ONE
1922—Before
Brigid Heron was a mother and a witch, and she refused to give up being either. There was nothing a mother wouldn’t do—and no power a witch wouldn’t master—to save her child. Fortunately for Brigid, the power she needed was right beyond her doorstep.
The town of Evermore floated outside the ring of Kerry, off the coast of Ireland. It might have appeared sleepy if anyone could see it. Mists circled the island most of the year, and when they didn’t, there was a wildness to the land. A once celebrated abbey crumbled along the lone mountainside and multiple croppings of ash and hawthorn trees made the land there near impassable. A coven of unruly witches, seeking an ancient and unattainable power, was rumored to reside on that side of the town. To the other side, though, were stretches of beaches and a dock, and inset from the dock a once thriving and inviting town. Almost five miles outside of the center of town, and there wasn’t a lot of town to begin with, was a slumbering lough. A lake rumored to contain power to heal any ailment, to best any enemy, to transform the world … if only a witch could tap into the rebellious magic swirling beneath its surface.
Just over the hill and down the lane from the lough of Brionglóid, the lake of dreams, sat Brigid’s house. A white stone house with a slate roof and a bright blue door, the house (like Brigid) bucked tradition. She planted a sprig of a hawthorn tree in her front yard in honor of her mother. She grew lavender and roses and hydrangeas out of season, vibrant pinks and purples and blues that seemed to grow even more alive in the rain and the frost. Her yard was always a brilliant green. Irish green, she called it. It was the perfect garden for walking barefoot across, letting your feet sink into earth softer than the best rug money could buy.
“It’s blessed by the fairies,” Molly O’Brian, Brigid’s closest neighbor who lived three kilometers away, liked to tell anyone who would listen. She would stand in front of her iron gate and push away the curls perpetually falling in her eyes, glaring in the direction of the lake. “That lough is, and I wouldn’t be going into it after the sun sets. There’s an angry howling that comes from it, like something awful is trapped beneath the surface waiting to get out.”
“It’s not just anything trapped under the surface, but the heart of magic. That lough is sought after by dark witches,” Peter McGee, with a shock of white hair and who was never without a pick of some kind between his teeth, often said from his teetering perch on his pub stool. “It’s that damn beating heart, has been calling to them centuries it has.”
“Not just any witches,” Sera McCarthy told friends over tea when they’d stop in to see her at the Bake House. “The Knight witches are the ones who want that lough. The four of them live on the other side of Evermore and only come out on the eve of a full moon. Beware the dark-eyed one with pale hair, she’s the worst of the lot and uses that godforsaken lough for all manner of ill repute.”
Brigid, with her copper hair, freckles, and skirts that were far shorter than was considered societally polite, knew herself a thing or two about ill repute.
“That Biddy Heron is a witch. No doubt about it, and the child’s most likely a changeling. It’s the only answer for how she came to have a babe with no husband and no known suitors about either,” Molly O’Brian was fond of saying to whoever would pass by while she was tending her own garden.
“There’s something strange about a redhead who talks to herself,” Peter McGee liked to declare of Brigid. “She’s got a calmness as eerie as the still waters of the lake, and that girl of hers is too smart for a lass. She does the numbers in her head, doesn’t need a paper to add ’em up, and if you ask her, she can’t even tell you how she got them.”
Sera McCarthy tended to disagree. “Brigid’s odd to be sure, but she’s one fine healer. Fixed up my Johnny and Violet when they had the flu, and I wouldn’t wish on anyone what her child’s going through.”
The child, Dove Heron, was exceptional at math. And climbing trees, reading, telling tall tales, and most especially drawing. She was Brigid’s greatest wish come true, her deepest dream realized.
Dove was a special bit of magic, born from a deal Brigid made. A deal not struck with her Goddess, whom Brigid trained under, but with an outside power. The only deal she’d ever made to go against her Goddess, and the deal had proven to be worth its cost … even when things grew complicated.
Brigid came into the world knowing exactly what she was missing. Love. She sought it all her childhood and into adulthood, and yet it remained elusive. She didn’t fit in with other children. She had a funny habit of singing to herself and preferred staring at the stars and reading to gossiping. Her mother grew sick when Brigid was still a teenager and didn’t have the capacity to do more than suffer in pain, and Brigid, for all her skills as a healer, failed to save her mother. Her lone friend, her sister Agnes, was much older than Brigid and had left when Brigid’s father attempted to raise his hand to her one night after failing to keep yet another position of work in the village. Her father officially abandoned them not long after that, and the townspeople wondered if the Herons were all just a bit cursed when it came to normal things like love. The longing in Brigid grew as her work as a healer in town spread, and she witnessed the true love of a mother and child. Brigid knew, into the very marrow of her bones, she was born to be a mother.
