Leanan Sidhe's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

The Leanan Sidhe walked past her mother toward the low green light, and heard the hags before she saw them. Three shapes crouched at the edge of the reeds, wet hair, mossy teeth. They had been watching the whole thing. One of them cupped a hand to her mouth and whispered into the air. The whisper lifted like a moth and flew east, where the bad listeners kept their open doors. She stopped. She knew that sound. She had used it herself a hundred times to ruin a rival. Soft has gone into her. Soft, soft. By dawn every hungry thing in the peat would know she had wept, and one of them would come for her belly before she reached the stone cradle. She turned toward the hags. Her old face was gone. Her voice was not. "Say it louder," she said. The middle hag grinned. "Say what, lovely?" "That I am soft." She stepped closer. The child pulled at her ribs and she let it. "Say it so the whole bog hears. I am not soft. I am changed. There is a difference." She threw her head back and shouted it at the low sky. The word came out of her chest like a struck bell. Reeds bent. The hags flinched. Up the slope, three figures came down from the cottage path. Hozier walked in front, small and pale, mud on his boots. Behind him, the raven-shouldered man carried his yew bass across his back. The red-haired woman in the wine coat carried a small brass pipe under her arm, the kind that fit an organ. They had heard her shout. Hozier stopped in front of her. He looked at her belly, then at her face. "Sing it," he said. "Not shout." "I do not sing." "You will tonight." Alex swung the bass around and set his hand on the low string. Isa knelt in the wet grass, wedged the brass pipe into the peat like a stake, and pressed her ear to it. She nodded once at Alex. He plucked. The note went down through the pipe into the ground and came back up under the Leanan Sidhe's feet. Hozier opened his mouth. What came out was not a song she knew. It was earth-love, plain as bread, warm as a hand on a fever. It struck her where the child lived. She did not drain it. It filled her. The dark thing that had ridden her thousand years lifted off the child inside her and burned away in the sound. The peat under her feet grew wet with readiness, and something far off in the muck flinched, a great cold thing that had been counting on her rot. She opened her mouth and sang back. The hags scattered. The whisper died in the air. Her mother, down at the cradle, smiled for the first time.