Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(47)
“There’s something out there,” he says. “A bogeyman.”
“Do ye mean one o’ the Fae?” I asks him. “If it’s one o’ the Fae, there might be something I can do about that.”
“Like what?” he sneers at me. “Are ye goin’ to give us a hunk of iron? We’re not as simple as ye think, Eoghan ó Cinnéide. We’ve already taken all the precautions, and given all the offerings, and said all the prayers, and still it’s been happening. And not just to us, not just here. All the villages near this fecking bog suffer, to the south and east and maybe the west too. During the night they lose a cow here, a sheep there, and every so often we lose a lad or a lass too. There’s a gods-cursed bogeyman out there, sure as I have a cock to piss with, and if ye want us to give a single sad shite about your advice, which we never asked for, then ye will shuffle your bony arse into that bog and kill what’s been killing us for all these years.”
The others all grunted their assent and I saw that there was no help for it. I couldn’t do Gaia’s business until I attended to theirs. And in truth I thought Gaia’s business could wait. Kids should be allowed to grow up in peace or else no one has any, do they? The desolate looks on those faces glaring back at me, well, there was only one way to fix them: justice. Whoever took those kids had stolen their parents’ joy and their hope for the future along with them.
“All right,” I says to them, and it’s a good thing I did, because they were ready to tell me to feck the oldest goat in the meadow if I said anything else. “I want to hear some details, please. But one at a time. The more specific ye can be about times and places of property or children stolen—especially the children—the more it will help me. Because I do want to help ye, and that’s no lie.”
And that, me love, was what got me on the soggy, squelchy road to meeting Siodhachan, though I sure had no inkling of it at the time.
They gave me a lodge of earth and wood to work in, and there I received them, one by one, to hear stories of loss and mourning.
What grabbed me most was the tale of Saoirse, who had lost her daughter, Siobhan, not a fortnight before. A thin and underfed thing, as most of the villagers were, she wiped tears and snot away from her face as she sobbed out her tale in gulping fits and starts.
“ ’Twas thirteen nights ago, sir. I puts her to bed and gives her a kiss on the cheek and tells her she’s loved, for she is. And I have me worries like we all do but I’m thinkin’ she’s safe, for who is sleepin’ next to her but me an’ her own da? She has the iron about her neck, and we says the prayers to Brighid and the Morrigan and all the gods below, and nary a peep out o’ her all the night long. But when the dawn comes and the cocks are scolding the sun, she’s gone! Her blanket turned down, her doll left behind, and no answer to our calls. We checks the grounds, ye know, to make sure she’s not out relieving herself, but she is nowhere to be found, is she? Not anywhere. Nowhere in the village. We rouse the lot of it, but Siobhan is vanished. So what can it be, sir, but the bogeyman of Boora Bog what’s been plaguing us for years now?”
“Are ye sure as ye can be in your most secret of hearts, Saoirse,” I asks her, “that the Fae cannot be involved in this? Have ye, or perhaps your husband, done anything to draw down their wrath in years past?”
“I can’t be positive, now can I, sir, when what offends them is so often a trifle what humans would never understand. But in me heart I’m sure I can’t think of anything that would invite such a punishment upon our heads.”
“I understand,” I says, and nod to indicate that I’m in the same room, looking at the same facts. “Now think back to that morning ye found her gone; were there any footprints or anything at all unusual?”
“Oh, aye. We followed a pair of footprints right into the bog. But it wasn’t a stretch of a hundred steps before we lost the trail. The waters, sir, are worse than clouds at covering up what ye wish to see.”
“But these footprints, now: Were they a man’s, a woman’s, or something else?”
“Oh, it was too difficult to tell, sir, beyond they being human and full-grown.”
“How old is Siobhan? Could they have been her footprints?”
Saoirse shakes her head. “I doubt it. She’s fourteen and wee for her age. And she knows better than to go wanderin’ in the bog anyway. And me husband said, look at the depth of those prints, now, for sure they was made by someone powerful heavy—or else someone carrying Siobhan! Me daughter could never make heavy prints like that.”
The interviews with the others are all of a kind; whatever they lost, they lost in the night, and no clues except for the occasional footprints trailing off into Boora Bog before getting lost in standing waters. Well, that and the almost visible holes torn in their spirits. This wasn’t like the mourning of men and women who’d lost their partners in a battle, where ye knew the risk and knew that death was to be expected and borne. This was the terror of the innocent, at the mercy of a world gone mad, and the way they looked at me, like I was the only one who could give them a reason to carry on in the mud and the rain and the infinite fog of their despair—well, it near stabbed me in the guts.
I’m still thinkin’ it’s some kind o’ rogue Fae that’s clever enough to glamour itself into a human shape, for I can’t imagine what else might have an appetite for humans—unless it’s a fecking vampire. Once I think o’ that, the possibility grows in me mind. I had yet to meet one then, but the Druids on the continent said they were nasty and creeping north with some very disciplined armies—the Romans, ye know. The method fit with what I had heard about them: They hunted at night and had a strange ability to charm people into doing what they wished.