“The boy?”
“Do not act dumb, Hogboon. I know what they talk about beyond these walls. I know they talk about the boy. They wonder if it is true, if he is real. Well, he is real. You will meet him and you will take with you two things for him. One is a message. The other is a gift. My guards will give you both.”
One of the Fomorians removed a pair of tongs from his belt and approached a cauldron. Ignoring its angry flames, the guard plunged his tongs into the fire and pulled out a long clear crystal. He brought it over to Broonie.
“The miners work day and night to find the meagre supply of these crystals,” growled Gantrua. “Each has the power to open up a path between the worlds. We need to send one to the Promised World, but it will only retain its power through a sacrifice. I suppose I should tell you that yours will be a noble one, but I doubt very much nobility would ever stoop to be an acquaintance of yours, so we shall just get on with it.”
Gantrua turned away to exit from the far side of the plinth, then paused mid-step. “Which of your fingers is least precious to you, Hogboon?”
“Erm, they’re all kind of useful to me, Your Superlativeness. I’d find it hard to choose.”
“They all say that,” snarled Gantrua, then disappeared off the far side of the plinth.
The guard holding the crystal came closer. From his waist dangled a rather bloody-looking pair of pliers. The second Fomorian grabbed the Hogboon by one arm and pinned him to the ground.
Broonie had held out for this long, but he decided it was finally a good time to scream.
At breakfast, Finn’s father came into the kitchen and began rummaging through a drawer.
“How are you feeling this morning, Finn?”
Finn had a mouth full of cereal and couldn’t quite get an answer out.
“Good stuff. Listen, I’ve been thinking about what happened yesterday,” said his father, now searching through a cupboard. “It’s a lack of live Legend practice that’s held you back. My fault really. We’ll remedy that. Get hold of a Legend for you to fight.”
Finn swallowed his cereal. “Um … is that what you’re looking for now?”
His father had moved to another cupboard, his head stuck in it as he searched for something. “It’s all very exciting, Finn. You becoming Complete, me joining the Council. No other family in the world has that to look forward to. It’s really something.”
He emerged empty-handed, then stood up straight while looking around intently. “That’s going to have to do,” he said, grabbing a knife and moving towards Finn, who dodged as his father made for the toaster behind him. Using the knife, he forced off the toaster’s handle and left the room with it.
A few seconds later, Finn’s mother arrived in the kitchen. “Hello, sunshine,” she said, grabbing a couple of slices of bread and putting them in the toaster. She paused, realising what was missing. “Hugo!”
Finn left the house for school, and Emmie appeared just as he passed the corner where their streets met.
“What’s happening?” she asked, stepping in beside him as if the two of them had known each other forever.
“Erm, eh …” was Finn’s reply. It occurred to him that he should be a little more articulate from now on.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to worry too much because Emmie did most of the talking. She generally seemed to treat silence like an enemy. And what she mostly liked talking about was Darkmouth. While most newcomers found themselves compelled to run out of the place as fast as they could, Emmie was fascinated by almost every detail.
She had noticed there were bars on the windows of many homes and businesses. “Even the church looks like a prison. What if you had an actual prison here, would they put bars on the bars?”
Then there was the way the people greeted every drop of rain warily, as if it might be a deluge of blood, not water. “If they’re afraid of rain,” observed Emmie, “Ireland isn’t a great place to live, is it?”
She greeted every dent in a lamp-post and every crack in the pavement as possible damage from a Legend attack, and was disappointed when Finn dismissed each one as just another dent caused by someone not watching where they were backing up their car or yet more cracks that hadn’t been fixed.
Finn hadn’t given a tour of Darkmouth to a newcomer before and he could see how much Emmie longed to hear of adventure. So, as they walked along the seafront, he pointed to the large weathered rock jutting straight up some distance off shore. “That’s called Doom’s Perch. A Legend threw that there. It’s called Doom’s Perch because, about a hundred years ago, a local man escaped a Legend attack by stealing a boat and taking it out to that rock.”
Under her fringe, Emmie’s eyes encouraged him to continue.
“He climbed to the top, assuming that it would be a good place to hide out, and waited for the Legend to pass. Once the attack was over and everything looked safe, he went to climb back down to the boat.”
“Did he get eaten on the way down?”
“No, he slipped on seaweed, fell into the sea and was never seen again. They’ve called it Doom’s Perch ever since.”
Emmie screwed her face into a taut grin. “Yeah, nice one. Try and fool the city girl. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Finn felt a bit defeated by that. The story was pretty much true, although he might have made up the part about the boat being stolen.
Because they had dallied on the walk to school, they were late and Finn was again forced to take the last empty seat. As he sat down, he saw a half-melted toy car on the desk. The Savage twins were sniggering from the back, Conn Savage fiddling menacingly with his misshapen ear and Manus rubbing his knuckles beneath his eyes. Boohoo.
Over the next few days, Emmie asked Finn a lot of questions about Darkmouth and about his life, and the thing that came up most was this: she wanted to see inside his house. She was quite persistent.
“Maybe I could come to your house instead,” he’d suggested.
“Nah,” she responded.
She did this a lot, and it worked as a verbal weapon of sorts, a swift stab of a needle that punctured any talk she didn’t want to carry on. Finn had learned little about Emmie, other than that her father had come here to work because of a contract on the phone lines, and he planned to go back to the city once his job was done. She had met all Finn’s other enquiries with a wall of Nahs.
“Will your friends come and visit you here?”
“Nah.”
“Do you have a nice house back in the city?”
“Nah.”
“I suppose the city was really exciting to live in.”
“Nah.”
“Do you miss your cat? I’d like to have a cat, but my dad’s not big into pets.”
“Oh, I’d love it if Silver was here, but I couldn’t bring him.”
“Is a friend minding him?”
“Nah.”
But, when it came to Finn’s house, the words poured out like water from a burst pipe.