There were other lessons she taught me, lessons I would blush to relate. It was necessary, my grandmother said, for I was a girl, and to get anywhere in the world I must be able to attract a man and to hold him. It was not just a case of learning a certain way of walking, and a particular manner of glancing, or even of knowing the right things to say and when to remain silent. Nor was it simply a matter of using the Glamour to make oneself more beautiful or more enticing, though that certainly helped. Grandmother’s teaching was a great deal more specific. It made me cringe to hear her sometimes. It made me hot with embarrassment to be required to demonstrate before her what I had learned. The thought of actually doing any of it made me recoil in horror. She thought me very foolish, and said so. She reminded me that I was in my fifteenth year and of marriageable age, and that I had better make the best of what little I had in the way of natural charms, and learn how to use the craft to enhance them as required, or I’d have no hope of making anything of myself. It was plain to me, as I struggled with these lessons, why my father had summoned her to guide me. If it was true that I needed to acquire these skills, to know these intimate secrets, then it was equally clear he could not have taught me them himself. There are some things a girl cannot discuss with her father, no matter how close to him she may be. But I lay awake at night, wondering at his decision, for Grandmother was a cruel teacher, and her presence in the Honeycomb cast a cold shadow on my days and filled my nights with evil dreams. Why had he gone away, so far I did not even know where he was? Was that in itself some kind of test? He had never left me before, not even for a single night. I was heartsick and lonely, and I was worried about him. He was my world, my family, my only constant. I needed him; he surely needed me, for there was no other on whom he bestowed that rare smile which lit up his sombre features and showed me the man for whom my mother had left the world behind. Was he afraid of Grandmother? Was that why he had left me to her mercies? My dreams showed him gaunt and white, coughing painfully somewhere in a dark cave all by himself. I wished he would come home.
Autumn advanced into winter, and the lessons went on at a relentless pace.
‘Very well, Fainne,’ Grandmother said one day, quite abruptly, as we sat in the workroom resting. All afternoon she had made me turn a spider into other forms: a jewel-bright lizard; a tiny bird with fluttering wings that blundered, confused, into the stone walls; a mouse that came close to making its escape through a crack until I clicked my fingers to change it into a very small fire-dragon, which puffed out a very small cloud of vapour, flapping its leathery wings in miniature defiance. I was exhausted, as limp in my chair as the spider which now hung, still as if dead, in its web high above me. ‘Time for a history lesson. Listen well, and don’t interrupt if there’s no need of it.’
‘Yes, Grandmother.’ Obedience was the easiest course to take with her. She was ingenious in her methods of punishment, and she disliked to be challenged. I far preferred Father’s methods of teaching which, though strict, were not unkind.
‘Answer my questions. Who were the first folk in the land of Erin?’
‘The Old Ones.’ This type of inquisition was easy. Father had imparted the lore over long years, and he and I were fluent in question and answer. ‘The Fomhóire. People of the deep ocean, the wells and the lake beds. Folk of the sea and of the dark recesses of the earth.’
Grandmother gave a peremptory nod. ‘And who came after?’
‘The Fir Bolg. The bag men.’
‘And after them?’
‘Then came the Túatha Dé Danann, out of the west, who in time sent the others into exile and spread themselves all across the land of Erin. Long years they ruled, until the coming of the sons of Mil.’
‘Very well. But what do you know of the origins of our own kind?’ Her eyes were sharp.
‘Our kind are not in the lore. I know that we are different. We are cursed, and so we are ever outside. We are not of the Túatha Dé. Neither are we mortal men and women. We are neither one thing nor the other.’
‘That much you’ve got right. We’re outside because we were put there. One of us transgressed, long ago, and they never let us forget it. Know that story, do you?’
I shook my head.
‘We’re their descendants, whether they like it or not. Fair Folk, or whatever they choose to call themselves. Gods and goddesses every one, superior in every way, drifting around as if they owned the place, as they did, of course, after packing the others off back into their nooks and crannies. But someone dabbled in what she shouldn’t, and that started it all off.’
‘Dabbled? In what?’
‘I said, don’t interrupt.’ She glared at me, and I felt a sharp, piercing pain in my temple. ‘Back in those first days we could do it all, had every branch of the craft at our fingertips. Shape-shifting, transformation. Healing. Mastery of wind and rain, wave and tide. We were gods indeed, and no wonder the Old Ones crept back to their caves with their tails between their legs. But there are some byways of the craft that should not be tampered with, not even by a master. Everyone knew that. It’s perilous to touch the dark side; best leave it alone, best stay well away. Unfortunately there was one who let curiosity get the better of her. She played with a forbidden spell; called up what should have been left sleeping. From that day on there was an evil let loose that was never going to go away. So she was cast out, and part of her penalty was to be stripped of the ability to use the higher elements of magic: the powers of light, the healing, the flight. All she had left was the dross, sorcerer’s tricks: she could meddle, and she could perform transformations, a frog into a man maybe, or a girl into a cockroach. She had the Glamour. Precious little, compared with what she’d lost. She attached herself to a mortal man, since none of the high-minded ones’d have her, not after what she’d done. And you know what that means.’
This time an answer seemed to be expected. ‘That she herself would become mortal?’
‘Not exactly. Our kind live long, Fainne; far beyond the human span. But it did mean she in her turn would die. She would survive to see her family perish of old age before she herself moved on. Her descendants bore the blood of the cursed one, through the ages. Every one of us has her eyes. Your eyes, girl. Every one has the craft, but narrowly, you understand. Some things will always be beyond us. That rankles. That hurts. It should be ours. The punishment was unjust; too severe.’
I opened my mouth, thought better of what I was about to say, and shut it again.
‘Thinking of your father, are you?’ she said, unsmiling. ‘Thinking he seems to manifest a somewhat wider range of talents than those I described? You’re right, of course. I chose his father well: no less than Colum, Lord of Sevenwaters. They’re druid folk, that family. Look how they live, shut away in their precious forest, surrounded by those Others. They’ve got the blood of the Old Ones, mixed with the human strain. Ciarán’s different. Special. He should have ruled there after Colum. Isn’t he the seventh son of a seventh son? But I was foiled. Foiled by that wretched girl and her cursed brothers. They’re the ones you need to watch out for. The ones with the Fomhóire streak in them.’
I frowned in concentration. ‘Why would that be dangerous, Grandmother? The Fomhóire were not users of high magic.’
‘Ah. There’s high magic, and there’s sorcerer’s magic, and there’s another kind. You might call it deep magic. That’s what the folk from Sevenwaters have, and we don’t, child. Not all of them, mind. Most of them are simple fools like your mother, weak-willed and weak-minded. How my son ever