivelling around to Oisín and inspecting his eyes.

It was something that Oisín had wondered himself. He was small with freckles, green eyes and hair the colour of sand. Both Stephen and Sorcha had black hair, blue eyes and not a freckle between them.

‘It’s complicated genetics,’ Stephen began, but before he could explain what he had learnt about Mendel for his Junior Cert, Granny Keane had interrupted him.

‘Lots of people have green eyes, love. Your cat, Smoky, he has green eyes, hasn’t he?’

Sorcha nodded slowly. It was hard to imagine Smoky getting enough energy to leave his basket, let alone plot an evil scheme.

Granny Keane patted Sorcha’s hand. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about any of us.’

‘Or worry at all,’ Stephen said, standing. ‘It’s just a story. Where is the stupid DART? Dublin Area Rapid Transit? A slug would get home faster!’

‘What time is it?’ Granny Keane asked.

‘Almost five,’ Stephen answered grumpily. He’d never been more ready to get back to his friends and his own house.

‘It’s too early to be getting dark,’ Granny Keane murmured. In the middle of June, the sun never set until after ten, and yet the station was gradually getting darker and darker.

‘Probably climate change,’ Stephen said. That was what their father said whenever the weather went weird.

‘No, no, it’s nothing,’ Granny Keane said quickly, standing up as if she’d suddenly realised something. ‘Come on, let’s get you a seat near the front.’

Usually they walked along the platform because it was easier to get a seat at the front of the train, but Oisín didn’t think they needed to worry about that today. The few people at the station were leaving, whispering about the terrible state of train delays, the awful cheat of a summer where it started to get dark at five o’clock and how it was all probably something to do with the euro.

‘Gran, are you sure the train’s coming?’ Oisín said, looking up to check the clock.

The train was still twenty minutes away and the neon seconds were flickering along towards five o’clock. But as soon as Oisín looked up he saw at once what had bothered Granny Keane and what was causing the unnatural darkness. Hovering over the glass roof were several creatures, their black forms blocking all the sun from the platform. Not one, not tens, but hundreds and hundreds of ravens, all of them pecking their beaks against the glass and looking down with terrible green eyes.