On the eve of St. Brighid’s Day, she slipped out into the forest that rested between the lough and her home, laid a basket of freshly baked bread (thanks, Sera), a full pint of beer (stolen from Peter), and a newly cooled pie (courtesy of Molly’s windowsill) at the base of a tree adorned with ribbons and a small spring that ran beneath it. The clootie well of Sainted Brighid, the best and most beloved goddess of them all, and Brigid Heron’s mentor.
“Goddess Brighid, hear my plea, for life and strife and all I believe. I ask of you to gift to me a child of my own, a light in my life, a beautiful soul to love and nourish in the ways I dream.”
Brigid lowered a cup into the well, with her desires cast into it as her spell.
The Goddess, who was never silent, did not reply. Brigid went home and, in the morning, found the Goddess waiting for her in the pasture beyond her home. A beautiful spot that boasted hazelnut and sloe trees with nuts that Brigid could never crack. It was the Goddess’s favorite spot in all of Ireland, a hill that featured a fairy ring, one the Goddess never entered but loved to sit beside and lay back in the grass, studying the passing clouds. She wrapped her cloak the color of night around her, her ivory skin and gentle green eyes shaded, her fiery red hair and crown made of flowering flames covered by her hood.
“I cannot give you what you seek,” the Goddess said, her eyes on the heavens.
“You’ve taught me to harness the wind and tame the tides, but you cannot teach me how to gain what I truly seek?” Brigid said, laying a fresh basket of fruit at the Goddess’s feet.
“Child, I would give you all of the universe if it would make you happy, but it would not. What you ask would never work. You cannot serve the nineteen with a child.”
“Of course I can.”
“You can’t complete your mission to become one of the nineteen and tend the eternal flame when you’re caring for a babe.”
“You don’t need me right now,” Brigid said. “I could wait and instead of taking my place in a few years, I will serve you later.”
The Goddess sighed. “It would go wrong, child. I cannot give you what you seek.” Instead the Goddess gifted Brigid a book, a history of magic and a grimoire of spells in one.
Brigid took the book back to her home and read it forward and backward. For one year she studied the spells inside and perfected them. Then one day, as she was walking up the road, she came across a power unlike any other. It tasted of smoke and cherries, and she had to push against the urge to turn and walk the other way.
A man too handsome to be real stood leaning into the stone wall that separated one side of the lane from the other. He slouched against the stone, his gray pants, and black boots too crisp and clean for the countryside, his white buttoned-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up revealed defined forearms and hands that looked like they belonged to an artist, not a farmer. Long and lean fingers that matched his tall, angular body. His eyes were dark, and glinted as they gazed at her, unrelenting in his study of her from head to toe. He had an aristocrat’s straight nose, sharply chiseled jaw, and delectably full lower lip. Brigid wondered at first if he were a mirage, if she had somehow dreamed him out of thin air. Then he dipped his chin, and her heart skipped a nervous beat. Dark unruly hair came down to his chin, the wind tousling it back, and she thought he wasn’t so much angelic in his beauty as a fallen devil in her way.
She swallowed, considering turning back, and then he smiled and her stomach flipped at the dimple pressed into his cheek.
“You don’t tend the lough,” the man said, his voice wafting out and around her like a dense fog.
She blinked and he was right in front of her. For a moment, Brigid forgot how to breathe.
Brigid Heron did not believe in love. It was why she had asked the Goddess for a child and not a man or a woman to lay with. She had seen what marriage did to her parents, what it did to those in the village, and she did not have time to fight unnecessary battles of heartache and self-preservation. She knew enough of lust to fill her needs when she traveled off island, but as she inhaled the musk and mint of the ridiculously tall and brooding man standing before her, she realized she did not understand desire.
It punched at her core. The man’s smile shifted into something so delicious, Brigid bit back a whimper.
“Will you not speak to me?”
“What?” she managed, after untangling her tongue.
“Your lough. You do not tend it.”
Brigid gave her head a shake. “It is unwell. No one tends the lough.”
He lifted his brows.
Brigid cleared her throat. “Or no one should tend it.”
