R. Anderson - Swift

‘Maybe he doesn’t know how to speak,’ piped up one of the younger girls from her seat on the rug. Teasel’s cavern was as cosy and well-furnished as any in the Delve, but not even she had enough chairs for twenty. ‘Has anyone ever heard a spriggan talk?’

I have, thought Ivy. But the memory of that soft, insinuating voice made her feel slimy all over, and it wasn’t as though he’d said anything useful. Teasel needed answers, not mockery.

‘Tch! You’d get more sense out of an animal,’ said another woman. ‘It’s useless, if you ask me — meaning no offence to you, Teasel,’ she added as Keeve’s mother bristled. ‘Of course we all want to see your lad safe home again. Only that I can’t see how that nasty creature down below is going to help us find him.’

‘Well,’ said Teasel, pinching the yarn tight between finger and thumb, ‘if the creature won’t give me back my son, then at least we can make him pay for it. That’s what I say, and Hew’s of the same mind. My man killed a spriggan all by himself once, you know. Stove its head in with his thunder-axe, and kicked its carcass into the sea.’

The other women exclaimed and sat up, eager for details, but Cicely edged closer to Ivy. ‘I don’t like it when people talk about killing,’ she whispered.

‘It’s a spriggan,’ Ivy replied, not looking up from the wool she was carding. ‘And if he won’t tell what he did with Keeve, then he deserves it.’

Yet later that evening, after she’d tucked Cicely into bed, Ivy found herself wondering why the spriggan wasn’t talking. Perhaps he was afraid of being executed for his crimes, but he must realise that he was never going to get out of the Delve anyway…

Make him pay for it, murmured Teasel in her memory, and then with grim relish, My man killed a spriggan all by himself once.

But that had been thirty years ago, according to Nettle. If the spriggans had managed to elude the hunters of the Delve for so long, how had her brother and Mattock caught this one so easily? Especially if he’d killed Keeve and eaten him right down to the bones, as no one was saying but everybody feared. Surely after committing such a horrible murder, he’d want to put as much distance between himself and the Delve as he could?

‘How am I supposed to know what goes on in a spriggan’s head?’ asked Mica irritably, when Ivy asked him. By that time Cicely was sound asleep, so they could talk freely. ‘Ask the Joan, if she can get him talking before he starves to death.’ He poured himself a tankard of small beer and sat down at the table. ‘Anyway, why should you care? I thought you’d be happy to see him caught. Revenge for our mother, and all that.’

‘And all that?’ Ivy repeated in disbelief. ‘You caught a spriggan with your own hands! How can you talk as though-’ She dropped onto the bench across from Mica. ‘You can’t still think our mother left us on purpose.’

‘Why not?’ he snapped, then flinched as Cicely mumbled and turned over. ‘All I’m saying,’ he went on more quietly, ‘is that nobody knows what happened that night. And I don’t see how you can keep on about spriggans, when you of all people should know-’ He broke off and pushed back from the table, his lip curling. ‘Oh, what’s the point? You never listen to me anyway.’

‘I’m listening now,’ said Ivy, making an effort at patience. Maybe Mica had forgotten the tenderness in Marigold’s face as she kissed her children good night, or her radiant smile as she danced to the music of Flint’s fiddle. Maybe he truly thought there was some reason their mother would have wanted to leave. ‘Go on. What is it I’m supposed to know?’

‘About the fight, of course.’

‘What fight?’

‘Between Dad and Mum, the night before she disappeared.’ He glanced at the archway to their father’s bedchamber — the only separate room in the cavern. ‘They were in there with the door closed, so there’s no telling how it started. But once they got going you could hear nearly every word. Don’t you remember?’

Her parents, fighting? It seemed impossible — Flint had always doted on Marigold, and neither of them were the quarrelling sort. Ivy was tempted to suggest it had just been a nightmare, but the look on Mica’s face forestalled her. She shook her head. ‘You’re going to have to remind me. What were they fighting about?’

‘She said she was leaving, and she wanted to take you and Cicely with her.’ His voice wavered on the last phrase, and he made a face at his tankard. ‘Dad was furious. He said he couldn’t stop her throwing away her life, but she wasn’t taking his children anywhere. Then she started to cry and I couldn’t make out what she was saying any more, and he didn’t say anything at all. And when she came out of the chamber she was still crying, but quietly, like she didn’t want any of us to know. So I pretended I was asleep.’

Ivy’s stomach felt heavy, as though she had swallowed a stone. ‘I don’t remember any of that,’ she said.

‘Well, you should. Because you sat up and asked her what was the matter. And then she climbed into your alcove and shut the curtains, and the two of you were whispering in there for ages.’ He ran a finger around the rim of his cup. ‘So you knew she was going away, like I did. You just couldn’t bear to face the truth, so you…’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, blocked it out somehow. Made yourself believe it was the spriggans who took her instead.’

‘I didn’t make myself do anything!’ Ivy knotted her fists in her lap, so furious she felt sick. ‘What makes you think your memory is any better than mine? Maybe it was you who couldn’t bear to think that our mother was taken by the spriggans, so you invented this story and talked yourself into believing it! You think she bled all over her shawl on purpose, then left it on a gorse-bush for Dad to find so she could…do what? Go dancing with the faeries?’

Mica hunched his shoulders. ‘I don’t know why she wanted to leave,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know what happened to her either. Maybe the spriggans did get her in the end. But I’m not going to waste my life brooding over someone who-’

‘Don’t you dare,’ warned Ivy. ‘If you want to tell yourself that Mum was selfish and uncaring and that we’re well rid of her, then I can’t stop you. But I remember what she was really like, and I will never believe that. Never.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mica muttered into his beer. ‘Either way she’s gone, and she isn’t coming back. Believe whatever makes you happy.’

And all at once Ivy thought she understood. ‘Is that why you never said anything to me about it?’ she said more softly. ‘Because you thought I was happier not knowing?’

‘No,’ said Mica. ‘I never said anything because I knew you’d be like this.’ He drained his tankard, shoved it towards her, and marched off to bed.

Ivy sat unmoving, staring into the foamy dregs. She felt numb and a little dizzy, as though she’d cut herself by accident and was just beginning to feel it. Could she really have forgotten something so enormous, so shattering? Even if she had, shouldn’t she be able to remember it now?

Yet when she forced her mind back to that evening five years ago, she found only a blank fuzzy space — nothing to confirm or deny anything Mica had said. Could she really have been so weak, so desperate, as to erase her own memories? She’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing, but maybe…

No. She wasn’t going to blame herself, or her mother, until she could be certain that Mica’s story was true. Which meant she’d have to wait until her father came home, and ask him.

Or better yet, she could go find him herself, and settle the question at once. After all, what was the worst Flint could do to her? Even a blow or a curse would be better than the silence she lived with every day.