John Lenahan - Prince of Hazel and Oak

The reading eventually got easier, partly because I got better at it but mostly because Mom invented a Shadowbookmark that held your page if your mind wandered. But it was the sword-fight teaching that became the highlight of my day. In the beginning my students were pretty much in awe of me, even after seeing me get popped in the temple by Essa. They all wanted to know about the Battle of the Twins of Macha and how I chopped Cialtie’s hand off and the Army of the Red Hand and what the Real World was like. I spent a lot of the first couple of days just talking to them, especially when Dahy wasn’t around, but then I really started to get into teaching. A lot of these kids were just bad, so I had to reach back into my memories to the basics that Dad had taught me when I was a kid. Back when I thought it was really cool being taught sword-fighting, as opposed to when I was a teenager and I thought Dad was a borderline lunatic. I found that the nice thing about teaching is that it makes you realise that a lot of the stuff you think you do by instinct and without thinking, is actually a well-honed skill. Dishing out all of this stuff to eager students, who were improving, made me appreciate my father even more and it gave me strength when I had to go back to the reading sessions.

I was usually so tired at night that I didn’t have the energy to kick Brendan out of my tent – so we became roommates. He spent most of his days under the tutelage of Spideog. When no one else but me could hear, he made fun of his master’s mystical ravings, but he listened and adopted every drop of archery advice he was given. When he wasn’t talking about arrows and trajectories or how sore his arms and fingers were, he quizzed me on our progress towards finding a cure for Oisin. He never talked about his daughter. I suspected that the reason he had thrown himself so fully into training was to give himself something else to think about.

Mom gently kicked me awake at four in the morning. It was my shift in the reading room. Since Mom had the stint before me we saw each other every day at changeover. We didn’t say much. I didn’t ask her if she found anything ’cause I knew if she did, she would tell me. She looked tired as she handed me an envelope that had my handwriting on it. Inside it was a fragment of a document I had read the morning before about the cross-pollination of grape plants. I had entitled it, ‘Everything will be Vine in the Morning’.

‘Is that a joke?’ she asked.

‘Well, it was supposed to be but obviously it didn’t work on you.’

She gave me that patronising mother look.

‘Sorry, Mom, I’m just trying to keep my sanity in there.’

‘I know, son,’ she said as she cupped my cheek in her palm. ‘Just have a little thought of the poor people who are going to have to sort this paperwork out after us.’

‘OK,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek, ‘get some rest, you look beat.’

It was still dark when Mom and I got outside. The November air stung my cheeks as I walked her back to her tent. She promised me she would sleep and not sit up all night working and worrying. Then I turned and took a deep cold breath and steeled myself for an early morning adventure in dull literature. It was as bad as being back at school – worse actually; I didn’t have Sally’s notes to borrow here. As I groped in the dark towards the always lit reading room, a flicker of light caught my eye. As I got closer I saw it was the unmistakable glow of Lamprog light. My heart skipped a beat as I saw the only girl I know that travels with a firefly. As she heard me approach she cupped the bug in her hand but when she recognised me, she opened her fingers and bathed her face in light. Wow, Essa is beautiful in any light but she really is made for firefly light.

‘What are you doing up?’ she said, breaking the magical moment that was obviously playing out only in my head.

‘I’m off to do my shift in the reading room. What are you doing up? Is the Turd-low snoring?’

‘It’s Turlow,’ she said, ‘and you only have to call him The Turlow at official functions.’

‘Like your wedding?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘So are you really going to spend a lifetime with a snorer? You would think with all of the magic healing stuff around here they could cure that and you wouldn’t have to be roaming around all night.’

‘I’m not awake because of him. I’m not sleeping with him and he’s not a snorer.’ She was getting more flustered with every word.

‘Why not? Oh no, is he diseased? These royal weddings are so treacherous.’

Essa threw both of her hands into the air. ‘Why did you have to come back?’ she hissed and stormed off, leaving her firefly fluttering around confused. I whispered, ‘Lamprog,’ and it tentatively came and sat in the palm of my hand as quietly, in the darkness, I answered Essa’s question, ‘I came back for you.’

I bounced into the reading room with the echo of Essa saying ‘I’m not sleeping with him’ rolling around in my head. It wasn’t until I placed the first piece of parchment into the Shadowreader that my spirits dipped. The Shadowbook was a collection of Leprechaun poetry. I had to stick it back in the pile – there was no way I was going to sift through poetry at this hour all of the morning. The next piece caught my eye ’cause it was short and it had two names I recognised on it. It was a letter from Spideog to Dahy describing the last battle of Maeve’s army in the Fili war.

Apparently the forces of the House of Duir were seriously getting their butts kicked by Maeve and the Fili. The Shadowmagic stuff was completely unknown to them and they found it impossible to defend against. After Maeve issued an ultimatum to Finn, which he refused, the Fili regrouped into one giant battalion with Maeve in the centre. Using several barrels of tree sap, the Fili queen conjured up some sort of spell. Everyone watching could feel the power of it building in the air and then, with a large flash of light that seemed to implode without a sound, the Fili were gone.

I always thought the Fili were killed but they just vanished. They left behind their clothes, weapons and every other earthly possession, but the Fili themselves had just disappeared. Spideog finished by writing, ‘It was a blessing for The Land, my friend, but a personal disappointment for me. I would have liked to have taken a few Fili down before I died in battle.’

I could see now why my grandfather Finn had forbidden Shadowmagic – it had caused much hardship. Now, ironically, it was the only thing keeping my father alive.

The next slip of paper grabbed my attention; it was a thesis on sword parries and counter-attacks. I knew I would find it interesting and possibly very useful for my students but it wasn’t going to get Dad healthy so I just skimmed it and stuffed it into an envelope. I wondered when I would have the leisure time to come back later and read it properly. With a little over an hour to go I found something else. I was pretty sure it had nothing in it that would help Dad but there was no way I was going to skip it. It was entitled: ‘Banbha and The Turlow’.

This manuscript was old and it certainly wasn’t easy to decipher. I admit I started reading it just to get some dirt on Essa’s Turd-low boy but I soon forgot all of that when I got into the meat of it. It was the story of the end of the first millennium, when the three sisters ruled The Land. The original Turlow went to Banbha and demanded to be allowed to return to the Otherworld. Banbha told him that leaving was impossible. She warned that the further any of them sailed from The Land, the faster they would age and die. The price of immortality, Banbha told Turlow, was that he and his kinsmen must remain in The Land.