“So, it’s true. You avoid the lough and your fellow witches. I thought the story must be wrong, written in the wrong ink, on the wrong page, in the wrong chapter even.” He leaned down just enough to bring them level eye to eye. “Why do you hide from who you are? A witch needs her coven.”
“I hide from no one, and I am not alone,” Brigid said, setting her shoulders back. “The lough is not well, and my Goddess does not reside there.”
He inclined away from her, and Brigid shifted her arms one across the other at the loss of his presence. It was foolish to feel such a way, and she would search the book of the Goddess later for a spell to address whatever malady she was clearly suffering from.
“What is it you want and why are you here?”
“Can’t a body take a walk and find a witch he wishes to speak with?”
“There are other witches you could speak with. I am not a member of the witches of Knight. I work with my Goddess.”
“Your goddess, the Goddess Brighid, you mean? Tender of the eternal flame, the exalted one, who enjoys healing those who harm themselves, stealing milk from cows, and has poor taste in poetry?”
Brigid’s eyes narrowed and she took a step back. Who was this stranger to be so bold? “You dare to tarnish the name of my Goddess?”
“I dare a great many things, but I cannot tarnish that which is rust. I can only hope to help it shine.” He took a step forward. “You shine already. I could see your glimmer from the skies … and feel your sorrow through the earth. Why are you so sad? What has your Goddess done?” Whatever he saw in Brigid’s face had him tilting his chin. “Or not done, rather?”
Brigid swallowed, her hand unconsciously going to her stomach. “Who are you?”
His gaze followed her hand and when he lifted his eyes to hers, she had to press her heels in the road to steady herself at the compassion she saw there. “You may call me Luc.”
Brigid knew enough of men to know when one wasn’t saying something. “What do others call you?”
The corner of his mouth gave a single twitch, as though it were fighting a smile, and the dimple flashed. Brigid decided, watching it, dimples should always win. “Most around here call me Knightly.”
The breath whooshed into her lungs at the name. The master of Knight, the being the coven of witches known as the witches of Knight served. She had heard of his cruel beauty, but she had never crossed paths with him before.
“I need to go,” Brigid said, lifting her chin higher, refusing the nerves that flooded in at the recognition of his name.
“What do you know of my lough?”
“I know it is not yours.”
“The lough was made by Manannán, god of the sea, and my foster father. As such, kingship over the lough and this land rightfully should pass to me.”
“And yet it remains shut.”
“Because your Goddess doesn’t like to share.”
“Or because she is wise and wants to protect the people of Evermore.”
“She took what was mine, and I want it back.”
Brigid leveled him a look. “Good luck with that.”
“You need me,” he said. “And I need you, so why don’t we help each other?”
Because Luc Knightly never helped anyone but himself.
“There is but one other deity in the realm that dares to enter Evermore,” the Goddess had written in the book she gave to Brigid. “The man whose essence is as dark as the night himself, who seeks to pervert magic for his own gain and to rule all of your kind. You cannot control the fates and they bend for no man. That lough he seeks to harness is incapable of being healed because it was made to lead to chaos. It must stay shut, or the world as you know it will be in grave danger of destruction. Remember, he is not to be trusted, for he will bewitch any mortal’s eyes or ears with his lies and false promises.”
Like the lough, the Goddess did not trust Luc Knightly or the magic in him. Which meant Brigid should not trust him either.
And yet.
Brigid’s hand was still cradling her stomach, and the emptiness there. Her days had been full, yes, of spell work with the Goddess, healing in the village, and tending her small garden. People opened their doors to her, but rarely to allow her inside, for a healer was an asset in the small town of Evermore, but her unusual talents and penchant for seeing people too clearly were off-putting. Brigid’s attempts at making friends were always vaguely successful, villagers were happy to have her services but wary of claiming her companionship. She lived, but she longed. Her nights, well, they were the toughest of all. Consisting of solitary meals by a fire, silence in a room meant to hold laughter, with only the sound of a heart breaking slowly, over and over, one day at a time.
“How can we help each other?” she asked, knowing she should run home, put as much space between herself and the man who made her palms itch, and yet she did not wish to move an inch. Not if there was a chance he might have the power to give her a family.
His eyes stayed on her stomach for another beat, before meeting her eyes. “You desire a child. I can give you one.”
The craving for him, the one that had wound itself around her foot as soon as he stood before her, slithered up her leg and climbed onto her thigh.
“I don’t think so,” she said, her breath hitching.
“We can make a deal,” he said. “I give you what you most desire, and you help me.”
Copyright © 2022 by Paige Crutcher