While Tara spent the rest of the day in the school hall, training willing islanders in the secret art of candle magic, Fionn scoured the ruins of the old McCauley farmhouse. Sam joined him in his efforts, stoically surrendering the chance to attend the magic lesson, in order to pursue the legend of the Tide Summoner with his best friend. An afternoon of fruitless searching gave way to an evening of the same, Fionn and Sam crawling around in the frost-slick grass, while the ghost of Fionn’s McCauley ancestry yielded nothing but numb fingers and wet socks.
When night fell, they trudged home along the strand, greeted by reports of the evening ferries, which had brought two hundred more blank faces across the narrow slip of sea. Another regiment marched inland and then disappeared down the craggy underside of the island.
After a late dinner of his grandfather’s beef-and-Guinness stew, Fionn lay awake scanning the shelves in the darkness. He noted the missing candles, since sacrificed to his sister’s lessons. She had taken the bare minimum, but Fionn still worried over the loss. Tomorrow, more magic would be donated in aid of island practice, creating new gaps that would remind him of all the ways he was failing his people. How the islanders who had once respected him now looked at him with a mixture of pity and betrayal. How they had turned to his own sister for leadership.
And why wouldn’t they? They knew his secret, after all.
Magic Barren.
Useless.
The wind howled outside the little cottage on the headland, pressed its hands against the windows and shook them in their frames, as if the island was trying to tell him something.
The bond that takes a touch to make
Will not before a lifetime break.
But the bond had been broken. Hughie Rua was long dead. So where did he leave the Tide Summoner?
Lay worthy hands upon the shell,
And breath becomes the ocean’s knell.
Fionn studied his hands in the dark. Were they even worthy of the Tide Summoner? He turned over on the couch, pulled the blanket up around his ears. When he finally fell asleep, he dreamt of the mainland. He glimpsed rolling green hills and newly paved motorways, little towns made from cobblestones and coloured flags. He recognised the different patterns, each county a notch in Ireland’s curved spine.
Fionn saw Ivan standing beneath the Dublin spire, the column rising like a sharp tooth in the darkness. Morrigan’s laugh rushed through him. She was gleeful, expectant.
Tick-tock, Storm Keeper.
Tick-tock, comes the Reaper.
Fionn felt his skin peel away, his bones plucked from his skeleton and stacked one by one, until they made a spire as tall and white as the one in his mind.
Dublin.
Ivan was in Dublin.
The clock was getting louder.
It set the tempo of his pulse.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-TOCK, TICK-TOCK, TICK-TOCK –
He woke, gasping. Fionn felt as if he had swallowed a ball of fire, and it was torching him from the inside out. His fingertips were crackling. He curled them into fists and breathed through his nose, to keep from vomiting all over himself.
A shard of moonlight slipped through the window and crept all the way up to the couch. Fionn looked around, making his eyes as wide as he could in the darkness. The shelf in the corner was shaking.
There was a thought prodding at him.
Think, said a voice in his head. Remember.
He wandered over to the shelf. The moonlight came with him, dusting itself along the labels as Fionn’s magic glowed like an ember in his chest.
The thought was crystallising. It was a memory, and it came in Niall Cannon’s voice. Hughie named it after his boat. Saoirse. Means “freedom”.
Fionn stared at the candles.
Well, he was the great protector of our freedom, after all.
Seven blizzards in a row. A handful of summer skies. Autumn showers and winter winds. Sean McCauley’s Runaway Kite … Storms and storms and storms and storms. Unexpected Tornado at Josie’s Twelfth Birthday Party. Ribbon lightning, sheet lightning, forked lightning, flash lightning … Hurricane Ophelia. Snow days and snowstorms. Sunsets and sunrises. Suaimhneas, which meant ‘peace’, and Saoirse, which meant –
Fionn froze.
Saoirse.
Freedom.
Was it possible?
Had it been here all this time, sitting right under his nose?
He reached out to take the candle, and a breeze curled around it like a finger. It knocked it from the shelf.
Fionn caught it in mid-air. ‘I was about to do that,’ he said aloud.
The candle was tall and thin, like a stick of dynamite, the wax as inky as a pirate’s sail. Fionn dipped his nose in and almost sneezed. Gunpowder – the thickness of it rested along the top like froth on a cappuccino. Then came the rest: a violent storm flung from an angry horizon, capillaries of lightning burning fissures in the sky. Shattered wood and burning flags, ash and fire, and cast-iron cannonballs soaring through an open sea. Blood and bone and seaweed, all tangled up in the salt-filled gurgle of drowning men.
Fionn bristled as the dredges of Saoirse crawled up his nose – crusted barnacles and scales the colour of burnt silver, a shark’s grin bearing down on human skin.
Merrows.
He stared at the candle.
All this time, Hughie Rua had been living in Tír na nÓg.
And the Tide Summoner along with him.
Fionn didn’t know if it was funny or maddening, but he laughed anyway. The sound hung in the air like a melody, and sung him to sleep with the candle tight in his fist.
This time, when he closed his eyes, he dreamt of adventure.