Winter Moon: A Banshee's Tale

Chapter 8

Aoife buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled, though her sniffles were drowned out by the Shannon. There was nothing either of us could do but watch in silence. My companion tucked herself at my side, her own eyes brimming with tears again. It was a while before the cries subsided. Aoife wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and stood up.

"It was all your fault!" She said, standing up, her hands bunched into fists at her sides. Her voice trembled.

My companion opened her mouth, as though to respond. Knowing her, she would likely have agreed with the girl, but Aoife gave her no chance to speak. "You're the reason everyone hated me and da! And now you've come to take him away from me too!" She was almost circling as she spoke, in hopes she might meet my companion's eyes as she spoke. A pity she looked right past us as she levelled her final accusation. "My friends were right, you're a monster!"

Monster. The word almost resounds in the little clearing, but my companion does not miss a beat. "I know," she says brokenly. "I cannot help it."

Aoife's hands clench tighter around the folds of her dress, although the anger on her face is replaced by doubt. "What do you mean, you cannot help it? Can't you just stop?"

"I can't. I made a promise when I died."

"You shouldn't have! Why would you promise to kill people?" She cried.

"I don't kill people, Aoife. I never have."

"Don't you? You said it yourself, that to hear you is to hear death."

"It is true," my companion says gravely. "But it is not me that Death follows."

"Then how can you be so sure?" she demands.

"Because that is the deal I made. That I would warn my kinsfolk when their time is near, so they may die with less regrets than I."

"Oh." She thinks for a moment. "So all this while, you're supposed to be helping us?"

My companion scoffs. "I fine job I'm making of it."

Aoife says nothing, merely leaving. She stops a few steps away from the edge of the clearing, turning slightly to face the river. "I'm sorry I called you a monster," Aoife says.

"You weren't wrong," my companion replies sadly. "Go."

Aoife waits for a long moment, looking over her shoulder. As she leaves, I follow quietly behind, the sun having long passed its peak. I must admit it was pure chance, then, that I came upon Aoife and her father on my way back to the forest. They were crouched at the base of an oak, Aoife tucked against her father's shoulders as he brushed tear tracks off her face. I did not hear what he told her, but whatever it was, it seemed to be reassuring. Aoife took one long searching look across his face before throwing her arms around him, burying her face beneath his neck. I had a fair idea of what it was they had spoken about; it was hardly likely the girl had much to cry about with regards to the game we pulled her from. Her father, for his part, looked no more ruffled than usual, and so, I left them to it. After all, there was nothing for me to do, not just yet.

We did not see Aoife at the bakers', or even along the streets for the better half of a year after that. The only word of her my companion managed to catch was that the girl had started accompanying her father to work. Some sort of roadwork, by the sound of it, and that had been that. With the crop having failed for two years now, the cracks in Saol's facade of wellness were beginning to show. The lands at the edge of town were empty now, and the streets, lifeless. Seeing children whose skin clung to their bones had become as common a sight as any, and where once there had been gossip, there were now the beginning whispers of rebellion. Oisin and his sons were travelling more often than not, and word on the street was that they were moving soon to a town with better prospects. As for my companion, she took the form of an old crone more often than not.